by Johannes Wiener, July 2023
bíos (Ancient Greek, βίος)
From Proto-Hellenic *gʷīwos, from *gʷih₃wós (“alive”).
Meaning: life (often with a positive connotation: the good life)
poíēsis (Ancient Greek, ποίησις)
1st Meaning: poetry, poem
2nd Meaning: creation, fabrication, production
poiéō, ποιέω “to make”, in philosophy this term is used to bring something into being that did not exist before
poesia (Latin) was used not only to describe poetry but also illusions and daydreams
biopoesie can be understood as systems, structures, processes, or actions which create life or the good life or the poetry of life/being alive/everything that is alive, or very foundational a tendency to create life or life energy.
nekros (Ancient Greek, νεκρός),
From Proto-Indo-European *neḱ-rós, from *neḱ- (“perish, disappear”) + -ρός (-rós). See also Latin nocēre (“to hurt, harm”), nex (“murder, violent death”) (as opposed to mors, which means „normal death“), and Sanskrit नश्यति (naśyati, “to disappear, perish”).
machina (Latin),
First Meaning: contrivance, machine, device, gear
1st Meaning: machine
2nd Meaning: scheme, plan, machination
nekromachine can be understood as systems, structures, processes, or actions which manufacture death/harm, which erase life and complexity, machination as well as physical machines play a key aspect in these systems/structures, or very foundational, a tendency of annihilation.
I attempt to go back and forth between working with my hands on the land, intuitive association, and rational analysis, in the hope to generate insight via triangulation with different approaches. It is hard to recognize the patterns of a phenomenon if we don’t have a term to describe it, therefore this text tries to first and foremost create terms that generate an image in our heads that allow us to address the phenomena which shape our world. My main concern is not to establish a well-rounded theory that explains our current predicament, as humans on earth, but rather to produce an initial spark so we can start to talk about what is happening in a less eclectic, more coherent, substantial, and connected way.
The search for the origin of the illness
There is an understandable tendency which tries to find the origin of the ills of contemporary human society within human history. The archetypical example of this thinking is found in Rousseau’s 1755 work „Discourse on the Origin of Inequality“.
The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”1
I am deeply sympathetic to the appeal that the fruit of earth belongs to all and the earth to no one and I acknowledge that proclaiming such ideas as a prelude to the French Revolution is not something to scoff at. However, this kind of thinking which is reproduced in various schools of thought, from Marxism to various Nationalisms and Feminisms, tries to pinpoint a certain point within human history, where „shit did go sideways“. These moments certainly exist, we can point to the detonation of the atomic bombs, Auschwitz, the rise of British colonialism, the creation of industrial capitalism, plantation agriculture, the colonization of the Americas, the Mongol storm, the invention of gunpowder, the rise of the Roman Empire, the creation of slavery, the subjugation of women, the invention of writing and taxation, the rise of agriculture, creation of human societies beyond immediate kinship, etc., but trying to find the deciding moment is in itself a doomed endeavor. If we take for example a quite popular „point where shit did go sideways“, the invention of agriculture, it is very easy to point to both agricultural practices which did not create class-based societies and also complex hunter-gatherer societies which already had social stratification and even slavery.2 We can always find necessary pre-conditions or pre-developments which enabled the problematized development to occur. Even if the creation of agriculture would be the single event that doomed humankind, like the classical „expulsion from paradise“, societal stratification, and the use of tools and fire are necessary for systematic agriculture here we enter the realm of Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tale. I can push the point of the „expulsion from paradise“ far back into pre-history, back to the use of fire, which enabled human beings to systematically shape landscapes and ecosystems across the globe, being catapulted to the top of the food chain, with increasing distance to every other animal. The use of fire, a source of energy that is external to our bodies and which can be made mobile is – in my point of view – the only real difference between us and all the other animals on this planet (we will come back to this point later).
A Tale of Apes and Dolphins
But also at this point, if I don’t think that we are simply cursed animal, I do need to explain where certain tendencies come from. One crucial aspect of the dilemma I am describing is that we humans, as special animals, like to think that while we have been and are still subject to biological evolution, like all other biological beings, cultural evolution is special to only humans. It is certainly true, that human cultural evolution is qualitatively different from all other animals, but it is simply not true that animals don’t experience cultural development or cultural differences. I will just point to two examples.
Our closest relatives the Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and the Bonobo (Pan paniscus) are the only two species in the genus Pan, which separated around 1.5-2.1 million years ago sharing the same ancestor. The species separated when the vast Congo River system formed, but they still interbreed in the last several hundred thousand years.3 Their bodily differences are not that stark, Bonobos are a bit more slender and gracile than Chimpanzees, they both inhabitate tropical forest ecosystems in Africa. However, they inhabit very different societies. Bonobos are mostly nomadic, lacking a clearly defined territory, but rather travel within a certain area that overlaps with the preferred areas of other groups of this ape. They are normally led by an experienced female, which relies on an intricate web of social alliances with mostly females, but also caring, well-connected male Bonobos, in which experience, knowledge, social inclusion, and age play a crucial role. Aggressive or coercive males are generally suppressed by alliances of females, who are weaker in a one-to-one physical confrontation, but who compensate for this with numbers, while including less aggressive males into the higher ranks of the group. Bonobos are known for conflict resolution via sex, they are the only other animal that engages in tongue-kissing and is the only other primate that practices sexual intercourse face-to-face.
Chimpanzees on the other hand are born into a quite different culture, inhabiting tendencially dryer, less abundant forests, living in slightly smaller, but highly territorial communities. Chimpanzee communities are ruled by a strict hierarchy of males, which sometimes includes females. This hierarchy, even when it is stable is based on constant aggression of the dominant males towards the rest of the group. Chimpanzees know borders as well as border patrols, they practice infanticide of children of other males, they know war, conquest of territory, and even genocide.
Although there is an environmental difference between the habitats of Bonobos and Chimpanzees, the differences in the natural surroundings within the four Chimpanzees subspecies are significantly greater than those of the Bonobo and the Eastern Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii). The societal and cultural differences between Bonobos and Chimpanzees cannot be simply reduced to an ecological determinism.
