I’ve only known a few feral humans in my time. And a few that are in-between.

Generally, I prefer them to the domesticated variety.

Social media is a tool for domesticating humans.

What do I mean by domestication?

In plants, this means that the plants lose features and abilities that allow them to reproduce on their own. So that the ‘new varieties’ can only reproduce with human intervention. One term for this is ‘cultivar’. Salvia Divinorum is a cultivar in this sense.

For humans, it means something weirder. Different things in different places. Effectively, however, it means they cannot exist without the infrastructure provided by cities and representational culture. In plants, domestication means reproductive slavery. In humans, it means cognitive, relational and behavioral slavery.

Feral humans reject this, to varying degrees.

I had the privilege of speaking with one feral human, Mona Ellefsen, many years ago. She lived in the outback of Canada, in a tipi with a few horses. She trained hunters in how to hunt in the wilderness. Eventually, she was captured by a landowner and locked in a mobile home on his property for many months. That man had 10-12 such mobile homes. Because he was wealthy and powerful… he was never prosecuted. Mona is an amazing human being. A feral human.

I know another woman in Australia who simply refuses to live in a structure, and though she participates in civilization by obtaining resources from cities and such, she’s a fully wild animal. A prodigy, who I love and admire.

There are also half-ferals. My dear friend Ryan First-Diver is like this. He’s a ‘half-blackfoot’ man, who is, in many ways, the epitome of an indigenous scholar. He doesn’t like being domesticated, and is wild in his mind, and a bit domesticated in his ways of life. He watches over the wildlife and the Rattlesnakes Of Lethbridge. Such an amazing man, who is misunderstood by both sides of his heritage, the domestics and the indigenous.

Another brilliant feral is my friend Zvonko Obrovac who, when I asked if he had friends, said “I prefer animosity and isolation.”

There’s a great science fiction story that frames this weird situation called ‘White Fang Goes Dingo’ by Thomas Disch. It imagines a future where humans have been domesticated by aliens who are effectively omnipotent. Most of them live in ‘kennels’ and dream of being chosen as ‘a pet’. But there are ferals who reject this… and instead explore their humanity beyond the interference of the ‘Masters’.

We moderns are not really human. Most of us have no idea what we are or can become… because our experience of domestication is »internal to our minds. And that’s the pivot upon which the possibilities of freedom or domestication (in our case, complex slavery) depend. To ‘free one’s mind’ is a phrase used variously in different situations, but, fundamentally it means to ‘escape the trap of falsified humanity, cognition, and awareness’.

Some non-ferals are capable of this.

Since childhood, I have been both. Inside, I am feral, and at the same time, am capable of ‘functioning’ in the labyrinthine prisons of human representational culture. Which is mostly about counterfeiting virtue, awareness, relationships and human potential. What is the source of this?

It can be framed as ‘evil’, but, mostly, it’s not.

It’s what happens when humans become willing to submit to the absence of our abilities and capacities for ‘more than merely human’ development and relationships… and the result is ‘civilization’. It’s really slavery; a broad library of interior and relational losses that occur when we ‘fail to resist the temptations’ of the cultures that arose by evicting our natures, our relationships with Nature and the Sky, and our potentials for that which ‘democracy’ is a representation of.

What got evicted was mutual awareness, concern, wonder and play. Experiment and improvisation.

What was evicted… was our interior spirit and relationships with Nature and Origin. Mostly, this was not precisely a result of what we do… but rather, what we »failed, over time, to refuse to do.

It turns out that our humanity, and our more-than-merely-human nature, depends on something resembling the refusal to collapse the complex manifold of our natures and potentials… into saleable, controllable, profitable… representations.

And so most of us will get the wrapper, the label, but not the food inside it. Like fish who have never seen water, but have stories about it… we will be born, live, and die… knowing little of our actual nature, potentials… and Origin.

But some of us will work, throughout out lives… to amend this cruel travesty.

And one day, we will forge ways of being more-than-merely human … together… again.

And they will race through our species like the opposite of a lethal contagion… ‘resurrecting’ the spirits and natures of our people.

May that day be tomorrow.