Terror and Ecology: Essays on Religious Extremism in Context

Terror and Ecology:

Essays on Religious Extremism in Context

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Revitalizing Terror: Immanentizing the Eschaton in Today’s World Hacking Oppression: Programming the Language of Utopia You Shall Not Pass: Pipeline Protests as Cosmic Warfare The Magic of Sacrifice: Scapegoats and the Sacrificial Dialectic Beyond Revolution: Symbol and Mystery in Eric Voegelin’s Philosophy of Magic Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath (Review) Technique and Obsolescence: Meditations on the Religiosity of Tubes (Review) A Tale of Two Anarchies: A Dialogue Between Contemporary Anarchist Criminology and The Politics of Attack (Review) 9. Civilization as a Cosmic Crime: Energy, Resistance, and the Insurrectionary Approach to Food Ethics 10. Knowing Nazis: A Biosemiotic Approach to the Eco-poetics of Fascist Imagery 11. Collapse Criminology: Terror, Ecology, and the Biosemiotics of Extremism

Revitalizing Terrorism: Immanentizing the Eschaton in Today’s World In systematizing reality to comprehend our own existence, we are presented with the unique opportunity to rearrange reality as seen fit. However, our potential as co-creators does much to foment hostile opposition by those who assert that this type of action constitutes a neo-heretical activity, steadfastly maintaining that God’s creation should remain unchanged as the primary manifestation of perfection. In contrast, Thomas Berry describes the inherent spontaneity our genetic coding is prone to, revealing the Natural law wherein order arises out of the coherent and collaborative articulations of its principle members: “They can be understood as facets of a mystery too vast for human comprehension, a mystery with such power that even a fragment of its grandeur can evoke the great cultural enterprises that humans have undertaken. (Berry pg. 198, 1988) Whereas the cosmos that engulfs us so profoundly reveals an extraordinary complexity of numinous existence, the human species, deriving from its billions of years of physical development, is perhaps the most interesting outgrowth of such being. Diverging from the “natural world” that seems so unerringly harmonious, humanity does much to exemplify an antithesis to such amity with our environment and those we share it with, demonstrating an intellectual void that births such complications as the unpreparedness to deal with climate change, habitat loss and species extinction, massive carbon sink shifts, ocean degradation, “dirty” industries and unwise production, deforestation, and the general depletion and exhaustion of various ecosystems.

These seemingly insurmountable problems we face at the dawn of a new millennium contextualize the need to reevaluate our social agreements and responsibilities to one another. The information and technologies that provide alternatives to these envisioned scenarios are still so relatively new that it will likely take a herculean effort to not only mobilize the forces necessary to enact the monumental change needed, but ably distribute the consciousness critical to sustaining such a shift in values and social processes as well. By properly energizing the various movements engaged with the society that encompasses them, while simultaneously maximizing their communicative abilities to alleviate incomplete and deficient interpretations of the motivating rationale behind such forces, vitality can be restored to those ameliorating the world they reconstruct. Out of the resulting power “network of networks” emerges the controlling entities needed to achieve a culture we each seek to enjoy.

Toleration of Earth’s processes undoubtedly requires our respect for creation and life.

Accepting the intrinsic value of natural systems and their instrumental roles in providing sustenance for our own human societies lets us forge new imperatives that extend communal wellbeing far into the future. As such, an empathetic civilization predicated on bio-mimicry materializes, offering the greatest chance of survival while accentuating the possibility for success and prosperity: “We are recovering our unity, not by returning to a prior culture and consciousness, but by moving beyond the fragmented, egoic civilization that has dominated humankind for the past two centuries—moving toward a cooperative

world constituted by free people who are capable of representing the interest of the human species.” (Lazlo pg. 86 2008) The fact that we have essentially criminalized nature in favor of synthetic programs that process the Earth through monolithic corporations should adequately demonstrate the unsustainable and artificial nature of our economy. Capitalism has been critiqued by many as representing an unmitigated failure prioritizing planned obsolescence at the expense of the world we necessarily convert into “resources” so as to accumulate capital and wealth through constant and committed exploitation. Thus, the capitalist market impairs even its own social and environmental conditions through the reflexive premise of scarcity, leaving us to recognize capital as “its own barrier or limit because of its self-destructive forms of proletarianization of human nature and appropriation of labor and capitalization of external nature.” (O’Connor 1988) Moreover, the system we reside within is perpetually contextualized by the future, in that every action taken or investment protracted is based on an abstract mental projection predicated on our need to consume material goods for advantageous profit. Unfortunately the effect is one where the present moment, the “Now,” is hardly prioritized: we struggle to define what we will eventually need and thereby trivialize the most important tenets of the human experience, those day-to-day activities that alone offer the possibility of finding ever-present joy in the world around us.

A facility that can foresee and forestall the detrimental consequences of a social development uncategorized by the necessary maturation processes then becomes essential for sanctioning new behaviors that embody patterns of compassion and insight into chaotic and complex social functioning. The present moment may therefore be transformed by some conscientious delivery system sympathetic to positive cultural change, effecting the generation of a healthy balance between nature and society—a soul and eco-centered designation engendering mature and imaginative manifestations of personal application. Identifying boundaries of unhealthy modes of being thus provides the means to rectify reality with ideality, infusing the system we are each engaged in with lasting ramifications to ensure accessibility for positive growth.

Employing Habitual Difference Being that our cognitive abilities have evolved from the natural conditions that preceded them (while maintaining the capacity to change those very same conditions), it should not be surprising that the collapse of our social values corresponds to the instigation of many of the ecological crises we find ourselves confronted with. Using this logic to craft a comprehensive response, the development of an eco-psychological value system could potentially remedy the situation. The resulting “ecology of mind” clarifies a central purpose for directed action—namely, the integration of interiority into systemic processes.

Through honoring the diverse perspectives of various worldviews, we can model changes in behavior to take place through new understandings of self in relation to our environment, learning to live and situate ourselves in a Holarchy of ecological wellbeing:

“In short, you become an embodiment of multiperspectival awareness, which increases your intimacy with reality because you are in more conscious contact with it through multiple modes of being and knowing. In turn, this presence allows you to be more timely and skillful in responding to circumstances and situations.” (EsbjornHargens, Zimmerman pg. 320, 2009) This emphasizes the importance of education, without which there could be no ideation of a society based on partnership principles and consensus organization, or any other alternative to the callous corporate system that “suppresses democracy and personal choice, limits the protective power of the nation-state, and reduces financial support for public services, while radically increasing the income gap between the wealthiest and the poorest people and nations.” (Goerner, Dyck, Lagerroos pg. 325, 2008) Consider then that any possible opposition to such a malevolent force (one based on greed and unapologetic self-interest) would require a certain program to institute some sort of difference to what is perceived as “undesirable.” The mathematical and logical formulas needed to create infrastructure that betters the quality and quantity of life must accordingly be decentralized and dispersed so that access can be maintained at all levels of civil society. Transmitting knowledge achieves major impacts through crystallizing patterns, ensuring a universal intelligence relevant to establishing a healthy sense of self-sufficiency. And through “blueprint copying”—that is, the identification, documentation, and dispersal of successful models and processes—social innovation and adaptation to new problems can likely be achieved at a much faster rate. (Bornstein pg. 266, 2007) Action complements theory through praxis; in this respect, any movement instilled with education remains pertinent in a social context. Mastery of a social system lets us transcend barriers so that an agenda of “change” can be implemented through action with the creation of new substance. The result manifests new culture, contingent upon our own understanding of ourselves and the space we inhabit—“when we perceive our place in the universe we come to know our role and our mission: to be truly one with the world of which we are an intrinsic part.” (Laszlo pg. 93, 2009) This movement into education generates wiser actions, leading to a society we might qualify as “good.” We are able to work towards something “other” than a reality rooted in “vice,” or those actions considered inherently “wrong,” by sustaining such a revolution in an empire of disorder.

Thus we can maintain our rights and healthy living habits despite any conflict, establishing independence through programs of peace that heal and maintain the world we depend on.

Personal Action Projects When confronted with an oppressive force that poses an extreme threat to life and liberty, one must not commit to passive discontent, but rather take active and necessary steps to confront and expel its effect on one’s own comfort. While violence surely cannot be sustained (as it necessarily ends once there is no one left to do violence to), the learning process most certainly can

(and must!), with activists taking on the enormous responsibility of accomplishing unending social change using classrooms as laboratories to effect the difference they wish to see, through the knowledgeable understanding of a shared global system: “solving for pattern arises naturally when one perceives problems as symptoms of systemic failure, rather than as random errors requiring anodynes.” (Hawken pg. 178, 2007) This in turn suggests certain principles for any project aimed at addressing the underlying conditions that systemically generates violent reaction. By protecting a natural cycle of energy derived from the sun, from which each of our basic necessities are primarily obtained, we are able to substitute for the poisonous makeshift economy we have made real, devised through ignorant conclusions based on fallacious premises.

“The solar resource could replace all need for oil, coal, and nuclear resources in the United States…In addition, solar offers a nondestructive solution to the land that it uses, whereas coal and nuclear taint and contaminate the land they use forever.” (Pg. 55) Or as Ward Churchill writes, “In order to be effective and ultimately successful, any revolutionary movement within advanced capitalist nations must develop the broadest possible range of thinking/action by which to confront the state. This should be conceived not as an array of component forms of struggle but as a continuum of activity stretching from petitions/letter writing and so forth through mass mobilization/demonstrations, onward through the realm of “offensive” military operations.” (Pg. 94, 2007) In this way, our movement can stay informed to the nature of its opposition as multiple constituents determine the course of events in a self-organizing process. Human development is thus conditioned through expertise to construct and create new substance, manipulating policy through self-empowered directives: by creating an event, procedure, program, or never-ending “experiment” where students are taught to grow, utilize, and discern reality for themselves, a constant revolution can be forever sustained. Theory is proposed, results are produced, and competence is proven through a scrutinizing dialogical assessment. However, since language itself is self-reflexive, those who endeavor to do outright harm to an opposing force will necessarily fail, as their movement will likely be void of any lasting substance, based on antipathy rather than rapport: Apart from negative messages, however, the specific picture of what [terrorism] would REPLACE these international circumstances with is deliberately vague. There is a lot of evocative language, general references to restoring peace, instituting [God’s] law, and installing a modern [system of governance]—a hazy dream of a better, more just future to be achieved through a defensive [holy war].

But what exactly would that new [holy] “state” (or entity) look like? This is not specified, as doing so would undermine the movement itself. (Cronin pg. 180, 2009)

Bibliography Berry, Thomas. (1988) The Dream of the Earth. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco, CA Bornstein, David. (2007) How to Change the World: social entrepreneurs and the power of new ideas. Oxford University Press: New York, NY Churchill, Ward. (2007) Pacifism as Pathology. AK Press: Oakland, CA Cronin, Audrey Kurth (2009) How Terrorism Ends: understanding the decline and demise of terrorist campaigns. Princeton University Press: New Jersey Esbjorn-Hargens, Sean and Michael E. Zimmerman. (2009) Integral Ecology. Shambhala Publications: Boston, MA Freeman, S. David. (2007) Winning Our Energy Independence: an energy insider shows how. Gibbs Smith: Layton, UT Goerner, Sally J., Dyck, Robert G. and Dorothy Lagerroos. (2008) The New Science of Sustainability: building a foundation for great change. Triangle Center for Complex Systems: Chapel Hill, NC Hawken, Paul. (2007) Blessed Unrest: how the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming. Penguin: New York, NY Laszlo, Ervin. (2008) Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: how the new scientific reality can change us and our world. Inner Traditions: Rochester, VT Laszlo, Ervin. (2009) WorldShift 2012: making green business, new politics, and higher consciousness work together. Inner Traditions: Rochester, VT O’Connor, James. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction CNS 1, Fall, 1988. Retrieved 5/5/2010 from http://members.cruzio.com/~cns/Occasional/ Plotkin, Bill. (2008) Nature and the Human Soul: cultivating wholeness in a fragmented world. New World Library: Novato, CA

Hacking Oppression: Programming the Language of Utopia Only after the last tree has been cut down; Only after the last fish has been caught; Only after the last river has been poisoned; Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten.

-Cree Indian Prophecy

Fragmented Resistance in an Empire of Disorder: Many groups holding nature as sacred are finding their spiritual practices targeted in the onslaught of an economic theory that justifies ecological destruction for profit. Their connection to the surrounding bioregions is further deteriorated by the incursion of government and corporate theft that appropriate and exploit the sustenance of the local resource base. The effect of industrial society’s imposition on vital ecosystems forces displacement and cultural devastation, whereby civilization ends up demonstrating pathogenic properties: “A cancerous tumor continues to grow even as its expropriation of nutrients and disruption of vital functions cause its host to waste away. Similarly, human societies undermine their own long-term viability by depleting and fouling the environment…”

(MacDougall, Humans as Cancer, pg. 82) Yet even as the living world collapses under the systematic control of international capitalistic tendencies, the exploding popularity of peer-to-peer networks is undermining and subverting this dominant paradigm.

The assessment that government and the global marketplace are unrepresentative of one’s cultural values allows for the initiation of alternative visions of social justice that demand civic action. Unfortunately, the problem itself may be structurally built into the system we operate within, whereby the monetary system (and namely the medium of exchange) is subject to perturbations in personal desire for property and capital accumulation that function at the expense of social and environmental wellbeing. The eco-activist and anarchist Edward Abbey writes, “Money attracts because it gives us the means to command the labor and service and finally the lives of others—human or otherwise. Money is power.” (Abbey, Theory of Anarchy, pg. 25) This is certainly evident as when corporations dump toxic waste in running water, electing to spend their resources on the damage they do to ecosystems rather than take costly measures needed to avert such natural catastrophes in the first place. Those that subscribe to nature spirituality on the other hand do not conceive of nature’s monetary value but instead recognize its intrinsic worth, commonly communicating with nature intelligences and engaging with the wider community of living beings they consider sacred. (Harvey, Animism Today, pg. 81) The impending upheaval instigated by corporate interests can then be seen to threaten native peoples who are forced to mobilize, sometimes violently, in what can only be described as a global insurgency to mitigate the hazardous effects of an ideology imposed exclusively for profit.

The extreme nature of such resistance is many times linked to terrorist, or eco-terrorist activity, as sub-national groups like the Sea-Shepherd Conservation Society, responsible for the halting of the Japanese whaling fleets, or the Environmental and Animal Liberation Fronts, (among many others) are condemned for perpetrating the millions of dollars in property damage, defending their militant rhetoric by pointing out that animals and natural systems are innocent and must be rescued by any means necessary (even violently) if excessive violence is avoided, and then only after all nonviolent alternatives have been exhausted. (Regan, How to Justify Violence, pg. 233) Those adverse effects of industrial society’s institutionalized degradation and structural violence, which consequently destroy the sustaining environment on which it depends, are responded to by radical active resistance, organized to engage the root cause of such devastation while

simultaneously enacting an alternative social system. Sabotage, terrorism, violence, and general opposition to oppressive forces in the name of social and environmental wellness can then be seen as a symptom of a greater sickness, so that revolutionary and anti-institutional risk cultures ultimately represent the “somewhat rational response to political and economic conditions that limit the effectiveness of state-sanctioned forms of protest,” challenging current paradigms. (Laurendeau, pg. 180) Challengers to State Supremacy: Even as these controversial tactics are condemned by the authorities often targeted by the radical action employed by this “Green religion,” the accusation that these groups should be uncritically dismissed as irrational terrorists exposes the hypocrisy prevalent in the state’s own utilization of power. Take for example the United States of America’s denouncement of Iran’s nuclear program as a violation of good intentions (even as the Western powers each enjoy a thriving nuclear program), added to the fact that the computer worm Stuxnet, widely credited as originating in U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies, was found to have undermined Iran’s nuclear program. (Ackerman, 2011) While this style of industrial sabotage is certainly more humanitarian than the murder previously perpetrated against several Iranian nuclear scientists, (Spencer, 2010) the precedent set by national governments should at least make any critic of similar tactics used by radical environmental groups hesitant in making disparaging comments, since both are done in defense of survival (in theory at least).

Likewise, in the absence of governmental transparency, heralded by governments as fundamental to a free and open society, when the group WikiLeaks published the U.S. State department’s internal memos to the Internet, disregarding their classification statuses, international governments denounced the act as cyberterrorism. Even so, the effect fueled resistance efforts in Tunisia (after extreme wealth discrepancies were made public), and spread later to Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Iran, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Albania, and elsewhere, assisted by social media web sites. In a seeming reversal of its initial stance on the effect of open connection technologies, the U.S. State Department later issued a statement regarding its promise to defend the openness of the Internet with a venture capital investment project aiding hacktivists living in repressive regimes.

One of these hacktivist groups in particular, appropriately named Anonymous, did much to foment the Middle Eastern revolution, attacking the Tunisian government after it blocked cables that referenced the country as a totalitarian police-state, (Toor, 2011) while targeting American company sites like Paypal, Mastercard, and Amazon, that had withdrawn material support from WikiLeaks, disrupting the flow of their internet traffic. Indeed, as the Middle East expressed its desire for democratic reform as a vehicle to rectify economic inequality, Anonymous likewise set its sights on Bank of America after the company began to strategize as to how to discredit WikiLeaks, who claimed to be in possession of 5GB that exposed an “ecosystem of corruption,” sending Bank of America’s stock price down by 3% as a result. (Webster, 2010) Anonymous hacked the email account of one of the data intelligence firms charged with discrediting WikiLeaks, publishing more than 44,000 emails to the world wide web. The emails showed the developed proposal discussed the legal action that could be taken against WikiLeaks, proposing to sue the group and put an injunction on releasing any data. Moreover, not long after Kamal Abbas, the general coordinator of the CTUWS (an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt) expressed solidarity with the workers in Wisconsin who were protesting the stripping of their collective bargaining rights, (Jilani 2011) Anonymous declared in a communiqué its next operation would target the Koch brothers, chronic industrial polluters and long-time funders of conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity, for attempting to usurp

American democracy. (Wing, 2011) 140 years after the Paris Commune uprising, Anonymous, an activist collective free of any hierarchical leadership structure, continued to promote freedom of speech and human rights, standing with those citizens of the world fighting against what is widely contended to be an abuse of government authority seeking to destroy and repress the solidarity and power of the working class. Like the earlier commune, Anonymous is considered by its detractors to essentially demonstrate extremist and terrorist tendencies, operating with the anarchistic ideals perhaps similar to Republican Spain, Woodstock, or the Free and Open Source computer programming communities that offer cooperative self-determination as a means to construct, restore, and encode through technology an ecotopia of sorts. Where active organization and civic engagement ensures a vibrant society will overcome systemic scarcity and government repression, hacktivists, supporting the struggle of the working class in its mobilization against political dominance, are structurally transforming civil society and facilitating revolutionary social change through their own operation as a modern resistance network.

Idealizing and Encoding a Utopia: The transnational social insurgency represented here engages in radical civic voluntarism with the intent of restructuring civil society, attacking the dystopian vision of a global economic system enforced by a hierarchical politics of corruption. Whereas industrial society as a system of oppression institutionalizes and enforces the exploitation of labor and systemic injustice through corporate-sponsored environmental devastation, activists are able to confront and destroy the implicit colonial project that controls and commands the potential of collective power, abolishing the literal prisons they find themselves in by using the power of language, computer and otherwise, to produce ideal culture. As this freedom of expression is instituted to infuse social justice movements with creative dissidence, the repudiation and thorough replacement of an established political system can be realized as those who were once governed find cultural representation through new social play, taking the form of reflexive games that are finally given precedent: “Considered as a cultural environment, a game plays with the possible erasure of [its internal mechanisms and experiences] and therefore plays with the possibility of its own existence.� (Salen and Zimmerman, pg. 587) In this respect, as humanity interacts in new ways to form new systems (through new games), political and social change mirrors philosophic application insofar as the new consciousness is, or will be, developed in its ideal form. This then is the single and most encompassing purpose we might consider: what shall we do, when we have declared our independence from what others have in mind for us to do? Secondary to this consideration is the question of how to realize that particular directive. To these ends, I can only offer what many have repeated before: seek freedom, of course!

A revolution literally implies a freedom of movement; so to identify instances where movement is hindered or outright prohibited is to clarify circumstances in which freedom is absent. These particular points of reference allow a subject to critically engage and craft alternatives to oppressive conditions; for instance, anarchism may replace marketplace oppression, as productive power is organized to rival political power.

Industrial society may give way to local governance that takes tenets of bioregionalism or permaculture into consideration. In this way, solutions are offered when problems warrant their formulation, so that

transforming the world macroproblem consists of perceiving how the entire pattern is defective, assuming that “the dilemmas have their satisfactory resolution only through change in the dominant paradigm.”

(Harman, pg. 131) This shift most likely consists of infinite proposals to rectify socially destructive tendencies, for instance in Riane Eisler’s conception of a partnership society, the IWW’s long-term goal of abolishing the wage-system, Jeremy Rifkin’s empathetic civilization, or Christopher Manes’ flavor of radical green neo-tribalistic anarcho-primitivism, to name a few. Yet despite the multivariable forms humanity’s ecotopian visions may take, the general consensus remains that the current system is untenable and true environmental awareness is needed for our collective survival, with social and environmental crises necessitating the consideration of possible future scenarios (Peak Oil and Climate Change among others) in which the rising costs in production undermine social stability. James Speth similarly speaks to the need for a post-economic growth plan: “The new environmental agenda should expand to embrace a profound challenge to consumerism and commercialism and the lifestyles they offer, a healthy skepticism of growthmania and a redefinition of what society should be striving to grow, a challenge to corporate dominance and a redefinition of the corporation and its goals, a deep commitment to social equity and justice, and a powerful assault on the materialistic, anthropocentric and contempocentric values that currently dominate in our culture.” (Speth, A New American Environmentalism, pg. 19) It is then in the spirit of reconsidering our current dominant paradigm that I have formulated my own action project to operate as a pivotal attack on the oppressive culture that systematically imprisons, murders, destroys, and attacks the freedom of a particular community. The effect, it is hoped, would initiate the dismantling of such an overbearing force by cutting into the allocated funds set aside to further the directives of hazardous procedures instituted by an unrepresentative system of malignant control.

Growing For a Common Cause In this newly founded Green Anarchism, the establishment of a cyber-commune can work to promote social prosperity in direct relation to the surrounding ecology as a new sacred space, mobilizing communities to restore a sense of environmental ethics in the decentralized local praxis each community member critically engages in. As seed exchanges further the promotion of new education and research concerning agriculture and green industry, growing communities can not only disengage from harmful practices that destroy the earth, but develop and expand the patient advocate network to include all others as well. The effect would provide social services with material support through increased revenue, as participants voluntarily enter new social contracts where play is an essential component that flourishes in a fun and meaningful culture so that festivals, games, and cultural exchanges “go viral.”

By radically dismantling the current system of industrial oppression which profits off of the destruction, imprisonment, wasteful spending, and artificially inflated prices of prohibition, violent tendencies of a disaffected population seeking to eliminate and overcome unrepresentative authorities simultaneously decrease, effectively monkey-wrenching the capitalist logic of global oppression by boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning the capitalist arena and living within an alternate community based primarily in agriculture and a compassionate connection to the rest of the natural world, now able to properly engage in the political process through civic republicanism:

“The presence of an active civil society works to decrease governmental corruption, reduce state terror, and minimize the impetus for anti-governmental demonstrations and riots. In other words, the presence of a robust civil society holds governments accountable, protects its citizens, and provides a suitable outlet for people to voice their concerns and be heard.” (Forbis, pg. ii) Global Insurgency through E-narchy: This paper has argued that corrupt or unrepresentative bureaucracy can be eliminated for encoded patterns in which the work of a critical mass is designed to contribute to a common cause. In the proposal outlined above, money can be rendered obsolete and irrelevant as a medium of exchange when interdependence is accounted for by languages programmed to distribute enlightened consciousness. As Earth’s resources increasingly become considered common heritage of the natural life processes, air, water, food, land, and social capital can be recognized as a common asset on which to restructure our principles and communities. Anarcho-syndicates can produce biodegradable goods and focus on providing services rather than manufacturing material products, achieving a partnership society as a viable alternative to western industrial globalization and its discontents: “Beginning with the two modes of immediate organization and control, namely organization and control in the workplace and in the community, one can imagine a network of workers councils, and at a higher level, representation across factories, or across branches of industry, or across crafts and on to general assemblies of workers councils that can be regional and national and international in character.” (Chomsky, 2005 pg. 137) The Internet is the ideal instrument by which to initiate that transformation, as it was constructed as a decentralized network of communication. A worldwide collection of computer networks that transfers and exchanges data, using common standards, can provide for an alternative means of exchange no longer limited by the finite, quantifiable sum implicit within monetary system. Thus the anarchistic nature of a collaborative communication network, utilized in a biocentric framework that promotes fair bioregional consumption to be maintained through local federations of conscientious citizens working for a common purpose (i.e. fulfilling every level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) allows Anarchy to be reconsidered as its online equivalent—“Enarchy.” Dialogue and collaboration can include valuable insights that craft common liberation praxis, facilitated by an education infused with green values that seeks to maintain unity while taking into account its effect on the surrounding ecology.

Through universal communication; a superior organizational method; and biocentric ideals that maintain the common kinship of humanity; a global insurgency is well-suited to take place through a method of E-narchy to manifest a free society. In this way, conflict and inequity can be confronted and resolved in a new global marketplace seeking as its purpose the abolition of prison, war, and general discontent through the production and harmonization of social content. As praxis is applied, civic participation can alleviate terrorism and encode justice within society’s very nature. This intentional “community of communities” can then serve as an outward manifestation of ecological activism, where those feeling alienated in mainstream society might find refuge in the universal availability of a uniting structure that constructs a meaningful world order for them. In so doing, these communities are able to “form the institutional settings for the practice of lives rooted in the belief that simplicity and conscious, compassionate living is preferable, and one can have the faith that choosing a life in community will lead to a better world for all.” (Baumann, pg. 351)

As legalization efforts give way to programming culture through the use of language (as legalization implies an outside authority okaying one’s personal intent), social connection occurs through the implicit religiosity of a shared sacred worldview. Eco-magic in the marijuana movement, as the conscious manipulation of relevant energy forces, can then offer the possibility of willing the surrounding landscape to protect a community seeking simply to live freely and without persecution.

Technology, as an extension and catalyst of personal intent, facilitates this expression, as when protest singer Willie Nelson’s offhand comment that there should be a Tea Pot Party to engage in the political process for marijuana legalization drove the formulation of such a group on Facebook; or when the OKLEVUEHA Native American Church of Hawaii sued the DEA for infringing upon their right to use cannabis as a sacrament within the framework of an indigenous Earth-based healing religion. In either case, while perhaps not technologically determined, in that Facebook, the Internet, or the Legislative process cannot by themselves cause a revolution, these tools certainly offer the potential for hackers to condition the social environment in which they reside, ensuring a successful campaign that overcomes the oppression and hindrances to the free access of movement. Their ability to encode social change through the transformation of technology and digital media is, in the opinion of the author, ultimately justified as they force into public discussion the reconsidered effect of “humanity’s relationship to technology, from whether there are determinations or not to constantly developing sets of determinative affordances in computer and network socio-technologies.” (Jordan, pg. 140) Thus as a global community of activists mobilize, organize, resist, and find themselves socially empowered to operate self-sufficiently, the language they utilize to program new expressions of dissent may redirect our cultural narratives through a new folklore of activism.

Outside Readings: Ackerman, Spencer (2011) “With Stuxnet, Did the U.S. and Israel Create a New Cyberwar Era?” Wired. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/with-stuxnet-did-the-u-s-and-israel-create-a-new-cyberwarera/ Baumann, John (2001) “Radical Simplicity: intentional community as environmental activism and nature religion.” PhD dissertation for the UC Santa Barbara Chomsky, Noam (2005) Chomsky on Anarchism. AK Press: Oakland, CA Forbis, Jeremy Scott.(2008) “Organized Civil Society: a cross national evaluation of the socio-political effects of non-governmental organization density on governmental corruption, state terror, and anti-government demonstrations.” PhD dissertation for Ohio State University Harman, Willis (1998) Global Mind Change: the promise of the 21st century. Berrett-Koehler Publishers: San Francisco, CA Holden, Dominic (2011) “White House Requests Meeting with Seattle Times to Bully Against Pro-Pot Editorials.” Salem News. http://www.salem-news.com/articles/february282011/seattle-pot-kerlikowske.php Jilani, Zaid (2011) “Leader of Egyptian Unions to Wisconsin Protesters: ‘We Stand With you As you Stood With Us.’” Think Progress. http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/21/leader-egyptian-unions-wisconsin/ Jordan, Tim (2008) Hacking: digital media and society series. Polity Press: Cambridge, UK Laurendeau, Jason (2007) “Mutiny and Sabotage in Defense of Mother Earth: risk cultures, radical environmentalism and ecotage.” PhD dissertation for the University of Calgary Mansur, Keith (2011) “The First Step: M-Project May Well Revolutionize Medical Marijuana’s Acceptance.”

Oregon Cannabis Connection. http://issuu.com/occonline/docs/0201_whole_paper? mode=embed&layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml&showFlipBtn=true Salen Katie and Eric Zimmerman (2004) Rules of Play: game design fundamentals. MIT Press press: London, England.

Spencer, Richard (2010) “Iranian nuclear scientist ‘killed by Mossad or the CIA.” The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/8168693/Iranian-nuclear-scientist-killed-byMossad-or-the-CIA.html Toor, Amar (2011) “Anonymous Attacks Tunisian Government, in Defense of WikiLeaks.” Switched. http://www.switched.com/2011/01/03/anonymous-attacks-tunisian-government-wikileaks/ Webster, Stephen C (2010) “Flashback: Wikileaks chief said he has 5GB of secret docs on Bank of America.”

Raw Story. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/30/flashback-wikileaks-chief-5gb-dirt-bank-america/ Wing, Nick (2011) “‘Anonymous’ Hackers Take Down Koch Brothers-Backed Americans For Prosperity Website.” Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/28/anonymous-koch-americans-forprosperity_n_829056.html

Tar Sands Resistance as Cosmic Warfare “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self-Reliance The conditions for life are complex and precise; yet humans are systematically altering those conditions so as to potentially jeopardize the health of the biosphere as a whole. This deterioration of life-support systems is pushing us towards (if not past) a global tipping point, changing the very nature of the planet. Whereas the root cause has been identified as “human population growth and how many resources each one of us uses,” there is growing consensus that global leadership and cooperation is needed to sustain the wellbeing of the planet. (Sanders 2012) Still, the challenge to fundamentally transform the social system is hardly on track to avoid these projected trends. Fossil fuel production is at an all-time high and energy demand is projected to grow 53% by 2035. (Ausick 2011) Recent reports estimate the carbon economy and its climate changing effect is currently responsible for the deaths of five million people per year and will increase to exceed 100 million deaths by 2030, disproportionately falling upon the poorest countries. (DARA 2012) Even as the International Energy Agency warns that the world will “‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change” if the energy infrastructure is not rapidly changed in the next four years, pipeline projects continue to be built across North America to deliver fossil fuels to overseas markets. (Harvey 2011) These pipelines not only pose immediate threats to the ecosystems they cut across but risk destabilizing the climate entirely.

Among such projects, the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline, tapping into the Athabasca Oil Sands in Canada and stretching more than 1,700 miles underground across six states and 2,000 U.S. waterways (including the Oglalla Aquifer, a primary source for farmland irrigation water, and the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer which provides drinking water for 10 million Texans), has been called by leading environmentalists a “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet,” spelling out what would essentially mean “game over” for the climate movement. (McGowan 2011) More and more, these projects are met with increasing resistance: action camps of the Unis’tot’en clan of the Wet’suet’en Nation are defending traditional lands from billion dollar corporations and the Canadian government by blockading construction of the Pacific Trails Pipeline at various points. Similarly, the tar sands blockades in the United States have mobilized tree-sits, lockdowns, banner drops, celebrity arrests, and outspoken criticism, pointing out these projects would contribute to global warming and risk the release of millions of gallons of crude oil into surrounding ecosystems.

Potentially carrying 830,000 barrels per day to users, the Keystone XL provides a major flashpoint between those seeking to limit global warming by stopping carbon emissions, and those looking to further expand the market for oil sands crude. (Luther et al. 2012) These conflicts demonstrate fierce opposition to a last ditch effort for extreme exploitation of the planet’s resources to the detriment of human and non-human communities—perceived as the potential genocide of the global poor and biocide of the living planet, directed at the behest of global capital. Says one blockader, living in the Tar Sands Blockade tree village that protects an entire grove directly in the path of the Keystone XL Pipeline, “if our actions here are inspiring to enough people and/or the right people, then enough force and/or tactical breakthroughs will be generated, legally or illegally or both, to force the bad guys to back down.” (Anonymous 2012) This passage articulates the clash of worldviews, where ruling ideas governing public sentiments are challenged in a very tangible way. Seeking to change the root causes of environmental harm, the logic of radical earth defense in turn offers alternative and oppositional frameworks to guide and condition how we treat the natural world.

“They work at the ideational and affective level of human experience and activity. Ultimately, it is the masses, through public consciousness raising, that will ensure long-term solutions to environmental destruction by demanding changes in economic practices.” (Kamieniecki 1995, pg. 331) By shifting the dynamics of harm to stop ecological abuse and reverse degradation, these movements contradict the law and established norms of a larger social segment, bringing to mainstream consciousness an understanding that the prevailing social order is not only unsustainable, but immoral as well.

Feral Jihadis Radical environmental groups and their allies hold a deep commitment to the earth community and the professed sanctity of life itself. This reverence is rooted in a belief that the biosphere is “interdependent, intrinsically valuable, and sacred,” (Taylor 2010, pg. 102) motivating a transformative politics respectful of the earth. But while aspirations for a social order grounded in an earth-based civic religion can structure new beliefs and behaviors, such outlooks may provide spiritual mandates for more militant forms of resistance, especially if such acts are interpreted as effective means to undo environmental degradation Positioning themselves against global industrial processes, ecological resistance movements target the material forces contributing to the deterioration of nature’s material conditions; and historically in increasingly hostile ways. Besides sustaining blockades of logging roads and pipelines, radical environmental activists have also engaged in tree spiking, power line sabotage, arson, intimidation, and general strikes to defend life as a sacred force against the onslaught of civilization. This moral commitment to land-defense is prevalent in militant eco-resistance campaigns. By “slowing the pace of extraction, empowering others to resist environmental destruction, and publicly exposing and ridiculing environmentally irresponsible industries and the government that supports them,” activists cost extractive industries millions of dollars, cutting into profit margins and forcing them to reconsider their damaging effects. (Smith 2008) Yet by all indicators, the environmental protection movement is in a worse position today than ever before. Its inefficacy has in turn provoked an escalation of tactics and strategies described in anti-civilization literature as mobilizing underground networks for asymmetric actions and sabotage to disrupt industrial systems and dismantle industrial infrastructure. Targeting the essential processes that keep civilization functioning, “Decisive Ecological Warfare” is considered imperative to facilitate social collapse and thereby ease the pressure and encourage people to dissociate from industrial capitalism voluntarily: “Since industrial civilization is systematically dismantling the ecological infrastructure of the planet, the sooner civilization comes down, the more life will remain afterwards to support both humans and non-humans.” (Jensen 2011, pg. 424) The strategic militancy of ecological resistance is no longer aimed at merely carrying out defensive actions against industrial assaults; instead, weak points, critical nodes and bottlenecks are identified and targeted to disrupt and destroy the key foundational support necessary for civilization to function. Here, civilization as a totality is described as the technological mechanism by which the powerful are able to exploit the marginalized and destroy the planet.

Drawing inspiration from militant movements like the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta and the Iraqi insurgency, earth defense movements are encouraged to adopt “similar convictions of strategic rigor,” and coordinate “decisive attacks against multiple such nodes [that] will have an exponential effect, and can cause cascading failures within the system.” (Budd 2012) This shift to predominantly guerrilla tactics stems from the necessity of attacking a monolithic technologically advanced social structure through smaller, underground and decentralized forces so as to achieve success.

Signifying the loss of state-legitimacy and ultimately the initiation of (or at least calls for) a world-wide insurrectionary ecology, activists engaging in such forms of resistance have been reclassified as “terrorists” by the federal government,

since their tactics incite mass fear and discomfort for those who are dependent upon and invested in civilization’s basic services (electricity, industry…). However, for these activists, those same services are considered expressive of the logic of “domestication” that provides the origin of modern domination in the first place, and thereby justify their removal altogether.

Such attacks are done in complete disregard for the laws of the state too, for if it can be determined that the state should not exist in the first place, then its laws hold no power whatsoever and perhaps even constitute corrupt boundaries to be emphatically transgressed. Ted Kaczynski writes on the role of morality and violence in anti-civilization discourse, “It is necessary for the function of modern industrial society that people should cooperate in a rigid, machine-like way, obeying rules, following orders and schedules, carrying out prescribed procedures. Consequently the system requires, above all, human docility and social order. Of all human behaviors, violence is the one most disruptive of social order, hence the one most dangerous to the system.” (Kaczynski 2008, pg. 242) Seen here, the logic of ecological resistance has fashioned a rationale seeking nothing less than the complete removal of what is determined to be oppressive, exploitative, immoral, and unsustainable—namely, civilization itself. The full range of revolutionary activities are thusly considered to be legitimate methods contributing to effective earth-defense, even to the point where extinguishing human life becomes a reasonable endeavor, as when Kaczynski murdered or attempted to murder several captains of industry, including a timber industry lobbyist, the president of United Airlines, a university geneticist, and engineering and computer science professors, among others. Like others today, Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unabomber) asserts that the consequences of industrial society have been a disaster for the human race, robbing humans of their very nature and inevitably enslaving those enmeshed and involved in its processes, and therefore justifies engaging in the violent, militant actions considered to be tactical warfare.

