Hidden away in a lush valley in the northwest corner of Spain, the town of Santiago de Compostela was built around the putative tomb of Saint James the apostle. Discovered by a hermit in the early ninth century, the stone box said to contain Saint James’ remains spawned a network of long-distance pilgrimage routes known together as the Camino de Santiago. Today, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year follow the example set by Asturian king Alfonso II, who traversed his realm to see the tomb soon after hearing of its discovery.

One of the attractions within the cathedral built over the tomb is the Portico of Glory, one of the cathedral’s grand entrance gates. The pillars and arches of the 800-year-old masterpiece are adorned with carvings depicting scenes from scripture. The grand central tympanum depicts, in addition to Christ and Saint James, the twenty-four elders of the apocalypse who feature in the Book of Revelation. In Revelation, these elders are equipped with harps, which they begin to play once the apocalypse is underway and God’s chosen have been saved from the dying earth. Carved into the Portico of Glory, the elders have not yet begun to play – but they are tuning their harps, frozen in anticipation.

Such is the despondent mood of our decadent present. Be it from runaway artificial intelligence, imperial wars, algorithmic domination of our minds, or the bread-and-butter consequences of ecological collapse, apocalypse is in the air. Few seem to be more afraid than the oligarchs themselves, who, as detailed in the Guardian (“The rise of end times fascism”, 2025) and elsewhere, are using their riches to construct bunkers, feudal cities, and spacefaring arks to ride out the collapse that their greed has brought about. While we can be comforted by the Ozymandian destiny of our generation’s wayward sociopaths, the rest of us are faced with the urgent task of securing a better end of the world.

This goal is made all the more difficult by the banishment of large swathes of people from public life. From media consolidation to the fascist political takeover, from the erosion of the professional and intellectual classes to the replacement of tactility with shadow-life in the digiverse, more and more people are catching on to their exclusion from societal decision-making. With formerly working-class “center-left” parties now operating as a B-team of financiers and industrialists who enjoy the fruits of inequality but lack the mettle to embrace fascism, a stream of thinkpieces decries the political and cultural “wilderness” in which those who believe in a better world now find ourselves.

As hopeful talk of rapid political shifts or technological breakthroughs fade into trite palaver, realization and alarm is growing over our breakneck course into a radically altered world. Our only recourse is to turn a weakness into a strength. If our civilization has gone mad, then the wilderness can be our refuge and source of inspiration. The physical, cultural, and psychic “outside,” the marginal spheres not yet devoured by the ravenous maw of technocapitalism, may offer our final font of dissident imaginaries. We are not the first to have been expelled to the wilderness, and we must learn from those who came before: there is no choice but to sing.

The wilderness has long offered the allure of freeing aesthetic instincts from the bounds of society. The Rubaiyat, a collection of quatrains purportedly written by the Persian intellectual Omar Khayyam around the turn of the 12th century, extolls the wilderness in the following poem:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

The narrator prizes the simple pleasures of life over the trappings of society. Bread, wine, and poetry form the material basis to enjoy a scene ambiguously suspended between exile and renunciation. The speaker’s experience is elevated to the sublime through the singing of their partner, a shared aesthetic experience which lifts the extra-societal wastes to paradise. The artistic beauty of the scene, prefaced by the book of poetry and realized by song, is liberatory and self-justifying.

Another angle to understand this image is through Khayyam’s oft-repeated praise of wine, which appears throughout the collection. While lazy criticism has interpreted this praise as a celebration of indolence or hedonism, a more thoughtful interpretation is offered by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote his own collection of quatrains inspired by the Rubaiyat, including therein some criticism of the original. Pessoa writes:

The normal man drinks either because he is thirsty, or because he craves for drink, or because he is happy or because drink is a medicine to him. … But Omar drank because that was all that was left, as another, struck with paralysis, might look on things, for sight had been left to him – not to see for sight’s sake but for life’s sake.

From this perspective, the wilderness is concomitant with Khayyam’s vision of spiritual liberation. Against the empty backdrop of wilderness, actions and desires are justified in and of themselves. Hence the wilderness singer does not sing for fame, fortune, or cultural influence, but simply because it is what one does in the wilderness – a celebration of life for its own sake. This purity of life and the embrace thereof turns wilderness into paradise.

