Fifth Men's Periodic Primitive-Living Practice

The Fifth Men's Periodic Primitive-Living Practice was a voluntary, hazardous retreat from technological civilization into a deliberately preserved wilderness. Its participants hunted, farmed, and lived without civilized assistance, accepting real danger in return for what their society regarded as spiritual renewal and a lasting connection to humanity's primitive past.

A deliberate wilderness

The practice belonged to a civilization in which material abundance had largely freed people from routine labor. Machinery managed production, while individuals could travel freely and choose between solitary homes and shared communities. Against this background of extraordinary convenience, the Fifth Men preserved extensive areas of hill-country and forest as playgrounds, and set aside an entire continent, the Wild Continent, to remain as nearly natural as possible.

The Wild Continent stretched from the Tropics to the Arctic. Its mountains were a particular reason for the choice: erosion by water and frost had worn down most Alpine regions, making mountains especially prized. The preservation of this territory was not simply scenic conservation. The Fifth Men considered sustained contact with primitive life necessary for a sophisticated race whose ordinary pursuits centered on art and science.

The practice in the wild

People of all ages went to the Wild Continent, sometimes staying for many years. They lived without aid from civilization, relying on flint and bone tools, or, more rarely, iron that they or their friends had wrested from the earth. Their work centered on hunting and simple agriculture; their limited leisure went to art, meditation, and the experience of what the narrative calls primeval human values.

This life was not made safe by the surrounding civilization. The Fifth Men had created new kinds of animals to compensate for the Fourth Men's destruction of animal life, and released them into the Wild Continent. Some were formidable carnivores, dangerous to people armed only with primitive weapons. The wilderness therefore exposed participants to genuine physical peril rather than a controlled imitation of hardship.

Cost and purpose

The practice carried a high death rate. Promising lives were sometimes cut short, and those who undertook the experience could dread its hardships and doubt that they would return. The danger was understood as part of the institution's cost, not as evidence that the trial had been made harmless.

The Fifth Men nevertheless judged the sacrifice worthwhile. A people whose natural lifespan was three thousand years and whose lives were spent largely in civilized pursuits, the account says, could be invigorated and enlightened by an occasional decade in the wild. The practice thus set the ease of an automated, abundant society against the difficult conditions from which human life had emerged. Its purpose was not to abandon civilization permanently, but to renew the capacities and perspective that civilization risked making remote.