Analyzing the Cult of the Green Dragon The environmental movement has, through its rhetoric and methods, produced a degree of reactionary backlash.

“Resisting the Green Dragon” (RGD), a group self-identifying as a “biblical response to one of the greatest deceptions of our day,” sees in environmentalism a false global religion that has infiltrated popular culture to target the youth, threaten the sanctity of life, and devastate the world’s poor. Citing “green programs” that point to population control, abortion, global government, and euthanasia as necessary solutions to climate change and overpopulation, groups like RGD contest ecological resistance, seeing it to be an existential threat. Similarly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has repeatedly labeled “eco-terrorist” groups the most dangerous domestic terror group, with harsh sentences for crimes that amount to property destruction (30+ years at times) specifically imposed as a result of this label. But does such ecoresistance warrant the fear it has instilled in Christian, government, and more moderate circles?

There is no doubt that ecological resistance movements share key characteristics with the religious violence carried out by terrorist networks around the world. Seen as waging a defensive “just war” to protect the planet, radical environmentalists demonize perceived enemies, just as groups like al-Qaeda, abortion clinic bombers, or any other movement seeking to kill in the name of a holy ideal. Ecological activists waging cultural war against the dominant power system approach cosmic significance (at least for themselves) by identifying their violence as part of a spiritualized struggle. The quest for an environmentally conscientious social system in which nature is privileged thereby offers a course for “righteous rule,” in which violence is conceived of as a sacred duty—where actions classified as “ecoterrorism” refer to those symbolic actions on the battlefield of ideas that are assumed to uphold a divine order. These environmental activists are, in a sense, warring against the very separation dividing civilization from nature in the first place. For them, there is no difference between the sacred and profane, because the very nature of every day life is revered.

This access to the holy is absent in the de-animated worldview of a secularized culture whose lack of awareness tends towards destruction and a kind of domestic abuse. The struggle to end the duality between green spirituality and a

secular state creates the religious meaning necessary for violence to be used symbolically to reassert a primal order in a chaotic milieu in which the crumbling value-systems of modernity are challenged and replaced. Acts like the Tar Sands Blockade become public performances or spectacles, symbolically empowering a largely marginalized movement to raise consciousness and reclaim its potency. This process parallels the logic of religious violence exactly: “The syndrome begins with the perception that the public world has gone awry, and the suspicion that behind this social confusion lies a great spiritual and moral conflict, a cosmic battle between the forces of order and chaos, good and evil.

Such a conflict is understandably violent, and this violence is often felt by the victimized activist as powerlessness, either individually or in association with others…The government—already delegitimized—is perceived to be in league with the forces of chaos and evil.” (Juergensmeyer 2001, pg. 228) The religious violence of green spirituality becomes a countercultural force undermining the hegemony of the dominant order: the task of humans is no longer destructive because it is to so love the earth as to spiritualize it, consequently reconciling spirit and matter. By applying this intention, ecological resistance movements and individuals are empowered to operationalize the unmediated spiritual authority of nature to dissolve the relations of domestication through symbolic expressions that assume divine justification. The conflict is dramatized as cosmic war so that actions like the Tar Sands Blockade become a performance act of sacred transformation aimed to implode civilization’s capacity for ecocide.

Looking Forward: The Sacrifice of Civilization?

The initial construction of the Keystone XL pipeline has induced a counterattack threatening to collapse the very system itself. A fundamental antagonism is present in which globalized power has encountered resistance. Given the evidence, it seems likely that the desecration and violation of the earth will continue to justify violent, militant acts, perhaps hinting at a course for reconciliation.

“Only by addressing environmental degradation at its varied roots will we reduce environmental decline. Only thus will halt the threat it poses to human livelihoods, the insult it represents to the deeply held moral duties that many individuals feel toward non-human nature; only then will we eliminate environmental-related violence.” (Taylor 1998, pg. 26) As ecological resistance identifies the potential breakdown of social order to be rooted in a worldview structured upon nature’s exploit for material wealth, it necessarily orients itself to disrupt the stability of the dominant order. This exposes a crisis by which a form of ritualized murder is employed to transfer the collective guilt and thereby resolve the community conflict, with civilization fulfilling the role of surrogate victim.

Activists materially challenging the processes that underpin civilization engage in a form of generative violence against civilization. Amounting to a form of “ego-death” needed for collective transformation, the sacrifice of civilization provides a symbolizing event sanctifying the violence needed for cosmic reconciliation. The violence inherent in this ritual murder merges civilization with the larger culture in a process of martyrdom, a symbolic exorcism able to heal separation and restore balance.

Resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline and other fossil fuel projects can be seen as performance theatre symbolically empowering individuals who put their bodies directly in confrontation with a demonized enemy. Motivated by a deep conviction that nature is sacred, actions are designed to destroy the prevailing disorder and end the moral collapse characterizing civilization to impose what is considered a more enlightened and spiritually advanced mode of social organization in harmony with a spiritualized earth.

Bibliography

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Retrieved 11/3/12 from http://247wallst.com/2011/09/19/global-energy-demand-will-grow-by-53-by-2035/ Budd, Alex (2012) “Time is Short: Systems Disruption and Strategic Militancy.” DGR News Service. Retrieved 11/1/12 from http://dgrnewsservice.org/2012/10/24/time-is-short-systems-disruption-and-strategic-militancy/ DARA. (2012) “Findings and Observations.” Retrieved 11/1/12 from http://daraint.org/wpcontent/uploads/2012/09/CVM2ndEd-Findings.pdf more can be found in “A guide to the Cold Calculus of a Hot Planet http://daraint.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/CVM_RELEASE_FINAL_ENGLISH.pdf Harvey, Fiona. (2011) “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns.” In The Guardian.

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Retrieved 11/3/12 from http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/27/idUS323166223820110627 Smith, Rebecca K. (2008) “Eco-Terrorism? A critical analysis of the vilififcation of radical environmental activists as terrorists.” Originally published in Environmental Law, Vol. 28, Issue 2. Retrievable at http://www.supportdaniel.org/files/Ecoterrorism_critical_analysis.pdf Taylor, Bron, (1998) “Religion, Violence and Radical Environmentalism: From Earth First! to the Unabomber to the Earth Liberation Front,” in Terrorism and Political Violence, 10 (4), 1-42: Winter 1998 Retrieved 11/1/12 from http://www.brontaylor.com/environmental_articles/pdf/Taylor–ReligionViolenceandRE.pdf Taylor, Bron Raymond (2010). Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA Sanders, Robert. (2012) “Scientists uncover evidence of impending tipping point for Earth.” UC Berkeley News Center.

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The Magic of Sacrifice “The art of revolutionizing and overturning states is to undermine established customs, by going back to their origin, in order to mark their want of justice.”

Blaise Pascal

Abstract: This essay posits sacrifice as a dialectic that balances perceived cosmic and cultural orders.

Civil disobedience, as an expression of this sacrificial process, integrates the numinous into daily life so that “martyrdom” becomes a positive fulfillment of religious duty. This essay argues that violence plays a necessary part in transference (a process by which “divine justice” is implemented) as a means to communicate with divinity. By incorporating theories of modern warfare and peacemaking, I hope to demonstrate how sacrifice heals assumed divisions between God and humanity (as well as competing cultural systems) and transcends them by forging new social identities that enact new states of being.

Introduction: The strategic innovation of warfare has thoroughly achieved technological supremacy. Today the United States military wages war against non-state terrorist networks, hunting down and killing enemy combatants with Special Forces and unmanned drone strikes. This fighting is markedly different from traditional modern warfare. Invading armies are now waging counterinsurgency programs against asymmetric warfare, and “full-spectrum dominance” is implemented by a military structure that has achieved total hegemony over multiple domains of the battlefield.

In turn, disempowered “insurgents” are reduced to focusing the rage of indigenous populations to fight on the moral level, attacking the enemy’s civil society to create the perception of defeat. As ideological networks and individuals become more capable of effecting mass damage on their own, attacks against persons or property are being carried out to demoralize and convince political leaders their goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. States in turn rely upon an evolving style of war that functions to defeat such insurgencies, manipulating forces in economic, political, social, and military domains to hunt down insurgents in culturally appropriate ways.

Here, conflict is “altered” to create conditions favorable to the state power. Manipulation, influence, and co-optation are employed to define and shape the outcomes and effects of a perception-based warfare strategy that targets the context of conflict. Such techniques become sufficiently advanced when the population is unaware even of the very existence of hidden forces that “represent the manipulation of guerrilla pressures to effect an occult feedback loop and alter the context of society.” (Abbott, 2011) Indeed, consciousness has been made a technology, capable of neutralizing enemy threats by shifting the social ontology in which they arise; in essence, a weapon of warfare used to resolve conflict, so highly advanced it is hardly distinguishable from

magic.

Methodological Supremacy Whereas opposing ideologies form the core directives for which enemies clash, battlespace is in fact located in the community consciousness. The very understanding of reality is called into question as observations are manipulated to control and minimize retaliation. Such warfare remains an effective method for political struggle, with systemic violence used when necessary to pacify the populace from sufficiently challenging an instituted power. This efficiency should not be conflated with being a supreme method for inducing social change in civil society however, since “nonviolent resistance methods are likely to be more successful than violent methods in achieving strategic objectives.” (Stephan and Chenowith 2011, pg. 42) Because nonviolent resistance achieves demands against the will of the opponent by seizing control of the conflict by non-conformity or defiance, it is often more effective than violence due to its ability to enhance perceptions of legitimacy and appeal to encourage participation (thus putting more pressure on the target).

By sacrificing the use of violence, non-violence offers “a civilian based method used to wage conflict through social, psychological, economic, and political means without the threat or use of violence.” (Ibid, pg. 9) Rather than participate in violent forms, non-violent action dramatizes the conflict by inciting and defining violence as a mode of unjust action. This moment of injustice, by which a peaceful, non-violent action is met with violent opposition, exposes a conflict that determines which state of reality will ultimately emerge, violent or non-violent. Non-violent civil disobedience functions to identify and overcome this injustice by entering into a sacrificial relationship that establishes dialogical communication between violent and nonviolent orders.

But if sacrifice is so complex, whence comes its unity? It is because, fundamentally, beneath the diverse forms it takes, it always consists in one same procedure, which may be used for the most widely differing purposes. This procedure consists in establishing a means of communication between the sacred and the profane worlds through the mediation of a victim, that is, of a thing that in the course of the ceremony is destroyed. (Hubert and Mauss 2011, pg. 110) The victim’s cosmic struggle, ultimately ending in death, reconciles a corrupt social order by balancing a spiritual debt, assimilating the community to divinity again. It is this sacrifice that achieves, ritualistically, its desired results by directing its influence into reality. The absolute adherence to non-violent action obtains by automatic operation a mechanically produced effect that becomes the reason for the rite’s own existence. In this way does sacrifice forge a social identity strong enough to maintain a sense of cosmic and cultural order in the face of a catastrophic imbalance.

“This is the explanation of the fundamental importance laid by nearly all cults upon

the material portion of the ceremonies. This religious formalism—very probably the first form of legal formalism—comes from the fact that since the formula to be pronounced and the movements to be made contain within themselves the source of their efficacy, they would lose it if they did not conform absolutely to the type consecrated by success.” (Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Belief pg. 35) Identity and Spirit Where radical jihad is considered the “sixth pillar of Islam,” divine struggle can be realized in the violence of religious war: When a muslim community is ruled by non-muslims, a jihad can be justified only if Islam is suppressed…Muslims have a religious duty to join a jihad to end the injustice that their fellow religionists may be suffering anywhere in the world. (Hiro 2002, pg. 420) Here, cosmic war is waged in the cultural realm, intended to cure the misalignment between cultural and cosmic orders, and violence as a method for social change is sacralized. The ultimate action of sacred violence is conceived as the holy duty of martyrdom, where the warrior willingly dies to fulfill the ethical commandment to struggle for a sacred order. “As the supreme performance of the jihad, martyrdom does not depend on the knowledge either of an external audience or of an external reality, serving instead as its own proof.“ (Devji 2005, pg. 104) Jihad is waged as a holy war without ignorance or false consciousness against a corrupt cultural order, with sacrifice modeling a self-contained ethical performance that becomes the very moment of spiritual identification: “The crucial function of this transformation is that it is this moment that most completely serves to enable the martyrology to serve the production of ‘group identity and self-definition…’ (Boyarin 1999, pg. 108) Martyred in cosmic service to a sacred allegiance, the victim dies with the intention of redeeming society. At once killed in obedience to the divine, and apologetic for the social failure to live in harmony with divine law, sacrifice mediates between sacred and profane, providing a sociological phenomenon to presumably maintain the continuity of community.

Though sacrifice usually involves the killing of one individual person or animal, and warfare involves the destruction of a whole group, they are both acts of destruction undertaken—perhaps paradoxically—in order to establish a more ordered and peaceful world…like sacrifice, the idea of war is a way of providing a framework of order over a chaotic situation.” (Juergensmeyer and Kitts 2011, pg. 218) The dualism of social alienation from divine law provides a conflict, to be “healed” by violence. At the same time the martyr is compelled to perish as a supreme indicator of divine allegiance, the culture is likewise compelled to sacrifice this intermediary for the sake of social stability. Sacrifice in this case functions as the core mechanism by which the cultural order stays in power, scapegoating the martyr as a threat to the traditional system whose control of power is maintained by violence.

Sacrifice can thus be seen to be the active display of confrontation between cultural and sacred orders, the tension between the victim and culture that duel as opposing expressions of divinity. This struggle for power creates a violent rivalry between martyr and culture, and the collective transference of violence to the victim demonstrates how unjust relations are maintained as the inner spirituality of the cultural order.

Timeless Love If violence throws into perpetual conflict institutions engaged in cyclical violence, nonviolence operates to heal their divisions. By targeting and unmasking the spiritual core of events, nonviolence is able to confront the spirituality and physical manifestation of violent cultural systems in which principles of love are destroyed. Fidelity to a singular spiritual directive in the face of external repression creates conflict through which the injustice of the dominant cultural structure is transformed through a dialogic method of communication between culture and victim. While violent terrorisms enact violence, nonviolent dissonance as subversive proclamations of holy order make injustice visible, to be consciously transformed and returned to its true spirit through the struggle against oppressive structures that reproduce patterns of systemic injustice through violence.

Girard offers Christ as one who submits to violence in order to reveal the structural matrix of domination. In so doing, he becomes the focus for perceived disorder, and killed, indicating the radical alienation between social and eternal order. He is murdered by a system that privileges violence as a method to ensure order and does not tolerate any individual who so radically opposes it. Christ is martyred, violently sacrificed to uphold social order, yet his love acts in opposition to the laws of violence. The divinity of Christ thus subverts this corrupt social order that is based in violent reciprocation while confronting and absorbing its full effect.

“To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind.

Violence is the controlling agent in every form of mythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance…A nonviolent deity can signal his existence to mankind only by becoming driven out by violence, by demonstrating that he is not able to remain in the Kingdom of Violence.” (Girard 2006, pg. 193) Christ, as the nonviolent direct expression of the divine nature of God, offers a new reality by actualizing nonviolence in the present as the very ethos of a divine, domination-free future. This vision is extinguished by a social order in direct conflict with such divine principles, so that whereas all violence further extends injustice and domination into the future, nonviolent intercession creates moments of divine resonance in the present that express a more sacred reality. Irigiray writes that the natural order is overlaid with sacrificial orders of violence, indicating the division and effect this dualism takes.

“The sacrificial order overlays the natural rhythms with a different and cumulative

temporality that dispenses and prevents us from attending to the moment. Once this occurs imprecisions multiply and grow. A catharsis becomes necessary.” (Irigiray, pg.

77) The myth of redemptive violence justifies sacrifice as a process of spiritual transformation, necessitating an event through which violence is used as a method to align the social order with the sacred, a method to balance opposing orders. The victim is objectified and destroyed, with any peace conceived of as an effect of violence In this respect, the social order is fundamentally rooted in the moment of violence, manifesting its expression in the very moment when life is taken for a spiritualized purpose. All future peace is necessarily preceded by any present violence. Where violence exists, non-violence cannot.

Christ then offers the possibility for an alternative system in which altered spiritualties inaugurate new rhythms of social living. Adherence to nonviolence, as a central mode of being, unmasks the tension that arises between nonviolent action and the injustice of its reception into dialogic relationship.

Injustice can be lovingly confronted so that the tension of the conflict can be uncovered and sustained through commitment to embrace the “other” non-violently. Here, love as a creative, dynamic, and revolutionary force is able to transform the social structure by initiating the integration of “self” and “other” through the communicative capacities of sacrifice. The objectification of the victim is destroyed when, through the refusal (inability?) to retaliate violently, loving action establishes nonviolent relations that in turn help to resolve conflict and realize a more perfect form of divine justice. Adams writes of this process, “The will to love becomes the impetus toward justice; creative negotiation with people or things that might have previously been obstacles; and finally, experiences of discovery and joy leading to ever deeper and more complex experiences of subjectivity and relationship with God and others. Loving out of this new dynamic is to be an active co-creator with God in the divine and originally good created order of things, the kingdom of God, which might also be called the Order of Love.”

(Adams 2000 pg. 297) There is no place for the presence of violence for a later peace because the presence of peace necessitates the absence of violence, no matter how subtle. In other words, peacemaking starts now: where the action of time offers conscious space to resolve conflict. The intervention of civil disobedience incites repression to make injustice explicit, yet nonviolence as a strategic method of civil disobedience is the very sacrifice of violence as mode of action. Here, and only here, opposing systems can be united in the presence of dialogical communication, where relational supremacy is not sought as a goal, but rather it is the transformative effect of a loving relationship that becomes the means to itself as the very same end.

In the very moment of conflict, the violent sacrifice of non-violence perpetuates an order predicated on murder, legitimizing injustice as a necessary evil. Alternatively, Christ’s nonviolent

sacrifice of violence confronts such injustice and initiates a new reality of participatory loving creativity. Where the incarnation of love is able to systematically dismantle and overcome the sacrificial violence of a given order, the expression of a sacred, divine order is made evident.

Metamorphosis and Divine Union By unmasking the tension between violent and non-violent orders, lines of communication are opened. Loving action combines these opposites through nonviolence to maintain a relationship, eventually to the cost of the victim’s life, who is scapegoated to incite collective violence for spiritual transformation. Such violence is sacralized for the reason that it is seen to be the necessary process by which divine is able to come into the world. The corrupt social order is antithetical to the divine, and victimizes and destroys it in response. The victim’s life is sacrificed so as to return the community to the divine ordering of society.

Christ offers nonviolent love as a superior method to wage conflict by exposing and restoring relations with the injustice it comes into conflict with, those based in social exploitation.

Civil disobedience is sacrificial when nonviolence as a force of truth, becomes a method to consciously produce a loving order through direct action, where it contradicts and subverts that power system based on violence. Where communication (dialogue) is unable to remain (murder), the very instance of violence represents the synthesis by which the mechanism of sacrifice acts as a transference point bringing the social order into balance with the divine order so that its efficacy is demonstratively proved: the power of the divine is expressed as a loving order communicating divinity to society through constructive, loving action.

The transformative synthesis of sacred sacrifice resolves the perceived duality of divine/human, with loving social action as an alternatively divine state of mind and being. The victim willingly embraces death as an ecstatic reunion with God, infusing non-violent love with the systemic violence of the sacrifice. This love that is temporally realized as a potentially active and dynamic force, provides a constructive power that itself creates the very end it seeks. On this, King writes “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.” (King Jr. 1963) Non-violent communication offers spiritual action whose presence intends justice, transforming itself through loving dialogue. This allows for social health to be uniquely judged on the “capacity of its least privileged members to resist any abuses of authority.” (Spretnak 1991, Pg 8) Non-violence, as both method and result, heals the spiritual duality of injustice as applied in moments of constructive communication and peaceful social relations. As does Christ, Gandhi demonstrates nonviolence to be a more effective method of conflict resolution, the convergence of love in time that provides “dynamic control on the field of action through the fashioning of techniques for the

creative resolution of conflict.� (Bondurant 1959, Pg. 199) Predicated on non-violence as a technique to realize and enact peace, cooperative relations becomes a process that communicates, interconnects, and transforms the intentionality of divine union into a powerful force. Sacrifice therefore becomes a ritual for communion, a transformative process by which a divine intermediary is invoked for social perfection. Consciousness of God then commands spiritual defiance against injustice, opening up a new spirituality to participate nonviolently in a divine state of being(s). Here, Walter Wink writes of spiritual intercession, A new force field appears that hitherto was only potential. The entire configuration changes as the result of the change of a single part. A space opens in the praying person, permitting God to act without violating human freedom. (Wink 1998, pg.

186) By unmasking the tension between social violence and divine love, nonviolence as a force of truth consciously produces a more peaceful order. Direct action contradicts and subverts power systems based on violence. This corrupt social order is antithetical to the divine, and victimizes and destroys it as a response. Such violence indicates the presence of injustice where love does not fulfill the law, and sacrifice recreates reality through divine interaction. Nonviolence as a method to act outwardly a loving order thus offers relational cooperation where participation in divine peace is to freely know God’s justice in time, with love resonating as a relational union, in each moment predicated upon the exaltation of relations.

Bibliography Abbott, Daniel H. 2011 The Handbook of Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW) Nimble Books: E-book Adams, Rebecca 2000. “Loving Mimesis and Girard’s ‘Scapegoat of the Text’: A Creative Reassessment of Mimetic Desire” in Violence Renounced. Willard M. Swartley, Ed. Bondurant, Joan V. 1958. Conquest of Violence: the Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict Princeton University Press.: Princeton, NJ Boyarin, Daniel, 1999. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford University Press, CA Devji, Faisal, 2005. Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY Durkheim, Emile 1912. The Elementary Forms of Religious Belief.

Girard, Rene, 1996. The Girard Reader. Ed. James G. Williams. The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, NY Hiro, Dilip 2002. War Without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response. Routledge: New York, NY Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss, 2011. "Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss." In Princeton Readings in Religion and Violence. Mark Juergensmeyer and Margo Kitts Eds. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ Irigiray, Luce 1993. “Women, the Sacred, and Money” in Sexes and Geneologies. Columbia University Press: New York, NY Juergensmeyer, Mark and Margo Kitts. 2011. Princeton Readings Religion and Violence Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ King Jr., Martin Luther 1963. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” Stephan, Maria J. and Erica Chenowith, 2008. "Why Civil Resistance Works: the logic of nonviolent conflict.” In International Security. Vol 33, Issue 1 Spretnak, Charlene 1991 “The Spiritual Dimension of Gandhi’s Activism” retrieved online https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:m1RZImObIbAJ:acorn.sbu.edu/x1990-1991/Mar91-The %2520Spritiual %2520Dimension.pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjsBsTdxS9SMhPLFxm2RxNiogtXN6EP1W2VzYbB dy3qwn_tobtY3cfSIdxNy6M6ZOuM8BD5UjSNwJb6MGWwxKZ4arHRxfKVP6cVfdx9_UrMqIn2xYZJNEm2mJBfJ2 sopwORNOWJ&sig=AHIEtbQlEk2ZlwsA-rvtJbp1Zz3pev9cxA Wink, Walter, 1998. The Powers that Be: theology for a new millennium. Doubleday: New York, NY

Beyond Revolution: Symbol and Mystery in Eric Voegelin’s Philosophy of Magic “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”

–Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philsophicus

Abstract: Eric Voegelin’s search for truth ends where it begins—in mystery. This paper suggests that at its center is Eric Voegelin’s philosophy of magic. I argue Voegelin’s emphasis on magic and its role in gnostic revolution further places it as a cornerstone for his larger body of work; Moreover, this study of magic must be situated in its traditional context in order to articulate a common framework for any future study of magic to draw from.

Keywords: Magic, Gnosis, Sorcery, Revolution, God, Symbol, Time, Divinity, Mystery

Introduction: On the Crisis of Existence This section locates Voegelin’s work as focused initially on the symbol as cosmion, or named order, of an existing world, evoked and reified in language and performative utterance. The implications of the misplaced fallacy of political doctrine were made relevant to Voegelin when he narrowly escaped National Socialism’s system of science with his life, a system rooted in what Voegelin defines as an outburst in the “magic imagination”: the “magic dream.”

Early on, Voegelin articulated the problem inherent in political ideas, e.g. the national economy: A linguistic symbol to create and call into existence a world through the power of naming it as such.

On the potency of this performative utterance, with the ability to speak reality into existence, we have only to think of Parmenides’ dictum, “by being, it is.”

Because symbols have no meaning apart from the experience they express, any symbol of history means nothing apart from what it is—its own nature. It’s nature, reborn in each moment, becomes the very meaning of the symbol itself, offering an ideal image for meaning: it stabilizes meaning by controlling the term’s “purpose,” or intent. Voegelin understood this as the attempt “to enclose a temporal process in the rigidity of a spatial construct, an attempt that, being in its essence unrealizable, must not lead to truths, but always to further unsolved problems.”1 That is to say, the objectification and reification of “spirit” as a term deforms the truth of reality into a doctrinal truth about reality. This misplaced concreteness is nowhere more relevant than in the self-organization of political religions, where political will constitutes and self-directs the nature and 1 118 CW 7

form of its own political process. Admitting knowledge of phenomena as a key to utilitarian mastery, Voegelin states that understanding human substance does not provide a similar key to society and history: “The expansion of the will to power from the realm of phenomena to that of substance, or the attempt to operate in the realm of substance pragmatically as if were the realm of phenomena—that is the definition of magic.”2 With this definition of magic at hand, we can now begin to understand the relevance magic would hold both for Voegelin and us today. To restate the issue in Voegelin’s words, “We have ventured the age of science will appear as the greatest power orgy in the history of mankind; we now venture the suggestion that at the bottom of this orgy the historian will find a gigantic outburst of magic imagination after the breakdown of the intellectual and spiritual form of medieval high-civilization. The climax of this outburst is the magic dream of creating the Superman, the manmade Being that will succeed the sorry creature of God’s making. This is the great dream that appears first imaginatively in the works of Condorcet, Comte, Marx, and Nietzsche, and later pragmatically in the Communist and National Socialist movements.”

Voegelin’s Magical Thesis: Pure and Simple This section follows Voegelin’s initial inquiry into the “magic cosmion of order,” from its evocative constitution to repetitive objectification and the systematic murder of alternatives. The deformative potential of the “magic of the word” implies the active divergence in the “magic imagination” between dream and reality. Thus “magicians” use “grimoires” and “magic operations” for a “magic effect.”

The “magic trick” does not work however, so Voegelin can diagnose the “magic program,” and in particular the “magic act of violence” as a symptom stemming from the rejection of reason, a spiritual disease seeking to realize its utopian dream by transfiguring reality.

Identified as the outburst of magic imagination, the magic dream is deliberatively used to control or influence factors, intending its images as the archetypal symbols of divine power, whose evocative power of language, “the primitive magic relation between a name and the object it 2 190-1 V. 10

denotes,” transforms the field of human forces into an ordered unit in the evocative act—what Voegelin calls the “magic cosmion of a constituted order.”3 Voegelin main concern with these “magic evocations—that is, historical articulations of experience constitutive or regulative of political order”—is due to the “power of magic evocation,” the function of the immanent psychological language that evokes the presumption that any term refers to an objective reality, facilitated by a persuasive “symbol of the magic unit,” whereby the power of name to evoke a political unit is described “as something not magically but empirically and objectively real.”4 The privileging of utilitarian mastery of reality becomes an idolatry of sorts, where science is held as the key to curing evil and transform humanity. For Voegelin, “the interrelation of science and power, and the consequent cancerous growth of the utilitarian segment of existence, has injected a strong element of magic culture into modern civilization.” It is for this reason, the attempt to “create an absolute cosmos out of the finite forces of human desire and will” that Voegelin is able to tell us the process “may be called magic.”5 Voegelin explains: “By accident, studying other problems, I found for instance that the term magic, in the sense of the magic of the word, appears for the first time in a production by Gorgias the sophist, in the fifth century, in the Encomion Helenes, where he speaks of the magic of the power of Paris in persuading Helen to come along with him.

That’s where the magic of the word appears. And he compares that magic of the word to the magic of addiction to drugs. So you have two main sources for getting drugged: either the magic of words or chemical drugs.” 382 Such structuring power in the form and function of language implies its close connection with divinity and the many names attributed to the eternal, self-existent nature of God. Voegelin’s concern with the legalese that transfers power to the sovereign, through which a group transforms itself into a person with distinctive political force in history, is apparent: Throughout history, this “magic function of kingship” creates political order by symbolizing it through a unity of human personality, imposing a conceptual framework in which speech assumes itself as a function of God, bestowed to man by God, for example to Adam in the Old Testament, or Thoth, interpreting the will of God in words, through which all things are made, coming into being through an act of speech. This power of naming divinity becomes the symbol of infinite perfection, a royal art, emphasizing human power and will in the “reascension” toward spiritual enlightenment to accomplish marvelous actions.6 The difference between the magic dream and reality is therefore, for 3 Check first; 19. 230 4 228 5 V24, 208-9

Voegelin, the “activist’s faith in his power to transfigure the structure of reality. He must imagine himself to be a magician…”7 Voegelin recognizes this “magic opus” as a System of Science, a second reality intending itself as an operation in first reality, attempting to escape control and judgment by the criteria of First Reality: the System’s “magic program” intends human transformation as a technical “magic effect,” not through gradual moral reformation, but via “total revolution” and the “orgy of destruction” it offers.8 The dream denotes a self-generating reality that disposes actual reality through speech acts and language, purely imaginative acts with no basis in reality whatsoever.

In turn, new evocative orders are self-interpreted by utopian activist dreamers who expect the first reality to conform to the second reality of the dream, distinguished by a “trick action” from ordinary action that results in a “transfigured reality”— The magic, Voegelin shows, does not work but rather “reveals the terror at the core of the magic dream.”9 The elimination of an essential feature of human nature defines the dream as a utopia, whose disenchantment gives rise to spirited revolt against the injustice of such an act. Voegelin reiterates the disconnect between the means and end inherent to the process, explaining how most “ideologies” are in fact “magic operations in the same sense that Malinowski uses magic of the Trobriand Islanders,” beliefs and rudimentary rites standardized into permanent traditional forms that enable man to carry out with confidence important tasks—“the sublime folly of hope,” which, if used carelessly, becomes dangerous blasphemy.10 In a sense, Voegelin defines magic, especially the “magic of violence,” by its inefficacy for transforming reality into its intended object. His point that “magical activism” has been catastrophic for the process of history is vindicated in his analysis of Hegel, the “master magician” of the 19th century.11 Hegel attempts to conjure an image of history, using it as an instrument of power, so that the “grimoire of the magician…will evoke for everybody the shape and the reconciliation that for himself he cannot achieve in the reality of his existence.” Knowledge of this system of science allows one to learn the “magic words that will evoke the shape of things to come.” Thus Hegel’s Science of Spirit is a search for the “magic words” and the “magic force”

6 Pg 52, Kristin Pfanku’s “Ancient Magic: A Survey of the Technical Hermetica, in Rosicrucian Digest: No. 1 (2011).

Retrieved from http://www.rosicrucian.org/publications/digest/digest1_2011/images/11_pfanku/11_ancient_magic_052411.pdf 7 V33. 339 (possibly not) 8 242 9 230 Check

10 see Malinowski pg, 90 in Magic, Science, and Religion.

11 Pg. 339 Wisdom and the Magic

“that will determine the future course of history by raising ‘consciousness’ to its state of perfection.”12 Voegelin offers the only true test there is: “The effectiveness of the grimoire depends on the transformation of First into Second reality as a fait accompli.”13 Hegel’s does not. The scientism invoked by Hegel is a magic attempt to achieve mastery over history and reality, and ultimately fails. Here, Voegelin traces the magician’s dream to its origin in the “activist’s passion of transforming the truth of divinely created order into the terror of humanly created nontruth, if not antitruth.” By making the imaginary results of the magic operation acceptable as real resolutions to real problems in reality—whether changing the nature of man by writing a book or resorting to violence; the judgment embedded in the utopian imagination is realized as a formative social force in the world. For in substituting phenomenal for substantial reality, the atrocity does indeed change reality in the manifestation of the “magic act of substitution.”14 As Voegelin explains, “Magic means the attempt to realize a desired end that cannot be realized if one takes into account the structure of reality. You cannot by magic operations jump out the window and fly up—even if you so desire. If you try such things—for instance, producing a change in the nature of man by the dictatorship of the proletariat—you are engaged in a magical operation. There you have the problem of disease and the magic.”15 Voegelin diagnoses the act of violence as a symptom of a disease of the mind, prompting his concern for its pathogenesis and the structure of consciousness that both confuses dream and reality and makes it a real force in society and history.16 Yet in pursuing the surface motivations for resistance “to the extreme of their expression in magic operations,” Voegelin’s analysis “could not be conducted without constantly touching on the deeper stratum of resistance, i.e., on its source in the structure of questioning consciousness itself. In the depth of the quest, formative truth and deformative untruth are more closely related than the language of ‘truth’ and ‘resistance’ would suggest.”17 Voegelin names this rejection of reason, in which one believes themselves possessed of a magical power to transfigure reality, and where the two images rival each other for the claim of reality, a “spiritual disease,” or “pneumapathology,” his analysis of which emerges in his most mature works,

12 249; check 13 249 14 325 WMOTE check.

15 V33. 339 16 325 wmoe 17 51/325?

as in the “key to all his other works,” where he specifically identifies the magical dream to abolish the reality we participate in: 18 “At the extreme of this revolt in consciousness, ‘reality’ and the ‘Beyond’ become two separate entities, two ‘things,’ to be magically manipulated by suffering man for the purpose of either abolishing ‘reality’ altogether and escaping into the ‘Beyond,’ or of forcing the order of the ‘Beyond’ into ‘reality’…The first of the magic alternatives is preferred by the Gnostics of antiquity, the second one by the modern gnostic thinkers.” 19 To summarize what has just occurred in this last section, research indicates that from Voegelin’s first encounter of the magic cosmion of order, his in-depth analysis of the magic of word, magically evoked by those claiming divine inspiration, precipitated a theory of active divergence in the magic imagination of dream and reality: self-described magicians use magic operations whose magical effects—the system of science, grimoire, and magic program—are found to not work; Moreover, the active rejection of reality is no more apparent than in the attempt to transfigure it through the magic of violence, which collapses into pneumapathology.

Between Gnostic Revolution and Revolutionary Gnosis But this story is not finished, for in his anamnetic breakthrough to the structure of consciousness, Voegelin would forge a new, empirical political science that transcended positivist scientism. For though people carry the force to establish the constitution, and the people’s political will determines the form of political existence, the unified “will,” or “decision,” ultimately dissolves into a richly structured multiplicity of wills, so that the anamnetic recovery of the structural forces in the conscious present reveal “the well-ordered human existence must be oriented through the love of divine perfection and is consequently as dependent on the specific achievements of order taking place through institutional processes [that] must therefore be understood as the results of divinehuman encounter and cooperation.”20 This is, in a sense, the theory by which “lawgiving” occurs by those with ties to the divine: the prophet, poet, healer, political leader, etc. Thus the specialist, or “religious functionary who operated as a crisis manager became a necessity to the lives of ordinary people. This role the magician was able to fulfill. Applying his craft, the magician could give people the feeling that he could make things work in a world 18 V33. 339 19 pg. 51 V. 18 20 unsure

where nothing seemed to work the way it used to. He had handbooks of magic, which contained the condensed wisdom of the past, wisdom made effective to solve the problems of the present.…[the] magician served as a power and communications expert, crisis manager, miracle healer and inflicter of damages, and all-purpose therapist and agent of worried, troubled, and troublesome souls.”21 Moreover, this same effect occurs not only by the lawgiving of politics, but in healing too. In Plato’s Symposium for instance, medicine is defined in this way, as “a knowledge of the forces of Love in the body… and a person who can accurately diagnose whether the noble or the vulgar love is functioning in these cases and can interchange them is a master therapist.”22 For Plato, music, and indeed the very nature of the cosmos is similarly structured in this way: “Just as earlier it was medicine, so here it is music that brings the concord to all these cases, implanting a mutual love and harmony; and so, music is a science of love, relating to harmony and rhythm. It is not difficult to recognize the love-forces in this actual establishment of harmony and rhythm, and here it is not the twofold Love that is at work…The knowledge of these love-forces, when it concerns the courses of the stars, and the seasons of the year is called ‘astronomy’. And to the longing for wholeness the name ‘love’ has been attached.’23 Aristotle defines Nous as the core of personality. If man doesn’t love this core, and thus his own self, he loses contact with reality—a core problem implying its resolution in the love of the divine.24 As Voegelin suggests, this “magic of the creative core is not revealed to an observer, but attracts the partner in the relationship of governance and reshapes his soul into an affinity which up to that moment had not existed.”25 We can perhaps then see in Voegelin’s search for order and quest for truth, a recovery of magic to supplant his earlier totalizing attribution of the term to the kind liable to that species of abuse most often associated with theories known technically as “black magic,” whose malevolent influences indicate a malpractice intending a destruction of health. 26 Like consciousness, magic fluctuates between intentionalist and illumining kinds, so that a Voegelin is able to state, “The magic of the saving Word is as dependent on man’s openness to the order of love as is the magic of the disordering word on his inclination to resist and hate truth.”27

21 pg. xlvii in the Greek Magical Papyri 22 186 C-D-187C Symposium, Plato 23 C 188 B 24 253 25 V. 19?