The second example4 is that of different cultures within the species of Orca (Orcinus orca), described as „Ecotypes“, which differ in favorite prey, behavior, and dialects.5 There are cultures of Orca that prey mostly on fish and don’t hunt for marine mammals (seals, otters, dolphins, etc.) and others that do not even recognize fish as food.6 Orcas in tropical waters tend to be much more omnivorous since the abundance (but not diversity) of marine life is lesser in warmer waters and they can’t afford to be picky. Being omnivorous would probably serve as an evolutionary advantage to various Orca cultures, the ecosystem they inhabitate could support more of their kind.
This is reminiscent of the likely cultural taboo of the Greenland Norse, which settled the island from the 10th to the 15th century, of not eating fish,7 while for other Norse people (those inhabiting Iceland, Scandinavia, and Britain) fish was a staple diet. This seems to be one factor among others that lead to the demise of the Greenland Norse and their replacement by the Thule people (proto-Inuit), which were not present in Greenland before the 14th century.
The point of these two examples is to show, that while ecological, geographical, and climatic conditions influence the behavior of living beings, other, „cultural“ factors influence the evolutionary path of a species. Rational enlightenment (which still ideologically and philosophically dominates the scientific establishment) tends to view the natural world as an aimless and chaotic process. Living beings evolve in a mostly passive way, being subject to external drivers to whom they simply react, where the ecosystem is sorting out those unfitting individuals. However, the examples of our ape and dolphin relatives (Orcas are whales in name only), hint at animals having cultural differences and behaving not always in a sensible way, even considering their basic interests (for example not eating fish, if you can).8 The question then arises as, to how these cultural differences come into being, by randomness, by active influence, or by tendencies which are either inscribed in biological life itself or which arise in the evolutionary process itself. Randomness would seem to not produce Orcas that voluntarily give up a big portion of their potential meal, „just because“. Imagining living beings as active subjects who can shape their own culture (and therefore their destiny) seems like a quiet attractive possibility, especially for human beings who grew up in a very individualistic and “change is downstream from culture“ society, but neuroscience tells us that our brain shapes decisions even before we are consciously aware of them,9 and on this special occasion I will trust them. Especially since factoring in our own human bias, our ego, and the need to be in direct control of our actions/decisions strengthens this notion. However, it raises the question of who makes these decisions, if they are neither ecologically determined, consciously done, or random (instinct may be many things, but random is not one of them). It shows that there are deep biological forces in our bodies that guide our behavior, without our conscious involvement. Maybe it is even possible to claim, that those are the essence of our being and that they safeguard our consciousness from our lower levels of awareness (the very dangerous „half-knowledge“) of our self. It might be that, those tendencies that guide our intuition, which „gaslight“ our conscious self into thinking it is in charge, while it is actually the co-pilot. But how did those tendencies end up there, or for that matter in the Bonobos, Chimpanzees, Orcas, and other living beings?
A Question of Life and Death
Biology already recognizes Competition, Mutualism, and Parasitism as different modes of interaction between two or more species. But this only describes how species relate to each other, not how the behavior arose that drove them into these relationships. Current scientific understanding is that when life first arose on our planet it had a quite passive and basic character to it. I imagine microbial mats, covering the first geothermal areas in the ocean and after the development of photosynthesis 3.4 billion years ago, it could spread to various other regions of the planet. What I mean with passivity is not simply dunking on microbial life (never would such a thought emerge in my head), but rather a passivity when it comes to the transformation of energy, „sitting there consuming heat-energy or waiting until the sun hits you, just growing and multiplying as the days go on. But at a certain point, something weird happened and at least one Prokaryot engulfed („swallowed“ or „grew into“, whatever your kink) another Prokaryot,10 creating Eukariots which paved the way for the evolution of both multicellular organisms, complexity and higher states of consciousness, but also and necessarily predation. Living beings killing and eating other living things is an integral part of creating complexity. And a long dialectical game between prey and predator began, death became a fundamental aspect of life and biological evolution. One organism feeds another, creating the possibility for new generations to evolve, and adapt, becoming more resilient, and complex in this process. Therefore death itself is a crucial function to sustain life.
This process of life becoming more complex, bringing forth species with ever higher levels of consciousness11 and culture, is the basis for the term I introduced at the very beginning of the text, biopoesie. It originated from the appearance of life, which fills our incredibly beautiful and complex universe with a new dimension.
It is important to state here, that I do not believe that there is a hierarchy between higher and lower forms of consciousness, but rather that those are inseparable from each other. The human brain could only arise because of our symbiotic relationship with the billions of microbes that live in our intestines, in its most direct form, but also the myriad of beings, from phytoplankton to fungi who are necessary to create the atmospheric conditions for complex life to arise. This web of life is in essence a singular phenomenon, which shows itself in different aspects, which we call species. It is not just necessary to look at this in such a way for moral or spiritual reasons, but claiming otherwise is simply unscientific. I like to think of life as a plant (think about algae rather than a tree), which over time grows into more and more complex, finer but also more resilient structures, which adapt constantly to the pressures it faces, but where also sometimes a branch dies off. It always remains the same plant, just changing its form and growing in a certain direction, but not along a fixed path.
If we imagine life as this complex algae, growing in multiple directions, growing into itself, then it is maybe easier to understand what I want to describe with the term biopoesie. It is a tendency that is inherent to this process, that guides the growth of life towards enabling it to expand, being able to move to new habitats, which were formerly too hostile, creating more complexity, diversity, and resilience. Life creates the conditions for its thriving. This process, as everything else in the universe, is not without contradiction, but over time, it fine-tunes itself, creating a balance that we call homeostasis. This tendency which is part of all living beings is one part of our instincts, guiding all species to a certain, varying degree towards mutualism and symbiosis, within their species, but also sometimes between vastly different species. It influences the behavior of a species as well as the cultures12 and can even amount to such cultural differences that it leads to the creation of new species (as we can see with the Chimpanzees and Bonobos in such a drastic manner). Behavioral change itself can therefore influence biological evolution via epigenetics in a self-enhancing tendency. The tendency of biopoesie was carried (as with everything else) from biological evolution to us and our culture as well. We can recognize it in the small acts of kindness in our everyday lives, the bravery of a mother protecting her child, the way many indigenous people relate to each other, the beauty of art, the connection of an old man to the garden he cares for, the essence of all the religions of which their worldly representatives often fall short, the experience of falling in love or embracing someone we care for.
However, we all know that death and bitterness are part of life as well. We should not blind ourselves by us currently experiencing a consciousness that is (maybe just temporarily) separated from the other consciousnesses and which has to come to an end in its current form.13 The second term I introduced is nekromachine, but it would be unfitting to throw this term at the phenomenon of death, „normal“ modes of extinction, cruelty between species, infanticide (often by males of the same species who want to ensure their own genes to reproduce), etc. The term nekros (perish, disappear, violent death) of this amalgam seems more fitting for this phenomenon. As ugly as this phenomenon often appears, it is a natural tendency of the growth of life as well, ensuring that life persists through the creation of internal stress, which leads to adaptation and an increase in resilience. It seems also that complexity in life is created by accessing the energy which is stored in more basic life forms to nurture more complex forms (ie handing over the solar energy stored in microalgae to those who feed on it).
This tendency of nekros is part of all living things and biological processes, as is the tendency of biopoesie. They appear as a „contradiction“, however, I try to look at them as complementing each other, being integral aspects of all biological phenomena.14 Over time one or the other tendency can ascent in, for example, a species or a process, however, the other tendency will never be lost, and if circumstances change, the „minor“ tendency can again shape its mode of existence and evolution.
Humankind also carries the tendency of nekros in itself, not just since the adaptation of agriculture, class/caste society, patriarchy, or various other „parts of departure “ where „shit did go sideways“. Human „nastiness “ was always part of our existence, but certain conditions (and cultural frameworks) enabled and even favored this tendency while others reduced it. Violent conflict, domination, blood feuds, environmental destruction, rape, and murder are part of all human societies, often just contained in an embryonic, isolated state, which could be managed by the community or society. We should not project our hopes for an egalitarian, harmonic life onto societies way back in pre-history (and even less towards existing indigenous people that still live in classless societies) and romanticize those human beings. We should rather take them seriously, and learn from those experiences, but not try to replicate and transplant what grew out of different conditions into the world we live in. But putting ourselves into the shoes of those that came before us, or those that inhabit different ecosystems and societal structures, trying to imagine how we would live, love, and act if we would have been born in another society is important, since this not only creates empathy but also opens the door for changing our current mode of living.
Of fire…
What makes human beings fundamentally different from all other species currently inhabiting this planet is our ability to harness and control external forms of energy. For most of our existence, the main form was fire, not limited to our species, but inherited by our ancestor Homo erectus. Also Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as (probably) the dwarf species Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis were using fire as a tool. It was the crucial element that catapulted our species to the top of the food chain in various ways, which were enhancing each other in a dialectical relationship. The main aspect seems that by cooking we started pre-digesting our food outside of our bodies, softening it, killing off parasites and diseases, allowing for our internal digestive system to be reduced in size, and allowing our metabolism to put more energy into the development of our brain. Compared to chimpanzees humans have a much shorter digestive tract1516 The process of cooking and sharing food is a complex social phenomenon that created cohesion among the group, and strengthens social bonds, care, imagination, and trust. It created a dynamic in which planning and creativity were enhanced („How does it taste if we combine those roots with the fish we caught?“) and humans learned that patience will be rewarded. This cultural change boosted our evolutionary development, not just because of the reduction of our digestive system, but also because protein, which is crucial for brain development was becoming much easier available.17 Fire captures the gaze of humans, its mystical dancing, the wonder of the flames consuming organic matter, creating a heat-space in which the group gathers, repelling predators and lighting up the faces of your kin in the darkness was a crucial factor to nurture our imagination. Fire plays a crucial factor in all spiritual practices and religions, often it is seen as divine, the path to honor/communicate with the spirits, the ancestors, or gods, even in sanitized monotheism fire and flames are used to represent the almighty or their messengers. This role of fire, as the non-human spirit, that was dancing in the middle of the group, giving warmth and light, orientating the view of the group onto the center, should not be underestimated for what made us who we are. It allowed us to enter habitats that would have been too hostile, crossing mountains and even moving into the Arctic, far away from the jungles and savannas that are the preferred habitat of apes. For the first time in the history of our planet, a species was able to use the stored solar energy in organic substances to create a metabolism outside of their bodies.
Although there are reports18 of Australian hawks that intentionally spread burning branches from wildfires to expand the wildfires to feed themselves on the carcasses of fire casualties, this doesn’t constitute the same quality as the use of fire within humankind. Australian landscapes evolved to adapt to these frequent burnings only with Aboriginal people moving first into this land, around 40 000 years ago. As in other areas of our planet humans used fire to manage the land, clear out undergrowth to make it easier to traverse it, rejuvenate the vegetation for their main game animals, and remove „fuel“ that might create catastrophic wildfires (as we witness them today in Australia and California, thanks to the land management practices of those settler-colonial states, climate change and industrial agriculture). It might be the case that our dear Australian hawks started to mimic the practices they observed for several 10 000 years from the humans that stewarded the land.
We can see the nurturing aspect that fire can play, even within ecosystems, if it is integrated into a communitarian society that co-evolved with the land and its beings, being connected to the creation of new life, ritual, storytelling, and a cosmovision that roots human beings in the deeply interwoven relationships of the ecosystem, not above the other beings, but beside them. However, we should also not romanticize the beginning of this relationship. When human beings first move into a new ecosystem, they tend to create a mess. It takes time for relations of familiarity to arise, that deep connection and knowledge with the other beings on the land, to be generated, and a new homeostasis to emerge. Take Australia for example, whose fauna developed quite distinctively from those of the rest of the big connected landmass, that we differentiate into Eurasia and Africa, since its separation from Gondwana around 100 million years ago. Human beings were not familiar with the fascinating creatures that roamed the Australian plains and forests. „More than 85 percent of Australian terrestrial genera with a body mass exceeding 44 kilograms became extinct in the Late Pleistocene. Although most were marsupials, the list includes the large, flightless mihirung Genyornis newtoni. More than 700 dates on Genyornis eggshells from three different climate regions document the continuous presence of Genyornis from more than 100,000 years ago until their sudden disappearance 50,000 years ago, about the same time that humans arrived in Australia. Simultaneous extinction of Genyornis at all sites during an interval of modest climate change implies that human impact, not climate, was responsible.“19
I know this also from my own experience working with the land, in agriculture and gardening, that it takes time and – in my ecological context – seasons, for one to get a grasp of the needs and conditions of a specific area, to create a familiarity with those that grow and roam there, them starting to know you and transform a space into a place. In the beginning, you observe and are being observed, you break things and your things break. For example, a small wheat field that I planted whose seeds and seedlings got simply carried away by crows or carefully planted fruit trees that got attacked in full spring by a male deer (at a time when they are not peeling bark because they have enough to eat) that was expulsed from his group (I wonder why, they kicked him out!). This state cannot be jumped over or avoided, only its severity can be reduced by stepping carefully, learning from those with experience, as well as making time for observation and bonding. Sooner or later a new homeostasis can emerge and – in my point of view – it is the task of mature humans to guard this ecological state, ensuring that the needs of human communities are met, enriching biodiversity, and interweaving the communities that depend on the ecosystem with the land itself.
