It is important to note that even anarchists are among fabians and the trade unions are in their very core corrupted, although there are many people who are uncorrupted who are anarchists and trade unionists. The same is true for the church in its institutional forms. The same is true for those who fund/lead patriot/nationalist movements. There are way more good people than inverted ones. But the inverted ones have manipulated every sings sector of society.
“New Detroit was billed as a “new urban coalition,” as it included representatives of the working class and the African American community. However the group was neverthe less dominated, and bankrolled by the city’s oligarchs.”
An idealistic statement for sure. Often, among the idealistic believers there is a fanatical pursuit that is single minded. Belief in itself is problematic as it is exclusive. Diversity is what makes life so interesting as shown by nature. Our ad attempts to control others with our belief systems leads to schemes such as the WEF agenda.
"Often, among the idealistic believers there is a fanatical pursuit that is single minded."
This is often referred to as "the power of one's convictions" and just as often held up as an example of something to be admired, if not emulated. But wait! Hitler had the power of his convictions, for a while at least. So did Lenin, Stalin, Mao... you get the idea.
It's not enough. Fervent belief is NEVER enough. You need objective evidence that what you're proposing is actually possible, not least to say desirable. And what's desirable for one may not be for another. Quite the dilemma, but it has to be faced if we're to make any progress, and by that I mean the maximum quality of life for the maximum number of people possible within the means at our disposal on as sustainable basis as can be achieved. I don't know if you can sum that up in a slogan or capture it in a movement, but it's what I'm aiming for, which is why I don't attach myself to any particular ideology because IMO, they all fall short of the mark.
I'll agree with you here. My ideology is my own... although because I think that taxation is theft, I am against kleptocracy, the essence of statecraft. Therefore I am an anarchist, but that doesn't mean I subscribe wholesale to anyone else's belief system.
In reality I'm prepared to concede that there are exceptions to every rule - anarchists are against coercion, but what do you with sex offenders? A lot of people would say "just kill 'em" but who gets to decide who lives and dies? Furthermore, what if people depend on them? What if their labour is necessary? If we got into specific examples, I think that we could agree that some offences are forgiveable, whereas others are not. Such questions don't have easy answers, and at the end of the day politics is always a matter of playing it by ear.
I'm concerned about more mundane things. Basic services like gas, electricity, motor fuel, water, sanitation, roads. I've worked in the transportation sector for half my life, first on ships, then in trucking. The system of basic services we've built up over the last century is breaking down, very badly in some areas. New hires, if you can even find them, are almost completely lacking in problem solving skills, not to mention the basics of the trades and professions they're supposedly educated in. How does an anarchist address these issues? I don't mean pointing out the problems, I mean coming up with solutions. It's all well and good to discuss the way things 'ought' to be, I have a long list of those myself, but how do we get there? What's the plan?
That is a big question. The big question, in fact... Personally I'm for bioregionalization... I think pursuing self-sufficiency at the individual level is misguided, but food and energy sovereignty at a community level should be a top priority. I don't believe in "one-size-fits-all" solutions... James C. Scott's notion of vernacular systems is useful here.
Are you familiar with the work of James C. Scott? I think you'd like him. He writes about how states impose totalitarian systems on vernacular ones. For instance, There was no one French language before Napoleon. It was imposed in much the same way the Metric system was. There was no countries called Italy or Germany before the 1800s, but national identities were imposed upon people through state schooling.
Nature itself is anarchic and chaotic... Empires seek to impose a homogeneity in order to prime its subjects for Propaganda.
You might also enjoy Propaganda: the Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul. The essence of statecraft is controlling the perception of the masses so they act against their own interests, and the only way to do that is through propaganda. Propaganda goes much deeper than most people realize. It's not just history, mainstream media, etc... it goes all the way down to mythology, grammar, systems of measurement, etc... The word kindergarten doesn't refer to a garden where children can play. The children are the crop that are being cultivated. That's the true origin of the term kindergarten.
The way that diversity is used by the woke these days is just an appropriation of a fashionable term - real diversity includes diversity of belief, the bane of totalitarians.
Not familiar with Scott. I just downloaded 'Two Cheers for Anarchism' so I'll add that to my reading list. I notice the authors you recommend all take Anarchy as their starting point. Inasmuch as they may use the scientific method in their research, starting with a premise then setting out to prove it is not the same as starting from no premise and following where the evidence leads. This is my basic complaint with anthropologists which I share with Marvin Harris. Anthropologists ascribe all sorts of meaning to the behaviours they witness, but how many look for underlying material causes? Moreover, how many try to distinguish between what Harris called the emics and etics of a society? Where is the guarantee that your subjects are telling you the truth and not simply trying to impress you, or dodging the question because it reflects badly on them or violates one of their taboos?
Granted, I also start from a premise, i.e. that people in general are corrupt or corruptible, but I'm at least aware that I'm doing that and I have ample proof to support that hypothesis. That said, I don't have an answer to the problem, just belief in a means of analyzing it, which is what the scientific method is about. There's no getting around this. Publish anything on any academic subject and your colleagues are going to check your methods and conclusions. Peer Review.
As far as overarching explanations of how humanity operates, the best case I've seen was made by a Zero Hedge poster several years ago who went by "Radical Marijuana." His model was organized crime. Basically, the best organized criminals rise to the top, not because they're the most brutal, although they can be brutal when threatened. They rise to the top because they have the best understanding of what motivates people, which is fear and greed. It was a dark vision of humanity, but I couldn't find anything in it I disagreed with. He didn't start with a premise, he just followed the evidence where it led. Sometime we don't like the results of our research because it contradicts deeply held beliefs. Scientists fall into that trap as well, which is why Thomas Kuhn wrote 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' a landmark work in the philosophy of science.
Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor in Human Evolution to counteract the social darwinists who promoted the (basically Hobbesian) idea that competition for limited resources defines human nature. Anarchists don't dispute that we have competitive drives, but those can be overemphasized. I would argue that's what you're doing if you think the prime motivating drives of people are fear and greed. Those are certainly powerful urges, but so is love, the desire for pleasure, the desire to belong to a group, the desire to care for one's family members, etc... We have both competitive and cooperative urges, which means we have the capacity to override our baser instincts for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement with more magnanimous & altruistic ones... many people are willing to sacrifice themselves for others, aren't they?
Anarchy IS the starting point for human politics. That's just a fact. We weren't hatched from Minority Report pods or something. Human beings lived for without states since before we became Homo Sapiens. Anarchism is the mother of all ideologies, just as animism is the mother of all religions.
Oh you're in for a treat with "Two Cheers for Anarchism"... I'm listening to the audiobook now... Scott did two years of fieldwork living in a peasant village in Southeast Asia and was heavily influenced by the Quakers. His anarchism is much broader and deeper than most... and he's one of the most-cited political scientists of all time (for good reason).
Part of my mission is to de-Antifa-ize anarchism... Punk music played an important role in spreading anarchist ideas starting in the 1970s, but now the association with dropout youth culture has become a hindrance to anarchist ideas gaining wider appeal.
He's also neither doctrinaire nor dogmatic. I think you'll get a lot out of his work.
The reason I asked is because lately the word has taken on a political meaning which more often than not doesn't correspond to reality. For example, one of my favourite countries, Japan, is the least diverse on the planet, and yet it suffers almost none of the problems typical of somewhere like France or Germany, who both encourage diversity as a desirable goal. What I've observed in my travels is that people tend to be most comfortable when surrounded by people who think the same way and share the same beliefs. It also doesn't hurt if they look like each other. Korea would be another example. Stable society, low crime, solid work ethic... if those are your metrics. Iceland, same thing. Sweden, however, which had much the same ethnic composition as Iceland is now in serious trouble thanks to an indiscriminate policy of diversity with no reference to whether the new arrivals share the same values as Swedes.
I like that you make these kinds of arguments... because the hysterical obsession with race and racism made a lot of things unspeakable throughout much of my life... the example of Japan is interesting... I haven't been, and my sense of the "soul of Japan" comes from the novels of Yukio Mishima, who paints a VERY dark picture, making me somewhat skeptical of your portrayal. I suspect that you could find pros and cons to cultural isolationism, but personally I'm a big believer in the desirability of cultural mixing. But from what I've heard things are not going well in Sweden at all, and we need to be able to talk about such things like grownups.
I value that different cultures have distinct differences. It would be so dull if we were all forced to conform to a narrow world view. Often cultural differences are a product of weather and geographical influences in regions. I value the amazing diversity of the living world.
We need to stop defining intelligence as “book learning”. Intuitive and emotional intelligence need be given equal space of perception. Then we will make more compassionate decisions. Balance is the key. There will always be problems within any society. If wisdom from a balanced perspective is respected then we will have better leaders. Getting to that point will take a more mature humanity. I am not a Buddhist but do look to their psychology of humans for guidance. Nothing can be forced.
Hence the reason why the cabal expend so much effort on division and inciting factionalism - through cognitive infiltration and agents provocateurs. Subversion, in other words. It is, really, necessary for them to do this.
Likewise, they also spend an inordinate amount of time infiltrating all the specific types mentioned in the article and inciting as much corruption (and misdirected energies) as possible.
Given this is the playbook, the counter-subversive method is quite clear. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say. Revelation of the method.
This, I'd say, is what would ultimately lead to the convergence of the uncorrupted. You're right - I think it's the thing they fear the most...
Do you not see the danger in defining yourself and fellow travellers as "the uncorrupted?" How is this any different from "God's chosen people" "woke" "ubermenschen" or "New Soviet Man?"
Who gets to decide who "the uncorrupted" are? You? On what basis?
"Let’s first look at IQ, or general intelligence. In order to be able to deal with seriously complicated work or get through a real university program, an IQ of about 125 is necessary. Only about 5% of the population in the West has this IQ or higher. This means that the pool of potentially high-level competence people is very small to begin with. Even if we use a cut-off of an IQ of 115, which is sufficient for most semi-complicated work, the potential pool only goes up to 16% of the population."
Let's be generous and use 16% here. What this is saying in that fully 84% of humanity are incapable of running a modern industrial economy. That's not a measure of their education, it's the limit of their capacity to learn. I know egalitarians don't like this line of reasoning because it harkens back to the eugenicists clustered around Nazi Germany and who plague us to this day, but without recognition of the fact that we're dealing with people who need leadership in order to achieve anything above a subsistence level existence, then any project aimed at liberating the masses from the grasp of our evil overlords is bound to fail because they KNOW who that 16% (or 5%) are and have successfully co-opted most of them. Those are the same people who the 84% will eliminated out of pure revenge in a peasant's revolt or communist revolution, and then what? You still have to run the economy, but you just killed off the only people capable of doing that.
Leaving aside the point that "corruption" is an abstract noun lacking a precise definition (I know it when I see it, but do we both see the same thing?) let's not overlook the fact that a fundamental precept of the major religions is that we're ALL corrupt. This is the point where religion and natural science intersect. Nature in its most basic form is about survival. All creatures, man included, seek their own survival and will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal. Survival of the species, which follows from that first principle, implies some form of social organization to defend itself, not just against other tribes or species, but against the vagaries of Nature herself. Given the uneven distribution of intelligence in our species, this implies a need for leadership, from which arises a hierarchy of relative competence. It's when leadership renounces its obligation to the tribe, society or nation, that corruption rears its ugly head, all the way down to the lowest levels. I think we've seen a pretty good example of how this works over the last 3 or 4 years.
