Written By: Fabrizio Beverina
The Council of the Forest
It was a warm, cloudy afternoon. The men of the tribe gathered under the shade of a great samaúma, the queen of the jungle. A few guitars and drums rested nearby. The Varinawa love music; they weave it into every occasion, as naturally as breathing. Some sat on the giant roots of the tree, others on pieces of wood, others directly on the soft, sandy ground.
In the center stood a plastic bottle filled up with ayahuasca and a small wooden cup. There were no formalities. People served themselves a little glass, not a large dose, just enough to connect, and began to share. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they sang. They laughed, they joked. The important thing was to connect; the solution, whatever it was, would arise naturally.
The air smelled of mapacho. Nobody voted. Nobody argued. Decisions rose slowly, like smoke. One spoke, another sang, a third listened with eyes closed until a shared rhythm emerged among us.
This was not governance as the West understands it. It was not majority rule or ideological debate. It was something older, what anthropologists never quite capture, a collective consciousness that listens before it speaks.
I have joined many of these circles in Brazil with the Varinawa, and others in Colombia with the Huitoto, where the medicine was mambé, the sacred powder of coca leaves mixed with ash. Each time, I am astonished by how the medicine itself, ayahuasca or mambé, seems to think with us.
It isn’t hallucinatory democracy, but ecological decision-making, where every voice, human, plant, ancestor, animal, has a say. Here, politics and spirituality dissolve into the same breath.
Civilization as Psychosis
When I first read John Zerzan, his words struck me like a diagnosis. He wrote that civilization itself, agriculture, domestication, the worship of time and progress, is not our triumph but our trauma. We’ve been told that history is ascent, that technology redeems, that comfort equals freedom. Zerzan flips the story: every tool, every number, every screen adds another layer between us and the living world.
Reading Christopher Ryan’s Civilized to Death years later, I felt the same echo through a different language. Ryan argues that the so-called progress of civilization has made us lonelier, sicker, more anxious, and less connected to our own bodies and communities. What we call “development,” he suggests, is often a slow estrangement from the conditions in which humans evolved to thrive: small, egalitarian groups rooted in mutual care, direct contact with nature, and a rhythm of life unmediated by abstraction. Like Zerzan, he sees our malaise not as a glitch in the system but as the logical result of the system itself.
Both writers point to the same paradox: the further we advance, the further we drift from ourselves. It’s easy to agree with them while scrolling through another day of algorithmic madness. But theory collapses when faced with the weight of conditioning. Even among anarchists, people who shout “freedom” louder than anyone, the cage persists inside.
The Failure of External Revolutions
I know this because I tried. More than a decade ago, I founded an anarchist community in China called RiShi Labs. We lived without hierarchy, experimenting with collective decision-making, open love, open code, no rules.
It was beautiful precisely because it was impossible, the wabi-sabi beauty of things that cannot last. A failed utopia. Because even when the rules were far away, the rules were still inside us. The rules we had learned, absorbed, inherited from this so-called civilized society. We carried its logic into every meeting: control, suspicion, ego, the will to be right. We wanted liberation, but our minds were domesticated. We were still dirty, and as the Buddhists teach, you cannot see clearly through a dirty window.
I understood then that no anarchist dream can survive within authoritarian minds. You cannot build freedom with the same psychology that built prisons. Krishnamurti had seen it long before me: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” And again, “To transform the world, we must begin with ourselves.”
Revolutions fail not because of tanks, but because of minds that have not yet unlearned obedience. We see it happen all the time. The words of Tancredi talking about the revolution in The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) come to mind: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
The Dirty Mind of Civilization
Modernity is not only external; it has colonized our neurons. It speaks through our gestures, our reflexes, our sense of time. We hurry even when there is nowhere to go. We compare, compete, calculate, scroll. Our nervous systems now pulse to the rhythm of machines, precise, restless, sleepless.
This is what Zerzan means when he says civilization is symbolic: we think in abstractions instead of relationships. We obey clocks, not bodies; laws, not intuitions. It’s not enough to reject capitalism; we must de-install its software from our cortex. Clean the operating system from all the garbage accumulated over generations.
But how? Krishnamurti proposed meditation as negation, to see thought as thought, not truth. I discovered another path to the same silence: the medicine way.
Ayahuasca as Political Therapy
Ayahuasca is not an escape from the world. It’s a purge. During ceremonies, people don’t vomit food, they vomit stories. They expel the myths that built our cages: the myth of progress, of control, of superiority. You can almost hear civilization leaving the body with each retch, making us more natural, less civilized.
