One hundred thousand years ago, the storyteller begins, your ancestors lived much as the folk you will read about in this journal do. They created and solved their problems together, in the process not only arranging for survival but also fashioning their world by attributing meaning to an overwhelming and alien cosmos.

Under capitalism, you too live in that alien, overwhelming cosmos, she continues, just as your ancestors did so long ago—but because you are inundated constantly with culture that is mass-produced for you, you forget that this creation and attribution of meaning is the central question of human life. Self-determination, let alone self-realization, is impossible without addressing this.

Find your way back to the wilderness, she urges, back to wildness—or rather, recognize that this is the Wilderness, this is not your “natural environment,” this is the forbidding, inhuman, senseless dystopia your philosophers, unable to see beyond the insides of their own heads, have projected onto the Wild. Once you recognize that the important question for you is the same as it was for your ancestors millennia ago—how to impart meaning to such a place—you can begin to do so, and catch up to where they were.

The tale-spinner concludes her tale: When you set out on this journey, do not reckon yourselves modern primitives, but primitive post-moderns: the first of an ancient order. Imagine that you sow the seeds of a long-deferred future, seeds hundreds of thousands of years old.

From Hunter/Gatherer #1