What I see Anarchists arguing for is that leadership isn't necessary. That some sort of (as yet undefined) self-organizing principle is sufficient, but where's the historic example? Never mind history, what's the biological basis on which this ideal is premised? An even distribution of the intelligence needed to sustain such a society? No evidence for that.
My argument is that we are lacking leadership, not that there's an excess of it. There's an excess of tyrants these days, no doubt about that, but I wouldn't call them leaders. So the next question is how do you go about developing leadership? Certainly not by renouncing the basic principle, which is what I see Anarchists doing. Ironically, I see the same underlying impulse in self-declared anarchists as I do in the conservative right. "Nobody's going to tell me how to live my life."
You got upset with me when I chastised anarchists for being undisciplined. You claimed they were at the forefront of social movements, for which I asked you to present examples. Leaving aside the irony of claiming that anarchists play a leadership role in social movements, it's not what I've seen. From 1975 to 1980 I did volunteer work for a human rights organization my ex-wife was employed by, of which she's now the director. Their main goal was resettling political refugees from Latin America, mainly Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Argentina. Victims of the CIA's dirty wars for the most part. Pretty horrific stuff. We had Marxists, Socialists, Liberals, Christians and Jews on our staff, but no anarchists. I'm pretty sure of that because we all hung together and discussed our political views and the topic never came up. Not once. So where were you guys when all this was going on?
The only serious historic change brought about by anarchists that I'm aware of was ironically the murder of one of the great reformers of the 19th Century, Czar Nicholas II, a man who took responsibility for reform of Russian society against a myriad of competing interests opposed to that. A genuine leader, and your guys murdered him. How did that work out?
Do you have any better idea for how to frame things in a way that would appeal to people of different ideological backgrounds? The goal as I see it is to break anarchism out of its subcultural ghetto and make common cause with Christians, Muslims, the urban poor, Quebec separatists, blue-collar industry workers, farmers, etc...
I'm kind of mystified as to why you see the word "uncorrupted" as problematic. What's not to get?
Are you corrupted? I'm not. Should I pretend that I am just so I don't offend people who are? I really don't get your argument here.
Arguably, Paul is using the word "uncorrupted" to mean "authentic". I suppose you could say that authenticity is a subjective value judgement, but that sounds like the type of anti-essentialist argument that a postmodernist would make. Trying to talk about politics without making subjective value judgements would be completely counter-productive. All deliberate political action should be about obtaining a desirable result, and what is desirable depends on what one values.
A lot of anarchists were corrupted by the new COINTEPRO, which promoted divisive identitarianism and anti-"conspiracist" conspiracy theories about "Red-Brown Alliances"... A lot of people fell for campaigns of ideological subversion, which was often accompanied by access to grant money... Paul has done good work exposing corrupt NGOs in the UK.
As for your stuff about university graduates being the only ones intelligent enough to guide society, I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Most Africans were intelligent enough to refuse the clot shot, most Ivy League graduates were not. Furthermore, the person with the highest IQ is definitely not automatically the best leader. Keith Rainiere of the NXIVM cult has one of the highest IQs in the world, and Epstein, Paul Leroux, and Roger Thomas Clark are probably up in the 0.01% club too. I'll agree that it is in the best interests of groups of people to have intelligent leaders (I don't think even the woke argue against that!) but intelligence is not the only important trait.
As for the ideas that anarchists are against leadership, I'm curious where you got that idea. I'm sure that you could find people to argue against the very notion of leadership, but that is not the position of either the classical anarchists or people who have studied stateless societies. I would tend to agree with you that leadership is inherent to human social organization. I explain my views on leadership here: https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/what-geese-can-teach-us-about-leadership
I don't think share your view that all religions teach that we are corrupt. I guess that's a possible interpretation of the doctrine of original sin, but that certainly wasn't what I was taught. Humans are certainly corruptible, but if we were inherently corrupt what would be the point of morality?
As for Buddhism, the eight-fold path is all about righteousness, which is kind of the opposite of corruption.
As for your other post, I didn't see it... Could you link to it please?. Multiple people maintain this account.
-Crow
p.s. I personally murdered Czar Nicholas and I'd do it again. How did you know it was me?
"I'm not easily offended, but your characterization of anarchists annoys me. We have been on the front lines for social movements for decades whilst engineers and scientists have been building the infrastructure of domination. Now the collapse we've long predicted is upon us and you're making fun of anarchists for being downwardly mobile (i.e. poor)?"
My reply is in the link.
"whilst engineers and scientists have been building the infrastructure of domination."
How would you expect me to respond to such a statement? Same way as you responded to my criticism of anarchists perhaps? I suppose I should have expected something like that based on my experience of anarchists in BC. Different anarchists though right? Or do you agree with spiking trees and sabotaging pipelines and construction equipment? How does that win the hearts and minds of blue collar workers?
Here's the problem. Anyone with a grudge against society can call themselves an anarchist and go out and fuck things up, and unfortunately you all get tarred with the same brush, just like you tarred science with "building the infrastructure of domination." Seriously, that is pure sloganeering and I gave you a significant example of why it isn't true in my reply that you apparently didn't read.
That's why I argued for a rebranding of your efforts. Distance yourself from it. The word 'anarchist' has negative connotations for most people, so it's an uphill battle defending an ideology which can be easily corrupted. It's like trying to defend communism by arguing that it was never given a fair chance - that the concept is sound but the people carrying it out are corrupt. Well of course they are (and were). Like I said, humans are corrupt. We may be born in a state of innocence but that changes the minute we start using language, because language itself is corrupt, never mind the nonsense our parents teach us which we soak up like a sponge before we even arrive at the indoctrination centres masquerading as 'public education.' That's the corruption I'm talking about, and to make a claim to being uncorrupted to me just smacks of elitism. That's why I asked, have you ever seriously questioned your own beliefs? Easy to question the beliefs of others, which is another form of corruption - assuming we own the high ground when our thoughts and ideals are just as corrupt as anyone else's.
