Against Civilization Quotes

“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

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

“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

“Something about these steps took away our autonomy. They made us dependent. Supposedly we were freed from the barbarism of self-determination toward the new Freedom of work and a world of stuff. We sold egalitarianism for plastic.”
― John Zerzan, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections

“we aren't seeing the symptoms of collapse that define our times. We aren't thinking about anything but what is good for us here and now. We aren't thinking outside of our conditioning. We aren't thinking outside of civilization.”
― John Zerzan, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections

“Powermongers will act in their own interest, but their power relies on our complacency with the terms they have poured us in.”
― John Zerzan, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections

“At the time that technology was becoming a worldwide unifying force, social scientists such as Durkheim and Masaryk noted that melancholy and suicide increased precisely with the forward movement of civilization.”
― John Zerzan, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections

“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

“the achievements of civilization "have been paid for at a very high cost in human degradation, suffering, inequality, and dominance.”
― John Zerzan, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections