Our Vision

What we are confronted with today is not the result of corrupt politicians, greedy corporations, failing ideologies, or poor political decisions. It is neither liberalism versus socialism, nor democracy versus authoritarianism, nor progressivism versus conservatism. These illusory alternatives are merely manifestations of a deeper process that began at the dawn of human history, when we became determined to transform the environment as no other species ever had.

The domestication of fire constituted the first divergence. Neither an error, nor the fault of our ancestors. Fire led to cooking. Cooking made agriculture possible. Agriculture, in turn, gave rise to the emergence of the first States and civilizations. Each artifice necessarily entailed those that followed. No individual decision or collective will could have altered this trajectory*. Mass extinctions, the death of soils, the poisoning of waters, epidemics of chronic diseases, surveillance States, globalization, and social disintegration are not accidents. These phenomena are merely the inevitable outcomes of an organization of human life founded upon systems incapable of aligning with our fundamental needs*.

As a species, we coevolved for hundreds of thousands of years in close relation with our environment. Our relationship to the world, our senses, our perceptions, our needs were shaped by long-proven hunter-gatherer ways of life. From the domestication of fire onward, the human rapidly drifted away from the conditions that had seen him born. Given the possibility of living in environments incompatible* with our biological programming*, we plunged into a cycle of frustration-compensation* that we strove as best we could to moderate through the elaboration of increasingly complex artifices. Layer upon layer, artificiality branched out into veritable systems of dependence that eventually crystallized in the form of the first civilizations.

The Antivital Civilization

Civilizations were founded broadly around the idea of human perfectibility. We believe, on the contrary, that this narrative, far from fulfilling its pretension to accomplish humanity, denies its true nature. By naturalizing the pathologies it generates and by condemning instinctive behaviors, civilization places the moral responsibility for failure upon individuals rather than acknowledging the inadequacy of our environments to our nature. The moralities that prevail are never the most just, but rather those useful to the maintenance of dysfunctional societies, such that all ideologies constitute cultural responses to the socio-economic problems implied by human domestication*. Moreover, religions, and by extension all metaphysics, serve to create otherworlds that remedy the existential malaise* experienced by human beings when severed from the meaning infused by wild life.

The problem does not lie in human nature. The problem lies in the context in which our instincts, initially salutary, produce pathological outcomes*. Corrupt politicians, exploiters, and the self-righteous alike ultimately obey the same evolutionary programming. Their behavior need not be judged morally, for it is the expression of blind processes in which every human being acts according to their biological and environmental conditioning. No reformist policy will be able to durably remedy the harmful effects of artificiality on the living. Artificiality can only grow over time owing to its iatrogenic character*. The principle of competition for resources* implies that a selective advantage will always be given to the holders of the most productive technologies, and sooner or later will force the others to adopt them if they do not wish to perish.

A New Consciousness

Our ancestors could not know where the path they embarked upon would lead. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the digital revolution has enabled a progression and circulation of knowledge never before equalled. We are now in a position to conceive of a deep history of humanity, beyond cultural and symbolic boundaries, beyond the Nature-Culture dichotomy. Today it is impossible to ignore the dramatic consequences of artificiality on the vitality of our species and on the irreversible destruction of the others. Technological solutionism constitutes, in our view, a risky wager for the future about which we have every reason to doubt. Reason should, on the contrary, invite us to understand and then embrace our natural determinations in order to inhabit the world while remaining free and fulfilled. Feralism is a product of dialectical reason inscribed within the history of Western philosophy: it embodies this will of deliberate renunciation of technical progress, which would not have been possible without the experience of artificiality.

Conclusion

Nowadays, artificiality takes a decisive form through the expansion of the technological system*. Transhumanism constitutes the horizon of the process of human domestication through the surpassing of biological limits assisted by science. Furthermore, the globalized system will not be able to dispense with a form of modern eugenics either, if it wishes to protect itself from the disorders linked to the pressure exerted upon individuals. By suppressing all natural desire for freedom and autonomy, the system secures its stability over time. Mass culture, medication, loss of libido, dysgenics, submission to the Welfare State, and the prevailing nihilism already constitute precursor signs of this alienation. We could consent to this evolution, satisfy ourselves with a new standard of freedom; but in that near future, what would remain of our humanity and of the rest of the living? Would we truly be fulfilled?

The Feral Response

Understanding the trajectory determines the orientation toward rewilding—not a return backward, but an evolution toward a new form.

What "feral" means

"Feral" describes an animal that was once domesticated and has returned to the wild. Not a fantasized primordial state, but a new condition.

We can neither ignore the lessons of our history nor change it. But once we have become aware of it, reconnection with the regulations of the living becomes a determined orientation.

Feralism embodies this path. It is neither a primitivist fantasy nor a headlong rush into technology. It is a conscious transformation, enlightened by the lived experience of life under the sway of artificial systems.

Shared diagnosis, divergent paths

Several movements recognize the crisis. Each proposes a different way of confronting it.