The Withway:

calling us home

Paul Cudenec
For those whom I love still and yet must live without

winteroak.org.uk

Cover illustration: The Hilly Path, Ville d’Avray, by

Alfred Sisley (1879)

Copyright © 2022 Paul Cudenec. The author formally

retains copyright over this work but permits non-
commercial reproduction or distribution

ISBN: 978-2-9575768-2-1
 “In an ideal state of society one might imagine
the good New growing naturally out of the good
Old, without the need for polemic and theory;
this would be a society with a living tradition”

T.S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’

 CONTENTS

Preface i

Part I: Natural Withness 1

Part II: Lost in Falsehood 43

Part III: Finding the Withway 107

Endnotes 151
 PREFACE

It has become a commonplace observation over

the last couple of years, amongst dissidents
thrown together in an epoch-defining struggle for
freedom, that the left-right divide has no more
meaning.
Perhaps this has always been the case, given
the evident absurdity of trying to squeeze the
whole glorious complexity of political and
philosophical thought into a one-size-fits-all
linear model. But at least the labels “left” and
“right” provided, until recently, a rough idea of
somebody’s position regarding certain key social
issues.
Now, however, even that approximate guide
does not work. On the so-called “left”, people who
theoretically oppose both big business and the
state are suddenly enthusiastic admirers of a
toxic combination of the two, with their
commitment to “fundamental human rights”
replaced overnight with the conviction that it is
“selfish” for individuals to resist the arbitrary
dictates of power.
On the so-called “right”, those who have

i
claimed to be trying to preserve a certain
familiar way of life, guarantee a certain sense of
order, have stood back and applauded as the
society they always claimed to protect is
subjected to controlled demolition and long-
vaunted democratic values are abolished in
favour of the kind of ruthless martial law that
was supposed to be impossible in their “free
world”.
The separation today, between those who
support the system’s narrative and those who
challenge it, simply does not follow the left-right
divide. Another way of seeing the current
situation is in terms of people versus power, as
below versus above. While this is true as a kind
of shorthand, which I have myself often used, it
does not provide us with the whole picture of
what we are facing.
The Withway is an attempt to identify the
deeper issues at stake and point at a different
way of seeing the civilizational choices with
which we are being collectively presented.
It is not, as will be readily apparent, a
political manifesto or a detailed programme for
action. It is, rather, an exploration of ideas which
is intended to act as a preliminary signpost, a
rough sketch of the way in which many of us
know intuitively we ought to be heading.
The primary direction in which we urgently
need to move is, of course, away from the

ii
technocratic tyranny currently being imposed on
us by force. In order to do so, we need to embrace
and express the values which separate us from
the cold “scientific” authoritarianism of the
dominant cult.
In the pages that follow, I frame this in
terms of re-establishing connections – social,
natural and metaphysical – which have been
stolen from us over a long period of time.
The overall perspective is holistic; not just in
terms of seeing the whole picture, but in knowing
that seeing the whole picture is important.
Within that overall reality, we could focus on
the many fundamental differences between the
way of being and thinking encouraged by the
dominant system and the alternative which I
happen to here term the Withway.
We could compare their power with our
empowerment; their desire for control with our
need for freedom; their lust for quantity with our
quest for quality; their emphasis on price and
profit with our commitment to value and fair
exchange; their life-hating fetish for artificiality
with our love for nature within and without;
their twisted addiction to lies with our gut feeling
for truth; their shallow, fragmented and
subjective outlook with our profound and all-
embracing organic vision; the ugliness of their
world with the beauty of the archetype we hold
in our hearts.

iii
 There is much work to be done in expanding,
illustrating and joining together these themes,
and many others, in a philosophy both ancient
and new which can challenge and replace the
deadthink of this toxic and moribund system.
I will try to play my small part in the
months and years ahead, but if we are to have
any real effect we are going to have to be
numerous, creative and determined.
What name might we give this effort, what
flag might we fly under on this ideological
journey? I am not sure we can credibly give a
label to a great movement of thought which is, in
part, against the kind of mentality which always
insists on labelling things!
But one will emerge, in due course, as it
always does, and our task will be to ensure that
the content of our thinking is sufficiently
grounded, solid and authentic to stop that
eventual label from being polluted, corrupted and
turned against our intentions.
For this, depth of thinking is required; depth
grown from eternal truths, rather than cobbled
together from cheap slogans and passing fads.
In the ruins of this civilization, we need to
plant a mighty tree of authentic wisdom that will
watch over the health, freedom and future of
humankind for many centuries to come.

Paul Cudenec, January 2022

iv
 PART I: NATURAL WITHNESS

In July 2021, more than a year into the global

Covid “crisis”, philosopher Augustin Berque gave
an open-air talk in southern France, which I was
able to attend.
The retired university professor spoke, all
too briefly, from the shade of a marquee erected
in the garden of the birthplace of Camisard
resistance fighter Abraham Mazel, surrounded
by the sunlit verdant hills of the Cévennes
National Park.
In these inspiring surrounds, Berque out-
lined his study of what in French he calls “la
mésologie” (the term ‘mesology’ has not yet taken
root in English), which he says is “a new kind of
knowledge”1 taking us beyond the historical
stage of modernity.
The fundamental idea, Berque said in his
talk, was about respecting local realities and
thus respecting their inhabitants in a complete
context: “respecting their link with a territory is
to respect our common link with the earth”.2
As he set out in print in 2017, the connec-
tions between a person and the milieu in which

1
they live cannot be erased. “Each of the two
terms taken by itself is only half of reality. What
la mésologie examines is precisely the combina-
tion of these two terms, which together make the
whole reality”.3
Berque argues that any landscape consists
not only of measurable objects that materially
surround us, but also of the perception that we
have of it, stressing that “the reality of a
landscape is in what takes place between the
environment and our brain”.4
He adds: “The milieu depends on the being
and, vice versa, the being depends on the milieu.
Each term supposes the existence of the other
and also creates the other”.5
This deep connection to place also takes us
beyond the merely individual to the social,
because it is something always shared with
others: “To be fully human, we need our two
halves, the one which is our physical individual
body and the other which is our medial body, in
other words our milieu, which is necessarily
collective”.6
One of the principal inspirations for Berque’s
outlook is the Japanese philosopher Watsuji
Tetsurô (1889-1960), whose thought he regards
as amounting to “a revolution in the history of
being”.7
Berque says: “With his vision of social
organicity and of the social body (aidagara), he

2
discovered a field of reality which turns the
modern conception of existence upside-down by
placing it back in an earthly environment... For
Watsuji, the question of milieux (fûdo) concerns
what physically creates and weaves together
human societies, on this Earth”.8
Watsuji identified a perpetual interaction
between living beings and their milieu, leading
to a mutual “appropriateness” between the two,
which he termed fûdosei, the médiance which is
at the heart of Berque’s mésologie.9
In English, we might decide to translate
fûdosei as “withness”: the withness of place and
inhabitant which means that neither could be
what they are without the other.
Our withness means that we are never
separate from the world that surrounds us, mere
observers or spectators, cocooned in our egos and
looking out on something which we can never
finally be sure is real.
Instead, we are irrevocably part of that
world, our being and emotions inseparable from
all that is flowing around us.
Watsuji writes: “The springtime wind is that
which scatters the cherry blossom or that which
caresses the waves. The summer heat likewise, is
that which withers the full-blooming greenery or
that makes the children play on the beach. Just
as we discover ourselves in sorrow or joy in the
midst of the wind that scatters the flowers, it is

3
ourselves that we hear, drained of all energy, in
the blazing sun which beats down on the trees.
This is to say that we discover ourselves within
fûdo, ourselves as a social organism”.10
By seeing ourselves in our withness, we
understand ourselves and can thus freely shape
ourselves and the place where we live, he says in
his classic book, Fûdo.11
Factors such as the climate, the soil, rain,
heat and cold all inform the way in which we
decide to build our houses, the kind of clothes we
make and wear, the tools we fashion and use, the
food we grow and eat.
This real experience, over many generations,
of what the poet and critic T.S. Eliot refers to as
“a particular people in a particular place”,12
accumulates to create what we sometimes label
“tradition”, which Eliot insists is no political
abstraction or fixed idea to which we must
remain welded, but living culture rooted in
experience and always open to change.
For most of humankind’s history, this place-
withness (shared by nomadic as well as
sedentary peoples) formed the basis of our living,
creating a bond which would have seemed too
obvious to need pointing out.
As contemporary philosopher Tu Wei-ming
notes: “A natural outcome of primal peoples’
embeddedness in concrete locality is their
intimate and detailed knowledge of their

4
environment; indeed the demarcations between
their human habitat and nature are muted”.13
When we picture birds in a wood, bees in a
bank of flowers or fish in a stream do we feel the
need to draw a hard line between birds and
forest, bees and flowers or fish and water? Or can
we conceive of them as belonging to one and the
same phenomenon, as simultaneously birds-with-
trees and trees-with-birds, as bees-with-flowers
and flowers-with-bees, as fish-with-water and
water-with-fish?
And ourselves? Can we still remember
ourselves as people-with-the-land, as the-land-
with-people?14 Can we rediscover our identity in
that living organic entity?

***

Tradition is not solely, or even primarily, the

maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs; these
beliefs have come to take their living form in the
course of the formation of a tradition... We are
always in danger, in clinging to an old tradition,
or attempting to re-establish one, of confusing the
vital and the unessential, the real and the
sentimental. Our second danger is to associate
tradition with the immovable; to think of it as
something hostile to all change; to aim to return
to some previous condition which we imagine as
having been capable of preservation in perpetuity,

5
instead of aiming to stimulate the life which
produced that tradition in its time.

T.S. Eliot15
***

When we live in and with a place, we do so

alongside others.
Withness always tells of a collective level to
existence, as Watsuji stresses when he
reproaches the German philosopher Martin
Heidegger for going no further in his search for
authenticity than the individual level.16
For Watsuji, the notion of a human being
(ningen) also embraces society, in the form of a
community or a combination of people. “This dual
character of the human is its fundamental
character. It follows that neither anthropology,
which only deals with one of its aspects, the
individual, nor sociology, which only deals with
its other aspect, society, can see the essence of
humanity. To really grasp the core of human-
kind, we have to understand the real structure of
human existence, which is at the same time
individual (ko) and whole (zen)”.17
He explains that in traditional Japanese
society “human conscience was that of the group”
and “human totality was perceived as a
mysterious force”.18
In Watsuji’s terminology, therefore, the word

6
ningen means not just a plain human being, but
the human being complete in his essential
withness.
How might we translate his ningen into
English? Are we perhaps talking about withmen
and withwomen? These withfolk experience what
Watsuji calls ningen sonzai – human life in its
full withness. They are experiencing not just
bare existence, as individuals cut off from their
community and their surroundings, but a whole
and authentic belonging to the world of which
they are part.
One of the foremost theoretical descriptions
of this natural human withlife comes from the
Russian thinker Peter Kropotkin
He argues in his best-known work, Mutual
Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that the tendency for
co-operation and solidarity is “deeply interwoven
with all the past evolution of the human race”.19
Kropotkin develops this theory in his unfin-
ished work Ethics: Origin and Development,
where he complains that those followers of
Charles Darwin who regard competition between
individuals as the key to evolution, have
forgotten that the English naturalist himself
identified the instinct of “mutual sympathy” in
social animals.20
Adds Kropotkin: “On the basis of new inves-
tigations in the field of history it is already
possible to conceive the history of mankind as the

7
evolution of an inherent tendency of man to
organize his life on the basis of mutual aid, first
within the tribe, then in the village community,
and in the republics of the free cities...”21
In 1902, the same year that Kropotkin
published Mutual Aid, another radical thinker
was advancing a similar theory on the way that
living beings have a natural tendency to act
together in the collective interest.
The Austrian Otto Gross, who was only 25
years old at the time, wrote an essay about
Synergetik, or social energy, the force which
binds together large numbers of individuals of all
species. This could be observed in a school of
young fish: “The entire school moves uniformly
like an organism, particularly in fight or flight”.22
This natural solidarity, says Gross, is an
innate “will to relate”:23 an urge to withness
which does not need to be taught.
Human beings are not separate, isolated
units with no connection to those around them,
any more than they are mere appendages of the
collective, bound always to submit to its control.
Withness is always a two-way process, a
relationship and not a hierarchy. The individual
thrives as a free and fulfilled human being when
she or he has the support of a community. A
community thrives when it is made up of free
and fulfilled human beings.
The richness is in the symbiosis.

8
 ***

Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was a philoso-

pher, writer and poet who, in the face of the
growth of dehumanised industrial society, held
out for a way of living based on freedom and
solidarity.
He urged the modern person to rediscover
themself as “the free child of Nature”24 which
they still were deep down.
To be true to this inner nature, a man had to
cherish “his organic relation with the whole body
of his fellows”25 because it was this which held a
free and natural society together.
When that organic order-from-below was
gone, the door was opened to the supposed need
for a state to come in and impose order-from-
above.
Carpenter writes: “If each man remained in
organic adhesion to the general body of his
fellows no serious dis-harmony could occur; but it
is when this vital unity of the body politic
becomes weak that it has to be preserved by
artificial means, and thus it is that with the
decay of the primitive and instinctive social life
there springs up a form of government which is
no longer the democratic expression of the life of
the whole people; but a kind of outside authority
and compulsion thrust upon them by a ruling
class or caste”.26
9
 ***

Homage to thee, O Breath of Life, to thy crashing;

Homage to thee, the thunder; homage to thee, the
lightning;
Homage to thee, O Breath of Life, when thou
pourest rain.

The Atharva Vida27

***

“Birth and death, food and fire, sleep and

waking, the motions of the winds, the cycles of
the stars, the budding and falling of the leaves,
the ebbing and flowing of the tides – all these
things have, for thousands of years, created an
accumulated tradition of human feeling”,28 writes
John Cowper Powys.
He says it is the poetry of the real and the
living, “the whole turbid stream of Nature, in its
wild oceanic ensemble”29 that is the authentic
source of our spiritual well-being.
Powys refers to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
view “that the meaning of culture is nothing less
than to restore, by means of our imaginative
reason, that secret harmony with Nature which
beasts and birds and plants possess, but which
our civilization has done so much to eradicate

10
from human feeling”.30
“Human sensations are Nature’s self-
expression. They are the earth’s awareness of
herself. They are like the blossoming of flowers –
the only way in which the rooted life of the
organism can realize itself and be itself”.31

***

From Wakan Tanka there came a great unifying

life force that flowered in and through all things
– the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks,
trees, birds, animals – and was the same force
that had been breathed into the first man. Thus
all things were kindred and were brought
together by the same Great Mystery.

Standing Bear32

***

The understanding of the withness of people and

nature is deeply embedded in traditional wisdom
across the world.
It will come as little surprise to a modern
Western reader to learn that a Native North
American sun dance ceremony might contain the
phrase: “The sky is my Father and these
mountains are my Mother”.33
But what about the similar statement that:

11
“Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother,
and even such a small creature as I finds an
intimate place in their midst”?34 These are the
words of 11th century Neo-Confucian philosopher
Zhang Zai in China.
One of the defining characteristics of tradi-
tional Chinese political philosophy, explains
James D. Sellmann, is its commitment to “the
significance of cosmic harmony and its belief that
this harmony is based on a reciprocal relation-
ship obtaining between human life and the
environment”.35
Mary Eveyln Tucker adds that a “profound
sense of the interconnectedness of the human
with one another and with nature” is central to
Confucian thinking, nature being “indispensable
for sustaining communal life”.36
Japanese Confucian scholar Kaibara Ekken
(1630-1713) sees this withness as a harmonious
spirit: “While the Wise know of its existence, the
Foolish do not, for their hearts are heavy with
selfish desire. This harmonious Spirit exists not
only in man, but also in the birds, the beasts, and
the fishes, and even in plants. Beasts play, birds
sing, and fishes jump; while plants flourish,
bloom, and ripen. They know how to enjoy that
Spirit: man oftentimes does not”.37
For Ekken, our heavenly and physical
natures are essentially one and the same: “The
fecundity of nature and the well springs of the

12
human heart are seen as two aspects of the all-
embracing process of change and transformation
in the universe”.38
J.J. Clarke credits Chinese Taoism with
giving a particularly central role to nature, thus
creating “a distinctive picture of the intimate
relationship between the human and the natural
worlds”. He points out that Eastern thinking is
holistic in outlook, refusing to draw any absolute
distinction between the human and the natural
worlds, or between mind and matter, but “seeing
all such elements as inextricably entwined
within an organic whole”.39

***

The way is broad, reaching left as well as right.

The myriad creatures depend on it for Life yet it
claims no authority.

It accomplishes its task yet lays claim to no merit.

It clothes and feeds the myriad creatures yet lays
no claim to being their master.

Lao-Tzu40

***

Russian-Swiss scientist Constantin von

Monakow devoted his life work to showing how

13
human beings are closely bound up not just with
one another but with animals, plants and non-
organic bodies, into which we merge after death.
He writes: “There is an undeniable glory in
the thought that an indelible temporal bond
links us, not only with our ancestors and our
descendants, but above all also with the whole
rest of the organic world”.41
Natural withness is the essential reality of
our existence, a reality which was very clear to
those who lived and died before the advent of the
industrial era.
“Our forefathers of fifteen hundred years ago
lived not what we call ‘close to nature’ but
actually involved with nature”, writes Brian
Branston. “They were not creatures apart,
different from the birds, plants or animals, but
fitted into the natural cycle of synthesis and
disintegration which any kind of civilization
always modifies”.42
Withness is a belonging-to, a being-part-of.
The boundary between me and that to which I
belong is not solid, because I know that my very
existence is rooted in that belonging. I am an
extension of that which spawned me, which
surrounds me, nourishes me, enchants me and
welcomes my physical remains when my days are
over.
French radical Georges Lapierre writes
about the relationship between individuals in

14
what are today described as “primitive” societies.
Each person has their own outlook or vantage
point, their own subjectivity, but others are seen
as fellow subjects rather than as animated
objects, mere walk-on extras in the film of one
individual’s all-important life.
He explains that this same withness is
extended to the world beyond human community.
Mountains, animals or plants are not seen as
objects to be investigated or exploited, but as
“subjects entering into a subject-to-subject
relationship with men and women”, 43 he says.
“The non-human environment isn’t one
empty of thought, it has nothing to do with our
idea of nature, when all which is other is
regarded as an object; instead it is a world of
spirits, visible or not; it’s a world of subjects with
which the human subject is led to maintain a
delicate relationship, all the more delicate since
these non-human subjects, like human subjects
for that matter, can prove to be touchy and
powerful. This is a universe inhabited by subjects
bound by the universal law of reciprocity, of gifts
and gifts-in-return, in a world based on the
exchange of all with all”.44
In the withworld, these fellow subjects are
not to be spurned, despised and despoiled, but
must be respected and listened to for the wisdom
they can bring us. Standing Bear, raised in this
way of thinking, recalls: “The old people told us

15
to heed wa maka skan, which were the ‘moving
things of the earth’. This meant, of course, the
animals that lived and moved about, and the
stories they told us of wa maka skan increased
our interest and delight.
“Knowledge was inherent in all things. The
world was a library and its books were the
stories, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and
animals that shared, alike with us, the storms
and blessings of earth”.45
The traditional human belief system gives
every object in nature its own spirit and power,46
and all of nature – animals, plants, mountains,
forests, streams, landscapes – is understood to be
animated by living intelligences or “spirits”, with
which people could be in communication.47
This supposedly outmoded outlook is not
some kind of random bundle of superstitions and
“unscientific” misunderstandings, as contempo-
rary thinking would have it, but a solid basis for
a profound and holistic understanding of our
world and our existence.
“They have studied nature, drawn their
conclusions from it, and found it to be the
embodiment of a profound metaphysical principle
pertaining to all existence”, writes James G.
Gowan regarding the Australian aborigines.
“They have seen in it a symbol of an underlying
reality which needs to be understood as sacred if
true wisdom is to be attained”.48

16
 Natural withness therefore not only de-
scribes an authentic human relationship with the
wider world, but an authentic grasping of that
world, and our relationship to it, within our
collective thinking.
“The system of Nature is at the same time
the system of our mind,” wrote the German
nature philosopher Friedrich Schelling.49
Minds that work in partnership with exter-
nal reality, which is sometimes termed “nature”,
rather than in denial of it, form themselves in
accord with that reality, extend and develop that
reality as human thought.
Withness is also within us.