…machines and corporations.
But back to the fire. After the last ice age, our planet became warmer and therefore more humid, and more stable conditions developed to a state that we call Holocene. Human beings were present in all main areas of Earth, only missing in some remote islands (Aoteraoa, Island, Greenland, etc.) and Antarctica, all landscapes were shaped by human activities and we were firmly established as the apex predator in every corner of the globe. In specific ecological conditions of densely populated alluvial lowlands, human communities enjoyed a super-abundance which allowed them – in a process that is not decisively clear to us – to create new modes of living with plants, that we call agriculture. It is important to see this development not as us beginning to domesticate animals, cultivate plants and plant them on the land, but rather as a different quality of a process that started much earlier. Planting fruit and nut trees, creating conditions for herbs to grow, building fish traps from stones20, building fences to direct game and other practices were widespread before the rise of systematic field cultivation of mostly grain-producing plants (rice, barley, wheat, maís, millet). This practice was first integrated into a wider diet and might have started on the alluvial river banks, that were flooded every year, where plowing and weeding were not that intensive and no irrigation was needed. In addition, since these banks changed their face every year, control or even ownership of the land was not possible. However, over generations in certain societies, the traditional practices of keeping inequality at bay slowly eroded and inequality as well as forms of hierarchical control persisted. We can observe this in embryonic forms with the oldest city Çatalhöyük.21 I think it is important to see this not as an unstoppable trend to which human beings were passive victims, countless societies managed to go back to egalitarian modes, often on a seasonal basis, countless rebellions and exodi are witnesses to the wish of our ancestors to live without domination, control, and subjugation, this is the biopoetic aspect in this process.
Here we can witness slowly the fusion of the tendency of nekros with a new concept: the machine. μᾱχᾰνᾱ́ (mākhanā́) comes to us from Old Greek, with an unknown origin which is probably related to the Indoeuropean *megʰ- (“to be able”), it has a complex meaning which is connected to machines, machination, and the mill. With machines we describe devices, built by humans that often include gears and are considered more complex than tools, developing „a life of their own“, machination describes human planning to the detriment of others, often by fooling them, and the mill is connected to the verbs for „crushing, grinding“ and emerged to mill grains alongside the rise of big-scale agriculture, slavery, and a bureaucratic, authoritarian state. The tendency of nekros that we inherited from our evolutionary development manifested itself in these complex, contradictory processes that shaped the Bronze Age. I like to view this development as similar to the spread of cancer, the nekromachine can be seen as a dormant cancer cell, always being present in humankind, however, the conditions for its thriving were absent in most human societies, most of the time. However with the rise of the bureaucratic machine, which we call the state which was predicated on spreading control over ever more peoples, resources, and geographical areas being wielded by an elite that used it for their enrichment the nekromachine slowly came into being. It is also important to see the incredible limitations of the nekromachine at this time. In the year 2000BC, most humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies (most of the Americas, Subsaharan Africa, Northern Eurasia, Australia), while many lived in mostly egalitarian simple agricultural societies (Mesoamerica, the North-East of South America, most of South and East Asia, most of the European peninsula), a smaller population live in complex farming societies/chiefdoms (enclaves along the Pacific coast of South America, the Middle East, parts of the Mediterranean basin and a part of China), while real state societies only occupied the tiny stretches of land along the Nile, the Indus, Crete, Cyprus, the Syrian city-state, Ur III and Caral-Supe in what is today Peru. The energy was limited to the power of slaves, soldiers, horses, and the bureaucratic management that organized them for their endeavors.
As brutal as these early empires behaved, their power was limited. Even the mighty Roman Empire, whose specific culture of objectification and genocidal subjugation was stopped by the Rhine, the Danube, the dense forests of Central Europe, the Saharah, and the Arabian desert as well as the Atlantic. It had real geographical boundaries and the indomitable people who inhabited them which it couldn’t overcome and who – alongside its internal subjects – eventually overcame it. The mode of the classical empire found a new homeostasis, often one of the incredible horrors for its subjects, a world where slavery, genocide, and forced labor were not uncommon, but where there were real technological boundaries to them. In addition, the elite of various societies, from Confucian Chinese emperors to Muslim Khalifs, European medieval nobility, or the Sapa Inca followed a mode of rule which often tried to secure long-lasting rule and therefore certain concessions to their subjects. These concessions would often be cloaked in the language of the shared religion of the ruler and ruled, being adapted to the specific cultural, social, and ecological context.
This homeostasis was based on a more or less stagnant energy mix of draft animals, human labor power, biomass (in the form of wood, charcoal, whale oil, plant oils, manure, etc.), as well as small water- and windmills and tiny amounts of petroleum, coal, and gunpowder. However with the development of efficient sailing vessels another kind of energy – in the form of wind – entered the mix, slowly giving the Western colonial powers of first Spain and Portugal, then Britain, the Netherlands, and France an edge over the land-based empires of the Americas, Eurasia and Africa who were based on the traditional homeostasis of empire. The utilization of this additional energy, alongside the necessary technological advances, allowed the European maritime powers to massively reduce the cost of transport over the high seas and shift the traditional expansion on land towards overseas colonialism. This mode of expansion was not implemented by all empires of the European Peninsula, several landlocked powers would continue to follow the model of regional, land-based expansion (Russia, Austria, Prussia until the late 19th century) similar to the mode of the Ottoman, Persian and other non-European empires. However, the overseas colonies, and the subjugation of countless non-European peoples around the globe, first Spain and Portugal, then the Netherlands, and France but mostly Britain got an edge over their European rivals, as well as over the big regional empires outside of the European peninsula.