26 pg. 28 Book of Black Magic By Arthur Edward Waite 27 From Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme, pg. 335 V.12

To heal the governing body is another magic entirely, one based in the dreams that give visions, and deepen an understanding of purpose and source; where law is received from another world leading to freedom and completeness, wisdom.28 Orpheus’ knowledge, for instance, was the initiate’s knowledge of incantations, of the magic power of words—of poetry “that has an effect capable even of reaching into the world of the dead.”29 Peter Kingley explains how these myths “point to the actual use of incubatory techniques as a preparation for lawgiving. And they provide a perfect example of what later Greek writers meant when they said incubation had given humans two of the greatest blessings—healing, and good laws.”30 This, says Kingsley, is the logic Parmeneides attempted to introduce to the West, one questioning everything, and turning people’s lives and values upside down; A logic in which everything merges with its opposite and returns to the source of life, a place beyond space-time, in this interplay of night and day, through silence into harmony of spheres.31 “[Philosophers] had the power to transform people, to lead them through a process of death and rebirth to what lies beyond the human condition; to bring orphans back into the family they’d always belonged to.”32 Indeed, the seeking and being drawn are the same movement of the soul, says Voegelin, surrendering to the one universal ground of hope, to “the faith that the universal structure of human experience, to the extent that it realizes itself in openness of existence ordered by the fundamental tension of existence toward transcendental perfection of being, toward the true as such and the good as such, toward a splendor and beauty far greater than such words as these can convey...”33 Here, in this place of no separation, out of the long spiritual evolutionary process in which cosmic relations are reflected and developed, we can hold a vision of an Earth made up of components bearing striking resemblance to human organs, circulating the blood and respiration of the Earth’s ecosystem that keep the digestive forces responsible for an illness in check, so the uninterrupted cycles of Earth, Gaia, as a living organism, mark a new relationship in which knowledge and wisdom are held in cooperative union.34 In this respect, Voegelin’s philosophy of magic offers a paradigm of order:

28 See The Greeks and the Irrational by E.R. Dodds, esp. Dream Pattern and Culture Pattern 29 122 Peter Kingsley: In the Dark Places of Wisdom 30 ibid, 216 31 ibid, 171 32 ibid 219 33 unsure 34 231-2 Zoeteman, Kees (1989) Gaia-Sophia: A framework for ecology. Floris Books Edinburgh

“openness of existence as compared with existential closure, of willingness to surrender to the love of God, the tension of existence, or of pulling back from it.

Perfect openness of existence, however, lies beyond the ordinary human being, who is as much between existential openness and closure as between the other poles of the metaxy…To be truly human, in other words, is to participate to varying degrees in the perfect humanity that is realized fully through the drawing of divine grace.”35 God, as paradigm of order, is not correlated perfectly with the human condition, but rather leaves open the mystery of disorder in the order of the All, transcending language while negating the rational basis arguing against religion in words. Such signs and symbols emerge from our sensory perception, so that when this absence is present to the intellect, the limitation and the suggestiveness of language can be seen, not as contradictory, but complementary, for they belong to the symbolic function.”36 Inna Semetsky discusses the sign of the magician in the context of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, stating “[The sign of the Magician]’s action is such as to establish an unorthodox connection crossing over the dualistic gap between mind and matter, science and magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and object, and human experience and the natural world, thereby overcoming what Whitehead called the paradox of the connectedness of things. The Magician represents a certain quality that acts as a catalytic agent capable of eliciting transmutations, that is, the emergence of novelty...

“Not limited to the knowledge of facts, it is the Magician’s phronesis, or deep understanding of the connectedness of things, that leads to the revaluation of experience, enriching the latter with value and meaning… The Magician in us combines sensitive perception with the practical ethics of know-how (Varela 1999) and strikes this resonating chord that makes us act wisely, cooperatively, and in harmony with the environing world. Nature, which is causally open, exceeds the realm of Seconds and includes its own virtual dimension, which is however never beyond experience because experience itself is a relational category, a fold: As structured by sign-relations, human experience is an unfolding expression of a deeper semiotic process, into which it becomes enfolded. This means that experience always already has a religious dimension understood as “re-ligio, the linking backward to the origin” (Jantsch 1980, 218), even as the origin is virtual. The deep meaning of the evolutionary process of experience is expressed in the language of signs (Semetsky 2006a) that can be read and understood via its own mediation by symbols and images.”37 35 pg. 392 Vol. 12 Quod Deus Dicitur 36 129 Longxi, Zhang (1992) The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West. Duke University Press.

Durham and London.

Of this phronesis of the magician, we can look to Voegelin’s anamnetic experiments, in which he recollected a lost state of stillness returned through meditative ascent to the One, 38 in which “the rhythm of outgoing self-assertiveness and meditative return…are processes and moods of the soul,” crystallizing with plasticity tension of the existence of the human condition. 39 In a series of remembrances, Voegelin articulates his experiences of transcendence “in space, time, matter, history, wishful dreams, and wishful times,” identifying the “magic charm,” “a magic world,” “the magic of Xanten,” “The Magic Flute,” and “the power of their magic,” referring to fairy tales of Voegelin’s childhood, his exegesis of the meditation engendering the experience as part of its self-articulation through symbols to express its own luminosity on the level of symbols. In Anamnesis, he writes: “[Aristotle insists] phronesis regards the last concrete thing, for the practikon, the truly effective thing, is the eschaton, the last one. (To be noted here is the meaning of the practikon: it is not a matter of the ethical but rather of the effective aspects of action, right down to effective magic.)…Aristotle’s insistence on this point elicits the final question whether phronesis can be adequately characterized at all as knowledge of right action, for this mode of expression puts between knowledge and action the subject-object of which Aristotle precisely wanted to eliminate. For hism this knowledge merges into concrete action, and action is the truth of the knowledge; what separates the two is not the distance of subject and object but a noetic tension in the movement of being…The virtue that Aristotle calls phronesis, or political science, is an existential virtue; it is the movement of being, in which the divine order of the cosmos attains its truth in the human realm.”40

Chronology, Chorology, Cosmology We are returning, at last, to a power that carries the human into another reality, where prophecy, future, past, and present are contained in the confrontation between human and divine. In

37 See abstract and pg. 341 in “The Magician in the World: Becoming Creativity, and Transversal Communication” (2009) in Zygon, Vo. 44 no. 2 38 Meditation as “inward practice by which one develops awareness of the dimensions of consciousness (intentionality and luminosity), reflective distance, and consciousness of existential tension and its poles of immanence and transcendence. –the philosopher’s effort to explore the structures of existential consciousness and a notetic movement through the metaxy of existential consciousness…to find the balance of truth between the intentionalist desire to know reality as an object, and the mystiery of a reality in which such a desire to know its own truth occurs.” Autobiographical Reflections

39 pg. 24, V.19?

40 pg. 69, “What is Right by Nature?” in Anamnesis (American version)

Voegelin’s41 anamnetic experiments, the stillness created an opening into a world…entered in deep meditation, ecstasies and dreams.42 This is perhaps not unlike what Jacob Sherman calls, “the special knowledge of God [that] demands special sorts of epistemic practices and ways of comporting ourselves to the mystery we seek to know. The contemplative claim is that knowledge of God, though always a grace, is chiefly to be found through the path of transformative contemplative spiritual practice. In contemplative knowing, one knows only as one is also transformed in both intellect and heart, thus becoming more attentive to God as the center of one’s being.”43 This hermeneutic method raises to consciousness what is experienced and understood, unconstrained by theoretical concept but taking relevant factors, enjoying the pursuit towards open mindedness and common sense, with new insights into nature of hermeneutics; it is a method to come into contact with divinity, in which the end is present in the cause: not by our own power do we partake of life, but of a “divine operation of God.”44 In this sense, the submission to the ground of existence establishes a loving pattern and behavior that colors the object, state, emotion, relation of desire, relation of value, etc; a meaningful relation; intrinsic attraction, where love of God as gift; the irrationality of loving without reason, a love which does not follow criteria but creates them in love itself.45 For an example, we can look at Voegelin’s analysis of Jesus’ potency and charisma as an ordering force: “The healing mana is not used by Jesus at will; its effectiveness is confined to persons who have faith in him. The casuistic details are important. The mana has to be met by faith in order to be effective; Magic compulsion was also excluded on the part of Jesus. The metanoia, the turning, the healing, the state of faith, had to spring from the soul forces of the individual; the attempt at magic miracle working was a possibility in his soul, but a possibility that was definitely rejected... “The mana of Jesus and the faith of the believer are corresponding personality elements that can communicate with each other and thus constitute a kind of community substance.

This interaction between Jesus and the faithful is the closest we can come through our sources to the constitution of the Christian community as a divine and at the same time historically active substance. The mana conception of the community between Jesus and the believers is the basis of the later Pauline interpretation of the community as the body and the spirit of Christ.”46 Voegelin’s formulation of the problem is simple: 41 42 181 43 pg. 248 in Partakers of the Divine: Contemplation and the Practice of Theology 44 ibid 45 See Plato’s Symposium.

46 155 V. 19

“…Nobody can recognize the movement of divine presence in the Son unless he is prepared for such recognition by the presence of the divine Father in himself. The divine Sonship is not revealed through an information tendered by Jesus, but through a man’s response to the full presence in Jesus of the same Unknown God by whose presence he is inchoatively moved in his own existence…

His solution: “The realization that well-ordered human existence must be oriented through the love of divine perfection and is consequently as dependent on the specific achievements of order take place through institutional processes must therefore be understood as the results of divine-human encounter and cooperation.”

Through Voegelin’s empirical political science, in which laws are forms of creative activity, value exists a priori to beliefs and attitudes. In his anamnetic recovery of the structural forces in the conscious present, the decisive difference that appears with Christianity, needed for explaining the revolutionary deformations of our present concern, human alienation is the foundation for an existential theory of revolution. For “When magic loses its spell and the façade of government becomes transparent, the disillusioned observer can discover nothing but acts determined by tradition, interest and lust of power. Tradition as organizing principle throughout, marking the point where a new evocative element enters to split up or sop up the accumulated mass.”47 On grasping the ruler’s essence, in particular Jesus’ charisma, or Mana, and superhuman intention, Voegelin refers to Nietzsche: “In order to characterize this gift of grace, Nietzsche uses the word magic…’as if a magical will emanated from them, they attract weaker forces with inexplicable alacrity who are amazingly transformed by this creative core under the spell of the sudden burst of power, though unaware of the affinity until the moment in which it overcame them.

This correlated was correlated with a study of Napoleon, the “combination of an unheardof magical willpower with a gigantic intellect, nimble in every direction, equally intent on amassing power and on unceasing combat, in the last analysis, against the whole world…an air of inexpressible charm…grasped with magical swiftness and skill.”

In Voegelin’s analysis and concept of the ruler and his spell, the terms “enchantment” and “magic” are evoked, drawing from Nietzsche, who, 47 no idea

“speaking of the ruler’s magic will and creative core that draw the weaker natures and compel them to obedience, he accurately describes the essential relationship of governance, the domination of one human being by another.” The “magic attraction of the ruler’s will” underlines the necessity of power and the evil of all governance due to the spiritual disharmony between rulers and ruled, must “necessarily appear as evil to the ruled.”

Here we can point to the duality of magic, for the magic of the word is unique in the intensification and control of its term: “Magic (white and black) displays many similar forms. Formulas can be used either to keep evil away or to ask it to come—as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Devils can be controlled by language, as can physical matter. Christ casts out spirits “with a word” (Matt. 8.16) and false exorcists attempt to use Jesus’ name as a spell in Acts 19.13.”48 The effect is similarly acknowledged by Voegelin: “The magic of the creative core is not revealed to an observer, but attracts the partner in the relationship of governance and reshapes his soul into an affinity which up to that moment had not existed. It is only this second concept of magic and affinity that is relevant to our investigation, which proceeds from an immanent standpoint.

The first concept belongs to the obscure sphere of transcendent speculation in which the ruler, as the slave discussed earlier, is the function of a mysterious force of nature that intends to realize its cultural purpose. The second concept characterizes the ruler in a way that, methodically, is closely related to Weber’s investigations concerning charisma. The meaning of the ‘magic will’ or the ‘creative core’ are as clear, or unclear, as the concept of the special gift of grace introduced by Weber.

Because these reflections blend with the first ones made from the standpoint of the transcendent observer, the meaning of the latter are colored by the first. Something of the super-personal origin of magic enters into them, which is echoed by the concept of charisma. To be sure, it seems doubtful that within the framework of Nietzsche’s ideas the people attracted to the magic of superhuman willpower and reshaped under the influence of its creative core—i.e., are drawn into the ruler’s spiritual sphere—are the same people who have been classified as slaves. After all, the slave was not described as a person with a specific essence, but as a creature who, though nature’s unfathomable will, had been forced by external circumstances into the position of being dominated. On the other hand, those who are drawn to the 48 121 Crystal, David (1965) Linguistics, Language and Religion: Hawthorn Books: London 189

creative force of the great ruler and enter his orbit are weaker than he is in that they lack the vital power to attract others into their own orbit. But they are not completely different from him; indeed, they are capable of becoming much like him.”

This passage echoes the very first occurrence of Voegelin’s use of the term “magic” in his writings, referring to the shading of relation we actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought; our personality and its individually chosen activities: “Hume’s “magic” of association, as when James speaks of ‘this magical imponderable streaming,” of the romanticism of the fleeting moment, and occasionally of the explication of transitive fats.”49 Thus Voegelin’s term of magic transcended and included the magic cosmion of order, such that to the claim that “the chronological order of appearance does not correspond to the order of declining reality” and that “science comes after magic, and nevertheless, one can in a sense consider magic as a degenerate form of science,” he responds with statement that “one cannot abstract from the historical order in which the problems appear. There is no atheism before theism; it is theism which is the condition itself of the ulterior development of atheism.”50 Magic is everywhere; and everything is magic.

To the “primitive mind,” men are surrounded by a swarm of unknown and unseen forces that affect them for good or ill. Forces are not conceived of as personifications or abstractions, but as actual beings, as demons or spirits that have a real existence. Thus illness is thought of as a maleficent spirit entering into and taking possession of an afflicted person, that is, the ailment is the possessing spirit. This experience and symbolization of history, of time, space, and substance, “originates in the presence of the process when a truth of reality emerging from the depth recognizes itself as equivalent but differentiated.”51 Symbols function properly when they point beyond themselves in a direction that leads ultimately toward infinity, unfolding of a pattern of meaning in time, a process of gradually emerging existential truth, of development into conscious existence attuned both cognitively and ethically to the structure of reality. The differentiation of noetic consciousness is event in history; ontological disturbance where insight into and beyond consciousness, the sensory experience of participation of man in his ground of being, has advanced.52 For Voegelin, “imagination as a structure in the process of a reality that moves toward its truth, belongs both to human consciousness in its bodily location and to the reality that comprehends bodily located man as a partner in the community of

49 V1, pg. 54 50 V11, pg. 120 51 ?

52 233

being….through the imaginative power of man the it-reality moves imaginatively toward its truth.”53 An editorial explains how Voegelin “moved beyond the language of “history” as a study of evocative sentiments and political ideas strung through time as ascertained by dispassionate contemplative science. In so doing his ever unfinished search for order arrived at a complex theory of order and disorders of history that preserved the Whole conceived as selfinterpretive—through the human-divine capacity of man as uniquely reflective reality… [he] addresses the crisis of consciousness-reality from the hard-won perspective of mystic-philosopher, heart of experiences informing the symbols of noetic and pneumatic meditative consciousness, and to their comparative analysis in terms of structure, process, cogency, and equivalences.”54 Love, as daemon and spiritual disease, brings us to the root foundational power, the energy of present moment used for good, where “an energy-soaked molecule in the brain is responsible for the ion’s movement… because of energy it got, ultimately, from…this photonic shower from the beginning of time [which] powers your thinking…Fires from the beginning of time empower you right now—this instant. What you are thinking and feeling this very moment is possible only through the cosmic fire. Your entire nervous system is rich in this fire…of psychic energy” evoked by the universe, evoking our reverence for this fire.”55 To continue the story, Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme point out that “the universe is not just a vast ‘out there,’ but is rather an ‘in here.’ Numinous fire became, over fifteen billion years of creativity, the here and now—a moving endpoint of development, one that happens to include communities of living beings.56 Further, Swimme tells us the “All-nourishing abyss then is not a thing, nor a collection of things, nor even, strictly speaking, a physical place, but rather a power that gives birth and that absorbs 53 V. 18, pg 52 54 V. 19 55 Universe is green dragon pg. 168 56 Universe Story, pg. 23:

existence at a things annihilation. The foundational reality of the universe is this unseen ocean of potentiality. If all the individual things of the universe were to evaporate, one would be left with an infinity of pure generative power. Each particular thing is directly, and essentially, grounded in all-nourishing abyss.”57 Perhaps this too is what Plato beckons us to, something always beyond our understanding, yet nevertheless omnipresent in the psychic structure of reality: “…But we shall not be deceived if we call it a nature invisible and characterless, allreceiving, partaking in some very puzzling way of the intelligible and very hard to apprehend…the most correct account of it would be this: that part of it which has been made fiery appears at any time as fire; the part that is liquefied as water and as earth or air such parts as receive likenesses of these.”58 It is this space that makes possible the doubling of being in an image, and the duplicity of being, having both origin and abyss at the same time. In this study of space, it can therefore be assumed that “if one were to take metaphysics to be constituted precisely by the governance of the twofold, then the chorology could be said to bring both the founding of metaphysics and its displacement, both at once…disclosed in a dream.”59

The Movement of Divine Presence; The Presence of Divine Movement In this dream that offers a vision of the reality of existence as experienced in the movement of a mutual participation of human and divine, the language symbols expressing the movement are not invented by an observer who does not participate in the movement, but are engendered in the event of participation itself. The ontological status of the symbols is both human and divine, moving towards wholeness.60 And it is only in this form of revelation, in which love for the true and the good, the “divine ground,” which “stimulates a search for truth that may result in particular judgments,” and in which eternity realizing itself as the image of time, can be found. 61 To reiterate Plato once more, mortal nature partakes of immortality “by procreation, remembering what has left, so that it is preserved forever,” its memory of virtue taking part in a creation or more 57 Hidden heart of the Cosmos, pg. 100 58 51 Timaeus, Plato 59 123 Chorology.

60 Not sure 61 Gospel and Culture, pg. 187 V. 12

beautiful and immortal progeny.62 Beholding beauty then, “to know what beauty is, beyond images to truth, bringing forth true virtue, [to] become immortal”; “to share in the madness and ecstasy of philosophy,” so that, as Socrates can say there is “some power in me through which you can get to be a better man. You must perceive in me a sort of incredible beauty…you’re trying to get for yourself the real thing in beauty, in place of the sham”; This is the nature of Socrates’ miracles, such that his arguments are “clothed by words,”63 words that, when one “sees them opened up and penetrates into them, one finds to begin with that they are the only discourses that make any sense; and later that they have a great divinity, that they are filled with the images of virtue, in themselves, and when they are extended to their fullest meaning they encompass everything that it becomes a man to contemplate who is seeking to achieve the beautiful and the good.”64

Silence and Ex-Stasis Here, I will end in hopeful Silence, a forgetting of words in which ineffable silence excels all sounds, where silence is put in a frame of music and words: the mystic gesture for capturing the true meaning and expressing it in suggestive silence—meaningful, active silence, the acknowledged limitation of language becoming what is deliberately left unsaid when the poet discovers the magic of suggestive silence, and evocative power of language. I will leave the last word however, to the student, immigrant, political scientist, refugee, legal scholar, historian, professor, philosopher, and mystic, Eric Voegelin, to remind us of what took a lifetime to recover: “The flux of presence is the experienced Parousia of the Beyond in time, the mode of time in which the It tells its tale through the events of the metaleptic quest by endowing it with the indelible present; it is the time of the It-tale that demands expression through the capitalized Beginning and End when the presence of the Beyond is to be symbolized in the questioner’s account of his quest.”65

62 207d-209c Symposium 63 218e ibid 64 222e 65 See Volume 18, pg. 45

Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath

by Ted Koppel (A Review) On December 23rd 2015, hackers hijacked eight Ukrainian power companies’ distribution management systems, sabotaged operator workstations, and launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks to flood web servers and paralyze company networks with malware. The result left over 80,000 people without power—the first known hackercaused blackout in history.66 While the lights eventually came back on, the attack highlights the growing concern in security circles that the effects of well-orchestrated and sophisticated cyber attacks are far-reaching in a new generation of techno-centric warfare. The government of Canada similarly announced it had been facing dozens of attacks targeting critical infrastructure, where power plants, electrical grids, aviation software and other government-run systems were attacked, with the potential to threaten water supplies, energy and utilities, manufacturing, internet communications technology, and non-governmental institutions such as schools and hospitals as well.67 In this context, Ted Koppel (of ABC’s Nightline fame)’s investigative report appears prescient, detailing how a welldesigned attack on America’s three power grids would prompt near immediate societal breakdown by forcing Americans to survive upwards of two years without access to a working electric grid.

Comparable assaults on critical infrastructure are not only likely, Koppel reminds us, but happening already. Citing the well-planned “terrorist” attack on AT&T’s fiber-optic telecommunication system providing power to Silicon Valley as a likely “dress rehearsal” (possibly by a SEAL team) rather than a legitimate sabotage attack, 68 he offers up the assessment of experts: “if nine of the country’s most critical substations were knocked out at the same time, it could cause a blackout encompassing most of the United States.”

He draws attention to the “Stuxnet worm,” developed in concert between the United States and Israel—the first time a digital weapon has been used as an instrument of policy—to infiltrate Iranian nuclear facilities and destroy the necessary centrifuges that make nuclear weaponry possible. In retaliation, Iran responded with a cyber attack on Saudi Arabia (and the world)’s most “valuable” company, the oil firm Aramco, using a virus to erase data while replacing it with an image of a burning American flag, before attacking a Qatari natural gas company and taking several of America’s largest banks offline.69 In mapping the range of vulnerabilities, Koppel evaluates the state of the grid through interviews with individuals at the highest levels of government and industry, concluding not only that such an attack is imminent, but points out there are virtually no preparedness or contingency plans in place to deal with the aftermath. Any that do simply ensure a continuity of governance rather than plan for public needs. Individuals assumedly must get themselves to a location where the grid is still intact, as systems dealing with the distribution of food, water, energy, sewage, medical, and law and order would almost immediately collapse as supply chains break down and supplies are exhausted in a matter of days.

Only the military, Koppel believes, has the capability and credibility to impose order, distribute supplies, establish shelter, and manage millions of domestic refugees.

66 "Everything We Know About Ukraine’s Power Plant Hack." Wired.com. Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

67 "Canada Discovers It's Under Attack by Dozens of State­Sponsored Hackers VICE News." VICE News Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

68 "Assault on California Power Station Raises Alarm on Potential for Terrorism." WSJ. Web. Accessed 03 Feb.

2016.

69 "In Cyberattack on Saudi Firm, U.S. Sees Iran Firing Back." The New York Times. Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

With this realization, Koppel searches out the “Ark-Builders,” touring the prepper and survivalist movements and critiquing their “bug-out plans” as not only limited by their intrinsic selfishness but relying solely on the ability to move to a place where electricity still courses through a working grid. The solutions of the wealthy are equally ill-suited to the threat, depending on reconfigured living spaces or “bug-out properties” that attempt to ensure resource security. These, and even relatively isolated communities in rural areas like Wyoming that would scarcely notice a cyber attack would be hard-pressed to preserve cultures of self-reliance and civic cooperation in the face of a mass migration that would swarm and deplete food sources. He goes on to predict that if cities break down before rural areas, a close-knit community and values of “neighborliness” would likely collapse if an urban exodus meant sheltering a highly diverse group of grid refugees.

For anarcho-primitivists engaged in primal war, the value of this book then is to lay out the battle space in detail, albeit through a superficial lens of history whose conclusions would only further dependence on the state and the cyber flow of digital capital.

Anti-civilization activists like Kevin Tucker and Ted Kaczynski have already hinted at the possibilities cyberwarfare and hacktivism might play in dismantling civilizing forces. Tucker replies to the question of whether hacking represents an effective tactic by praising data dumps while at the same time questioning why hackers would delay taking down the grid if they could in fact do so.70 Kaczynski also wonders whether a single individual or small group could exert a powerful influence that outweighs that of large organizations to affect millions of people via the internet, reflecting on the actions of an Assange and the role such technologically literate individuals might play in reshaping the political landscape. Even Derrick Jensen makes inroads into a plausible strategy of cyber techniques in Endgame: Resistance, with his seemingly fabricated conversations with hackers and ex-military personnel who together fantasize about the ease with which they could destroy the nuts and bolts of the physical economy (yet paradoxically stop short of doing anything at all). 71 Clearly unfamiliar with such anti-civ literature, Koppel proposes the only reason why a major attack on the grid has not yet happened is because the motivation to do so simply does not exist.

Such an attack would require opportunity, capability, and motivation, and Koppel proposes that while governments like Russia and China are already in the grid, mapping the infrastructure so as to “prepare the battlefield” once the need to attack is apparent, the financial repercussions make it illogical for a national economy so intricately tied to the success of the United States’ to warrant such an attack. Countries like Syria, Iran, and North Korea with deeper motivations are closing in on the technology but may fear the repercussions, while the only hindrance for a non-state terrorist network is simply a lack of capability. Still, a well-funded extremist group like the Islamic State, professing their willingness to do as much damage as possible, would seemingly have no qualms about such an attack (indeed they are already actively trying) —a possibility that rests solely on whether they can find an able partner to pay enough to make it worth their while. 72 Still, the near impossible task of identifying the source of any such attack mean other governments might blame “unstable” actors to shield themselves from accountability if ever they were to decide to hit where it hurts.

What is fascinating about this investigation is that, even with the threat of cyberwarfare and physical attacks on infrastructure through coordinated strikes to cause cascading outages, Koppel shows how the private companies in charge of protecting the grid are loathe to make significant security investments, and are in fact pressuring governments charged with protecting critical infrastructure to deregulate the industry. As one politician explains in a chapter, “[private power companies] were afraid of having to spend money that they couldn’t prove to themselves they would actually need to spend.” Adding to these capitalist pressures, America has outsourced production of most of the vital physical

70 "Interview with Anarcho­primitivist Kevin Tucker." The Fifth Column. Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

71 Jensen, Derrick (2006) Endgame, Vol. 2: Resistance. Seven Stories Press: New York, NY 72 "ISIS Is Attacking the U.S. Energy Grid (and Failing)." CNNMoney. Cable News Network, Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

components it would need to be replaced in an attack, so that transporting them through a downed grid would be unrealistic in any timely way.

Salvation for Koppel comes in the image of the highly disciplined, hierarchical organization of the Mormon Church, a religious community encouraged to prepare for disaster as both a matter of religious doctrine and historical precedent.

While failing to mention anything about indigenous groups (living without electricity their entire histories) slaughtered by these settlers as they secured water sources in the area, the author sees the highly organized powerbase, scale, and incentive to prepare for the unexpected as a masterful display of foresight. Mormon families are encouraged to sustain themselves for up to a year by storing supplies, with mandatory tithing providing and adding to Church funds that support an elaborate, widespread structural pattern of social organization (bishops, counselors, presidents, quorums, etc.) with precise systems of communication and oversight, each developing their own emergency plans, an intricate administration that functions to manage a parallel economy. The Mormons, it appears, are well suited for social breakdown, with an independently subsidized welfare infrastructure that includes a sprawling network of stores, generators, tanks of fuel, farms, ranches, orchards, canneries, silos, storehouses, tens of thousands of irrigated acres, processing plants, and a national distribution and delivery system to supply their own needs, able to sell any remainder of produce on whatever market is left intact. Says one church leader, “In the event of a massive crisis, everything could be consolidated to provide resources for the church and its members,” if no one else.

Koppel’s “solutions” follow the recognition that individual, communal, regional, and even international contingency plans are relatively short-sighted and generally unworkable in the face of mass panic, theft, and violence. In turn, he points to the newly minted mission statements of private security firms seeking to capitalize on the shortcomings of the state by alerting energy companies to unauthorized parties while monitoring intrusions through increasingly robust cybersecurity systems. He goes on to suggest small, modular reactors that would allow energy independence for military bases that could in turn enter into cooperative agreements with local communities to share surplus energy when the grid does go down, while at the same time building political will to develop mass national recovery programs and pass cybersecurity bills to defend U.S. military and industrial systems. Moreover, he alludes to the growing realization that cyber attacks—and the oft cited potential for a “cyber pearl harbor” – ultimately amount to an act of war, so that mutual assured destruction might be enough to dissuade any substantial military-grade attacks.

Here, the search for guidance in a post-electric age seems to come full circle into even more dependence on “cybersecurity” to preserve industrial civilization and the domesticated worldview and culture that provokes the crisis in the first place. The irony of course is that the internet developed from a decentralized information-sharing defense technology before the global economy was onto onto this framework through “smart grids.” The “internet-of-things,” then, has morphed into a full-fledged weapons system, rendering the global techno superstructure of international capital susceptible by definition to hackers anywhere who would choose to exploit virtually any vulnerability with as little as a laptop.

Still, the book provides a few conclusions worth repeating. Koppel’s contribution, besides mapping vulnerabilities and pointing out the various failings of different survival proposals, is in articulating the need for a strategy that necessarily stems from a radical shift in mindset. Good people everywhere are open to suggestions and willing to voluntarily work in solidarity for a shared purpose, and so the potential for social transformation is only one hard realization away. The book thus leaves the reader with one worthwhile resource perhaps more than any other: Hope.

Such hope exists in the recognition that the possibility of grid collapse may happen simply because it can, the aftermath prompting the immediate conditions needed for rewilding to begin in the absence of institutions and systems that have tamed wildness for so long. And while the systemic thirst for profit comes at the expense of ecological and cultural resiliency, that same process has brought these systems closer to their own death knell than ever before. The torturous truth of this reality is evident in headlines of poisoned water and communities, mutated animals, and the increasing

absence of life and habitat we once knew. The violence of the grid then represents something greater than itself—the willingness to forsake those it depends on it for its own efficient propagation—a suicidal impetus. Koppel has then put on display civilization’s Achilles heel, a vulnerability open for exploitation.

Our culture has evolved to mirror our language. One can see the effects of how computer languages have massively reconfigured that culture to the leviathan it has become today. And yet if it is morally permissible to prompt cyberwars between powerful (or more likely, increasingly failed) states that destroy each other’s competitive advantage, in order to leave space for those birds and coyotes whose lives are endlessly encroached upon and destroyed on a daily basis, perhaps a virus predicated on a few lines of code reflecting such rewilded sentiment can throw this culture back into anarchy once more.

But perhaps even without this code we can have hope.

As I finish this writing, a 24-hour gale warning is in effect and three large branches have already fallen outside my home.

A local electric company leaves a message telling me the area is experiencing a power outage affecting upwards of 2,500 people. Perhaps nearby a power line as been blown down, El Nino’s whispers to a land thirsting for insurgent action, hoping its greatest desire will be realized. As temperatures rise and people look to their air conditioning for solace; as historical blizzards subsume areas and thermostats are cranked to blast heat; as the earth rises up screaming out for relief, perhaps the delicate equilibrium of the supply and demand of energy that Koppel traces will be thrown out of balance. And maybe, at that moment, a squirrel’s well timed attack on the grid can answer that call.

Already, 623 power disruptions have been provoked by squirrels, 214 by birds, 52 by raccoons, 47 by snakes, 25 by rats, 9 by beavers, with slugs and other critters attacking the grid every few days, though the exact total is assuredly much higher.73 Indeed, if only one blackout to date has been attributed to hackers, it seems more likely to put our hope in wild life before the techno-elite anyway. It is these creatures who are putting their bodies on the line because it is in their nature to do so, consciously or otherwise, acting on the plan this traumatized and deeply wounded world crafts in response. We should be so bold as the squirrel that lost its life in 1987, shutting down the energy supply to the Nasdaq exchange to disrupt upwards of 20,000 shares of stock from being traded.74 Already, we can see these systems that domesticate us have generated the conditions in which human and nonhuman forces are together fighting back, comrades in a primal war.

73 "A Terrifying and Hilarious Map of Squirrel Attacks on the U.S. Power Grid." Washington Post. Web. Accessed 03 Feb 2016.

74 "Stray Squirrel Shuts Down Nasdaq System." The New York Times. 09 Dec. 1987. Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

Technique and Obsolescence: Meditations on the Religiosity of Tubes The immortal worm’s story ends when it is swallowed by another immortal. The story of the swallowings is the subject of World His-story, which by its very name already prefigures a single Leviathan which holds all Earth in its entrails.

-Fredy Perlman, Against His-story, Against Leviathan75 They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet, did you know that? Do you know why? Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people…

–Ted Stevens, U.S. Senator76 Andrew Blum begins the preface of his best-selling book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (2012) when a Brooklyn squirrel kills his internet connection by chewing through a rubber wire.77 Its death stirs the author to investigate the rest of the internet’s physical structure over the course of two-years, traveling tens of thousands of miles of buried cables that link continents, buildings, and people together in a history of names and landmarks that define the complex technology. A primary evolutionary force today, the internet is thoroughly integrated into the earth, its tubes converging to form the infrastructure necessary for it to function. The book then spans genres to map this ground: travel narrative, digital ethnography, adventure novel, and dystopian nonfiction, a virtual Theogony to account for order in the chaos of unseen forces, ideological values, and cultural norms of an increasingly high-tech landscape.

On the Sorcery and Tyranny of the Technosphere The squirrel jolts both author and reader out of the world of failing metaphor by making the technical anatomy of the internet tangible by illuminating its machinery. “in basest terms, the Internet is made of pulses of light. Those pulses might seem miraculous, but they’re not magic. They are produced by powerful lasers contained in steel boxes housed (predominantly) in unmarked buildings. The lasers exist.

The boxes exist. The buildings exist. The Internet exists—it has a physical reality, an essential infrastructure, a ‘hard bottom,’ as Henry David Thoreau said of Walden Pond.”78 The omnicentric nature of the internet means its points of presence are everywhere, streaming human activity across glass fibers. For Blum, it is initially recognized to reside in the “black cable modem with five green lights, a blue telephone adapter…and a white wireless router with a single illuminated eye” beside his living room couch. 79 From there, the line moves into the basement, through the yard and past the squirrel to a fiber junction box, where a thick bundle of cables aggregates the surrounding neighborhood “into a few strands of glass…node8M48,” in North Brooklyn, before moving to a “head-end,” the fenced off building containing a cable modem termination

75 Perlman, Fredy (1983) pg. 43, in Against His-story, Against Leviathan: an essay. Black and Red, Detroit, MI

76 Stevens, Ted (2006) “Your Own Personal Internet” Wired. Taken from https://www.wired.com/2006/06/your_own_person/ Accessed 4/8/2017

77 Blum, Andrew (2012) Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. HarperCollins Publishers: New York, NY.

78 Ibid, 4 79 Ibid, 1

system whose router, “sprouting yellow wires,” is plugged into the “master head-end” in Hicksville, Long Island, where the broadband internet services center’s (BISC) routers “aggregate all the signals coming and going between Cablevisions’s customers and the rest of the Internet,” networks like Level 3, AT&T, Hurricane Electric, and KPN that connect in specific places: “60 Hudson Street, 111 Eighth Avenue, Equinix Ashburn, Equinix Newark, Equinix Chicago, and Equinix Los Angeles.”80 Unlike the usual metaphors used to describe the internet— “web,” “cloud,” “net,” “village…”Tubes aptly represents the otherwise undetectable links that are crucial for civilization’s many networks to operate. The technosphere, veiled in a technical language so often left to specialists, is so sufficiently developed as to appear like magic, deforming a sense of reality by clouding the ability to distinguish between self, internet, and ideas of either, to enclose and uproot its users into a placeless existence eclipsed by another world. 81 Focusing attention on its material structures, the book works to demystify, decipher, and dissolve the illusions that would disappear the real story. In doing so, Blum’s journey takes on for him the significance of a religious pilgrimage as he searches out the face of the internet’s hidden structures while seeking tech gurus to guide him and navigate the terrain.

A mystical strain runs through the text, transcending what is visible to discern its controlling powers, testifying to a technology that faithfully intends and records a modern economic. In this regard, technicians and computer scientists become virtual engineers of an occult science, structuring an asylum increasingly regulated by machines and algorithms. As one former product philosopher and technology ethicist describes, “never before in history have 50 mostly male 20-35 year old designers living in California working at three tech companies influenced how a billion people spend their time.”82 Readers might then recognize in the pages the details of their own subjugation, animals captured and constricted by the fiber and tubes that ensnare them in a pantheon of ruling forces.