***

Over the course of many millennia, our belonging

to nature and our understanding of that
belonging shaped itself into stories, myths and
religious beliefs.
“It is from the constant awareness of the
living connection between man and the
phenomenal world that the myths of our
ancestors arise, that their gods are born”,50 as
Branston puts it.
Robert Graves describes how ancient Euro-
peans worshipped the Great Goddess, the Lady
of the Wild Things: “Dances were seasonal and
fitted into an annual pattern from which

17
gradually emerges the single grand theme of
poetry: the life, death and resurrection of the
Spirit of the Year, the Goddess’s son and lover”.51
In my own 2017 book The Green One, I
present, as a multi-faceted composite character,
what Varner describes as the vegetation spirits
and gods which “are the foundations for classic
and contemporary religious thought”.52
I suggest that this idea, projected onto
mythological characters from somewhere deep
within the collective human soul, amounts to the
knowledge that we cannot be separated
physically or psychologically from the nature of
which we are part. The Green One, whether in
the guise of god or goddess, fairy or mermaid,
Khidr, Robin Hood or Jack in the Green, is “the
memory of this connection, the appreciation of
this human belonging and of the fact that it must
remain the untouchable foundation of our
being”.53
Watsuji, in his book on withness, takes a
similar view of the origins of at least some
strands of religious thought. He writes that the
Greek gods were “nothing other than the
divinisation of external nature (such as Zeus and
Poseidon) or of internal nature (such as
Aphrodite and Apollo)” and that gods of esoteric
cults, like Mithras and Osiris, “were also
divinisations of the forces of nature”.54
He writes of India that “numerous hymns

18
are addressed not to the ‘gods’ but to ‘nature’, for
example to the sun rather than to a god of the
sun, to the water which flows or which falls from
the clouds rather than to a god of water”.55
“All the forces of nature are deified by reason
of their mysterious character. It is not just the
most visible things, like the sun, moon, sky,
storm, wind, fire, water, dawn and earth, but
also the forest, the savana, animals...”56
Sir James George Frazer, in his seminal
work The Golden Bough, judges that the spring
and harvest customs of European peasantry
deserve to rank as “primitive”, because they have
not transformed aspects of nature into gods and
goddesses in the way that the ancient Greeks or
Egyptians did.
He writes: “No special class of persons and
no special places are set exclusively apart for
their performance; they may be performed by any
one, master or man, mistress or maid, boy or girl;
they are practised, not in temples or churches,
but in the woods and meadows, beside brooks, in
barns, on harvest fields and cottage floors.
“The supernatural beings whose existence is
taken for granted in them are spirits rather than
deities: their functions are limited to certain
well-defined departments of nature: their names
are general, like the Barley-mother, the Old
Woman, the Maiden, not proper names like
Demeter, Persephone, Dionysus”.57

19
 Demeter and Persephone, on the other hand,
are anthropomorphic representations of the corn:
“As the seed brings forth the ripe ear, so the
Corn Mother Demeter gave birth to the Corn
Daughter Persephone”.58
Frazer notes that ancient rituals aimed at
helping the revival of plant life in spring arose
from the reality that “the life of man is
inextricably bound up with that of plants, and
that if they were to perish he could not
survive”.59
The same is evidently true of nature more
generally and something which I did not explore
through the vegetation-orientated character of
The Green One was the way in which the
behaviour and characteristics of our fellow
creatures form the basis of what we now think of
as purely human thinking.
Frazer points to “a time before the invention
of husbandry when animals were revered as
divine in themselves”.60
These animals were, as we have seen, re-
garded not as soulless objects but as fellow
subjects – “the sharp line of demarcation which
we draw between mankind and the lower
animals does not exist for the savage”.61
There was thus a foundation of a subject-to-
subject relationship between the ancient human
being and the animals on whom his survival
depended.

20
 “Even in the act of killing them he testifies
his respect for them, endeavours to excuse or
even conceal his share in procuring their death,
and promises that their remains will be
honourably treated”.62
Frazer describes, for instance, how an
Australian aboriginal ceremony depicts the
witchetty grub, used as food, “in the act of
emerging from the chrysalis”.63
He records of the aboriginal Ainu people of
Japan: “The skulls of slain bears receive a place
of honour in their huts, or are set up on sacred
posts outside the huts, and are treated with
much respect: libations of millet beer, and of
sake, an intoxicating liquor, are offered to them;
and they are addressed as ‘divine preservers’
(akoshiratki kamui) or ‘precious divinities’”.64
And he explains that when the human sense
of withness regarding an animal goes further
still, there is a taboo against harming the sacred
beast: “No consideration will induce a Sumatran
to catch or wound a tiger except in self-defence or
immediately after a tiger has destroyed a friend
or relation. When a European has set traps for
tigers, the people of the neighbourhood have been
known to go by night to the place and explain to
the animals that the traps are not set by them
nor with their consent... The population of
Mandeling, a district on the west coast of
Sumatra, is divided into clans, one of which

21
claims to be descended from a tiger”.65
Meanwhile, “various tribes of Madagascar
believe themselves to be descended from
crocodiles, and accordingly they view the scaly
reptile as, to all intents and purposes, a man and
a brother”.66

***

As human cultures gradually turned their deified

animals into mythological characters and
anthropomorphic gods, the original inspiration
became harder, but not impossible to identify.
Frazer, for instance, regards the fact that
the Phrygian Attis was killed by a boar, along
with the fact that his worshippers would not eat
swine flesh, as strong indications that he was
originally a pig deity.67
Turning to Egyptian mythology, he writes:
“The annual sacrifice of a pig to Osiris, coupled
with the alleged hostility of the animal to the
god, tends to show, first, that originally the pig
was a god, and, second, that he was Osiris. At a
later age, when Osiris became anthropomorphic
and his original relation to the pig had been
forgotten, the animal was first distinguished
from him, and afterwards adopted as an enemy
to him by mythologists who could think of no
reason for killing a beast in connexion with the
worship of a god except that the beast was the

22
god’s enemy...”68
Regarding the reasons why religious Jews,
like Muslims, do not eat pork, he says “we must
conclude that, originally at least, the pig was
revered rather than abhorred by the Israelites...
And in general it may perhaps be said that all so-
called unclean animals were originally sacred;
the reason for not eating them was that they
were divine”.69
There is a parallel here with the taboo on
eating horse-flesh in Britain, as described by
Graves. “The horse, or pony, has been a sacred
animal in Britain from prehistoric times, not
merely since the Bronze Age introduction of the
stronger Asiatic breed. The only human figure
represented in what survives of British Old
Stone Age art is a man wearing a horse-mask,
carved in bone, found in the Derbyshire Pin-hole
Cave; a remote ancestor of the hobby-horse
mummers in the English ‘Christmas Play’. The
Saxons and Danes venerated the horse as much
as did their Celtic predecessors”.70
The goddess Demeter (along with what
Graves calls “Cernidwen the Welsh Pig-Demeter,
alias the Old White One”)71 is also seen by Frazer
as an evolution of pig-worship: “The pig was
sacred to her; in art she was portrayed carrying
or accompanied by a pig; and the pig was
regularly sacrificed in her mysteries”.72
The complication here is that Demeter is

23
also the corn-goddess and that “in European folk-
lore the pig is a common embodiment of the corn-
spirit”.73
Frazer notes that Dionysus, too, was a deity
of vegetation “often conceived and represented in
animal shape, especially in the form, or at least
with the horns, of a bull”.74
“However we may explain it, the fact re-
mains that in peasant folk-lore the corn-spirit is
very commonly conceived and represented in
animal form”,75 writes Frazer. “Amongst the
many animals whose forms the corn-spirit is
supposed to take are the wolf, dog, hare, fox,
cock, goose, quail, cat, goat, cow (ox, bull), pig,
and horse”.76
Ultimately, all these mythological characters
represent nature, and the representation of
natural withness in the human collective mind.
Nature knows no fixed boundaries: all is
interdependent and intertwined.

***

Other manifestations of animal-withness in

human mythology include:

* Egyptian goddess Isis. “Cows were sacred to

her, and she was regularly depicted with the
horns of a cow on her head, or even as a woman
with the head of a cow”.77

24
* Greek goddess Athena. “The goat was at one
time a sacred animal or embodiment of Athena,
as may be inferred from the practice of
representing the goddess clad in a goat-skin
(aegis)”.78

* Theban god Ammon. “The ram was Ammon

himself. On the monuments, it is true, Ammon
appears in semi-human form with the body of a
man and the head of a ram. But this only shews
that he was in the usual chrysalis state through
which beast-gods regularly pass before they
emerge as full-blown anthropomorphic gods. The
ram, therefore, was killed, not as a sacrifice to
Ammon, but as the god himself, whose identity
with the beast is plainly shewn by the custom of
clothing his image in the skin of a slain ram”.79

* Italian deity Faunus. Identical to the Greek

Pan, he was “the son of Picus, which is Latin for
woodpecker”.80

* Armenian goddess Anaitas. She was derived

from the lion-goddess Anatha Baetyl, according
to Graves.81

* Biblical cherub. Mentioned in the first chapter

of Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, it is also clearly
a beast of the calendar sort, says Graves. “It has

25
four parts which represent the ‘four New Years’
of Jewish tradition: Lion for Spring, Eagle for
Summer; Man for Autumn, the principal New
Year; and Ox for Winter, the Judaean ploughing
season”.82

* Delphi, famed for its oracle. Graves specifies

that this ancient Greek site was sacred to “Apollo
the Dolphin-God or Porpoise-god”.83

***

Indian mythology, in which gods often take on

animal forms, goes further in its sense of an
essential withness between humans and the
other beings with which we share this world, as
Watsuji describes: “Even if we are currently
human beings, in the next world we will perhaps
exist as cows and in the previous world we were
perhaps snakes. Correlatively, beings who are
currently cows or snakes were perhaps
previously humans, or one day will manifest as
such. Thus, even if these creatures differ greatly
in term of appearance, they all emerge from one
sole substance”.84

***

In his introduction to Frazer’s The Golden

Bough, Robert Fraser suggests that the real

26
subject matter of the work is not immediately
obvious. “Frazer’s work might seem to be a
compendium of ritual and custom. In fact it is
something very different: a book on the human
mind and the connections habitually made by
it”.85
The research and analysis was a kind of
mental anthropology,86 the study of what people
have thought in the past, an uncovering of the
layers of thinking which constitute universal
human attitudes “and their different ways of
expressing themselves in a variety of places and
periods”.87
Given the fact that Frazer’s work clearly
shows the way human belief-systems have
emerged from our belonging to, interactions with
and observations of nature, we could say that
The Golden Bough describes the way in which
our primal natural withness has been codified
and absorbed into the collective human mind.
Kropotkin, too, saw the way in which our
thinking had evolved from our closeness with
fellow creatures.
He writes in Ethics: “Our primitive ancestors
lived with the animals, in the midst of them. And
as soon as they began to bring some order into
their observations of nature, and to transmit
them to posterity, the animals and their life
supplied them with the chief materials for their
unwritten encyclopaedia of knowledge, as well as

27
for their wisdom, which they expressed in
proverbs and sayings. Animal psychology was
the first psychology studied by man – it is still a
favourite subject of talk at the camp fires; and
animal life, closely interwoven with that of man,
was the subject of the very first rudiments of art,
inspiring the first engravers and sculptors, and
entering into the composition of the most ancient
and epical legends and cosmogonic myths”.88
While the primitive human may have ini-
tially simply related “these exploits of animals in
his tales, embellishing the acts of courage and
self-sacrifice with his primitive poetry, and
mimicking them in his religious rites, now
improperly called dances”,89 a deeper process was
at work.
Kropotkin argues that it is here that we see
“the natural origin not only of the rudiments of
ethics, but also of the higher ethical feelings”.90
Human notions of good and bad have been
“borrowed from nature”, he says. “They are
reflections in the mind of man of what he saw in
animal life and in the course of his social life, and
due to it those impressions were developed into
general conceptions of right and wrong. And it
should be noted that we do not mean here the
personal judgments of exceptional individuals,
but the judgment of the majority. They contain
the fundamental principles of equity and mutual
sympathy, which apply to all sentient beings”.91

28
 In declaring that “nature has thus to be
recognized as the first ethical teacher of man”,92
Kropotkin is careful to explain that alongside the
“ethical lessons” which our primitive ancestors
gained from the observation of nature, there are
our “inherited ethical tendencies”.93
He writes: “The social instinct, innate in
men as well as in all social animals – this is the
origin of all ethical conceptions and all the
subsequent development of morality”.94
This understanding is, like all real under-
standing, an old one. It was set out in the third
century BCE by the Chinese Confucian
philosopher Mencius.
For him, all the cardinal virtues such as ren
(human-heartedness), yi (righteousness), li
(courteousness) and zhi (wisdom) were innate to
us, as pure potentials. “This means that everyone
possesses these virtues ‘to begin with’. If an
individual is able to carry these beginnings into
full development, the individual can become a
sage”,95 explains Joseph S. Wu.
“His empirical argument states that when
we observe a little child about to fall into a well,
we experience a feeling of distress or alarm, and
our natural response is to make an effort
immediately to rescue the child. From this
example we can conclude that our natural feeling
does not allow us to tolerate the suffering of
others. Such a feeling is universally innate in all

29
of us, and this is the ‘beginning’ of human-
heartedness”.96
As Kropotkin identifies, we do not have to
decide whether the lessons we have drawn from
nature come from ancestral observation or from
innate belonging – both factors are in play here.
Gross, who regarded ethics as arising from
“a primitive instinct inherent in the human
species”,97 specifically endorsed Kropotkin’s
suggestion that it was a question of both genetics
and “normative discipline”.98

***

Our natural withness means that we have

evolved not in competition with nature nor
alongside nature, but with and within nature.
The English poet William Wordsworth was
…well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being99
Human thinking and ethics have grown, in a
particularly human way, from the seed of our
natural belonging.
Berque writes: “Morality cannot be reduced
to nature but neither can it be separated from its
foundations in nature”.100
Watsuji, too, is very clear on this matter,

30
remarking that we end up regarding the
particularities of nature within us as being
merely particularities of human life.
But, he says, humans are not born as clean
slates unmarked by their natural withness: “We
therefore have to see that the particularities of
nature are something engraved in the spiritual
structure of the human being, who is in this
nature”.101

***
When nature is able to express itself fully and
clearly through the human mind and hand, its
original beauty shines through.
For 19th century art critic John Ruskin
and the Pre-Raphaelite movement he inspired,
there was a withness in medieval society which
remained visible in its artistic achievements,
such as the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe.
Gothic, in Ruskin’s eyes, was a form of art
that was natural, human and beautiful, an art
which expressed a social world of “tranquil and
gentle existence, sustained by the gifts, and
gladdened by the splendour, of the earth”.102
These three qualities – natural, human and
beautiful – always go together in Ruskin and the
Pre-Raphaelites’ shared vision and are
contrasted with a modern industrial world which
is artificial, inhuman and ugly.
Alfred Noyes depicts Ruskin as the prophet

31
of the new religion, “the religion of beauty”.103 He
taught the young artists that it was in nature
that they would find the aesthetic inspiration
that had infused the Gothic cathedrals with their
forest-like interiors, urging them to “go to
Nature... rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and
scorning nothing”.104
“It is simply fuller Nature we want”,105
declared William Holman Hunt and the Pre-
Raphaelites honoured not only the artistic
tradition of the Middle Ages but also its way of
thinking.
Ananda Coomaraswamy explains that from
the medieval perspective, the form, beauty,
goodness and truth of a thing are seen as deeply
connected, almost synonymous.106
Art, like nature, is the outpouring of univer-
sal light. The individual artist is just one natural
channel through which this light passes and
makes its beauty visible, on a canvas or in a
sculpture as in a mountain or a forest.

***

An understanding of natural withness lies at the

heart of the work of German artist and theorist
Joseph Beuys.
“It is not the case that first the earth must
exist so that plants can grow in it, but rather
that they have evolved hand-in-hand,” he says.

32
“All matter arose through organic processes”.107
He cites the example of bone, which comes
into being by means of a natural process which
remains visible.
“You can see that it has arisen out of fluid
form, and so has spiral movements and vortices
in it everywhere, very like vortex or spiral
symbols. So it’s really a rigidified fluid form. And
if the bone is examined in detail you can still
read the fluid form in it”.108
As an extension of his idea of organic form in
the structure of everything, Beuys describes
human freedom as being founded on underlying
natural order or “laws”.109
He highlights the idea of a social organism,
“a living being that we cannot today perceive
with our ordinary senses, without practice”.110
There is furthermore, he suggests, an arche-
type behind this social organism, an idea of what
human community would look like if we were
living in a condition of full natural withness.

***

The pattern of the human mind, the human

essence, is something that has developed within
nature.
This innate structure, with an inborn and
natural sense of good and bad, right and wrong,
ugly and beautiful, provides the basis of human

33
culture.
Codified into myths and religious beliefs,
expressed as art and architecture, or regarded as
basic decency or common sense, it is the force
that gives pleasing shape to our lives, guiding
the way we relate to each other and to the world
around us.
Emerging naturally from our withness, it
also speaks to us of our withness, of our
dependence on and responsibilities towards our
fellow humans, our fellow creatures and nature
herself.
This pattern is natural order within us. It is
the source of the social cohesion for which so
many lost modern souls have yearned and
sought, often blindly. Eliot, for instance, writes of
James Joyce’s groundbreaking novel Ulysses that
the Irish writer’s great conception was to use
myth as a method for bringing order to the
contemporary world.111
“Throughout Eliot’s work the idea of pattern
or order becomes the informing principle – he
finds it everywhere, in literary tradition, in
ritual, in political myth and in English history”,
writes biographer Peter Ackroyd.112
Eliot also sees pattern in the speech of
ordinary people, which he seeks to reflect in his
work. He stresses the need for a ‘common style’
in poetry, a ‘common language of the people’, the
attempt to reflect ‘the changing language of

34
common intercourse’. “Even his understanding of
musical pattern and musical form, which in
practice was for him a deeply instinctive activity,
was discussed in terms of the musical pattern
which is ‘latent in common speech’”.113
Eliot himself explains: “Of course, we do not
want the poet merely to reproduce exactly the
conversational idiom of himself, his family, his
friends, and his particular district: but what he
finds there is the material out of which he must
make his poetry. He must, like the sculptor, be
faithful to the medium in which he works; it is
out of sounds that he has heard that he must
make his melody and harmony”.114
The pattern of natural order is dharma,
asha, humanity’s withness to the structure of
life, the order-from-within that informs our
knowledge that not only do we have no need of
external authorities and structures to bring
“order” to our communities but that such
authorities serve merely to destroy the organic
order which arises naturally among us and thus
they bring only disorder and social shattering.115
As Eliot’s close friend the anarchist Herbert
Read wrote: “There is an order in Nature, and
the order of Society should be a reflection of
it”.116

***

35
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe approached this
same issue from the perspective of botany,
notably with his Versuch die Metamorphose der
Pflanzen zu erklären (Metamorphosis of Plants)
in 1790.
He detected the presence of innate principles
throughout nature which provided a sense of
direction and purpose to individual organisms.
This is the innate cohesion and order which
renders artificially-imposed authority not only
unnecessary but disruptive of our natural
withness.

***

The patterns of nature are also, since we are part

of nature, patterns in the human mind. But
because we are human beings, these patterns
manifest themselves in ways particular to
humankind, such as through our rich traditional
mythology, as we have seen.
Varner considers enduring mythology to be
comprised of a “universal memory”, a collective
human awareness which recognises and
describes the “inter-relatedness of the organisms
on the Earth with the Earth itself, and the Earth
in relationship with the universe”.117
The origins of this universal memory in the
patterns of nature within us explain why, despite
the enormous diversity of what German

36
ethnologist Adolf Bastian called Völkergedanken,
or specific cultures, we are united by our common
elementary ideas, Elementargedanken.
This is the “essential similarity”118 identified
by Frazer and what Joseph Campbell terms “the
fundamental unity of the spiritual history of
mankind”.119
There are no dividing lines between physical
and psychic reality, between the world outside us
and the world within. Our minds are an
extension of the patterns of the cosmos.
Our stories and beliefs are not so much
human constructions as human filterings and
rearrangings of the organic shapes, cycles and
forces from which we are ultimately inseparable.
For instance, Radmila Moacanin explains
that a mandala, the Sanskrit word for circle, is
the round form found in all elements of nature,
and in the arts and dances of all people,
throughout history. “It is also an image residing
in the depths of the human psyche that
spontaneously emerges and assumes many
different forms”.120
Graves suggests that our word “circle”
originates from the “circ-circ” cry made by
falcons, known for their circling. This natural
pattern also took the form, in human minds, of
the goddess Circe. He says her name means “she-
falcon” and he also links her to the use of the
magical circle in various rituals.121

37
 Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psycho-
logy, devoted his life to studying the origins and
significance of this ingrained pattern in the
human mind and its manifestation in mythology
and religion.
“Mind is not born as a tabula rasa”, he
writes. “Like the body, it has its pre-established
individual definiteness; namely, forms of
behaviour. They become manifest in the ever-
recurring patterns of psychic functioning”.122
He identifies universal archetypes within
the human psyche which underlie our thought
processes at the deepest level and which remain
dormant as “forms without content, representing
merely the possibility of a certain type of
perception and action”.123
As Moacanin puts it: “Archetypes are not
inherited ideas; they are merely propensities in
the human psyche that can express themselves
in specific forms and meaning when activated”.124

***

Behind the Jungian concept of archetypes lies

the assumption that there is a collective
unconscious which is the common heritage of all
humanity and the universal source of all
conscious life.
Writes Moacanin: “In the depth of the collec-
tive unconscious, there are no individual or

38
cultural differences, no separation. It is the
realm of primordial unity, nonduality, and
through it each person is connected with the rest
of humanity”.125
But the withness implied by these deeply-
etched patterns goes further than our human
and natural withness: they reveal our essential
belonging to the universe as a whole.
This cosmic withness was embraced by the
traditional wisdom which illuminated our
existences for many thousands of years.
Silvia Federici describes it as a “magical
view of the world which, despite the efforts of the
Church, had continued to prevail on a popular
level through the Middle Ages”.
She explains: “At the basis of magic was an
animistic conception of nature that did not admit
to any separation between matter and spirit, and
thus imagined the cosmos as a living organism,
populated by occult forces, where every element
was in ‘sympathetic’ relation with the rest”.126
Lapierre likewise depicts an old way of
thinking from which we might draw inspiration:
a system of thought which posits “an intimate
solidarity”127 between the human individual,
human society and the universe.
“The human being is at the centre of a
communication network on a cosmic scale, at the
centre of a network of universal correspondences.
We find this hard to accept”.128

39
 This wider context is the bedrock of all
traditional metaphysical understanding, even
though this with-wisdom – or should we simply
say “withdom”? – remained more visible and
accessible in non-Western belief systems.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the important
Indian philosopher who was president of his
country between 1962 and 1967, explains: “If
science teaches us anything, it is the organic
nature of the universe. We are one with the
world that has made us, one with every scene
that is spread before our eyes. In a metaphor
common to the Upanishads and Plato every unit
of nature is a microcosm reflecting in itself the
entire all-inclusive macrocosm...
“We are solid with the world and are deeply
rooted in it. We are not merely spectators of the
universe but constituent parts of it”.129
Another Indian thinker, Sri Aurobindo,
writes that “the self and the world are in an
eternal close relation and there is a connection
between them, not a gulf that has to be
overleaped... This is the realisation which the
ancient Vedantins spoke of as seeing all
existences in the self and the self in all
existences”.130
Aurobindo says that our self is not the
individual mental being usually identified as
such, but that which is sourced from our deep
withness and is “one with all existence and the

40
inhabitant of all existences”. He adds: “The self
behind our mind, life and body is the same as the
self behind the mind, life and body of all our
fellow-beings”.131
Chinese Confucian thought is also based on
“anthropocosmic unity”, notes Chenyang Li: “One
way to describe this metaphysic is that Heaven
and man are an inseparable single oneness”.132
And the world of withness is never about a
one-way relationship, but about what Alan Fox,
summarising the ideas of Fazang (643-712), a
philosopher from Samarkand in Central Asia,
describes as “the interpenetration of phenomena
with principle and with each other without
obstruction”.
He continues: “In some sense, this can be
understood as the relation between a context and
the elements which make up the context – the
context depends on its elements just as the
elements are meaningless outside of a
context”.133
Here is Berque’s médiance, with which I
began this section, interpreted on a metaphysical
level. Our withness to all that surrounds us is
centred not on the personal or the universal, nor
even on both together, but on their interdepend-
ence and ultimate inseparability.