That is the meaning of 'physician, heal thyself' as well as "let he who is without sin...etc."
Speaking of the corruption of language:
"As for your stuff about university graduates being the only ones intelligent enough to guide society, I'm going to have to disagree with you there."
Where did I say that? I used Gaius Baltar's example of the intelligence required to get a degree, not that only university grads are intelligent enough to lead. That's clearly false going by the idiots Harvard's been turning out lately. The metric here is intelligence, not the degree itself. That should be clear from reading what he (not I) said.
as for this:
"Most Africans were intelligent enough to refuse the clot shot, most Ivy League graduates were not."
Intelligent enough, or ?
1) no access to vaccines because they were hoarded by the developed nations who promised them but never delivered?
2) wary about anything involving western medicine. I suppose you could call that intelligent, but what was at stake for them vs. someone facing the loss of years of study and a serious debt load to get there? Not a fair comparison.
You mentioned the Buddha. Did he also not warn us about attachments? I'm pretty sure he meant to ideas as well as material goods. You seem pretty attached to your ideology, just as I am to evidence based science. I can make a very good case for my belief in science, despite the obvious human corruption that comes with any human endeavour. Can you do likewise as I asked in response to...
"We have been on the front lines for social movements for decades."
Seems like a good subject for an article.
As for Czar Nicholas, I used that example as it's representative of the unintended consequences of acting out of the power of one's convictions, rather than a sound assessment of where that might lead to. It led to the death of the plotters obviously, but it also upended a reform program that could have led to the kind of world that you or I might be more accepting of, rather than the horrors it set in motion which lasted almost a century and cost millions of people's lives. I'm not saying that one act precipitated all that, but it was definitely a contributing factor, and is viewed as such by present day Russians who cringe at the very mention of the word 'anarchist.'
Hey... I seem to have offended you, so I'm going to reply diplomatically. I am a very opinionated person, but I'm trying to be more humble about the way that I present those opinions. I am aware that I have a habit of pissing off my readers. Your comments are often thought-provoking. Most often I agree with you in large part, and when I disagree, I find our exchanges illuminating. I honestly consider it a compliment that you write such lengthy, thoughtful comments. It shows quite a deal of respect that I'm someone worth bouncing ideas off of, and the feeling is mutual.
That said, I'm mystified that I would have to justify the part about being on the front lines of social movements for decades. To cite one easy example, anarchists were the reason the Battle of Seattle went down in history.
Anarchists were also very present in opposing the War on Terror, and in more recent times in supporting indigenous resistance from the Unist'ot'en Camp to Elsipogtog to Standing Rock.
I personally was involved in all of the movements I mentioned above. I have been arrested many times for my activism, been on probation, had to do community service, pay restitution, etc.
Now you seem to be telling that I'm doing activism wrong, which is what annoyed me in the first place. True, we have yet to succeed in our objective to create a free society, but I've been doing my best to do my part for a decade. In February 2020 there were rail blockades, port blockades, and highway blockades across the country. It was the most revolutionary moment in Canada since Oka and it took COVID to put an end to.
Oh yeah, I'll also mention the Quebec student strike, in which anarchists were extremely well-represented. Another example that comes to mind is the Zapatista uprising, the most successful revolution of the past 50 years. Before you accuse me romanticization, keep in mind I've travelled extensively in Chiapas. I know what I'm talking about.
I hope that you don't take this the wrong way, but what have you done? You seem to think that you know better than I do, but other than recommending that the anarchist movement rebrand, what are you actually suggesting? Do you have a strategy to propose? I agree that we need a basis of unity that has broad appeal, but at the same time, a lot of populists back demagogues like Trump and don't realize that the problem is that state itself, not its supposed leaders or figureheads.
You say "it's an uphill battle defending an ideology which can be easily corrupted", and I agree. It's definitely an uphill battle contesting the powers that shouldn't be, because some very rich people want us to be disempowered, and will attempt to thwart any meaningful social change that challenges their power. I'm not peddling a Care Bear fantasy. Real change will require protracted political struggle, and they don't call it "struggle" because it's easy.
I'm actually open to the idea of rebranding, because words are just words, but anarchism is the word for the ideology that opposes the centralization of power in the hands of a bureaucracy with a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of violence.
Plus, I only have so much influence, you know. Considerably less than, say, Derrick Broze, who has proposed Agorism as an alternative to anarchism to avoid the stigma. That term hasn't caught on. Others have proposed voluntarism, panarchism, organic radicalism, and egalitarian anti-modernism.
Voluntarism appears to be the front-runner, as it used by James Corbett, Etienne de la Boetie, and others. What do you think of the term voluntarism? Do you think that fits the bill? It does have the advantage of framing an ideology in terms of what we are for (voluntary social relations) as opposed to what we are against (institutionalized coercion).
As I've said before, a marklar by any other marklar would smell as sweet. I am an anarchist, and I own it. If another term catches on that I can identify with, great. I'm not holding my breath, though. Political labels go in and out of style. Technically, libertarian socialism is nearly synonymous with anarchism, but socialism is associated by right-wingers with authoritarian communism and/or the welfare state, whereas libertarianism is associated by left-wingers with market fundamentalism. Anarchist is the most legible label that exists for what I am. I do agree with you that we shouldn't be married to labels or even ideas, though. At the end of the day what I'm for is morality based in natural law.