Stratigraphic Layers of a New Religious Empire Blum analyzes the light within the tubes as a cultural artifact shaped by social structures and terrestrial backdrops, “nexuses of information” whose logical, physical, and topographical conditions together form the layers of a modern domestication: Multiple networks run through the same wires, even though they are owned and operated by independent organizations…the networks carry networks. One company might own the actual fiber-optic cables, while another operates the light signals pulsing over that fiber, and a third owns (or more likely rents) the bandwidth encoded in that light...that allows for the likelihood that

80 Ibid, 265-266 81 In one study, the anthropocene is described in terms of a “conspicuous stratigraphical signal of

anthropogenic changes in production and consumption across the biosphere” and thus the mass of total human technology, now weighing 30 trillion tons with more technofossil “species” than the number of biotic species, potentially signals its geologic layer. Following science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clark’s third law that any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic, the core of the technosphere, far from being a force separate from humans, can be located in the matrix of relationships that create cultural and individual identities of deepest value and meaning. This implies a deeply integrated existence wherein human activity, thought, the natural world, and unseen reality are all interrelated, exuding a magic-like power so long as the intricacies behind the technosphere’s operating systems remain unrecognized. Blum’s writing then contributes to an anthropologic understanding of this phenomenon of magic, in the tradition of Weber, Frazer, Maus, Malinowski, or Evans-Pritchard, but now also reimagined by voices Starhawk, David Abram or Malidoma Some. Blum’s case differs however, in the sense it is he who effectively becomes the “primitive” coming to terms with the more sophisticated techniques he spends the book getting a handle on, an outsider charting the material patterns conditioned upon a witchcraft, or magic taken for granted as the basic state of reality. For the study on the Anthropocene, see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292964087_The_Anthropocene_A_conspicuous_stratigraphica l_signal_of_anthropogenic_changes_in_production_and_consumption_across_the_biosphere

82 PBS. “Your phone is trying to control your life,” retreived at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=MacJ4p0vITM

many individual networks— ‘autonomous systems,’ in Internet parlance—run over the same wires, their information-laden electrons or photons jostling across the countryside, like packs of eighteen-wheelers on the highway.83 The internet can therefore be described as a set of overlapping realms; electronic signals travel the physical machinery across earthly terrains in this newest imperial project.

Not unlike archaic civilizations governed by the warrior-priest-kings proclaiming themselves divinities worthy of worship, the culture today is similarly guided by uniform conviction. Digital code and the apparatus that delivers it are likewise invested with triple authority (military, political, religious) where techno-priests are tasked with regulating daily life and organizing ritual behavior as they govern technical, cultural, and ecological realities. A seamless, omnipresent progression, within the internet’s hulking mass discernable patterns become apparent, cemented in the daily service and communion its attendants devote themselves to.

Like every religious history before it, there are moments and places where ideas take material shape, its psychic and aesthetic components arranging narrower and ever more impoverished experiences for their users. Blum moves from the internet’s origins as an experimental nationwide computer network, conceived of to ensure the survival of information in any event, drifting to aged relics, major centers, and internet onramps. He visits the cable landing stations, the trucks and ships that lay cable beneath cities and oceans, and data factories to gain insight into the servers, routers, modems, exchanges, and all the rest of the instruments, plastic, metals, fiber optics, boxes, discerning from these remains the social order contained in each pulse of light. The handful of global megahubs that represent hundreds more regional hubs, each capturing and redistributing traffic along the paths where industrial and colonial dynamics advance in sophistication, are ruled now by the single, golden law that repeat the digital kingdom’s prophetic destiny: “Get your packets to their destination as directly and cheaply as possible, by increasing the number of possible paths.”84 An architecture and narrative of control is set up, circling the earth, plugging in continents through telegraph cables, ocean lines, and port cities, converting countries into call centers, all the while expanding with the ferocity of evangelists espousing a manifest destiny. The consequences are the “cities of light,” their fiber strands converging in access points and critical vectors to move and store data. Deep inside this complex, our digital avatars are imprisoned and enslaved to those who sell our online produce to the highest bidder seeking information on prospective customers. The entirety of our social order is present in the inner workings of these tubes, stratigraphically signaling the geologic boundary of a new reigning creature that has drastically changed the flow of energy with a synchronizing technical apparatus built to yoke cultural memories, repurposing our lives as cogs in an engine driving us towards oblivion. The reality is mundane, banal, ordinary: business coopts our futures to serve profiteering ends: This is the cloud. All of those buildings like this around the planet create the cloud. The cloud is a building. It works like a factory. Bits come in, they get massaged and put together in the right way, then packaged up and sent out. But everybody you see on this site has one job, that’s to keep these servers right here alive at all times.85 The psychic aspect of land, traumatized by civilization, empire, capital, and technology, is increasingly victimized by imperial ambitions as the myriad state and capitalist forces are joined in a single emerging beast that devours everything before it, its technical lineage reproducing the regulating ideology for its communities, nations, and businesses to dedicate their lives and energy toward. In doing so, the internet’s built structure evolves new behaviors to cope with this situation: eyes down on screens, head in the “cloud,” unaware of their new identity as

83 Blum, 19 84 Ibid, 109 85 Ibid, 259

walking talking gadgets, these retrofitted instruments called “users” have been redesigned to serve and worship both idol and idolater attending to its needs.86 A Mathematics of Light Blum journeys the anatomy of this Leviathan searching for its “aura,” each physical connection presenting another organ of efficiency where light speed connection is valued above all else. Cheap, fast, and reliable capacity is purchased, traffic and congestion grows, new tubes connect formerly separate nodes, and profitable companies accelerate the rate of networked exchange. The internet then cannot be conceived of as simply a noun, but rather must be recognized for what it is, a verb, an “internetting” of a global culture approaching light speed, the tubes forming the spaces in-between. Blum describes his revelation accordingly: What I saw was not the essence of the Internet but its quintessence – not the tubes, but the light…better thought of as math made manifest; not hard, physical tubes, but ineffable, ethereal numbers…for all the constantly advancing miracles of silicon, the planet itself remains unassailable, along with the speed of light and the human desire to be connected…the Internet was made of light.87 The speed of light across the length of tube transmutes the ever-present aspirations of rising companies and entrepreneurs into frictionless profit for instant interaction, provoking crises of bandwidth in which states and firms are sacrificed in pursuit of a higher purpose: It worked according to an incontrovertible physical truth: a pulse of light goes in one end and comes out the other. There is plenty of magic in the light itself—the rhythm and wavelength of its pulses determine the amount of data that can be transmitted at a time, which is in turn dependent on the machines installed on each end. But none of that changes the need for a continuous path.

Individual strands of fiber can be spliced together end to end by melting the tops, like candles—but that process is delicate and time-consuming. The path of least resistance is unbroken. Hopefully.88 While the book successfully displays the profit-based intentions of those engaged in the internetting of the world, Blum does not include much in the way of the energy it takes to force light-speed travel across enormous distances when volts of electricity are sent through cables, nor does he speak much to the ecological effects of

86 Domesticated animals, much less stimulated than their wild counterparts, will often evolve

stereotypies (of 35 million farm, lab, and zoo animals and pets in the world, estimates are 91.5% of pigs, 82.6% of poultry, 80% of American minks living on fur farms, 50% of lab mice, 18.4% of horses have some stereotypy), defined as repetitive, invariant, and seemingly pointless behaviors hypothesized to exist when a biological need cannot be expressed, for example when captured gophers dig holes to feel safe, or captured carnivores pace intensely for hours on end. The persistent repetition of these “senseless habits” as an increasing percentage may mean the animal is suffering in a barren environment, so that abnormal repetitive behaviors help protect emotional responses through coping mechanisms. In this regard, can addiction behavior sequences evoked by modern electrical stimulation provide coping mechanisms to deal to the horrible stress of having been removed by hypercivilized life from the rich, natural environments of early ancestors, interfering with an animal’s nervous system and quality of life? Terry Grandin suggests in her book, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals, that a well-designed animal welfare program would stimulate seeking (searching, investigating, and making sense of the environment) and play systems that produce feelings of joy in the core emotional systems in the brain, while avoiding rage, fear, and panic systems when necessary. Intuitively, wild areas that keep animals occupied and activate positive emotions are optimum environments to prevent these stereotypies from forming at all or reducing them when they do. For more on Grandin’s book, see http://grandin.com/inc/animals.make.us.human.ch1.html

87 Blum, 163 88 Ibid, 168

laying tubing, the wastelands of trashed computers and discarded devices, nor the changes in surrounding life places, imagined spaces, and domesticated dreams such technological “progress” induces in the human mind. 89 He does not talk about the transformation of earth into the tubes themselves, nor the rate of emissions arising from this process, nor the energy it takes to sustain it. Instead, a sense of essential places as they stand today and the moods they engender are described, along with the altogether overwhelming nature and degree of complexity as a whole.

Targets for Terrorists As energy bubbles up from the earth to be extracted and processed into fuel for the technologies we increasingly devote our lives to, what relevance do IT workers, hackers, security experts, electricians now have for the companies and states they minister to, shepherding and securing a hobbled flock unendingly afraid of the looming specter of computer death? Perhaps in recognizing their destinies are impacted by powers greater than themselves, it is only natural such groups attempt to evoke favor from the apparent supernatural forces they are dominated by, paying top dollar for technicians to channel this divine power and heal any machine afflicted with a virus.

Like each religion before it, the internet situates a glorified memeplex, culturally accreting sacred sites, relics, monuments, apostles, stories, and ritual services. One of Blum’s interviewees anticipates a book that forecasts the places to be attacked and defended, celebrated and hidden in an oncoming spiritual feud, catechizing: Are we creating through this book a road map for terrorists? By identifying the ‘monuments,’ as you refer to them, if they are known and damaged and destroyed, it’s not just one building that goes down, it’s the entire country that goes down, and is that a wise thing to be broadcasting to the world…Do you want to be the guy who says, ‘here’s what you attack to take down the country’?90 Already a Scotland Yard 2007 operation broke up an Al-Qaeda plot to blow up the Telehouse’s compound and with it do extensive damage to the London Internet Exchange, what Telehouse’s technical services director called

89 Studies on the ecological impacts of the internet infrastructure, for instance a Greenpeace report on

internet data centers, shows how the videos, pictures, emails, status updates, news, and tweets generated are stored in giant data centers packed with computer servers that consume huge amounts of electricity, often from polluting dirty energy sources and clustered in locations offering tax incentives and cheap costs. These electric information factories amount to 1.5-2% of global energy demand (3% in the U.S.), growing at 12% per year; the data centers and telecommunications network behind the internet and cloud are ranked 5th against countries for electricity usage, emitting hundreds of millions of tons of C02 each year, or 1% of all emissions released from fossil fuels. A report on the impacts of submarine cables on environments conclude that electromagnetic fields and heat dissipation pose a threat to the marine environment, along with toxic contamination and disturbances.

Whether the Internet of Things will be a net benefit for the environment is thus by no means clear, requiring one weigh the use of fossil fuels, automated work, and electrical efficiency against landfills of e-waste, with the United Nations University estimating 53 million tons of e-waste were disposed of worldwide while around 67 million tons of new electrical and electronic equipment were put on the market, predicting a rise by a third to 65.4 million tons by 2017. Further, while these environmentally destructive activities are certainly capable of disrupting ecological services, the damage to our minds may be just as significant, albeit in new ways not yet understood. On internet addiction as a disorder, see https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-addictive-internet-use-restructure-brain/ For reports or studies mentioned above, see: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/climate/2011/Cool %20IT/dirty-data-report-greenpeace.pdf https://www.bfn.de/fileadmin/BfN/meeresundkuestenschutz/Dokumente/BfN_Literaturstudie_Effekte_ma rine_Kabel_2007-02_01.pdf http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/news/52624/UNU-1stGlobal-E-Waste-Monitor-2014-small.pdf

90 Blum, 116

“strategically important organizations at the heart of the internet,” in an interview with the Times of London. 91 The question of sharing information about critical local infrastructure built for the purpose of sharing that same information may seem dizzying, but critical services demand attention; ultimately Blum’s interviewee shares his knowledge, for one simple reason: “they wanted the attention; it would be good for business.” 92 The perennial contradiction between the profit and safety again resurfaces: while secrecy may, from a security standpoint, make sense, from an economic perspective it does not, and so any group will broadcast into the marketplace for the sake of this intention. The decentralized design of the internet is similarly juxtaposed against the tendency to concentrate hubs to reduce the time it takes to send and communicate content as it moves along the tubing. These principles of publicity and secrecy, distribution and concentration form the basis of the dual nature of the internetting world, evident in a contradictory aesthetic of “cyberiffic” tones of Silicon Valley’s techie building interiors, as compared to the often discreet and anonymous steel buildings at undisclosed addresses owned by indeterminate companies.93 Whether any of these targets remain essentially symbolic or functional in primal or ecological warfare is a question to be taken up when considering the underlying strategy and tactical advantage behind any potential action. It may be easy enough to kill off a portion of the North American Network Operators Group (“NANOGers”), so-called “wizards behind the internet’s curtains” who Blum writes are the only ones who would know how to fix the internet’s biggest pipes at a party for instance (“if a bomb went off in its midst, who would be left to run the Internet?”); or somehow bypass the sophisticated security systems to infiltrate an exchange; or strap a bomb to a Brocade MLX 32 router at the core of some large internet exchange, for instance at Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Palo Alto, or London, to prevent hundreds of gigabits (billions of bits of information made of light) from being sent each second.94 The obvious vulnerability is recognized when one employee at the “center of Milwaukie’s internet” muses to Blum on the mass of tubes serving twenty five thousand people before them, “look what someone could do in here with a chainsaw.”95 If the Internet is generally a series of tubes connecting machines, then in essence it exists as a series of routes that can be cut and nodes that can be crippled. Resistance, the increased friction on a flow to hinder and discourage its movement, is antithetical to the previously mentioned golden rule of the internetting impetus of light-speed profit. One might seek to launch a tube-slicing or box-breaking spree—the larger, more connected, and most indispensable the bulk of conduits, the better, the most heavily trafficked international Internet route for instance, between New York and London.96 One article points out “roughly 99 percent of global Web traffic is dependent on deep-sea networks of fiber-optic cables that blanket the ocean floor like a nervous system…tangible

91 For an brief analysis of Al Qaeda’s plot, see Simson Garfinkel’s article, “Could Al Qaeda Plunge

England into an Internet Blackout,” retrieved here https://www.technologyreview.com/s/407528/couldal-qaeda-plunge-england-into-an-internet-blackout/ In the article, Garfinkel compares the attack with an imagined one on the AME West compound he visited, pointing out, “some luddite terrorist using my name could easily have called, arranged the tour, and then blown up the gigaswitch with a pipe bomb.” Since 2007, the original Telehouse (North) building has since been joined by larger, more sophisticated ones, Telehouse East and Telehouse West.

92 Blum, 115 93 Websites like Empire Logistics, LilSis, and Data Center Map are a few examples of how invisible

power structures, centers, and individuals in logistical infrastructures can be mapped, with special attention to vulnerabilities, key sites of struggle, chokepoints, and connections to broader dynamics and solidarity opportunities along global supply chains, presumably rupturing the flow of capital by shutting down major thoroughfares. For more, see http://www.empirelogistics.org/ , https://littlesis.org/ and http://www.datacentermap.com/

94 Ibid, 119 95 Ibid, 23 96 Ibid, 180

targets – creating very real choke points in the system.”97 How can online growth occur if there is no ground to grow in? Looking at the technopriest class as similarly vital, their annihilation might have a comparable effect.

Without wizards behind the curtain, who will sustain the spectacle?

Beyond that, destroying the thirteen root servers that decode IP addresses, stopping their replication, and killing backups would prevent all internet browsing while taking down phones, computers, businesses, etc.; governments or hackers could use their internet kill switches to shut it off and keep it down; data centers could be demolished; key engineers, architects, and others capable of rebuilding core internet components could be attacked; cyberwarfare; ransomware; and on and on…

But to what degree are such actions effective? Would destroying servers and routers, slicing network paths or eliminating super-empowered actors seriously delay messages by rerouting them through alternative pathways? To what extent would physical damage slow a connection, or halt it completely? And to what purpose? To delay the messaging by a fraction until tubes are repaired, the boxes replaced? To hinder and disrupt the ease and facility of “resource” extraction so long as one is able? To free oneself of the internet altogether? And always, for how long?

Never forever. Any significant action causing internet failure has remained arguably minimal and always temporary, due to the basic premise of the internet’s original design. Power may go out and regional access may not work, but the internetting remains. Major hubs and exchanges have fail-safes and backups, so that it remains, for all practical purposes, “self-healing.”98 Whether cables are cut by earthquakes or fishing boats cast anchors unaware, or a buried fiber-optic cable is accidentally cut with a shovel, knocking Armenia offline for twelve hours, repairs are relatively instantaneous.99 Put otherwise, while the internet’s extremities may be vulnerable and fragile on an individual basis, the overarching structure of the whole is much more resilient. Perhaps more likely than an anti-technology activist ever permanently crippling physical infrastructure is a country or company forgetting to pay for internet services, as when the entire Australia Internet Exchange, and with it the entire Australian continent, was shut off.100 Here, the intention and directives guiding those with their hands on the machinery is evident as a crucial motivating force.

Attacking the internet’s physical structures would likely result in delays of microseconds, minutes, hours, perhaps a day or two. For anything approaching weeks, or theoretically months or years, chaos would have to be introduced through highly developed code or the equivalent degree of physical destruction of critical infrastructure on such a scale that its replacement could not occur in any timely manner—capabilities largely out of reach of most would-be anti-civ activists, and certainly disincentivized by state-sponsored actors threatening increasing scales of retaliation against any other potential offender. In all these cases, recovery points, security measures, and the decentralized nature of internetting in general would likely mean the global energy systems that power them would make better targets than the internet itself.

As pointed out, the only hacker-caused blackout to date was launched against Ukraine, presumably by Russian actors, lasting as long as it took to restore power manually.101 Since the event, Ukraine has been recognized as the unofficial training ground for Russian cyberwarfare operations, presumably in preparation for future real-world missions against perceived threats.102Any serious large-scale cyberattack, therefore, seems more likely to be done by national governments targeting one another for geopolitical strategical gain than any non-state actor, though it is well known and much more often the case that governments kill their own internet, as with Iran or Egypt during

97 Kleyman, Bill (2014). “How the Internet May Be Taken Down.” Data Center Knowledge. Retrieved 7/14/17 from http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/08/29/internet-may-taken/

98 Blum, 200 99 Ibid.

100 Ibid, 83 101 For more on Russia using Ukraine as a cyberwarfare training ground, see Andy Greenberg’s article, “How an Entire Nation Became a Test Lab for Cyberwar,” (2017), retrieved 7/14/17 from https://www.wired.com/story/russian-hackers-attack-ukraine/

102 Ibid.

the Arab Spring, but even the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit cut communication services to disrupt citizen protests.103 For now, we can be confident that the internetting-of-things that occurred in the five years since Blum’s book came out has subsequently recruited and weaponized the technosphere’s mass of connected devices to make them and the tubes between them a viable and persistent threat to anyone remaining dependent upon them. Web pages and powerlines downed by internet outages and electrical blackouts, individuals and institutions paralyzed by ransomware, and the critical financial and energy systems digitally assaulted in cyberspace everyday have all become targets in a cat and mouse game playing out across tubes, taking shape in the images and stories that flicker across our screens.104 Obsolete Techniques Perhaps some successful attack, if only for a moment, might serve as a breath of fresh air, a temporary break in the monotony of second life, shocking people back towards the non-digitized world. But to think attacking individual tubes of electricity or the boxes they inspire will in any way be a major setback for civilization, so long as the basic narrative of technological progress and profit remains intact, is a losing strategy if taken as an exclusive method of activity or resistance.

The internet, as a technology, exists as the hyper-specialized body of techniques developed to share information, now largely for commercial purposes, upon which entire industries have been erected. Within the context of civilization and capitalism, it is a medium motivating countless numbers to stake the entirety of their lives upon the machinery of their own domestication.

Resisting this technology is, then, very nearly impossible in any meaningful way. If one wanted to resist the influence of the internet, one could go behind their couch and smash their modem with a hammer. Easier, unplug it. Disconnecting others however will likely remain temporary and therefore, generally ineffectual in any permanent sense. Instead, the tubes and boxes would need to be deprived of electricity at the very source of the physical energy they depend upon, but also deprived of the psychic energy it takes to reproduce the narrative such techniques are essential to life in the modern world, so that resisting technology in any relevant way beyond mere symbolic victories will not occur through physical and electronic attacks on infrastructure alone.105 Online connection and disconnection offer weapons for both assault and defense. As Blum writes, “to be on the Internet is to want to be found.”106 The social aspect that internetting implies (as opposed to the energy infrastructure it relies upon) is thus both a vulnerability and asset. There is ostensibly no way to physically attack this edifice in any lasting way (or at the very least, it has never been achieved apart from webpages suffering from temporary DDoS attacks or brief moments where regional connections are severed), assuming that taking down the entire internet, or the larger technological systems it exists within across the planet, is even the goal at hand.

The benefits of any lone attack to the anti-tech activist is negligible at best because the force of resistance in such examples is simply too weak or unavailable to be maintained in the face of a self-repairing Leviathan.

103 See David Kravets’ article, “San Francisco Subway Shuts Cell Service to Foil Protest; Legal Debate

Ignites,” (2011), retrieved 7/17/17 from https://www.wired.com/2011/08/subway-internet-shuttering/ or Dana Lievelson’s 2013 article, “The Government’s Secret Plan to Shut off Cellphones and the Internet, Explained,” retrieved 7/17/17 from http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/internet-phone-killswitch-explained/

104 On Ransomware and the vulnerability of the internet of things to hacking, see, Brian Buntz (2017)

“WannaCry Aftermath: Is IoT Ransomware in Our Future,” retrieved 7/17/17 from http://www.ioti.com/security/wannacry-aftermath-iot-ransomware-our-future For more, Steve Ranger’s “Cyberwar:: A guide to the frightening future of online conflict” is also be helpful, retrieved 8/7/17 from http://www.zdnet.com/article/cyberwar-a-guide-to-the-frightening-future-of-online-conflict/ .

105 This is only to say methods of “resistance” will only be effective so long as methods of rewilding are not neglected.

106 Blum, 30

Further, for the same reason insurgents don’t start by breaking their own modems, smashing their own routers, and cutting their own telephone wires in order to avoid repression. Activists would likely be “disadvantaged” in the context of the war they might wage within the belly of civilization if they were to attack the same regional information communication technologies they depend on for reconnaissance, securing necessary supplies, organizing, etc. In a civilized context of economic competition and state power, try as one might, attacking critical infrastructure does not make it go away, because the perceived need for it does not go away; instead, technology’s raison d’etre is reinforced, evolving more effectual security measures to defend against alleged threats, developing new security protocols, etc.

This is the realization Blum’s demystification of abstraction provides: the internet represents our own collective desire, so as long as it is wanted, it remains. As he explains, “everything you do online travels through a tube. Inside those tubes (by and large) are glass fibers. Inside those fibers are light. Encoded in that light is, increasingly, us.”107 To attack this digital “us” without attacking the civilized context that produces and sustains “us” amounts to a kind of symbolic, nonstrategic martyrdom and indiscriminate attack that serves only Leviathan’s reified narrative that It is essential to protect the civilized from what can only be interpreted as an incoherent doctrinal cancer.

Any serious movement, individual or otherwise, against civilization will recognize the futility of physical attacks against infrastructure alone, shifting to human intention as the location where the final (only?) battle for primal, ecological war must ultimately be waged. Attacking the grid’s physical apparatus without undomesticating from the same structures one might seek to attack would be an unreasonable, impotent, time-consuming activity that simply misunderstands the scale necessary to be effective.108 Rather, if technological progress means improved “efficiency” to more effectively actualize a given potential or end (despite its many unforeseen disasters), then we have only to recognize that the internet, its infrastructure, and the technosphere itself, along with civilization as a whole, are the amassed body of techniques that have only sporadically been understood in history to have become obsolete as methods to ensure survival. While certainly not an either/or case, symbolically attacking largely irrelevant or easily repairable cables and tubes that remain nonessential to the overall structure of the internet and civilization will remain largely ineffective unless enough energy is invested into non-technological lifeways, depriving the technosphere of the effort and intention it takes to remain operational and relevant. Where intention goes, energy flows. Or as Blum writes, “people go to where things are.”109 Electrification, perhaps the ultimate expression of domesticated energy, grounds the internet’s pulsating light, re-presenting Leviathan’s collective will in each new click, like, tweet, post, and communicated message or transaction. To live a life where such technologies are unnecessary and obsolete, it is vital to develop survival techniques where disconnection—a life without these specialized techniques and apart from what is internetted— is not a disadvantage, but cultivated as an unmediated pathway to access the universal energy coursing through the earth, now powering machines. On its own it is able to entirely resist technology, alienation, and the division of specialized labor that reproduces the ultra-domesticated existence separating us from what our aboriginal bodies long for. But how does a life without electricity endure?

Whereas anarchists could arguably be happy with the ability to wrest power away from state and corporate power using decentralized media, the technosphere it depends on has become omnipresent, omnipotent, increasingly omniscient in its own right. Learning to live outside electricity and domestication to adequately resist the electrification of life remains a necessary ingredient, more so than blogging about attacks on power stations can ever be. Independence from electricity means satisfying bodily needs without technology, externalizing a rewilded intention in a less electrified world. Inevitably, whether state or non-state actors take down grids across the world or former citizens simply learn to live without them, letting them crumble without resurrecting them when they do, they will eventually cease to function one way or another if wildness is ever to recover. Like any

107 Blum, 6 108 Of course, for some, this may not matter.

109 Blum, 183

specialist faced with a disrupting technology, the technopriests advocating subservience to the electric gods they serve, charging fees and collecting tariffs, can do nothing once others have realized these gods themselves are dead and dying, their religion decaying as the biosphere’s energy flows are uncaged, repairing themselves and the landscapes as the fountain of energy bubbles up into healthy communities once more.

Does this mean there is a place for breaking boxes and cutting tubes in the war for anarchy and the wild? The computer languages we utilize daily are a domesticating force, prompting the overcomplication of life so that hardly anyone in civilization can do anything for themselves anymore. Instead they become experts in nothing of consequence. The artifacts that facilitate such relations can absolutely be attacked insofar as civilized networks can be leveraged against themselves, victims of the same national and technological power they promote. But if the direct connection to the surrounding land necessary for a life apart from Leviathan is forsaken in those moments of brief electrical disconnection, will it matter? In these cases, such structures remain scapegoats to condemn while continuing to deny the unmediated experience of wild nature.

On some level, this necessitates a kind of appraisal, detailing and examining the processes of civilized life each of us are subject to. Is it possible to live without a phone, internet, or electricity? What local networks can aid us towards these ends? How can life exist without civilization, in perpetuity? Is life so domesticated that one cannot survive without the imprisoning asylum around us? If so, how can this reality be undone, as fast as possible, and always totally and completely? If not, why not? If it requires internet, electricity, or civilized structures to facilitate the “jailbreak” necessary to experience true liberation and a life attuned to a wild and uncontrolled existence, then how to distinguish between technological necessity, desire, and addiction? At what point will these structures become outmoded towards such ends and how to move beyond even them?

As Blum continuously asks, what is the purpose of internet connection, or any connection, at all? Such questions provide opportunity for the complete reformulation of a mathematics of light: what does your body need at its deepest levels? What foods satisfy those needs, and how are these foods freely sought and attained?

Where then should one live or move to directly access the energy necessary for life in each passing season? What is worth giving attention to and reproducing in each new present? A web site? A Facebook group? A pithy tweet? A coping mechanism? The company tasked with repairing damaged tubes? The sentiment behind the messages delivered through these tubes? What online activity is absolutely essential, and what remains only the residue of domesticated habituation? By answering questions like these—how to live life unmediated by tubes of controlled energy—we approach the guiding attitude driving the technosphere onward and can consider how to dismantle technoculture and make the internet obsolete at a personal level. Such answers begin to establish the lifeways necessary for uncivilized life to take root.

Dispossessed of nearly every landbase by civilization, anyone might be forgiven for embracing the hyperspecialized techniques made available to survive each new day. Still, one might perceive the specter of a general strike taking shape, where a permanent unplugging from infrastructure on a mass scale could return life to the instincts of its deepest nature. To continue civilized pathways would be to accept a place as hyperdomesticated animals, helplessly reliant upon schemes designed to augment subservience, where any “resistance” would remain superficial and ineffective so long as the depth of an instinctual nature remains unexplored.

Retrieving a Depth-of-Place The question of civilization and resistance, I will argue in the last analysis, remains a technical question: how do we survive together, here, based on what is available to us, now (and with now, forever)?

We can today recognize that civilization no longer (if ever) provides an answer. Rather, other techniques are needed to render civilization obsolete as a force of social organization adapting to new conditions. Here, the use of internetting may be a technique able to aid in this regard, informing, communicating, connecting, delivering, reflecting from cyberspace the form and substance wildness might someday take.

While it’s often assumed civilization cannot or will not voluntarily transform itself into a sustainable mode of operation, to believe a planetary eco-militia front will force civilization to its knees can seem even more far-fetched than voluntary transformation (though admittedly, any scenario in which humans survive an upcoming bottleneck is too). To run from it, or fight against it, as Perlman points out, is to invite obliteration of those communities of resistance that try either: “the community can remove itself physically from the monster’s reach, or it can stay where it is and try to hold its own against the beast…ultimately none flee for good, since the Leviathan will shrink the size of the world and turn all places of refuge into cleared fields… [its] institutions are not a part of Life but a part of Death. And Death cannot die.” 110 Any hope for a future may well depend upon the degree to which transformation is voluntary if the only conceivable way to stabilize and sustain a “post-wild” world forced into interdependence by the body of domesticating techniques co-evolving in symbiosis.111 In the wake of social collapse, there can be no assumption that the simple vacuum of civility would be preferable to intentional transition. Rather, the abrupt collapse and absence of structure could leave millions and billions vulnerable and unable to withstand the murderous technology of the genocidal state.112 It is also difficult to believe civilization would go down without taking everything with it.

Here, uncivil imaginings are valuable in re-ecologizing the suffocating traumas of cityscapes. In this critical space, informal bioregional networks, permanent subsistence zones, and feral bands of human animals intimate glimpses of approaches where landscapes are not continually assaulted by extractive industry, where healthy cultural patterns have a chance to reemerge to establish roots.113 To unplug from the machine for the sake of subsistence may still involve domesticated techniques, but the life-affirming, uncivilized alternative that primitive horticulturalists provide can begin the process of unlearning the totality of oppressive techniques; From here, assaults against any civilized remnant can be launched, providing non-electric networks of anonymous activists the places, groundwork, and support needed to attack the legitimacy of the state, omnipotency of industry, and reified economic doctrine from the refuge of rewilded land and lives.

To imagine this triple evil might break down in the face of an exponentially growing wild instinct, one has only to remember: anything can happen.

110 Perlman, 31-33 111 On the question of whether the technosphere has so domesticated the Earth and biosphere that

the climate feedback loops can now no longer be stabilized without technological innovations, for instance increasing dependence on carbon capture technology or preventing nuclear meltdown, consider Philip Sutton, co-author of Climate Code Red, suggesting at the 2015 SLF Great Debate (“To Collapse or Not to Collapse: Pushing for economic ruin or building a great transition” on 2/13/2015, retrieved here: https://vimeo.com/119722889): “The notion that you can avoid ecological collapse by causing economic collapse is…a nut’s idea. If you cause economic collapse, we have too much carbon dioxide in the air right now.

What system is going to take it out under 20,000 years? The only way we’re going to get that excess CO2 out of the air is if we build the capacity to take it out and we have some hope…

Unless we try to think through what we want and make it happen we can’t make it happen… economic collapse as a tool for ecological salvation is nuts, it’s unnecessary, and it is actually counterproductive in blocking the ability to restore a safe climate. It’s actually going to make our job worse.” (56:30)

112 Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, offers an analysis of Nazi

Germany’s aggression and the vulnerability of collapsed states to serious violence, genocide, and untold oppression and death that may be helpful in considering realistic scenarios following collapse in which power vacuums are filled by pathological tendencies.

113 The positive vision of a green anarchy takes many forms, for instance in Graham Purchase’s

Anarchism and Ecology, Seaweed’s Land and Freedom: an open invitation, or Do or Die’s “Down with the Empire, Up with the Spring, Part Two,” which can be found in the anthology Cracks in a Grey Sky. Aric McBay’s “Goal 2” and “Strategy E” may provide a path as well: “to defend and rebuild just, sustainable, and autonomous human communities, and, as part of that, to assist in the recovery of the land…[to] rebuild a sustainable subsistence base for human societies (including perennial polycultures for food) and localized, democratic communities that uphold human rights.” (From “Decisive Ecological Warfare,” in Deep Green Resistance: strategy to save the planet).

It is elsewhere envisaged that religions evolved from the symbolic rituals associated with significant moments in life: birth, subsistence patterns, death.114 Burials, ceremonies, rituals, hunting magic, art, power structures, seasonal calendars all aligned to what was perceived as a sacred order stemming from wild nature’s divine essence.

Whereas this life-giving energy directly patterned ancestral cultural expressions, rooting them in what might be called animistic “religious” experience, today that same energy flows through the tubes that power the machines that surveille and control us. That energy has been so distorted as to have fashioned a cybernetic religion, one that would sacrifice living experience for an existence mediated by a class of technopriestkings who enrich and uphold themselves in a division-of-specialization, clicking away with a religious fervency. To confront this new technoreligious empire, better techniques for collapsing the edifice and retrieve a sense of what is truly of value— experiencing wild nature—should be encouraged.

The collapse of complex adaptive systems occurs when a system is deprived of energy.115 Knocking out the energy systems that maintain and power Leviathan’s processes can increase the stress and, hopefully, ensure that the plastic geologic layer of the Anthropocene—the tubes within which the entire civilized culture is now confined —may be so deprived of energy as to lay buried for millennia, obsolete and unused, marking the point at which humanity no longer desired to remain in its civilized state. Following Blum’s lessons however, while the technosphere’s physical veins that energize the system can be momentarily slashed, the apparatus itself would not bleed out for as long as there are those seeking to sew shut its wounds for the sake of the convenience, security, and control that uphold civilization as the only conceivable technique to mediate power and secure privilege at the behest of its constituents. Yet it seems the only way a community of life, human and non-human, together will survive.

To ensure biospheric stability (and any hope for a future), only a rewilded, free arrangement transcending paradigms of commodification and profiteering can achieve what at this point would be indistinguishable from a miracle. At the very least we might experience life briefly without external control, unconstrained in its devotion to wild instinct, freed of civilization, unmediated by the electronic signals that displace our deepest natures.

114 For more on the origins of Paleolithic religion, see D. Bruce Dickson’s (1990) The Dawn of Belief:

Religion in the Upper Paleolithic of Southwestern Europe. Studies in Cognitive Archaeology, like Stephen Mithen’s Prehistory of the Mind: The cognitive origins of art, religion, and science suggests a novel theory of the mind in which separate mental modules are fused together through social and linguistic pathways that recombine specialized intelligences into metacognitive breakthroughs that fluctuate over time. Religion, like art or science then would combine social, technical, and natural history intelligences in symbolic forms, as when artifacts for social interaction, specialized technology, and anthropomorphic thought promote a cognitive fluidity that selects for greater attunement to the life-support systems it depends on.

115 One theory for societal collapse is that energy return on energy invested (EREI) is a chief concern

in maintaining social complexity, so that a 3:1 to 5:1 EREI ratio can sustain the essential overhead energy costs of a modern society. For this reason, that the continual input of energy from sunlight is necessary to keep ecosystems organized and functioning, collapse can be seen as the sudden loss of the energy needed to maintain social complexity, stratification, internal and external communication, and exchange and productivity. Further, due to the second law of thermodynamics, all complex adaptive and non-adaptive systems must eventually collapse by definition, as sufficient energy flows cannot be maintained forever due to the finite nature of energy in universe. Joseph Tainter’s book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, analyzes social collapse in this framework of energy flows and diminishing returns. For more on the role of energy flows and the complex of complexity in cosmic history, see Fred Spier’s article, “How Big History Works: Energy Flows and the Rise and Demise of Complexity,” published in Social Evolution & History 4(1), March 2005 (87-135), updated and available here: http://www.sociostudies.org/almanac/articles/how_big_history_works_energy_flows_and_the_rise_and_d emise_of_complexity/

A Tale of Two Anarchies: A Dialogue between Contemporary Anarchist Criminology and The Politics of Attack “The Native peoples of this land are under attack. That fact cannot be ignored, and it cannot be resolved in the courts, because the courts are one of the instruments of the attack.”

-John Mohawk "There is no freedom in ‘wildness’ if, by sheer ferality, we mean the dictates of inborn behavioral patterns that shape mere animality. To malign civilization without due recognition of its enormous potentialities for self-conscious freedom — a freedom conferred by reason as well as emotion, by insight as well as desire, by prose as well as poetry — is to retreat back into the shadowy world of brutishness, when thought was dim and intellectuation was only an evolutionary promise."

–Murray Bookchin “It’s useless to wait for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.”

-The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

Nearly twenty-five years after the infamous Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was signed into law, Donald Trump has signed the First Step Act, called a “Christmas Miracle,” by Van Jones. Hailed as the product of a diverse and bipartisan coalition bringing together liberals and conservatives together, the bill gives a “second chance” to those caught up in the criminal justice system. Yet, for all the hype surrounding it, there are still voices that raise critical concerns about it, as well as perspectives absent altogether—perspectives that fundamentally diverge with regards to the premises about criminality, criminalization, and the role of the state in criminal justice. Does this mean we are again poised for a missed opportunity? Another failure? Perhaps we should simply expect more of the same under the guise of reform?

A System Beyond Repair or Reform?