41
 PART II: LOST IN FALSEHOOD

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can
understand

W.B. Yeats1

As I write these words, humankind has never

seemed further from a condition of natural
withness.
In 2013, I warned that “the normal, healthy,
interconnections of a society, the neural
pathways that enable it to function as a whole,
have been blocked by disease – the disease of
modernity”2 with the result that it is now “almost
impossible to lead a truly meaningful life”.3
Over the last two traumatic years, still more
layers of separation have been added to this
already-serious loss of authenticity.
The ideal of social withness has been directly

43
countered by a new cult of “social distancing”, in
which all direct unmediated contact with our
fellow human beings is regarded as dangerously
irresponsible.
Henceforth, in the twisted vision of the
Great Reset publicised by Klaus Schwab of the
World Economic Forum, all our interactions
should take place within the digital framework
constructed around us by a predatory ruling
class.
We are ordered to distrust each other, to
mask our faces and thus our emotions, to avoid
talking, singing, hugging, kissing or even
shaking hands.
Solidarity is out of bounds: those who do not
conform to the diktats of authority are depicted
as not only unworthy of empathy or support but
as positive threats to the well-being of the
credulous majority.
Any talk of freedom is interpreted as selfish-
ness, any expression of individual opinion as
anti-sociality, any critical thinking as conspiracy
theory, any revelation of inconvenient truth as
disinformation, any deviation from, or
questioning of, official dogma as criminality.
Even our withness to our own bodies has
come under unprecedented attack, our physical
integrity denied in the same toxic pharmaceuti-
cal breath as the existence of our natural
immune systems.

44
 Transhumanism, once seen as a peripheral
cult of semi-crazed life-hating fantasists, has now
revealed itself to be the official religion of the
worldwide global establishment: a dominant
death-cult possessed of enormous financial
wealth and thus power.
We are faced with the possibility of a night-
mare future in which the very essence of
humanity has been destroyed, in which every
last one of us has been removed from our natural
belonging to each other and to nature and
reduced to the status of units of human capital in
a digital economy, our life-energy harvested for
the profit and pleasure of a clique of venal and
sociopathic parasites.
How on earth did we get to this point?

***

The general name we could give to everything

that assaults, undermines, pollutes and destroys
our natural withness is “power”.
Power is a form of separation. A human
being who seeks power over another has ceased
to regard that person as a fellow subject and
treats them instead as an object. The denial of
withness, of mutual sympathy, with fellow
human beings breaks the natural bond which
creates natural order.
By treating any fellow human being as less

45
than human, power-seekers abandon their own
full human identity as withfolk. In considering
themselves to be better than others, whom they
see fit to use as objects for their own self-
advancement, they are effectively removing
themselves from the realm of right-living, from
dharma, from the collective ethical sense that
makes us fully human.
In attempting to increase their own status or
level of comfort by walking on the backs of those
they consider beneath them, they fall down to a
condition beneath that of authentic humanity.
The same applies when such incomplete
humans, half-humans lacking the withness
essential to our shared humanity, refuse to see
their innate withness to nature and instead
regard fellow creatures or living eco-systems as
objects, lower than them, from which they
consider they are entitled to extract the material
wealth with which they maintain and expand
their power over other human beings.

***

There are many and diverse theories about how

and when power-based relationships entered into
human society – or, more specifically, how and
when they crept beyond the purely personal (and
thus ephemeral) to become a systematically
embedded blockage to our natural withness.

46
 Some maintain that it was in abandoning a
nomadic way of life and taking up agriculture
that our ancestors adopted a hierarchical social
structure that would evolve into the modern
state.
But James C. Scott, in his 2017 book Against
the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States,
takes a slightly different view.
He reminds us that the first evidence of
cultivated plants and of sedentary communities
appears roughly 12,000 years ago: “Until then –
that is to say for ninety-five percent of the
human experience on earth – we lived in small,
mobile, dispersed, relatively egalitarian,
hunting-and-gathering bands”. 4

He points to the fact that the first very

small, stratified, tax-collecting walled states
emerged in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley only
around 3,100 BCE, in other words several
millennia after the first crop domestications and
sedentism.
Scott writes: “This massive lag is a problem
for those theorists who would naturalize the
state form and assume that once crops and
sedentism, the technological and demographic
requirements, respectively, for state formation
were established, states/empires would
immediately arise as the logical and most
efficient units of political order”.5
He concludes: “Clearly our ancestors did not

47
rush headlong into the Neolithic revolution or
into the arms of the earliest states”.6
So while the adoption of an agricultural
lifestyle certainly made possible the emergence of
states, ruling over and taxing settled popula-
tions, it did not automatically bring it about.
Another agricultural world was demonstrably
possible.
Scott raises the question as to what it was,
then, that after thousands of years of agriculture,
suddenly pushed free communities into power-
based state structures.
Did people suddenly decide they would like
to live under the control of a central authority
which had the right to confiscate their produce,
conscript them into its armies and so on? Or
were they forced?
He muses: “If the formation of the earliest
states were shown to be largely a coercive
enterprise, the vision of the state, one dear to the
heart of such social-contract theorists as Hobbes
and Locke, as a magnet of civil peace, social
order, and freedom from fear, drawing people in
by its charisma, would have to be reexamined”.7
If the first states used coercion to establish
their rule, then they were criminal enterprises
and the whole of our state-based civilization
since then has been built on a foundation of
crime. Violent crime, in fact, because force (both
inflicted and threatened) has always been the

48
mainstay of state control.
The motive for this crime is clear: popula-
tions under state control could be forced to
produce surpluses which would enrich the ruling
family or clique, enabling them to build up ever-
greater material wealth with which to pay those
who violently imposed their criminal control.
Scott draws out the reality of the state’s
essential criminality by exploring the role of
early “barbarians”, which is to say peoples who
were not yet incorporated into states.
They initially flourished alongside the early
states by plundering the surpluses produced at
the behest of those states. State rulers often
ended up paying them not to carry out these
raids. Since the money used to pay them off came
from the exploited population, people were
effectively being taxed by their enemies.
As Scott says, this amounts to a protection
racket, of the kind carried out by modern day
criminal mafia, in which the threat of violence is
used to extract money from the victim.
He writes: “Protection rackets that are
routine and that persist are a longer-run
strategy than one-time sacking and therefore
depend on a reasonably stable political and
military environment. In extracting a sustain-
able surplus from sedentary communities and
fending off external attacks to protect its base, a
stable protection racket like this is hard to

49
distinguish from the archaic state itself”.8
The early agrarian states and the barbarian
entities were effectively “competing protection
rackets”,9 he stresses.
Because states themselves draw up the rules
by which their societies operate, their definitions
of “legal” and “illegal” will never identify their
own existence as being fundamentally criminal.
But the violent coercion on which state rule
depends is a crime nonetheless, according to the
innate human sense of right and wrong, the
natural ethics which form the ordered pattern
behind authentic human communities.
This ugly reality is illustrated by the way in
which, from the very start, states regarded and
treated human beings – not as subjects but as
objects.
“A peasantry – assuming that it has enough
to meet its basic needs – will not automatically
produce a surplus that elites might appropriate,
but must be compelled to produce it”, writes
Scott.
“Only through one form or another of unfree,
coerced labor – corvée labor, forced delivery of
grain or other products, debt bondage, serfdom,
communal bondage and tribute, and various
forms of slavery – was a surplus brought into
being”.10
He says evidence overwhelmingly confirms
that bondage was a condition of the ancient

50
state’s survival: “States, we know, did not invent
slavery and human bondage: they could be found
in innumerable prestate societies. What states
surely did invent, however, are large-scale
societies based systematically on coerced, captive
human labor”.11
Unfree labour was needed to build city walls
and roads, dig canals, to carry out mining,
quarrying, logging, monumental construction
and agriculture.
Violent coercion was the means by which
men could be forced to work for the state, and
archaeological evidence from ancient Mesopota-
mia indicates that slaves and prisoners of war
were not treated well, many being depicted in
neck fetters or being physically subdued.
Write Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine: “On
cylinder seals we meet frequent variants of a
scene in which the ruler supervises his men as
they beat shackled prisoners with clubs”.12
The state saw itself as owning the people it
ruled over (what greater crime could one imagine
than the theft of one’s own person?) and regarded
its population as human livestock, says Scott, “as
a form of wealth”.13
Thus walls around cities, or great walls
across China, were not so much intended to keep
the barbarians out as to keep the human cattle
inside the state corral: “One of the hallmarks of
early statecraft in agrarian kingdoms was to hold

51
the population in place and prevent any
unauthorized movement. Physical mobility and
dispersal are the bane of the tax man”,14 writes
Scott.
“The state remained as focused on the
number and productivity of its ‘domesticated’
subjects as a shepherd might husband his flock
or a farmer tend his crops. The imperative of
collecting people, settling them close to the core
of power, holding them there, and having them
produce a surplus in excess of their own needs
animates much of early statecraft”.15
The development of the state was a deliber-
ate move by a band of organised criminals to
“move beyond sheer plunder and to more
rationally extract labor and foodstuffs from their
subjects”,16 as Scott puts it.
Even in their earliest form, calculation and
statistics were used by the robber-tyrants to
reduce fellow human beings to numbers on a list,
to mere objects to be exploited for profit and
power.
Receipts, work orders and labour dues
quickly made an appearance and “something like
‘work points’ were created showing credits and
debits in work assignments”.17
Early written records from Uruk show that,
in state accounts, the age and sex categories used
to list human labourers were exactly the same as
those used to describe “‘state-controlled herds of

52
domestic animals”, suggesting an equivalent
social status, as Guillermo Algaze has
commented.18
Similarly, women slaves of reproductive age
were prized in large part as “breeders”19 because
of their contribution to the early state’s
manpower machine.
Our communal strength and sense of free-
dom, which might lead to rebellion, arise from
our withness and so had to be destroyed by the
tyrants running the early states.
Slaves were drawn from scattered locations
and backgrounds, separated from their families
and communities. They were thereby “socially
demobilized or atomized and therefore easier to
control”, explains Scott. “Having, unlike local
subjects, few if any local social ties, they were
scarcely able to muster any collective opposi-
tion”.20

***

“Every State constitutes an alliance of the rich

against the poor, and of the ruling classes, i.e.,
the military, the lawyers, the rulers, and the
clergy, against those governed”,21 writes Peter
Kropotkin in Ethics.
We might go further and say that every state
constitutes a crime committed by the rich against
the poor, by the self-appointed ruling classes

53
against the victims of their endless self-serving
violence.
We see this same picture again and again
throughout history. The Roman Empire, such an
inspiration for Western Civilization as a whole,
and not merely for fascism, was characterised by
its central control, its “tension towards
integration”22 as Watsuji Tetsurô terms it.
Slavery, of course, went hand in hand with
the accumulation of imperial wealth and power.
Scott writes: “Imperial Rome, a polity on a
scale rivaled only by its easternmost contempo-
rary, Han Dynasty China, turned much of the
Mediterranean basin into a massive slave
emporium. Every Roman military campaign was
shadowed by slave merchants and ordinary
soldiers who expected to become rich by selling or
ransoming the captives they had taken
personally.
“By one estimate, the Gallic Wars yielded
nearly a million new slaves, while in Augustan
Rome and Italy, slaves represented from one-
quarter to one-third of the population. The
ubiquity of slaves as a commodity was reflected
in the fact that in the classical world a
‘standardized’ slave became a unit of measure-
ment: in Athens at one point – the market
fluctuated – a pair of working mules was worth
three slaves”.23
When European states embarked on build-

54
ing a more recent empire, slavery again played a
key role. Adam Hochschild has observed that as
late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s
population could be said to be living in bondage.24
If outright slavery subsequently became less
prevalent, it was perhaps because it was no
longer even necessary.
“When population becomes so dense that
land can be controlled it becomes unnecessary to
keep the lower classes in bondage; it is sufficient
to deprive the working class of the right to be
independent cultivators”,25 writes Ester Boserup.
Deprived of our withness to the land, we are
deprived of our autonomy and so at the
permanent mercy of the violent criminal class
who stole everything from us.

***

.... Men have forgotten

All gods except Usury,
Lust and Power

T.S. Eliot26

***

The iniquitous role of the state is identified by

the ground-breaking German sociologist
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) in his best-

55
known work, Community and Society.
He concludes that it amounts to “nothing but
force”27 and totally undermines the possibility of
organic social cohesion in “a natural order in
which every member does his part harmoniously
in order to enjoy his share”.28
Ordinary people are very aware that the
state is their enemy, he says. “The state, to them,
is an alien and unfriendly power; although
seemingly authorized by them and embodying
their own will, it is nevertheless opposed to all
their needs and desires, protecting property
which they do not possess, forcing them into
military service for a country which offers them
hearth and altar only in the form of a heated
room on the upper floor ...”29
It is not by chance that Tönnies was also an
outspoken critic of the commercial mentality that
underlies modern society.
Commerce is about making money, gaining
wealth and thus power, at the expense of other
human beings. It breaks from the innate human
ethics of withness and social solidarity and
instead proposes a dog-eat-dog anti-morality, in
which all sense of right and wrong is swept away
by the pursuit of egotistical and material ends.
It was, as we have seen, this sociopathic
craving for power over others which motivated
the criminal gangs who first set themselves up as
“authorities” and built all the apparatus of the

56
state to justify and defend their historical theft
from the commons.
Tönnies identifies a social decline from
traditional organic community, Gemeinschaft,
into the top-down artificiality of modern society,
Gesellschaft.
He writes: “The merchants or capitalists (the
owners of money which can be increased by
double exchange) are the natural masters and
rulers of the Gesellschaft. The Gesellschaft exists
for their sake. It is their tool”.30
The move to Gesellschaft “meant the victory
of egoism, impudence, falsehood, and cunning,
the ascendancy of greed for money, ambition and
lust for pleasure”.31

***

The commercial mindset places quantity above

quality, price above value, glitter above
substance.
It reduces human beings to units of produc-
tion and consumption, to the means for its own
enrichment.
It was this mindset that lay behind the
Utilitarian movement in 18th and 19th century
Britain, as Theodore Roszak sets out in The Cult
of Information.
Although they claimed to follow scientific
objectivity, Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham

57
were in fact inspired by “a definite political
ideology, a not-so-very-hidden agenda”,32 he
writes.
Their “perfectly dismal vision of human
nature and a grim obsession with cash values”
led them to believe that the poor should be
whipped to work. “This made them the allies of
factory owners who had reduced the conditions of
labor to an inhuman level. It would be no
exaggeration to say that, with the lash of pure
fact in their hands, the Benthamites helped
produce the work force of the industrial
revolution”.33

***

Business presents itself as some kind of entity

separate from the state, but needs the state to
impose its exploitation on the population.
Business therefore needs to control the state and
can never allow genuine democracy to come in the
way of its needs.
Business is nothing other than theft, but because
business controls the state, this theft is regarded
as legitimate.

Organic Radicals website34

***

58
The “work ethic” embraced by slavemasters
ancient and modern is one of the many
symptoms of our loss of withness.
As creatures who belong to the Earth, to
nature, we naturally evolved to flourish and feed
ourselves from the fruit of the land, as does other
every other living being within the planetary
organism.
But a barrier has been erected. The re-
sources which are our collective birthright no
longer belong to us, but to a class of thieves who
have claimed them for their own and have so
much accumulated wealth and power that they
can deploy unlimited violence to keep hold of
their loot.
We are therefore obliged to work for these
criminals, to give our labour for their still-
greater enrichment, simply in order to have the
right to live somewhere, to drink water, to clothe
and feed ourselves and our families.
Although camouflaged by talk of salaries
and contracts and trades and careers, as well as
by the crumbs of minor luxuries that fall into our
mouths from the tables of the wealthy overclass,
the bondage is as real as that endured by the
slave-labourers of ancient Mesopotamia.

***

In her book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia

59
Federici rejects the received wisdom that a
“transition to capitalism” formed part of a kind of
natural social evolution.
Instead, she says, it was a response by the
European ruling class to a mighty wave of
popular revolt in the Middle Ages which
threatened their domination.
She writes: “Capitalism was the counter-
revolution that destroyed the possibilities that
had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle –
possibilities which, if realized, might have spared
us the immense destruction of lives and the
natural environment that has marked the
advance of capitalist relations worldwide. This
much must be stressed, for the belief that
capitalism ‘evolved’ from feudalism and
represents a higher form of social life has not yet
been dispelled”.35
The Middle Ages, she explains, were a period
of “relentless class struggle” in which “the
medieval village was the theater of daily
warfare”.36
“Everywhere masses of people resisted the
destruction of their former ways of existence,
fighting against land privatization, the abolition
of customary rights, the imposition of new taxes,
wage-dependence, and the continuous presence
of armies in their neighbourhoods, which was so
hated that people rushed to close the gates of
their towns to prevent soldiers from settling

60
among them”.37
So as to impose their system on the unwill-
ing people, the power elite used “social
enclosure”,38 Federici says. “In pursuit of social
discipline, an attack was launched against all
forms of collective sociality and sexuality
including sports, games, dances, ale-wakes,
festivals, and other group-rituals that had been a
source of bonding and solidarity among
workers”.39

***

The fracturing of human withness, in all its

aspects, can be seen as resulting from the
psychological separation of the individual from
the social and physical milieu, the forgetting of
the bonds of mutual sympathy that tie us to each
other and to the physical context of our lives.
The ruling gang of criminals not only cast
aside empathy and solidarity in their quest for
power, but also instil that same flaw in others
and depend on that social fragmentation to
prevent the huge majority from combining
against their domination.
Chinese philosopher Mozi had already
identified this danger in the fifth century BCE.
“The social crisis of his times, according to Mozi,
stems from selfishness, or what he calls
partiality,” outlines Lawrence F. Hundersmarck.

61
“When the ruler of one state thinks only of
gaining advantage over the ruler of another
state, or when one family seeks its own ends over
all other families, the resulting narcissistic self-
preoccupation generates a disease of partiality
that destroys society”.40
Recent consumer society, which has polluted
even supposedly critical political currents with
its me-first off-the-peg individualism, has
dragged this narcissism to new depths.
Behind the tendency, we can see a deep
ideological attachment to separation, a fanatical
opposition to any idea of solidarity or holistic
withness, which informs the dogma of modernity
often labelled liberalism.
Complains Eliot: “These liberals are con-
vinced that only by what is called unrestrained
individualism will truth ever emerge. Ideas,
views of life, they think, issue distinct from
independent heads, and in consequence of their
knocking violently against each other, the fittest
survive, and truth rises triumphant. Anyone who
dissents from this view must either be a
medievalist, wishful only to set back the clock, or
else a fascist, and probably both”.41
But, at the same time, the contemporary
system also denies true individuality in its
demand for total conformity and obedience. The
cogs in their machine are not supposed to think
and act autonomously.

62
 Kropotkin, that great exponent of collective
mutual aid, notes with concern the steady
growth of “the subjection of the individual – to
the war machinery of the State, the system of
education, the mental discipline required for the
support of the existing institutions, and so on”
and warns of “the presumption of a still greater
absorption of the individual by society”.42
He concludes that “the want of development
of the personality (leading to herd-psychology)
and the lack of individual creative power and
initiative are certainly one of the chief defects of
our time”.43
On this road apart on which we have all
been forced to travel, the natural order of our
world has been left far behind.
Authentic individual development gives each
of us the confidence and capacity to become all
that we could have been and to thus to enrich the
collective life of the community of which we are
part.
Selfish individualism is a stunted growth, a
twig of life that never blossoms and brings no
beauty to the bare, diseased tree of a humanity
ripped out of the soil of natural withness.

***

John Cowper Powys writes in The Meaning of

Culture, first published in 1929, that if you look

63
and listen for a moment in the modern world you
are sure to find something “that is so repulsive to
you, so poisonous to your nature, so contrary to
all your ideas of what beauty is, and what truth
is, and what noble simplicity is, that it will
scarcely bear thinking on”.44

***

Psychoanalyst Otto Gross explores the way in

which individuals are mentally crushed by
artificial contemporary society.
Fearful of being rejected and unloved by
those around us, we stifle our inborn potential so
as to fit in.
Gross writes: “The fear of loneliness, the
drive for contact, forces the child to adapt: the
suggestions from foreign will that one calls
education are incorporated into one’s own will.
And so the majority consist almost solely of
foreign will that they have incorporated, of the
foreign type to which they have adapted, of the
foreign being that appears to them completely to
be their own personality...
“They have spared themselves an inner
divisiveness; they have adapted to things as they
are. They are the majority”.45

***

64
Our essential human identity, as withfolk, arises
from our symbiotic relationship with our own
milieu, community and culture.
Therefore, paradoxically, the more we
embrace the particularities which constitute our
personal withness, the more we become a general
example of humanity fulfilling its true innate
potential.
As Eliot writes of W.B. Yeats: “In becoming
more Irish, not in subject-matter, but in
expression, he became at the same time
universal”.46

***

Money is a tool. For dominated and exploited

individuals, it is the tool by which they can
regain the basic right to food, shelter and
warmth stolen from them by the ruling class
along with their social and natural withness.
For the dominating and exploiting criminal
class, money is the tool by which they can make
individuals participate in, and become totally
dependent upon, the system they have created in
their own interests.
Little matter if once-free people had devised
their own systems of exchange and mutual gifts
which worked perfectly for them. Once money-
power takes control, it will demand tributes and
taxes be paid to it in the currency it has invented

65
and controls. This money can only be obtained by
participation in its own structures of exploita-
tion.
Money is the means by which the ruling
criminals can solidify the power they grabbed
with their initial act of coercion and theft. It
allows them to accumulate their wealth, first in
terms of piles of gold and then in the shape of
numbers on ledgers and on computers.
They use this money to protect and extend
their ill-gotten power, by paying individuals to
physically enforce their power, paying
individuals to lie on their behalf and by
constructing all the machineries of their
permanent domination over the majority.
Usury, loaning money at excessive rates of
interest, allows those with control over the
issuing of money to accumulate massive amounts
of financial wealth, with the attendant
accumulated power inexorably expanding
towards the point of complete monopoly or
complete implosion.

