Interview Transcript: Keith Farnish Interview Transcript. Undermining-- Legal and Illegal Ways To Fight the System

R.K.: Well you know there are, in the states, I don't know if you have them in England, but there are a number of survivalist reality TV channels.  It's all about surviving after the apocalypse and of course there are so many books and movies out about the apocalypse, where do you think that fits in to your vision of things?

K.F.: It doesn't.  I do subscribe to something called Bushcraft which is not survival.  Bushcraft is a way of living that sustains the environment in which it exists.  Survival seems to be an idea, it seems to have grown out of this self centered independent mentality, this itemized idea that you depend upon only yourself and that really is not sustainable in any form.  

You've got this idea, oh you're going to lock your family into a bunker and you're going to have all your stores and you're going to protect yourself against everything.  Apart from the fact that you're likely to commit suicide out of sheer boredom and desperation, you can only live for a short period of time like that.  There's no future for a sheer survival.  You need to create these communities.  You need to have ways of genuine living so I don't see any relationship between survival and long-term living.  

I don't want to survive.  I don't want to be on the edge.  I actually want to live and this is what indigenous people have been doing ever since humanity came about. There's a wonderful article, Marshall Sahlins studied various indigenous people over a long period of time and he suddenly realized that these people, well they actually don't work constantly.  

They've got a huge amount of leisure time and they sit around and talk and they just relax and he couldn't work out how this was possible until he saw the sheer efficiency in which they worked and they didn't need stuff.  They didn't need anything that we consider to be essential now within civilization.  It really, that's not survival, that is living and living is something that you really crave as humans.  

As I say, I don't want to live on the edge.  I don't want to be in constant fear that something is going to get me.  I want a community that I can trust and I can enjoy and I can be part of.  

R.K.: So are you in a community like that now?

K.F.: It's getting there.  It's certainly much more of a community than I lived in five years ago before I moved.  We do have, you can have communities within communities.  There are people who I regularly, I'm in contact with on a regular basis that I work with, that we have, we try and create a community as best we can within civilization.  

Really this is where we need to keep trying, we need to keep connecting people, as communities are being constantly broken apart by the day to day demands of modern life, going to work constantly having a job and that's what life is about, and then going out and buying stuff and then when you want entertainment you go somewhere else for entertainment or you watch TV and that's not community.  People aren't connected to each other.  

The idea of community is you are connected to other people and you depend on them and they depend on you and that is certainly something that I recognize here where I live, and it's something that's coming back.  I think people are starting to realize that they do need communities.  If only it could happen a bit quicker and the way it can happen is by undermining the things that stop us gathering as small bands of people.  

R.K.: Well, we're running past an hour now and I wanted to make sure that we cover all of the basics that are important.  

One thing I want to say is your book on undermining goes into a lot of detail on many many different ways and different approaches on how to undermine, starting with just a black magic marker and changing the message on a poster to blocking the entrances to shopping malls.  They can get very risky or they can get minimally risky but a lot of them involve in some ways breaking the law.

K.F.: Yeah.  The law, I think we've got to distinguish between what's legal and what's lawful here.  Laws in, certainly laws in Western countries are, they are statutes, they are things that have been put there by politicians to control you to make sure that you do whatever the system wants you to do.  

There are certain things like murder, taking someone's property although you do question where the property came from in the first place, obviously harming someone directly in some way, taking away their liberty, that kind of thing, these common features of human morality, and that's what I would consider to be a law and they're the laws by which humans should live.  

Yes breaking the law, if we can use that phrase is something that underminers will inevitably do, and it's incredibly liberating.  It's a wonderful thing.  In the vast majority of cases you're not going to get in any trouble for it if you're careful and I do provide some instructions on how to be careful but we are going to have to break the law because the laws are about controlling people.  

Laws are about benefiting the corporate world and if we're going to change things then those legal instruments that are being put in place to control people have to be broken apart.  They have to be challenged constantly otherwise nothing will change and that is why we have to distinguish between what is lawful?  What is something that is naturally right and moral for humans to do and where that overrides what politicians and corporations have put in place to make themselves rich or make themselves powerful.