Why Become Feral

[00:00:06]Felix Rodriguez de laente was a Spanish naturalist, one of the most brilliant voices of the 20th century. He lived with wolves, flew around the world to film the last wild places and spoke with a kind of sorrow that comes only from seeing something precious disappear.

[00:00:27]Someone once asked him, "In which era of history would you have liked to live?"

[00:00:33]"Not the Middle Ages," he said. "Not the Renaissance, not powerful Rome. I would have liked to live in the Paleolithic, in the bosom of a tribe of powerful quadinary dwellers."

[00:00:47]Think about that for a moment. a modern scientist, a man of television and airplanes and microphones, saying he would trade all of it for a life in the stone age. Why?

[00:01:00]Rodriguez de la Fuente said something else. He said, "The quadinary dweller reached the highest degree of perfection in the care of nature. These dwellers embodied taboss which avoided any destruction of nature. They knew they were part of the whole. Rodriguez de laente maintained that the great rupture, the wound that still bleeds through everything we do even today, happened about 10,000 years ago when humans stopped being gatherers and began to de wild.

[00:01:37]We developed a predatory psyche and a culture that included domesticating animals, plants, and finally ourselves.

[00:01:48]But Rodriguez de laente sensed that humans are beginning to what he called break the moorings of the Neolithic.

[00:01:57]That is what I want to talk with you about today is what breaking the moorings means, what reing, feralization means. Let's be precise about what domestication means. It is not simply taming. It is a transformative technology that shifted the operational edge of the human ecobody mind. That word ecobody mind is important. Your body is not a vehicle for your mind.

[00:02:28]Your mind is not a ghost in the machine.

[00:02:31]You are one integrated living system.

[00:02:34]body, mind, domestication changed how that system operates. It brought with it four deep shifts.

[00:02:43]First, a culture of appropriation and exclusion, hierarchy and obedience.

[00:02:50]Second, a shift from active trust in the spontaneous harmony of existence to active distrust and a desire for domination and control.

[00:03:04]Third, a shift from trust in a sacred world where abundance arises from natural balance to the anxious search for security through endless growth and accumulation.

[00:03:17]Fourth, a shift from mystical participation in the unity of living, feeling integral to a community that includes animals, trees, rivers to a distant, invisible, transcendent spirituality.

[00:03:32]These elements of change comprise the original trauma and its traces are in each of us. In the anxiety of not being in control, in shame about our own bodies, in the fear of the wild, in the need to secure the future through more vigilance, more regulation, more domestication, more control, more power. Let me give you a definition.

[00:03:59]Animality is the wild undomemesticated embodied spontaneous and deeply relational way of being that belongs to a living ecobody mind before and beneath the civilizing process of domestication.

[00:04:15]Animality is not the opposite of culture, rationality or morality. It is their living root. It is the bodily dimension of freedom. the capacity to feel, move, choose, persist, surrender, and trust and participate in the interdependent web of all life. To respect animality in others and in ourselves is to remember that bodies are not made to be possessed. Now, here's where it gets uncomfortable.

[00:04:49]Emotionally, the shift produced by domestication moved us from feeling part of the whole, embedded in the community of the living toward a new need for control, distance, and distinction from animals.

[00:05:05]That is when we began to claim human uniqueness.

[00:05:09]We have domesticated other species brutally, but we have done something almost equally invasive. how we treat children.

[00:05:19]The human child is born in a state of extreme dependency.

[00:05:24]Our nervous system expects to find the mother's body. But after centuries of intervention in birth and early infancy, of repeating generation after generation the very patterns we used to domesticate other animals, that expectation is systematically frustrated.

[00:05:44]At the origin of violence is always violence against the child's animality enforced through separation, unresponsive care, and the suppression of spontaneous expression.

[00:05:58]Such unnested care often leaves a baby fearful, insecure, and vulnerable in a threatening world. The baby learns to feel that they are bad and may never truly feel safe.

[00:06:12]That is the biological basis of fear and anxiety, the original wound.

[00:06:19]The child who depends on love to survive will do anything to keep that love. This keeps the other in a state of perpetual dependency.

[00:06:28]Obedience infantilizes.

[00:06:31]The obedient child learns to override their own needs to secure the caregivers's love and in doing so loses the foundation of self-efficacy.

[00:06:42]Then comes early education.

[00:06:45]Education became the workshop where docile, obedient, productive humans are manufactured.

[00:06:51]discipline, order, deanimalization, gradualism, repetition, a technology of control derived directly from the techniques of domesticating animals.

[00:07:06]In the 17th century, the father of modern education, Commenicus, wrote that the child is born in a state of beastiality.

[00:07:16]Without education, he said, man becomes a ferocious beast.

[00:07:22]Alice Miller called it black pedagoguy, a system that under the appeal of I punish you for your own good annihilates the child's will. The child who has been beaten will beat in turn. The one who has been threatened will threaten. The one who has been humiliated will humiliate.