***

The writing tablets of the earliest states, which

recorded details of human capital and their work
credits, were just as much tools of oppression as
the shackles and clubs with which the slave-
labourers were bound and beaten.

66
 But all these represent just the first compo-
nents in an enormously complex composite tool
for domination which has progressively taken
over every aspect of our lives.
Watsuji describes how the ancient Greek
civilization depended on the use of slaves and the
import of foreign workers, along with wealth
gained from trading: “In this way the life of the
polis was more and more centred on artificial
and technical activities which maintained its
domination of the Mediterranean”.47
He goes on to discuss Roman aqueducts,
whose construction represented “nothing other
than a victory over the constraints of nature”.48
Thanks to its aqueducts, he says, the city of
Rome was able to swell to a size unthinkable for
the Greeks, the people who had shown the
Romans how to artificially conquer nature.
It is important to note here that the Roman
aqueducts, like the Greeks’ earlier achievements,
served primarily to expand the power of their
empire. They came into being as tools of empire,
the everyday conveniences they brought to the
imperial population being secondary to that
overriding historical imperative.
Roszak identifies a “clear and simple politi-
cal agenda” behind the contemporary continua-
tion of these early artificial and technical
activities: “to concentrate more profit and power
in the hands of those who already have profit and

67
power”.49
French philosopher Jacques Ellul uses the
term ‘technique’ to describe what most would
term ‘technology’, on the basis that the ‘-ology’
suffix applies to the study of a subject rather
than to the subject matter itself. Because the
English word ‘technique’ has other meanings, the
German term ‘Technik’, much loved by the
industrialist Nazis, better conveys his sense.
“We can say, taking a general view, that we
have some historical experience of the choices on
offer when Technik is involved. And we can see
that each time, in every circumstance, Technik
has always historically led us in the direction of
the centralization and concentration of power”,50
says Ellul.
Right from the start, Technik’s machines
have been about increasing profit. “The more a
business is ‘productive’ and competitive the less
human labour it employs”,51 he notes.
“Despite attempts to demonstrate otherwise,
the ‘new machines’ are machines to economise on
the workforce. We see growing investment in
capital and decreasing investment in the
workforce, at the same time as the number of
workers shrinks”.52
Writing about the trend to online education,
Roszak comments that this is a question of
“selling a labor-saving machine in an economy
where that labor is abundant and could be had

68
for a decent wage”.53
Human interests always come second in a
society ruled by Technik. “The machine never
stops”, Ellul says, and to achieve maximum
profitability “people have to be organised to work
the same way!”54
Technological dependence is motivated by
“obvious commercial reasons”,55 Roszak
accurately remarks. Technik is a tool invented to
achieve a certain aim – the increase of a
minority’s profit and power at the expense of the
majority. Any society which takes Technik into
its hands will always find itself carrying out the
insidious work for which this tool was designed.
As Ellul points out, it is therefore not true to
imagine that Technik is “neutral” and that its
value depends on the use we make of it.56
Its goals, explains Roszak, have long since
been selected by those who invented it, who have
guided it and financed it at every point along the
way in its development. It is “their machine”.57
Their machine. Their tool. Their weapon
used against the 99.9 per cent of humankind
whom they regard as nothing more than fodder
for the relentless expansion of their empire of
exploitation and greed.

***

In 1948, French thinker Georges Bernanos

69
launched a scathing attack on machine-
civilisation and its technology in the essay
‘France Against the Robots’, insisting: “The
Civilization of the Machines is the civilization of
quantity opposed to that of quality”.58
He warns that post-war society’s obsession
with productivism, consumerism and money-
making is threatening humankind and its
spiritual well-being, observing that “we can
understand nothing about modern civilisation if
we don’t first accept that it is a universal
conspiracy against all kinds of interior life”.59
Bernanos’ analysis is well summarised by
Jacques Allaire: “Having has replaced being. In
our modern societies, blinded by the speed with
which they can produce, the sense of having has
become the one and only sense. Having is even
the essence of being”.60
Inevitably, Bernanos’ critique of industrial
capitalism led to him being branded “reaction-
ary” by the cheerleaders of Technik, but he
stressed that he was not looking backward but
forward, to a different kind of future.
“The rule of Money is the rule of the Old. In
a world which has succumbed to the dictatorship
of Profit, anyone who dares to put honour before
money is automatically reduced to powerless-
ness. It is the spirit of youth which is rejected.
The youth of the world has a choice to make
between two extreme solutions: surrender or

70
revolution”.61

***

The sinister agenda of The Great Reset goes

beyond the techno-horrors of genetic engineering,
nanotechnology, surveillance and drone warfare.
Klaus Schwab’s writing has confirmed time
and time again that his technocratic fascist
vision is also a twisted transhumanist one.
As I explained in 2016: “This cult, which
originated in the USA in the 1950s, basically
envisages that humans will soon outgrow the
restrictions of their natural bodies and, thanks to
technological advances, evolve into semi-robotic
beings. They will have artificial bodies, with
replaceable parts, and their brains will
eventually be uploaded into computers, giving
them unimagined mental powers”.62
Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution aims
to merge us with machines in “curious mixes of
digital-and-analog life”.63 Our bodies will be
infected by nanotechnology and our privacy and
freedom entirely abolished.

***

Roszak describes how in the USA in the 1970s,

personal computers came to be seen “as a
technology of liberation”,64 and elements of this

71
techno-romanticism still linger amongst those
who otherwise position themselves against the
dominant system (such as in the promotion of
blockchain-based crypto-currencies as a form of
resistance).
But the harsh reality is, as he says, that
“information technology is an outgrowth of the
existing industrial system”65 and an integral part
of “the ongoing military-industrial drive toward
rationalizing, disciplining, and ultimately
dehumanizing the workplace”.66
Since its very beginning, IT was a collabora-
tion between big corporations like IBM, Digital
Equipment, and Data General, and the
Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Projects Agency
(DARPA).67 As Michael Bywater noted in The
Observer back in 1985: “Artificial intelligence is a
two-word phrase which makes US Department of
Defense officials salivate when they hear it”.68
It has long been bound up with what Roszak
terms “an obsessive need to keep track of
everybody’s least significant movement”69 and an
accumulation of data which amounts to “a
strategy of social control”.70
Today we have reached the point where, as
researcher Alison McDowell71 has been at pains
to warn us, the ruling criminal clique aims to
create a digital twin of each and every one of us,
herd us into smart cities, strap us with wearable
technology, monitor and control our every

72
movement and interaction, treat us as digital
assets on a blockchain ledger which speculators
can trade for profit.72

***

“Technik claims to liberate humanity, but in

reality has set itself up as an uncontested power,
which considers itself beyond judgement, escapes
all democratic control, uses up natural resources
and which forms within society a real ‘technical
system’. It threatens that which is most precious
to humanity: its freedom”.73
In thus summarising Ellul’s critique, Jean-
Luc Porquet also puts his finger on a key
question. People generally enjoy being free and
have always reacted with shudders of fear when
presented with imagined dystopias involving the
cold tyranny of machines and robots.
So why have we, as a society, done nothing
to prevent the rise of Technik to the very brink of
a Fourth Industrial Revolution designed to crush
for ever the free human spirit?
The answer is simple. We have fallen for its
falsehoods. As Ellul puts it: “The technological
narrative is above all a narrative of lies”.74
These lies are applied to various products of
Technik. Using not just straight-forward
advertising, but also the disguised marketing
conveyed through TV series, films, magazine

73
articles and newspaper reports, it tells us that
the objects it has manufactured are not just
highly desirable but useful to the extent that we
will henceforth not be able to live without them.
They are all “solutions” to problems which,
for hundreds of thousands of years, human
beings had somehow never even identified.
Fridges, vacuum cleaners, cars and TVs all
became “necessities” of our lives in the 20th
century, in the same way that computers,
internet connections and smart phones have
done so in recent decades.
Behind this is a general sense of what
Roszak calls “technophilia, our love affair with
the machine in our lives”,75 whether that
machine be a steam engine or a drone.
And this technophilia is part of a broader
cult of Progress, which regards all technological
innovation and sophistication as necessarily a
step in a positive direction for humankind, a
further advance towards an end goal which
remains strangely elusive but nevertheless
somehow desirable.
The myth of Progress aims to cement Tech-
nik into our lives by insisting that everything
that it has done so far was good and necessary,
that we could not possibly imagine our lives
today without it and that the future will
inevitably consist of an infinite extension of its
power and activities.

74
 Like the aristocrats of old, today’s techno-
crats consider themselves above the law, as Ellul
says,76 but also above all criticism. They have
“rendered almost impossible general reflection on
the world of Technik”,77 Porquet points out.
Technik presents itself as morally good and
thereby can depict any challenge to its
domination as morally bad. In the emotive,
dishonest and toxic tones so typically used by
defenders of the dominant system, anyone who
fundamentally attacks modernity and its so-
called Progress is not just misguided but
dangerous, evil, threatening the very lives of
those who look to Technik to prop up their
existences.
The industrial system declares itself “too
important to be called into question”,78 says
Ellul. “No judgement is admissible which could
risk standing in the way of Science or Technik”.79
It is not considered legitimate to counter the
machine-logic of Technik with concerns about the
ethical value of its activities, since it is regarded
as self-evident that technological advance is
always a good thing.
Writes Ellul: “When it’s a question of the
dangers, costs, and so on, the scientist or
technician, who has run out of arguments, closes
down the discussion with ‘In any case, we can’t
stand in the way of progress’. There is thus
something here which is absolute, unassailable,

75
against which we can do absolutely nothing,
which human beings must simply obey”.80
Technik stands radically opposed to human
withness, our natural belonging to each other
and to our world. It aims to replace our cultures
with its own sterile uniformity.
Its much-vaunted scientific “objectivity” and
“neutrality” reflect nothing but its own ethical
and intellectual emptiness.
“There is no philosophy of Technik because it
has nothing to do with wisdom”,81 says Ellul.
“Technik is nothing other than Power”.82
We are “indisputably in a society made
entirely by and for Technik”,83 he insists, to
which we are forced to submit by what he terms
“a sort of state terrorism”84 and the establish-
ment of what is effectively “dictatorship”.85

***

“As the futurologists and their political disciples

present it, the rise of the information economy in
America is a matter of manifest industrial
destiny, a change so vast and inevitable that it
might almost be a natural process beyond human
control. It is hardly that. The conversion to high
tech has been the result of deliberate choices on
the part of our political and corporate leadership.
To begin with, it was intimately linked to the
steady militarization of our economic life since

76
the beginning of World War II”,86 writes Roszak.
He warns that “something very big, new, and
threatening is permeating our political life” using
information technology as its tool: “What we
confront in the burgeoning surveillance
machinery of our society is not a value-neutral
technological process; it is, rather, the social
vision of the Utilitarian philosophers at last fully
realized in the computer. It yields a world
without shadows, secrets or mysteries, where
everything has become a naked quantity”.87
Edgar Morin identifies this very big some-
thing as “a mega-machine run by an interna-
tional elite of bosses, managers, experts,
economists”.88
Ellul describes it variously as “the techno-
military-state complex”89 and “this scientific-
state-techno-economical complex”.90
Identifying the many contradictions and
difficulties involved in maintaining this system,
he asks how it can be kept functioning and
expanding.
He replies: “In truth, there is one way, but
only one: the most totalitarian global dictator-
ship that could ever exist”.91

***

Millions of people across the world have been

shocked by the ultra-authoritarian technocratic

77
and transhumanist agenda unveiled to the public
in the form of the Great Reset.
But this has been brewing for a long time,
with Roszak, for instance, warning well before
the turn of the century that “powerful corporate
interests are at work shaping a new social
order”.92
In fact, we could say that what is happening
today was an inevitability, given the way that
the tyranny of Technik has been allowed to grow
and grow towards this stage of suffocating
domination, like a huge malignant tumour
consuming the living flesh of humankind and the
wider organic reality with which we are
naturally one.

***

... What have we to do

But stand with empty hands and palms turned
upwards
In an age which advances progressively
backwards?

T.S. Eliot93

***

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence

available today detailing the many ways in

78
which Technik, backed by its cult of Progress, is
defiling life.
Indeed, as I wrote in 2013, we do not even
need officially-stamped “scientific” proof to show
us that it is having a serious effect: “How could it
not? How could it be that all these factories,
power stations, processing plants, roads,
airports, mines, quarries, oil wells, mills, shafts
and chimneys would not present a serious threat
to the natural world?”94
But the ill effects of industrial and technical
development go deeper than the physical level
and have corroded human society, culture and
thinking.
“Life loses all its depth, beauty and tender-
ness, leaving only a mechanised existence”,95
writes Watsuji of our modern age. “Thousands of
young men the world over are breaking their
heads in vain against the iron walls of society
like trapped birds in cages”,96 says Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan.
Individuals are ripped apart from any sense
of withness and spellbound by Technik –
“mesmerized by the multiplication of images, the
intensity of noise, the dispersal of information”97
as Ellul puts it.
This process starts from a very early age,
meaning that the evolution and development of
authentic and innate human qualities are stifled
by this external world of shallow artifice.

79
 Roszak warned us decades ago of future
schools “where ranks of solitary students in
private cubicles sit in motionless attendance
upon computer terminals, their repertory of
activities scaled down to a fixed stare and the
repetitive stroking of a keyboard”.98
“There will never be a machine that leaves
us wiser or better or freer than our own naked
mind can make us,”99 he says.
Musing on Technik’s assault on our liberty,
Roszak writes: “I found myself haunted by the
image of the prisoner who has been granted
complete freedom to roam the ‘microworld’ called
jail: ‘Stay inside the wall, follow the rules, and
you can do whatever you want’”.100
“How far will the suppression of individual
freedom go?”101 asks Ellul and his question is all
the more pertinent in the New Normal of the
2020s.

***

The English poet and artist William Blake was

famously appalled by the “dark Satanic Mills”
which blighted “England’s green & pleasant
land”.102
In the new infrastructures of Technik, he
saw:
turrets & towers & domes
Whose smoke destroy’d the pleasant gardens,

80
 & whose running kennels
Chok’d the bright rivers.103
But his disgust reached beyond the purely
physical into the whole way of thinking which
made industrialism possible.
Roszak says that “Blake was among the first
to link scientific sensibility to the killing
pressure of the new industrial technology upon
the landscape”.104
Kathleen Raine writes: “For Blake, outward
events and circumstances were the expressions of
states of minds... Man has made his machines in
the image of his ideology”.105
Blake uses the term “single vision” to de-
scribe the system’s mechanistic worldview – the
“enemy of life” in Raine’s words.106
He regards this narrowing of the intellect as
nothing less than a spiritual enslavement of the
people, turning them into docile wage-slaves in
the new factories.
For Blake, all the many social evils that he
sees around him are aspects of one vast problem,
a civilization in which “Human Thought is
crush’d beneath the iron hand of Power”.107

***

Joseph Beuys warns that in a world ruled by

Technik “ultimately perception of the intercon-
nectedness, of the whole web of interrelation-

81
ships, is destroyed”.108
Our participation in society is hindered by
the hierarchical structures within which we are
all imprisoned: “Even if someone wishes to, he
can’t take real responsibility for his actions since
everything is, as it were, done from above
downwards”.109
“Cars, for example, production methods, the
capitalist way of dealing with money etc, all push
into our lives. Everything of this sort, which is
foisted on us, appears to be the reality, the only
way of doing things, because the ability to
perceive the inner substance of things is
lacking”.110
Volker Harlan, exploring Beuys’ thinking,
observes that just as the mechanistic modern
mindset “sees the human heart as a pump, the
brain as a control apparatus, it also sees
humanity as something that can be centrally
controlled: power control centres. Since this view
sees life processes, in principle, as all repetitions
of the same process, it produces bureaucratically
categorized mediocrity by means of a mass
psychology that negates human dignity”.111
Beuys complains that people do not ask
themselves how human society should be
structured and have “no sense or perception of
the archetype, that is, of the healthy condition of
a social organism as it evolves”.112
As a consequence, the social organism is “so

82
ill that it is absolutely high time to subject it to
radical treatment, otherwise humanity will go
under”.113

***

The Situationist, and particularly Post-

Situationist, movement in Europe has been
particularly astute in its observations on
modernity and industrialism.
Guy Debord, its leading figure, repeatedly
explained that the dominant “spectacle” was
nothing less than the commercialisation of the
world, its reduction to the empty level of product
and profit.
“The spectacle is the moment when the
commodity has achieved the total occupation of
social life”,114 he writes.
“There remains nothing, in culture or in
nature, which has not been transformed, and
polluted, according to the means and interests of
modern industry”.115
This industrial society is a dead thing,
according to Debord, “the concrete inversion of
life”.116
After the Situationist International was
dissolved in 1972, his thinking took an
increasingly anti-modern and anti-industrial
direction.
Patrick Marcolini observes that in Debord’s

83
1978 film In girum imus nocte et consumimur
igni and then in Commentaires sur la société du
spectacle, his “romantic critique of modernity”
was particularly evident, along with “a secret
nostalgia for bygone times”.117
Miguel Amorós, a jailed veteran of the
Spanish resistance to Francoism who found exile
in France, was involved in producing the anti-
industrial Encyclopédie des Nuisances, a journal
and then publishing house.
He writes: “Our critique of science, technol-
ogy and the industrial system is a critique of
progress. And in the same way it is a critique of
the ideologies of science and progress, not least
the workerist ideology, in both reformist and
revolutionary guise, which is based on taking
over, in the name of the proletariat, the
bourgeois industrial system and its technol-
ogy”.118
Jaime Semprun, also involved in the Ency-
clopédie des Nuisances, regarded the notion of
Progress as merely “a product of the bourgeois
industrial age”,119 explains Marcolini.
Technology and science carried no promise of
liberation – “on the contrary they form part of
the structures of domination which have to be
brought down”.120

***

84
Radical poet and artist William Morris said in
his first public lecture in 1878: “Everything made
by man’s hands has a form, which either must be
beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with
Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant
with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be
indifferent”.121
Beauty is nothing other than withness made
visible, whether in nature or in human beings,
our works and our thought.
Anything based on the toxic anti-values of
separation, self-interest, exploitation, slavery,
domination and greed, anything and anyone
fundamentally bad, can never transmit beauty.
As Ellul insists: “Everywhere, Technik
creates ugliness”.122

***

Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of Eliot, writes

that the 20th century Anglo-American had “a
clairvoyant sense of his time”.123
He had become increasingly concerned by
the qualitative decline of the society in which he
lived and “in particular the signal inability of
liberal democracy to sustain moral or intellectual
values which might effectively confront the
ideologies of fascism or communism”,124 says
Ackroyd.
“He described the fatal weaknesses of West-

85
ern democracy, and how the progress of
industrialization was creating an apathetic
citizenry – the kind of people who could only be
aroused by despots like Hitler”.125
Writing in 1948, Eliot argues: “We can assert
with some confidence that our own period is one
of decline; that the standards of culture are lower
than they were fifty years ago; and that the
evidences of this decline are visible in every
department of human activity. I see no reason
why the decay of culture should not proceed
much further, and why we may not even
anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it
is possible to say that it will have no culture”.126
Ackroyd explains that the poet had “wit-
nessed in his lifetime the beginnings of the
disintegration of European culture”127 and saw
the sources of that disintegration as lying much
deeper than the political level usually cited.
He was unhappy to have found himself,
initially in his native USA, living in “a society
which offered no living or coherent tradition, a
society being created by industrialists and
bankers, and by the politics and the religion
which ministered to them”.128
Eliot wrote in 1939: “We are being made
aware that the organization of society on the
principle of private profit, as well as public
destruction, is leading both to the deformation of
humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to

86
the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a
good deal of our material progress is a progress
for which succeeding generations may have to
pay dearly... For a long enough time we have
believed in nothing but the values arising in a
mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of
life”.129
At the end of the Second World War, Eliot’s
“sense of the spiritual degeneration of English
life”130 led him to fear that victory over Hitler
might lead only to a post-war world based on the
very same concepts of “efficiency”131 and
“material organization”132 which had motivated
the industrialist and productivist Nazi regime.
“There was a prospect ahead of ‘centuries of
barbarism’ which in an interview the year before
[1945] he had already related to the coming
dominance of technology,”133 explains Ackroyd.
“We might get a ‘totalitarian democracy’”,
Eliot warns with remarkable foresight, “a state
of affairs in which we shall have regimentation
and conformity, without respect for the needs of
the individual soul; the puritanism of a hygienic
reality in the interest of efficiency; uniformity of
opinion through propaganda and art only
encouraged when it flatters the official doctrines
of the time”.134

***

87
McDowell’s Wrench in the Gears website has
shed light in recent years on the “gamification” of
technology and the way in which younger
generations are being tricked into helping to
build the digital cages in which their lives will be
imprisoned and financially exploited under the
Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Ellul, who died in 1994, saw this coming.
“What could be more ideal than to learn by
playing?”135 he asked, identifying the threat of
“the mutation of the intelligence of the child”136
by “the most terrorist education system in
existence”.137
“I am firmly convinced that this whole
system of games, leisure and technical
distraction is one of the most dangerous factors
for human beings and tomorrow’s society. It is
that which leads us into unreality”, he warned,
“making us live in a totally falsified world”.138

***

“Historical humankind has been mesmerized by

the narrative of progress”,139 writes Scott,
echoing Ellul, and his own research shows that
the same is true of the narrative of the state.
The principal myth by which we are misled
is that, during the long history of humankind,
state control has been the norm.
The first states to emerge were “minuscule

