The Primal Way

The Heart of the Anarch

Primalism is the essence of anarchism, a philosophy of life which repudiates all forms of dominating force, and of anarcho-primitivism, which rejects civilisation. One of the most common criticisms of the latter is that it is impossible in the modern world. We would, says Noam Chomsky, have to murder seven and a half billion people to make anarcho-primitivism a viable option for humanity, and, literally speaking, he’s right. It is indeed literally impossible for us to live as men and women have lived for millions of years. It is literally impossible to get together with a hundred-odd people and stroll off naked into the woodlands, but all this misses the point of primalism, which is not a literal emulation of pre-civilised society; indeed it has nothing at all to do with the global cult of literalism.

While it is true that primalism was our past and will be our future, that this civilisation will crash—and soon—like all civilisations do, leaving us in a drastically reduced state and forced to orient ourselves, once more, towards the wild, and towards original forms of social organisation, primal societies do not and cannot begin with any kind of formal template. Primality begins with primal consciousness. This consciousness is available at any time, even now, in the teeth of the machine. Indeed it is now, at a point when all formal means of manifesting our primal natures are denied us, when it has become difficult or even impossible to access the natural world, the social world and even the world of our own bodies, that such an orientation becomes the only means of staying sane.

Not that we cannot form groups founded on the timeless principles of primality, beginning with the group of two, the beginning of human society. It may be impossible to live without modern technology, or to engage in mass rituals of ego-softening joy, but the kingdom of the senses is not a remote land, nor is the royalty which rules over it a pantheon of gods sitting on Mount Olympus. It is here, and it shares its sovereignty with all those who went before us.

The cultural variety of primal peoples was almost unimaginable¹ because they shared common qualities with each other that allowed such diversity of form. These qualities they had in common, to some extent, with all societies which managed to maintain some independence from the civilised world, with individuals who have instinctively felt their way back to primality (we often call such people ‘geniuses’) and with me, the author, whose experience cannot be ignored here, as it is the only human being I have direct inward access to.

Selfless · Primal man is not a slave to his mind. He perceives through the ‘screen of the self’ when he needs to isolate things from his experience and think about them, but his experience ‘precedes’ the rational activity of concentrated ideation. This means that self-made distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity do not cut primal man off from experience, which means, further, that primal people have the panjective capacity to feel out the other from within. This, the quality we call ‘empathy’, is the source of all morality and creativity. I can only actually care about another if I feel her as an extension of my own experience. I can only actually sense the quality of a thing from within if I immerse myself in my own inwardness; not the subjective thought and emotion we have come to regard as ‘within’, but that which is aware of thought and emotion. This sense of being intimately ‘at home’ in the world is the foundation of primality, ‘giving rise’ to all the qualities which ‘follow’ from it.

Civilised people try to avoid stepping on each other’s egos, playing an implicit game of ‘I won’t mention your outrageous selfishness if you don’t mention mine’, the reason being that everyone selfishly cares. Primal people, by contrast, constantly mock each other, and nobody cares. Their personal relations are founded on ego-diminishment; nobody is allowed to think highly of himself (a famous example is the Ju/'hoansi practice of mixing up personalised arrows, giving the prestige of a successful hunt to the owner of the arrow, rather than the man who shot it²). In order for individuals to stay rooted in unselfish consciousness primal folk also perform rituals and rites, some of which involve entheogens, the purpose of which is to crack, soften and temporarily dissolve the self-shell, so that new shoots can grow. The most common and important of these is lovemaking, the self-softening means by which consciousness enters the world incarnate.

Primal Language · has no ‘I’, or has an ‘I’ which adapts itself to the living context, changing from person to person, or moment to moment, or day to day (names are also fluid in primal society, reflecting the quality of the witnessing consciousness). The locus of judgement in primal language is not fixed—one cannot make a distinction between ‘it is interesting’ and ‘I am interested’, one can only panjectively say that there is interest here. There is no copula, such as English ‘is, am, are’, and so no automatic conversion of subjective opinion into objective fact, so one cannot say ‘you are stupid’, only that you and stupidity are [temporarily] coincident. Primal language flows in and out of gesture, song, tone and facial expression—which is to say, the context, to which words are subordinate. I know what you mean from the whole situation. Above all, however, primal language is inherently metaphorical, in that the literal and the non-literal—the what it is and the what it is like—are both ‘expressions’ of an elusive quality which is betrayed by exclusively literal speech. For primal man appearance and essence, fact and quality, are one.

Gendered · Woman is complete and is considered to be so. Man is incomplete, cut off, and must find his way back to her; through craft, self-mastery, long experience and what we call ‘aspiration’. Man’s ‘cut-offness’ is a desensitising, isolating focus which enables him to both overcome his lovelessness and protect woman from it. These differences amount to a separation of domain³ and a concomitant complementarity that surmounts it. Separation of domain means that men and women use different tools and do different work, suited to their innate capacities, although the sexes are rarely apart and never socially segregated; in fact, where men and women spend time separated from one another, men come to think of women as subservient to them.⁴ The primal fact of complementarity is the meeting place, in consciousness, that unites male-female poles, while ensuring that there can be no question of one sex lording it over another, either grossly, in society or subtly, in romantic partnership. 