On another note, I don't think that you're giving Africans enough credit. Last I checked, vax uptake was something like 6%, despite massive propaganda campaigns. It certainly wasn't due to a lack of availability of vaccines. Africans by and large saw COVID for what it was - a sketchy injection pushed by sketchy people with sketchy interests. They learned their lesson from the AIDS scam. Americans and Canadians have been subject to many fake diseases since the 70s, and a majority still haven't caught on. Most who have figured out that COVID was fake still haven't figured out that AIDS was too.
As for your defence of science, here I vehemently disagree with you. The "science" that has been pushed on the world for a hundred years is fundamentally wrong. It's an ideology packaged as an ideologically neutral collection of facts. But much of it must be taken on faith. Take the Big Bang, for instance. Where's the proof of the Big Bang? Why is it accepted as a scientific theory? And does the second law of thermodynamics actually prove that the universe will end in heat death? It's not like I disprove that, but science-believers take that as an article of faith when it's an unproven hypothesis.
I would recommend looking into Bertrand Russell and how British aristocrats pushed "scientific" atheism. There's nothing scientific about atheism. You can't prove a negative. It's as much of a leap of faith to believe that the universe was created by accident as it is to believe to it was created by a loving God. I don't know about you, but I know what leap I'd rather take.
Furthermore, atheism is ahistorical. There are abundant historical examples of miracles. I have three words for you: Joan of Arc. A secularist would say that she was schizophrenic, but that doesn't explain the fact that the voices she heard gave her accurate information. An illiterate "schizophrenic" peasant girl was able to lead an army to victory. How often are schizophrenics skilled military strategists?
Whenever presented with something that contradicts their worldview, secularists simply refuse to refuse it. Furthermore, they think that they're good guys, despite the 20th century showing that atheists can be every bit as brutal as the worst religious fanatics.
There's nothing new about science being corrupted. It was used by British imperialists as a justification of their supremacy long before COVID was a evil glimmer in Fauci's eye. Evildoers will always disguise their intentions in whatever guise happens to be convenient at any given time. Tyrants can't exactly come out and state their true intentions, so they dress up their plans according to the intellectual fashion of their times.
Now, I'm not blaming all scientists or all engineers for being in on some big evil plan or anything, and I acknowledge the incredible life-enhancing benefits of Western medicine before it was corrupted... and there is still a lot to praise. Prosthetic limbs come to mind. But the days where believers in science can claim any type of moral high ground are over.
I'll end on something you said that I agree with: anarchism tends to collect a fair number of people with antisocial personality traits. This is a big topic, but I won't deny it.
A lot of people go through an anarchist phase because they reject the values of their parents, and anarchism involves a rejection of the values of the dominant society. Eventually a lot of people grow out of this phase because we all have to make compromises in this world and a lot of anarchists can be judgemental and puritanical in the same way that adherents to other belief systems can be. What can I say?
People are people, and there are a lot of people who call themselves anarchists that I want nothing to do with. But at the end of the day, statecraft is a extortion scheme with advertising campaign. You can pretty it up with propaganda, but there's no state without a bureaucracy, and there's not bureaucracy without taxation, and there's no taxation without armed goons threatening people with violence. It's a protection racket. If you think things all the way through, you will arrive at that conclusion.
There's no getting around it. Statism is Stockholm syndrome.
First let me apologize for getting on your case. That was frustration and disillusionment speaking more than it was anger. Any anger I feel right now is towards what’s going on in the world right now, not towards you. You asked what have I done? Well, without being too specific let me say that the source of my disillusionment has a lot to do with events in my life that are similar to yours, just at an earlier time - specifically from the late 60's onwards.
My family background is British military and I was expected follow that tradition, which I wanted no part of. Why would I, when I was meeting kids only a few years older than me who had abandoned their country, possibly forever, because they didn’t want to fight in a war they didn’t believe in? That was back in the days when Canada honoured the rule of sanctuary. Not any more.
Speaking of that, my ex-wife, Spanish, from a family divided by their civil war, was and still is a human rights worker. I think I mentioned that in another post. So my early education was draft resisters, and political refugees. Chile, Argentina, El Salvador. Some had been in Pinochet’s prisons.
I lived in Spain briefly with my ex, and got to know her family story. Franco was still in charge at the time, so plenty of guys with machine guns. ETA was active and a few bombs went off while I was there. The border was even closed for a time, so my wife was stuck. Her dad was a Franco guy, a practicante. Half-way between a nurse and a doctor. Her uncle was a captain in the Republican army. Offered early release from prison at the 5 year mark if he renounced taking up arms against the state, he refused to sign and did the full 20 year stretch. His Novia waited the entire time to marry him. I played chess with the guy and almost won. His wife was delighted by that. I was 20 at the time and these people made a very big impression on me.
You mention activism. My first taste of that was occupation of a section of land adjacent to Stanley Park. It was big deal at the time, but few remember it now. Basically it was about stopping development of a hotel adjacent to the park. Hey wouldn’t you know it! Found an article about it:
One thing the article doesn’t mention is that the site was flying a couple of really big North Vietnamese flags. I saw those and I was like, WTF? How does that help our image with the public? Had some interesting conversations with the ‘hippies’ over that one. We didn’t call ourselves hippies BTW. We were freaks. I think the freaks may have been anarchists, some of them anyway, but the central theme was "don’t be laying any trips on me, man" if that makes sense. Like the Residents said in “Unavailable” “there are causes that haven’t been given a principle yet” The guiding principle for us was skepticism. Of all things, including ourselves. Still my guiding principle.