88
affairs both demographically and geographi-
cally... a mere smudge on the map of the ancient
world,” Scott writes. Far from representing the
global status quo, these states were “tiny nodes
of power surrounded by a vast landscape
inhabited by nonstate peoples”.140
This remained true for thousands of years.
States were very much the exception and most of
the world’s population continued to live outside
their grasp.
“In much of the world there was no state at
all until quite recently”, he writes. “Outside their
reach were great congeries of ‘unadministered’
peoples assembled in what historians might call
tribes, chiefdoms, and bands. They inhabited
zones of no sovereignty or vanishingly weak,
nominal sovereignty”.141
Our understanding of this reality has long
been skewed by the fact that only states, with
their cities, monuments and written records,
tend to leave behind evidence which can later be
discovered by archaeologists and historians.
The life-without-state which existed for long
periods over large expanses of the Earth left
“little or nothing in the way of records”, explains
Scott.142
Rather than regarding such societies as
periods of disintegration and disorder in between
the rise and fall of glorious state civilizations, we
might regard them as the natural condition from

89
which humankind has occasionally deviated.
But to do so would be to break the taboo by
which the existence of a state is presented as an
absolutely necessary pre-condition for any kind
of decent human existence.
The second myth which props up the alleged
“need” for a state is that they are “legitimate”,
along with the laws drawn up to create this
impression by those who run the state, and, as a
more recent extension, legitimate because they
are “democratic”.
I am not sure how, after the last two years,
anyone could still believe that we live in
anything like a democracy. As I wrote in ‘Ten
Things We Have Learned During the Covid
Coup’: “Democracy is a sham. It has been a sham
for a very long time. There will never be any real
democracy when money and power amount to the
same thing”.143
Ellul highlighted, as the great political
illusion regarding the state, the belief “that the
citizen could, through political means, master or
control this state, or change it”.144
Eliot expands on his warning of “totalitarian
democracy” by describing the falsehood which
surrounds our understanding of our “Western”
world.
“The current terms in which we describe our
society, the contrasts with other societies by
which we – of the ‘Western Democracies’ –

90
eulogize it, only operate to deceive and stupify
us,” he observes.
“We conceal from ourselves the unpleasant
knowledge of the real values by which we live.
We conceal from ourselves, moreover, the
similarity of our society to those which we
execrate”.145

***

Ellul writes that the latest manifestation of

Technik is leading us into “a universe of
diversion and illusion”146 even more sophisticated
and misleading than the Spectacle which had
previously been described by Debord and his
fellow Situationists.
Truth and reality are not just hidden from
us, and replaced with false versions, but often
even totally inverted by the language of a system
based upon layer and layer of hypocrisy and lies.
“In any given society, the more they talk
about a value, a virtue, a collective project”, he
explains, “the more it is the sign of its absence.
They talk about it precisely because the reality is
the opposite”.147
By this handy rule of thumb, says Ellul, we
can see that the real world in which we live is the
complete inversion of humanism, the value
constantly invoked by “liberal democracies”.
At the time of writing, the system and its

91
propaganda cannot stop talking about
“sustainability” and “saving the planet”.
This is, of course, because it represents the
complete inversion of all these fine-sounding
words.
Rather than trying to justify the acceleration
of environmental destruction represented by its
Fourth Industrial Revolution, or even attempting
to play down the adverse effects, it opts for the
big lie of claiming that its plans are actually
aimed at benefiting nature!
The idea that Technik has now somehow
separated itself from its physical reality and
become a “clean” and “smart” tool aimed at
protecting the natural world is, of course, absurd.
Roszak spells it out: “An industrial economy
is fundamentally a manufacturing economy; high
tech itself requires manufacturing... A high tech
economy remains a manufacturing economy if
the factories have been automated”.148
American feminist and environmental
activist Judi Bari saw through power’s fake
green lies, declaring: “This system cannot be
reformed. It is based on the destruction of the
earth and the exploitation of the people.
“There is no such thing as green capitalism,
and marketing cutesy rainforest products will
not bring back the ecosystems that capitalism
must destroy to make its profits. This is why I
believe that serious ecologists must be

92
revolutionaries”.149
Post-Situationist Semprun warns, with René
Riesel, that “precisely the same intellectual and
material means used to build this world
threatened with ruin, this teetering edifice, are
now being deployed to diagnose the problem and
recommend a remedy”.150
Semprun died in 2010, before “climate
capitalism” raised the art of greenwashing to
new levels of duplicity, but had astutely
predicted that “the illusion-merchants have
happy days ahead of them. During the disaster,
the selling goes on”.151
Canadian investigative journalist Cory
Morningstar has probably done more than
anyone to expose the deceit behind the corporate
“solutions” being promoted to the “climate crisis”
– a narrow term which usefully renders invisible
the broader environmental damage wrought by
Technik.
She writes: “What is being created is a
mechanism to unlock approximately 90 trillion
dollars for new investments and infrastruc-
ture”.152 And she warns: “This project, of
unparalleled magnitude, is the vehicle to save
the failing global capitalist economic system and
bring in the financialization of nature”.153
This new infrastructure will, of course, not
be in the least bit “sustainable”, whatever those
selling it might claim. As Ellul rightly remarks:

93
“Pollution will continue to develop along with the
growth of Technik”.154 Or, in Morningstar’s
words: “This we know: the planet will not be
saved by those that have destroyed it”.155

***

The same falsehood, the same fake environmen-

talism, is currently being used to promote and
justify a global land grab.
Variously termed a “New Deal for Nature” or
“Nature Positive”, it hides its ruthless
imperialism behind the flimsy facade of
“conservationism”.
In his 2020 book on this “green” colonialism,
Guillaume Blanc says that corporate control is
being imposed on Africa under the deeply
contradictory watchword of “giving nature to the
people; preventing the people from living in it”.156
He explains that this always works in more
or less the same way. International conservation
“experts” claim that they are working for the
good of humanity, fighting poverty, hunger and
disease, and so on, and that their projects are
sustainable, community-based and participative.
Additionally, the love of nature felt by so
many in Europe and North America is
instrumentalised, by presenting a false picture of
Africa as a natural paradise threatened by the
presence of its own indigenous human

94
inhabitants.
The withness of African people to their
milieu is disregarded, their symbiotic relation-
ship to the land depicted as some kind of
contamination.
Once more, the hypocrisy of the system
reaches the point of outright inversion of reality.
African peasant farmers, who produce their
own food, very rarely buy new clothes, move
around on foot and don’t own computers or smart
phones, are accused of “destroying nature”.
But in fact, as Blanc points out: “If we want
to save the planet, we should be living like
them”.157

***

I have recently written a lot about the fake left

and its response to the Great Reset coup. This
has gone beyond mere lack of resistance to
outright support of authoritarian measures and
vitriolic smearing of those who dare challenge
them.
The seeds of this betrayal were, however,
sown back in the 19th century when socialism
embraced two of the system’s primary tools of
oppression – the state and Technik.
The new Marxist orthodoxy banished the old
socialist dream of a better future, now
condemned as hopelessly “utopian”, in favour of a

95
red-tinted version of the dominant system’s own
cult of Progress.
Furthermore, it actually defined the human
beings it claimed to represent in terms of the
servile role they were being forced to carry out
under that same system.
It therefore no doubt seemed quite natural to
these “workers” that after the Bolshevik
Revolution they would continue to spend their
lives working, sacrificing their own freedom and
happiness for the “greater good” of progressive
industrialism.
Liberalism is also a misleading political
position in that it never expresses any real
principled commitment to the democratic
principles it likes to flaunt, insisting ultimately
on the need for “law and order” to protect the
profitable infrastructures of its economy from
popular disorder.
It represents, as I have written elsewhere,
“the two-faced tyranny of wealth”158 which can
easily switch into authoritarian mode whenever
it sees fit, whether in the 1920s and 1930s or in
the 2020s.
That is not to say, of course, that the values
superficially represented by political liberalism
would not be laudable if they were genuine.
The problem lies in the gap between this
representation (the blurb on the cover) and the
toxic reality that it masks – along with the

96
apparent inability of modern citizens to
distinguish one from the other.
Again and again we can see genuine people
attached to a political ideology or movement
because they believe it is what it claims to be – a
struggle to save the planet, to bring about social
justice, to defend decency or whatever.
While they, and their good intentions, are
not themselves fake, they reinforce fakeness by
gullibly accepting as authentic the slick PR
image presented by movements which are in fact
being used for completely different, usually
exactly opposite, purposes.
They act innocently, perhaps, but stupidly,
like someone who allows their judgement to be
constantly swayed by advertising or who easily
falls prey to con-artists or fraudsters.
We can see this phenomenon in action with
historical Fascism and Nazism. On the surface,
these allied movements in Italy and Germany
stood up for “the people”, both in terms of the
nation, Das Volk, and in terms of the idealised
majority of hard-working ordinary citizens whose
interests they were supposed to represent.
But fascism, like Marxism, not only failed to
escape from the trap of regarding the state and
Technik as essential for human existence, but
worshipped them as the foundations of its new
order.
Behind its lip service to its “people” lay a

97
dehumanising ideology of unrestrained
productivism and industrialism that regarded
them as nothing but fodder for the machineries
of profit which these authoritarian regimes really
served.
Anyone who digs a little into fascism will
quickly discover that, like Technik in general, it
has no real philosophy.
There is plenty of stirring rhetoric and use of
ideas and imagery designed to attract fanatical
support for a limited period of time, but all of
this lacks essential coherence and has no depth
or soul.
It is telling that Eliot, who “seemed too
radical to conservatives and too conservative to
radicals”,159 was not ultimately drawn to fascism
(as his friend Ezra Pound sadly was) finding that
it “it could not provide any set of objective values
or principles”.160

***

Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee

T.S. Eliot161

98
 ***

The falsehood oozing from every pore of modern

society is not confined to the detail of the
particular instances above; there is a general
sense of disconnection from authentic reality.
Ironically, this departure from truth seems
to be connected to a long-term obsession with
“facts”.
Roszak traces this phenomenon back to the
17th century when, he says, scientific thinkers
became so suspicious of ideas which had become
fixed dogma that they called into question the
very validity of ideas.
“They recommended a new point of depar-
ture, one which seemed innocuously neutral and
therefore strategically inoffensive to the cultural
authorities of the day: they would concentrate
their attention on the clear-cut indisputable facts
of common experience – the weights and sizes
and temperatures of things. Facts first, they
insisted. Ideas later”.162
This historic departure from traditional
wisdom has had serious consequences, believes
Radhakrishnan: “We are slaves of a mechanical
system of ideas. Rationalist codes of morality
sacrifice flexibility and richness to correctness
and consistency. Professing to act on principles,
our intellectuals are cut off from the deeper
sources of vitality and their souls are at strife

99
with their minds”.163
By the early 1960s, notes Roszak, it became
commonplace for people to speak of their minds
as being “programmed”, revealing that “people
were coming to see themselves more and more as
a kind of machine: a biocomputer”.164
As a result we find ourselves in a culture in
which “the mind in all its aspects can now be
been as ‘nothing but’ a rather complicated
information-shuffling machine that works up its
highest powers from simple, formal procedures
that organize data points”.165
This mechanistic “scientific” outlook ignores
the organic reality of human beings, describing
us as if we were artificially-manufactured
machines rather than extensions of the living
flesh of nature.
This is simply not true! It is yet another
falsehood propping up the system.
Just as our bodies are the fruit of nature, so
is our thinking. As we saw in Part I, our minds
are formed and informed by the patterns which
make up the underlying order of the cosmos,
which emerge in our consciousness as arche-
types, myths and ideas.
“The mind thinks with ideas, not with
information”,166 stresses Roszak. “Only one
narrow band of our experience is represented in
the computer: logical reason. Sensual contact,
intuition, inarticulated common-sense

100
judgments, aesthetic taste have been largely, if
not wholly, left out. We do not bring the full
resources of the self to the computer”.167
It is absurd, he says, to pretend that “artifi-
cial intelligence” can interpret reality in the
same way as the human mind: “Interpretation
belongs solely to a living mind in exactly the
same way that birth belongs solely to a living
body. Disconnected from a mind, ‘interpretation’
becomes what ‘birth’ becomes when it does not
refer to a body: a metaphor”.168
Any digital interpretation or representation,
such as the virtual digital world proposed under
the Fourth Industrial Revolution, can never be
anything than a “rough caricature”169 of reality,
he says.
The understanding of humanity, life and the
cosmos presented to us by Technik and its
fragmented machine-thinking is a sub-standard
replica, a cheap pixelated substitute for
authenticity.
It can provide us with no understanding of
human beings or our withness to the world in
which we live.
Augustin Berque identifies an early denial of
our natural médiance in the Discours de la
methode of his compatriot René Descartes, where
the influential 17th century philosopher
announces that he has no need of any place170 in
which to carry out the thinking which he

101
famously claims proves his existence (“I think
therefore I am”).
“What he means, is that he is himself by
means of himself, independently of everything
around him. This is a radical break with
traditional notions, which always saw people as
connected to their milieu”.171
This outlook, which became dominant,
extracted the human subject from nature, from
the world, and depicted him as some kind of
separate observer who was not actually part of
the reality in which he lived.
It is not only false but dangerous for our
well-being.
Berque explains that it means we lose our
bearings in our individual existence, that we
become incapable of feeling a real connection
between our interior world and the outside
world, “between the microcosm (the little world
which concerns you personally) and the
macrocosm (the big world of the universe, nature
and humanity)”.172
The idea of a totally objective point of view, a
point of view from an abstract nowhere, is
nonsensical since, as Berque remarks, “living
beings are always situated somewhere, in a
certain milieu”.173
While in recent decades the notion of objec-
tivity has been rejected by scientists, particularly
in the realm of quantum physics, the mindset of

102
which it forms part has continued to pollute
general thinking.
In his 2018 book Le Sens des limites: contre
l’abstraction capitaliste, Renaud Garcia argues
that the artificiality and abstraction of life under
Technik is depriving us of a real sense of being
alive – in our bodies, in our daily lives, in our
milieu: “In this world of artifice, going beyond
the surface to a deeper level, that of the sheer
essence of things, is no longer conceivable”.174
He condemns transhumanism, which he says
“reduces the human brain to a simple processor
of information, a mere calculating machine”175
and is built on the “basic negation of the reality
of living organisms”.176

***

“As European cities grew and forested areas

became more remote, as fens were drained and
geometric patterns of channels imposed on the
landscape, as large powerful waterwheels,
furnaces, forges, cranes, and treadmills began
increasingly to dominate the work environment,
more and more people began to experience
nature as altered and manipulated by machine
technology”,177 writes Carolyn Merchant in The
Death of Nature.
“A slow but unidirectional alienation from
the immediate daily organic relationship that

103
had formed the basis of human experience from
earliest times was occurring. Accompanying
these changes were alterations in both the
theories and experiential bases of social
organization which had formed an integral part
of the organic cosmos”.178
With the industrial age, supported by its
dogma of fakeness, separation and fragmenta-
tion, we have, in George Lapierre’s words,
“broken the primordial pact” and “we are paying
the price for this on every level: social disintegra-
tion, spiritual blindness, disruption of the cosmic
environment. Human life is going to become
impossible”.179
Radhakrishnan saw the same thing happen-
ing back in 1929: “Since the primaeval unity is
broken, man is uncertain and wavering. We seem
to be alienated from nature, leading sceptical,
artificial and self-centred lives”.180
Berque is right when he says that the links
between a person and their milieu, or indeed
with nature itself, can never be suppressed,181
but awareness of these links can be severely
eroded.
“A sense of the basic emotional unity be-
tween man and the moods and forms of Nature”
is, as William Anderson observes, an idea
“foreign to the dominant scientific and cultural
philosophies”.182
For those who are intent on building a

104
world-prison based on our separation from each
other and from nature, widespread awareness of
withness represents an obstacle to their
nefarious “progress”.
Robert Graves laments that for the modern
town-dweller, “the one variety of religion
acceptable to him is a logical, ethical, highly
abstract sort which appeals to his intellectual
pride and sense of detachment from wild
nature”.183
People who have spent their lives amongst
brick and concrete are no longer capable of
understanding the sense of age-old wisdom and
culture rooted in our belonging to the Earth, he
laments. “The commonest references to natural
phenomena in traditional poetry, which was
written by countrymen for countrymen, are
becoming unintelligible”.184
Roszak notes that this breach with nature,
and thus with reality, very much suits the
purposes of those who promote the urban-
industrial system, “hoping to see it mature into a
wholly new order of life in which science and
technology have permanently mastered the
forces of nature and have undertaken to redesign
the planet”.185
There is a downward spiral involved here.
The more we are physically separated from
nature, the less we care about it and the easier it
becomes for the criminal profiteers to plunder

105
and destroy the organism to which we
(unknowingly!) belong.
It is hard not to join Eliot in sensing in this
modern world “the presence of evil and
darkness”186 and in feeling the advent of “the
dark ages”.187
Today, we are faced with what Berque calls
a “third stage”188 of separation from our
withness, in a world of transhumanism and geo-
engineering of which shameless artifice is the
jealous god.
Disorientated, disembodied and dispossessed
by power and its endless lies, we stumble further
still from the Withway.

106
 PART III: FINDING THE WITHWAY

Pleasure cannot be ours as long as we wander

from the true path of mankind. In your heart,
therefore, seek the true path and then the pleasure
shall be added.

Kaibara Ekken1

***

As we saw in Part II, the root cause of our

separation lies in the power which has been
accumulated by a criminal ruling clique.
The classic form taken by this violent and
thieving entity is the state, but it uses other
guises. When states expand they become
empires. When an empire has expanded to
embrace everything, everywhere, it has become a
global tyranny.
Whatever name power gives to its physical
structure – nation, union of nations or world
order – this will always be a weapon wielded,
from above, against the people. The bigger and
more powerful this weapon, the wider the control
107
it can exert and the greater the damage it can
inflict.
Our first priority in rediscovering our with-
ness will therefore have to be a rejection of this
power and its vehicles of oppression.
If this rejection happened in stages, the first
stage would necessarily be a decentralization of
power from the global level at which it is
currently exercised.
But we can’t stop there. The decentralization
has to go right down through the whole of society
to the extent that it amounts to a reversal in the
direction of power.
Instead of power imposed on those below by
those above, we would see power emerging from
the grassroots in the shape of an empowerment
which resists all attempts to control and exploit.
We have to see through the lie that we are
incapable of running our own lives and
communities in the way that we see fit, forget
any notion that our decision-making role can be
safely handed over to “democratically-elected
representatives”.
Jacques Ellul points out that members of the
political class, divided into parties which seem to
be constantly at war with each other, are
essentially working together to defend their class
status: “And as long as supposedly democratic
countries have a political class, they can never
have any real politics and real democracy”.2

108
 ***

Money is another tool of power; a tool of

compliance. But it is a symbolic tool. It has no
physical reality.
We cannot eat or drink money. It does not
warm us in winter or shelter us from the winds.
It does not carry us from one place to another,
compose or perform music, make us laugh, tell us
stories or make us think.
We do not need money. It is true that in our
money-based society, certain things can only be
acquired with money. But this state of affairs
only reflects our collective submission to the
class which invented and controls money and
wields it as the weapon of its continuing
domination.
Money is the suit of clothes in which the
Emperor-Thief parades pompously through our
lives, demanding that we applaud and grovel
before his splendour.
But when, one day, a small voice calls out
that he is naked and ridiculous, that his finery is
make-believe, then the spell is broken. The
people realise that they have been fooled and the
charlatan-tyrant is run out of town to hoots of
derisive laughter.

***

109
If money is merely a means, then “work” as we
know it today is a means to a means. We have to
labour to earn a wage because without money we
cannot exist in the society built by the money-
power.
Work, in an old-fashioned sense, always has
to be done. Food has to be gathered, grown,
prepared. Water has to be fetched. Homes have
to be built, cleaned, maintained. Clothes and
shoes and tables and knives and dishes have to
be fashioned. The sick and the young and the old
have to be cared for.
But this is work we do for ourselves, because
it has to be done or we want to do it. It is as
much a part of human existence as breathing
and walking and does not keep us chained up for
hour upon endless hour, for week after week,
year after year, decade after decade.
Working with a knife at our throats, because
a criminal mafia insists we pay for the pleasure
of living in the world that they have stolen from
us, does not make us free. It makes us slaves.