The massive reduction of cost for overseas transport enabled several other processes which reinforced each other in a dialectical way. The subjugation of most of the Americas and the Caribbean, with no existing feudal structures, meant that new, unknown, and horrific structures could be built up from nothing, by the viceroys, merchants, and bureaucrats, in short, the obscene soldateska which was unleashed at non-European peoples around the globe. In the European peninsula, the existing feudal order resisted every change of the status quo, both from the peasant cast as well as from the nobility, trying to expand their interests within the traditional framework, but being horrified by the advent of modernity. In the Americas and the Caribbean the conquest of the land, with a severe lack of European settlers (until the 19th century) created the mode of plantation agriculture. Because of the familiarity of the native inhabitants with the land, its swamps, forests, and mountains, it was quite difficult to force them to work, when they could simply run away and live from the land. However since overseas transport was so cheap, it became feasible to transport African slaves to the Americas in their millions, building up a slave-labor force, which massively increased the profits for the colonial empires and merchants. It is crucial to underline that this mode of production, is not only morally reprehensible towards the enslaved human beings, but it is also depleting the soil, creates environmental damage, and is simply less efficient than small-scale farming.22 Various forms of production and structures of domination that the European colonial empires employed in the Americas were an eclectic way of copying and rearranging existing models, like the Mediterranean sugar islands run by Muslims and worked by slaves,23 the Trans-Saharan slave trade24 and in terms of settler colonialism, the Teutonic order, its internal European crusades, settler colonialism towards Slavic and non-Christian people as well as the establishment of the Prussian military state.25
The combination of centralization of wealth with geographically far-reaching endeavors gave birth to the machine that would birth machines: the corporation. While there were some predecessors to the corporation in Roman law, the mode of overseas colonialism created entirely different structures, both in quality and scale which were void of humans bearing their responsibility. Finally, the nekromachine found – alongside the faceless power-wielding structure of the state – its true form.
The machine that consumes life
With the rise of the corporation, all existing obstacles of homeostasis (often in itself quite limited and obscure) slowly dissolved as if they would have been put into a bath of acid. This process was not a passive one, it was cluttered with work-houses, slave patrols, cannon boats, railroads, and machine guns. The absolute majority of humans were terrified by the glimpses of what was to come and they resisted every step of the way, this often expressed itself in chaotic millenarist uprisings like the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II (Peru), the Haitian Revolution (Haiti), the Taiping rebellion (China), the War of Canudos (Brazil), the Donghak Peasant Revolution (Corea), the Mahdist War (Sudan), the Paris Commune (France), the Seminole Wars (Florida), the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (India), the Murid War (Caucasus), the numerous Irish rebellions, the Anglo-Afghan Wars (Afghanistan) and many others.26 For many participants the mixture of social, ethnic, religious and economic aspects merged into a worldview in which they intuitively felt that it was the end of the world and a new one would be born in her place. A world that would terrify them and where they didn’t want to see their children growing up. In this tumulous 19th century the nekromachine really came into being.
I will use the term nekromachine now not merely as a tendency that is part of all human actions (maybe only to a neglectable degree) but try to paint an image of an actual machine, that spans the globe, which gears grind night and day, consume energy, human beings, cultures, and whole ecosystems. This machine was nurtured over the last several thousand years and became more and more entrenched on our planet boils down to a simple algorithm. The algorithm takes natural resources adds human labor and produces abstract value (monetary value, speculative value, and increasingly digital value), in this process, it literally drains the life forces from the planet, its complex ecosystems, and the humans beings (as well as their rich traditions and cultures) engaged in its algorithm. It is a mode of being and becoming that cannot give life, which is antithetical to the tendency of biopoesie, the essence of life and the core of our humanity.
Natural resources + human labor → abstract value
life force being turned into dead matter
Because of its extractivist nature, the nekromachine needs enormous amounts of energy, first in the form of coal and then of oil. The biopoetic processes which occur on our planet put these huge quantities of carbon deep into the earth for a reason, to be not put into the atmosphere again. We are currently witnessing a process, where the fundamental processes that created ecological homeostasis on our planet are being disrupted by the rise of the nekromachine. However, it is important to not only reduce this to climate change and the burning of fossil fuels, since everything that this machine touches becomes hostile to life, but we can also see this very clearly with nuclear power plants producing radioactive waste and to a lesser degree with megalomaniac hydroelectric dams, toxic chemicals in solar panels and lithium batteries.
Numerous processes that we witnessed over the last 200 years, like the centralization of wealth and power, the compartmentalization of science and its foundation on positivism, the creation of ethnically homogeneous national states, the encroachment of bureaucratic control into communities and personal life, the rampaging surveillance, the destruction of self-sufficient farming communities around the globe and the creation of precarious and dependent slum-populations, the rise of the chemical industry, the military-industrial complex, industrial agriculture, and monoculture, the annihilation of particular modes of culture and their replacement with a shallow, marketable global culture, that only differs slightly in the respective areas, and many other phenomena are the expression of the nekromachine subduing the Earth and humankind. As with any other process in nature, this should not be seen in absolutes, but rather as shades of grey turning more and more light, coming closer to white but never being able to take on this color (if in this black and white analogy, white represents the nekromachinist tendency and black the biopoetic one). Within this process of the nekromachine taking hold of Earth and the human mode of living, we can witness also opposing trends, where the biopoesie within us tried to alter the mode of development, where rebellions attempted to stop the rampaging nekromachine and dealt some blows to it. Examples of these biopoetic attempts can be found everywhere, in small, regional efforts like the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, the globe-spanning anticolonial movements, or the movement for women’s liberation, the struggle to stop the US-war machine murdering Vietnamese peasants, the partizans fighting German, Italian and Japanese fascism during WW2, the ecological struggles of indigenous peoples to protect their land, and everything on it, but it can also express themselves in individual acts of kindness, courage, and creativity. As with every other human endeavor also here the biopoetic tendency is not absolute, countless movements were hijacked to ultimately be integrated into a world system that is ruled by the nekromachine.
