Zoldier Wars 3: Memetic Mutation

If you're reading this and you're one of us, this is your evolutionary history. Your recent ancestors passed through the narrowest evolutionary bottleneck our species has yet survived. Somehow, despite extreme environmental pressure, the genes in your lineage didn't go extinct and weren't forced to mutate to form a new species. It was your memes that were altered, those elusive cultural DNA code snippets responsible for the reproduction of human social behavior. In other words, your existence is the product of successful memetic engineering.

If you're reading this and you're not one of us, chances are you're one of the last mutant zombie soldiers that have just crushed our tribe to enslave and colonize us. If we're lucky, you're an alien anthropologist studying our remains long after we migrated. In either case, I hope you enjoy the story of how we survived and transcended patriarchy...

Back to meme theory, we're all very similar genetically as a species despite variations on the surface, and we have been for about 200,000 years. However what really makes us different is the distinct cultures that we evolve. Cultures rise and fall in waves, adapt, disperse, or go extinct, just like populations of species.

The main difference between genes and memes is that unlike the failed attempts to mechanically re-engineer our genes in the early 21st century, we all have the innate capacity to successfully re-engineer our memes. For 99% of human history, cultural evolution was like a memetic art form. It's canvas was our nomadic egalitarian hunting and gathering tribes and it's pallet was an array of diverse myths, songs, dances, stories, clothes, piercings, tattoos, baskets, pottery, etc.

It was only within less than one percent of recent human history that the model for human society devolved into utter destructive chaos and the dominant meme sequence began to encode the monstrosity we called patriarchy. It was simply the loss of balance between masculine and feminine energy. Humans had successfully flattened the primate dominance hierarchy for hundreds of thousands of years, then suddenly the violent urge to control overtook the gentle urge to create. This cancerous mutation swept the globe in just a few thousand years and viciously destroyed almost all remnants of the pre-existing "partnership" societies, replacing them with "dominator" societies.

In these dark millennia, the memetic art form lost its innocence and stopped reflecting plants, animals, the earth, the sun, and the stars. The canvas became toxic crowded cities, and its pallet was a sludge of anthropocentric, narcissistic, violent, misogynistic, xenophobic, and materialistic religions, education systems, and mass media.

Humanity’s identity was once defined by peering out through the window of a tribal consciousness deeply embedded in the wild landscape. But recently a few cultures began looking only at themselves in a citified mirror of vanity. Ever more alienated from the planet and the cosmos, they justified the domestication and destruction of all in their imperial path towards ego-aggrandizement. Every ruler tried to build the tallest sand castle. Ironically every ruler was eventually swallowed by the desert sands they made of their once lush and fertile lands.

This monstrous memetic mutation caused the 6th mass extinction of life on earth, and almost wiped out all of humanity in the process.

The very fact of your life was made possible by a resistant subcultural evolutionary mutation that took place near the end of civilization. Thanks to the work of feminist anthropologists, the dominant paradigm began to crack and was eventually shattered, at least among some of our neo-tribes. It was the rediscovery of ancient goddess worshipping cultures, the ethnographies of the last living egalitarian societies, and the study of the diversity of sexual politics in primates that gave us hope and empowered our rejection of the myth of male dominion over all life.

According to the dominators narrative of human evolution, we should feel lucky to have been civilized under the omnipotent hand of god and his chosen men. We should feel honored to have been “saved” lest we remain heathen savages, wild, naked, and unaware of the profit potential of the land, timber, minerals, livestock, and labor we cared not to exploit for private gain.

When that was the only narrative we knew, we had no choice but to march forward into paternal progress. In the schools of modernity we were taught that life before civilization was “nasty, brutish, and short.” Yet it was soon discovered that in fact the truth is quite the opposite. A new intellectual meme wave began to form; some called it primitivism, neo-tribalism, or the archaic revival.

The great lie was that life in cities ruled by elite men was superior to the equality and anarchy of life in the wild. Our research was able to subvert this lie and social movements began to grow. While some of us dreamed of insurrectionary glory, civilization didn’t last long enough for us to train our troops to fight it. It fell right on top of us.

Amidst the post-apocalyptic world devastated by plague and warfare and ruled by warlords and their militarized zombie soldier hordes, a few of us maintained strong holds of peace, equality, and autonomy. We became information stewards of the “herstory” of patriarchy so as to ensure our decedents would never temp fate again. What was once the harsh oppressive reality of male dominance became a ghost story strategically used to keep the excesses of ego in check.

We survived, and so did our now sacred texts, barely. The wave of unregulated patriarchal domination was more lethal than the plague. When the state existed, it bred the monstrosity in captivity and spent vast amounts of time, money, and energy trying to harness and train its ferocity to serve corporate fascist ends. Without a cage and a trainer, this tortured beast was even more fearsome. Luckily the worst of it only lasted as long as the bullet supply. Weapons technology regressed over time. They pulled out mortars and muskets from museums, they bred horses and built chariots, they didn’t stop until the last sharp object was dulled on human bone.

Retreat into the badlands has been the only strategy for cultural survival since the dawn of civilization. Thankfully with the knowledge of permaculture, we could terraform any bad land into an edible paradise in a decade with a cart full of seeds and stock, and a bit of rain.

I can't believe it myself, that we were so successful. In my early years as a scholar, it was all considered a utopian pipe dream. The "realists" laughed at all the eco-topians. Indigenous traditionalists pounding drums and fighting to reclaim their lands and ways of life; hippie communes strumming acoustic guitars and praying for peace; psychedelic trance dancers flailing inside a collective hallucination nested within the benevolent consciousness of the earth mothership, downloading third-eye visions of extra-dimensional technologically advanced alien crystal cities that had long ago transcended patriarchy, the inhabitants of which appearing anxious to mentor us; peace punks moshing away the concrete and planting permaculture food forest gardens. Who would have thought, we’d crawl out of the rubble and rise from the ashes.

At the peak of the empire’s prowess, like the many that fell before, its arrogance was its demise. Humility toward nature and wealth defined by group values, not private holdings, was the salvation of the oppressed, as we danced on the ruins.

I don't know if we all made it. But I know enough of us did. We believed in the proud prehistory of humanity, and we fought to revive the archaic into the future. We all honored the feminine divine, we all loved our mother earth, we all sought balance, we all sought peace. And we all knew that peace is birthed by cooperation, and killed by competition.

Amongst our tribe, we broke the cycle in just one generation of memetic code hacking. It was easier than we ever dreamed.

The pathology of patriarchy was not a genetic or biological disease, rather it was comprised of a belief system that was replicated with great effort and imposed on each successive generation. By simply choosing not to reinstall the belief system, the entire monstrosity collapsed within our remote population. With no more GI Joes, Barbies, Princes or Princesses to aspire to, our children’s minds were finally free. With the materialist and individualist models for beauty, wealth, and power gone, human development quite naturally returned to a deeper communal pattern. The evolved template was always there, it had just been suppressed by indoctrination.

Once we got far enough from the rotten urban core, the real work began: building a new culture out of the fragmented ruins in our post-modern minds, while still fighting off the zoldier hordes. Their reign grew weaker as the virus burned hot and fast. But the warlords managed to keep the infection and vaccination racket going long enough of set up an iron grip on all evacuation routes.

Next I’ll tell the story of our great escape…

Zoldier Wars #2: We Can’t Stop Progress But We Can Stop Patriarchy

I have to admit I’d been praying for the Earth Goddess to bring the collapse. I always thought the sooner the better because that would mean less weapons, less pollution, and less dead bodies to clean up when the shift hit the fan. I mean, if cataclysmic earth changes and ensuing famine and pestilence would have thoroughly devastated modern society before machine guns, fossil fuels, and nukes, think of how much more elegant post-apocalyptic survival would be.

I know that sounds cynical and misanthropic, don’t get me wrong I truly love humanity, it was just patriarchal techno-industrial civilization that had to go. It had become a toxic specter looming across the globe, spanning the last 5,000 years. It had tainted the memory of millions of years of relative bliss, peace, and innocence that our tribal ancestors knew. In fact it had systematically obliterated the very memory of our tribal roots.

In my youth, when I was a strict anarcho-primitivist, I believed that the “myth of progress” was an evil lie used to euphemize the destruction wrought by demonic materialism. I fought against technology, the state, and the corporate empires built by capitalism. I have no regrets, we did fight the good fight, however ala Terence McKenna’s Novelty Theory I realized long ago that progress itself isn’t the enemy.

From the meta-physical notions of the nuosphere, the Akashic record, the collective unconscious, to the physical monuments, libraries, engravings, glyphs, and other cultural means of data storage, the evolution of consciousness is irreversible. Of course on the physical plane it will be fragmented by fire, flood, warfare, enthnocide, and simple neglect. And on the meta-physical planes, we’ll continue to lose, hide, and fight over the shamanic key-ring that unlocks the cosmic database. But no matter by what disaster or blunder our progress is set back, it cannot be undone.

