1) What are the deal-breaker questions of anarcho-primitivism? that is to say, which of its questions are the ones another ideology would need to answer better for you to switch camps / change your mind?
2) What written works raised and answered these questions best, i.e. what are its essential reads?
I answer (1) this way:
###The Hierarchy Question
What is hierarchy? Is it ever necessary? Does human nature inevitably produce hierarchy in human society, or what other conditions produce this social pattern?
###The Technology Question
What is technology? Will Modern hi-tech help us with our current problems, or did it create them and will it just create more? How essentially bound up with capitalism and the state is it? How do I abandon things like modern medicine and the internet without excessively disabling myself?
###The Civilization Question
What is civilization? Does it always spring from agriculture? What distinguishes it and separates it from simple agricultural chiefdoms and from complex technological projects, in cultural materialist terms? Do cities guarantee hierarchy and class structures such as states? How do I best respond to its legal / violent ensnarements?
###The Agriculture / Pastoralism Question
What is agriculture and how is it distinct from gardening / horticulture? What is pastoralism? What is domestication? Have these life ways done anything permanent to our bodies or the environment? How do I leave them behind and prevent their environmental effects?
###The Delayed-Return Question
What is the immediate-return vs. delayed-return distinction? (I take this to be foundational to the above 3 questions if not the first as well.) If this distinction marks the fundamental fault line that separates healthy from sick relations in society / with the ecology, then the question “What caused delayed-return?” is paramount. How can we collectively come to live more immediately?
###The Question of Human Nature & the Primitive
Who is the primitive? Do the above questions go ‘far back’ enough? Does the primitive exemplify the best of human nature? Is the primitive essentially without delayed-return or any of the above questioned life ways? Tied into all of the above is the question of human nature and whether we’re determined / fated to reproduce the above phenomena (in certain situations).