biopoesie to survive the nekromachine
Our current mode of living on this planet cannot continue, the nekromachine is rapidly consuming the complex web of life out of which we arose and on which we are dependent. I like to think of it as radioactive cancer that makes those in its proximity sick if you are a spiritual person, you would say that it is consuming your soul, if you are rational, you can point to studies that show that structures of power and wealth select for psychopats27 and wielding power literally causes brain damage with undermines empathy.28 Human beings that live their lives further away from this grinding machine, from wealth and power, in the periphery have „lower exposure“ to its soul-corroding essence. Therefore it is easier for them to act in a biopoetic way.29
The differentiation of biopoesie and nekromachine as tendencies that are found in every human act undermines our current political framework. This framework is either based on how one positions oneself towards progress (left, progressive versus right, conservative), towards the centralization of power (authoritarian versus libertarian), the role of organized religion (secular versus theistic), or which is simply satisfied by describing different ideologies (Socialist, Neo-Liberal, Islamist, Pan-Africanist, Bolivarian, Anarchist, etc.). The main framework, of left and right comes from the French Revolution and the National Assembly, where supporters of the existing order, that wanted to „conserve“ it sat to the right, and the revolutionaries who wanted to „progress“ it sat to the left.30 This framework is applied in a sloppy way, where „left“ means social, economic and political rights for disadvantaged or marginalized people often including environmental protection, where „right“ means maintaining the existing structures of power and wealth often disregarding environmental protection, roughly being aligned with the tendency of biopoesie and nekromachine. However, this framework is overlooking the real meaning itself, being about how to position oneself towards progress.
Let’s picture that with an example: Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline. In 2016 protests erupted because a petrochemical corporation, Energy Transfer LP, constructed a pipeline that can transport up to 750,000 barrels of light sweet crude oil per day from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to Southern Illinois, crossing several important bodies of water, including the Mississippi, the Missouri and Lake Oahe as well as running close by the „Standing Rock Indian Reservation“. The indigenous-led movement was directed against the pipeline and the near-certain danger of polluting these important bodies of water, which would affect huge swaths of land, countless communities, and ecosystems, for the transport of a substance that shouldn’t be burned anymore and the machine that is associated with it. It wanted to „conserve“ the purity of the water, the integrity of the land, and the health of the communities and not „progress“ towards a world of megalomaniac technological projects, that would strengthen the structures that put them into the reservation in the first place. If we use the framework that we inherited from the French Revolution and modernity, these protestors would be „conservative“ (although the self-described „left“ of the United States and beyond supported the protests) and the corporation as well as the National Guard which protected their interests would be „progressive“ (although the political „right“ of the US was cheering them on). We can see that this framework doesn’t hold here, as in many other struggles and phenomena as well. If we try to apply the framework of biopoesie and nekromachine to it, it fits like a glove. One side, which protects life, the health of communities and ecosystems, is opposed to the structures of colonialism, the militarized settler-state, and the petrochemical industry, in short, it represents the tendency of biopoesie within humankind. The other side builds a pipeline to transport oil which is extracted from roughly 3 km beneath the surface of the earth, where an oil worker dies every 6 weeks,31 deep geological formations are being fractured to release even more oil („fracking“), with complete disregard for the protecting the land, the water, and the communities in their path. They do this to turn those natural resources (that our established homeostasis put 3 km under the earth for a reason), by exploiting the labor and health of its workers into abstract monetary value, while poisoning the atmosphere and damaging numerous ecosystems, in short, we can see the ugly face of the nekromachine. One tendency tries to protect life and its foundations while the other is creating extinction (not even simply death, as death, can nurture new life, but erasing the foundation for life and homeostasis). This example is very clear, in other social, political, economic, or cultural phenomena the tendencies are much more balanced, however in our current time where the nekromachine rules supreme, it strengthens this tendency within the particular, „isolated“ phenomena.
Nurturing the counter-tendency of biopoesie is the way for humankind and countless other beings to survive the multiple crises we are facing today. Although we have to be very clear in stating that there is no technological „fix“ to our dilemma, cultivating biopoesie is not something that is opposed to technology in principle or even calls for „going back to the good old days“ (not even those before the advent of agriculture). It sees all phenomena as being composed of those tendencies and therefore opposes absolutes. It sees the potential in human beings, to nurture the side in them that differentiates the Bonobos from the Chimpanzees, not in an erratic act of free will, but rather like gardening where with care over time life and complexity unfolds. The care in gardening includes the suppression of certain plants that would dominate, so diverse homeostasis can flourish, it is in no way opposed to violence (since eating is per definition a violent act), but rather poses the question of „What form of violence nurtures life, creates balance in the ecosystem, doesn’t harm those under my care?“ The same question can be applied to technology, rather than debating if technology is good or bad, it enquires about the biopoetic elements within specific, concrete kinds of technology, and adds the question „Does that technology empower human beings to nurture their biopoetic side, does it empower communities, can it be misused by the nekromachine?“ However, while a biopoetic way of thinking and acting is not antitechnological, it calls for caution towards machines as well as for the reduction of digitalization, prefers small-scale, decentral, community-based technology, and generally values resilience over efficiency.
biopoesie calls upon human beings to act with the responsibility, that our role in the web of life asks for, to unfold our potential as stewards of the land and this planet, not with the self-negation and self-hatred, that is so prevalent in parts of the environmental movement. But rather see ourselves as part of nature, as it gaining a new quality on this planet, becoming more complex, and as with every other qualitative development in biological evolution, that disrupts existing homeostasis, ruptures and extinctions happen. However, the amount of extinction and senseless violence is not, as many developmentalist ideologies claim a „historic necessity“ that was needed to „develop the means of production“. Most things that were developed by nurturing the nekromachine cannot be used for a biopoetic transformation, the gigantic militaries, the huge petrochemical infrastructures, the nuclear power plants, industrial agriculture destroying the land, cities that are built for cars or the transplantation of self-sufficient farmers to the slums of the big metropoles, these are not structures or processes that did „go generally in the right direction, but have to be adapted“, they are destructive and it will take a lot of time, labor and energy to deconstruct or reverse them. Some of the scars that the nekromachine caused on humankind and the face of our planet will be visible for eons, even if we would turn into a biopoetic direction immediately (and this is very doubtful). By nurturing the biopoetic tendency within ourselves, our communities, and humankind in general, by accepting nekros as a necessary part of life, death that gives life, and by trying to separate it from the mechanical, algorithmic aspect of the machine we might be able to drag ourselves out of the dilemma in which the nekromachinist structures have put us in.