***

Power has built up an intermeshing machinery

of tools with which to keep us in our profit-
yielding place.
“Peasantries with long experience of on-the-

110
ground statecraft have always understood that
the state is a recording, registering, and
measuring machine”, writes James Scott, citing
its use of conscription, forced labour, land
seizures and head taxes.
“The firm identification in their minds
between paper documents and the source of their
oppressions has meant that the first act of many
peasant rebellions has been to burn down the
local records office where these documents are
housed”.3
Power is permanently afraid that its rule
might collapse under the pressure of popular
resistance. It tells us that the “sustainability”
and “resilience” of its vile system of exploitation
are of paramount importance for our well-being
and depicts its potential loss of control as a
nightmare scenario, the “end of civilization”, a
“descent into anarchy”.
Time and time again throughout history,
empires have collapsed and given way to
societies which leave behind no official records
and no archaeological evidence of awe-inspiring
grandeur.
Writes Scott: “If the population remains, it is
likely to have dispersed to smaller settlements
and villages. Higher-order elites disappear;
monumental building activity ceases; use of
literacy for administrative and religious purposes
is likely to evaporate; larger-scale trade and

111
redistribution is sharply reduced; and specialist
craft production for elite consumption and trade
is diminished or absent. Taken together, such
changes are often understood to be a deplorable
regression away from a more civilized culture”.4
But the collapse of a “typically oppressive
state”5 is less likely to mean a dissolution of a
culture than its “reformulation and decentraliza-
tion”6 and need not imply a decline in human
health, well-being, or nutrition, he explains.
In fact, “there is a strong case to be made
that such ‘vacant’ periods represented a bolt for
freedom by many state subjects and an
improvement in human welfare”.7
Can we imagine “the vast population not
subject to state control”,8 an “intricate web of
relatively egalitarian settlements”9 peopled by
“opportunistic generalists with a large portfolio
of subsistence options spread across several food
webs”?10
If we are instructed by the dogma of moder-
nity that such a thing is simply not possible, this
is no doubt because such ways of living are
“environmentally resistant to centralization and
control from above”11 and “the very breadth of a
subsistence web – hunting, fishing, foraging, and
gathering in a variety of ecological settings –
poses insurmountable obstacles to the imposition
of a single political authority”.12

112
 ***

... Round and round the fire

Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth,
Mirth of those long since under the earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of the milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

T.S. Eliot13

***

“I believe that if India, and through India the

world, is to achieve real freedom, then sooner or
later we shall have to go and live in the villages –
in huts, not in palaces. Millions of people can
never live in cities and palaces in comfort and
peace”,14 wrote Mohandas Gandhi in a letter to
fellow Indian independence campaigner
Jawaharlal Nehru in 1945.
He argues elsewhere: “Given the demand,

113
there is no doubt that most of our wants can be
supplied by the villages. When we become
village-minded we shall not want imitations from
the West or machine-made products”.15
“My idea of village swaraj is that it is a
complete republic, independent of its neighbours
for its own vital wants, and yet inter-dependent
for many others in which dependence is a
necessity.
“Thus, every village’s first concern will be to
grow its own food crops and cotton for its
clothes... My economic creed is a complete taboo
in respect to all foreign commodities, whose
importation is likely to prove harmful to our
indigenous interests. This means that we may
not in any circumstances import a commodity
that can be adequately supplied from our
country”.16
One of Gandhi’s closest political colleagues,
Bharatan Kumarappa, wrote the book
Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism while he was
being held as a political prisoner of the occupying
British regime.
Gandhi, in his foreword to this work, credits
Kumarappa with inventing the word “villagism”
to describe their shared vision of decentralised
communities based around traditional crafts and
culture.
Kumarappa explains that villagism is rooted
in ancient pre-industrial ways of living and is not

114
derived from Western socialism.
“The idea of social ownership of production
and sharing of things in common was not original
to Socialism. Such an arrangement existed in
some form or other even in early times, when a
whole community or village held land and other
property in common and distributed wealth
among its members”.17
He is very critical of orthodox socialism for its
dependence on a central state to manage its
supposedly egalitarian society, warning: “As
Capitalism took away wealth which rightly
belonged to the people and accumulated it in the
hands of the capitalist, Socialism takes away the
power which rightly belongs to the people and
concentrates it in the State.
“And concentration of power is not less
dangerous than concentration of wealth; for men
get intoxicated with power and can use it with
disastrous effect against those who disagree with
them”.18
Kumarappa insists that his proposed society
would act as a bulwark against all concentra-
tions of power, on the national and international
level: “We must not think of Villagism therefore
as only a matter of economic arrangement but as
a social order aiming at ridding the world of
imperialism and war”.19
Watsuji Tetsurô says that the Indian human
being is one who “hates the obligations of life in

115
the polis and who loves the independence
provided by agriculture and the communal
organisation of the village”.20
But the Gandhian vision of withlife sourced
from local autonomy has been shared by many
others, not least English radical William Morris,
part of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
In his 1891 novel News From Nowhere,
Morris “envisaged a postindustrial future that
recreated the preindustrial past, a society of
villages, family farms, and tribal settlements”,21
as Theodore Roszak puts it.
Austrian-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber
rejected modern industrial society in favour of
what he called a New Community.
In the 1900 essay ‘Alte und neue Gemein-
schaft’, he describes how this would be based on
the “living mutual action of integral human
beings”.
It would replace the principle of utility with
the principle of creativity, allowing individuals to
accomplish their human potential.
He argues: “Thus will humanity, which came
out from a beautiful but rough primitive
community, after going through the growing
slavery of Gesellschaft, arrive at a new
community, which will no longer be grounded, as
the first one was, on blood affinities (Blutver-
wandtschaft), but on elective affinities
(Wahlverwandtschaft)”.

116
 Only in these circumstances, insists Buber,
could the age-old revolutionary utopian dream
come true and “the instinctive life-unity of the
primitive human being (Urmenschen), which has
been for so long fragmented and divided, return
at a higher level and in a new form”.22
He adds elsewhere: “The new organic whole,
founded on the regeneration of the ‘cells’ of the
social tissue, will be the renaissance (rather than
the return) of organic community in the shape of
a decentralised federation of small communi-
ties”.23
Universal human withlife is what T.S. Eliot
describes as the traditional “norm” of a “small
and mostly self-contained group attached to the
soil and having its interests centred in a
particular place, with a kind of unity which may
be designed, but which also has to grow through
generations”.
He states: “It is the idea, or ideal, of a com-
munity small enough to consist of a nexus of
direct personal relationships, in which all
iniquities and turpitudes will take the simple
and easily appreciable form of wrong relations
between one person and another”.24
Finding the Withway is rediscovering our
belonging to each other and to the land where we
live and we do well to pay heed to the experience
of those “primal” peoples who today still preserve
that wisdom.

117
 They can tell us not only how people thought
and lived in the past but also how people will
have to think and live in the future.
As philosopher Tu Wei-ming affirms: “What
we can learn from them, then, is a fundamental
restructuring of our way of perceiving, thinking,
and living; we are urgently in need of a new
attitude and a new worldview”.25

***

No: there seems no escape from our difficulties

until the industrial system breaks down... and
nature reasserts herself with grass and trees
among the ruins.

Robert Graves26

***

It seems entirely evident that what we need “is

nothing less than the break-up of Technik’s
society”, as Jacques Ellul puts it in ‘Autopsie de
la révolution’.27
However, the ruling mafia have, we saw in
Part II, constructed a powerful taboo against any
fundamental questioning of the relentless
machineries of Technik.
They have created the illusion that the
advance of what they call Progress is bound up

118
with the very passing of time, that its endless
proliferation is not only desirable but pretty
much inevitable, barring some kind of “disaster”.
Even many of those who have accompanied
us this far towards the Withway will no doubt
stop short in the face of the ideological warning
tape placed across our path by the system’s
thought police.
They will regurgitate the received opinion
that turning our backs on industrialism as a
whole is unrealistic, unworkable and unneces-
sary; that those of us who propose such a
direction for humanity are extreme, deluded and
even dangerous.
They prefer what they regard as the sensible,
pragmatic and safe option of simply reducing the
environmental damage caused by Technik, by
cutting waste, recycling and making use of the
latest shiny bright-green innovations manufac-
tured by Technik itself.
But, in truth, this sensible and safer option
does not exist!
Industrialism can never be sustainable, its
products are always polluting, its endless
cancerous growth is its permanent and essential
logic.
The only other alternative to the ending of
industrial Technik is the continuation of
industrial Technik and this continuation will
inevitably lead to two things.

119
 Firstly, and more obviously, the natural
world of which are part, including the soil which
feeds us, the water we drink and the air we
breathe, will be progressively polluted and
degraded to a point of unimaginable misery.
Secondly, because Technik is a weapon
wielded by criminal power, the vast majority of
humankind will be increasingly assaulted,
controlled and enslaved by its infrastructures – a
process which is already accelerating at an
alarming rate.
If those who reject the Withway of deindus-
trialisation really welcome this other option,
even when its implications have been made clear
to them, then they should come out and say so
openly: “I hereby declare that my lazy
attachment to a certain familiar sense of reality
and to a largely comfortable way of life, with all
the conveniences which I enjoy today, is more
precious to me than the freedom of future
generations and even the continuation of life on
Earth”.
That way, at least, we will all be able to see
clearly where their priorities and values really
lie. As will their children, their grandchildren
and their great grandchildren, if our species
survives that long...

***

120
I am part of the modern world, descended from
generations of city-dwellers whose connection to
nature was limited to the tending of a vegetable
patch or a weekend excursion into the
countryside just outside London.
I was born into a reality where there is
always hot water in the taps and where a room
can be lit at the flick of a switch. While I am now
happy to live without fridge, washing machine or
vacuum cleaner, I still listen to recorded music,
make telephone calls and connect to the internet.
But the fact that I am personally inexperi-
enced in non-industrial living does not mean that
I cannot see the path that humankind has to now
take.
If we cannot rise to a collective level of
imagination that surpasses our accumulated
personal habits and conditioning, we will never
be able to leave behind the debased way of life in
which we have been confined and we will never
rediscover our natural withness and vitality.

***

This land of ours was once, we are told, the abode

of the Gods. It is not possible to conceive Gods
inhabiting a land which is made hideous by the
smoke and din of mill chimneys and factories,
and whose roadways are traversed by rushing
engines.

121
Mohandas Gandhi28

***

Power has physical form in the shape of its

factories, its oil refineries, its mines, its docks, its
server farms, its airports, its motorways, its
railways, its chemical plants, its pylons, its
pipelines, its cables, its satellites, its phone
masts, its surveillance cameras, its tanks, its
missiles, its drones, its robots, its army bases
and its prisons.
But its real control over us and our lives is
psychological. It has persuaded us that its toxic
existence and growth is completely normal,
acceptable and even beneficial.
Its strength is based on the lies it tells us, the
narrative with which it blinds us to the reality of
what it is and what it is doing to us.
If we are ever to escape its deadly grip, and
find ourselves on the Withway to a decent human
future, awareness is therefore of utmost
importance, on every level.
For instance, on a physical and biological
plane we remain in a state of withness to the rest
of humankind – it is only our knowledge of that
belonging which is often sadly lacking.
As we have seen, ancient Chinese philosopher
Mozi identified the problem, 2,400 years ago, as

122
being the “partiality” which allowed people to
enjoy a subject-to-subject relationship with
members of their family or immediate
community, but blinded to them to their
withness with regard to strangers.
For Mozi, “the natural identification with
one’s own community ought to be expanded to
other cities and states”, explains Lawrence F.
Hundersmarck.29
“Only when everyone regards any other as
another self will all be secure”.30

***

Truth is organic
It does not come down from heavens
For it rises from the earth

Clément Pansaers31

***

The great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy used the

term “love” to describe this withness of the heart,
this realisation that “we are all members of one
great body”.32
He did not stop short at the human level. “We
are spiritually connected on all sides – not only
with people but with all living creatures”,33 he
declared. “Whether they know this or not, all

123
creatures are inseparably connected”.34
What has to be overcome is the psychological
separation of the individual from the context to
which they belong.
Sri Aurobindo writes that an ideal society
“would respect the freedom of each of its
members and maintain itself not by law and
force but by the free and spontaneous consent of
its constituent persons”, noting that this would
be difficult to create “so long as individual man
clings to his egoism as the primary source of
existence”.35
This detachment from the individual ego is a
practice which could be described as spiritual or
mystic, but not necessarily religious in the usual
sense of the term.
Orthodox religions tend, in fact, to reinforce
separation – perhaps because they are, as Joseph
Campbell observes, “concerned primarily with
the maintenance of a certain social order”.
He adds: “The mystic way, on the other hand,
plunges within, to those nerve centers that are in
all members of the human race alike, and are at
once the well springs and ultimate receptacles of
life and all experience of life”.36
This mystic awareness of human, natural and
cosmic withness has not been a prominent
feature of most cultural and political movements
opposing dominant power, which is perhaps why
we have been so far unable to cast off the

124
shackles of oppression.
One notable exception was the Dada move-
ment of the early 20th century, a defiant
explosion of vital creativity against the crushing
cogs of industrial doom.
“Confronted by the hostility of the modern
world towards mystical existences, they placed
modern art and avant-garde techniques at the
service of an underground transmission of a very
ancient spiritual-philosophical tradition”,37 says
Benjamin Hennot.
Writing about Belgian Dada-ist Clément
Pansaers, he argues: “From his self-proclaimed
rebirth in 1916 until his death in 1922, all his
work can be seen as a contemporary European
extension of the Taoist tradition and, more
precisely, as a new chapter of Chuang Tzu, who
isn’t an author, but a ‘philosophical’ tradition”.38
Pansaers and his colleagues were thus
striking out in exactly the opposite direction to
the Technik-worshipping avant-garde who found
themselves in step with the hyper-industrialism
of the fascist and communist regimes.
“For him it is not a question of allowing
himself to be galvanised by the forces unleashed
by industrial development, as the futurists
desired, but rather of abandoning himself to the
cosmogonic flow which gives rise to all beings
and all things”,39 notes Hennot.
Watsuji writes about kiai, a harmony of vital

125
breath, which he says “we can only feel
intuitively”.40
Our awareness of withness, our withness-as-
awareness, is there waiting for us if only we
could free ourselves from the malign influence of
life-hating, spirit-stifling Technik.

***

Most people today are not withfolk. They have,

tragically, lost all awareness of their withness,
all sense of their grounding in the natural
texture of existence, all access to the strength of
the cosmic flow within them.
As a result they are insecure, self-obsessed
and fearful – ideal victims for tyrants who know
how to play on these fundamental weaknesses.
“Modern man is afraid and lives in anxiety:
he focuses his anxiety (provoked by the Technik
surrounding him) on illness”, writes Ellul.
“Modern man no longer knows how to suffer,
can no longer overcome even the slightest pain.
He no longer knows how to mobilise his inner
resources to fight by himself against anxiety or
fear”.41
German philosopher Ernst Jünger describes
in The Forest Passage the “gullibility of modern
man” – a lack of spiritual faith lethally combined
with a misplaced faith in contemporary power:
“He believes what he reads in the newspaper but

126
not what is written in the stars”.42
He adds: “The need to hear the news several
times a day is already a sign of fear; the
imagination grows and paralyzes itself in a
rising vortex”.43
If regaining awareness is the key to finding
the Withway, and thus escaping tyranny, then
the process must necessarily begin within the
individual mind.
How we might each go about achieving this is
set out by Aurobindo in his inspirational
metaphysical masterpiece, The Synthesis of
Yoga.
“We have to see Life as a channel for the
infinite force divine”44 he says, and thus banish
the psychologically-crippling illusion of
individual separation, isolation and powerless-
ness.
“Truly, we do not think, will or act but
thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse
and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around
itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural
activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that
forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the
impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of
that sea of force in action and do not govern it,
but by it are governed and directed.45
“The Yogin is able to feel his body one with
all bodies, to be aware of and even to participate
in their affections; he can feel constantly the

127
unity of all Matter and be aware of his physical
being as only a movement in its movement. Still
more easily yet is it possible for him to feel
constantly and normally the whole sea of the
infinite life as his true vital existence and his
own life as only a wave of that boundless
surge”.46
Because this feeling of withness is an aware-
ness of something which already exists, but has
been forgotten, we do not need to mentally strive
in order to find it, explains Aurobindo.
The seeker of the Withway gradually realises
that “a force other than his own, a force
transcending his egoistic endeavour and
capacity, is at work in him and to this Power he
learns progressively to submit himself” and “in
the end his own will and force become one with
the higher Power; he merges them in the divine
Will and its transcendent and universal Force”.47
But this realisation of our universal belong-
ing is only the first stage of the process, the
“turning point”, as Aurobindo explains. “For now
we begin to understand the sense of our
struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At
last we are able to seize the meaning of our
ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the
help that was given us by all that hurt and
resisted and the utility of our very falls and
stumblings”.48
Withness is always our reality, whether we

128
are aware of it or not. But when we have gained
awareness of it, on the highest metaphysical
plane, its light shines on everything else
beneath, illuminating our understanding and
informing our action on every level.
“We are able to become without egoism,
bondage or reaction the channel in our mind and
body for a divine action poured out freely upon
the world”,49 Aurobindo contends.
From this new perspective, of our return to
everyday life informed by our complete
awareness, the significance of everything is
reversed.
Instead of seeing around us a host of separate
beings, objects and phenomena, and trying to
piece all this together to make some sort of sense
out of the apparent confusion, we start from the
knowledge of unity and work down from there.
As Aurobindo writes: “The gnosis dwells in
the unity and knows by it all the nature of the
diversities; it starts from the unity and sees
diversities only of a unity, not diversities
constituting the one, but a unity constituting its
own multitudes. The gnostic knowledge, the
gnostic sense, does not recognise any real
division; it does not treat things separately as if
they were independent of their true and original
oneness”.50
Alan Fox says of the philosopher Fazang that
he taught that “since all things are in causal

129
relations with other things, their being overlaps,
so to speak, and it is then wrong to conceive of
things as separate or discrete”.51
In practice, this means seeing a wood rather
than a number of trees, looking for factors which
unite and explain rather than divide and
confuse, going beyond the apparent chaotic
separation of people and phenomena and
searching for the patterns, the fundamental
order, that always lie beneath.
For the 11th century Cheng brothers (Cheng
Hao and Cheng Yi), writes James D. Sellmann,
“there are many manifestations of principle, but
principle is always one. The myriad forms all
constitute one body because they originate from
the one principle and contain that principle”.52
The Chinese philosopher-siblings emphasise
unity, judging that the metaphysical, the ethical,
the natural, the human, the mind, human
nature, destiny, principle, and the self-
cultivation of moral virtue are all ultimately
linked together. They insist: “The highest truth
is always resolved into unity, and an essential
principle is never a duality”.53
This was the age-old understanding pre-
sented in “scientific” terms by the German
philosopher Georg Hegel, much misunderstood
today due to the way that his thought was
subsequently stripped of its metaphysical basis
by one group of followers and turned to purely

130
political ends.
With his dialectic, he was stressing that all of
reality is contained within the universe as a
whole: there is a general Zusammenhang or
framing context. This means that all apparent
differences can necessarily be transcended at a
higher level.
Jacques d’Hondt writes that the Hegelian
dialectic is “a logic of universal interdependence,
of the inseparability and unity of opposites, of
going beyond ruptures, a logic of becoming”.54
And Frederick Beiser regards the dialectic as
arising from Hegel’s nature-based thinking and
“its triadic schema of organic development,
according to which organic growth consists in
three moments: unity, difference and unity-in-
difference”.55

***

At the same time as the individual can only be

understood in the context of the universal, the
knowledge of that universality can only come to
the individual from within his own deepest,
universal, essence.
“Individualism is as necessary to the final
perfection as the power behind the group-spirit;
the stifling of the individual may well be the
stifling of the god in man,” writes Aurobindo.
“There is continually a danger that the

131
exaggerated social pressure of the social mass by
its heavy unenlightened mechanical weight may
suppress or unduly discourage the free
development of the individual spirit. For man in
the individual can be more easily enlightened,
conscious, open to clear influences; man in the
mass is still obscure, half-conscious, ruled by
universal forces that escape its mastery and its
knowledge”.56
When the individual realises his power to
channel and express the light of the universe, he
can allow the life force which has always
animated him to take on a new meaning as “an
indispensable intermediary”57 between above and
below, a way of enabling the highest truth to
become present and active in the physical world.
Our awareness of our belonging to the whole
is a necessary stage in allowing us to act and live
in accordance with that knowledge.
While some Eastern traditions suggest that
when we have become aware of cosmic withness
we should withdraw from the “illusion” of the
physical reality we have previously experienced,
Aurobindo’s philosophy insists that, on the
contrary, we should return to the fray in a
renewed form.
“An absolute liberty of experience and of the
restatement of knowledge in new terms and new
combinations is the condition of its self-
formation. Seeking to embrace all life in itself, it

132
is in the position not of a pilgrim following the
highroad to his destination, but, to that extent at
least, of a path-finder hewing his way through a
virgin forest”.58
“In Life itself there is the seed of its own
salvation”.59

***

John Cowper Powys judges that in the face of all

the “vulgar sensationalism”60 and “commercial-
ized opinion”61 with which we are continually
besieged in the modern world, we have to create
our own personal philosophy to uphold the values
which are important to us.
Ultimately this has to be sourced from within
each one of us.
When you consider a cultured person’s
individual philosophy “you feel that this is what
he has secretly and profoundly lived by for many
a long year”,62 says Powys. “That this personal
philosophy already exists before it is brought into
conscious articulation cannot be doubted”.63
This authentic personal philosophy has to be
embedded within one’s very personality and
existence. “To philosophize is not to read
philosophy, it is to feel philosophy”,64 Powys
stresses.
“With a cultured man there is no gap or
lacuna between his opinion and his life. Both are

133
dominated by the same organic, inevitable
fatality. They are what he is”.65

***

Seekers of the Withway – “the thinkers, the

artists and the heroes” – draw inspiration from
the universal and, in doing so, suffer a superficial
separation from other people, writes Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan.
“They are lonely, self-centred, not by choice
but by necessity. Genius has no place for team-
work. Poets and prophets do not go into
committees”.66
Radhakrishnan says that the individual who
has achieved spiritual freedom has a vision of life
so clear and complete that “it lives through days
of darkness, beholding the sun with the eye of
the soul”.67
Such a person is sustained by his inner vision
of withlife, even when this is not reflected in the
society in which he lives. “He is able to face crises
in life with a mind full of serenity and joy, the joy
which is the sign of proper fulfilment of function,
nature’s seal that life’s direction is right and
secure”.68
When we descend deep inside ourselves to
find out who we really are, we simultaneously
ascend to our essential withness and are forever
transformed.

134
 “Individuation is an at-one-ment with oneself
and at the same time with humanity, since
oneself is a part of humanity”, writes Carl
Jung.69
Radmila Moacanin describes it as “essentially
an unconscious, autonomous process in which the
psyche in its natural and spontaneous urge for
wholeness is striving to harmonize its conscious
and unconscious contents”.70
She adds: “When one has become truly
oneself, that unique individual – unlike anyone
else who has ever lived, an unrepeatable spark in
the universe – one no longer has the need for
competition, for hatred and hostility, for power to
dominate others; compassionate wisdom
spontaneously arises”. 71

***

“Individuality is a thing that cannot be killed.