Embodied · Primal people do not consider their bodies to be a source of shame. They do not cover their genitals and are comfortable naked. They have an open attitude towards sex. They usually make love in private, but they speak about sex openly and do nothing to restrain the sexual impulses of their children, allowing them to initiate each other, at a young age, into the pleasures of sex. Their sensate physicality, a practical necessity as much as a source of intense pleasure, increases their sensitivity to each other and to the natural world around them. They are aware that all intelligence originates in, or through, the body, to which the abstract mind is a ponderously crude servant.

Nobody is Fucked · Fucking—the hyper-focused emotionality of the completely cut-off, unconscious male—is impossible. There is therefore no masturbation, no pornography, no prostitution, no persistent and consistent homosexuality (only playful experimentation; no gay pair-bonding⁵), no use of props in the sex act, above all the most corrupting and isolating prop of them all; imagination. No imagination means no expectation, which means no anger, and no frustration, which means no need to compel people to have sex with you, with all the social misery that acquiring power over women entails. There are still problems between primal men and women, which occasionally include jealousy and violent anger, but the constant, restless hunger for dominance and the depraved instinct for sexual subjugation are both absent, clearing the way for endless love, constant love-making and peace.

Children · are not special in primal societies, they are unique, which means their innately intelligent will is sovereign. There is no attempt to adapt one’s style of thought to that of a child; primal adults may play childishly with children, and they certainly delight in their company, but they never talk down to children, shout at them, get angry at them, compel them to do things they don’t want to do or even treat them as children.⁶ Mothers, panjectively aware of their children’s needs—which include being placed in her arms and allowed to be next to her body for the first year of their lives—are entirely passive before their children’s innate instincts and never judge their children, either positively or negatively,⁷ leading to cheerful, confident children who love the company of adults, love to learn from them and are unburdened with emotional pain.

Uncertain · Modern people are unable to accept that risk cannot be measured, that banning risk forces free men, who naturally seek out risk, to make their lives more dangerous,⁸ and that the more protected someone is, the more at risk they are. Primal children, even toddlers and babies, are allowed to pick up sharp knives and they are allowed to play near dangerous precipices and lethal currents. Their innate instincts for self-preservation are given complete, uncoerced freedom, and yet injuries are practically unheard of. Civilised children are protected from every imaginable harm, yet they run headlong into injury. As the primalist Tao Te Ching reminds us, ‘when the people are not trusted, they become untrustworthy’. This applies to children and to entire populations.

Undemocratic · Collective decisions may be the result of debate, usually between men (ratified informally by women), but they are either made implicitly, with members of a community ‘feeling out’ the right path, until they reach a point where there is no need to bring a decision to explicit notice, or they are made by those in temporary, powerless authority (the ‘Anarchist King’), with everyone free to ignore their instructions as they please.

Workless · because there is no difference between work and leisure. Primal people engage in what we call ‘subsistence activity’ for as little as four hours a day. It may be hard, but they do not consider it to be qualitatively different from anything else they do—which is very often nothing—because work itself is entirely non-alienating. It is done with one’s own hands, at one’s own pace, for one’s own pleasure and purpose. Some people in primal societies do no work at all their entire lives⁹ and are happily tolerated. There is no such thing as ‘freeloading’ because nobody suffers from providing for people who don’t work.

Cheerful · The good humour of primal folk is universally acknowledged by reporters. They are happy, always laughing and joking, rarely taking anything seriously. Their ‘religions’ are a kind of childish game, their work, no matter how hard, is a kind of game, which primal people are always ready to interrupt, and even their funerals, although understandably solemn and sorrowful, are without anguish. With no notion of the social construct of scarcity they have no fear of tomorrow and are absurdly profligate with any ‘good wealth’ that comes into their hands, never storing it.

Moneyless · ‘Generalized reciprocity, the giving of something without an immediate expectation of return, is the dominant form within face-to-face groups’.¹⁰ What this means is that there is no money, no barter, no trade (except with enemies) and no fixed debts; human beings organise ‘economic activity’ through informal gift economies, equitably giving away surplus. No money means no poverty, no destitution and no financial slavery. Primal people are wealthy without money; they can live as they please. Each individual is totally self-sufficient, as is each society, and so, with no need to rely on anyone else, there is and can be no exploitation of any kind.

Wild · It goes without saying that primal societies are natural, but the constant active presence of the wild, and the manner in which it shapes human perception, has far reaching social-psychological effects. ‘Wildness deprivation’ leads to a thirst for ersatz substitutes (such as art), to a catastrophic inability to detect or value harmony and, because nature is an unsentimental teacher, fosters both arrogance and ineptitude. It also leads to more distracted thought, as things made by minds, such as cities, incite preoccupation and mentation.

