When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics w/ John Zerzan

On this edition of Parallax Views, a previously unpublished with the controversial anarcho-primitivist philosopher John Zerzan from August 2020 about his new book When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics (Feral House 2021). Zerzan argues that the root cause of social woes like alienation and neuroses, as well as domination and hierarchies, are the cause of agricultural and industrial civilizations. Moreover, he believes we are in the grips of a techno-madness that is spiritually anathema to being human. A critic of transhumanism, Zerzan believes in the extremely radical idea of anarcho-primitivism which posits a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that he believes could in some ways be achieved through rewilding. In this conversation we discuss a number of his ideas, Noam Chomsky's criticism of anarcho-primitivism, transgender rights, Michel Houellebecq's Soubmission, Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, the origins of John's activism in the days of the Vietnam War, John's critique of the Left, and much, much more.