Above: Chilean uncontrollables clash with riot police in Santiago, Chile, during widespread rioting on July 14, 2011.
“There they were, the voracious youth again, destroying everything, erecting barricades, clashing with police, nothing could stop them… There is fire and passion in their hearts, love and hatred on their insides, courage and decision. The beauty of chaos has returned to grace the streets, it is not only fire that adorns the asphalt, it is also the energy of the youth, the abolition of the sexes, everyone in the struggle… Will this struggle bear fruit? To want to study just to be someone in life? The individual who goes searching for real happiness, does not stop at so little, she knows that she can educate herself, and although that path is longer, that doesn’t make it less interesting, because everything else is interminable…” (Circulo Individualista Aves del Fuego)
Download: PDF zine version by Dark Matter Publications.
+ Spanish translation: Cover & Contents.
Urgent message for all those who have or are in danger of being labelled mentally ill
Selling cures for the problems they created
It is well known that depression has been on a steady rise in the past few decades. This increase apparently isn’t about to stop since the World Health Organization (WHO) recently predicted that, by 2020, depression would be the second most prevalent health problem in the world, just below heart disease, and offered as an explanation that this was due to a previous underestimation of the number of people suffering from this “illness”.
Couldn’t the increasing feeling of emptiness and worthlessness characteristic of depression be related to the society we live in, at a time when people lose themselves in consumption and mass entertainment to avoid thinking about their miserable life, their economic survival or the ongoing destruction of the planet? While the “experts” paid by pharmacology corporations will invariably answer that depression is a brain disorder due to a “chemical imbalance”, the result of some faulty genes they have yet to identity, we cannot help to wonder how this could not be environmental considering there was no such thing as depression in Africa before colonization?
Depression has widely been touted as endemic to the 20-something generation. Severe depression is 10 times more prevalent today than it was 50 years ago, and it strikes a full decade earlier in life on average than it did a generation ago. Such feelings and behaviours testify to frustration and despair that have nowhere to go when the social landscape is so frozen. Disaffection or even opposition are quickly marketed into sellable style images; alienation as fashion. Meanwhile suicide, perhaps the ultimate regression, has been on a steady rise for several decades.
– John Zerzan
Continue reading “Reclaim Your Mind : Manifesto – An Urgent Message for all those who have or are in danger of being labelled mentally ill” →