I stayed away from activism after that and a few other fiascos, like the Christmas parade that turned into a riot. Emotions ran pretty strong back then. Kennedy made that speech around the same time, where sometimes you have to throw yourself into the machine, or words to that effect. That’s suicidal IMO and can cause more harm than it sets out to correct. Look at J6 for example. Those people walked right into a trap and a few of them lost their lives. You see any serious moves to get them out after how many years? They’re forgotten already, just like Assange. Just like my wife’s uncle. Better to take the long view and recognize that change happens at the margin, not as a mass movement. Better to educate yourself in the history, strategy and tactics of your opponents who’ve had a long time to hatch their plans. There’s direct action, and there’s subversion. Not many people have the patience for the latter. It’s like that Chinese proverb about moving the mountain. Let me see if I can find it.
Yep, here it is at the 18:44 mark. Ain’t the internet wonderful?
Take my ex’s uncle for example. An intelligent man, a dedicated communist. But what exactly was the point in refusing to sign? It made an impression on me at the time, but in retrospect, he could have married his novia (all those years she waited!) and got the hell out of Dodge. Cuba would have taken him, or they could have moved to the USSR. With his experience he’d have been a colonel in no time, teaching other communists how to defend themselves. Wouldn't that have been a better choice? He’d have had children too. Like in the Chinese proverb.
This is turning into a major essay so here’s the short list of things I’ve become disillusioned with:
The Counter Culture. The Psychedelic Movement. The Punk Thing. The New Wave Thing. The Rave Thing. The Do Your Own Thing Thing. I probably missed a few, it’s been a long time. More recently, the Vaccine Skeptic Thing. Not too many skeptics in that camp. Selective Skeptics I calls em.
The problem with anything you can describe as a movement is they become corrupted, both from outside and from within. Some are fake to begin with. Just a front for something else or simply a way of tracking malcontents. Proud Boys spring to mind, but there’s plenty of other examples. For me, what applies here is that old adage about generals fighting the last war. These tactics don’t work anymore. In a mass media environment all they do is provide footage for the MSM to slant in any direction they choose.
So, a different approach is what I’m on about. No clue what that is yet except that the moment people start calling it a ‘movement’ I’m out.
On the science thing, I think you’re confusing Science with scientists. Not the same thing. Science, however flawed, is the only belief system that looks back on itself and corrects its own errors. It does so grudgingly, but the fact that it happens at all is something to cling to because no other belief system does that. Science is the Missouri of the epistemological swamp. It’s the only State that has “Show Me” as a basic principle.
I love the essence of your article...
It is important to note that even anarchists are among fabians and the trade unions are in their very core corrupted, although there are many people who are uncorrupted who are anarchists and trade unionists. The same is true for the church in its institutional forms. The same is true for those who fund/lead patriot/nationalist movements. There are way more good people than inverted ones. But the inverted ones have manipulated every sings sector of society.
“New Detroit was billed as a “new urban coalition,” as it included representatives of the working class and the African American community. However the group was neverthe less dominated, and bankrolled by the city’s oligarchs.”
One Nation Under Blackmail v. 2 p 75
An idealistic statement for sure. Often, among the idealistic believers there is a fanatical pursuit that is single minded. Belief in itself is problematic as it is exclusive. Diversity is what makes life so interesting as shown by nature. Our ad attempts to control others with our belief systems leads to schemes such as the WEF agenda.
"Often, among the idealistic believers there is a fanatical pursuit that is single minded."
This is often referred to as "the power of one's convictions" and just as often held up as an example of something to be admired, if not emulated. But wait! Hitler had the power of his convictions, for a while at least. So did Lenin, Stalin, Mao... you get the idea.
It's not enough. Fervent belief is NEVER enough. You need objective evidence that what you're proposing is actually possible, not least to say desirable. And what's desirable for one may not be for another. Quite the dilemma, but it has to be faced if we're to make any progress, and by that I mean the maximum quality of life for the maximum number of people possible within the means at our disposal on as sustainable basis as can be achieved. I don't know if you can sum that up in a slogan or capture it in a movement, but it's what I'm aiming for, which is why I don't attach myself to any particular ideology because IMO, they all fall short of the mark.
I'll agree with you here. My ideology is my own... although because I think that taxation is theft, I am against kleptocracy, the essence of statecraft. Therefore I am an anarchist, but that doesn't mean I subscribe wholesale to anyone else's belief system.
In reality I'm prepared to concede that there are exceptions to every rule - anarchists are against coercion, but what do you with sex offenders? A lot of people would say "just kill 'em" but who gets to decide who lives and dies? Furthermore, what if people depend on them? What if their labour is necessary? If we got into specific examples, I think that we could agree that some offences are forgiveable, whereas others are not. Such questions don't have easy answers, and at the end of the day politics is always a matter of playing it by ear.
I'm concerned about more mundane things. Basic services like gas, electricity, motor fuel, water, sanitation, roads. I've worked in the transportation sector for half my life, first on ships, then in trucking. The system of basic services we've built up over the last century is breaking down, very badly in some areas. New hires, if you can even find them, are almost completely lacking in problem solving skills, not to mention the basics of the trades and professions they're supposedly educated in. How does an anarchist address these issues? I don't mean pointing out the problems, I mean coming up with solutions. It's all well and good to discuss the way things 'ought' to be, I have a long list of those myself, but how do we get there? What's the plan?
That is a big question. The big question, in fact... Personally I'm for bioregionalization... I think pursuing self-sufficiency at the individual level is misguided, but food and energy sovereignty at a community level should be a top priority. I don't believe in "one-size-fits-all" solutions... James C. Scott's notion of vernacular systems is useful here.
Fanatical is my key word as it excludes diversity in it’s pursuit of a singular ideology that all adhere to.
What does diversity mean? I see that word a lot these days but I still don't understand what people mean by it.