The speech of a couple alone in the wilderness evokes an even older line of Middle Eastern poetry. In the second chapter of Genesis, God presents Adam which the creatures He has created, and “whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Here lies the enduring power of the wilderness: the potential for creation, or in our postlapsarian case, recreation.

To echo Adorno and Horkheimer’s early critical theory, the received concepts of modern society masquerade as having conquered myth, whereas they have simply become modernity’s new myths. Returning to the wilderness allows stale concepts to be exposed as fictitious, and the liberated singer to re-name phenomena aptly for current conditions. When left critically unexamined for too long, names carry the threat of paralyzing and blinding obsession (See Nabokov: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”). Periodic re-naming, re-conceptualization is necessary to open new imaginaries. As T. S. Eliot says in the last of the Four Quartets ,

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.

In an era in which politics is crippled by unquestioning belief in stale and fictitious concepts increasingly detached from material conditions, few things are more necessary than a new language fit for our times.

Khayyam’s wilderness singer has the advantage of partnership, an audience to legitimize and lend meaning to joyful expression and conceptual freedom. The romantic figure in the wilderness gains an existentialist undertone when presented alone, as in the poem “Air” by the ecomodernist poet W. S. Merwin. The poem begins,

Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.

The first line shows the narrator to be an accepting subject of greater forces – they do not choose to walk at night, it simply is the natural state of things. The single string of the lute calls into question its expressive capacity, and its overturned position suggests that playing it is not urgent. The narrator appears to doubt the quality and wisdom of their own path with the descriptor “strange.” Having established a journey which is inevitable but with unclear goals, the narrator continues:

This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.

The scene expands to reveal the wasteland surrounding our lone hero. They do not judge the dust as harshly as they did their own way, willing to listen to the emptiness. We understand the narrator to be resolute in their unknown quest, but again see their recognition of powers beyond their control. The “leaves sitting in judgment” evoke uncertainty, yearning, and desperation, which give way to the leaves’ predetermined execution by winter.

The poem ends:

This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.

The solitude and receptivity of the narrator combine with the emptiness of their desert ambience to reveal hidden desires. The wilderness’s aspects of disorientation and being “outside” of space, time, and civilization allow for the recognition of the inexpressible. The hero’s initial uncertainty and self-critique give way to realization and acceptance. As in Khayyam’s quatrain, singing in the wilderness is justified simply by being what the singer ends up doing. The immanent is self-justifying. The wilderness is a psychoanalytic tool which pierces the conscious mind to uncover subconscious drives, which can be expressed purely by the existential hero against a blank backdrop.

To realize the boons of the wilderness, it is critical to enter it free of preconceptions or ulterior motives. The “desert fathers” of early Christendom sought to escape the sinfulness of the physical realm by living atop pillars in the desert, allowing their bodies to decay as they communed with the divine. Alfred Tennyson’s poem, “St. Simeon Stylites,” presents a critical analysis of the underlying vanity of such an extreme lifestyle. Narrated from the perspective of the titular monk, who spent almost 40 years living on a pillar, the poem begins with a mix of self-abasement and vain hope:

Altho’ I be the basest of mankind,
From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin,
Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, …
I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold
Of saintdom.

The transactionality of Simeon’s penance is suggested from the start, with his extreme self-criticism being a performance of the humility requisite for sainthood. Simon goes on to describe his many sufferings endured during his outdoor life, within which he raises his central complaint:

Who may be made a saint, if I fail here?
Show me the man hath suffered more than I.

This register of poetic whining continues throughout, as Simon laments that “even beasts have stalls.” Like Job, Simeon feels that his suffering allows him to question God’s judgment. While the poem ends with Simon receiving a divine crown and feeling confident that he shall rise to heaven, the reader is left to wonder whether Simon’s salvation has truly come at last, or whether the crown is another hallucination brought about by Simon’s deranged self-righteousness

Simeon’s tale differs in a crucial way from other images of banishment. Merwin’s lone wanderer has ended up in the desert seemingly due to fate, rather than a clear goal, which leaves them receptive to the spiritual gifts of the wastes. Meanwhile, Tennyson’s Simeon has chosen banishment in search of heavenly rewards. Rather than singing in the wilderness for the joy of singing, Simeon chants psalms as an impatient display of fealty. Simeon’s wilderness is an illusion: while he is physically in the desert, he is psychologically just as intertwined with society as before his exile. The wastes surrounding him merely emphasize Simon’s continued entanglement in the sociotheological system which dominates his psyche.