Hakim Bey said it well, “We are not interested in a return to the primitive, but in a return OF the primitive”. In this reality, time is an arrow, there’s no going “back”. There’s no return to the Golden Age of Innocence. It’s ever forward. The question is: will we learn from the mistakes of the past? Will we redeem ourselves in the eyes of Gaia? Will she forgive us and offer to nest us back within her loving yet limiting ecological arms?

We are industrious and inquisitive creatures. We’re artisans, tool makers, truth-seekers, story tellers, star-gazers, time-keepers, scribes, mystics, prophets, and psychedelic shamans. We learn and create, learn and create, learn and create. As Terence McKenna put it, we’re “monkeys with a dream”. For most of our (pre)history, with the guidance of shaman, we used our super-animal abilities to deepen our connection to each other, the earth, and the cosmos. We progressed using the technologies of the body, the song, the dance, and the plants. We progressed and built vast infrastructure and communication networks in spiritual dimensions, creating little to no waste, pollution, wires, or machines.

Tragically, with the reversion to the old primate model of the fearful, controlling, territorial, dominating male-macho-monkey-mind we disgraced our most progressive adaptation: gender equality. It was the perversion of masculinity and the subversion of femininity that led to the material progress that has ruined the planet. Material, not spiritual progress has brought us all to the brink of extinction in only the last few thousand out of several million years of blossoming as a species.

So no, it’s not cynical or misanthropic to have prayed for the collapse. Chaos=opportunity. Of course I wish we had done more to prepare to seize this unprecedented moment of opportunity. Had we been better survivalists when the system was still intact we’d have worked through a lot of the trial and error when the stakes weren’t so life and death. The sharp and often lethal learning curve of basic survival post-SHTF is quite a hindrance. But the hope and dream of composting patriarchy keeps my heart beating strong.

This isn’t just a biological evolutionary bottleneck, (the reduction of the global human population to a fraction of its pre-collapse number) it’s a cultural evolutionary bottleneck. The Pentagon and Hollywood meme machines have ground to a halt. There is now an epistemological and mythological vacuum into which neo-pagan folklore must flood.

Gaia gave us a head start. She took out techno-industrial civilization, but the dominator culture still exists and is now unrefined and unrestrained. It will either subdue the feminine, animals, and the earth again, and enslave us into a new dark age, or we’ll take advantage of this opportunity to destroy it and restore balance in every sphere.

There was no hope of burying the monstrosity of patriarchy before the collapse. It sat atop a electro-petro-chemical-nuclear-muscular throne in a global fortress guarded by high tech machines, manned by millions of soldiers, and powered by billions of serfs and slaves. But now the demonic patriarchs are on horseback again and fighting with barbaric weapons. They’ll all be illiterate soon, they have no crops, their rations will run out, their micro-empires will crumble.

Now is our time to topple the zoldiers, knights, and warlords. So long as we preserve and study the great works of eco-feminist scholars, design settlements by the ethics and principles of permaculture, and seek guidance from artists, elders, and shamans not salesman, leaders, generals and priests, we may have a chance to know the joy and beauty of living in peace on Earth.

May our tribes re-learn the ancient wisdom that our ancestors passed through so many generations, and that Bonobos know by instinct: don’t let the male ego get out of control, or it will take control of everyone and everything. It will turn tools into weapons, dance into torture, fertility into fear, sacraments into drugs, sex into rape, art into propaganda, literature into scripture, food into poison, desire into addiction, resources into commodities, paradise into hell, progress into pathology.

The Zoldier Wars
A post-apocalyptic science fiction series on the political ecology of the future

Just as crack heads were engineered by the criminal power elite before the collapse, after, it was the zombified plague carriers who were easiest to exploit.

Most people die within a week of infection, but the zombies are the ones who when infected die slowly. Not knowing how long they’ll live, but knowing it won’t be long, they have no reason to help rebuild society. Their pathogenically induced sociopathy make them the perfect death squad mercenaries. They call the zombie recruits “zoldiers”. They work for cheap, they just want a few highs, lays, and gourmets before their inevitable gurgling end.

Because the zoldiers are so short lived though, the warlords’ business model needed innovation. Fearing the virus would eventually burn itself out they began culturing it in the same labs that were used to find the cure. The last scientists were captured and enslaved and now out one door goes the virus and out the other goes the serum.