Typically, in understanding the formative institutional influences on any ideological force behind any goal (family, school, civic structures, political activities, mass media…), most Americans, despite various ideological viewpoints, “tend to side with one of two perspectives: the liberal or the conservative ideological perspective.” (Marion and Oliver, 2012) Whereas liberals, striving to protect individual rights, are willing to allow government to intervene in socioeconomic aspects of life to rectify injustices, conservatives, in contrast, tend to believe in the individual responsibility of people for their own behavior, willing government to legislate against supposed immorality. In this way, liberals, skeptical of morality and the utility of criminal sanction, align themselves with a due process model to ensure the constitutional rights of individuals, while conservatives align themselves with a crime control model, attempting to repress criminal conduct through effective prosecution of offenders so that individual rights are subordinate to the security of the society in question. In this way, we can

understand policy to be the result of institutionalized ideology, built upon underlying assumptions behind crime causation (rational choice theory for conservatives, positivist psychosocial theories for liberals). Further, the goals and aims of these competing perspectives within the criminal justice system tend to fall in stark contrast with one another: a crime control model sees law and order as necessary for deterrence, incapacitation, punishment, and to teach morality; while a due process model seeks to promote rehabilitation, reintegration, and restoration, at times even seeing criminals as themselves victims of conditions that increase the probability of criminality.

The tension and fundamental difference between these are both real and discordant, so that often liberals and conservatives make arguments that talk past each other, mischaracterizing each other’s positions to compare the best version of their own perspective to the worst excesses of the other. Is crime a deviation from a justice system rooted in community consensus, or the failure of social institutions to provide the means to assimilate to such a consensus? Beyond this contradiction however, both perspectives, liberal and conservative, assume the ability of the justice system to be neutral and fair in their ability to dole out sentences that adequately distribute justice throughout society. This ideal “consensus model” can be distinguished from a “conflict model” that suggests that the justice system’s processes may themselves be problematic, since various subcultures do not innately share in the same value systems, degree of political power, and so, are invariably in conflict with one another, especially as they engage with the criminal justice system. This is to say that conflict theories suggest social factions in conflict with one another, so that criminal justice processes and systems are in fact determined by the degree of power any political and economic interests holds.

Put otherwise, within criminology, conflict theorists suggest, unlike liberal and conservative criminology, that there is something inherently problematic in the criminal justice process itself that needs to be resolved and reformed for justice to prevail.

What is missing altogether from any contemporary debate on criminal justice reform then, is the suggestion the criminal justice system is distorted so completely by the needs of power and capital (those most likely to affect any such reform) which dictate the priorities of the state, that any such reform will continue to reproduce and systematically structure bias against marginalized classes or ethnic groups. Such a radical perspective, unlike conservative, liberal, or even conflict criminologies, suggests then that the criminal justice system in turn cannot be reformed until the conditions that give rise to the political and economic pressures that distort the criminal justice system in the first place (i.e. the creation of surplus populations and thus the so-called “dangerous classes” from which criminals tend to derive) are addressed. (White and Haines, 2000) In his article, “Distinction between Conflict and Radical Criminology,” (1981) Thomas Bernard points out the difference between the conflict model of crime and more radical perspectives: “The primary purpose of conflict criminology is objective, nonpartisan analysis of the law enactment and enforcement process. Radical criminology, however, maintains that no criminology, including conflict theory, can be both objective and nonpartisan.

All such criminology is said to ultimately serve the interests of the ruling class. The only objective criminology is said to be radical criminology, which explicitly sides

with the working class against the interests of the ruling class. No middle ground exists between these two positions.” (377) Thus radical criminologists differs from conflict theorists in that they explicitly point to the capitalist economic system as generating any such conflict in the first place; and moreover, align themselves with the exploited classes to act with and alongside their struggle. Indeed, there is a moral aspect to radical criminology that is not present in conflict theory, namely the willingness to assume such conflict expressed as crime is not inevitable, but rather can be addressed through certain conscious actions taken on behalf of those subjugated classes against capital and those who maintain relationships imbued by capitalist values.

Here then we can recognize the importance of a book like Contemporary Anarchist Criminology (CAC) for its willingness to provide the first sketches of a radical and critical criminology and inquiry that identifies incarceration, subjugation, power, and the state as itself antithetical to justice and freedom. Moreover, by bringing such a perspective in dialogue with Michael Loedenthal’s Politics of Attack (PoA), the combination of an anarchist criminology with an inquiry into insurrectionary theory is able to create a dialogue that makes important contributions to the field of criminology, critical security studies, and peace studies. In so doing, the interchange offers the opportunity to hear from neglected and marginalized voices aligned to the most systematically oppressed that must be integrated in any conversation about criminal justice reform and conflict resolution seeking to address the very roots of injustice.

Sketches of an Anarchist Criminology The previous sections sought to locate and differentiate an anarchist criminology within the wider tradition of radical and critical criminology, as distinguished from more traditional or orthodox perspectives. Still, discerning what separates anarchist from traditional Marxist criminology is at surface level, difficult to apprehend, yet altogether an important endeavor. To do so we must look first at those theorists who identify as anarchists before reflecting on the critical points they relate to make any sort of substantive claim.

In the first place, the book CAC, after an introduction, sets out its chapters in three sections: contemporary classics, contemporary voices, and finally contemporary prisoner voices, all within an emerging anarchist criminology seeking alternatives to punitive justice. We can see then this discipline as emerging alongside of, as well as within, the social context of resistance movements opposing global neoliberal forces, seeking access to critical resources yet threatened by abusive laws and elite demonstrations of power. Indeed, the integration of a variety of critical approaches to sociological theory—feminism, abolition, radical ecology, and radical criminology, alongside political and economic crisis, characterize the emerging discipline, informing and offering “cutting analysis of social structures of inequity, oppression, exploitation, and injustice…[pointing] to meaningful alternatives to present systems and goes beyond so-called pragmatic concerns within limited reforms to show that radical transformation is realistic and possible.” (2) Moreover, CAC is based in empirical, real world experiences of state violence and social war, aligning with those it targets to produce a militant co-research that seeks to map the battlefield for a more effective warfare, weaponizing its inquiry to erode the fundamental premises upon which power is built and abolish those conditions that generate criminality and criminalization to aid in the

liberation of its victims. Thus, the book’s focus on transformative justice goes well beyond the liberal conception of restorative justice, seeking first to break out of the status quo arrangements, empowering individuals and communities to resist effectively and build alternatives informed by mutual aid and ecological justice, disrupting capitalist reproduction by intervening in historical processes that themselves produce these oppressed groups. As such, the authors offer a tool kit for revolutionaries, without assuming any significant division between revolutionaries, social theorists, and the oppressed classes for which the revolution is waged.

The first section locates anarchist criminology in the wider criminological context, built from transformative and abolitionist perspectives and movements. Moreover, the suggestion that crime is caused by criminalization alone gives weight to the idea that state legality reifies and empowers violence and enforcement institutions as indispensable to state definitions of what constitutes peace.

The book thus begins, after an introduction to the project, with Jeff Ferrell’s 1998 article, tracing anarchist critiques of law from early writers and activists like Godwin, Stiner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Berkman, and the IWW to later theorists, demonstrating the cultural relevance of such moments as the Paris Commune, Situationists, the DIY and punk movements, as well as free radio and countercultural experiments. In doing so, he cobbles together an anarchist criminology out of the critical undercurrents anyone is able to participate in, as opposed to formally recognized and professional criminologists. Further, in contradistinction to the broad harms of state legality, he suggests the public has outsourced its own authority in many cases to become reliant on centralized control systems, which in turn perpetuate and amplify crime, increasing the degree of social control in all aspects of sociocultural life. He thus articulates the impulses of anarchist criminology, focusing on criminalized activities from cultural expression to political resistance.

While Ferrell speaks to the various cultural strands anarchist criminology has inherited to better challenge and destabilize an orthodox criminological theory rooted in mainstream assumptions of crime, power, and the necessity of the state, Harold Pepinsky’s 1977 article “Communist Anarchism as an Alternative to the Rule of Criminal Law,” spells out how, while resource deprivation may in many cases necessitate crime, the rule of criminal law, in attempting to maintain swiftness, sureness, and severity in its responses, cannot in fact eliminate such injuries, for the simple reason these three elements are mutually exclusive. Rather, his “logic of the magnet analog” suggests an inverse relation between these elements, where strengthening any ensures the repulsion of the others. The more severe a law, for instance, the less swift it can be implemented as the state must review the increasing complexity to impose any sanction. For this reason, Pepinsky suggests, lowering the severity of penalties makes arrest and prosecution surer. His conclusion is simple: for law to effectively deter crime, community mechanisms must not allow for crime control to “impede the swift, sure, severe application of the law.” (27) With this in mind, Pepinsky points out that the rule of criminal law is symbiotic to progress toward a communist anarchism, so that communist anarchists and criminal justice legalists must collaborate so as to reduce the force with which law is applied in order to better deter injurious behavior from occurring. To do otherwise might in fact be counterproductive: “[those] who seek to defeat the criminal justice system by attacking it defeat their own purposes instead, for the criminal justice bureaucracy expands in response.” (30) For this reason, says Pepinsky, gradual and respectful erosion of criminal justice

enforcement must occur, or tyrannical backlash will terrorize and destroy both peace and community security. Such an argument may be counterintuitive for anarchists, who are asked to “empower” the criminal justice system “they now fear to act fearlessly,” while remembering that “law rules more the less it is imposed, and law is imposed less the more its agents are respected.”

(34) In the final essay of the “Contemporary Classics” section, Jeff Shantz offers a critical analysis of Cesare Lombroso’s 19th century criminological analysis of anarchists. Shantz, one of the editors of the book and participant in the Critical Criminology Working Group at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, critiques statist criminology by identifying the ideological underpinnings of economic and political power and the social harms that thereby arise. (Shantz 2017) Shantz is thus well able to point out how Lombroso’s unscientific methods toward a positivist genetic criminological theory were used to discredit the political movement, pointing out the class and confirmation biases (and falsified evidence) used to generate the self-affirming prophesy aimed at naturalizing hierarchy and criminalizing resistance to it. Indeed, by doing so, a distinct understanding of how such perspectives from the standpoint of power and capital may indeed say more about those charged with developing the field in the first place: “[Lombroso] offers, then, no analysis at all…here again, then, his hereditary analysis is really a statement of Lombroso’s own morals…for Lombroso, resistance against economic injustice is simply a mark of some deviance or other (criminality, insanity, immorality, etc.).” (43) Such insight into the mind of persecutor and oppressor thus demonstrates how criminality is in fact often equated with resisting the conditions generated by “systems of economic and judicial inequality and oppression.” That is, the effects of poverty are demonstrated as traits of criminality, engendering criminal potential in any mindset that critiques such conditions. Thus in “Lombroso’s belief that all reforms should be introduced only very gradually,” we are able to see that revolutionary change can only be understood as the effort of the criminally insane. Moreover, such class arrogance, speaking in the language of power, is able to generate the kind of cultural capital necessary to gain access to police and policy-making endeavors of those who fear such radical contagion, so that Lombroso exerted considerable influence on the field at large, inviting legal repression and segregation of those classified as “lunatics” for their political positions.

Indeed, as power conflates crime with the harmful conditions that reproduce social harms and behaviors classified as crime in the first place, the inclusion of these classical anarchist writings then provide a novel contribution, namely identifying counterintuitive insight and elucidations embedded, if concealed, in the discipline at large. Drawing from historical resistance to state constructions of justice, seeking symbiotic ways to erode the legitimacy of criminal justice systems without directly attacking them, and reconsidering criminological theories that, if perhaps unscientific and projecting their own class prejudices on subjects to obscure reality, are at least indicative of the psychology of power, are all helpful in establishing a basis for any anarchist criminology to develop upon.

In the second section, “Contemporary Voices on Alternatives to Punitive Justice Within Anarchist Criminology,” the theoretical basis is expanded to disrupt punitive, dehumanization processes by empowering locales to effectively monkey-wrench an economic slavery, seeking to

make incarceration financially impossible through effective prison resistance. Differentiating between mere restorative justice seeking to rehabilitate offenders to operate within an unjust social setting, and transformative justice, and situating crime, power, state violence, and resistance within a hierarchy extending back far further than capitalism per se, the book instead proposes relocalizing autonomy and self-determination to just, ecologically sensitive, and spiritually attuned communities instead.

Hackett and Turk, in “Freedom First” suggest that prison abolition should seek leadership first in prisoner resistance movements, lending support to those who upset and disrupt the settler colonialist logic and the “afterlife of slavery.” In this regard, “prisoners provide an informed and grounded analytic of state repression, carceral power, and resistance that is invaluable to abolitionist thought and strategy.” (54) Even as domination mutates over the course of history, its “core function” of “racialized social control and the preservation of a white supremacist order” remains.

For this reason, prison revolts are able to create new political spaces while resisting the “civil death” that legalized prison slavery creates. For the simple reason that, as the Free Alabama Movement makes explicit, “money is the motive,” economic resistance, removing the economic incentives of maintaining abysmal working conditions, is better suited to address core issues, since the costs of any response to organized prisoner uprising “in terms of finances, public legitimacy, and ability to maintain order are unsustainable in any correctional institution… More than 30 days would likely bankrupt most state budgets.” (60) The authors then detail ways in which prisoners fight with their bodies and voices in a “confrontational insurgency,” through work stoppages, organized and less organized uprisings, occupations, arsons, and frequent attacks on staff until shifts of correctional officers refuse to come to work, rendering prison facilities untenable by creating crises while competing with officials for credibility. In doing so, the power, logic, and credibility of prisons are effectively eroded, the personhood of prisoners is asserted, and protests against prison slavery, school to prison pipelines, police terror, and post-release controls are sustained by utilizing political channels and popular support.

Laura Magnani similarly challenges the logic of the punitive nature of prisons and the American criminal justice system, undermining the rationalizations in which prisoners not only lose their freedom, but their dignity, humanity, and compassion as well. Thus it may be, she states, that police, courts, and prisons themselves are creating dangerous people, and that by dismantling prisons, one can work “to dismantle the whole punitive justice system grounded in punishment, domination and control, of which the police play a significant part…[Instead] by addressing the underlying causes of street crime…providing people with jobs, adequate housing, and healthcare will cut down on the instances of victimization and make people less desperate.” (78) Hence the potential for real community can occur only where reforms do not merely “prop up the existing system,” in the name of “restorative justice.” The state, if culpable for the violence produced at a micro-level, must then assume responsibility for any harm caused by adequately funding restorative and rehabilitative efforts.

Magnani then points to where disciplinary systems in schools have been replaced with restorative justice systems, transforming its Zero Tolerance Disciplinary Policies to decrease suspensions by 40% while successfully resolving conflicts in over 76% of cases. Moreover, as similar programs are integrated into the criminal justice system, recidivism rates are also reduced, victims report greater levels of satisfaction with the justice process, and post-traumatic stress symptoms among participants are cut. Such systemic changes suggest, for the author, that building parallel systems demonstrating healing methodologies can be done “without expanding the net of the criminal justice system, where the people sent to the parallel system were people who never would have found their way to prison in the first place.” (82) In the final chapter of the section, Mark Seis provides an insightful contribution to the emerging field of “green criminology” with his chapter, “An Anarchist Criminology for Understanding Environmental Degradation.” In it, he draws attention to what is elsewhere called the “treadmill production of capitalism,” namely that the impetus for “capitalist economies to endlessly grow violates the most basic laws of nature,” yet going further to attribute the declining health of our environment to be a product of sedentary agriculture and an alienated civilization that seeks to impose an anthropocentric logic onto the surrounding regions. As neolithic villages and agrarian cities develop “hierarchically organized governments fostering and protecting social systems of stratification” that produce surplus food, a division of labor, and organized institutions of power that in turn produce social forms that exceed carrying capacity, we are here reminded of the Marxist assertion that law and ideology are structured by an economic system, as “no legal system operating within the confines of consumer capitalism and the ethos of human supremacism will be able to change the suicidal trajectory of pursuing unlimited growth on a finite planet.” (88) This is to say the preservation of inequality through legal apparatuses ensure environmental degradation through an exploitative relationship extended to the natural world. As Seis points out: “the environmental crisis is a cultural crisis and requires a change in our cultural ethos as well as our social construction of economy, governance, and relationship.” (89) In identifying the key characteristics of sustainable cultures then, and drawing from indigenous practices and worldviews, Seis is able to identify the tame/wild binary as a source of spiritual sickness, catalyzing alienation and disenchantment, while advocating for more democratic technics that ensure access to land bases by all. Unlike the kind of alienated production incomprehensible to sustainable cultures, relocalization efforts can work to redesign urban areas through intentional place-making, decentralizing energy grids and allowing people direct access to nature that allows them to confront the overexploitation and hidden costs of urban and industrial lifestyles. This in turn means injustice is eradicated through equitable social relations and environmental justice efforts, where local communities are able to produce materials, food, energy, clothing, and other basic amenities people need by “building sustainable communities and steady state economies [that] all boils down to scale and a conscious awareness of the carrying capacity of your landbase and the ability of the community to reciprocate and replenish that which is renewable to the landbase.” (90)

Hence a local democratic politics, more able to provide for the basic necessities that in turn guide relocalization efforts and cultural transformation through alternative visions of justice is envisaged as an adequate response to reduce the deprivation and inequity assumed to prompt crime and injustice.

Part three of the book gives voice to contemporary prisoner voices within anarchist criminology, looking at how economic coercion destroys human relations, compassion, dignity, and humanity. In a sense then, crimes and social harms manifest as oppressive relations, generated by the political economy and reproduced at an individual level. Crime is motivated as a product of alienation and as an increasing sociocultural and economic necessity within the confines of capitalist society – indeed a product of the capitalist fear of rebellion. Thus those most affected by the punitive and retributive values underlying the criminal justice system – the prisoners themselves— offer solutions that imply nothing short of revolution. Not just political revolution, but social revolution, where an empathetic society can begin to restore the socioemotional bonds capital has broken, while the power system itself, defining what constitutes deviance and criminality, can itself be abolished. Social harms, it must be remembered, are not necessarily criminal, but rather may be normalized, naturalized, and rationalized by those who have the most to gain by dominating and controlling those they depend on for their wealth, themselves perpetrating harms and injustices that are ignored or incentivized by the powerful political and economic systems they maintain.

Reverend David “Wolf Eyes” Rose, Sr. thus looks at the specific logic of modern society for “possessing” Mother Earth, while discarding its spiritual elements. This in turn breeds a social values “out of balance, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically,” seeping into our unconscious and extended throughout society through media influence, in turn skewing the justice system by class, race, and power relationships. Indeed, ensuring justice prevails requires “people who are educated and spiritually developed…[to] help change the balance of today’s moral, ethical and spiritual/psychological imbalances—one soul at a time.” (106) If this does not happen, Wolf Eyes writes, such a crisis will become repressed and isolated without ever being corrected. Indeed, this is what occurs in prisons and society, so that a “total rebuilding of the educational system” is necessary in order to restore justice by teaching responsibility, self-respect, and honesty within any community.

Maurice L. Graham similarly continues on the theme of the spiritual sickness of an unbalanced society by focusing on the connections to slavery in the prison system. He recognizes both slavery and prisons as profit-making mechanisms, implying consumers in a global economy are themselves complicit with the post-abolition re-enslavement of blacks, as business machines find acceptable ways to retain profits to fuel their power to influence and direct the state. Indeed, as he points out, “the degrading of human rights is the only path to slavery,” so that even “due process is a security threat” to those meting out punishment. Here, the corruption generated by profit in slavery is present too in prison policy. For this reason, alternatives to incarceration will need to adequately address profit in order to resolve the dehumanizing processes that control, exploit, and enslave prisoners today.

The final, and perhaps most radical essay of the book is its last, by Sean Swain, “On Crime and Deviance.” This should come as no surprise, considering Swain, mounting a run for Governor of Ohio in 2018, promised to

“decommission the Ohio National Guard, empty Ohio’s prisons and turn them into squats, recognize Native American land rights as set forth by the Treaty of Greenville, arm the tribes with national guard weaponry, to include tanks and attack helicopters, refuse to sign any budget causing the government to shut down, and sign an Executive Order making it legal to assassinate him if he remains in office longer than 90 days.” (Swain, N.D.) Indeed, his website explains his predicament and hints at what it will take to change it: “Sean will only be liberated when the illegitimate power of the lawless rogue state holding him hostage [‘without legal conviction or sentence’] is abolished once and for all.” He elaborates upon this position in his chapter by seeking to imagine alternatives outside of the socially constructed realities of “crime,” “justice,” and “punishment” as they are traditionally understood. Thus he challenges the premises of “deviant conduct” and the idea that such conduct should be “punishable” by those assuming a “right to rule,” pointing for example to when the legal practice of slavery in a moment suddenly became “illegal” due to the power of those able to decide (or not) to address an injustice.

Thus, such premises of state legitimacy serve only the interests of the privileged elite of a political economy based on exploitation and suffering. Law, Swain asserts, functions as “a tool to keep the rest of us in our places, to maintain our obedience to their system, to compel our conformity to a set of behaviors that has, for thousands of years, perpetuated wealth for the wealthy and power for the powerful.” (132) Moreover, these elite, he points out, have managed to persuade the rest of the population that to remain obedient is in their best interest as well.

In this way, Swain provides perhaps what becomes a fundamental principle of an anarchist criminology seeking to completely eradicate crime altogether: “To abolish ‘crime’—that is, perceived deviance designated as punishable by those who assume the ‘right to rule’—we need only eliminate the special category of the privileged elite and the special category of those who assume the ‘right to rule.’ If we eliminate both of these categories…there would be no one empowered to distinguish deviance that is not punishable from deviance that is. If there is no one to declare which instances of deviance is punishable, the category of behavior we now know as ‘crime’ ceases to exist.” (133) As Swain suggests, the eradication of influence, wealth, and power would themselves decrease the social forces that drive and label behaviors as deviant, and thus social deviance itself. Law, then, might be understood as obsolete, impotent, and ineffectual, in that it does not in fact prevent those actions it seeks to prohibit. Moreover, it is not meant to address those injustices that in fact cause the most harm in society, but rather is wielded against those least benefited by the systems that maintain their powerlessness. As such, in the absence of hierarchy, local communities operating through consensus would produce fewer instances of deviance by generating “a viable sense of meaning, purpose and connection, rather than compulsion, drudgery and alienation.” Hence to collapse the current system altogether, with its privileges and monopolies of power, would allow for spaces to comprehensively address the conditions that cause “deviance,” in new, more effective ways.

Swain then perhaps captures Bakunin’s sentiment most: “Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit

which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!” (Bakunin, 1842) Analyses, Strategies, Tactics, and Approaches In many ways, the only critique of this book is that it is simply too short and cannot as a result include every element that would be necessary for a field of anarchist criminology to seriously be considered by mainstream criminology or policy-making; though of course, this is not the editors’ intention. While providing a host of theoretical critiques, apart from the first chapter there is little in the way of developing or linking the field to a past lineage or placing it within the wider context of other criminological theories, for instance explicitly differentiating its core tenets to Marxist, Critical, or other radical theories of crime. Admittedly, the authors state that it is a “short, concise text designed to aid in the development of a complex field of anarchist criminological study focused on alternative structures of organization and resistance movements.” (7) Moreover, in producing a book with only nine voices, it is not as inclusive as it could be and so would benefit from diverse viewpoints across various oppressed groups, as is pointed out by the editors themselves.

It is certainly the case, for this reason, that there is a deficit in testing hypotheses, with little attention paid to quantitative research able to substantiate some of the authors’ more radical claims.

While those writing certainly base their critiques and suggestions in personal experience, the book is similarly short on implementation and real world examples that seriously close the gap between oppression and liberation. In many ways, then this may contribute to a “willful failure,” as Ferrell describes it, undermining the hope for freedom by stopping short of developing a “master plan” and instead focused on a “useful corrective to encrusted certainty and the desire for domination.”

(1st chapter) Or, it may be a testament to a field in its early infancy, and a challenge to readers to develop its core tenets.

Nevertheless, the book highlights the different pathways and techniques anarchist criminologists can explore within the emerging field. In this regard, the book provides a way to locate any tactics or strategies anarchist may employ to prefigure a new world. The somewhat useful heuristic below is meant to locate the various tactics, or methods, an anarchist criminology might utilize, based on the assumptions made (whether one accepts or rejects the legitimacy or relevance of the political economy) and the strategy employed (engaging the political economy or seeking to avoid it).

Criminological Typology of Anarchist Strategies, Assumptions, and Methods/Tactics Strategy of Confrontation (Communities of Opposition)

State/Capitalism is Accepted

State/Capital is Rejected

Integration: lobbying to ensure change

Insurrection: attacks to destroy power

-conversation among criminological perspectives

-work stoppages -uprisings

-redirect energy of just causes into legitimate channels -civil engagement -media coverage -rebuild education systems -reconstitute law enforcement Strategy of Avoidance (Communities of Exile)

Autonomy: retreat to insulated communities -community mechanisms for self-management -study groups for education -prisoner support programs -relocalization projects

-occupations -arsons -attacks on staff -protests -eradicate class system -abolish categories of privileged elite Circumvention: evade power by establishing alternative structures -establish alternative processes for reconciliation -restorative justice programs -alternative ways to address deviance

Figure 1.

Of course, this chart is ideal in the sense there is no firm boundary between methods, yet what is important to recognize is that while individuals and adjectives might seek to explicitly distinguish each typology from the other, in reality, such divisions are mostly ideological and break down in practice to form more effective campaigns. Moreover, there is a specific relationship between the insurrectionary field and the others—namely, that as each other field finds success, insurrection as a method becomes relatively obsolete, as there is less reason to attack for the sake of liberation. Still, one can assume that if these other pathways become blocked as effective methods of transformative justice, insurrection (direct attack) will become more widely seen as effective and necessary methods of transformation.

It is to this particular field of insurrection then that we will look at by reviewing Michael Loedenthal’s The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence (PoA).

A Politics of Attack Loedenthal’s focus on insurrectionary theory draws from queer, feminist, postmodern, and critical theories to approach the insurrectionary violence of the post-millennium period. As such, it represents, like Contemporary Anarchist Criminology, another example of militant co-research, seeking in the written, anonymous communiqué the principles that explain, contextualize, and give insight into this form of anarchist praxis. After reminding the reader that any such analysis of communiqués must first not be for the police to repress such activity, Loedenthal instead encourages readers to look at such objects as themselves legitimate units of political analysis, written by subjects with worthwhile analyses able to contribute to the wider field seeking to understand political conflict.

For this reason, PoA examines the insurrectionary phenomena over the course of history to contextualize, analyze, and understand any insights such militant groups produce that may contribute to any such political analysis: “History must precede strategy, and strategy must precede ideology. Therefore it is essential that readers remain conscious of the historical precursors, but allow themselves to nuance that understanding as it is explored in light of the wider theory.” (132)

After an introduction laying out the methodology, paradigmatic assumptions and framework, as well as the scope of the inquiry and its relevance for political theory, critical security studies, and social conflict, Loedenthal uses the first two chapters to create a political and historical context for contemporary insurrectionist activity, demonstrating the broken lineage between Guy Fawkes, early tendencies in anarchist theories (e.g. “propaganda of the deed”), and pre-millennial social movements, to the post-9/11 activities by clandestine insurrectionary networks of urban guerrillas, laying out a number of groups, cells, and tendencies for consideration.

He is thus able to identify insurrection as a technique within the wider context of “social war,” a tactic meant not to induce the overthrow of state or economic regimes, but rather to “bring about radical social change through initiating conflict,” (99) demonstrating “alternative modes of existence, temporary sites of counter-systemic living.” (106) The insurrectionary tactics in question (arson, explosives, graffiti, animal release, vandalism, assassinations, etc.) are then understood as the materialization of a “socio-political critique of alienation, anti-capitalism, and anger finding a target in the infrastructure of corporate interests.” (103) Moreover, the material structures attacked are done so, not because to do so would ever be effective in overthrowing capitalism or the state, but rather to ensure through demonstration the “socio-political arena of structural control is disrupted and its function temporarily changes from that of structural maintainer to symbol of resistance,” (107) one forcing the state to choose whether to either fail to stop terrorism and appear ineffective in securing the peace, or else to stop “terrorism” through repression and enact tyrannical and violent methods to further polarize the populace. This focus on targets is meant both to attack symbolic targets as well as disrupt the flow of localized manifestations of state and capitalist systems, attacking its “functional logistics” after seeking to “diagram the weaknesses, bottlenecks, and soft underbellies of grandiose targets [that] are common in the post-millennial clandestine networks.”

After looking at the historical lineage of anti-authoritarian insurrectionary violence and its role in revolutionary design, Loedenthal explores insurrection as a strategy theorized in anonymous texts and communiqués. In doing so, he is able to tease out the internal logic of such groups, demonstrating how insurrectionary critique is leveled at a “Totality,” the “totalizing force of everpresent coercion that extends from the material to the spiritual,” (143) suggesting that their strategy is not to create a future utopia, but rather to focus on the present, attacking to show “the erroneous nature of the social spectacle and expose the violence inherent in everyday life.” (146) To do so challenges the hegemonic logic of state monopoly on violence by generalizing revolt to a social war and the entirety of social relations, seeking to paralyze normality altogether. Here insurrection is meant more to rupture the very belief system of state and capital that has been normalized and naturalized, opening up pathways to new social forms by demonstrating a willingness to actively negate the totality wherever it is experienced.

In looking at the histories, tactics, strategies, and texts that are presented by the various insurrectionary actors then, Loedenthal leaves us with at least eight tendencies evoked in the communiqués: (1) immediate, continuous, and spontaneous direct attack; (2) waging this social war to create points of rupture with power and order by exacerbating points of dissatisfaction; (3) extending the idea of intersectionality to confront “The Totality” while seeking total liberation from oppressive systems (classism, sexism, racism, homophobia, speciesism…); (4) unmanaged,

temporary forms of contestation that exist outside of any Leftist notion of social movement; (5) rejecting reformist programs for radical social transformation; (6) rejecting civil engagement for illegalist activity; (7) extending the insurrectionary critique to forms of alienation that generate ecological crisis through domestication and industrial technology; (8) and praxis informed by individualist “wild egoism,” evoking a barbaric, pre-capitalist worldview.

As these tendencies are shared and discussed through various communiqués, the temporary disruption of the status quo is able to further critique and political analysis, developing communal meeting places at “points of ideological, rhetorical, and strategic affinity, and it is on this basis of affiliation that the movement is constituted and reproduced.” (196) Thus Loedenthal is able to demonstrate how analysis by insurrectionary movements evolves its goals and praxis, tying any one strike to a wider historical legacy while seeking to inspire others to follow with new attacks on power and empire by violently rejecting the relations and structures they reproduce, at the same time “adding teeth to critique, and anti-social violence to praxis.” Based on the insurrectionary “canon” that speaks to the history of past attacks through an increasing body of communiqués, statements, letters, and other texts, such attacks are thereby meant to create content for new communiqués which explain, contextualize, and justify each attack, in turn influencing new attacks and all subsequent communiqués. Loedenthal points out this is distinct from conceptions of terrorism, since insurrectionary violence “is a form of asymmetric, decentralized war carried out through networked and ideologically-linked attacks at a non-centralized, fluid target…it does not seek to terrorize, but rather to exhibit dissent and offer critique…the violence of the attack creates the space for the critic to ‘be heard’ and in doing so temporarily disrupts the discourse it is critiquing for example, the infallibility of market capitalism.” (221) This in turn suggests a flow of information from attacker to (often times online) reader, where insurrectionary sympathizers find insurrectionary hubs that receive and redistribute the authored critiques of insurrectionary attackers. Moreover, the increasing popularity of and effective spread and knowledge transmission suggests alternative, radical propositions for how to reduce insurrectionary violence: “If one hopes to quell resistance, one must seek to change the material conditions that oppress the masses and create the conditions for such a critique to develop.” (115) This is further elaborated in Loedenthal’s final paragraphs: “If we were to treat political violence in a manner akin to that of criminal violence, the ‘solution’ to insurrectionary attack is systemic, revolutionary change that reduces domination and marginalization. These solutions would likely be discounted summarily by policymakers who would prefer a list of targets than a list of arguments for better access to education, housing, healthcare, transformation, etc. In other words, to ‘solve’ the insurrectionary critique would require system-level change aimed at a deconstruction of that very system and, as such, is unlikely to be embraced by power elites. Because the critique is aimed at power itself, to embrace its proscription of change would deny the brokers of that power a great deal of influence and control.” (223)

For Loedenthal, redefining the political violence of insurrection as, rather than simply “terrorism,” a form of political critique, is to “disrupt the discourse that constructs it,” while changing the logical response which “reconfigures the discourse from system maintenance to system transformation,” no longer making state-centric policy that has the security of the state as a primary goal, but rather uses revolutionary consciousness and the discourse and logic of anti-state attack to articulate “a system-level critique which rejects political representationalism, abhors domination, and seeks nothing short of total liberation.” (225) A Tale of Two Anarchies: Bridging the Divide What is most important about these two important books is their shared recognition that the crisis generating crime and insurrection is structural. Loedenthal makes this explicit, pointing to a NASA-sponsored study that suggests industrial civilization’s collapse may be imminent, due to “unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.” Moreover, this rise and collapse is recurrent, where upper classes “downplay the structural nature of the problem” and instead allocate only a small portion of accumulated surplus to the majority of the population at, or just above, subsistence levels. At the same time, he points out how “ongoing climate change is ‘substantially correlated’ to rises in violent crime and group conflict.” (190) Seis says as much, advocating structural transformation as a necessity, that class system is unsustainable, and, drawing from anarcho-primitivist theorists, implicitly suggests civilization, indeed sedentism itself, causes the violence, inequality, oppression, and suffering that prompts criminality.

Thus an anarchist criminology and insurrectionary approach to critical security studies are better able to approach social conflict with the intention of providing more radical peacebuilding strategies. By setting up alternatives to power and domination, through direct confrontation or active avoidance, both books overcome the state mythology and mystification of its bureaucratic and violently coercive role in resolving conflicts it creates itself, pointing out how the unequal distribution of power arrangements are themselves constitutive of the totality of social relations that spawn violent insurgency.

For these reasons, it is imperative to include in public debate such perspectives, integrating their insights, and refusing to allow their repression by a hegemonic narrative seeking to monopolize authority, legitimacy, and violence to such ends. Instead, the transformative strategies for justice that emerge out of these books address wealth, race, patriarchy, and ecocide in more comprehensive ways by addressing the fundamental root conditions that generate these symptoms in the first place —strategies that neither conservative nor liberal, conflict, nor perhaps even more traditionally radical perspectives (i.e. Marxist) have to date offered.

Yet while both books provide a terrific assessment of the various anarchist positions and proposals for how to substantively address power to reduce crime, domination, violence, and coercion in the name of community security, there are certain theses that detract from both. CAC for instance, while searching for an insurgent theory, seems to derail at times into what can only be described as an “anarcho-liberalism,” falling somewhere between anti-capitalist Lefts and the positions of Social Democrats—anti-neoliberal perhaps, yet unable to adequately address the presence of the state and capital, indeed reifying the existence of both. “Solutions” abound that can only be described as liberal, and at times no solutions seem present whatsoever. Thus while the book

provides sketches for an anarchist vision of transformative justice, and sets out a kind of program or vision (decentralize autonomy, community based solutions, transformative justice…), it makes few contributions in terms of how to actually move from here to there, lacking empirical results to support its more piercing insights.

PoA also has important contradictions that seem not to be addressed. For instance, insurrectionary thought assumes violent confrontation will lead to more violent confrontation, thereby opening up possibilities to break with the hegemonic logic of the state, disrupt the flow of state power and capital, widen opposition to both, and negate the power totality in the present, by waging armed struggle. Yet as is pointed out, the insurrectionary anarchist strategy, descending from an urbanized form of guerrilla warfare, fails due to the fundamental paradox Pepinsky points out: in violently attacking the state and capital through small, nimble groups who assassinate political figures, free prisoners, destroy symbolic and functional targets, supporting themselves by robbing banks, and living illegally, these clandestine organizations, armed insurgents, and feral terrorists invite the full weight of political repression upon themselves while at the same time risking alienating others and driving them back to confirm the hegemonic logic of the state and capital which naturalizes its role as defenders of the public order against the violent, perceived “irrationality” of those anti-authoritarian elements whose logic, if it is ever shared to those outside of its sympathetic reader base, itself assumes the futility of armed attack in ever overcoming power.

What is the point of attacking then, when attacking undermines insurrections’ own longevity to compromise pathways for liberation?

This question can be answered with a second implicit contradiction, namely that while Loedenthal repeatedly suggests insurrectionism is not an attempt to create a prefigurative politics, this assessment is directly contradicted by the insurrectionists themselves: “The new anarchist urban guerrilla is not a means of struggle, it is our existence itself.” The establishment of an “Informal Anarchist Federation,” where anyone attacking the infrastructure of domination can claim membership, assumes a prefigurative politics that communicates intent through its own praxis. This is to say, the politics of attack exemplifies the insurrectionary logic in its tactics, strategy, rhetoric, and the image of a war waged against a specific target set—in the fires set, the people killed, the banks robbed, the insurrection pursued. Wherever structural and relational power is destroyed, another world is thus not only possible, but manifest.

