Westerners who see themselves as the pinnacle of human evolution typically view hunter-gatherers and other stateless peoples as relics of the past, even if they are alive in the present. In doing so, they are presuming that history is an inevitable progression from less to more complex, and that Western civilization is more complex than other cultures. If history is organized into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age, Information Age, and so on, someone who does not use metal tools must still be living in the Stone Age, right? But it is eurocentric, to say the least, to assume that a hunter-gatherer who knows the uses of a thousand different plants is less sophisticated than an operator at a nuclear power plant who knows how to push a thousand different buttons but doesn’t know where his food comes from.
Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works
Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works
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The more the world is emptied of an objective meaning and the more it becomes thoroughly absorbed by our own categories and thus becomes our world, then the more we find meaning eradicated from the world; and the more we find ourselves immersed in something like a cosmic night— to express it in a modern way. The demystifiation (Entmagisierung) or disenchantment of the world - to use an expression borrowed from Max Weber - is identical with a consciousness of being barred out, of a darkness in which we all move.
Theodore Adorno, Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft
Theodore Adorno, Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft
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