Hella Nation - Evan Wright [47]
Kaczynski’s rise as guiding light of radical environmentalists like Wingnut was promoted by Portland, Oregon-based author and thinker John Zerzan, who describes himself as a “leading theorist of the anti-civilization movement”—what he sometimes calls the “primitivist movement.” Zerzan came of age as an antiwar protester in San Franciso in the 1960s. Employed as a social worker by the city, he earned a master’s degree in history from San Francisco State University and gradually evolved from being a garden-variety left-wing activist to an anti-technology theorist. In 1988 he published Elements of Refusal, a collection of essays in which he began to formulate his argument that all technology developed since about the time of the Paleolithic era has harmed the human race.
After Kaczynski’s arrest in 1996 for his seventeen-year Unabomber terror campaign that injured eleven people and killed three—all strangers to him selected because of their roles in fostering technology—Zerzan began meeting with him in prison and sharing ideas. He later dedicated the second edition of Elements of Refusal to the Unabomber. Wingnut and other anarchists speak of Zerzan and the Unabomber in the same breath, and Zerzan’s books are as widely read as the Unabomber Manifesto.
One of Wingnut’s friends puts me in touch with Zerzan and we meet at an upscale pasta and panini shop in a gentrified section of Portland, which Zerzan selected. Zerzan, fifty-six, would not look out of place at a college faculty meeting. He wears dark loafers with cream-colored socks, and a brown leather jacket over a University of Paris sweatshirt. His graying beard is neatly clipped.
Zerzan describes himself as an anarchist opposed to nonviolent protest on the grounds that “civil disobedience is just the agreement that you respect the law. It’s a very explicit consecration of the system.”
Both of us order salads. As we wait, Zerzan speaks movingly of Kaczynski as a martyr who was “willing to put his life out there. The most humiliating thing for Ted was to be portrayed as crazy. He is not crazy at all.”
By the time our salads arrive, Zerzan is explaining the desired end state of the current anarchist-environmental movement as he and Kaczynski see it: to dismantle civilization and turn the clock back to the Paleolithic era, aka the Stone Age.
“You mean so we can live like cavemen?” I ask.
Zerzan laughs and assumes a professorial air as he labors to erase my ignorance. “Think of our ancestors as wonderful primitives, not cavemen,” he says. “Before agriculture and animal husbandry,” Zerzan states, “when we were a hunter-gatherer society, there was equality between people and between genders. There was no war and no pollution. There was leisure time. Disease was unknown. Cancer did not exist.” Zerzan smiles. “How wonderful the Paleolithic era was.”
Zerzan refers to the harbingers of this new age—young anarchists like Wingnut—as “future primitives.” As I get to know Wingnut better, the influences of Zerzan become clear. “What needs to happen for Earth to survive is for a few billion people on this planet to be killed off,” Wingnut tells me. “I’m not saying I want it to happen, or that I would try to make it happen. But people are a disease to the planet. If there’s nuclear war, good riddance. Some of us will be out here surviving at the hunter-gathering level, where we belong.”
Wingnut, his anarchist friends and mentors like Zerzan and Kaczynski have somehow managed to turn love of “Mother Earth” into a cult of apocalyptic doom.
THE DRIVE FROM EUGENE TO L.A. takes approximately sixteen hours. Wingnut allows me to ride along in his getaway vehicle, the old Chevy Cavalier we have been driving since we left Seattle.
Wingnut spends most of the ride to L.A. dozing in the backseat, waking up occasionally to swig from a bottle of Tabasco sauce. The hacking cough he