In this regard, the prefigurative politics of anarchism is present in both books, albeit in categorically different ways. While both are certainly skeptical (to put it mildly) of power and authority, CAC offers the positive vision of social anarchism, proposing community building, communist anarchism and cooperation, prisoner support, transformative justice programs, sustainable relocalization projects, addressing the psychological imbalances of the dominant culture, rebuilding education systems, developing alternatives to incarceration and retribution, and abolishing the class system and power structure completely. PoA on the other hand leaves the “civic anarchism” to the social anarchists, instead developing its own prefigurative politics based on wild egoism and active nihilism, attacking the power that enslaves the individual will, always against real, concrete targets such as machines, buildings, and the humanoid automatons that personify and maintain these power relations. Moreover, the clandestine, armed and violent underground cells,

affiliated with the wider insurrectionary milieu, actualizing the various tendencies in concrete demonstrations of praxis, also provide insight into an organizing strategy more conducive to the nomadic individualist anarchies of anti-social anti-authoritarians. Moreover, it takes for granted that civic anarchism is itself reformist, while socialist anarchism cannot effectively address the colonial settler logic inherent in documents like the Constitution (which CAC suggests can be a potentially liberating document) or social arrangements like relocalized sedentary ecotopias, which would potentially subordinate the individual to the collective. Here, violent opposition to immediate conditions is seen as more effective in combatting oppression and opening up avenues for total liberation in the present than is integrating civic solutions and compromising or collaborating with power for the sake of gradual change.

This split, between collectivism and individualism, between reform and revolution, between insurrection and civic engagement, between gradualism and accelerationism, between violence and nonviolence, between pessimism and optimism, etc. are recurring themes present in both books, themes that each author seeks to navigate in contributing to an anti-authoritarian critique of those academic fields (criminology, security studies) usually dominated by conservative and reactionary perspectives that may themselves create the very paradigms that produce violence, political conflict, crime, and the political and social war that give rise to these critiques in the first place.

As academics, criminologists, militant co-researchers, and prisoners experiencing the very structures, instruments, processes, and relationships that cause and reproduce suffering, the authors of these two books effectively explain the source of criminality, deviance, and violence, providing critical solutions to crime and punishment both counterintuitive to power and at times antiauthoritarian movements as well. In doing so, they point to law itself as a form of class oppression as opposed to a legitimate response to what is superficially perceived as intrinsically criminal behavior, challenging the very methods and assumptions behind responses by the criminal justice system and representative democracy, driven by capitalistic social relations (class structure, ownership, control, rule…). There is a refusal to enter the realm of debate that is not self-conscious of such processes that compromise more comprehensive views of justice, and in doing so embrace the logic of breaking with the severe repression of a bourgeois-driven law itself antithetical to notions of peace, justice, and freedom, while reconsidering the premises on which responses to crime should be derived.

An anarchist criminology and insurrectionary theory are thus more action-oriented critiques, not anti-scientific, but anti-“objective,” highlighting that objectification of individuals and communities as “criminal” invisibilize those conditions that create criminality in the first place. The two books then refuse assimilation into the larger conservative and neoliberal dominated bodies of discourse on crime and security, rejecting the possibility of reconciling the oppressed to imposed political and economic structures that would merely make more effective those structures able to control and suppress those most marginalized by the sociopolitical and economic contradictions underlying crime. The solution both books offer is thus the overthrow of the dominant order, its systems, and structures, creating ruptures in the very relationships that maintain them, albeit through a number of diverging methods, yet always beginning at the micro, personal level of experience. The abolition of crime and criminality then can only be initiated in the individual mind, before it is able

to be extended to a macro, social scale. If the solution to crime is the overthrow of a specific type of political economy, this can only occur by supplanting a hegemonic logic of separation, hierarchy, and exploitation with an alternative that confronts, opposes, and abolishes it for another in the immediate moment, extending temporally as conditions become more favorable as they are increasingly normalized and naturalized.

If power assumes resistance, as Foucault suggests, then capital and the state assume attacks as inevitable. Yet rather than utilize criminology, security studies, the criminal justice system, and anthropological fields of political science, economics, etc. as ways to mitigate those attacks and that resistance, anarchist criminology and militant co-research is here used to confront this relationship and imply structural transformation that can make resistance (and thus violent attacks) as obsolete, unnecessary, and irrelevant once the conditions that generate violence are themselves removed from social experience. This then speaks to the revolutionary insight of both books, and as such, their specific points must not be allowed to be adopted by mainstream elements in ways that do not promote the overthrow of capitalism and the state. Already, movements for “restorative justice” and “community policing” seek to defang radical critiques of law and criminal justice, using the rhetoric of radicality without integrating its most radical proposals. As even Lombroso suggested, the “restoration of popular tribunates…to give voice the grievances of the people, [means] just causes would not be abandoned exclusively to the advocacy of extremists.”

For this reason then, an anarchist criminology or critical security study must decide for itself whether it will relinquish control over words and deeds to adequately address the conditions of suffering to those historically, theoretically, and strategically responsible for generating or maintaining those conditions to ask the question: why leverage the power for marginally better conditions when that power can be used to bankrupt the establishment and create radically new conditions altogether?

Both an emerging anarchist criminology and bourgeoning insurrectionary theory provide ways and means to deliver answers to this question, producing structural transformation through a wide range of tactics that prefigures this new reality—by living in ways that at times destroy oppressive structures, or build up new ones. Both however will undoubtedly be required if total liberation is ever to be experienced in the present.

Works Cited Bakunin, Mikail (1842) “The Reaction in Germany: From the Notebooks of a Frenchman,” Marxists.org retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1842/reaction-germany.htm 12/25/18 Bernard, Thomas (1981) “Distinction Between Conflict and Radical Criminology,” in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Vol. 72. Issue 1 Spring. 362

Loedenthal, Michael (2017) The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence.

Manchester University Press: Manchester, UK Marion, N., & Oliver, W. (2012). The Public Policy of Crime and Criminal Justice (2nd Edition).

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. ISBN 13: 9780135120989 Nocella, Anthony J. II, Seis, Mark, and Shantz, Jeff (2018) Contemporary Anarchist Criminology: Against Authoritarianism and Punishment. Peter Lang Publishing Inc.: New York, NY Schantz, Jeff (2017) “Anarchists against (and within) the Edu-Factory: The Critical Criminology Working Group,” in Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces. Eds. Robert H. Haworth & John M. Elmore. PM Press: Oakland, CA SeanSwain.Org (N.D.) “About Sean Swain,” retrieved from https://seanswain.noblogs.org/aboutsean-swain/ 12/25/18 White, Robert and Haines, Fiona (2000) Crime and Criminology: An Introduction. Oxford University Press

Civilization as a Cosmic Crime: Energy, Resistance, and the Insurrectionary (Wild Egoist) Approach to Food Ethics "Let a Christian hunter go to the Lord's woods and kill his well-kept beasts, or wild Indians, and it is well; but let an enterprising specimen of these proper, predestined victims go to houses and fields and kill the most worthless person of the vertical godlike killers, --oh! that is horribly unorthodox, and on the part of the Indians, atrocious murder!

Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears."

-John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk “A calloused coldness, or meanness, results when our animal senses are cut off for too long from the animate earth, when our ears—inundated by the whooping blare of car alarms and the muted thunder of subways—no longer encounter the resonant silence, as our eyes forget the irregular wildness of things green and growing behind the rectilinear daze.”

-David Abram Becoming Animal “It is logical, we will continue with these acts, and other scientists and the rest of techno-nonsense must pay the consequences of their actions, and better for it to be by some wild terrorists like ourselves.”

-Communique from Individualists Tending Toward the Wild, Claiming responsibility for a bomb wounding two professors at Technological Institute and of Superior Studies of Monterrey Abstract: This essay focuses on the inquiry process as applied to food ethics, emphasizing civilized systems as a particular type of cosmic energy pathway that creates inequity while generating the conditions for its own collapse. In doing so, four suggestions are proposed to contextualize the assertion that civilization represents an assemblage of energy blockages that disrupt (resist) natural flows in ways that exacerbate harms and crimes, while pointing to a particular “anticivilizational” tendency which attempts to address these concerns in unorthodox ways. The contribution of such a thesis is to generate a hypothesis as new forms of resistances that can overcome, circumvent, dissolve, or destroy such barriers (or, additionally, become a barrier—a resistance to resistance) through more integrated approaches to activism. Finally, this paper suggests interventions by militant researchers that can both reconfigure energy patterns in more equitable ways, while speculating on the kind of relationship to food ways post-domestic cultures might turn to.

Keywords: Food ethics, cosmic energy, collapse, anti-civ movements, green anarchy, dark green religion, resistance, militant research, immediate-return lifeways, agriculture, domestication.

A Brief Introduction to the Nature of Inquiry into Food Ethics This essay begins with food ethicist Paul B. Thompson’s assertion that advocates of different philosophical systems often compare the most optimistic interpretation of their favored approach to the least successful applications of the alternative, resulting in a dichotomy in argumentation where both sides speak past one another, leaving real ethical concerns unaddressed. Resolving these tensions then demands “more tolerance for inconsistency than analytic philosophers have become accustomed to,” and as such, “it may be more important to adopt a style in ethics that avoids premature closure on normative issues rather than one which rushes to judgement.”116 It is in this spirit that this paper will inquire into issues of food ethics, and particularly the insurrectionary “anticiv” approach to them.

The typical inquiry process as espoused by John Dewey, elaborated upon by David Kolb, begins with disturbance, prompting divergence (consideration of possible causes), assimilation (deciding upon the correct cause to account for the disturbance), convergence (formulating a plan of action or process to execute), and finally accommodation (supplements to the hypothesis resulting in the resolution of the problem).117 The inquiry process can thus be deployed toward the various elements within a field of ethics (constraints, conduct, consequences, and cumulative outcome) and applied to food issues, drawing from subsequently established schools of thought (utilitarianism, virtue theory, rights theory, neo-Kantian views, contractualism, etc.) to better understand the concerns at hand. As the author states, “Food ethics, then, is the study of how virtue, vice, rights, duties, benefits, and harms arise in connection with the way that we produce, process, distribute, and consume our food.”118 What is important here, Thompson suggests, is recognizing our epistemological process tends to imbue ethical assumptions, where deeply held convictions may be factually incorrect. Thus, philosophy must focus on epistemological claims, engaging in a kind of Habermasian “discourse ethics” where multiple approaches are brought in dialogue with one another, “focused on the process of engaging these different types of ethical reasoning in the form of discourse or debate where discussants trade arguments in the spirit of reaching a kind of agreement on what is right for the case at hand.”119 This would presumably lead to an epistemically sound ethical basis with regards to how to approach food relations, or at least, facilitate responses to difficult questions in the spirit of open inquiry. Even this is exceedingly difficult, as humans engage daily in value-trading (making choices to value one consideration over another) between different people who have their own ideas

116 255 117 It is worth noting the corresponding learning styles, intelligence, capabilities, and skills, and academic

departments: humanities or arts (divergence), natural sciences (assimilation), engineers and technologists (convergence), and business (accommodation). This outsourcing of key components of problem­solving can be argued to be indicative of the kind of specialization upon which civilizations are based, and thus why they have such a particularly difficult time responding to initial crises.

118 11 119 15

of competing values; moreover, these individuals and communities may even be operating in completely conceptual paradigms antithetical to one another.120 By understanding the inquiry process as it relates to food ethics, and recognizing the value of discourse between competing perspectives and paradigms (and engaging in such discourse in open and honest ways), we can begin to integrate marginalized perspectives in a larger, integral framework to better handle inconsistences with the hopes of more comprehensively asking and responding to ethical queries. In this regard, I will end this section by making the first of four suggestions, one I will circle back to by the end of this paper: Suggestion #1: Marginalized voices (even radical, insurrectionary, terrorist, or “anti-civilizational” ones) have value and can make important contributions to ethical concerns related to food and security issues.

Cosmic Energy Pathways Another premise I will operate with is the idea that “food is energy,” and as such follows particular power-mass laws that qualify the psycho-physical dynamics within the relationship of food, energy, sovereignty, and meaning for culture.

Eric Chaisson and Fred Speier suggest that in cosmic evolution at particular moments of spacetime, the increase of energy-flows through mass over time leads to increasingly complex structures, including the emergence of complex adaptive systems (life, ecosystems, human communities, civilizations, etc).121 Moreover, the so-called “Constructal law” holds that as energy flows through a structure over time, it does so through the most equitable pathway: branching patterns remaining self-similar across scale.122 While increasing or stable energy flows can be directed to grow or maintain the complexity of simple non-adaptive structures (stars) or complex adaptive structures (civilizations), conversely, the deprivation of these energy flows necessarily lead to their collapse (e.g. supernovas, social breakdown…). Moreover, because the Universe is itself a closed energy system, there is no chance 120 On this point, Richard Bulliet’s thesis in Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, that ethical considerations are

conceived today in a modern, technological, industrial paradigm absent only a few generations ago is critical. It is now the case then that unlike different cultures and social groups now living in a domestic worldview (where the killing of animals is taken for granted with few ethical concerns in consuming animal products), today these domestic relationships have been severed by urbanization so that the most common relationship we have with non­ human animals is either a romanticized affinity to the wild, or an exclusive “pet” relationship. Such relationships imbue our sense of animals with novel ethical dispositions, prompting radical environmental and animal rights organizations to engage in criminal acts on the basis of moral compulsion. This will be elaborated upon in upcoming sections.

121 Spier, Fred (2011) “Complexity in Big History” in Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History. UC Riverside. Retrieved 10/28/18 from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3tk971d2 122 See Adrian Bejan's book, “Design in Nature”. One can see this in phenomena as diverse as lightning, blood vessels, river flows, from the largest structures (galaxies and superclusters) to the miniscule (neurons and those little branchy things). This is the same phenomenon that Kleiber’s Law refers to, and what is referred to in Big History as the most efficient pathway by which energy passes through mass over time.

any complex structure within it can persist forever. The Second Law of Thermodynamics ensures such entities will eventually move toward simplicity.

Thus, since both simple and complex systems inevitably collapse, a stable, equitable flow of energy is necessary to sustain the complexity of the structure for as long as possible; an inequitable flow on the other hand will hasten its collapse. Generalizing to food systems, a second suggestion emerges, aligned to more pessimistic views of human development not unlike Jared Diamond’s “Worst Mistake” hypothesis, while drawing from Joseph Tainter’s theory of why civilization’s collapse, based on marginal productivity and declining returns of complexity for human systems 123: Suggestion #2: Agriculture, unlike subsistence strategies like hunting or foraging, intensifies energy flows in specific, non-equitable ways, depleting soil fertility and stratifying society in unequal ways, depriving energy flows to various communities, thus hastening its own collapse along with those dependent on agrarian systems.

This may require further clarification.

“The Death System” Prior to the Neolithic revolution, the so-called foraging age, marked by hunting and gathering, meant a specific set of social relations thought to be marked by egalitarianism. 124 For the purposes of this essay, it is enough to suggest the process of domestication intensifies with agriculture to institutionalize coercive systems—supporting arguments of the oppressive nature of civilization in the first place—that initiate conditions and factors for collapse. Whether or not this is true is secondary; it is believed to be true by specific political groups, as I will show.

I would like to suggest then, that the process of domestication in general, and agriculture in particular, has elsewhere been argued to foster dependence on a form of socioecological interaction (“civilization”) that externalizes the skills and tasks to a complex, specialized social system that cannot be sustained. That is, whereas foragers and hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era and those in “uncivilized” circumstances in the contemporary era have a subsistence-based culture better able

123 Joseph Tainter (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. 124 The advent of domestication and agriculture was “revolutionary” in that it introduces several new categories

and phenomena: as the story goes, domestication, or agriculture, ensures an increasing dependency on specific territory which in turn necessitates a sedentary lifestyle and with it the subsequent loss of core skills, the need to store food, the requirement of defending territory and stored food, the privileging of male­dominance and violence to carry out this requirement, a social stratification that results from food distribution, the emergence of a state or governing apparatus to manage complex tasks, a coercive relationship both to the land, the animals, and the people who are needed to manage them, an increase in labor time, a decrease in health primarily for those at the lower levels of this stratified society, and ultimately, the exhaustion of the land’s fertility and the survival imperative to find or conquer new lands and repeat the cycle at ever increasing scales, ultimately leading to the emergence of civilization as a culture of cities that imports needed resources from elsewhere, imposing a logic of colonization and empire onto the surrounding bioregions that stems outward from the original colonization of the soil. While this is of course an oversimplified model, it has been defended by enough theorists to at least warrant consideration and, more importantly for this essay, forms the theoretical basis of anti­civilizational activism and insurrection.

to live within the carrying capacity of the region, civilizations inherently cannot, and thus the seeds of their destruction are present wherever they are planted.125 “It is loss of soil fertility which pays for the primal idiocy of arrogant authority…our civilization remains, very much the creation of the soil we live on. No more than we ever could, can we afford exhaustive use—which is abuse—of fertility, or for that matter on any other natural resource.”126 These twin factors of oligarchy on the one hand, resulting from a highly specialized civilization where power is concentrated leading to crime and harm; and the ecological degradation required by a civilization that must grow to provide new resources to increase or sustain this complex system, is therefore described in Radical Transformation as a “death system,” whose thesis develops upon the major findings of a recent simulation, the Human and Nature Dynamic (HANDY) model, suggesting these two factors (inequality/oligarchy and environmental degradation) are primary factors involved in civilizational collapse: inequality disallows adequate responses to threats, while environmental degradation erodes the material basis for survival. 127 Moreover, as the developing field of “green criminology” suggests, the environmental degradation (and thus depletion of potential energy flows) corresponds to a rise in criminality, as scarcity leads to constricted socio-economic activity, exacerbating crimogenic mechanisms, in turn leading to higher levels of crime.128 What is important to recognize here is the deprivation of energy flows (leading to collapse) is correlated with increasing harms, and thus crimes, as individuals attempt to ensure access to those energy flows that remain, through theft, migration, terrorism, insurgency, ethnic conflict, organized crime, wildlife trafficking, fraud, poaching, water wars, riots, insurrection, etc.

For these reasons is civilization classified here as a “cosmic crime,” primarily due to its dependence on imposing a specific logic (domestication) onto the land, colonizing places while intensifying extractive and exploitative methods to sustain itself. The subsequent concentration of power therefore is antithetical to natural power laws (Kleiber’s law, Constructal Law…), in that rather than ensuring individuals participate in equitable energy distribution, an oligarchy emerges to monopolize power and energy, exerting control over others in society as well as the surrounding lands, depriving them of the necessary psychological and physical energy needed to survive and thrive.129 The resulting environmental degradation, crime, and oppression precipitates unnecessary suffering as it unnecessarily prompts collapse on a wide scale.

A Third Suggestion: The Spirit of Resistance 125 This is due in large part to the alienation and distance that characterizes people’s relationship to the carrying capacity. Simply put, they are incentivized to continue unsustainable patterns.

126 Hyams, Edward (1952) Soil and Civilization. Harper Colophon: New York, NY 127 Moetsharrei, Sfa, Rivas, Jorge, and Kalnay, Eugenia (2014) “Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies.” In ScienceDirect.

Retrieved 10/28/18 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615 128 See Crime, Violence, and Climate Change

129

The previous section suggests an argument for looking at civilization as a “death system,” or “cosmic crime,” based on the logic of domestication, the move along its spectrum towards agriculture, civilization, and the modern, industrial, technological, oligarchical type of civilization we exist within today. In this section I focus on a connection between spirituality and resistance and a kind of “endgame” for that spiritual resistance where the restoration of equity can restore the power-law relationship to distribute energy more evenly and avoid socio-ecological collapse, crime, and undue suffering within the community of life as a result of this “civilized” arrangement.

During times of crisis, there is a kind of renewal in which religious premises are reconsidered and actions are taken to resolve the roots of these crises.130 In a similar way, we can see in moments of transcendence, or transpersonal identification with the entire phylogenetic tree of life, an experience not unlike notions of the Christian “grace,” defined as the “participation in the life of God.” Thus one’s ability to move beyond their own individual human perception to one that is commensurate with the entirety of life itself might be glimpses of insight into the psychological pole of a much wider circuit of energy, provoked in times where physical activity is performed with this wider energy network in mind – “I am the forest defending itself,” “Thinking like a mountain” etc. In this regard, we can potentially see ecological resistance movements as the transpersonal spiritual defense taken to restore equity and protect the phylogenetic tree of life (or specific branch of the community) against particular cosmic threats.

Moreover, as one article has pointed out, insurgencies themselves correspond to a powerlaw, in that their activities and communiques can be seen to conform to ecological principles in general.131 This is to say that resistance movements, regardless of whether they are explicitly ecological, are at the very least implicitly so. Further, as resistance movements seek to restore equitable energy flows to their own communities, or perhaps even universally, and such flows are themselves hindered by the imperatives of civilization, agriculture, and the logic of domestication hyper-intensified, we can suggest a third possibility: Suggestion #3: Resistance is inherently, if unconsciously, anti-civilizational, though the fact that this remains unconscious can dull its effectiveness to mere reformism rather than decisive action at times.

In the following section, I will present two short case studies to demonstrate this reality, one movement I argue is implicitly anti-civilizational, one explicitly anti-civilizational, in order to understand how spirituality and religion are utilized to resist oligarchical oppression (inequity), so that a synthesis between the two can help make resistance more effective (by focusing explicitly on what and how to effectively resist), while also giving context to our own evolutionary moment, as well as to help develop the disciplines of ecology, religious studies, critical security studies, and ethics, as a whole.

130 Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches.

131 See Bohorquez et Al. (2009) “Common Ecology Quantifies Human Insurgency.” In Nature: International Journal of Science, retrieved 10/28/18 from https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08631

First Case Study: From the Axial Age to the Christian Aion Robert Bellah suggests the so-called Axial Age is marked by the specific tendency to “think about thinking.” That is, it provides a critique of the state of the world (the polis, the empire…) while initiating a utopian project to challenge external power and authority (“legitimation crisis”), relocating it to the individual, so as to rebuild the spiritual community out of that experience.

“These utopian projections took quite different forms in the four cases, but each one of them was harshly critical of existing social-political conditions. One thing being criticized was the harsh conditions of work, and almost all axial-age utopias had a large element of play.”132 Further, the Jesus and Christ movements drew extensively from at least two of these Axial movements, specifically the Jewish prophets as well as Greek philosophers. In doing so, they systematized a spiritual philosophy, reconceiving of the flow of energy to be more equitable, retrieving a gift economy by reciprocating with its members to evoke a new “insurrectionary” figure (Jesus Christ, who was crucified for being an insurrectionist) to mediate access to divinity, circumventing the role of the Temple and State to access divinity through a personal savior, conceiving of Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, while establishing the church as an earthly structure or mechanism that would catalyze equitable energy distribution. Thus, as the Roman empire collapsed due to its oligarchic tendencies on the one hand and the inability to maintain the energy flows needed to sustain its massive complexities, the Church, with its specific spiritual variant remained as a new “strange attractor” around which new systems were patterned.

The previous section has been extremely scant with regards to the complexities inherent in the various spiritual traditions referred to, and the various factors contributing to the Roman collapse. What is more important to consider however, is the crisis and tension that both Axial and Christian movements preserved, namely an anti-civilizational critique within a civilized, colonial, settler empire. That is, an intention subsumed within a medium. With this in mind I will propose a fourth suggestion: Suggestion #4: Within both Axial and derivative movements a latent conflict remains unconscious, driving forward the death machine process on the one hand, while at the same time spreading an “anti-civilizational” tendency, where spiritual resources can be called upon in times of conflict where the call to normalize equity is able to become explicit.

Over the course of this essay I have so far laid a theoretical basis out of which four suggestions have emerged: 1) Marginalized voices have value and should be integrated in frameworks to resolve crises

132 Bellah, Robert (2011) Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

2) A Death System (“civilization”) exists, grounded in the logic of domestication and oligarchy, intensified in a modern industrial and technological context where factors of degradation and exploitation lead to inequity, crime, suffering, and ultimately, collapse.

3) Resistance is inherently anti-civilizational, whether implicit or explicit 4) The Axial ages represent perhaps the most widespread form of anti-civilizational resistance, relocating authority from bureaucracy to individual, critiquing the root causes of suffering and, in what is sometimes called “second-order thinking,” proposes a spiritual alternative for the basis of community unmediated by external power relations.

These suggestions provide the necessary context for a second case study, an explicitly anticivilization movement which, I argue, offers a unique, if unpopular, perspective with regards to the process of inquiry related to energy distribution, and thus food ethics in general.

Second Case Study: Rise of the Feral Insurrectionist The normalization of anti-civilization discourse is beyond the scope of this paper, but I will point to several examples before turning to the major subject of this study.

In the first place, with the increasing understanding of the role of fossil fuels in contributing to climate change, species extinction, and the threat to human cultures, protests against pipelines have become increasingly popular, with key flashpoints including the Keystone XL pipeline as well as the Dakota Access pipeline, though there can be no doubt of many more. Elsewhere, I have argued these movements to be indicators of a kind of “cosmic warfare,” where movements seek to blow out the necessary infrastructure that sustain a social order (civilization) out of touch with sacred (ecological, or cosmic) principles. Whereas these movements tend not to name themselves as anti-civilizational per se, I argue that they are: in the first place due to their willingness to eliminate the energy sources that provide the energy return per energy invested (EREI) rate necessary to maintain civilization, but also because many of these movements take leadership from indigenous movements which have been the leading historic opposition to civilization’s encroaching, colonizing, settling directives.

Secondly, the increasing popularity of “militant” ecological resistance movements, for instance Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front but also groups like Deep Green Resistance (DGR), provide detailed analysis of the scope of the problem, and specifically name themselves as anti-civilizational, or “anti-civ.” DGR for instance, attempts to set up an above-ground organization to promote and normalize underground resistance cells capable of asymmetric actions that sabotage industry, disrupt energy systems, and dismantle critical infrastructure. While DGR provides more theoretical support than physical action with regards to normalizing this type of discourse, it is growing in prominence and popularity in radical circles, so that its “decisive ecological warfare” provides a framework for any open-source anti-civilizational resistance movement to follow.

Finally, I will point to “anarcho-primitivism” as another recent explicitly “anti-civ” development in the anarchist lineage, deepening their analysis of power from simply the state and capital to the processes that produce state and capital, namely civilization and the domestication process, even going so far as to suggest a correlation between early power relations/oppression and the increasing prevalence of domestication and the control inherent to symbolic thought. Thus

anarcho-primitivism, as a variant of “green” anarchy, which finds inspiration in lifestyle anarchism, insurrectionary anarchism, and indigenous resistance movements, are similar in their attempt to disrupt energy systems and dismantle critical infrastructure by attacking the electrical grid while regaining subsistence skills. That is, they trace the root of civilization and domestication (and thus oppression) to an internal relationship to the world around them, seeking to overcome this separation or alienation through “rewilding” on the one hand and “resistance” on the other. That is, a primal participation can be regained through what is termed “primal warfare,” attacking domestication within themselves, and as it is present within the world, intensified through civilization, industrialization, and the technosphere as it stands today, in the hopes of being a “future primitive.” This is to say, their goal of disrupting energy systems includes both physical networks as well as psychological ones.

These three examples offer a sense of the increasingly explicit anti-civilizational nature of ecological resistance movements, and the movement from non-violent symbolic or tactical actions to increasingly “violent” insurrection as a strategy to dismantle civilization and thereby free ecosystems from the oppressive boot of its empire and logic. However, they also presage something much darker, specifically a kind of murderous rage that includes killing civilians.

Here I am speaking specifically about an international “eco-mafia,” a self-described criminal network of murderers and “nihilist terrorists” who follow a philosophy of “wild egoism.” Initially coming from the Animal Liberation Front, but influenced from the nearly twenty-year eco-terrorist bombing campaign of the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, the actions and goals of the so-called Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS) have become increasingly murderous and extinctionist, sending out communiques that take responsibility for stabbing to death technologists, killing female hikers, burning down Churches, injecting acid into coke bottles in supermarkets, targeting industrial mining executives with bombs, leaving improvised explosive devices on buses at random, and calling for the poisoning of city reservoirs along with the abstract goal of killing the human species off entirely.133 While a group like ITS may seem seriously unhinged, dangerous, and potentially a phenomenon we might all hope will simply go away, I would like to argue, in keeping with our stated directive at the beginning of this essay, that even this marginal, terroristic, violent, insurrectionary, seemingly immoral voice should be integrated into a conversation about ethics with regards to food; for, as I will argue, they too can make an important contribution to issues of security and food ethics. Thus, I will move to an analysis of their activities and ideology, followed by some concluding remarks meant to summarize the research, consider the integration of these contributions, and offer suggestions for future studies.

An Ethnography of the Inhumane Whereas it may be difficult to empathize with criminals, murderers, terrorists, and, for all practical purposes, “evil-doers,” I first recommend taking the tact of cultural relativism, in the same way we might approach those who were once called “savages.” That is, to judge these individuals for 133 See ITS communiques #1­63

murder may be itself a form of ethnocentrism that depends on a particular moral framework that is paradigmatic and imposes its own sense of value onto a phenomenon. In the same way we might hesitate to judge a lioness attacking a zebra, or a hunter shooting a deer, or a bear eating a person, or a tribesman eating a monkey, or even at times the phenomenon of cannibalism as a ritualistic activity, I suggest we bracket our moral considerations for the moment and look at this group in a similar way. That is, following a philosophy of “wild egoism” that attacks the moral foundation inherent to civilization in the first place, ITS sees itself as engaged in a kind of “rewilding” seeking to overcome the separation between the human and animal by destroying their domestication and lashing out against the totality of domesticating structures, going so far as to kill its domesticates wherever they are found, not limiting their willingness to kill to only certain morally acceptable species.

The eco-extremist apologist journal Atassa explains their tendency to murder as anti-colonial resistance, specifically re-visioning the anarcho-primitivism “rewilding” to include the eradication of domesticity by eradicating domesticates entirely.134 Thus I suggest several frameworks with which to think of ITS: through a lens of militant research, within an anthropology “beyond the human,” as a “dark green religion,” and finally, as a Derridean “Auto-immunitary process” for the social organism the terrorist is representative of.

In The Politics of Attack, Michael Loedenthal uses the idea of militant research to focus on insurrectionists like the Conspiracy Cells of Fire, Anarchist International, and Individualists Tending Toward the Wild among others, focusing on the communiques to, on the one hand determine the ideological dispositions of the groups, and at the same time suggest a process by which the communiques and insurrectionary actions are related in the wider context of resistance. Thus, he is able to spell out ten such principles that guide the activities and logic of these insurrectionists: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Direct, continuous, immediate, and spontaneous attack Attack now, in the present Making the war against the state and capital a social war Attack the totality for total liberation Unmanaged and temporary attacks outside of traditional Leftist organizations Rejection of reformist measures and democratic participation for insurrectionary attack Illegalist resistance, including theft, murder, arson, and rejection of civil engagement Rewilding to end domestication, technology, and alienation “Wild egoist individualism” Radical, uncompromising social transformation

In this way, we are able to see how symbols of civilization can be re-appropriated to become symbols for resistance (a burning church, for instance). In a similar manner, an individual, domesticated or civilized, is similarly turned into a symbolic object, their death representing a kind of sacrifice to the wild gods, a manifestation of wild ego that signifies resistance to civilization in a 134 Atassa, put out by the anarchist publishing house, “Little Black Cart,” takes its name from the war clubs, or

“red sticks,” used by the Creek to exterminate the colonists and internal enemies within the Creek Nation during the Creek War, or as Atassa labels it, a “primitivist war.” As they state, “war functions in primitive society as a way to preserve autonomy and prevent the accumulation of political power and the growth of the state.”

more immediate, less strategic manner, attacking the physical manifestations of the totality as they present themselves.

“We the Secret Wilderness Society claim responsibility for the criminal fire set in San Geraldo Chapel of the Muncipal Park of Paranoa this past Saturday, the 16th. We know that the fire was started since we set it with our own hands. We threw gasoline in the back of the church we set fire to that shit, and we disappeared into the cold dark night…Those believers spread their gospel to our ancestors and cursed our pagan beliefs. They profaned and destroyed our sacred lands and in their place they erected Christian statues and established the temples of their religions. They also financed progress and brought civilization with its foreign values. With their actions they catechized and destroyed our savage ancestors. They made them forget their Spirits who inhabited the cosmos and taught them to not respect the Earth. By the Cross and the sword they imposed the civic mentality and aided the expansion of this shame, for that reason they deserve our egoic ancestral vengeance…While you kneel and pray in vain to a sky empty of your divinity, we eco-extremists look to the heavens and we see storms, lightning, gusts of wind, torrential rains, the stars, the sun, the moon, and we believe in all of this and we violently defend it, immeasurable Wild Nature.”135 This mindset can similarly be understood in light of an anthropology beyond the human. Here I am specifically referring to the text, How a Forest Thinks, in the sense that each action becomes a living signifier meant to communicate an inner world. Thus insurrectionary action, including murder, is done to impose a particular thought pattern, to amplify and exemplify a desired future made manifest in the present. The arson, or murder, we can say, represents a semiotic process where an organism embedded in a hostile environment is able to mediate through this action the sensory processes and experiences of a biological reality. This response is a particular lived reality, where agency is reclaimed, spontaneously exhibiting value. The more symbols of resistance (of wildness), the more semiotic density, and the more alive one feels.

Thus, the wild ego provides a sign of agency, attuned to a spiritual, undomesticated experience.

To think morally or act ethically requires a symbolic consciousness which is distinctly human, so that these “wild” actions force us to rethink of them beyond our own moral framework. If morality is a constituent element of domestic human life, an inhumane anthropology is necessary, so as to avoid imposing our own symbolic framework to other creatures which would simply attempt to domesticate them. Wild resistance then rejects this morality and acts outside of this moral framework in ways we consider “unethical,” but others might consider “wild,” or even, “natural.” We can see this kind of relationship where farmers attempt to kill wolves who attack their cows for instance. Perhaps understandable, though operating with entirely different inclinations and (domestic) paradigms. I suggest therefore that we should not exclude those animals who are not able 135 See communique at http://maldicionecoextremista.altervista.org/tag/individualists­tending­towards­the­wild­ its/

to exist within our morally acceptable paradigms from consideration, or else the wolf (perhaps even wildness), would likely be rendered extinct by the farmer and the domesticate, constricting the spectrum of possibility to create exclusively domestic forms, habits, and semiotic processes to the detriment of a wider biodiversity.

One last thing should be said here following the line of reasoning in How a Forest Thinks, namely that killing does not necessarily kill the relationship, but can in fact deepen it, reminding us that there are others that are animate, to therefore re-enchant our sense of an ensouled cosmos, deepening a sense of self and its relationship to life. Thus insurrection, including violence and killing, offers a kind of animist technique in which the insurrectionist, in depriving a domesticate of energy, creates an opportunity whereby this energy can be consumed and redistributed, helping people realize the dangerous reality that contextualizes them, while providing a wild sense of aliveness for both themselves and any others. This is not to impose a moral framework onto the phenomenon, celebrate or condemn it, but rather to understand as opposed to judge it.

Having considered ITS from the perspective of a militant scholarship (thinking with them), as well as an anthropology beyond the human, I now turn to this “tendency” as a “dark green religion,” in the words of Bron Taylor, as well as a focus on this particular brand of “eco-extremist” as representing for the social organism a kind of “autoimmunitary process” as Derrida might describe.

That is, as a wild reaction to the colonial, settler statism of western civilization, with its dualistic mindset, we are provided with a decidedly shadow side of nature religiosity in which “Wild Nature” is revered and violently defended as a sacred object of meaning, while at the same time indigenous gods are both called on to heal and protect them in their fight along with killing the enemy; and, at the same time, these wild egoists write in their communiques they experience a kind of demonic possession that fills them with a violent spiritual lust for blood: “We were on the hunt, and last night we turned into wolves. Our thirst for blood was satisfied for a moment, while the demons of our ancestors took possession of our minds and bodies…We are individualist-terrorists with egoist purpose… yesterday we stabbed the Chief of Chemical Services in the Department of Chemistry at the UNAM. Our knife pierced his flesh, his muscles, and veins, bleeding him and leaving him for dead. It’s a pity we couldn’t scalp him (as was the practice of our ancestors in war), but that’ll be for next time…the wounded and dead that we inflict will be as a blood offering to Wild Nature…we executed this man to show that we don’t have any respect for the lives of the hyper-civilized of the university or anywhere else. We despise their routines, their norms and morality. We reject equality, human progress, tolerance, science, collectivism, Christianity, pacifism, modernity, and all of the other shit that reeks of civilized domestication…this civilization wants to eliminate our most wild instincts to impose on us its values that run roughshod over the individual…it wants us to consider this murder “evil”, even though it is a result of a war without morality. May Eco-extremism and Terrorist

Nihilism increase in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Italy, and other places. With Wild Nature on our side!”136 Here we move from a simple “I am the forest protecting itself,” to “I am the wild storm that will tear apart any community I come upon.”

While it may be easy enough to state this shadow aspect provides us with evidence of a pneumapathology, or spiritual disease, whereby the ten core directives provide us with a kind of anti-doctrine, the phenomenon of the wild egoist and nihilist terrorist, who sees murder and the bombing of the totality of civilization’s concrete manifestations as a worthy, life-affirming endeavor meant to jolt the domesticate out of their “dogmatic slumber,” might be conceived of as an autoimmunitary process, whereby an immune system attacks the body itself.

“As we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity…once again the state is both selfprotecting and self-destroying, at once remedy and poison. The pharmakon is another name, an old name, for this autoimmunitary logic…a symptom of an autoimmune crisis occurring within the system that should have predicted it.

