The Good Savage

The cultivation of fire, language, linear time and measurement, which led to the development of agriculture, technologies, centralized politics and the mass media, have contributed, over thousands of years, to the gradual separation of humans from Nature, our communities and, ultimately, ourselves. We end up with what we have today: beings completely overwhelmed by the illusion of our independence and disconnection. Born of this belief is our modern culture. [1]

Unfortunately, the economy is the monotheism of our age: the market always wins because it is able to shape society and individuals in its image.

If we want to change the stories of our culture and allow people to feel free to be who they want to be, we must show courage. All you have to do to find this courage is to ask yourself what is the most important goal in your Life: is it just doing what other people expect you to do, or living your own truth? If you have chosen the latter, the next step is to put it into practice.

"Humanity is a product of Nature and as such has a meaning for the Life of the planet" -Arne Naess

The truth is that wise individuals, moderate in consumption and above all long-lived would damage the infinite growth in which we are immersed and would put the system in crisis. Living virtuously is the worst of sabotage because it ccosts little money, it makes us freer and it is uneconomical! [2]

The myth of the good savage is the apex of an animal fascination, of the unconscious notion that civilized man has lost something in the wake of progress: I am talking about the feelings of communion with the manifestations of Nature in its amazing forms. With civilization, humanity has created its own party in war with the rest of the planet: the biosphere (including man) is offered as a sacrifice for economic development. [3]

Fundamentally, wilderness is a state of experiencing and participating in oneness, and every tool we use to substitute it (like money for example) prevents us from tasting this. [4]

Getting wild again, for a dog, a horse or a human, means recovering that own cognitive heritage inherited from an evolutionary path over millions of years, it means returning wise-savage, being free to build realities, worlds and paths, free from any form of taming and cultural blessing.

Commonly, when we refer to instinct, our imagination refers to something irrational, uncontrollable, irrepressible; in this sense, it is confused with reactivity, emotionality, bestiality. But this story is the product of

chronic misunderstanding, resulting from the loss of our natural understanding of things. The animal instinct, in fact, has been forged by an evolutionary process that allows it to dialogue with the world from the very first moments of life, gaining experience after experience in a path of endless growth. [5]

"Nature speaks to you because you animal-man are part of it. Listen" -Native Americans

The return to the wild has a physical component that includes the re-appropriation of techniques and the development of sustainable methods of coexistence, including how to feed, find shelter and heal with plants, animals and substances naturally present in our bioregions. It also involves the dismantling of many aspects of whwt we intend for civilization. The return to the wild also has an emotional component: learning to live together in non-hierarchical and non-repressive communities. It's about giving priority to direct experience and passion over de-responsibilization and alienation, rethinking every dynamic and every aspect of our reality, getting in touch with our wild fury to defend our Lives and fight for a liberated existence, placing greater trust in our intuition and staying in direct contact with our instincts, restoring the balance destroyed after thousands of years of patriarchal control and taming... To rejoin Life! [6]

When we talk of voluntary simplicity, we automatically imagine sacrifice and loss: most people’s perception of it centers on having to give up something. But one of the most important lessons I've learned along my journey is that you gain something much more fulfilling, meaningful and rewarding when you find the courage to trust Life again and to open yourself up to a more connected way of being, than the little you let go of. Yes, there is a perceived loss, initially, but it is quickly replaced by a sense of freedom and connection beyond words.

"Every morning was a joyful invitation to lead life with the same simplicity and I can say with the same innocence of Nature. [...] I went into the woods because I wanted to live wisely, to face only the essential facts of Life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach me, and not to discover, on my deathbed, that I had not lived. I didn't want to live what was not a life, unless it was absolutely necessary. I wanted to live deeply, and suck all the marrow of it, live like a strong Spartan, so as to destroy everything that was not Life, mow wide and low and then put life in a corner, reduced to its simplest terms; if it turned out to be mean, I wanted to draw all the genuine meanness out of it, and show the world its baseness; if instead it appeared sublime, I wanted to know it through experience, and to be able to give a real account of it in my next digression. "[7]

[1] Charles Eisenstein, "Sacred Economics"

[2] Devis Bonanni, "The good savage"

[3] Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens,

"How Everything Can Collapse, a Manual for our Times"

[4] Mark Boyle, "The Moneyless Manifesto"

[5] Francesco De Giorgio, "In the name of animality"

[6] Green Anarchy Collective, "Green Anarchy" (Nautilus)

[7] Henry David Thoreau, "Walden or Life in the Woods"