In the power vacuum left by the state, it’s laissez-faire capitalism at its finest, though instead of the invisible hand, it’s the invisible microbe. Though with the collapse of the global industrial economy to be rich in this new economy of disease affords you few material comforts.

The citadels of the warlords are just as depicted in the Mad Max series, ramshackled camps of base debauchery ruled by the most ruthless and violent. Their knights herd the zoldiers and together they orchestrate massive raids on the surviving quarantine camps.

Most QCs are corrupt and the elected leaders secretly sell off the “kidnapped” slaves and “stolen” supplies in trade for meager pay offs and tentative peace.

We live in one of the few autonomous QC’s, with no leaders, no division of labor, no classes, no elite, we’re immune to the corruption of leaders, but subject to never-ending attack. Cannibalism is no longer taboo, so unfortunately we’re considered a delicacy. They know we make the best beer and wine, have the healthiest bodies, and own the only remaining sacred permaculture design texts. Their raids have come in successive waves in the five years since Year Zero.

Our defenses are strong enough to keep the knights at bay, they don’t dare approach our Viet Cong style maze of booby traps, weaponized thorny and poisonous perennial crop barricades, manure swamp motes, and other fortified layers and zones. The knights are vaccinated and hope to live long lives. It’s the zoldiers who are undaunted. With nothing to lose, they penetrate our perimeter by the hundreds. Most don’t make it near zone one, but those who do can usually be brought down from a safe distance by our garlic oil tipped arrows.

The sacred herb’s anti-microbial compounds are like napalm in the infected blood streams of the zoldiers as our crops have been enhanced by artificial selection in our labs, and by loving ritual devotion to the plant’s spirit in our dance gardens. In the absence of the witch burning religious atrocities of the past, we’ve had the spiritual space to experiment with new pathways of communication with Gaia’s herbal goddesses. The shaman among us have the clearest visions and most intelligible conversations, but we all directly experience to varying degrees the loving and healing intentions that the herbs have for us. Just as they combat pathogens in the body, they understand and support our combative efforts to survive and restore balance with humanity and the Earth. Our sacred union with garlic transcends the untrained senses. In ecstatic trance states she gave us visions of how to enhance her potency to be lethal to the invaders in the advanced stages of infection, yet life saving for us when ingested in the early stages.

These memoirs will serve to document our struggle to survive humanity’s most narrow evolutionary bottleneck and greatest opportunity to end 5,000 years of patriarchy. For without the means to build permanent culture, the new provisional empire of warlords, knights, and zoldiers will suffer the fate of Easter Island and in one generation the nightmare of history will be buried in the desert sands of doom. From the ashes may we rise and bloom.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/09/tsunami-unprepared-report-...

http://www.quake.ca.gov/gmaps/ap/ap_maps.htm

During RSG03, we talked about preparing for the localized threat of earthquakes and read the earthquakes section of the National Geographic Complete Survival Manual (http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/books/exploration/complet...).

We committed to implement 5 free/easy action items based on our reading/discussion:

1. assess the areas above beds, work/dinner tables, shelves, ect. for sharp, heavy, breakable, and unsecured items move/rearrange/secure them (e.g. move heavy items closest to the floor on shelves, move breakable/sharp objects away from beds, secure shelves, and other objects that could fall or tip over, etc.)

2. go through each room and determine the safest location to "stop, drop, and hold" on during an earthquake

3. establish a safe outdoor rally point (find and agree on a place to meet outside that's safe and out of the way of powerlines, trees, other potential hazards.

4. keep a pair sturdy shoes and flashlight by the bed (many earthquake injuries are cuts on bare feet from people who run out of bed in the middle of the night in the dark in a panic)

5. located the gas shut off valve to prevent fires/explosions caused by damaged pipes

We also discussed the Transition Movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns) and will definitely be exploring this phenomenon in future study groups.

We also discussed a cartoon film on the Federal Reserve System called The American Dream: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6OQzH07u0U&feature=related

We'll continue to assess a list of localized threats but to keep the weekly topics diverse we'll do them out of sequence and go into some self defense theory next week.

Hope to see you there!

http://www.save-the-rain.com/world-bank/

Terence McKenna hoped that by the end of history we’ll have become street smart in the ways of demonic materialism as we return home to the family farm in Eden. My hope is that we’re able to make this journey before natural and/or artificial disasters make it more a matter of survival than lifestyle. What Terence referred to as the eschaton, classic Survivalists call TEOTWAWKI, an acronym for “The End of the World as We Know it”.

