Agreed. It seems really silly to sit around and talk about how awful civilization is while you leech from it to survive. If the guy made his own tools and found his own food without the use of everything our society gives him (save maybe knowledge), his words would carry much more weight.
I have a lot of negative to say about civilization, and my entire life over the last two years had been centered around undoing those things. I have to disagree with what you're saying.
If you try to change one aspect of your life, say being vegan, you find that the other aspects of your life conspire to pull you back. With valiant effort you can resist in some narrow sense... maybe not eating animal parts. But then you realize animal cruelty is inherent in almost all common forms of farming. And in order to participate in social activities you are expected to eat animal bits, and your doctor doesn't know how to support you.
And perhaps even more importantly, even if I succeed at meeting your requirement, say living in a separatist vegan commune, we will simply exist in a bubble until we burn up and disappear.
The way you have influence is not usually by taking an unflinching moralizing stance, but by pulling gently and incessantly on the rudder, steering your community almost imperceptibly towards a new place, making heart wrenching concessions, standing by as your values are desecrated in front of you, and getting up to do it again. To truly take a moral stance one must participate in the murky politics of the hive of human activity.
The absolutists just die. If not literally, then mythologically, because no one can understand their lives, and so no one learns from them... Except maybe a few accolytes who are trying to climb the same mountain of radicalism.