Autoimmune conditions consist in the spontaneous suicide of the very defensive mechanism supposed to protect the organism from external aggression.”137 Here then we return to our original suggestion that this marginal voice may have something to contribute to our conversation about food ethics, and specifically the equitable distribution of energy. That is, there is for the wild egoist a hint of a pre-cultural imperative, if not ethic, that seeks to attack those social structures and arrangements that would deny it the psychological and physical energy necessary to remain free from domestication. As such, the contribution of such a movement is not just to demand complete structural transformation, but actively disintegrate social structures that mediate or deprive access to Wild Nature, where “the ‘solution’ to insurrectionary attack is systemic, revolutionary change that reduces domination and marginalization…to ‘solve’ the insurrectionary critique would require system-level change aimed at a deconstruction of that very system and, as such, is unlikely to be embraced by power elites…[the problem is found] in the articulation of a system-level critique which rejects political representationalism, abhors domination, and seeks nothing short of total liberation.”138 136 Individualists Tending Toward the Wild –Mexico City, Eco­Extremist / Nihilist Mafia (2016) “Accepting Responsibility for the Assassination of a UNAM Worker: Tenth Communiqué of the Individualists Tending Toward the Wild.” Retrieved 10/31/18 from http://nechayevshchinaed.altervista.org/2016/07/08/accepting­responsibility­for­ the­assassination­of­unam­worker­tenth­communique­of­the­individualists­tending­toward­the­wild/ 137 See Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida 138 Loedenthal, Michael (2017) The Politics of Attack: Communiques and Insurrectionary Violence

This is to refuse the demand for bigger, better cages, and seek to destroy and tear apart the cages altogether, refusing to wear leashes, or to come to heel when punished, threatened, or “tamed.” Moreover if we are to follow Thompson’s suggestion that we consider each perspective in a collaborative discussion of “process ethics” as described in the outset of this paper, then we are tasked with perhaps radically transforming our own ethical considerations in ways that allow killers to walk amongst us, if we are to integrate these perspectives and address their concerns and the moral dilemmas they provoke. Further, it is also apparent that we are not in a position to converse and dialogue with such perspectives, any more than we could persuade a bear not to eat us, because “they” actively refuse to listen to other perspectives. Thus, we can only listen, and attempt to accommodate their needs as far as we are willing, much like we would for a wolf who seeks the freedom to live a life of hunting, killing, and feeding on the energy of another living soul in ways that are not immoral, but perhaps amoral.

Food as Medicine (Resisting the Death System); Hypotheses for Future Research (Generating a Life System) While this essay has touched upon notions of food ethics, it is perhaps not entirely clear how insurrection necessarily connects yet. Let me begin a kind of synthesis with two quotes: “Food is medicine,” spoken by Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician, and “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a grand scale,” spoken by the German physician Rudolf Virchow in 1848. My suggestion is that if our ecological crisis is rooted in political reality, then perhaps this crisis can be healed by our relationship to food, and energy.

I have suggested therefore that food is energy, and as such, the complexities of our food system, with its concentration of power and wealth, and the deprivation of energy/food by impoverished communities can be traced back to the move away from immediate-return huntergatherer subsistence lifeways toward a delayed-return agrarian lifestyle that in turn provokes revolutionary change leading to oligarchy and environmental degradation via civilization. Moreover, the intensification and inequity demanded by the hierarchical political system emerging out of agrarianism catalyzes social and ecological collapse, crime, and conflict.

In this essay I have tried to liken a new development in ecological resistance movements as symbolic of an auto-immunitary process that seeks to destroy the body it considers to be responsible for illness and therefore necessary to attack. I have also spent time explaining this rationale, in that the body, in this case civilization, deprives certain critical components of energy, my hypothesis is therefore multifaceted. Thus the eradication of mediating structures, and thus the retrieval of a pre-separated lifestyle in the present that is driven by an instinctual “wild egoism” can provide pathways toward a post-domestic culture whereby specialization and domestication are eliminated for a primal relationship driven by identification with the wild.

To begin, I suggest that the equitable redistribution of energy would “solve” the phenomenon of ecological terrorism, depriving it of the source of suffering that creates the phenomenon. Further, anticivilization ecological resistance movements solve ecological collapse and (therefore) social crime and social harm in that they attack the very barriers that prevent equitable

energy flows, to eliminate oligarchic tendencies and environmental degradation. Moreover, the intensification of resistance to the intensification of energy blockages suggest that we can consider our resistance in terms of four differing circumstances.

Typology of Resistances in Inequitable Energy Circuitry:

Energy Flow Totality is Legitimate

Energy Flow Totality is Illegitimate

Strategy of Confrontation

Integration: lobbying by progressives hoping persuasion will direct resources to them.

Insurrection: attacks by enraged terrorists seeking to destroy monopolies on power and energy

Strategy of Avoidance

Autonomy: retreat by despairing hippies resigned to live in autonomous communes

Circumvention: bypass by radicals who evade mediating structures

In this regard, we can see something a political typology of energy circuitry where four different resistances emerge: 1) Integration: where a need for political participation or representation assumes blockages exist because the larger society has not acknowledged a blockage exists. The remedy is thus to raise consciousness of the blockage so the larger systems can act accordingly.

2) Autonomy: where the wider society acknowledges the existence of a blockage but there is no excess energy, so the community must reconstitute itself accordingly to deal with the austere (lessened) flow of energy.

3) Insurrection: where political corruption creates the blockage, intentionally degrading the energy flows to the locales, and the locales attack the blockage and with it the totality.

4) Circumvention: where the political corruption creates the blockage, while locales bypass the barriers and reconnect with the energy flows.

Beyond this, I will make the somewhat non-contentious claim that religion and spirituality will continue to assimilate resistance narratives until such time as the equitable distribution of energy occurs. Here, a fifth resistance emerges, specifically the blockading of those processes that themselves represent energy blockages (e.g. preventing dams from being built).

This then has a number of implications for fields as diverse as education, criminology, activisms, critical security studies, and perhaps even literary analysis. To summarize these points, I am simply stating that the restoration of wildness will ease tension in a way that increased repression not only cannot do, but will likely increase or aggravate the very crimogenic mechanisms causing harm and crime in the first place. Moreover, militant researchers can approach these blockages with a sensitivity toward the inhuman perspective, co-producing knowledge to radically transform and make manifest the latent contradictions inherent to a civilized perspective. Finally, I will end with

some speculation as to the future of civilization, crime, the possibility of collapse, and the desire for a new way of relating within the community of life.

In Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships, Richard Bulliet ends his book by suggesting “it will take true genius to rediscover the magic of the predomestic era, when animals communed with gods, half-animal beings commanded respect, and killing inspired awe and incurred guilt.” This is necessary, he concludes, as the paradigmatic split between pre-domestic, domestic, and post-domestic lifeways has seen the rapid expansion of industrial exploitation of life and its commodification, along with a new moral outrage and guilt-ridden approach to killing animals, and the varied resistances that seek to reestablish connection to wildness.

Whereas the paradoxes of competing paradigms with regards to food (energy) paradigms are so far unresolved, and indeed the conflict between them seem not only immense but at times irreconcilable, I suggest that the wild egoists offer a particular post-domestic pathway to a future lifestyle, one that does not shy away from recognizing domesticity as ecologically destructive, and therefore seeks to increase wild spaces by promoting subsistence living and the normalization of the death a living world demands.

For this reason alone, I have suggested this shadow side of an animistic death cult might still be able to teach us something with regards to humanity, relationality, spirituality, cosmic energy, domesticity, and forms of resistance that would hardly be fathomed, let alone seriously considered, if we were to take a superficial glance at the criminal violence they perpetrate. At its core, however, Individualists Tending Toward the Wild roots its activity in their experience of, identification with, and direct action on behalf of a “Wild Nature” violently opposed to a system that deprives it of unmediated access to that wild energy that nourishes it psychologically and physically.

“The difference for our terrorism is only the objective and the indiscriminate method, since for us the problem is not only the techno-industrial society and its progress, but humanity itself. But you practice terror with blind faith by looking at a new and unreachable human being, with hope in a sort of anarchist Eden for this catastrophe of almost 8 billion insatiable anthropocentric creatures…You are an incoherent universal shame.”139 Individualists Tending the Wild - Brazil, Secret Wild Society

139 “[ES] (Brazil 63 ITS Communiqué – Sociedad Secreta Silverstre: About the Anarcho­Police of 325”

MaldicionEcoextremista, Retrieved 10/28/18 from http://maldicionecoextremista.altervista.org/es­brasil­63­ comunicado­de­its­sociedad­secreta­silvestre­sobre­los­anarco­policias­de­325/? doing_wp_cron=1540784126.6932370662689208984375

Knowing Nazis: A Biosemiotic Approach to the Ecopoetics of Fascist Imagery in Atomwaffen Division’s Visual Communiqués “Poetically, man dwells…”

–Martin Heidegger Abstract: This essay looks at the neo-Nazi and fascist organization Atomwaffen Division, analyzing the images and content of their video communiques with the intention of better understanding their worldview. It is impossible however to understand this worldview without situating it in a wider ecological milieu. By crafting a biosemiotically informed ecopoetic criticism and applying it to the visual communiques within a particular interpretive frame, we can understand the degree to which the symbolic distortion of fascism produces and reifies an alienating worldview and reconsider how best to approach and transform the wider ecosystem in which it emerges.

Learning the Lifeworld: A Statement of Intention Recently a growing concern regarding nationalism and fascism has prompted interest in groups selfidentifying as “white nationalists,” along with those who actively and explicitly self-identify as fascists, Nazis, and white racists. Atomwaffen Division (“Nuclear Weapon Division, hereafter “AWD”) represents one such group, labeled a terrorist organization, several of their members imprisoned for five killings. The name itself highlights the strategy it seeks to implement, advocating the use of nuclear weapons against American infrastructure to initiate an inevitable race war. To advocate for this racial approach to politics, the group has produced a series of video communiques meant to promote its worldview and strategy, seeking new recruits to expand the philosophy and inspire praxis as far as possible.140 In this regard, the focus of this paper will be to utilize these videos and the symbols and signs within them to better determine the “inner life” of the Nazi, engaging what Jacob Uexkull might term the “umwelt” of the group, and by extension, perhaps contribute an understanding of other fascist organizations in turn. Drawing from C.S. Peirce’s semiotic theory, a typology of signs can help us to flesh out the complex relations of this particular mode of symbolic consciousness, understanding the meaningful relations out of which any epiphany or insight emerges so as to recognize the internal integrity (or inconsistencies) of the worldview itself.

I therefore hope to look at the lifeworld of the contemporary Nazi not as a mere “monstrosity,” or moral abomination, but rather to understand the particular aesthetic and logic around which any symbolic expression constellates to better engage this species of social critique in more effective

140 https://archive.org/details/AtomwaffenDivisionVideoArchive/

ways.141 In this regard, I offer a novel method, one fusing militant co-research with an engaged and ecologically informed materialist critique (what I will call an eco-poetic critique) so as to better identify whether such a species represents an existential threat to the wider ecological landscape and its constituent communities As every improvement in knowledge requires a methodological approach to premises through a new method, the eco-poetic critique is pragmatic in that it remains sensitive to the operational consequences of any symbol’s purposive effects, and thus the sense impressions, material effects, actions, events, and experiences it emerges from. It therefore offers a strategy to adapt to and fit well within any particular paradigm and the various environmental complexities it needs to adapt itself towards. That is to say, eco-poetics are a way of understanding the pragmatic urge to transform existence into sometime better, and therefore the concepts and abstractions that are concretized into symbols provide the unit of analysis from which any analysis, critique, and improvements will emerge to offer more faithful interpretations of reality and suggest more evolutionarily beneficial behaviors. This will be elaborated upon in depth in the next section.

Crafting an Eco-poetic Methodology The following section draws from a number of approaches that together make up an eco-poetic method to understand any essential relationship that would inform the reader/viewer about the nature of the subject’s worldview and the symbols by which that worldview is communicated, as well as the conditions by which that worldview is produced, and the meaningful themes that emerge in the materials to inform any behavior and program of action.

Drawing from Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, we can consider the role of a playful instinct that drives any physical, emotional, mental, and theoretical activity (e.g. political religions), including the production of symbols and literary devices for the sake of successful adaptation. Thus, “at the origin of our use of metaphor lies nature.” (Knickerbocker, 4) In this regard, any worldview can be recognized as a kind a playful place-making, rooted in the land, as the driving force that produces any poetic as a resonant system, where language is understood as nature, and similarly, nature as language. A “sensuous poesis” producing meaningful impacts and emotionally charged activities therefore will, as Sapir demonstrates, reflect the world around it, the symbol itself the point of integration between the environment and culture, a structuring force upon which any perception, interpretation, and reaction will ultimately rest. Here then, worlds and worldviews emerge from 141 A good overview of “Monster Culture” can be found in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in which he points out the idea of monsters assume the embodiment of a certain cultural moment, its propensity to shift accordingly within the matrix of relations that generate them, their transgression of categorical boundaries, their deviance and refusal to be assimilated within any normalizing cultural codes, their identities contingent upon transgressing subordination and control, their tendency to freely symbolize, normalize, and enforce forbidden desires, and a catalyzing of reevaluating cultural assumptions and why we have created them. In this regard, they provide “not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge—and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside.”

words as constituted by experience, a process by which meaning is transmitted via poetic functions to generate a shared understanding.

The set toward the message as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language…Any attempt to reduce the sphere of the poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to the poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. (Jakobson, pg. 70) We should consider then the duty to hear and know any other’s constitution as crucial for the simple reason that any language that arises in a shared space functions as both habitat and adaptive mechanism by which that habitat is itself constructed and arranged. This is to say, as Uexküll might suggest, within a biosemiotics we find an evolutionary pressure by which any interior desire can be described; moreover, poetry itself may provide a kind of science, a linguistic and semiotic method to understand the interiority of any organism, the biogeochemical and phenomenological desire prompting life’s struggle forward.142 I will consider this biosemiotic method to highlight the logic of an eco-poetic critique: an organism experiences a phenomenon, learns from it, and makes meaning that is integrated in a schema or hierarchy of value – in the case of homo sapiens, through symbolic consciousness. Since every entity is situated in relationship to any other, the reaction of an organism to any phenomena can therefore lead to more accurate predictions, articulations, and hypotheses with regards to particular meanings that are projected into or that may tend to dominate any given space. This “intention” found in the biological organisms that constitute “nature” imbues the landscape with competing meaning and can be read through any given sign to convey the lifeworld of experience so as to signal how better to perceive any phenomena and act accordingly; and of course, these meanings will shift according to the subjectivities of any biological organism or community in a given geographic and historic place.

The signal, sign, or symbol then functions as a fundamental unit of meaning, key to niche-building and place-making: if language is the technology needed to monitor and modify our perception, activity, and relationship to the structures that facilitate our dwelling, a more ecologically informed poetic expression would mean a more skillful approach to communicating this meaning. Further, this unit of meaning emerges as a concretized artifact of the interpretive process, one that itself is embedded in the very event in which meaning is made as the organism experiences the phenomenon at hand. In this regard, the sign or symbol mediates between consciousness and object of consciousness, so that the environment itself becomes an active partner in the process, producing the capacity for any breakthrough event to recode an individual’s agency to recognize patterns that induce a change of consciousness as a deeper order is made known in individual consciousness as 142 See Jakob Uexküll’s writing in Biosemiotics.

meaning transforms. The subsequent ontological disturbance, or, as Owen Barfield describes, the “felt change of consciousness,” can be located at the actual moment where a sign or symbol is interpreted, found meaningful, and articulated faithfully.

In these moments the ecosystem itself seems to experience a moment of self-awareness. Signs and symbols then communicate the logic of experience deriving from the relationship of the organism to its habitat, producing narratives that can be interpreted through a biohermeneutic focused on “life’s own role in creating the world in the evolutionary process and the possibility of using narrative strategies in understanding it.” (Utsler, 13) The iterative and relational dynamics of these symbols, emerging in the metaxis of consciousness between the subject-object relational event, form the linguistic set and literary devices that become meaningful ways to generate and control an environmental order, “the real means by which both natural and cultural semiosis drives natural and cultural evolution and development.” (Wheeler, 70) Thus symbols become might even be considered a kind of living organism in and of themselves, inducing particular patterns to reconstruct the linguistic habitat they reside in, by which systems of meanings in turn construct narratives that mediate meaning and catalyze epiphanies, so that what is “essential about the experience…[can] amplify our concern, increase our understanding, or drive personal transformation.” (Treanor, 78) The subsequent “place-making” process then is evolutionary in the sense that the narrative cultivates a particular character, “inducing people to change their lives” through new relational patterns they establish through the signs and symbols that constitute a given narrative. (Treanor 115) This is more than mere cognition, but implies a sensual reconfiguration, offering in symbolic models evolutionary pathways as contingent assemblages organized “to structure perceptual experience…and purpose-build the very ‘events’ of a life.”

(Bruner 2014) The narrative then maintains, nurtures, and supports the epiphany of a deeper order that is interpreted, habituating new routines to produce or reconfigure a narrative identity by introducing signs and symbols into new contexts; or rather, signs and symbols may introduce narrative identities and new routines into a context to produce entirely new cultures and environments.

As this narrative coalesces, one is capable of recognizing the interpretive structure that informs it, and cultivating a sensitivity to those dynamic inputs (memories, values, desires, events, traumas, conditions, phenomena) in the “hermeneutic circulatory between self and world” as it takes place (Trigg 170). This is to say, understanding a personal experience demands an essential sensitivity to the ecology it arrives within and is interrelated to, reflected in any given mood and emplotment, which in turn is projected into, and constitutes the world. That is, identity, action, experience, and interpretations become the recursive feedback cycle, constituting the signs and symbols that indicate particular arrangements and relationships, providing both an epistemology and hermeneutic with which to reflect upon and approach these various inputs, address them skillfully, even transform them in ways that are more faithful to the wider reality or ecosystems in which they emerge, to better

uncover the message an ecosystem expresses by focusing on the eco-poetics of the communicating medium.

Any communique, itself an inter-relational structure emerging from the wider symbolic set, can then be understood less as a declaration of separation, but rather as an impulse to connect, decentering the focus from any one actor to the ecosystem itself, and perhaps even the desire of this ecosystem as a whole. By changing the conditions in which complex systems emerge, new regimes of perception emerge as well, where arrangements of symbolic relationships are able to create the methods by which world-making occurs. To put it succinctly, an interpretation of the ecosystem coarises out of the assumptions that inform the epistemology to structure any given perception of relationships, leading to ethical considerations and behaviors that constitute all future reality – an ecosystem’s destiny so to speak. This necessitates a greater understanding of causes and strategies for transforming the causes and conditions that promote suffering, so as to potentially dissolve those mental and physical structures that manifest as physical configurations in ecosystems (e.g. civilization) so as to more skillfully attack the root causes of, say, white supremacy or neo-Nazism, in order to more skillfully address the entanglement of those material phenomena that form “knots in a vast network of agencies, which can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories” (Iovino and Opperman, 2014). Rather than focus on protagonists or antagonists within an ecosystem, we should consider whether the ecosystems themselves (as constituted by the politicaleconomic-social-cultural-symbol systems they constitute and are constituted by) are protagonistic or antagonistic.

This material-semiotic approach I have outlined above, moving between the poetic function of language, the event of experiencing the structure of reality, the symbolisms that emerge, the narratives they constitute, and the hermeneutics that they necessitate, all then constitute the phenomenon of nature more effectively knowing nature (“itself”), the self-reflective and selfrecursive process by which an eco-system, indeed the cosmosemiotic process able to more clearly discern its own desires, and the activities it engages in to achieve them.

In this sections I have sought to build an eco-poetic method rooted in biosemiotic approaches. This is essentially no less that the evolutionary process by which an organism adapts to its environment – by interpreting any given signal that might arise – yet recognizing language as itself a habitat rooted in the landscape, experience, and interpretive structures themselves. This method will in the next sections be applied to the visual communiques in order to better describe, interpret, understand, and deconstruct the worldview of Atomwaffen Division, with the intention of recognizing their core desires and motivations as to why they construct their imagery in this way, as situated in the wider ecosystem they are immersed within (and what this wider system itself may desire), through an ecopoetic approach to content analysis.

A Brief Note on Process and Relevance

While watching 19 AWD communiques, I qualitatively and quantitatively coded for each frame in order to come up with a list of relevant signs, indices, and symbols. From there, I “clumped” them into ten or so major categories with the intention of re-watching the videos to determine the quantity and frequency each sign, indices, and symbol appeared, along with what themes, or structural codes could be accounted for. As the coding scheme is mostly visual, I then transcribed all auditory statements and entered them into a word cloud, based on the visualized words by AWD, those spoken by others, and a combination of the two. Finally, I analyzed the coded findings and engaged in what I will call a “theming of the data,” which will be demonstrated in the following sections, relating findings, general insights, etc., with the expectation of comparing and contrasting all findings will several others project members in upcoming conversations.

That said, I will restrict my analysis in the following sections to several themes relevant to a field of eco-poetics in particular, namely the relationship to land, race, bias, locations, certain symbols, as well as the wider ecological context whose logic (what Timothy Morton will term “agrilogistics”) may well systematically produce such decisions with regards to the imagery and themes, as will be explained in further depth.

Agrilogistics, Civilization, and Solidarity: An Interpretive Frame In his book Humankind (2017), Tim Morton describes “agrilogistics” as the psychic effect of humanity having severed itself from the “symbiotic real,” an internal logic of the thought-mode attributed to the production of agrarian psychic, social, and philosophical space, walled off from the wild or “non-human” threats to protect the domesticated self. Indeed, as he states, it is an essentialist and metaphysical position requiring violence against those classified as “non-humans” to maintain itself, an ideological separation whose ontological effects arise where a biopolitical fear of the dissolution of boundaries (and thus the collapse of the imperial agrarian space) forms the basic logic underpinning violence, fascism, speciesm, racism, and the rejection of the possibility for a planetary solidarity in general.

The concept of race then, like the battle over land, is a battle for boundaries, demarcating a particular bounded identity (the human species, whiteness…), one that necessitates violence to maintain. That is, the nonhuman is exterminated due to the implicit logic of agrilogistics is enshrined into ethics and law, manifesting as the hierarchical violence that severs human and nonhuman relationships, to emerge as an ecological disaster, both as species extinction and genocide. The necessary exclusion, or severance required by agrilogistics becomes a feedback tendency leading to more fascism, as the exploitation of labor and soil depletes an ecosystem, generating poverty and extinction. Thus Morton defines fascism as hyper agrilogistics, a death culture in charge of the concept of life, the boundaries of which would be insane to move beyond, and in turn provides us with the ecological context by which any fascist symbol will necessarily hinge. For this reason, a fascist poetic offers the particular fossilization of the particular mode of

thought necessary to understand, say, concentration camps, the tendency toward genocide, and the neo-Nazi ethic at large, along with any fascist communique.

Before moving to any analysis of fascist symbols, I will bring to mind one other thinker who has perhaps done more to popularize the anti-agrilogistics paradigm than any other, namely Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, whose manifestos, “Industrial Civilization and its Discontents,” “Technological Slavery,” and “Anti-Tech Revolution: How and Why” along with various letters from prison make explicit the logic behind his violent bombing campaign meant to attack the industrial and technological system, an analysis that gives insight into both agrilogistics and Nazism in general. Such an “anti-agrilogistics” or “anti-civilization” perspective is certainly not unique to him alone, yet he likely represents one of the few individuals who has been most extreme in implementing the logic, and can help make explicit some elements that would perhaps remain unconscious.

Kaczynski writes that “the Nazi revolution was partly a revolution against civilization,” in that “[Hitler] and his henchman appropriated the potentially revolutionary forces that existed in German society (which included the anti-civilization current, among others) and exploited them to gain power for themselves,” referring to the Volkisch movement in German that was inspired by romantic and nihilist sentiments against civilization arising in reaction to modernity.143 And yet, while “Hitler and his allies merely tried to repeat on a larger scale the kinds of atrocities that have occurred again and again throughout the history of civilization […] what modern technology threatens is absolutely without precedent.”144 For Kaczynski, fascism is a reaction against the crisis of technology and the agrilogistics that necessarily drive it, for which there is no possible reform: “systems that compromise their own power and efficiency for the sake of “human values” are at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis systems that put power and efficiency first,” hence the reason people take recourse through various forms of escapism as opposed to direct confrontation, so that “people avoid the need to address the real sources of their discontent,” in turn offering a revolutionary approach: The only way out is to attack the underlying source of all these problems, which is the technoindustrial system itself…this applies not only to the physical components of the system, but to the whole mind-set, the whole system of values and priorities that characterizes the technological society.145 This is to say, while Kaczynski points to the many problems prompted by the agrilogistic paradigm and exacerbated by modern industrial civilization and technology (e.g. war, nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, pollution, global warming, ozone depletion, natural resource exhaustion, overpopulation, 143 https://www.wildwill.net/blog/2017/11/28/ted-kaczynski-individualists-tending-toward-savagery/ 144 https://www.wildwill.net/blog/2017/04/26/morality-and-revolution/ 145 https://www.wildwill.net/blog/2018/07/24/letters-ted-kaczynski-to-david-skrbina-march-2005/

crowding, genetic deterioration, species extinction, biotechnological disaster, replacement of humans by intelligent machines, biological engineering of humans, dominance of large organizations and individual powerlessness, surveillance technology, propaganda and psyops, psychoactive medications, mental problems, addiction, domestic abuse, generalized incompetence…), to focus on any one of these symptoms as a “cause” would be to miss the root of each—the very attitude of domestication that has spawned attacks on the underlying source of a symbiotic whole in order to extract and distribute wealth from it for a particular class of species (humans).

Race and nation then, as modernist constructs, are similarly understood as rooted in anthropocentric discourse and agrilogistics that excludes the joy of nonhumans from economic value – reducing them instead to objects to exploit and kill. This degradation reifies those correlates and concepts that are based upon dualism and egoistic projections of boundaries, distracting through anthropocentric discourse and therefore cannot address the central issue, inhibiting psychological, social, and philosophical access to the symbiotic real and the inclusion of the nonhuman into the space.

Thus Morton can say that the struggle against racism is a project of de-anthropocentrism, a reaction against the severance of indigeneity from the symbiotic real, with solidarity as a mode of this symbiotic real, the passion to share a world with nonhumans. One might see then in the public outcry of a hunter sport-hunting Cecil the Lion for instance, a parallel to the public outcry against white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and other forms of white supremacy. Here we might better understand the reaction against anti-Semitism as a kind of solidarity with “charismatic megafauna,” in the sense that solidarity with those deemed “nonhumans” manifests to enact such a mode of consciousness that perceives and enacts this symbiotic real in a political form.

I will also suggest that we are perhaps also tasked with cultivating a desire for kindness towards, like the nonhuman, the dehumanizing mode of consciousness enduring the severance in the first place.

Rather than calling them animals, monsters, and evil-doers, perhaps in Nazism and the white supremacist terrorist we can see what Voegelin might call pneumapathology or what Derrida might call an autoimmunitary disease, where the individual attacks the wider social system (and indeed the structure of reality itself) considered a threat unto itself. In this regard, maintaining a sensitivity to even the desires of the racist terrorist will be important to address the anxiety produced by the very system that is perhaps termed “the Jew conspiracy,” in order to widen the mode of consciousness that takes for granted the symbiotic real through a competing poetic that can induce a more effective dwelling.

To quote Heidegger, The poetic is the basic capacity for human dwelling. But man is capable of poetry at any time only to the degree to which his being is appropriate to that which itself has

a liking for man and therefore needs his presence. Poetry is authentic or inauthentic according to the degree of this appropriation. (Heidegger, 1971) Thus the Nazi, in failing to ensure a liking for man, not even to mention those persons determined to be “less-than-man” or nonhuman, is guilty of crafting an inauthentic poetry severed from the ecological and symbiotic real. In doing so, he produces a symbol that not only does not adequately address the core phenomenon that generates the experience of alienation for which he attempts to use race as a unifying device; but rather distracts and intensifies the severance that itself becomes the very home for the Nazi, or rather, a permanent state of homelessness, excommunicated from the symbiotic real.

This section has suggested that an agrilogistics that is foundational to civilization both severs the individual from the symbiotic real, and prompts the anxiety and conditions within which the individual is prompted to rebel, or find avenues of escapism. The Nazi however capitalizes on these criticisms, yet does not adequately address these root conditions, choosing instead to intensify the program (what Morton call’s “explosive holism”) through a mode of consciousness (fascism) that only furthers these conditions. Further, this mode of consciousness refuses a necessary humility and believes itself to have a monopoly on truth, virtue, and wisdom, mistaking its own interpretation of reality for reality itself, projecting its distorted worldview via symbols into the world as it produces and enforces categories that only serve to further distance itself from the symbiotic real.

This then helps to better understand any symbol or theme that arises within and from this mode of consciousness as it intensifies the agrilogistics that constitutes it.

Findings: Frequencies and Thematic insights The Nazi umwelt is the product of symbolic distortion, detached from the symbiotic real through the intensification of agrilogistics needed to maintain and make permanent the state of alienation that is mistaken for a place of refuge. In reality, the Nazi is in a permanent state of crisis and anxiety, living according to a fictional narrative informed by an aesthetic, ethic, and indeed a political theology of a make-believe nature. This is to say, the race war apocalypticism, naturalized hierarchy, and spectrum of violence employed are all meaning-making symbols that systematize any image and statement within the mode of consciousness, imbuing it with an extremism meant to shock and frighten – an emotional provocation AWD both recognizes and capitalizes on to generate new media.

Under the banner of free speech, a dehumanizing process is thus organized around racial purity to destroy the system, promoting underground insurrection through social media designed to initiate a civil war, while drawing from an apocalyptic and Satanic esotericism as a spiritual resource.

Moreover, in the nihilistic and romantic escape from modernity, there is a longing for wilderness as the means to re-root one’s ethnic heritage, drawing upon Charles Manson’s alternative family

dynamic (cells), while moving from urban adventuring to wilderness hate camps where weapons become the means to move from theory to action, escalating the potency of their ideology so as to generate publicity, new content, and in turn develop their own analysis, critiquing the failures of the far right while promoting covert strikes, ultimately even attacking power plants to cause nuclear meltdown so as to destabilize governments and create the conditions for white revolution.

What is perhaps noteworthy is the degree to which stickering and flyering on liberal arts college campuses occurs in response to the free speech rights of fascist groups being protested. The media generated, along with other traditional protest activities like banner drops, which in turn forms content for new videos, to further the development of the analysis.

Even as promotional activities are occurring, there is awareness that it is insufficient, with fascist “celebrities” JL Rockwell, George Mason, and Metzger all referenced to detail analysis that transcends right/left dualism, focusing on race, and suggesting the way to gain support is by fighting, not talking. Eventually, this is elaborated upon by Metzger, who critiques right wing groups, suggesting avoiding aboveground actions altogether, and move toward covert strikes against opposition meetings and promoting insurrection and civil (race) war (“white revolution”) as righteous warfare.

The recurring language about “the system”, where police, president, etc. are instruments of the system, and are thus enemies seems to break from traditional fascist organizations that promote state power. In contrast, AWD opposes bureaucrats, police, the U.S. Constitution, American flags, etc. That said, it is similarly in keeping with other fascist tendencies like ethnocentrism, macho heteropatriarchy, contempt for democracy, cultish personality, promoting hate crimes, promoting a sense of oppressed victimhood (“everywhere national socialism is hated”), fear, and outsider status.

The focus on urban decay (graffiti, broken down and abandoned buildings), a movement to wilderness areas and, and a kind of defense of these spaces permeates many of the videos, implying an affinity (longing?) for these places to find “roots” back into the land, while making explicit the desire to attack power systems to foster race war.

Approaching the Tradition to Locate Pathways out of it Much of these themes are articulated in Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home (2018), where she traces the post-Vietnam white power movement in its attempt to undermine the so-called Zionist Occupational Government, later changed to New World Order, by bombing infrastructure, assassinating political leaders, undermining currency, and conducting “leaderless resistance,” where autonomous cells choose their targets based on common narratives framed by movement texts as blueprints (e.g. the Turner Diaries), connected by message boards and various networks to engage in an apocalyptic confrontation with state violence.

As Vietnam seemingly normalized war crimes against communists, and veterans return home, obtaining military weapons to form underground paramilitary networks and camps for the sake of transnational anti-democratic insurrection and race war, the same general themes are found in AWD’s communiques, from the Vietnam era uniforms to the hate camps and focus on militia-driven underground leaderless resistance, to the various celebrities connected to the wider tradition of the white power movement.

In his article, “Alt-Right and Jihad” (2018), Scott Atran looks at the ecology of violent extremism, noting the parallels between white supremacist and Islamist terrorism, suggesting “when communities lack enough time to adapt to all the innovation and change, its members may fall short of their aspirations; anxiety and alienation bubble up, and violence can erupt along prevailing political and religious fault lines.” 146 Further, as Crank and Jacoby point out in their book Crime, Violence, and Global Warming (2015), links between environmental degradation, scarcity, and crime correlate, suggesting ecological disorganization exacerbates criminogenic mechanisms, leading to more crime, extremist violence, and terrorism. This degradation, manifesting as a severance from the symbiotic real, produces the psychic, social, and philosophical space that must be violently maintained by agrilogistics, with race war as a particular cause distracting from the root issue it derives and seeks to escape from.

AWD fits squarely in this Alt-right movement, and include a number of alt-right memes within their videos. As described in Nagle’s book, Kill All Normies (2017), the movement seemingly feeds off of a love of transgression, motivated by a deep cynicism and reactive nihilism shrouded in irony, a leaderless digital counter revolution against political correctness and virtue signaling. This repudiation of morality and love of transgression is similarly an attack on civility itself, and by extension civilization, rationalizing dehumanization yet doing so satirically and in a detached manner.

The intentional triggering can therefore be understood as an anti-establishment attack, targeting the hegemony of the liberal elite sensibilities so as to accelerate the collapse of a multicultural feminist, cultural Marxism, yet doing so through anti-conformity, anti-authoritarian approach seeking only to liberate the unconscious source of psychic energy derived from instinctual needs and drives, Freud’s “Id.” This is to say, if politics stems from culture, the alt-right has become a cultural factory, producing the psychic, social, and philosophical space to shift that culture through a form of mimetic warfare, using technology as the means for an open-source insurgency that comes off as a type of radical evil.

Charles Taylor suggests this tendency to resist the ethic of universalism stems from an excitement aroused in us by the rejection of the good itself. The motive here would be a kind of joy in destruction, a sense of heroic greatness in tearing 146 See Schirch, Lisa (2018) The Ecology of Violent Extremism: Perspectives on Peacebuilding and Human Security

down what the ethic of universal benevolence has tried to build…whether or not this kind of evil exists depends on a hermeneutical reading of motives…the ability to transform and transcend the instinctual heritage of nascent humanity which this move to a higher good requires would also make possible the step to what I’m calling radical evil: a drive to destroy the good which is also (largely) unanchored in this heritage.147 Taylor suggests poetry as potentially offering a “ritual of reconnection” to “the whole” since “we are biologically tied to a certain relation to the cosmos (a relation we have set about destroying in a feckless fashion).” (ibid, 344) Thus the importance of eco-poetic critiques of the hyper agrilogistic symbolism of fascism that instead can locate “the real language, the living creative one, which reconnects, as against the dead language which simply designates things that everyone can see, and allows us to manipulate them, totally ignoring their sign-character.” (ibid) This is perhaps similar to Voegelin’s recommendation for the need to restore language in order to clarify theory and recognize, in the different language symbols, the very order of existence. By reconstituting the broken whole of the symbiotic real, such language can heal and repair any severance to restore the intention for an original mammalian playfulness and the building of healthy and safe playscapes through language.

AWD thus utilizes Romanticism in the imagery it produces in conformity with its desire to escape the meaningless of the neoliberal order it identifies as the “New World Order,” or “Zionist Occupational Government,” seeking instead to make its own alienated narrative dominant. The desire for a new relationship to the land is further expressed, much like Hitler’s desire for autarkia and living space, similarly informs the narrative strategy of AWD, referring to neo-Nazi treatises like the Turner Diaries and Siege as approaches to attack the cities that express the logic of agrilogistics.

By clowning around in their videos, and engaging in a kind of “free speech extremism,” the group thus invites a disinhibition of fascist tendencies, naturalized as morally justifiable, as they seek to unite a eugenic theory with a romantic ecology in a “soil and blood” narrative that promotes an race-based approach to the land and politics, seeking to make their video communiques a kind of blueprint to follow, yet one that violently rejects the politics of multicultural solidarity and Marxist critique and therefore attacks the academy, seen as a symbol of the destruction of traditional identity. In this regard one might see a willingness to collapse the complexity of socioeconomic conditions into a symbol of apocalyptic war between the white race and harmful globalists, promoting an anti-state movement along with underground conspiracist subcultures.

This is to say, fascism becomes an omnipresent possibility, the potential to derail into a perspective constituted by the eternal struggle with the difficulties of temporality, shifting power dynamics, energy circuits, and material flows that make up the web of life, the symbiotic real. As a mode of 147 Taylor, Charles (2016) The Language Animal, pg 344

thought, it rejects reality, severing itself from inter-relationality, instead producing meaning in maintaining the severance as a necessary duty. Yet this duty and severance are both a mode-ofthought constituted by a dualism-producing boundary, the extension of which manifests in both AWD’s communiques as well as the Nazi death camps. It is a strategy of self-referential closure, a race-based strategy against the alienation of agrilogistics; and here we find perhaps a pathway out of this severance and logic.

Nazism and fascism are both alternatives sought for their opposition to the neoliberal hegemonic agrilogistics that violently sever indigeneity from the symbiotic whole in the first place. The longing for family, home, resolution, and tradition are thus a primary motivating desire. AWD rejects the eco-feminist and Marxist approach to this kind of homesteading, as where they find a piece of graffiti, “Join your local coven,” and cover it to write, “Join your local Nazis,” an unconscious promotion of patriarchy and hierarchy perhaps, yet one exemplifying the opposition to an enchanted, gender egalitarian ideal rooted in a symbiotic whole.