Most relevant to our current predicament are the wilderness wanderings of communities, rather than lone aesthetes and ascetics. The great book of leftist poetry, the Bible, is replete with such tales: expulsion from paradise, enslavement in Egypt, forty years in the desert, and more. Here we focus on the first half of Psalm 137, lamenting the Babylonian Captivity:

1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
2 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
3 For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
4 How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

The inability to sing in a strange land illustrates the entanglement between culture and place. As discussed by Canadian ecologist Fikret Berkes in Sacred Ecology, which documents observations from his time studying Cree resource management in the Hudson Bay, cultural development is a cumulative process linked to physical and ecological characteristics of a community’s environment. Thus the captives cannot faithfully reproduce “the Lord’s song” when stripped of its physical context. Physical exile demands cultural reconfiguration, if not destruction.

Thousands of years later, echoes of the Jews’ travails are abundant in the experience of the Black diaspora in the New World regime of slavery. Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection provides critical analyses of the cultural and legal power dynamics at play during and after slavery in the United States. She details how, when slaves were being marched in a coffle to be sold, they were ordered to “step it lively,” meaning to sing. This was done to present a festive and joyful demeanor, in line with white contemporaries’ belief that the “‘poor negro slave is naturally a cheerful laughing animal, and even when driven through the wilderness in chains, if he is well fed and kindly treated, is seldom melancholy.’” Hartman observes that through this forced celebration, “the captive was made the agent of his or her dissolution.”

This abuse directly recalls the third verse of Psalm 137. The phrase “they that wasted us required of us mirth” parallels the experience of American slaves. Being forced to sing in the wilderness is an act of domination by the captors which acts not only to control their captives, but also to assuage the conscience of those performing the violence of banishment. It co-opts the culture of the oppressed towards the ends of the oppressors. Not only is the sacred import of the captives’ music voided by physical banishment, but the music itself becomes a perverse tool wielded against its singers to facilitate their cultural destruction. When coerced, singing in the wilderness becomes torture rather than self-actualization.

Strikingly, however, both of these historical cases ended in a post-exilic cultural renaissance. The Jews wrote down poetic retellings of their various banishments, creating a body of text which continues to be celebrated worldwide through the dissemination of Abrahamic culture. The music which emerged from the Black diaspora, including blues, jazz, reggae, rap, and hip hop, has enjoyed immense global popularity. Reggae in particular has a lyrical tradition of exile, comparing the plight of Black people in the New World to that of the ancient Jews (see “Worth His Weight in Gold” by Steel Pulse, which quotes Psalm 137, as well as Bob Marley’s “Exodus” and “Babylon System,” among many other examples of direct and implicit references to the Old Testament).

The more recent critical theory of Jürgen Habermas offers a framework for interpreting these cultural victories. His writings argue that there is no external, objective basis for rationality, and that a shared sense of truth arises from “intersubjective” communication and debate. The shared human “lifeworld” possesses an ontological primacy over the logic of the techno-political “system” which governs production. These historic exiles represent both an extreme exercise of power by the captor empires, as well as a rupture for the captive populations from their existing political-cultural systems. Such an exile demands a cultural reinvention, recovering surviving fragments of the “home culture” while reconstituting them to critique the apparatus of oppression. Through such a cultural reinvention, the power of the captives’ intersubjectivity is deployed against the logic of dehumanization performed by the empires. The empires’ claim to superiority is based on the system-logic of their political economy, rather than a victory in the sphere of discourse. Long-term moral and narrative success goes to subaltern cultures which rely on collective experience to define what is true, just, and beautiful.

Back in Santiago de Compostela, the mythic origins of this medieval town have been absorbed into its status as a tourist hub. Whether arriving by foot, overland transit, or aviation, the postmodern pilgrim is greeted by fine dining options and ticketed entry to access most of the great cathedral which stands over Saint James’s tomb, including the Portico of Glory and its apocalyptic musicians. Pilgrims completing their Camino, after snapping the obligatory selfie in the cathedral’s plaza, stumble into a municipal office, take a number from a screen, and await their turn to enter the gift shop to purchase their compostela, a mass-printed document said to absolve them of sin.

With cultural treasures locked away behind class-gates and natural space relentlessly being destroyed and privatized, end-times capitalism has turned to the final frontier: overproduction of symbols, filling our brains with image-trash to complement our physical environment’s object-trash. Meanwhile, the year 2024 was the first in which the global average temperature increase surpassed 1.5 degrees celsius from the preindustrial baseline, a line in the sand which our brave oligarchs swore we would never cross. As more of the world becomes uninhabitable and physical comfort accessible only by a small minority, we are expected to content ourselves with shallow digi-lives stripped of autonomy, training algorithms for scraps while trapped indoors. Like so many before us, we have been banished.

A growing discourse in recent decades seeks to imagine our post-collapse future. The Spanish anarchist Carlos Taibo, in Collapse (Colapso) (2016) and other works, discusses the unsustainability of our society’s overall level of complexity and the inevitable need for decentralization. The 2015 essay, "How Everything Can Collapse" ("Comment tout peut s’effondrer") by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, makes a similar point that our political economy is precarious and unsustainable, coining the term "collapsology" for this emerging field. The French critic Yves Citton uses “collapsonaut” to describe those of our generation destined to navigate the end of the world and the birth of a new one. The work of the 20th century philosopher and critic of technology Jacques Ellul figures prominently in this discourse. The modern author Paul Kingsnorth twists a left-ecological background into a Christian-homesteader response to the dominance of technology.

While coming from a diverse array of ideological lineages, these critiques have in common a recognition that complexity costs energy and that decentralization is inevitable. As the global machinery strains and decays under its own weight, a retreat to the local prepares for the collapse of the global logistical apparatus, offers a better chance of defense against the ecofascist reaction sweeping the imperial core, and models experimentation and recovery for other communities.

Banishment invites us to minimize participation in destructive systems. Participation in today’s global economy, a mix of overproduction of digital symbols and overextraction of finite materials, offers a tiny and shrinking space for opposition. Increasing mediation by digital artifacts and algorithmic abstraction reduces knowledge workers to glorified button-pushers and lever-pullers lending a pretence of technocratic thoughtfulness to a system of violent extraction and discipline. Though increasingly limited, the “outside” which remains beyond this system, which includes our surviving nature, local communities, internal psyches, and abandoned or reclaimed productive spaces, is our final respite from which to imagine and practice alternatives.

Though the language used varies, another commonality in collapsology is the craving for meaning beyond production. While certain critics, such as Ellul and Kingsnorth, use Christianity as a shield against our sick society, less reactionary approaches are available. Citton, in the essay “Collapsonaut Attention,” discusses the aesthetic mode of attention, prioritizing “textures” and the inherent value of external things, as an alternative to the culturally dominant “extractivist” mode. This approach echoes the mindfulness offered by Buddhism and other wisdom traditions in its attention to the sacred nature of our environment. One does not need to retreat to the Abrahamic man-in-the-sky to value the beauty and mystery of our earth; one simply must reject the worship of dominance which pervades late capitalism.

Contesting the fascist state feels overwhelming because of our unstable basis of critique: what is the alternative to ecofascist reaction? In order to displace neoliberal defeatism as the counterpoint, we must use the freedom of the wilderness to recover the wisdom we have been made to forget, and to illustrate the possibility of other ways of being. The wilderness reminds us of the beauties of life which the techlords have forgotten: tactility, place, friendship, care. As the data-driven logistical machine which empowers our oligarchs decays, it is critical to have existing models of local community, spirituality, and environmental stewardship to take its place. Local experiments can link into a decentralized network of physical and cultural production to replace our dying empire.

There remains an essential difference between our banishment by techno-capital and those of mythic yore: ours is not imposed by divine will, but by political decisions made at specific historical junctures. Overproduction is neither necessary nor inevitable. Irreversible damage has already been done and continues to accelerate, but we can retake control whenever a collective realization is had in favor of life, freedom, and spirit and against extinction, domination, and trash. We will not defeat the oligarchs by building better weapons or faster algorithms, but by modeling more joyful lives. From our exile, let us sing of other paths, and hope that those searching for alternatives may hear us, join us, and create a newer world.