Nurturing biopoesie can take many forms. It means at the same time building or growing biopoetic structures and systems that safeguard life, create communitarian modes of living, and allow us to heal individually and collectively. At the same time, it means dismantling and struggling against the rampaging nekromachine, throwing stones into its gears, and always trying to reduce the harm that comes from it. It also means not playing on the field and within the logic of the nekromachine, but trying to change the game, to not feed the nekromachine indirectly by waging a nekromachinist struggle against it. All this is at the same time an internal process of self-cultivation, a collective process of biopoetic engagement and mutual care, the effort to carve out niches to nurture biopoesie within a world that is ruled by the nekromachine, it can take the form of small acts of kindness, as well as courageous collective struggle, it means building biopoetic networks and infrastructures for biopoetic change.
This is per definition a creative process, in which we have to create a new homeostasis to live together on Earth. We are imaginative, creative beings, that can steer our energies in various directions, not completely freely as the advocates of manifest destiny, modernity, and capitalism see ourselves, but rather by nudging ourselves into the direction of biopoesie, trying to create a self-enforcing process where every action and decision influences the chain of processes that come afterward. Seeing the things like this allows us to steer the future in a direction of biopoetic homeostasis where life, complexity, and consciousness can thrive and humankind can come into being.
final remarks
Ludwig Wittgenstein ends his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus „Wo von man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.“32 – „Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.“ This statement is powerful, especially in a world in which many people feel that something around them, or even inside them is extremely unhealthy, however, the words that are available to describe the immense brutality and senselessness are lacking from our vocabulary.33 My attempt with this text is to find words, so we can address the phenomena that are shaping our planet and our lives. In this way I try to nurture a mode of thinking and relating, that takes intuition seriously, without disregarding rational analysis, that tries to balance spirituality with materialism in a dialectical way. I am strongly influenced by Murray Bookchins’ text „The Philosophy of Social Ecology“ where he tries to create a synthesis of a higher quality of Hegels’ „Dialectic Idealism“ and Marx’ „Dialectical Materialism“, which he describes as „Dialectical Naturalism“. I try to limit my analysis not only to internal contradictions of human societies, cultures, and civilizations but try to situate us within nature, as the product of biological processes that lasts for billions of years, which ultimately are products of chemical and physical processes that reflect on the nature of the universe that gave life to us. I tried to expand my analysis beyond the realm of biology, trying to see if the tendencies of biopoesie and nekros can be traced to the formation of solar systems and galaxies, but my pragmatism (and ignorance of physics) got ahold of me. This text should be read as an incomplete, desperate attempt to search for words and meaning in the face of the horrors that I describe with the word „nekromachine“ and the deep love for everything alive and beautiful which I describe by „biopoesie“. Those words are just placeholders for something that ultimately cannot be expressed with words, it can merely be felt, seen, and experienced. I use a combination of words with come to me from Ancient Greek, which developed from the Indoeuropean linguistic family, I did this because of a certain familiarity that stems from my Central-European heritage as well as the proximity of this language to the society that witnessed the development of the embryonic forms of the nekromachine. In addition, the ambiguity and multidimensionality of meaning of these word constructions (something that is quite difficult to achieve within my German mother tongue) support the description of these complex, multifaceted phenomena. However, other languages that are not familiar to me, may produce words for these phenomena that describe them and their modes much better.
This text should be seen as a contribution to the discussion and internal struggle that humankind experienced since the dawn of time. I see these ideas not as my own, but rather as something that came to me, through the engagement with others, humans from all over the globe and diverse cultures, their ideas and theory, trees, shrubs, insects, wildflowers, lizards, birds and the land itself.
I will revise and expand this text eventually, this version was written from spring 2022 to summer 2023.
Footnotes
1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1755
2 Smith EA, Hill K, Marlowe F, Nolin D, Wiessner P, Gurven M, Bowles S, Mulder MB, Hertz T, Bell A. Wealth transmission and inequality among hunter-gatherers. Curr Anthropol. 2010 Feb;51(1):19-34. doi: 10.1086/648530. PMID: 21151711; PMCID: PMC2999363. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2999363/
3 https://www.newscientist.com/article/2110682-chimps-and-bonobos-interbred-and-exchanged-genes/#:~:text=The%20two%20closely%20related%20apes,in%20the%20wild%20was%20unexpected
4 Thank you, Alexander Wiener, my brother for bringing this to my attention.
5 https://uk.whales.org/whales-dolphins/meet-the-different-types-of-orcas/
6 https://www.marinebio.net/marinescience/05nekton/KWfeeding.htm
7 https://medium.com/a-maverick-traveller/the-rise-and-fall-of-viking-greenland-a-non-fishy-tale-876bf782dc5
8 McNamara J. M., Trimmer P. C. and Houston A. I. 2014 Natural selection can favour ‘irrational’ behaviourBiol.Lett.102013093520130935 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2013.0935
9https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/unconscious-brain-activity-shapes-our-decisions#:~:text=Our%20brains%20are%20shaping%20our,that%20we’re%20making%20one
10 Bengtson, S. (2002). Origins and Early Evolution of Predation. The Paleontological Society Papers, 8, 289-318. doi:10.1017/S1089332600001133 https://www.nrm.se/download/18.4e32c81078a8d9249800021552/Bengtson2002predation.pdf
11 I work with a definition of consciousness that is roughly based on Michio Kakus’ definition of consciousness (Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind, 2014 by Doubleday) (and I underline roughly, given the complete cowardness and uncreativity of the scientific community not daring to even approach a theory of consciousness). His definition is based on the number of receptors of bodily functions, which create feedback loops, and with the increase of feedback loops consciousness of a species increases. This definition includes all living beings, down to the most basic microbes. This is what I value in his attempt, he doesn’t fall into the trap of trying to confuse consciousness with self-awareness, limiting it to relatively clever animals (humans, most mammals, many birds, octopuses, etc.), also because he is quietly aware of the limitations of human consciousness. I am always startled by the argument that „lower species“ are „just following instincts“, as if instincts would somehow be separated from consciousness further it equally needs to explain how instincts arise. However, I also differ in fundamental aspects from Kakus’ understanding of consciousness. While Kaku believes that consciousness can be quantified in a positivist way (ie giving numerical values to the consciousness of different species), even comparing fundamentally different approaches to evolution, like the consciousness of plants with those of insects. He understands that there are qualitative differences to various consciousnesses (for example animals who recognize themselves in a mirror and those who are unable to), but he has to create a hierarchy between more complex forms of consciousness and more basic ones, not seeing them as integrated aspects of the same web of life which is conscious.