We might then see Nazism not so much as producing marginalization, but rather as an expression of it, the Nazi mindset as a place of division and the struggle for union, where strained relationships, violent tensions, and the death systems move from the unconscious into violent expression.

Consider the strategy for instance of using nuclear weapons to attack the infrastructure of western civilization – a strategy that seems suicidal at best. Yet one can perhaps see the desire for violent insurgency as the rage boiling by those that feel altogether unfree, where death is considered preferable to an enslaved life. Here, identity is produced in opposition to a death culture, seeking to destroy the structures that capture the individual by recourse to a death cult that simply concentrates the hyper-severance in a more extreme form.

The texture of AWD’s video communiques must then be seen as a site of struggle in an ideological space severed by agrilogistics, where fear and hatred of a disabling social system is systemically caused and therefore requires an ecological approach to re-immerse the desire to feel indigenous back into the symbiotic real, requiring alternative structures themselves capable of rupturing the typical agrilogistic mode of thought. I have sought in this paper to intimate a move from agrilogistics toward an ecopoetic critique that may go some way towards this goal.

Conclusion This essay has suggested that a new approach to white supremacy and neo-Nazism is required to dismantle it, one that can reorient the front line against Nazis themselves to the imaginal spaces in people’s minds, both fascists and anti-fascists so as to make explicit a common oppression perpetrated by the violence needed to maintain agrilogistics (“corporate profit”) at the expense of the well-being of the organisms trapped within the psychic, social, and philosophic space that manifest from and reproduce its logic.

AWD for instance communicates a particular narrative tradition that is important to understand as part of the larger ecosystem it operates within, and in fact is operating as part of a leaderless resistance cell strategy, hiding a broader movement of sedition driven by movement literature. It is important to know this history to realize the internal struggle, empirical experience, and the genealogy of symbols, and how these elements converge in the individual expressions of the white power movement.

Eco-poetics in turn offers an important alternative interpretation of the Nazi phenomenon, one that identifies the wider ecosystem that informs and produces desire in any of its constituent members, yet able to engage with the relations and values by reorienting the relationships of a semioticmaterial reality to heal the trauma of severance, and restore the memory of indigeneity and the love of land through crafting an alternative language able to provide an alternative habitat to live and operate within.

Like any home, love and kindness must be a necessary social arrangement, able to dissolve any harmful psychological or social structures, depriving them of the energy flow needed to concretize and sustain themselves; instead, a more effective language can catalyze system transformation and reorganize the relationships necessary to ensure a more skillful, poetic dwelling, one that is contingent on the valuing and liking for both human and non-human, and therefore needs the presence of both.

Collapse Criminology: Terror, Ecology, and the Biosemiotics of Extremism Abstract: As in any discipline, the evolution of criminological theory is determined by the reigning metaphysic of the day, whose explanatory power works to contextualize a given crime. Philosophy thus offers a necessary tool for the study of crime and harm that inevitably emerge at the confluence of power, law, politics, economics, ethics, epistemology, and other sociocultural spheres of influence. The recent emergence of the subfields of green, conservation, and climate criminologies suggests, in turn, that with the development of environmental philosophy, the scientific paradigm is again changing to accommodate the situational context of crime.

This paper looks at the increasingly dire predictions of ecological and social collapse to suggest how these phenomena together affect directions in criminology. Specifically focused on religious terrorism and violent extremism, I trace the relationship between terrorism, extremism, and the psycho-physical contexts in order to identify the semiotic process in structuring a given socioecological order or disorder. My objective to demonstrate a metaphysical environment that situates crime indicates the breakdown of social order, where the dual aspects (psychic, physical) of carrying capacity push individuals out of their respective zones of resilience, highlights the contentious claim that a threatened ecosystem or bioregion will enact terror through its member species. That is to say, religious terrorism and violent extremism must be understood as signaling a desire for systemic transformation, since it is the mode itself that is recognized as a threat to the well-being of its constituent members. Since state-responses to terror, violent extremism, and criminality generally attempt to problem-solve within an obsolete paradigm (deterrence), this paper ends with speculative solutions suggested by the paradigmatic logic of a more comprehensive metaphysic that views ecological restoration as both addressing the need for systematic transformation along with the root causes of harm, simultaneously increasing ecological and psychological resiliency for individuals and communities alike.

But where danger threatens That which saves from it also grows148

The Ecology of Crime Within the social sciences, criminology is a contested domain, where multiple perspectives and theories compete for political empowerment. The effect is the politicization of a science geared more towards placating popular perceptions of crime than adequately addressing the real conditions that cause crime. In this section, I hope to 1) integrate new methods into what I will call “traditional criminology,” before 2) linking crime semiotically to socioecological collapse so as to 3) rethink peacemaking strategies to more effectively address extremism.

148 Holderlin, Friedrich (1994) “Patmos,” in Friedrich Holderlin, Poems and Fragments, tr.

Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press), pg. 483

To do so, I employ what Lisa Schirch calls a “nested model of violent extremism,” where acts of terror are situated within networks employing extremist belief systems, themselves enmeshed in a wider local context, informed by individual identity, community grievances, national ideology, and global exchange.149 The implication is twofold: the means of intervention in various aspects contributing to violent extremism, terrorism, and, more generally, crime is better identified; and the narrative framing that would provide terrorism, violent extremism, and crime as a likely focal point (“Schelling point”), toward which actors might conclude would be the best options for desired outcomes, is more ably disrupted. Put simply, the causal factors of terrorist acts transcend both the individual groups and extremist narratives that frame them.

Yet the task to disrupt these frames is exceedingly difficult given the complex nature of the interrelated factors and lack of definitional clarity. As such, I use the following definition: Terrorism is the premeditated and unlawful use or threatened use of violence against a noncombatant population or target having symbolic significance, with the aim of either inducing political or religious change through intimidation and destabilization or destroying a population identified as an enemy.150 This definition is problematic, given terrorism is necessarily defined by a state, which assumes a monopoly on “legitimate” or “lawful” use of violence (as well as its own existence as legitimate).

Further, the definition brings into question the definition of “noncombatant,” especially where notions of “war” are “complicity” are similarly interrogated and complexified. Nevertheless, this paper highlights the fact that terrorism is an asymmetric tactic by a non-state actor meant to induce political change. As such, it challenges both the state’s monopoly on violence as well as the very legitimacy of this state.

J.M. Berger suggests extremism should be understood as an in-group defining itself as existentially threatened by a constructed out-group, with violence against the out-group as a necessary solution to the crisis this division provokes.151 Moreover, such extremist groups tend to define through personal or community grievances that in turn are conditioned by wider factors at play.

In this regard, preventing terrorism, violent extremism, and criminality requires attending to the wider socio-political context, integrally related to the ecological context that situates the behaviors and beliefs. These crimes thus signal the presence of grievances that function as the material-semiotic of the sociocultural context, as well as the desire for systemic and structural transformation, suggesting the degree to which restorative pathways may be more effective than deterrence would be in countering violent extremism by addressing the core factors involved.

Traditional Criminologies 149 Schirch, Lisa (2018) The Ecology of Violent Extremism: Perspectives on Peacebuilding and Human Security. Rowman and Littlefield International: New York, NY 150 Forst et al. (2011) Criminologists on Terrorism and Homeland Security. Cambridge University Press.

151 Berger, J.M. (2018) Extremism. MIT Press:

Following this ecology of crime, criminology then provides an interdisciplinary science uniting multiple scientific domains (biology, sociology, psychology, pathology, policy, economics, penology, etiology, phenomenology, victimology…), while uniquely located at the intersection of structural power, law, politics, economics, resistance, and other sociocultural spheres of influence regarding its research objects (delinquency, victims, social environment, methods of control, behavioral prognosis and treatment…). As such, it blends social, humanistic, natural, and technical sciences to offer a transdisciplinary, empirical-based approach to address and rectify unjust relationships between environment, society, and individuals as both a synthetic and group led process.

Even so, there being no shared scientific paradigm, competing models and perspectives abound, based on a number of contradicting premises. For instance, the question as to whether laws are made by consensus or by competing factions with power differentials who wield influence over the law against one another is the difference between Consensus and Conflict models of crime.

Further, the difference between prioritizing social stability or individual civil rights suggests two other models, a Control or Due Process models of crime. These models themselves are highly subjective and often reflect different political outlooks. For instance, conservative perspectives tend to assume a consensus model and uphold the status quo, seeking a control model to protect society against the so-called deviant, sometimes at the expense of social freedoms. Liberals on the other hand might similarly endorse the status quo, but are more likely to accept a Conflict model of crime, and therefore focusing on the due process model. Finally, radical criminology might see crime as contingent upon the wider social structures and economic arrangements, or even that the criminal justice process is inherently illegitimate.

These models are important to consider because they suggest different approaches to crime that become politically empowered. For instance, by isolating a criminal act and denying the criminogenic interactions between psycho-social-ecological processes and crime propensities or exposures, the logical flow model that guides the perception-choice of terrorism, violent extremism, or crime as an attractive option, is left unconscious. Moreover, in a highly polarized climate, when resources are scarce, political debate over where to intervene may stalemate, so that the underlying conditions are left unacknowledged and crime remains similarly unaddressed.

This is to say the evolution of criminological theory increasingly integrates new factors as empirical research is compiled and assessed, complexifying crime models in terms of what lies below the surface, while challenging premises and assumptions. Of course, reality and the perception of reality do not always align, so that policy is not always driven by evidence-based research, especially when value-systems are prioritized over scientific methodology.152 152 A paradigmatic example of this may be the Salem witch trials. While there were “experts” on witchcraft using “authoritative sources” (the bible), a long history of witchcraft, and even eyewitnesses accounts of the devil, socioecological trends at play in this contagion are less apparent. For instance, the loss of productive farmland over the course of decades along with the payment of taxes by farmer in Salem Village (where most accusers lived) to merchants in Salem Town (where most of the accused lived) suggests a pattern left unconscious by narrative accounts if we do not consider the role of environmental scarcity and economic strain

Much work has been done to understand how to reduce crime and recidivism for example, where child delinquency is found to have a significant relationship to later crime, so that children with greater risk factors and exposures to such risks (due to pregnancy, infancy, toddler, midchildhood, and adolescence onward) are more likely to become serious, violent, or chronic offenders, suggesting in term that family and youth services is a necessary strategy for crime reduction.153 Other causal factors leading to crime or recidivism include anti-social personality patterns, pro-criminal attitudes, and social supports for crime.154 Further research shows the most important issues for former felons in their reentry to society includes housing, employment, family and friends, programs and services, health, substance abuse support, and parole systems.155 It is fair to say then that those with reduced risk factors at an early age and after (those better resourced) are less likely to commit crimes or recidivate. Crime in a sense then offers a measure of socio-economic and cultural “health.” Indeed, this conclusion is so well documented as to influence law enforcement to target high-crime “hotspots,” based on greater numbers of criminals and higherthan-average levels of victimization. Crime mapping is thus used to identify trends and patterns of criminal behavior within a given area, influencing patrol and parole strategies by allocating resources through a kind of “predictive policing.”

Similar predictive algorithms utilize databases, computer models, criminal histories and information from criminological theories (biological, psychological, and social determinist and trait theories, social conflict and process theories, and life-course theories among others), such as socioeconomic factors, social interactions, social media, gang membership, and peer groups to determine specific individuals in a community more likely to commit violent crimes or become victims. In Colorado for instance, Pretrial Assessment Tools deem the risk of a defendant to be based on a score stemming from factors such as possession of a phone, owning or renting a residence, contributing to residential payments, alcoholic problems, mental health treatment, age at first arrest, past jail or prison sentences, active warrants, other pending cases in court, history of probation or parole, and history of bail jumping.156 This is to say, criminality emerges where communities cannot provide programs, services, and resources to prepare its members for life without recourse to crime, including drug treatment, medical care, rehabilitation services, or job referrals. Rather than a punitive approach to crime, preparing individuals and lessening obstacles (public prejudice, lack of support or skills to find jobs, motivation and attitude, documentation required by employment) rather than increasing them would likely reduce crime according to evidence-based research.

Often however, during political campaigns and legislative hearings, when approaches to crime and harm-reduction are debated and money is allocated around the different aspects of the criminal justice system, much of the discourse is less driven by evidence-based research than toughon-crime deterrence approaches meant not so much to address issues but alleviate constituent contributing to structural violence.

153 CJ (2017) 317 154 Ibid 305.

155 Criminal Justice in Action, 371 156 Ibid 230

concerns and appeal to their value systems, especially in times of political uncertainty and economic inequality and deprivation where individuals are unsure whether their own needs will be addressed if offenders are perceived as competition for basic needs and services they too lack access to.

Two critical conclusions are thus apparent: that 1) the causes of crime are place-based, in that certain hotspots probabilistically determine crime rates based on demographic trends, social services, political neglect, economic opportunity, and other sociological trends; and 2) effective preventative intervention requires “the coordinated delivery of services from numerous agencies, but these agencies were severely fragmented, resulting in ineffective preventative intervention.” 157 Terrorism studies, drawing from this kind of economic strain, similarly suggests terrorism is more likely when individuals experience collective strains that are 1) high in magnitude, with civilians affected, 2) such strains are perceived as unjust, and 3) inflicted by substantially more powerful others.158 These strains in turn contribute to negative emotional states and traits, reducing the ability to legally, militarily, and psychologically cope; reduce social controls that restrain terrorism; strengthen in-group and out-group extremist identity construction that commit such groups to violence; provide a model for terrorism to foster beliefs favorable to terrorism; each of which are further conditioned by still more inependent factors.

This is to say, a sense of economic injustice is psychologically present, where crime— terrorism and violent extremism included—takes place in an environment where capacity for services is degraded and, in an era of climate chaos, increasingly so.

Climate Change and the Degradation of Socioecological Relations While the preceding section highlighted contrasting perspectives and criminological theories, as well as the gap between what is needed to reduce risk factors leading to crime and the reality of a politically motivated approach to criminal justice reform in an economy marked by inequality and competition for scarce resources, the current section suggests further detrimental trends that in turn insinuate a likelihood for increased crime in the future.

Two models in particular indicate the economic mode of production as the source of environmental and economic degradation, both of which generate the conditions for socioecological collapse as scarcity disrupts socioecological processes and exacerbates criminogenic mechanisms, leading to crime and violence. When this collapse is in process, the religious belief systems of a given complex adaptive system begin to lose legitimacy, leading to new ideological developments – what the phenomenon of religious/ideological extremism provides: a perceived alternative survival pathway.

The first model comes from political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon who suggests environmental scarcity interacts with political, economic, and other factors to generate harsh social effects that in turn help produce civil violence. The constrained economic activity and subsequent inequality, social segmentation, and justice system hardening in turn leads to increased potential for

157 CJ 317 158 Agnew, Robert (2017) “General Strain Theory and Terrorism.” In The Handbook of the Criminology of Terrorism. Eds. Gary LaFree and Joshua D. Freilich. John Wiley and Sons Inc. UK.

ethnic conflicts, terrorism and insurgencies, individual level criminal activity, gang strengthening and migration, organized crime, and human trafficking, as well as crimes by the state and state elites.

In Homer-Dixon’s model, demographic factors (population growth, unequal resource access, decrease in quality and quantity of resources) lead to increased environmental scarcity that, exacerbated by ecosystem vulnerability (due to human-caused climate change) in turn leads to social conflict (migration or expulsion, ethnic conflicts, weakened states, decreased economic productivity, deprivation conflicts, coups d’etat), which feeds back into both political and economic conditions along with the increased scarcity of renewable resources: “The evidence we have presented here suggests there are significant causal links between scarcities of renewable resources and violence.” 159 Whereas analysists may tend to interpret these social effects (migration or expulsion, weakened states, ethnic conflicts, decreased economic productivity, deprivation conflicts, and coups d’etat) as the principle causes for violence, this overlooks environmental scarcity and the demographic trends leading to such scarcity as an underlying stress.160 A corroborating model comes from Robert Agnew, who lists the effects of climate change and its impact on crime. Increased temperature, changing precipitation patterns, and rising sea levels mean substantive habitat changes, flooding, negative health effects, food and freshwater shortages, threats to and the loss of livelihoods, increased migrations, growing mega-cities, and increased social conflicts, whose size, timing, and distribution will become increasingly detrimental, affecting the most vulnerable and least able to cope or mitigate these effects.161 Climate change, Agnew argues, will become a source of stress, with negative emotions and desperate situations generating pressures conducive to criminality. For instance, increased temperatures and frequencies of extreme weather events or “natural” disasters, shortages of basic necessities, increased poverty and inequality, forced migration, exposure to armed conflict, strains affecting higher-class individuals, corporations, and developed nations (fraud, insurance, etc.) will prompt escapes from strain (theft, illegal immigration…), revenge against the source of strain (vandalism, terrorism), or alleviate negative emotions (drug use), at the same time reducing social controls while fostering beliefs favorable to crime. The magnitude and injustice of these events may in turn throw the legitimacy of institutions into question, while disorganizing other control mechanisms (families, communities, states) that in turn increase opportunities for crime, foster social conflict, and contribute to new criminogenic mechanisms that promote higher levels of individual, group, corporate, and state crime. Agnew thus suggests climate change will likely become the major driver of crime, potentially leading to the breakdown of social order altogether.

159 Homer-Dixon (1993) Environmental Change and Violent Conflict.

160 In one example, Homer-Dixon focuses on the Philippines, where population growth lead to a popular migration to the uplands, which further eroded soil resulting in a lower per-capita availability of productive land. People in turn migrated to cities or further impoverished the uplands, leading to urban unrest and the weakening of the state, as well as rural receptivity to insurgency. In this way, Homer-Dixon’s model of demographic trends, leading to scarcity and the social consequences leading to violence seem to be affirmed.

161 Agnew, Robert (201?) “Dire Forecast: A Theoretical Model of the Impact of Climate Change on Crime”

What is critically important to realize is the role of state-corporate collusion and capitalism in producing the ecological disorganization that increases criminal activity.162 Drawing from the “Treadmill of Production” thesis, the need for adequate wages to maintain consumer demand and generate tax revenue ensures ecosystem exploitation to maintain corporate profit, with increased capital investment accelerating ecosystem exploitation. For this reason, the Treadmill of Production’s techniques increased not only production but also pollution and raw material extraction. In this way, the effects of ToP accelerated ecological disorganization and destruction, behaviors we have defined as green crimes from the perspective of the ecosystem. 163 The rule of law itself can be understood as oppressive, with capitalism in a sense determining the state of environmental law as where powerful interests use such laws to promote extraction, production, and commercialization. Environmental law indeed intensifies the conflict between capital and ecology, creating the false impression of the effectiveness of deterrence while maintaining technology and regulation will solve ecological crises. In a sense, there is a refusal to study ecological harm not defined by criminal law, as to do so would be impossible to the degree a colonial settler society, rooted in extraction, necessitates ecological harm to maintain its prosperity.

Structural forces such as capitalism and mechanisms within capitalism such as the treadmill of production generate ecological crimes by the very nature of the structural composition of these forces of production…in terms of ecological Marxism, this means that the structures of capitalism and nature are in inherent contradiction and conflict, with each expansion of capitalism promoting ecological destruction and the disorganization of nature.164 The extraction and waste disrupts ecosystems, while generating enormous wealth that in turn produces an oligarchy whose power extends to the legal sphere, influencing law to ensure this activity remains legal. In a sense, to reduce conflict, the definition of crime itself needs to change.

This is a critical realization in light of the Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY) model of collapse, where social collapse is a consequence of both 1) strong economic stratification, and 2) overexploitation of natural resources, determining the lifecycle of any given society.165 That is, the over-exploitation of either labor or nature – necessary aspects of capitalism and industrial growth models 166— can independently result in societal collapse.167 Environmental scarcity means energy dries up, 162 Lynch et al. (2013) Is Environmental Disorganization a Crime?

163 (250, Lynch et al. 2017) 164 Lynch et al. (2013) “Is it a Crime to Produce Ecological Disorganization?” British Journal of Criminology.

165 Motesharrei, Safa et al. (2014) “Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies.” Ecological Economics. V. 101 www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615 166 See Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems Analysis (2004) 167 According to the observed trends suggested by the Limits to Growth: 30-year update, we can expect such a collapse perhaps between 2030-2050

political and economic inequality means the poorest necessarily engage in exploitative relationships to survive, while elites maintain these relationships they benefit from. 168 Cosmologically, this is to be expected as the increased influx of energy flows into complex systems drives their complexity, whether the dissipative structure is a star, a living organism, an ecosystem, a civilization, a business, etc., while the deprivation of that energy flow necessarily assures the collapse of the given structure. Because these energy flows occur in a closed system – the universe, where energy can neither be created nor destroyed – all dissipative structures unavoidably collapse: “As crucial as energy flows are to sustaining or increasing complexity…scarcity ultimately causes the collapse of complex systems…complexity collapses as that energy source dries up, and the structure disintegrates.”169 Complex adaptive systems can never grow beyond what their energy inputs (solar energy, minerals in soil, water levels) can support, and tend to collapse when fluctuations in these inputs are sharp.

Understanding the role of crime in society requires a grand view. Crime has been linked to a fragmented ecosystem where services from agencies and institutions cannot be delivered. This ecosystem will only face more problems as pressures test the resiliency of socioecological relationships already threatened with disorganization from the economic mode of production, as well as its effects of social inequality and environmental degradation, two factors historically linked to every instance of social collapse in which unsustainable thermoeconomic flows are disproportionate or eventually blocked altogether. Indeed, the endless accumulation of capital, backed by imperial power and capitalist rationality, transforms landscapes with singular purpose – a way of thinking described as “world-ecological,” focused on the existing constitutive relations within the web of life.170 The modern world-system becomes, in this approach, a capitalist world-ecology: a civilization that joins the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the production of nature as an organic whole. This means that capital and power – and countless other strategic relations – do not act upon nature, but develop through the web of life. Crises are turning points of world-historical processes – accumulation, imperialism, industrialization, and so forth – that are neither social nor environmental as conventionally understood. Rather, these processes are bundles of human and extra-human natures, materially practiced and symbolically enabled. 171 Capitalism’s treadmill of production, accelerated by industrialism, drives collapse, inequality, and scarcity, conditions that foster criminogenic mechanisms, encourage criminal behavior, and increase the likelihood for terrorism, extremism, and violence. This is to suggest then that crime offers an indicator, or signal for an inequitable flow of energy, signaling an unjust social order around and against which crime offers pathways through which to avoid such deprivation.

168 See Radical Transformation 169 See Big History – “Analyzing Complexity” Coursera video.

170 Moore, Jason W. (2016) Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism PM Press: Oakland, CA 171 Ibid, pg. 97

Cosmotheanthropic Biosemiotics The symbolism of crime, as pointed out last section, indicates both a degree of social collapse as well as the rejection of social order. As such, crime provides us with an indicator of the health or unhealth of society and the breakdown of socio-ecological order. I argue in this section that a cosmotheanthropic semiotics is needed to identify the source of disorder and re-align the society with the needs and carrying capacity of the environment. For if insurrectionary violence signals the desire for systemic change, terrorism, like other crimes, can be understood as a kind of primitive rebellion by the ecosystem itself against an unsustainable social form.

This in turn suggests a method by which to orient our inquiry. Marx explains: The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.172 That is to say, infrastructural variables are primary factors of inquiry, the principal interface between culture and nature and boundary across which biogeochemical restraints interact with sociocultural practices that would attempt to overcome or modify such restraints. As such, one can assume these restraints are “passed on to the structural and superstructural components,” the causal chains affecting cultural evolution.173 This is not to say that the mental, ideological, or structural components cannot achieve a degree of autonomy from the behavioral infrastructure, but rather that infrastructural variables induce a kind of “probabilistic determinism” where the mode of economic production in material life – those technologies and techniques used to harness food and energy and exchange and distribute goods – are passed on to social organizations, structures, and systems, as well as the wider worldview.

Energy from the environment is drawn into the social arrangement through this infrastructure, driving sociocultural evolution, with social structures organizing and facilitating this arrangement, the worldview in turn rationalizing it. The effect is to make sacred those strategies that are adaptive, while making taboo, or criminalizing those behaviors considered maladaptive, or antithetical to the infrastructural arrangement. This is to say, a sense of the sacred is a product of place, systemically caused, with ideology grounded in the economic social function projected into the thoughts and feelings, experienced as natural, even divine forces.

To put it succinctly, the disbelief in the mode of production and economic base, exists in contradiction to the laws of the social structure in question, projected into the minds and will of its constituent members “by people who have become intellectually and emotionally emancipated from the existing system.”174 If thoughts are complex elaborations of what we do and how we feel, then we can expect that the techniques needed for a culture to remain within the physical carrying capacity of a region may have a psychological correlate.

172 Marx, Karl (1859) “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” 173 Harris, Marvin (1980) Cultural Materialism.

174 Lukacs, George (1968) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. pg. 257

We can see this especially where Traditional Ecological Knowledge institutionalizes adaptive strategies to ecological circumstances in narrative, spiritual form. This is to say, indigenous cosmology represents a “blueprint for ecological adaptation, positing worldviews as the organizing concept behind the cultural ecology of a group.”175 As those who are sensitive to observed signals determine optimum points for resource management and integrate the combined effects of environmental variables, these indicators form the basis of a complex adaptive systems thinking and holistic understanding of ecological dynamics, formalized as an optimization model and spiritually sanctified. In a sense, the spiritual and political leader is the same: the shaman, functioning as an “ecosystem doctor,” who compares observations against the collective memory of experience, choosing linguistic variables in place of numerical variables to create a learning model able to “cure a social malfunctioning.”

These social controls of necessity possess marked adaptive implications and must be enforced primarily in those aspects of existence which, to a large degree, determine survival…[the task of the shaman] is to cure a social malfunctioning. The diseased organism of the patient is secondary in importance and will be treated eventually, both empirically and ritually, but what really counts is the re-establishment of the rules that will avoid over-hunting, the depletion of certain plant resources, and unchecked population increase. The shaman becomes thus a truly powerful force in the control and management of resources.176 The adaptive capacity of resilient ecosystems is achieved through such individuals, attuned to ecological variables, biodiversity, and the relationships between them. Meanwhile, a reductionist science can degrade this resilience, whereas indigenous belief systems can institute and maintain systemic resilience by focusing on social learning and “keystone structuring processes.”177 To summarize, the probabilistic infrastructural determinism previously mentioned suggests a psychological correlate to the techniques institutionalized for the sake of ecological resilience. In this regard, energy flow, mediated by infrastructure, drives complex adaptive systems, with resilience strategies institutionalized as adaptive mechanisms to maintain the dissipative structure of the complex adaptive system. Further, the biosemiotics process where a socioecological order is generated and maintained by reading the ecological indicators drives cultural evolution.

This provides a cosmotheanthropic biosemiotics, where an entanglement of cosmology, divinity, and humanity are brought into a symbolic system utilized to ensure cultural perpetuity by existing within the carrying capacity of the bioregion. At the same time, when the infrastructure that constrains the social structures and worldview of a given culture is found to be unsustainable, indeed the economic mode of production degrades the landscape and ensures social inequity – causal mechanisms for the collapse of socioecological states of equilibrium – the religious and ideological validation of violence against this infrastructure, social structures and systems, and the worldview that regulates these structures arises. This violence is itself an expression of 175 Sacred Ecology, pg. 77 176 Ibid, 78.

177 Gunderson, Lance H. (2000) “Ecological Resilience –in Theory and Application”

socioecological relationships, its underlying narrative emerging from the energy circuits whose agents themselves make meaning and thus prompt “criminal” activity.

If extremist ideology justifying political violence is an indicator of material circumstances in which cosmic energy pathways are blocked leading to cultural collapse, then not only can terroristic crimes be seen to indicate these motivating conditions of collapse, but rather it indicates that a threatened ecosystem will itself enact terror through extremists aligned with its logic and desire for resilience.178 In a sense, terrorism and extremist violence may be a kind of trauma-based reaction to socioecological degradation, where criminal violence is perceived as a strategy to reduce external stresses absorbed by an ecosystem, usually produced by the state-corporate nexus, to maintain resiliency. Derrida in a sense, says something similar, that terrorism is, a symptom of a kind of autoimmune disorder that threatens the life of participatory democracy…[indicating] the spontaneous suicide of the defense mechanism supposed to protect the organism from external aggression…[and] ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against it’s ‘own’ immunity.179 In a sense, crime provides a mechanism to re-present an auto-immunitary response, a material semiotic that represents a desire for systemic transformation, and with it, the conditions needed to eliminate the necessity to engage in criminal behavior to survive. That is, increasing crime becomes a signal, an icon, index, and symbol of an increasing threat of collapse, suggesting increasing exploitation (of labor and environment) itself indicating scarcity.

In this regard, insurrectionary sympathizers read the landscape, understanding that the political and economic system degrades land and community, converging into collaborative insurrectionary hubs to receive and redistribute information, before authoring new texts and terrorist acts to more effectively attack the system supposedly there to protect the organism (but that cannot due to its infrastructure, technology, and economic mode of production).

One can see an important problem then with the current state of counter-terrorism and counterinsurgent theories – namely, that the killing and destroying of these terrorist groups does not in fact address the root cause of terrorism, extremism, or insurgency, and therefore will not prevent it. Whereas the national security state’s recognizes the twin threats of climate chaos and terrorism, its strategy tends to reflect self-preservation, deterrence, and the destruction of its enemies, spending billions to militarize borders and kill off insurgents. At the same time, it should be noted that “empirical evidence at both the international and domestic levels seriously undermines the rational deterrence thesis.”180 Indeed, as Michael Tonry suggests, “there is little credible evidence that changes in sanctions affect crime rates.” Rather, these deterrence arguments are “generally

178 More theoretical weight should be mobilized here, namely process philosophers that offer experience as a combination of mental and material poles; cosmogenesis suggesting reality as holding psychic and material aspects of energy; new materialism suggesting matter has agency; theories of consciousness and the extended mind, with consciousness arising in the ecological circuitry between entities, along with traditional ecological knowledge.

179 Derrida, Philosophy in a Time of Terror.

180 See Maureen Hiebert

normative arguments in disguise…disagreements based on deeply held moral intuition are seldom resolvable by resort to argument.”181 Thus we might recognize in these competing approaches to a common phenomenon, the reality that while counter-terrorism efforts typically reinforce and reify structures of power in society, using violence to deter those using force to oppose its hegemony, insurrectionary action seeks to eliminate those structures of power thought to dominate and marginalize landscapes and actors using violence.182 Hence, a biosemiotics of terror, extremist violence, and insurrection in turn articulates a system-critique which rejects political representation, abhors domination, and seeks autonomy and liberation.

The relevance of a cosmotheanthropic biosemiotic is crucial to these ends: at the very basic level, the perceptual experience of a stimuli, or sensation, will be interpreted to signal a specific circumstance that requires a reaction. Because violence signals the collapse of social order, religious terrorism signals overshoot of ecological carrying capacity, so that the physical carrying capacity correlates to a mental carrying capacity, the biosemiotics of which we can utilize to find more effective pathways to a desired end, where mentality is capable of feeling its environment to make any decision.

To understand this mental aspect, we might focus on the role of archetypes as indicating the physical circumstances from which the unconscious directs the conscious mind. That these archetypes are activated in physical situations helps us to realize that our symbols of the divine are contingent upon our experience of the world. This archetypal psychophysical process requires both an instinctual and philosophically reflective mode to adapt and react to the given circumstances presented to an individual. On the one hand, habits and beliefs are fixed, yet at the same time the introduction of doubt initiates a quest to find alternative beliefs that are more persuasive, alleviate doubt, and fix new habits. In this regard, the tendency to engage in violent or peaceful behaviors are semiotic responses to particular ecological settings that contextualize political decision-making processes. The inner and outer aspects, the mental and physical poles of energy, at increasing scales (individual, communal, bioregional) are united by a material-semiotic that induces changes and particular responses: the individual resonates with the ecological context, the ecological process resonates with individual desire, and the psycho-physical aspects of energy signal behaviors to remain within or move back into the natural limits or ecological resiliency.

In a sense then, political extremism can be understood as a kind of ecological criticism, and further, criminology can be seen as a theory of ecological resilience. In which case, what are the ecological conditions that produce crime, and how better to systematically cause its absence?

A New Interpretive Framework Today, climate change and terrorism both pose tremendous crises for a global society, yet relatively few identify the common source that drives both. Climate criminology as an emerging discipline offers both a science and metaphysic to understand the psycho-social-bio-(sub)cultural and ecological conditions underlying crime. Indeed, it provides us with an integral approach that traces crime to political, economic, and socioecological relationships, and the thermoeconomic flow 181 Tonry, Michael (2008) “Learning from the Limitations of Deterrence Research” 182 See Michael Loadenthal’s The Politics of Attack

structure’s circulation of psychophysical energy dynamics. In doing so, we are presented with crime as a material-semiotic signaling collapse, the unjust relationships driving it, and the desire for an alternative lifeway and social organization. In short, crime indicates the need for systemic transformation to avoid the collapse of social order altogether.

As such, we are tasked with finding outlets for system change that are more effective than violent pathways if in fact they do exist. This offers a strategy of ecological restoration to mitigate recidivism and cut crime rates. Similarly, it may encourage ecological hotspot restoration to address sociopolitical conflict. If capitalism prevents meeting basic needs, democratic responsiveness, and the equitable distribution of energy, then the ability to ensure an integrated resource base, a resilient political organization, and a more efficient flow structure can work to address the criminogenic mechanisms.

It is likely to be the case that religious terrorism will grow as scarcity grows, but also that insurrection will not be prevented through punitive mechanisms that attack those engaged in violence. Indeed, to target these militants would not address the physical and psychological conditions that signal violence as a necessary pathway to systemic transformation. Rather, ecological restoration and systemic transformation are hypothesized as more accurate predictors for lowering crime rates. Indeed, crime is less likely to happen where a direct relationship and opportunities for systemic transformation exist. As such, networks engaged in rebellion would be better served by increasing energy density flow, by 1) finding and consuming more efficiently decentralized energy sources, 2) by compressing the time-scale of the energy flow structure through community subsistence techniques, and 3) decreasing the overall mass of the system. 183 This is to say, a complex adaptive system must necessarily reach the narrow range of optimal energy flows that empower the structures and pathways needed to address the needs of the community and its individuals.

For instance, citizen science and civic engagement projects that improve overall global, local, and regional security through a synergy of approaches and services, that reduce economic inequality, improve political participation, and decrease environmental degradation will improve socioecological resilience and likely reduce the crime the derives from collapsing world-ecology. This suggests post-hegemonic ecological communities engaged in mass restoration projects must change the definition of crime to include ecological harm (the exploitation of nature) while recreating the economic order towards a more efficient thermoeconomic flow structure able to more equitably distribute energy and resources.

Environmental movements similarly offer a course for prefigurative politics, where market “solutions� can be confronted and disarmed, engaged in global solidarity efforts with those movements in places struggling with violent repression. In each case however, there must be the sustained engagement in reskilling towards subsistence technologies to reduce fossil fuel infrastructure, so as to challenge extraction and colonial settler structures in any and all forms, in turn providing the infrastructure for a new language, a new research program able to validate and verify the hypotheses spelled out in this paper.

Environmental impacts have economic impacts that in turn create sociopolitical impacts which destabilize the peace and security of that society. Already there are examples that large-scale 183 See Applying Big History

restoration efforts can help to secure regions in conflict, 184 lower crime rates in urban settings,185 and help in prisons to lower recidivist rates.186 Already, civic engagement and citizen science projects have been found to lower crime rates.

Currently, free market capitalism, the national security state, and the counter climate change movement work together, literally empowered by fossil fuels. I have tried to disentangle these, suggesting the treadmill of production at the core of the economic mode is itself a threat to national security. Indeed, the semiotic chain I’ve attempted to lay out must be “black-boxed” through a research program that verifies and validates such conclusions, in which case, it seems that restoration and environmental rehabilitation programs would necessarily emerge to redetermine the others.

This essay has attempted to demonstrate how acts of terror are nested in violent extremist beliefs, but these beliefs themselves emerge from the wider ecological context of individual identity, community grievances, national ideology, and global exchange –all the time shifting the landscape; as such, the landscape itself, and the relationships that constitute it must be the focus of any criminological theory and response. In shifting the focus from the isolated act to the circuitry of energy bubbling up from the land, constrained by the economic mode, through the social structure, and into the so-called extremist worldview, we are offered a truly revolutionary and ecological approach to peacemaking processes, whereby those sensitive to the needs of the land can work to institutionalize adaptive strategies able to promote global and regional security through the (infra)structural prevention of mass atrocities, violence, and crime by introducing new spiritual and ecological survival techniques.

Bibliography Crank, John and Linda Jacoby (2015) Crime, Violence, and Global Warming. Routledge: New York, NY Homer-Dixon, Thomas F. (1999) Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ Lynch et al. (2000) The New Primer in Radical Criminology: Critical Perspectives on Crime, Power, and Identity. Third Edition. Criminal Justice Press. Monsey, NY. Lynch et al. (2017) Green Criminology: Crime, Justice, and the Environment. University of California. Oakland, CA Mckay, Kevin (2017) Radical Transformation: Oligarchy, Collapse, and the Crisis of Civilization.

Between the Lines: Toronto, Ontario 184 See the Great Green Wall of Africa 185 See Research agenda 186 See San Quentin

Schirch, Lisa (2018) The Ecology of Violent Extremism: Perspectives on Peacebuilding and Human Security. Rowman and Littlemfield Internation: Lanham, MD Staniland, Paul (2014) Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse. Cornell University Press. Ithaca, NY