Your question has the answer. SEO can survive without "artificial" links of course. If you have been spending fortune on "building artificial" links then I'd suggest you better stop doing it cos what is really required are "contextual" links. Even if you are buying links, buy the contextual links so that they wont corrupt the SERPs, if not use "nofollow". So SEO can indeed survive without building "artificial" links.
Any backlinks which were made by website owner are artificial. End of story. The only way to avoid artificial links is to make a perfect content and then invest thousands into proper advertisement - this will give you a traffic and some links will be build naturally... But this is not SEO, this is marketing.