Quietly it may be, but just as certainly, silently,
perhaps, as the growth of a blade of grass, it
offers its perpetual and unconquerable protest
against the dictates of Authority”,72 writes
American anarchist and feminist Voltairine de
Cleyre.
The malign Dominant Idea stifling the
human spirit can only be challenged if
individuals have the courage and determination
to resist its power and are able to source, and

135
remain true to, a sense of justice that comes from
within themselves, she explains.
If they can do that, they can end their days in
the knowledge that they have done what had to
be done: “At the end of life you may close your
eyes, stating: ‘I have not been dominated by the
Dominant Idea of my Age; I have chosen mine
own allegiance and served it”.73

***

Like many others, I have spent the whole of my

adult life trying to understand what has gone
wrong with our world and how we might identify
and reach the path to a better future.
This is no easy task, given the numbers of
lies, deceptions and traps deployed by the ruling
caste so as to obstruct true understanding of the
slave-system they have constructed and prevent
any serious challenge to it.
But, like our sense of ethics, the Withway
exists deep in our minds as an archetype of how
we are meant to live.
Therefore, even when we cannot yet formu-
late it ourselves, we can usually recognise it
when it is reflected in the ideas of other
individuals or movements of thought.
The problem is that these reflections are
fragments and the fact that one aspect of
withness can be found in any source is no

136
guarantee that it points us to the Withway as a
whole.
Often we are encouraged by a promising sign
to follow a particular path only to find that it
quickly peters out in a tangle of incoherence.
Worst of all is the road that gradually veers
from its promised course, without us even
noticing, until it has performed a complete U-
turn and we suddenly find ourselves marching,
banners and placards still held proudly aloft, in
exactly the opposite direction to that promised by
our original intuition!
When we are young we imagine that a
question as important as how we should best live
must have already been resolved by the great
minds of previous generations and that it is
simply a question of finding one’s way to the
right philosophy, religion or ideology.
But as we get older, we realize that things
aren’t so simple and that in taking the beaten
track of other people’s thinking we usually find
ourselves being led astray.
It is much better to stay awake and alert, to
notice the hints and signs left by others but
ultimately to rely on our own inner moral
compass to guide us – our own sense of right and
wrong and our own instinctive reactions to the
ever-changing conditions of the society in which
we are living.
“We must be governed by the guide within

137
rather than by the opinions of men”,74 as
Aurobindo writes.
Because withness is within each of us, when
we follow our own way we also follow the
Withway.

***

We are finding our way back, all sorts of us from

all over the place, straying back together, staying
together some of us for a while to dig up the
concrete and find the stars beneath.

Jenny James75

***

Our holistic awareness of withness allows us to

see the world from a new and clear perspective
and new layers of understanding come into view.
We see not only that we belong to humanity,
to nature, to the cosmos, and that we are
inseparable from the context in which we are
situated, but we also realise how this withness
has become invisible to modern people.
We therefore grasp that there is something
important at stake with this idea of withness,
that it is not just an abstract idea only of interest
to navel-gazing day-dreamers, but has a very
real impact on our world and our lives.

138
 It is the lack of general awareness of with-
ness which enables power to divide, control and
exploit us, which allows us to accept its lies that
nature is a raw resource and that destruction
means progress. We are thus trapped in the
sterile mindset of materialist modernity.
As our awareness grows, it becomes obvious
to us that the Withway has not so much
disappeared from view as been hidden from view,
in the interests of power.
At this point, the Withway takes on a mean-
ing that it would not have possessed in a
different kind of society.
If all was largely well with our world, the
Withway would amount to a simple continuation
of the direction we were already taking, the
maintenance of “an orderly society in harmony
with nature”76 urged by traditional Confucian
philosophy in China.
But since this is far from being the case, it
necessarily implies a radical breach with the
status quo, so that we may rejoin the true path.
People who instinctively seek community,
cohesion and continuity – a society founded on
the natural order of withness – therefore find
themselves confronted with the need to become
revolutionaries.
Augustin Berque makes this point regarding
Watsuji’s insistence on fûdosei, on the
importance of our symbiotic relationship with the

139
places where we live, the grounding of our
existences in a context of physical reality.
While today’s rampant globalization system-
atically separates people from any sense of
belonging to a particular place, “Watsuji’s
mésologie demonstrates that it is our very
humanity that is at stake”, he says. “For sure, in
his day Watsuji was no revolutionary, but in the
21st century an idea like that carries the seed of
a completely different world”.77
Seeking the Withway necessarily implies
rejecting the current system which has dragged
us so far from it and urging others to do likewise.
Withness becomes a call to arms, a flag
behind which free humanity can gather and
prepare to engage.
As withness becomes visible as a cause, it
inevitably comes under attack from power, at the
very least on the level of smears and propaganda.
The idea of withness, sourced ultimately from
the purest metaphysical level, thus climbs right
down to the muddy battlefield of contemporary
politics.
It turns into something else. It is no longer
withness as reality, or withness as awareness of
reality, but withness as a struggle to reassert
itself as the guiding wisdom underlying human
existence.
There is only one means by which it can
become real and pro-active in the physical world,

140
by which it can actually struggle: us.
If we make ourselves available as channels
for the highest form of cosmic withness, we also
make ourselves available as instruments for the
restoration of withness on every level.
Our new holistic awareness shows us that the
practical battles in which we are engaged on a
human level are a down-reaching of higher
principle.
Furthermore, when we have risen to the
heights of metaphysical individuation, we
descend to the practical realm of struggle
infinitely empowered by this awareness.
Understanding that we are only transient
physical manifestations of the universal light, we
know that individual death has no meaning – our
eternal essence is in the whole.
“No one is easier to terrorize than the person
who believes that everything is over when his
fleeting phenomenon is extinguished. The new
slaveholders have realized this, and this explains
the importance for them of materialistic
theories”,78 writes Jünger.
“To overcome the fear of death is at once to
overcome every other terror, for they all have
meaning only in relation to this fundamental
problem”.79
The Withway is not just the knowledge of
where we must go but the courage we need to
take us there.

141
 ***

The moment of the rose and the moment of the

yew tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments

T.S. Eliot80

***

It has been the norm during my lifetime for

people to pretend that their individual lives take
place in a kind of bubble separated from the big
wide world outside.
All that really matters is your own little
story: your family, your relationships, your job,
your home, your tastes, your possessions, your
bank account, your pension scheme.
Having an opinion on the state of society as a
whole is an optional luxury. Taking that opinion
seriously enough to want to share it with lots of
other people is seen as eccentric; acting on it and
prioritising it over your own personal life is
regarded as alarmingly irresponsible.
It is, according to contemporary wisdom, not
only insane to focus on the bigger picture beyond
oneself but also futile, as mere individuals have

142
no possibility of influencing anything outside of
their own domestic sphere.
In this way our society turns its back on one
of the most important aspects of our overall
withlife.
Watsuji’s fûdosei not only embraces our
belonging to others, and to the space we share
with others, but also our belonging to time, our
presence in a certain moment in history.
“The milieu is inseparable from history,” he
writes. “The movement of human self-
understanding – the human in his characteristic
duality of individual and social being – is at the
same time historic. Consequently, there can no
more be milieu separated from history than there
can be history separated from milieu”.81
His holistic overview insists that all history is
rooted in place and all place is inseparable from
history. If we try to understand them separately,
we will be dealing only with abstract concepts,
cut off from context and thus from reality.
The reality we describe as “politics” or
“foreign affairs” or “progress” or “war” or “crisis”
is the ground on which we stand.
It is as much a part of our full being as is our
symbiotic relationship with place and people.
And just as we shape the landscapes in which
we live and we shape the social connections
which sustain us, so do we shape the society in
which we live and the way in which it evolves.

143
 If we neglect this essential role, shirk the
responsibility and hide away inside the cowardly
illusion of a purely individual existence, then we
continue to shape society, but in a negative way
– pushing it still further from the Withway.
Withness is present in time, as well as in
place and people. It is the crest of an ever-
breaking wave of history, as humans create
ourselves, our milieux, our cultures, our
traditions and our destinies in symbiosis with all
that surrounds and sustains us.
Eliot writes that the historical sense involves
a perception not only of the pastness of the past,
but of its presence: “This historical sense, which
is a sense of the timeless as well as of the
temporal and of the timeless and the temporal
together, is what makes a writer traditional. And
it is at the same time what makes a writer most
acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own
contemporaneity”.82

***

An epidemic of fear and despair has been

sweeping the world since 2020, with liberties
abolished, livelihoods lost, childhoods ruined,
families divided, communities splintered, hearts
broken, dreams shattered and lives left in ruins.
And yet, the seed of renewal can be found
inside the darkest decay. This horrific sequence

144
of events has also brought with it, despite itself,
a glimmer of hope that it represents the
beginning of the end of this malevolent historical
era.
While millions have been taken in and swept
away by the lies of power, millions of others have
finally awoken.
In their arrogance, the ruling mafia have not
even bothered to make sure their narratives are
watertight, that their figures make sense and
that their actions are coherent.
They have perhaps judged that their full-
spectrum domination of global society has
reached a point where they can get away with
anything they want, without even making too
much of an effort.
But they perhaps did not appreciate the full
consequences of removing the long-worn velvet
glove of “democracy” and exposing to public view
the clenched fist of their venal greed, hypocrisy
and violence.
People have not merely been able to see the
real motivations, the real machineries, behind
their so-called Great Reset, but are beginning to
understand previous historical events in a
different light.
In their now-notorious 2020 book boasting
about their project, Klaus Schwab and Thierry
Malleret of the World Economic Forum
themselves provide a context for the shock-and-

145
awe impact of the Covid spectacle.
They compare it with the 2001 atrocity in
New York and gloat about the way that, after
9/11, “new security measures like employing
widespread cameras, requiring electronic ID
cards and logging employees or visitors in and
out became the norm”.83
If these spokesmen for tyranny can make the
link, then suddenly it becomes considerably less
“crazy” for opponents of their system to do the
same thing.
Once someone has realised, through their
own observation and research, that the world’s
international institutions, governments and
media outlets have been systematically
terrorising us with co-ordinated lies for their own
nefarious purposes, that the “dodgy dossier” used
to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was merely
usual practice on their part, then the door is
open for all sorts of discoveries.
The idea that NATO, via its Gladio network,
could have carried out false flag terrorist attacks
across Europe in the second half of the twentieth
century does not seem as outlandish as it may
once have done.84
And, going back further, what about the
Second World War? Schwab and Malleret cite it
in the same breath as 9/11, describing it as “a
transformative crisis of previously unimaginable
proportions”.85

146
 The “fundamental changes to the global order
and the global economy” it brought about
included, of course, the post-war “Build Back
Better” of US economic and cultural occupation
of Western Europe.
When you combine this insight with an
understanding of the financial networks which
funded the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and thus
helped bring about the war,86 the official version
of our recent history has begun to seriously
unravel.
A political space has opened up since March
2020 in which it is possible to voice and share the
kind of fundamental critique of the global system
which was previously considered extremely
marginal.
What I have been trying to convey in this
book is that the nightmare imposed upon us
under the New Normal is the logical conclusion
of our departure from the natural order of the
Withway and the domination of power, greed,
money and industrial Technik.
If we succeed in resisting their new global
dictatorship, and securing our freedom to decide
our future, there will be no point in leaving
intact all the infrastructures of oppression, all
the weapons of control, which have brought us to
this sorry point.
Do we want them to be taken up and used
against us again by a slightly different gang of

147
rulers, or by the same old gang in one of their
regular new disguises?

***

For last year’s words belong to last year’s

language
And next year’s words await another voice

T.S. Eliot87

***

Millions are today awakening not just to the

reality of the system, but to their own historical
withness, the need to become an authentic
individual by going beyond individualism, the
need to find freedom by embracing responsibility.
It is easy to pretend that the vile reality of
the death-cult system is nothing to do with us
personally when its effects are suffered by other
people, outside of our personal cocoon.
Why would we feel the need to do anything
about bombs dropping on people’s homes
thousands of miles away, about other people’s
children in other people’s countries being forced
into slave labour or prostitution, about
communities we know nothing about being torn
from land we have never seen?
After all, we have our own livelihoods to

148
think about, our own families to care for, our own
personal well-being to assure.
But today the system has turned its weapons
on those who had until now been spared its worst
excesses.
Suddenly, vast numbers of people find
themselves unable to pretend that all is more or
less well with the world.
Suddenly, they are discovering, in their
hearts, the need to step forward and participate
in the unfolding of our collective destiny, to
realise their historical withness.
Once we have understood what is happening
to us, once we have allowed that understanding
to sink in, how can we not feel obliged to act?
“To know and not to do is as if our eyes saw
the way but our feet refused to follow in it. In
order of precedence, knowledge comes first, but
in order of importance action, for while nothing
can be done without knowledge, yet knowledge
not acted upon is useless”,88 Kaibara Ekken
advises us from 17th-century Japan.
Our ultimate destination need neither be
imminent nor visible in order for us to be able to
set off on the right path, he insists.
“Even a journey involving thousands of miles
must begin with a single step. When going to a
distant place, one must ever start from where
one is”.89
The Withway is an old way asking to become

149
the new way. It is the eternal way, the human
way within the natural and universal way.
“What intense joy we can gain in sensing the
wondrous phenomenon of Heaven and Earth –
the light of the sun and the moon; the passing
and re-passing of the four seasons; the changing
shapes in cloud and mist; the mountain’s profile;
the dancing stream; the soft breeze; moisture of
rain and dew; purity of snow; smile of flowers;
growth of fragrant herbs; infinite life of birds,
beasts, fishes and insects,” writes Ekken.
“To make ourselves conversant with this
wonderful nature is to expand our hearts, purify
our feelings, arouse holy thoughts, and wash
away all low and unclean desires. This is called
inspiration, for the goodness which is within is
aroused, and flows out at the touch of the outer
world”.90
When you have finished reading this, why not
go outside and look up at the blue sky, the clouds
or the stars?
Listen carefully. Even in the densest city, you
will hear it. The call of an unseen bird. The
giggle of an invisible child. Leaves set a-rustling
by a breeze from beyond. Phantom faery voices
singing of time long gone, of time yet to come.
Listen carefully. The Withway is calling us
home.

150
 ENDNOTES

Part I: Natural Withness

1. Augustin Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette:

dialogues mésologiques (Editions éoliennes, 2017), p.
46.
2. Augustin Berque, ‘Milieu vivant, milieu humain,
territoire et bien commun’, 24èmes Rencontres d’été
Abraham Mazel, 2-4 juillet 2021, Maison Mazel,
Falguières, Saint-Jean-du-Gard, pp. 16-17.
3. Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette, p. 42.
4. Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette, p. 32.
5. Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette, p. 75.
6. Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette, p. 52.
7. Augustin Berque, Préface, Watsuji Tetsurô, Fûdo: le
milieu humain, commentaire et traduction par
Augustin Berque (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011), p. 27.
8. Berque, Préface, Watsuji, pp. 11-12.
9. Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette, p. 58.
10. Watsuji, p. 44.
11. Watsuji, p. 45.
12. T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’,
Selected Prose, ed. by John Hayward (Middlesex:
Penguin, 1953), p. 21.
13. Tu Wei-ming, ‘Beyond the Enlightenment
Mentality’, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John A. Grim,

151
eds, Worldviews and Ecology: Religion, Philosophy,
and the Environment (New York, Orbis Books, 1994),
p. 27.
14. See Paul Cudenec, The Stifled Soul of Humankind
(Sussex: Winter Oak, 2014).
15. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’,
Selected Prose, pp. 20-21.
16. Watsuji, p. 36.
17. Watsuji, p. 49.
18 .Watsuji, p. 212.
19. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of
Evolution (London: Freedom Press, 1993), p. 180.
20. Peter Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development
(Dorchester: Prism Press, n/d), p. 15.
21. Kropotkin, Ethics, p. 17.
22. Otto Gross, ‘On the Phylogy of Ethics’, 1902,
Selected Works 1901-1920, trans. by Lois L. Madison
(New York: Mindpiece, 2012), p. 15.
23. Otto Gross, ‘Zur funktionellen Geistesbildung des
Revolutionärs’, Werke 1901-20 (New York: Mindpiece,
2009), p. 355, cit. Gottfried M. Heuer, Freud’s
‘Outstanding’ Colleague/Jung’s ‘Twin Brother’: The
suppressed psychoanalytic and political significance of
Otto Gross (London & New York: Routledge, 2017), p.
101.
24. Edward Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Cause and
Cure, and other essays (London: Allen & Unwin,
1921), p. 26.
25. Carpenter, p. 28.
26. Carpenter, p. 31.
27. The Atharva Vida, J .J. Clarke, ed., Nature in
Question: An Anthology of Ideas and Arguments
(London: Earthscan, 1993), p. 19.

152
28. John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), p. 73.
29. Powys, The Meaning of Culture, p. 72.
30. Powys, The Meaning of Culture, p. 130.
31. John Cowper Powys, Autobiography (London: Pan
Books, 1982), p. 238.
32. Standing Bear, ‘Land of the Spotted Eagle’, Nature
in Question, p. 26.
33. Crow-Apsaaloke Ashkisshe ceremony (sun dance).
cit. John A Grim, ‘Native North American Worldviews
and Ecology’, Worldviews and Ecology, p. 43.
34. Zhang Zai, ‘The Western Inscription’, cit. James D.
Sellmann, ‘Zhang Zai’, Great Thinkers of the Eastern
World: The major thinkers and the philosophical and
religious classics of China, India, Japan, Korea and
the world of Islam, ed. by Ian P. McGread (New York:
HarperCollins, 1995), p. 110.
35. James D. Sellmann, ‘The Spring and Autumn
Annals of Master Lu’, Great Thinkers of the Eastern
World, p. 40.
36. Mary Evelyn Tucker, ‘Ecological Themes in
Taoism and Confucianism’, Worldviews and Ecology,
p. 157.
37. Kaibara Ekken, The Way of Contentment, trad.
Ken Hoshino (Delhi: Facsimile Publisher, 2019), p. 30.
38. Mary Evelyn Tucker, ‘Kaibara Ekken’, Great
Thinkers of the Eastern World, pp. 369-70.
39. Clarke, Nature in Question, p. 7.
40. Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Nature in Question, p. 23.
41. Maria Waser, Begegnung am Abend: Ein
Vermächtnis (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1933), p. 265, cit. Anne Harrington, Reenchanted
Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to

153
Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999), p. 92.
42. Brian Branston, The Lost Gods of England (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 52-53, cit.
Gary R. Varner, The Mythic Forest, the Green Man
and the Spirit of Nature: The Re-Emergence of the
Spirit of Nature from Ancient Times into Modern
Society (New York: Algora, 2006), p. 17.
43. Georges Lapierre, Les ours prennent souvent la
forme humaine (pamphlet, 2016), p. 3.
44. Lapierre, p. 4.
45. Standing Bear, Nature in Question, p. 27.
46. Varner, p. 28.
47. Ralph Metzner, ‘The Emerging Ecological
Worldview’, Worldviews and Ecology, p. 167.
48. James G. Cowan, The Elements of the Aborigine
Tradition (Shaftesbury: Element Books Ltd, 1992), p.
2, cit. Varner, p. 15.
49. Friedrich Schelling, ‘Ideas for a Philosophy of
Nature’, Nature in Question, p. 123.
50. Branston, cit. Varner, p. 17.
51. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical
Grammar of Poetic Myth, ed. Grevel Lindop
(Manchester: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 413.
52. Varner, p. 28.
53. Paul Cudenec, The Green One (Sussex: Winter
Oak, 2017), p. 25.
54. Watsuji, p. 102.
55. Watsuji, pp. 71-72.
56. Watsuji, p. 73.
57. Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A
Study in Magic and Religion, ed. with an Introduction
and Notes by Robert Fraser (Oxford: Oxford

154
University Press, 2009), pp. 426-27.
58. Frazer, p. 409.
59. Frazer, p. 298.
60. Frazer, p. 551.
61. Frazer, p. 548.
62. Frazer, p. 538.
63. Frazer, p. 31.
64. Frazer, p. 525.
65. Frazer, p. 535.
66. Frazer, p. 534.
67. Frazer, p. 486.
68. Frazer, pp. 491-92.
69. Frazer, p. 487.
70. Graves, p. 375.
71. Graves, p. 357.
72. Frazer, p. 483.
73. Ibid.
74. Frazer, p. 399.
75. Frazer, p. 477.
76. Frazer, p. 455.
77. Frazer, p. 375.
78. Frazer, p. 494.
79. Frazer, p. 523.
80. Graves, p. 346.
81. Graves, p. 357.
82. Graves, p. 404.
83. Graves, p. 344.
84. Watsuji, p. 74.
85. Robert Fraser, Frazer, p. xx.
86. Fraser, Frazer, p. xxx.
87. Fraser, Frazer, p. xx.
88. Kropotkin, Ethics, pp. 50-51.
89. Kropotkin, Ethics, p. 53.

155
90. Kropotkin, Ethics, p. 16.
91. Kropotkin, Ethics, pp. 16-17.
92. Kropotkin, Ethics, p. 45.
93. Kropotkin, Ethics, p. 49.
94. Kropotkin, Ethics, p. 45.
95. Joseph S. Wu, ‘Mencius’, Great Thinkers of the
Eastern World, p. 27.
96. Ibid.
97. Otto Gross, ‘On the Symbolism of Destruction’,
Selected Works, p. 265.
98. Otto Gross, ‘Protest and Morality in the
Unconscious’, Selected Works, p. 282.
99. William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles
Above Tintern Abbey’, Nature in Question, p. 128.
100. Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette, p. 87.
101. Watsuji, p. 274.
102. John Ruskin, cit. Stephen Coote, William Morris:
His Life and Work (Oxford: Past Times, 1995), p. 21.
103. Alfred Noyes, William Morris (London:
Macmillan & Co, 1908), p. 15.
104. John Ruskin, Modern Painters I, cit. The Pre-
Raphaelites (London: Tate Gallery/Penguin, 1984), p.
12.
105. The Pre-Raphaelites, p. 11.
106. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation
of Nature in Art (New York: Dover, 1956).
107. What is Art? Conversation with Joseph Beuys, ed.
with essays by Volker Harlan, trans. by Matthew
Barton and Shelley Sacks (West Hoathly: Clairview,
2014), p. 59.
108. What is Art?, p. 61.
109. What is Art?, p. 72.
110. What is Art?, p. 22.