Are you familiar with the work of James C. Scott? I think you'd like him. He writes about how states impose totalitarian systems on vernacular ones. For instance, There was no one French language before Napoleon. It was imposed in much the same way the Metric system was. There was no countries called Italy or Germany before the 1800s, but national identities were imposed upon people through state schooling.
Nature itself is anarchic and chaotic... Empires seek to impose a homogeneity in order to prime its subjects for Propaganda.
You might also enjoy Propaganda: the Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul. The essence of statecraft is controlling the perception of the masses so they act against their own interests, and the only way to do that is through propaganda. Propaganda goes much deeper than most people realize. It's not just history, mainstream media, etc... it goes all the way down to mythology, grammar, systems of measurement, etc... The word kindergarten doesn't refer to a garden where children can play. The children are the crop that are being cultivated. That's the true origin of the term kindergarten.
The way that diversity is used by the woke these days is just an appropriation of a fashionable term - real diversity includes diversity of belief, the bane of totalitarians.
Not familiar with Scott. I just downloaded 'Two Cheers for Anarchism' so I'll add that to my reading list. I notice the authors you recommend all take Anarchy as their starting point. Inasmuch as they may use the scientific method in their research, starting with a premise then setting out to prove it is not the same as starting from no premise and following where the evidence leads. This is my basic complaint with anthropologists which I share with Marvin Harris. Anthropologists ascribe all sorts of meaning to the behaviours they witness, but how many look for underlying material causes? Moreover, how many try to distinguish between what Harris called the emics and etics of a society? Where is the guarantee that your subjects are telling you the truth and not simply trying to impress you, or dodging the question because it reflects badly on them or violates one of their taboos?
Granted, I also start from a premise, i.e. that people in general are corrupt or corruptible, but I'm at least aware that I'm doing that and I have ample proof to support that hypothesis. That said, I don't have an answer to the problem, just belief in a means of analyzing it, which is what the scientific method is about. There's no getting around this. Publish anything on any academic subject and your colleagues are going to check your methods and conclusions. Peer Review.
As far as overarching explanations of how humanity operates, the best case I've seen was made by a Zero Hedge poster several years ago who went by "Radical Marijuana." His model was organized crime. Basically, the best organized criminals rise to the top, not because they're the most brutal, although they can be brutal when threatened. They rise to the top because they have the best understanding of what motivates people, which is fear and greed. It was a dark vision of humanity, but I couldn't find anything in it I disagreed with. He didn't start with a premise, he just followed the evidence where it led. Sometime we don't like the results of our research because it contradicts deeply held beliefs. Scientists fall into that trap as well, which is why Thomas Kuhn wrote 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' a landmark work in the philosophy of science.
https://oceanofpdf.com/?s=The+Structure+of+Scientific+Revolutions
Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor in Human Evolution to counteract the social darwinists who promoted the (basically Hobbesian) idea that competition for limited resources defines human nature. Anarchists don't dispute that we have competitive drives, but those can be overemphasized. I would argue that's what you're doing if you think the prime motivating drives of people are fear and greed. Those are certainly powerful urges, but so is love, the desire for pleasure, the desire to belong to a group, the desire to care for one's family members, etc... We have both competitive and cooperative urges, which means we have the capacity to override our baser instincts for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement with more magnanimous & altruistic ones... many people are willing to sacrifice themselves for others, aren't they?
Anarchy IS the starting point for human politics. That's just a fact. We weren't hatched from Minority Report pods or something. Human beings lived for without states since before we became Homo Sapiens. Anarchism is the mother of all ideologies, just as animism is the mother of all religions.
Oh you're in for a treat with "Two Cheers for Anarchism"... I'm listening to the audiobook now... Scott did two years of fieldwork living in a peasant village in Southeast Asia and was heavily influenced by the Quakers. His anarchism is much broader and deeper than most... and he's one of the most-cited political scientists of all time (for good reason).
Part of my mission is to de-Antifa-ize anarchism... Punk music played an important role in spreading anarchist ideas starting in the 1970s, but now the association with dropout youth culture has become a hindrance to anarchist ideas gaining wider appeal.
He's also neither doctrinaire nor dogmatic. I think you'll get a lot out of his work.
So, diverse is the opposite of singular. Many ways and forms.
The reason I asked is because lately the word has taken on a political meaning which more often than not doesn't correspond to reality. For example, one of my favourite countries, Japan, is the least diverse on the planet, and yet it suffers almost none of the problems typical of somewhere like France or Germany, who both encourage diversity as a desirable goal. What I've observed in my travels is that people tend to be most comfortable when surrounded by people who think the same way and share the same beliefs. It also doesn't hurt if they look like each other. Korea would be another example. Stable society, low crime, solid work ethic... if those are your metrics. Iceland, same thing. Sweden, however, which had much the same ethnic composition as Iceland is now in serious trouble thanks to an indiscriminate policy of diversity with no reference to whether the new arrivals share the same values as Swedes.
I like that you make these kinds of arguments... because the hysterical obsession with race and racism made a lot of things unspeakable throughout much of my life... the example of Japan is interesting... I haven't been, and my sense of the "soul of Japan" comes from the novels of Yukio Mishima, who paints a VERY dark picture, making me somewhat skeptical of your portrayal. I suspect that you could find pros and cons to cultural isolationism, but personally I'm a big believer in the desirability of cultural mixing. But from what I've heard things are not going well in Sweden at all, and we need to be able to talk about such things like grownups.
I value that different cultures have distinct differences. It would be so dull if we were all forced to conform to a narrow world view. Often cultural differences are a product of weather and geographical influences in regions. I value the amazing diversity of the living world.
