Episode 25: What is Rewilding?
A different primal anarchy podcast with a different perspective.
My favorite answer to the title question …
We are civilized, right? But a different way of saying the same thing is that we have all become Domesticated. Civilized sounds right and good. Domesticated makes us sound bovine .. or like sheeple.
In fact those are just two ways of describing the exact same disease that afflicts us all in the Anthropocene Era. And yes, I believe that Civilized is not just a condition, but a malady.
Refined sugar. Refined tastes in literature, music, art … One sounds bad, the other sounds like the highest good. Whether you call someone civilized or domesticated, you’re describing the same essential phenomenon.
And rewilding is simply the attempt to reverse the pernicious malady of domestication in various forms and fashions, in ourselves, in our lives, in our environments.
To be again wild means: to be Willed, to begin to recover one’s will …
because domestication is the process of breaking something’s own will, as a horse is said to be broken when it no longer fights its captor and master.
This is the difference between a dog and a wolf.
Most of us are housebroken dogs with a big hole in the middle of us where a wolf used to be.
We try to fill the hole with some god, or gambling, or shopping, or substance addictions, or some constructed self-identification having to do with our own smarts or our jobs, positions, money; or our’race’ or our ‘sexual orientation’ or … “I’m an anarchist”, or whatever, when the only thing the hole really aches to be filled with is wolfy wildness, self-determination, and liberty.
Like back in the pre-civilized day.
Deep inside this explanation in this podcast, the author connects the idea of domestication to the concept of Property, which, as one anarchist famously said, is also the concept of Theft.
My cat is domesticated. My cat is broken. My cat is Mine and the horse you broke belongs to you–you can sell it, trade it–it has no wild will of its own any more. It is enslaved.
So are we.
I know you hate that idea, brother. I do too. Hating it changes nothing.
Unless we can somehow make use of that hate to successfully continue rewilding.
Instead of continuing to stuff our holes with that stuff.
You and I will never reach the wolfish end state and finally Be Wild. It doesn’t work like that. It’s a journey and not a destination and we’ve been walking in the wrong direction for ten thousand years.
Rewilding is simply turning around, reversing the bad course.
It is in a word to vertere.
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A note of caution at the end, as you consider whether or how to rewild.
If you’re doing it right, it’s probably going to be deemed illegal.
The state depends for its very survival on domesticated human beast-slaves. To really rewild is to resist and to try to reverse one’s own domestication and enslavement.
They’ll fight you every step of the way with every fucked-up tool they have, and they have a lot of them.
Watch your ass and don’t let them gun you down or trap you, wolf.