156
111. Peter Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot (London: Penguin,
1988), p. 112.
112. Ackroyd, p. 70.
113. Ackroyd, pp. 269-70.
114. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’, Selected Prose,
p. 59.
115. See Paul Cudenec, Nature, Essence and Anarchy
(Sussex: Winter Oak, 2016).
116. Herbert Read, cit. George Woodcock, Herbert
Read: The Stream and the Source (Montreal/New
York/London: Black Rose Books, 2008), p. 192.
117. Varner, p. 24.
118. Frazer, p. 12.
119. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive
Mythology (London: Souvenir Press, 2011), p. 5.
120. Radmila Moacanin, The Essence of Jung’s
Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism: Western and
Eastern Paths to the Heart (Boston: Wisdom
Publications, 2003), p. 27.
121. Graves, p. 366.
122. C.G. Jung, Psyche & Symbol: A Selection from the
Writings of C.G. Jung, ed. by Violet S. de Laszlo (New
York: Anchor Books, 1958), pp. xv-xvi.
123. C.G. Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective
Unconscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1969), p. 48, cit. Moacanin, p. 31.
124. Moacanin, p. 31.
125. Moacanin, p. 76.
126. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn:
Autonomedia, 2004), pp. 141-42.
127. Lapierre, p. 9.
128. Lapierre, p. 18.
129. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of

157
Life (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 43.
130. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga
(Pondicherrry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust,
1973), p. 353.
131. Aurobindo, p. 354.
132. Chenyang Li, ‘The Doctrine of the Mean’, Great
Thinkers of the Eastern World, p. 56.
133. Alan Fox, ‘Fazang’, Great Thinkers of the
Eastern World, p. 101.

Part II: Lost in Falsehood

1. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Stolen Child’, Selected Poetry

(London: Pan Books, 1974), p. 5.
2. Paul Cudenec, The Anarchist Revelation: Being
What We’re Meant to Be (Sussex: Winter Oak, 2013),
p. 11.
3. Cudenec, The Anarchist Revelation, p. 1.
4. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History
of the Earliest States (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2017), p. 5.
5. Scott, p. 7.
6. Scott, p. 46.
7. Scott, pp. 25-27.
8. Scott, p. 241.
9. Scott, p. 245.
10. Scott, p. 152.
11. Scott, p. 180.
12. Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine, From
Mesopotamia to Iraq: A Concise History, trans Hans.
J. Nissen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), p. 31. cit. Scott, p. 161.
13. Scott, p. 29.

158
14. Scott, p. 146.
15. Scott, p. 151.
16. Scott, p. 146.
17. Scott, p. 144.
18. Guillermo Algaze, ‘The End of Prehistory and the
Uruk Period’, The Sumerian World, ed. Harriet
Crawford (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 81, cit. Scott,
p. 160.
19. Scott, p. 169.
20. Scott, p. 167.
21. Peter Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development
(Dorchester: Prism Press, n/d), pp. 259-60.
22. Watsuji Tetsurô, Fûdo: le milieu humain,
commentaire et traduction par Augustin Berque
(Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011), p. 148.
23. Scott, pp. 156-57.
24. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and
Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 2015), p. 2, cit. Scott, pp. 155-
56.
25. Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural
Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under
Population Pressure (Chicago: Aldine, 1965), p. 73, cit.
Scott, p. 153.
26. T.S. Eliot, The Rock, Selected Poems (London:
Faber & Faber, 1954), p. 121.
27. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society:
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, trad. Charles P.
Loomis, (New York: Dover Publications, 2002), p. 216.
28. Tönnies, p. 208.
29. Tönnies, p. 230.
30. Tönnies, p. 83.
31. Tönnies, p. 202.

159
32. Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: A Neo-
Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence
and the True Art of Thinking (Berkeley/Los
Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1994),
p. 159.
33. Roszak, pp. 159-60.
34. Organic Radicals, ‘Anti-business and proud of it’,
www.orgrad.wordpress.com/articles
35. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn:
Autonomedia, 2004), pp. 21-22.
36. Federici, p. 26.
37. Federici, p. 82.
38. Federici, p. 84.
39. Federici, p. 83.
40. Lawrence F. Hundersmarck, ‘Mozi’, Great
Thinkers of the Eastern World: The major thinkers
and the philosophical and religious classics of China,
India, Japan, Korea and the world of Islam, ed. by Ian
P. McGread (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 16.
41. T.S. Eliot, ‘Religion and Literature’, Selected
Prose, ed. by John Hayward (Middlesex: Penguin,
1953), p. 40.
42. Kropotkin, Ethics, p. 27.
43. Kropotkin, Ethics, p. 28.
44. John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), pp. 309-10.
45. Otto Gross, ‘On the Symbolism of Destruction’,
Selected Works 1901-1920, trans. by Lois L. Madison
(New York: Mindpiece, 2012), p. 266.
46. Eliot, ‘Yeats’, Selected Prose, ed. by John Hayward
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1953), p. 203.
47. Watsuji, p. 140.
48. Watsuji, pp. 146-47.

160
49. Roszak, p. 233.
50. Jacques Ellul, Le bluff technologique (Paris:
Hachette, 2004), p. 502.
51. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 38.
52. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 36.
53. Roszak, p. 54.
54. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 104.
55. Roszak, p. 62.
56. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 90.
57. Roszak, p. 233.
58. Georges Bernanos, ‘La France contre les robots’,
cit. Aux origines de la décroissance – Cinquante
penseurs, coordonné par Cédric Biagini, David
Murray, Pierre Thiesset (Paris: L’Échappée, 2017), p.
28.
59. Bernanos, cit. Aux origines de la décroissance, p.
31.
60. Jacques Allaire, Aux origines de la décroissance, p.
30.
61. Bernanos, cit. Aux origines de la décroissance, p.
31.
62. Paul Cudenec, Nature, Essence and Anarchy
(Sussex: Winter Oak, 2016), p. 88.
63. Klaus Schwab with Nicholas Davis, Shaping the
Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Guide to
Building a Better World (Geneva: WEF, 2018), e-book,
27%.
64 Roszak, p. 143.
65. Roszak, p. 29.
66. Roszak, p. 204.
67. Roszak, p. 123.
68. Michael Bywater, The Observer, 1985, cit. Roszak,
p. 123.

161
69. Roszak, p. 211.
70. Roszak, p. 164.
71. See wrenchinthegears.com.
72. See Paul Cudenec, Fascism Rebranded: Exposing
the Great Reset (pdf, 2021), pp. 262-72.
73. Jean-Luc Porquet, Préface, Ellul, Le bluff
technologique, p. 6.
74. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 667.
75. Roszak, p. 44.
76. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 74.
77. Porquet, Préface, Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p.
15.
78. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 149.
79. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 414.
80. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 402.
81. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, pp. 396-97.
82. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 296.
83. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 51.
84. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 181.
85. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 689.
86. Roszak, p. 26.
87. Roszak, pp. 211-12.
88. Edgar Morin, La Méthode, vol 5, L’humanité de
l’humanité. L’identité humaine. Seuil, 2001, pp. 221-
22. cit. Guillaume Blanc, L’invention du colonialisme
vert: pour en finir avec le mythe de l’Eden africain
(Paris: Flammarion, 2020), p. 233.
89. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 160.
90. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 552.
91. Jacques Ellul, Le système technicien (Paris:
Calmann-Lévy, 1977), p. 287, cit. Serge Latouche
présente Jacques Ellul, Contre le totalitarisme
technique (Neuvy-En-Champagne: Editions le

162
passager clandestin, 2013), pp. 33-34.
92. Roszak, p. 241.
93. Eliot, The Rock, Selected Poems, p. 120.
94. Paul Cudenec, The Anarchist Revelation: Being
What We’re Meant to Be (Sussex: Winter Oak, 2013),
p. 33.
95. Watsuji, p. 242.
96. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of
Life (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 223.
97. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 393.
98. Roszak, p. 62
99. Roszak, p. xlvi.
100. Roszak, p. 75.
101. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 107.
102. William Blake, ‘Milton: A Poem’, Blake’s Poems
and Prophecies (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1954), p.
110.
103. William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. by
Geoffrey Keynes, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972), p. 361, cit. Peter Marshall, William Blake:
Visionary Anarchist (London: Freedom Press, 2008),
p. 39.
104. Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth: An
Exploration of Ecopsychology (New York: Touchstone,
1993), p. 42.
105. Kathleen Raine, William Blake (London: Thames
& Hudson, 1977), pp. 72-74.
106. Raine, p. 50.
107. Blake, ‘Milton’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p.
137.
108. What is Art? Conversation with Joseph Beuys, ed.
with essays by Volker Harlan, trans. by Matthew
Barton and Shelley Sacks (West Hoathly: Clairview,

163
2014), p. 23.
109. What is Art?, pp. 26-27.
110. What is Art? p. 57.
111. What is Art?, p. 89.
112. What is Art?, p. 22.
113. What is Art?, p. 21.
114. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris:
Gallimard, 1992), p. 25.
115. Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du
spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 20.
116. Debord, La société du spectacle, p. 3.
117. Patrick Marcolini, Le mouvement situationiste:
une histoire intellectuelle (Paris: L’Echappée, 2012), p.
202.
118. Miguel Amorós, ‘Fondements élémentaires de la
critique anti-industrielle’, Préliminaires: Une
perspective anti-industrielle (Villsavary: Éditions de la
Roue, 2015), pp. 60-61.
119. Patrick Marcolini, ‘Jaime Semprun’, Aux origines
de la décroissance, co-ordonné par Cédric Bagini,
David Murray, Pierre Thiesset (Paris: L’Échappée,
2017), p. 279.
120. Marcolini, ‘Jaime Semprun’, Aux origines de la
décroissance, p. 278.
121. William Morris, ‘The Lesser Arts’, News From
Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs, ed. by
Asa Briggs (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 85.
122. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 98.
123. Peter Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot (London: Penguin,
1988), p. 107.
124. Ackroyd, p. 242.
125. Ackroyd, p. 249.
126. T.S. Eliot, ‘Conditions of Culture’, Selected Prose,

164
p. 248.
127. Ackroyd, p. 156.
128. Ackroyd, p. 24.
129. T.S. Eliot, ‘Conformity to Nature’, Selected Prose,
p. 220.
130. Ackroyd, p. 88.
131. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Responsibility of the Man of
Letters in the Cultural Restoration of Europe, in
Norseman, July/August 1944, cit. Ackroyd, p. 273.
132. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Unity of European Culture’, radio
broadcast, 1946, cit. Ackroyd, p. 273.
133. Ackroyd, p. 273.
134. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Reformation of Society’, Selected
Prose, p. 210.
135. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 696.
136. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 694.
137. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 696.
138. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 652.
139. Scott, p. 7.
140. Scott, p. 14.
141. Scott, p. 15.
142. Ibid.
143. Cudenec, Fascism Rebranded, p. 274.
144. Jacques Ellul, L’illusion politique (Paris: La
Table Ronde, 2004), p. 218, cit. Serge Latouche
présente Jacques Ellul, Contre le totalitarisme
technique, p. 41.
145. T.S. Eliot, ‘Christianity and Society’, Selected
Prose, p. 213.
146. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 27.
147. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 252.
148. Roszak, p. 23.
149. www.judibari.org/revolutionary-ecology.html

165
150. Jaime Semprun, René Riesel, Catastrophisme,
administration du désastre et soumission durable
(Paris: Éditions de l’Encyclopédie, 2008), X.
151. Jaime Semprun, Dialogues sur l’achèvement des
temps modernes (Paris: Éditions de l’Encyclopédie,
1993), p. 59.
152. Cory Morningstar, ‘Act I, The Manufacturing of
Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Political Economy
of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex’, January 17,
2019,
http://theartofannihilation.com/the-manufacturing-of-
greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-
the-non-profit-industrial-complex/
153. Cory Morningstar, ‘Act V, The Manufacturing of
Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Green New Deal
is the Trojan Horse for the Financialization of
Nature’, February 13, 2019,
http://theartofannihilation.com/the-manufacturing-of-
greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-new-green-deal-is-the-
trojan-horse-for-the-financialization-of-nature/
154. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 425.
155. Cory Morningstar, ‘The Great Reset: The final
assault on the living planet’, November 28, 2020,
http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2020/11/28/the-
great-reset-the-final-assault-on-the-living-planet-its-
not-a-social-dilemma-its-the-calculated-destruction-of-
the-social-part-iii/
156. Blanc, p. 210.
157. Blanc, pp. 29-30.
158. Cudenec, Fascism Rebranded, pp. 88-130.
159. Ackroyd, p. 157.
160. Ackroyd, p. 171.
161. T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday, Selected Poems, p. 93.

166
162. Roszak, p. 103.
163. Radhakrishnan, p. 156.
164. Roszak, p. 18.
165. Roszak, pp. 231-32.
166. Roszak, p. 88.
167. Roszak, p. 71.
168. Roszak, p. 131.
169. Roszak, p. 127.
170. René Descartes, Discours de la methode (Paris:
Flammarion, 2008), pp. 38-39, cit. Augustin Berque,
Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette: dialogues mésologiques
(Editions éoliennes, 2017), p. 41.
171. Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette, p. 41.
172. Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette, p. 85.
173. Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette, p. 40.
174. Renaud Garcia, Le Sens des limites: contre
l’abstraction capitaliste (Paris: L’Échappée, 2018), p.
90.
175. Garcia, pp. 208-09.
176. Garcia, p. 210.
177. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women,
Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1990), p. 68.
178. Ibid.
179. Georges Lapierre, Les ours prennent souvent la
forme humaine (pamphlet, 2016), p. 11.
180. Radhakrishnan, p. 169.
181. Berque, Là, sur les bords de l’Yvette, p. 42.
182. William Anderson, Green Man: The Archetype of
our Oneness with the Earth (London and San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 154.
183. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical
Grammar of Poetic Myth, ed. by Grevel Lindop

167
(Manchester; Carcanet Press, Faber & Faber, 1999),
p. 472.
184. Graves, p. 449.
185. Roszak, p. 146.
186. Ackroyd, p. 182.
187. T.S. Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth (London,
1931), cit. Ackroyd, p. 172.
188. Augustin Berque, ‘Milieu vivant, milieu humain,
territoire et bien commun’, 24èmes Rencontres d’été
Abraham Mazel, 2-4 juillet 2021, Maison Mazel,
Falguières, Saint-Jean-du-Gard, p. 7.

Part III: Finding the Withway

1. Kaibara Ekken, The Way of Contentment, trad. Ken

Hoshino (Delhi: Facsimile Publisher, 2019), p. 34.
2. Jacques Ellul, Le bluff technologique (Paris:
Hachette, 2004), pp. 724-25.
3. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History
of the Earliest States (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2017), p. 139.
4. Scott, pp. 185-86.
5. Scott, p. 209.
6. Scott, p. 186.
7. Scott, p. 209.
8. Scott, p. 32.
9. Scott, p. 57.
10. Scott, p. 59.
11. Scott, p. 57.
12. Scott, p. 49.
13. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber,
1955), p. 16.
14. Mohandas Gandhi, letter to Nehru, October 5,

168
1945, cit. Ranchor Prime, Vedic Ecology: Practical
Wisdom for Surviving the 21st Century (Novato,
California: Mandala, 2002), p. 91.
15. Gandhi, ‘Constructive Programme’, cit. Prime, p.
87.
16. M.K. Gandhi, The Village Reconstruction
(Bombay; Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1966), p. 30, cit.
Christopher Key Chapple, ‘Hindu Environmentalism:
Traditional and Contemporary Resources’, Mary
Evelyn Tucker and John A. Grim, eds, Worldviews
and Ecology: Religion, Philosophy and the
Environment (New York, Orbis Books, 1994), pp. 117-
18.
17. Bharatan Kumarappa, Capitalism, Socialism or
Villagism (Madras: Shakti Press, 1946), p. 58.
18. Kumarappa, p. 105.
19. Kumarappa, p. 192.
20. Watsuji Tetsurô, Fûdo: le milieu humain,
commentaire et traduction par Augustin Berque
(Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011), p. 70.
21. Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: A Neo-
Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence
and the True Art of Thinking (Berkeley/Los
Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1994),
p. 146.
22. Martin Buber, ‘Alte und neue Gemeinschaft’, cit.
Michael Löwy, ‘Martin Buber’s Socialism’, Martin
Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy, ed.
Sam Berrin Shonkoff (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill,
2018), p. 133.
23. Martin Buber, cit. Michael Lowy, Rédemption et
utopie: le judaïsme libertaire en Europe centrale
(Paris: Editions du Sandre, 2009), p. 74.

169
24. T.S. Eliot, ‘A Christian Community’, Selected
Prose, ed. by John Hayward (Middlesex: Penguin,
1953), p. 215.
25. Tu Wei-ming, ‘Beyond the Enlightenment
Mentality’, Worldviews and Ecology, p. 27.
26. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical
Grammar of Poetic Myth, ed. by Grevel Lindop
(Manchester; Carcanet Press, Faber & Faber, 1999),
pp. 472-73.
27. Jacques Ellul, ‘Autopsie de la révolution’, Serge
Latouche présente Jacques Ellul, Contre le
totalitarisme technique (Neuvy-En-Champagne:
Editions le passager clandestin, 2013), p. 99.
28. Gandhi, The Village Reconstruction, cit. Chapple,
Worldviews and Ecology, p. 118.
29. Lawrence F. Hundersmarck, ‘Mozi’, Great
Thinkers of the Eastern World: The major thinkers
and the philosophical and religious classics of China,
India, Japan, Korea and the world of Islam, ed. by Ian
P. McGread (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 17.
30. Hundersmarck, ‘Mozi’, Great Thinkers of the
Eastern World, p. 16.
31. Clément Pansaers, L’Apologie de la paresse (Paris:
Editions Allia, 2005), p. 48.
32. Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom: Wise
Thoughts for Every Day, trans. Peter Sekirin (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), p. 70.
32. Tolstoy, p. 229.
34. Tolstoy, p. 155.
35. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga (Pondicher-
rry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1973), p. 184.
36. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental
Mythology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 449.

170
37. Benjamin Hennot, ‘L’Apologie de la paresse de
Clément Pansaers’, Dits, 21, Printemps 2016, p. 134.
38. Hennot, Dits, p. 137.
39. Hennot, Dits, p. 135.
40. Watsuji, p. 262.
41. Jacques Ellul, Le bluff technologique (Paris:
Hachette, 2004), p. 439.
42. Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage, trans. Thomas
Friese, ed. Russell A. Berman (Candor, New York:
Telos Press Publishing, 2013), p. 60.
43. Jünger, p. 29.
44. Aurobindo, p. 404.
45. Aurobindo, p. 203.
46. Aurobindo, p. 398.
47. Aurobindo, p. 52.
48. Aurobindo, p. 56.
49. Aurobindo, p. 43.
50. Aurobindo, pp. 464-65.
51. Alan Fox, ‘Fazang’, Great Thinkers of the Eastern
World, p. 100.
52. James D. Sellmann, ‘Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi’,
Great Thinkers of the Eastern World, p. 113.
53. Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, Great Learning, cit.
Sellmann, ‘Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi’, Great Thinkers
of the Eastern World, p. 114.
54. Jacques d’Hondt, Hegel et l’hégélianisme (Paris:
Que sais-je, Presses Universitaires de France, 1991),
p. 56.
55. Frederick Beiser, Hegel (Abingdon: Routledge,
2005), p. 81.
56. Aurobindo, p. 185.
57. Aurobindo, p. 162.
58. Aurobindo, p. 50.

171
59. Aurobindo, p. 162.
60. John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), p. 149.
61. Powys, The Meaning of Culture, p. 150.
62. Powys, The Meaning of Culture, p. 18.
63. Powys, The Meaning of Culture, p. 20.
64. Powys, The Meaning of Culture, p. 22.
65. Powys, The Meaning of Culture, p. 19.
66. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of
Life (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 162.
67. Radhakrishnan, p. 91.
68. Ibid.
69. C.G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 108,
cit. Radmila Moacanin, The Essence of Jung’s
Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism: Western and
Eastern Paths to the Heart (Boston: Wisdom
Publications, 2003), p. 48.
70. Moacanin, p. 43.
71. Moacanin, p. 112.
72. Voltairine de Cleyre, ‘The Economic Tendency of
Freethought’, The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader, ed. by
A.J. Brigati (Oakland/Edinburgh, AK Press, 2004), p.
63.
73. Voltairine De Cleyre, ‘The Dominant Idea’, The
Voltairine de Cleyre Reader, p. 45.
74. Aurobindo, p. 316.
75. Jenny James, Atlantis alive: Love Letters from a
Primal Commune (Firle, Sussex: Caliban, 1980), p. 19.
76. Mary Evelyn Tucker, ‘Ecological Themes in
Taoism and Confucianism’, Worldviews and Ecology,
p. 152.
77. Augustin Berque, Préface, Watsuji, p. 29.

172
78. Jünger, p. 93.
79. Jünger, p. 51.
80. Eliot, Four Quartets, p. 43.
81. Watsuji, pp. 47-48.
82. T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’,
Selected Prose, p. 23.
83. Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The
Great Reset (Geneva: WEF, 2020), e-book. Edition 1.0.
60%
84. See Paul Cudenec, ‘The Politics of Fear: Terrorism
and State Control’, Antibodies, anarchangels and
other essays (Sussex: Winter Oak, 2013), pp. 73-98.
85. Schwab, Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset. 5%
86. See Paul Cudenec, Fascism Rebranded: Exposing
the Great Reset (pdf, 2021).
87. Eliot, Four Quartets, p. 39.
88. Ekken, p. 77.
89. Ekken, p. 82.
90. Ekken, p. 31.

173
 Also by Paul Cudenec
NON-FICTION

The Anarchist Revelation: Being What We’re

Meant to Be (2013)
Antibodies, Anarchangels and Other Essays
(2013)
The Stifled Soul of Humankind (2014)
Forms of Freedom (2015)
Nature, Essence and Anarchy (2016)
The Green One (2017)

FICTION

The Fakir of Florence: A Novel in Three Layers

(2016)
No Such Place as Asha: An Extremist Novel
(2019)
Enemies of the Modern World: A Triptych of
Novellas (2021)

Full details of all these titles are available on the

Winter Oak website at www.winteroak.org.uk,
along with the regular information bulletin The
Acorn. To get in touch with Winter Oak please
email [email protected] or follow
@winteroakpress on Twitter.

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