Often in the Right Place - The Education of an Anarchist

These are the memoirs of John Zerzan, a radical thinker who has been reflecting, writing, and building a major body of essays for several decades-the central focus of which is a critique of civilization. Since his earliest essays, written in the 1970s, he has questioned technology and domestication relentlessly. His influence on green-anarchy and anarcho-primitivist philosophy has been fundamental in guiding the anarchist debate toward a critique of industrialism and technological society. This has made him a prominent figure in the anti-civilization debate. Indeed, reading Zerzan allows us to understand why the civilizational project is self-destructive and not viable even in the medium term. It is precisely from his anthropological readings that he concludes that the turning point that brought an end to the world where human beings lived a full life in communion with nature was the emergence of domestication. His thought, however, is not pessimistic. Faced with the civilizational project of annihilating life, Zerzan proposes a future primitive. Zerzan's work has developed along these lines over the last few decades, but his essays also reflect on the many sources of alienation that cause humanity's current isolation and profound existential crisis.