John Zerzan > Quotes

“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.”
― John Zerzan

“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?”
― John Zerzan

“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.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“God first created silence: whole, indivisible, complete. All creatures--man, woman, beast, insect, bird, and fish--lived happily together with this silence until one day man and woman lay down together and between them created the first word. This displeased God deeply and in anger she shook out her bag of words over the world, sprinkling and showering her creation with them. Her word store rained down upon all creatures, shattering forever the whole that once was silence. God cursed the world with words and forever after it would be a struggle for man and woman to return to the original silence. --Marlene Nourbese Philip”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“Mental illness is primarily an unconscious escape from this design, a form of passive resistance.”
― John Zerzan

“Clinging to politics is one way of avoiding the confrontation with the devouring logic of civilization, holding instead with the accepted assumptions and definitions. Leaving it all behind is the opposite: a truly qualitative change, a fundamental paradigm shift.
This change is not about:
• seeking "alternative" energy sources to power all the projects and systems that should never have been started up in the first place;
• being vaguely "post-Left", the disguise that some adopt while changing none of their (leftist) orientations;
• espousing an "anti-globalization" orientation that's anything but, given activists' near-universal embrace of the totalizing industrial world system;
• preserving the technological order, while ignoring the degradation of millions and the systematic destruction of the earth that undergird the existence of every part of the technoculture;
• claiming-as anarchists-to oppose the state, while ignoring the fact that this hypercomplex global setup couldn't function for a day without many levels of government.
The way is open for radical change. If complex society is itself the issue, if class society began with division of labor in the Neolithic, and if the Brave New World now moving forward was born with the shift to domesticated life, then all we've taken for granted is implicated. We are seeing more deeply, and the explorations must extend to include everyone. A daunting, but exciting opportunity!”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“Modern states with democratic forms of government dispense with hereditary leviathans, but they have not found a way to dispense with inequalities of wealth and power backed up by an enormously complex system of criminal justice. Yet for 30,000 years after takeoff, life went on without kings, queens, prime ministers, presidents, parliaments, congresses, cabinets, governors, mayors, police officers, sheriffs, marshals, generals, lawyers, bailiffs, judges, district attorneys, court clerks, patrol cars, paddy wagons, jails, and penitentiaries. How did our ancestors manage to leave home without them?”
― John Zerzan, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections

“a minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us ... the individual freed from the order of time,”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“Male violence toward women originated with agriculture, which transmuted women into beasts of burden and breeders of children.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“when justice is against the law, only outlaws can effect justice.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“As Proust put it, the only paradises are those we have lost.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“No time is entirely present,”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“Agriculture creates and elevates possessions; consider the longing root of belongings, as if they ever make up for the loss.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“To combat cultural genocide one needs a critique of civilization itself.
-Gary Snyder”
― John Zerzan, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections

“Language, and symbolism in general, are always substitutive, implying meanings that cannot be derived directly from experiential contexts. Here is the long-ago source of today's generalized crisis of
meaning. Language initiates and reproduces a distinction or separation that leads to ever-increasing place-lessness. Resistance to this impoverishing movement must lead to the problematization of language. Foucault noted that speech is not merely "a verbalization of conflicts and systems of domination, but... the very object of man's conflicts." He didn't develop this point, which is valid and deserves our attention and study. The roots of today's globalizing spiritual crisis lie in a movement away from immediacy; this is the hallmark of the symbolic.”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“We however, know what is at stake.' Namely, earning a living, which commandeers all those activities as mere means, reduces them to interchangeable, abstract labour-time. The quality of things ceases to be their essence and becomes the accidental appearance of their value. The `equivalent form' mars all perceptions; what is no longer irradiated by the light of its own self-determination as `joy in doing,' pales to the eye. Our organs grasp nothing sensuous in isolation, but notice whether a colour, a sound, a movement is there for its own sake or for something else; wearied by a false variety, they steep all in grey, disappointed by the deceptive claim of qualities still to be there at all, while they conform to the purposes of appropriation, indeed largely owe their existence to it alone. Disenchantment with the contemplated world is the sensorium's reaction to its objective role as a `commodity world.”
― John Zerzan, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections

“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.”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“To symbolize is to express time consciousness, for the symbol embodies the structure of time”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“history is the negation of nature.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“Various ways to employ fire, but none to domesticate it. Be like fire.”
― John Zerzan, When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

“All civilizations are the institutionalized appropriation by a small ruling elite of most of what is produced by the submerged classes. Their political/legal structures frequently claim to serve their subjects, but of course, then as now they exist to protect the privileged position of a few. Punishments enacted by early states, though often cruel by modern standards, do not reflect the strength of law enforcement. They are better understood as testimony to the weakness of coercive authority, it's need for drastic measures.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“With agriculture, art lost its variety and became standardized into geometric designs that tended to degenerate into dull, repetitive patterns, a perfect reflection of standardized, confined, rule-patterned life.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“earlier spirituality was participatory with nature, not imposing cultural values or traits upon it.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“In Genesis, the Bible's first book, woman is born from the body of man. The Fall from Eden represents the demise of hunter-gatherer life, the expulsion into agriculture and hard labor. It is blamed on Eve, of course, who bears the stigma of the Fall. 1' Quite an irony, in that domestication is the fear and refusal of nature and woman, while the Garden myth blames the chief victim of its scenario, in reality.”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“Our species is unique, mainly in a negative sense, having brought ruin and estrangement to every corner of the world.”
― John Zerzan, When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

“Five years before Jemison’s 1758 capture, Benjamin Franklin wrote these reflections: When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life…and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”
― John Zerzan, When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

“Admittedly, the nature of language is one of the most mysterious questions that exists for man to ponder on.”
― John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal

“As pressures build for life to become more quantified and machine-like, so does the drive to make machines more life-like.”
― John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal

“Civilization is also separation from an original wholeness and grace. The poor thing we call our "human nature" was not our first nature; it is a pathological condition. All the consolations and compensations and prosthetics of an ever more technicized and barren world do not make up for the emptiness. As Hilzheimer and others came to view domestications of animals as juvenilizations, so also are we made increasingly dependent and infantilized by the progress of civilization.”
― John Zerzan, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections