Robert Inhuman, ANTI-NATURAL SPECIES (from an email conversation in 2008)

Hate is a one way ticket to misery and desolation. These kinds of songs are not about hate so much as disappointment and humility. The reason humanity is critisized harshly is because our species is the root of every problem that opposes the natural world, or more specifically a world where sentient life does not have the temptation to manipulate its environment for a show of power, this is what sets humans apart from all other animal life. Our "progress" is only a mounting viral stranglehold on a world that would've been extremely balanced and self-sustaining in our absence. One of our root terminal flaws is narcissism, in which we are unable to be self-critical in the ways that can prevent these problems from getting so massive. Even our solutions are tainted with the same irresponsible and destructive tendencies. We are inherently imperial. That's my perspective at least, and I'm not alone in it.

I don't think I have a very extensive vocabulary, but this is a topic I've thought about quite a bit since my mid-teens, so I know pretty much what I want to say about it. The human species biologically is natural, but our instincts are to manipulate, almost always to the point of abuse, the world around us. How else could I describe a "civilized" world that literally wraps its Earth in cement and metal, choking it under a discipline for the sake of making life more convenient for only 1 species?

The problem with human happiness is that OUR happiness is at the expense of EVERYTHING else, regardless of longterm effects, regardless of an increase of suffering of certain species while our level of happiness increases. The challenge in most forms of constructive anarchism and green life philosophy seems to be REDEFINING what it means to be happy. I can make happiness mean being more in balance with the world that hosts me, instead of basing happiness on what I can OWN or what I can abuse at my every whim.

Capitalists and government representatives and religious fundamentalists are not the problem, everybody contributes to this problem, everybody we hate and love, you and me. And the tricky part is since the problem is at its base our inherent perspective on ourselves and our world, the solutions concocted by this same perspective are going to be flawed. That's why even in humanity's solutions it invents for itself, there is vanity and irresponsibility, it's not going to ultimately re-balance the world, it will at best just make us feel good about ourselves for a while.

My solution, what I choose for myself, and informed sober choice is one of the primary things my band is supposed to be about, is to try and look beyond my own wants and impulses, in favor of compassion and self-sacrifice even if it inconveniences me or does not make me feel the best always. That is the idea of being "inhuman", not in the sense of being brutal or heartless, but in the sense of trying to be something besides human, in my motives at least. It is a goal I have, a really difficult goal. Then, springing from this in myself, I hope to influence the people I encounter by example. That's what people like Gandhi were going for, and it seems like a pretty decent way to work with the circumstances we've been offered.