I’ve seen economists throw up the market, engineers throw up efficiency, and self-proclaimed healers throw up their need to save the world. Afterward, there’s a strange quiet, the mind finally unoccupied.
In that emptiness, something else can emerge: not ideology, but listening.
When the Huitoto hold council, they share mambé not to get high but to align perception. The plant becomes a mirror, revealing which ideas belong to the jungle and which to ego. In those hours, community decisions are not made, they are received, felt.
That is a political model our civilization can barely imagine: decision by resonance rather than debate, governance through presence rather than persuasion.
The Politics of Purification
Zerzan argues that symbolic thought separated us from immediacy; Krishnamurti reminds us that thought itself is the obstacle to freedom. Ayahuasca brings that philosophy down from the mind into the body. It moves the argument from theory to bloodstream, from abstraction to sensation.
Where Marx dreamed of seizing the means of production, the medicine invites us to seize the means of perception.
Every purge is a small revolution: not the overthrow of kings, but the dethroning of inner tyrants: fear, ambition, self-importance, fake dreams. After hundreds of ceremonies, I have come to see that the truest anarchist act is purification. Before dismantling the empire outside, we must vomit the empire within.
We were intoxicated and didn’t know it, drunk on civilization, on its noise and delusion. Now, purge after purge, we become a little cleaner, a little quieter. More connected to what we truly are: a fragment of the natural order, mysterious yet precise, incomprehensible yet perfectly alive.
The Collective Mind
What happens when a group purifies together? When everyone in the circle has faced their own shadow and softened the ego’s grip?
You get something like collective intelligence without control. Not the mob or the mass, but a shared mind that feels before it decides. I’ve witnessed this among indigenous elders: no need for authority because clarity itself leads. You don’t need to decide, just follow the flow. Things gets simpler. Look at the nature, difficult to say that it is not intelligent.
The behavior of millions cell of your body creates something unique that can perform incredible tasks, is this due to the intelligence of the single cell? Not to their coordinations, communication without talking, relationship make the intelligence. No neuron is intelligent; their unity is. The same, on a much larger scale, can be thought of in nature: the union of billions of beings interacting creates an intelligent organism that can solve new problems. (Like pollution).
This is the primitive future: the moment when community and nature think together again, when decisions grow like trees, rooted, patient, alive.
Beyond Romanticism
Of course, none of this is pure in the way our minds imagine purity. The forest is not free from conflict; trees compete for light, vines strangle trunks, insects devour leaves, yet all of it serves life. What looks like a struggle up close becomes balanced when seen from above. Nature’s perfection lies not in stillness, but in participation, in the endless dialogue of all things. Nothing is excluded.
We don’t need new myths; we need to remember the one already written in the soil. The hope we are searching for is not an idea: it’s the silent intelligence of ecosystems that know how to renew themselves. The future will not come from theories or movements, but from the rediscovery of this biological truth: life knows what it’s doing.
Plant medicines will not replace constitutions soon, but they remind us of what every true revolution forgets: that the transformation of the world begins in the transformation of perception. Krishnamurti refused to start a movement because he knew movements harden into prisons. Zerzan dismantled civilization only to find the self still standing in its ruins. Ayahuasca goes deeper: it dissolves even that self, until what breathes through us is no longer ideology but the consciousness of life itself.
Perhaps this is the new revolution, not against the world, but with it. Not built by man’s ideas, but grown from the same mysterious intelligence that moves the forest, the wind, and the beating heart of the Earth.
Closing: Toward a De-Civilized Mind
At dawn, when the ceremony is over, after the songs have vanished into the trees and the silence settles like mist. No one speaks, yet something has been spoken. A truth too wide for words. You can feel it in the air between us, as if the invisible threads that bind all things have been quietly rewoven.
The jungle doesn’t argue; it listens, adapts, and balances. Maybe our next civilization should learn from that: how to harmonize instead of dominate, how to grow without forgetting its roots.
The primitive future is not about returning to the past, but about remembering how to listen again. Before inventing new systems, we must cleanse the noise within us, the residue of fear, control, and separation that clouds perception.
A society can only be as sane as the minds that compose it. And somewhere, beneath the static of progress, the medicine of life itself is still waiting, patiently, quietly, for us to remember how to be part of the song.