“Everything moved by destiny is reduced to the lowest level; to the level of a pawn.”
Where human beings are unconscious of the forces that shape their world and their own decision making processes, their lives are predetermined by external powers. Through the development of a greater personal awareness though, including but not limited to the psychological and political, a person can raise themselves out of the sludge of determinism to achieve real self-liberation. And this book attempts to address that need. It’s therefore a work of political philosophy but one that strives to grapple with the holistic reality of the human condition; meaning it touches on a broad range of topics. As a result, the ideas here have been arranged into twelve loosely organized chapters: Anarchy, Capital, Civilization, Democracy, Geopolitics, History, Justice, Labor, Morality, Philosophy, Values, and War. Since there’s no strict divide between these subjects, there’s a substantial amount of cross referencing between them; but the arrangement such as it is will hopefully prove more illuminating than otherwise. And if the darker crevices of human society are exposed this can only add to the sum of our freedom.
[Excerpt from ANARCHY]
The foundation for any genuinely anarchist society will always be social conscience since those who are indifferent to the welfare of others, those who are content to exploit people and gorge themselves at the expense of the rest of humanity, are unfit for any society, anarchist or otherwise.
Humanity will never be free until all hierarchy is abolished and the politics of participatory democracy prevails. Hierarchy itself incentivizes exploitation. The greater the distance between people in a power structure, the more likely this will degenerate into antagonistic conditions.
Where individuals have internalized good values, laws are superfluous. Legalistic systems then end up offering incentives against virtue and as such are always hostile to true social progress. In a society where people govern themselves, a natural and harmonious anarchy will prevail.
Only voluntary social structures are morally justifiable and so the difficulty of building an anarchist society doesn’t even matter. No other kind can have merit; no other kind can have solid moral foundations.
It should be admitted that is was a primitive form of anarchy which gave birth to our political systems; a primordial lawlessness pregnant with every monstrous order (Echidna filled with the seed of Typhon) Said systems derived their impetus from the poverty of living in a state of natural lawlessness; emerging only once the various contradictions within that living condition had done enough to stimulate the demand for order. Likewise, the poverty of the subsequent systems themselves contains a renewed desire for liberation but, this time, with a greater expectation. It is here that true freedom finally begins its ascension, rising out of the mutual destruction of chaos and political systems to take the form of a truly anarchist society. Real freedom is not grounded in opposition but transcendence.
Any dogmatically libertarian society though will purge itself of all unifying elements and so these will just immediately fracture into several competing factions. The cohesion of a healthy anarchist society meanwhile lies in the organic affinity of its members and their genuine desire to engage each other in open communication and with the real intention of cooperating for everyone’s mutual benefit.
In true anarchy, rules are replaced by agreements. But that is quite different than the imagined chaos many conflate with the anarchist ideal.
Political goals can only be achieved through mass movement and any political organization that doesn’t prioritize this is sure to be inconsequential. Authority groups are of course aware of this which is why one of their most common tactics is to poison the reputation of any active radical group (Through infiltration, false representation, etc) so that the public detests it; even, and especially, where its aims serve the greatest public needs.
It’s easier to die a slave under the illusion of freedom than to confront the trauma of all the years lost in the course of being exploited. That’s why many ordinary people resist their own liberation; they dread the perceived experience of waking up to reality. But then they condemn themselves to greater suffering.
Generally, governments are just businesses disguised by a false nobility of purpose.
Politics is the art of using partial truths to serve outright lies. An acrobatics of perversity that in any ordinary light seems clownish and grotesque but in the shadowy halls of power is regarded with the utmost respect and esteem.
Fraud breeds in tunnels of secrecy. True anarchy can only thrive in the open.
Self-contradiction is the foundation of all growth; without the tension it provides, no progress is possible. Those who would aspire to improving themselves then should seek to maximize their own contradictions; not with the goal of sustaining these obviously but always looking for the equilibriums pooling within themselves that they can then disrupt for new impetus.
Liberation requires more than destroying external sources of coercion; it demands an internal self-sufficiency as well. Anarchism is impossible where the majority haven’t embraced the idea of self-sufficiency through labor and an individual belief in their personal obligation to everyone else in their groups. People who cut corners and rely on specious arguments in order to justify parasitic behavior (Stealing from businesses for example) are, regardless of the sincerity of their convictions, useless in building an anarchist society. They will be nothing but dead weight and a source of strife for their comrades.
The ideal of government was to be a thing that would free people from the tyranny of nature and barbarian invaders; so people came together to form communities. Even said societies had a logical basis then in collective action and mutual aid. Only an anarchist society though can truly fulfill this promise.
There are two choices: either become your own master or someone else’s slave.
And one of the main things that separates a free person from a slave is that a free person has privacy. A person is far less easy to exploit the less that’s known about them (Invisibility is often enough to keep someone out of the reach of a hostile power) As such, if you wanted to create a permanent state of serfdom you should start by indoctrinating the masses with a popular culture that celebrates invasive fame as a desirable end. That makes data collecting easier.
A fully enlightened society will inevitably be anarchistic (There won’t even be any imaginable need for authority structures)
The development of autonomy depends on solitude, on periods of reflective freedom away from the coercive energies of society. A culture dominated by an intrusive media and the absence of privacy then represents a serious threat to creativity and progress. Freedom is most nurtured in the silence of one’s own mind, the domain of the soul cleared of all external noise and so made fertile for new ideas. Original thoughts begin like the wisps of a new flame amid kindling; the pressures and opinions of society meanwhile are winds and rains.
Freedom cannot exist in what is purely finite; it must arise from the infinite. Meaning that capitalism and its materialistic preoccupations will always tend to suppress liberty on balance. But by recognizing the potentiality of the infinite in others, by acknowledging them as ends in themselves, as spiritual beings, we paradoxically liberate ourselves through voluntary moral restraint. In short, by locating the eternal in all people and the world around us, we universalize the infinite and maximize liberty. We reach the truth through pure decentralization. And what political form of life best corresponds to this? Anarchism.
Can stateless societies survive against hostile state actors? Generally no. The force multiplying effect of state level organization is simply too powerful (Look at the relative success of eusocial insects versus their solitary counterparts) What this means is that any parochial form of anarchism, something like a program for anarchism in one country, is just setting itself up for failure. To establish any large scale anarchist society then requires a global transformation of culture. And while this is certainly an immense undertaking, it is not without precedence. Consider the widespread embracing of technological development; once the tangible benefits of something becomes obvious, people will naturally adopt a new way of living. Here the anarchist need only place their faith in the inherent truthfulness of anarchism, in its message of universal human liberation, in order to contribute in full to the cause. The transformative potential of anarchism obviously doesn’t reside in coercive actions (Its whole premise is contrary to this) but rather the natural persuasiveness of anarchist ideals. All an anarchist has to do to build an anarchist world is to disseminate anarchist thought; once a critical mass of human beings is reached, anarchy will prevail without any additional effort.
If it’s fair to say that anarchy is grounded in mutual liberation then the question remains: what adversary stands in the way of this? Every ambition has its opposite after all but of course the opposite of liberation is coercion. Where anarchism strives to free all people, it does so then in a struggle against those forces which seek to reduce them to pure subordination. And these forces can be referred to collectively as capitalism; the belief that all things, including human beings, are capital and should be treated as such.