It is important to know what it is you are resisting. But when it comes to resisting the power structures of civilization, it is especially important to understand how the very things you are resisting have played a role in shaping your knowledge. Sun Tzu tells us “Know your enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated.” This is no easy task when the enemy is postmodern techno-industrial civilization, however, because the technological framing of civilized life sets the parameters of the knowable.
The mythical fairy tales that Mother Culture manufactures for us are offered up as obvious truth, and installed when our psyche is young and malleable. Whether civilization should be allowed to continue is an entirely unformable question for most people because both the moral and rational justification for civilization are grounded in myths that for most people are unquestionable facts: the myths of social and technological progress, for example, and the myth that civilized life is superior to all other potential options—with the possible exception of (always new and improved) future civilized life, of course.
When it comes to resisting civilization, the thing that makes it difficult to live up to Sun Tzu’s dictum with respect to knowing the enemy also makes it difficult for us to know ourselves, to understand the nature of our own motives and how they originate in the systematizing and technological structuring of our lived moment-by-moment experience.
But this very awareness is itself perhaps the beginning of knowing both the enemy and ourselves, the awareness that you and I have been groomed from a young age to think in mechanistic terms, the awareness that you and I have been conditioned to entrain our motives and actions to the systematic logic of the technology in which our lives are embedded, as if we too were machines.
To be able to act on this awareness is perhaps the beginning of true resistance.