Peaceful · There is almost no evidence of warfare in simple, pre-civilised hunter-gatherer societies (i.e. those without any contact with agriculturalists), and what scant evidence there is of mass murder is all clustered towards the end of the paleolithic period (i.e. when the hundreds of thousands of peaceful years that preceded agriculture ended). Primal people almost never go to war, and when they do there is often, despite risk of death, a playful or moderated aspect to their conflict. Being human they can hate, scorn, argue and get violently and even murderously angry, but these are all exceptions which prove the rule of primal life; its astonishingly pleasant peacefulness.¹¹

Illiterate · Literacy reshapes the human brain and accelerates the disembodied civilised drive to break up whole-life processes (gestalts) into discrete mind-manipulable things. Objectification of experience, alienation from society, inability to read faces, tones or atmospheres and excessive and constant, anxious thinking all began when the self-informed self (or ego) took control of conscious experience, but they were all magnified with literacy. A sane society is largely illiterate; there is certainly no need for ordinary people, living ordinary primal lives, to learn to read and write.

Low Tech · It goes without saying that primal societies are low-tech. They use tools, but these are ‘within reach’, in that, like simple machines, they can be completely mastered by the individual. There are no complex machines in primal society, the kind that appeared at the end of the medieval period, and so nobody is dominated by the need to maintain them, or the need to shape society to the requirments of the machine. While the earth serves the tractor, in that it must be reshaped for it, the hoe serves the earth.

In addition, there are no human machines in primal societies, meaning machines made up of large numbers of people; the kinds that built the Egyptian pyramids. This is because horticulture — or gardening — is also kept within reach. It is not permitted to get out of hand, to become intensive agriculture, which, from its surplus, both produces and demands a mass and which slowly degrades the soil, making agriculturalists weak and sick and compelling them to continually expand.

Divine · Primal people, sensing phenomena from within, experience those things under an aspect of eternity. ‘If it was a pool of water, the very watery pool might strike you: then that was god; or the blue gleam might suddenly occupy your consciousness: then that was god’.¹² The ineffable, expressed as ‘spirit forces’ (or not expressed at all), is usually conceived of as somehow feminine, in that it is loving and productive, yet, at the same time, destructive and utterly mysterious. Primal mythos, mirroring its appearance in [human] nature, comprises gods that are morally ambivalent, inchoate, flawed and bungling spirits of disorder and boundary-breaking freedom although, so complete is the influence of the spirit realm on the human—there is really no such thing as a mere thing, or a purely ‘technical’ act—it becomes almost meaningless to speak of divinity at all.¹³

Healthy · Civilised observers of primal folk are frequently astounded at the acuity of their senses and their physical strength. Primal man lives in much better physical condition than civilised people. He is long-lived, has an excellent diet (of meat: no primal people are or could be vegetarian) and rarely injures himself. His teeth are white and without cavity, the dental arch is broad and the jaw strong. ‘The facial and body development is good. The face is finely formed, well-set and broad. The body is free from deformity and proportioned as beauty and symmetry would indicate desirable’.¹⁴ Compare this to a bus full of modern people, Americans or Brits, for example — the horror! Infection is a danger in primal societies, as are parasites and a thousand other ‘natural shocks’, but primal immune systems are as powerful as primal intestinal fauna.

Capable · Add to the unselfish sensitivity and playfulness of primal people their ability to do an enormous number of things to an almost impossibly high standard, while being particularly skilled, as is natural, in those areas to which their natural proclivity inclines, and we can reasonably describe the primal world as a society of geniuses. We are pathetically inept in comparison, sickly infants dependent on the useless fragment of non-experience the system forces us to pursue.

Social · Primal people experience themselves within a continuum, stretching back, through a healthy social tradition, to the roots of life, and manifesting as a collective to which each individual is indissolubly united.¹⁵ This is not despite but because of the selfless individualism, tempered by primal duty, that primalism fosters, which naturally allies itself with one’s fellows. Over time primal duty became subordinated to and corrupted by tribal groupself which regulated social cohesion through paralysing shame. This gave way, in turn, to the perverted individualism of the modern West, obsessed with the thoughts, emotions, sensations and abilities of an isolated self which was now to be regulated with the shameless guilt (and a bizarre obsession with consistency) that moderns feel about not having lived up to their egoic ideals.

Inexperienced · Primalism, based on unselfish non-literalism, cannot be a question of literal imitation; but even if it were, and even if we could discover exactly how people lived tens of thousand of years ago, we would not want to imitate them, for the simple reason that their world, for all its glory, eventually led to ours. The one thing we have, which they lacked, must never be forgotten; our experience. Unlike our primal forebears we, those of us who are conscious, know that ego leads, literally, to hell on earth, a knowledge that will protect us from returning to the unforgivable barbarism that we call ‘civilisation’, and that will create a new world.

This article appears in Ad Radicem, available from most on-line bookshops.

1. Kelly, 2013

2. Lee, 2003.

3. Illich, 1982.

4. Sanday, 1981.

5. Barthes et al., 2015

6. Lancy, 2022.

7. Liedloff, 1975.

8. Adams, 1995.

9. Woodburn, 1982.

10. Sahlins, 1965.

11. Fry, 2013

12. Lawrence, 1981.

13. Sahlins, 2022

14. DeVries, 1952.

15. Lee & Daly, 1999.