John Zerzan is an American anarchist writer, born in 1943 and based in Eugene, Oregon, and the best-known voice of anarcho-primitivism: the view that civilisation, and before it agriculture and even symbolic culture, was a catastrophic wrong turn, and that human life before domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this was healthier, freer and more equal. Therapeutic Shamanism shares part of his reading of agriculture and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer as a rupture from the living world, but looks forward, not back: hunter-gatherer principles are templates for new ways of living, not a lost age to return to.
Who is John Zerzan? #
A writer and anarchist activist from Oregon. He was born in 1943 and settled in Eugene in 1981, where he became part of the city’s anarchist community, contributed to the journal Green Anarchy and began hosting his own weekly programme, Anarchy Radio, on the University of Oregon’s campus radio station.1 His books include Elements of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive (1994), Running on Emptiness (2002), Twilight of the Machines (2008), Future Primitive Revisited (2012), Why Hope? (2015) and A People’s History of Civilization (2018), and he edited the collection Against Civilization (1999). A memoir, Often in the Right Place: The Education of an Anarchist, appeared in 2026.2
His name already appears in the Therapeutic Shamanism books, alongside the historian Yuval Noah Harari, the scientist Jared Diamond and the naturalist Chris Packham, among the many people who have described the move from hunting and gathering to farming as a terrible mistake.3 See What did Jared Diamond mean by calling farming the worst mistake in the history of the human race?
What is anarcho-primitivism? #
A strand of anarchism that sees civilisation itself as the root of domination. Anarchism in general opposes hierarchy and the state; anarcho-primitivism traces both back to domestication, to the moment people began to control plants, animals and each other, and holds that the answer is not a better civilisation but a return to something like the life of foragers. In the introduction to Future Primitive Revisited, the political theorist Michael Becker describes the move from forager life to civilisation as “a radical rupture”.4
Zerzan goes further back than most. For him the wrong turn begins before farming, in symbolic culture: measured time, language, number, ritual and art, then the division of labour, and only then agriculture with its hierarchy, disease and writing. He reads the long, stable stretch of the Old Stone Age not as a failure to progress but as a choice: people “long chose nature over culture”.5
Which peoples does he draw on, and how did they live? #
Mostly nomadic hunter-gatherers described by earlier anthropologists: the San of the Kalahari, the Hadza of Tanzania, the Andaman Islanders, Aboriginal Australians, and the Mbuti of the Congo forest. From them he draws a picture of forager life as sharing, leisured, equal between women and men, gentle with children and largely without war or property. He notes himself that all these peoples had been influenced by contact with outsiders, and that the Mbuti in particular had lived alongside farming villagers, and been shaped by them, for centuries.6 So they are hunter-gatherers in transition, not untouched survivals of the Old Stone Age. See What was hunter-gatherer life really like? and Who was Marshall Sahlins, and what is the original affluent society?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism agree with him? #
On the diagnosis. Therapeutic Shamanism also sees the break from animism beginning with domestication and the farming revolution, and then accelerating sharply with the rise of the first city-states around 4000 BCE, which, after the British academic Steve Taylor, it calls the Fall. For hundreds of thousands of years, as hunter-gatherers, humans lived in a way that was ecologically sustainable, largely peaceful and mentally and physically healthy, by any sane measure the most successful culture there has ever been.7 See What is the Fall? and Who is Steve Taylor, and what is his idea of the Fall?
It also shares the anarchist reading of how those bands lived. Hunter-gatherer tribes had no leader who imposed decisions on the rest; they governed themselves through the cooperation of people who were truly equal. That is anarchism in its proper sense, order without top-down government, which is a very different thing from anarchy as chaos.8 See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism part company with him? #
On what follows. RewildingRewilding. Recovering the wild, undomesticated Soul: the practical healing work that follows from the Fall diagnosis. We cannot go back, only forward: ancient wisdom for future solutions. Read the full answer ourselves cannot be a mass return to a hunter-gatherer way of life: there are far, far too many of us now to be fed by hunting and gathering, so we cannot go back and have to find a way forward, taking the wisdom of shamanism with us.9 The aim is not to return to an age long gone, which is impossible anyway, but to reclaim the healthy principles hunter-gatherer societies were based on and use them as templates for radical new solutions to the problems we face now.10
Nor is any of this a romantic picture of the past. Hunter-gatherers were not living in paradise; they had sickness, injuries, conflicts, bereavements and hungry times like anyone else.11 And Therapeutic Shamanism does not date the trouble as early as Zerzan does: it describes the first seven thousand or so years of farming as reasonably good, “maybe not a golden age, but a silver one”, with things going catastrophically wrong only with the birth of so-called civilisation.12 See Isn’t the Fall just noble savage romanticism? and What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
What do his critics say, and how is he answered? #
The sharpest challenge comes from within the left and from other anarchists. The linguist Noam Chomsky and the social ecologist Murray Bookchin both said that calling for the end of civilisation amounts to calling for mass death, since only large technological systems can keep billions of people alive.13 Bookchin also attacked Zerzan’s rejection of technology and civilisation in his essay Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995).14
The reply, made by Zerzan and others, is that civilisations crash anyway, and that billions of people cannot be kept alive at the present rate of resource use and climate change, so the burden falls on the critics to show how their own path avoids a sudden collapse, and how the hierarchy and alienation of technological civilisation could ever be undone.15 See What did the Fall do to us?
What does Zerzan say about shamans? #
Something Therapeutic Shamanism does not accept. Zerzan counts ritual, and the shaman’s claim to special access to the spirits, among the first signs of the wrong turn, as specialists taking over a contact with the world that was once shared by all.16 Much of his evidence comes from farming and stratified societies, which is where Therapeutic Shamanism itself places the priestly, power-over kind of shamanism it calls Fallen. In the hunter-gatherer bands that came before, the shaman was a servant of the web of life, not a ruler within it. See What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