[00:07:44]Domestication thus becomes a mechanism of symbolic castration, a systematic process to cut, devitalize, and subdue the child's vital force in order to manipulate and control it. The goal is to tame the animal inside us, our spontaneity, our impulses, our nonfellowcentric basic sexuality.

[00:08:08]And the main tool to achieve this is shame. We are made ashamed of our bodies, of our desires, of everything that makes us living beings rather than docile trained bodies.

[00:08:20]So what do we do? How do we find our way back? Let me tell you one more story.

[00:08:28]Marco Polo describes a bridge to Kubla stone by stone.

[00:08:33]The emperor asks, "Which is the stone that holds the bridge?"

[00:08:39]Polo replies, "The bridge is not held by this or that stone, but by the line of the arch they form."

[00:08:48]Kubla Khan is silent, reflecting. Then he says, "Why do you speak to me of the stones? Only the arch matters to me."

[00:08:58]And Polo answers, "Without stones, there is no arch."

[00:09:04]We have become obsessed with the arch, the mind, the spirit, the transcendent, the abstract. We have forgotten the stones.

[00:09:14]The stones are bodies. Your body, the body of the horse, the body of the child, the body of the forest, the body of the river.

[00:09:25]The body has been the lost dimension, the silenced dimension. We speak of consciousness, of reason, of technology, of progress. But we rarely speak of the body's sovereignty, the body's intelligence.

[00:09:40]The body's wild, untamed capacity to feel, to heal, to connect, to resist.

[00:09:48]Without stones, there is no arch.

[00:09:53]Sylvia Federici, a philosopher of body and resistance, wrote something that stopped me cold. She said, "From dance, we learn that matter is not stupid, not blind, not mechanical, but that it has rhythms. It has language, and it is self-activated and self-organizing.

[00:10:16]The body knows in ways that discursive reason cannot capture. song, fasting, meditation, vision quests, dance. The health rituals of predomemestication cultures were not spiritual practices separate from science. They were technologies of embodied knowledge.

[00:10:36]Carl Young saw this clearly a century ago. He wrote, "In the course of the millennia, we have not only succeeded in conquering the wild nature that surrounds us, but we have also subdued our own wild nature."

[00:10:52]The shadow we projected onto colonized peoples, onto animals, onto the earth itself.

[00:10:59]That same shadow fell upon our own animality.

[00:11:04]Domestication has fought these capacities relentlessly, but there was a time when we did not need instruments to navigate the open ocean. The Polynesians traveled far out to sea at night with only their bodies as a compass. They could feel through the vibrations of the waves the different paths to steer their boats to the coast. That is embodied knowledge.

[00:11:28]That is animality.

[00:11:31]We have become afraid of the wild inside us. In the lack of homeostasis, we learn to seek control.

[00:11:39]But listen to Young's words carefully.

[00:11:42]Our own wild nature, not beastiality, not chaos, not something to be ashamed of.

[00:11:51]The capacity to feel deeply and connect, to choose according to your own structure, to persist, to surrender and trust, to participate in the web of life. That wild nature is not gone. It is buried and it remembers.

[00:12:12]To respect animality is to remember that bodies are not made to be possessed. Not the body of an animal in a factory farm.

[00:12:21]Not the body of a child who learns to control and possess other animal bodies.

[00:12:26]Not your own body trained to obey, shamed into silence, disconnected from its own wild knowing.

[00:12:34]So what future is possible?

[00:12:37]Not a return to the paleolithic. That's impossible. But something else, something Rodriguez de la Fuente suggested when he said, "We are beginning to break the moorings of the Neolithic.

[00:12:50]The feral is that which having been domesticated escapes human control and develops its own autonomous life. Feral horses, feral cats, feral plants. They are not wild by origin, but they have recovered something of their sovereignty.

[00:13:10]We humans can also become feral by reconnecting with wild mind within the conditions of the present.

[00:13:18]A feral culture is one that learns to disobey the mandates of domestication.

[00:13:24]Connection over control, trust over fear, participation over administration, love over imposition.

[00:13:34]Materana the great biologist said that love is the fundamental emotion that gave rise to humans. Not romantic love, not possessive love, but mutual acceptance, the conservation of the other and their legitimacy.

[00:13:52]Love is still there buried under millennia of trauma. The feral path is the path of digging it up.

[00:14:01]So let me end where the body ends which is to say nowhere.

[00:14:07]That knowing is not lost.

[00:14:09]It is in your bones. It is what our body does to know to be when we are into the wild. Nature is the fountain where our bodies need to drink. We must seek nature and we must teach our children to love the animality in themselves and around them to venerate nature not to administer its resources.

[00:14:34]We don't need to invent anything new. We need to remember something old something our bodies never forgot even when we forced them to.

[00:14:46]This is what I have learned from horses by accompanying their body minds on their path to be free to become feral, wild and loving. Be a stone in the arch of life.