Quotes from John Zerzan

There's a hollowness to civilized life. It doesn't appeal to people, and some people react with extreme violence.

Mass society has displaced real community, where people function together and account for their own lives.

It is our fall from a simplicity and fullness of life directly experienced, from the sensuous moment of knowing, which leaves a gap that the symbolic can never bridge.

"The people" aren't running anything. That's why technology has replaced politics as the source of ideology. The ideological claims are hollow and absurd, and nobody believes them anymore.

I don't want to be overly dramatic about it, but I think people more and more wonder, is this living, or are we just going through the motions? What's happening? Is everything being leached out of life? Is the whole texture and values and everything kind of draining away?

People are not more connected, despite the billions in ads from the IT companies. Why call it community? It's just technology. The machines are connected, not the people.

Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.

Mental illness is primarily an unconscious escape from this design, a form of passive resistance.

a minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us ... the individual freed from the order of time,

No time is entirely present,

Male violence toward women originated with agriculture, which transmuted women into beasts of burden and breeders of children.

when justice is against the law, only outlaws can effect justice.

Ritual regulation of production and belligerence means that domestication has become the decisive factor. "The emergence of systematic warfare, fortifications, and weapons of destruction," says Hassan, "follows the path of agriculture.

history is the negation of nature.

To combat cultural genocide one needs a critique of civilization itself. -Gary Snyder

To symbolize is to express time consciousness, for the symbol embodies the structure of time

Agriculture creates and elevates possessions; consider the longing root of belongings, as if they ever make up for the loss.

As Proust put it, the only paradises are those we have lost.

René Girard proposes that rituals of sacrifice are a necessary counter to endemic aggression and violence in society.

Sentences will be confined to museums if the emptiness of writing persists," predicted Georges Bataille.

Edward Carpenter looked at civilization as a kind of disease we have to pass through.48 This Decadence can be overcome. Confronting the nature of the whole is the inescapable challenge.

But as we have seen, recurring transitions and crises are proof that civilization never enjoys a long, untroubled sleep.

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Work, as a distinct category of life, likewise did not exist until agriculture.