12 I already addressed the question of cultures within animal species, which I would define as: „Distinct modes of behavior within a species, often linked to different ecoregions, but not only determined by them, often resulting in different modes of communication, mating and ways to feed oneself.“ Mating and the behavior and customs that come along with it seem to play a crucial role here because mating is very far removed from biological or environmental determinism, often requiring specific performative behavior.
13 While I personally believe that after our death our individual consciousness will dissolve like a drop of water into the ocean of consciousness, I am not claiming this here. However, given the incredible lack of knowledge of current science about the matter, a healthy dose of agnosticism would suit them well.
14 This view is informed by the category within dialectics of „unity of opposites“, first formulated by Heraclitus around 2500 years ago. However, I differ slightly from this view in not viewing the tendency of „biopoesis“ and „nekros“ as opposing each other ultimately. They are tendencies that guide life and in some circumstances, one or the other is becoming more characteristic of a certain phenomenon looked at in isolation (for example nekros in Chimpanzees and biopoesie in Bonobos). I think that it is important to look at nature not as something that is pushed around by internal contradictions, but as a symphony that plays on different tunes.
15 Furness, John & Cottrell, Jeremy & Bravo, David. (2015). COMPARATIVE GUT PHYSIOLOGY SYMPOSIUM: Comparative physiology of digestion. Journal of Animal Science. 93. 485. 10.2527/jas.2014-8481. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Comparisons-of-digestive-tract-anatomy-It-can-be-seen-that-the-human-digestive-tract-is_fig1_276660672
16 https://www.amnh.org/explore/science-topics/microbiome-health/fire-cooking-human-evolution
17 Burini, R.C., Leonard, W.R. The evolutionary roles of nutrition selection and dietary quality in the human brain size and encephalization. Nutrire 43, 19 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41110-018-0078-x
18 https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-prey/
19 Miller, G. H., Magee, J. W., Johnson, B. J., Fogel, M. L., Spooner, N. A., McCulloch, M. T., & Ayliffe, L. K. (1999). Pleistocene Extinction of Genyornis newtoni: Human Impact on Australian Megafauna. Science, 283(5399), 205–208. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2897399
20 For example the prehistoric fish traps of the Yaghan people in what is now called Patagonia. https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=18795
21 Wright, Katherine I. Karen. “Domestication and inequality? Households, corporate groups and food processing tools at Neolithic Çatalhöyük.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 33 (2014): 1-33. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027841651300055X
22 Ricciardi, V., Mehrabi, Z., Wittman, H. et al. Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms. Nat Sustain 4, 651–657 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00699-2 I think it is crucial, that we question the orthodoxies of modernity and capitalism on their own terms since many aspects of them have nothing to do with efficiency and „rational production techniques“ and everything to do with control, personal enrichment, and subjugating workers, peasants, craftspeople and those who live with the land.
23 J.H.Galloway, The Mediterranean Sugar Industry, Geographical Review,Vol.67,No.2.(Apr.,1977),pp.177-194. StableURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0016-7428%28197704%2967%3A2%3C177%3ATMSI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3
24 Mitchel Hunter, et al. The relationship between the Trans-Saharan trade and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Academia, https://www.academia.edu/9456887/The_relationship_between_the_Trans_Saharan_trade_and_the_Trans_Atlantic_Slave_Trade
25 Meehan, Patrick. 2021. A Promised Wilderness: Colonial Encounters and Landscape in the Late Medieval Baltic. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37368389
26 It is quite interesting, that so little is known about these often enormous uprisings. However it is also understandable since all existing political currents view them either with open hostility as rabid dogs who have to be put down for progress to succeed (these include huge sectors of the left, who have a shallow, ignorant analysis of Fascism) or are embarrassed by these movements, because they didn’t concede to their understanding of enlightenment, rational revolution.
27 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-many-successful-millionaires-are-psychopaths-and-why-it-doesnt-have-to-be-a-bad-thing.html
28 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/neuroscience-in-everyday-life/202006/the-brain-under-the-influence-power#:~:text=Psychopaths%20and%20some%20patients%20with,of%20people%20with%20low%20status
29 For obvious reasons there are very few studies about the behavioral differences of rich and poor people, but sometimes they show hints of the real situation. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/save/why-poor-people-tend-to-be-more-generous-than-the-rich/articleshow/65078320.cms
30 I view the French Revolution as a complex process that entangled various biopoetic elements like the rise of the Sans-Culotte, the Parisian poor, the ripple effects which enabled the Haitian Revolution and nekromachinist elements, the Women’s March on Versailles and its slogan of Liberté – Egalité – Fraternité but also numerous nekromachinist elements like the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and the establishment of the modern, technocratic, central state, the dissolution of common land,* collective rights of the peasantry and pre-capitalist socio-economic regulations for craftspeople and peasants, the strengthening of the capitalist elite, bourgeois liberalism and the (failed) incursion of French colonialism into North Africa. * Noelle Plack, Common Land, Wine, and the French Revolution: Rural Society and Economy in Southern France, c.1789–1820, 2016,
31 https://theworld.org/stories/2015-06-18/fracking-bakken-comes-high-human-cost
32 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921
33 This is a crucial factor in the development of increasingly religious conspiracy theories since the intuition and experiences of more and more people don’t align with the nekromachinist mode of mainstream media and the discourse within academia. Symbolically charged narratives are used to explain what people can feel but are unable to express with the words and narratives that are available or acceptable in polite society.