Whether or not we have two and half years, or thousands of years to prepare for cataclysm, what matters more than prophecy or prediction is being prepared for disaster today. Disasters range from high probability and small scale of impact, such as an injury or job loss causing a personal or family level collapse, to low probability and large scale of impact such as a major solar storm causing a global collapse of the electrical grid. Modern survivalism promotes acknowledgement of many threats, rather than attachment to any single event. In the case of Y2K, people panicked and rushed to stock up and fortify in a frenzy, and when it proved a non-event, most of that fear dissipated, people sold off their preps and rejoined the rat race almost overnight. In the dominant culture, we now lack what most of our great grandparents had, an understanding that shit can hit the fan at any time. That’s the nature of reality, of planet earth, and now more than ever, the global industrial economy. For most of human history our ancestors were localized and self-reliant out of necessity and hence had much less of an illusion of government/corporate provisioned safety. We no longer live in resilient nomadic foraging bands, or settled horticultural tribes in which disaster, emergency, and survival preparedness was intrinsic to human-ecology. Domestication, civilization, urbanization, industrialization, suburbanization, digitalization, etc. have both seduced and enslaved us to the matrix, the less a part of local ecology we are the more vulnerable we are to disasters of all kinds. In an obscure Dalai Lama lecture series I once heard, there was a time delay between his words and the translation. I wondered what thought in his mind caused this uncharacteristic roaring belly laugh. Seconds later it was articulated in English that he found a bit of cynical humor in expressing the fact that many in the Western world would surely die if the electrical grid collapsed. The critique of our precariousness and unsustainability is shared by people of all walks of life. While the green left has popularized many robust eco-memes, it has missed out on a lot of the fruits of the survivalist community. Modern survivalism, an emerging discourse you can plug into via thesurvivalpodcast.com is what I feel to be a vital alchemical synthesis of radical hippie and radical redneck thought and practice. A modern survivalist mindset doesn’t mean you’re a paranoid, xenophobic, back woods, ex-military hick in a snarling dog patrolled, barricaded bunker, filled with bullets, beans, and band-aids waiting for the ultimate Armageddon conspiracy. Nor does it mean you’re a long haired, post-60s acid head drop out in Humboldt county growing organic fruits and veggies among other things in a remote off-the-grid homestead with a pacifist aversion to defensibility. It means you seek to reclaim the wisdom of our elders and live with a healthy sense of awareness, precaution, and preparedness and a healthy skepticism and disdain for the incompetence if not malice of the establishment.  You can be anyone, anywhere and simply choose to be more like the ant that works hard in times of plenty to ensure security in times of scarcity, than like the grasshopper who carelessly frolics in the summer sun unwilling to accept the harsh reality of the coming winter. Modern survivalists emphasize the need for all preparedness efforts to be designed in such as way as to improve quality of life, whether or not a disaster strikes. A practical example, again using the case study of Y2k, would be to start growing and storing your own food, thereby investing in your health, your soil, your family, your future, etc. rather than just buying a ton of emergency food kits that you may never need and may not enjoy. Approached in this manner preparedness is a rewarding lifestyle as every inch of independence that you reclaim provides a new dimension of physical, mental, and spiritual freedom from the death culture. It encourages folks to realize that we’ve become dangerously dependent, not just on THE system, but on a complex tangled web of SYSTEMS. Pick your metaphor, house of cards, sand castle, dominoes. The sad truth is that from the moment our recent ancestors stopped composting, planting, saving seeds, pumping wells, healing with herbs, hand building shelters, hand making clothes, tools, etc. we put our lives completely in the hands of government and corporations. Luckily it’s not too late to reorient our minds, life-styles, and communities towards independent, localized, ecological sustainability that doesn’t bank on a new super-energy source, a new genetically modified food crop, a new pharmaceutical drug, or a new advanced weapon to stabilize and harmonize the future of humanity and the planet. Even on the 2012 timeline, which I’m admittedly a fanatic adherent to, we can still do a lot. Some solutions are big and fast, some are small and slow. With the right coordination of people power and capital, I believe we can popularize preparedness and permaculture and crash land out of history on a bed of lush organic food forests inhabited by egalitarian neo-tribal shamanistic goddess worshipping villagers, rather than crash land on a jagged desert of toxic festering landfills crawling with rabid zombie cannibals and road warrior barbarians ruled by ex-paramilitary and gangster mobs. The future political-ecological landscape will be determined by our level of preparedness and resilience today.

Use this workbook with your family to develop disaster preparedness plans, checklists, goals, shopping lists, emergency kits, and more.