We need to stop defining intelligence as “book learning”. Intuitive and emotional intelligence need be given equal space of perception. Then we will make more compassionate decisions. Balance is the key. There will always be problems within any society. If wisdom from a balanced perspective is respected then we will have better leaders. Getting to that point will take a more mature humanity. I am not a Buddhist but do look to their psychology of humans for guidance. Nothing can be forced.
Hence the reason why the cabal expend so much effort on division and inciting factionalism - through cognitive infiltration and agents provocateurs. Subversion, in other words. It is, really, necessary for them to do this.
Likewise, they also spend an inordinate amount of time infiltrating all the specific types mentioned in the article and inciting as much corruption (and misdirected energies) as possible.
Given this is the playbook, the counter-subversive method is quite clear. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say. Revelation of the method.
This, I'd say, is what would ultimately lead to the convergence of the uncorrupted. You're right - I think it's the thing they fear the most...
Do you not see the danger in defining yourself and fellow travellers as "the uncorrupted?" How is this any different from "God's chosen people" "woke" "ubermenschen" or "New Soviet Man?"
Who gets to decide who "the uncorrupted" are? You? On what basis?
https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/why-is-the-west-so-weak-and-russia
"Let’s first look at IQ, or general intelligence. In order to be able to deal with seriously complicated work or get through a real university program, an IQ of about 125 is necessary. Only about 5% of the population in the West has this IQ or higher. This means that the pool of potentially high-level competence people is very small to begin with. Even if we use a cut-off of an IQ of 115, which is sufficient for most semi-complicated work, the potential pool only goes up to 16% of the population."
Let's be generous and use 16% here. What this is saying in that fully 84% of humanity are incapable of running a modern industrial economy. That's not a measure of their education, it's the limit of their capacity to learn. I know egalitarians don't like this line of reasoning because it harkens back to the eugenicists clustered around Nazi Germany and who plague us to this day, but without recognition of the fact that we're dealing with people who need leadership in order to achieve anything above a subsistence level existence, then any project aimed at liberating the masses from the grasp of our evil overlords is bound to fail because they KNOW who that 16% (or 5%) are and have successfully co-opted most of them. Those are the same people who the 84% will eliminated out of pure revenge in a peasant's revolt or communist revolution, and then what? You still have to run the economy, but you just killed off the only people capable of doing that.
Leaving aside the point that "corruption" is an abstract noun lacking a precise definition (I know it when I see it, but do we both see the same thing?) let's not overlook the fact that a fundamental precept of the major religions is that we're ALL corrupt. This is the point where religion and natural science intersect. Nature in its most basic form is about survival. All creatures, man included, seek their own survival and will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal. Survival of the species, which follows from that first principle, implies some form of social organization to defend itself, not just against other tribes or species, but against the vagaries of Nature herself. Given the uneven distribution of intelligence in our species, this implies a need for leadership, from which arises a hierarchy of relative competence. It's when leadership renounces its obligation to the tribe, society or nation, that corruption rears its ugly head, all the way down to the lowest levels. I think we've seen a pretty good example of how this works over the last 3 or 4 years.
What I see Anarchists arguing for is that leadership isn't necessary. That some sort of (as yet undefined) self-organizing principle is sufficient, but where's the historic example? Never mind history, what's the biological basis on which this ideal is premised? An even distribution of the intelligence needed to sustain such a society? No evidence for that.
My argument is that we are lacking leadership, not that there's an excess of it. There's an excess of tyrants these days, no doubt about that, but I wouldn't call them leaders. So the next question is how do you go about developing leadership? Certainly not by renouncing the basic principle, which is what I see Anarchists doing. Ironically, I see the same underlying impulse in self-declared anarchists as I do in the conservative right. "Nobody's going to tell me how to live my life."
You got upset with me when I chastised anarchists for being undisciplined. You claimed they were at the forefront of social movements, for which I asked you to present examples. Leaving aside the irony of claiming that anarchists play a leadership role in social movements, it's not what I've seen. From 1975 to 1980 I did volunteer work for a human rights organization my ex-wife was employed by, of which she's now the director. Their main goal was resettling political refugees from Latin America, mainly Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Argentina. Victims of the CIA's dirty wars for the most part. Pretty horrific stuff. We had Marxists, Socialists, Liberals, Christians and Jews on our staff, but no anarchists. I'm pretty sure of that because we all hung together and discussed our political views and the topic never came up. Not once. So where were you guys when all this was going on?
The only serious historic change brought about by anarchists that I'm aware of was ironically the murder of one of the great reformers of the 19th Century, Czar Nicholas II, a man who took responsibility for reform of Russian society against a myriad of competing interests opposed to that. A genuine leader, and your guys murdered him. How did that work out?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_II_of_Russia
Hey,
Do you have any better idea for how to frame things in a way that would appeal to people of different ideological backgrounds? The goal as I see it is to break anarchism out of its subcultural ghetto and make common cause with Christians, Muslims, the urban poor, Quebec separatists, blue-collar industry workers, farmers, etc...
I'm kind of mystified as to why you see the word "uncorrupted" as problematic. What's not to get?
Are you corrupted? I'm not. Should I pretend that I am just so I don't offend people who are? I really don't get your argument here.
Arguably, Paul is using the word "uncorrupted" to mean "authentic". I suppose you could say that authenticity is a subjective value judgement, but that sounds like the type of anti-essentialist argument that a postmodernist would make. Trying to talk about politics without making subjective value judgements would be completely counter-productive. All deliberate political action should be about obtaining a desirable result, and what is desirable depends on what one values.
A lot of anarchists were corrupted by the new COINTEPRO, which promoted divisive identitarianism and anti-"conspiracist" conspiracy theories about "Red-Brown Alliances"... A lot of people fell for campaigns of ideological subversion, which was often accompanied by access to grant money... Paul has done good work exposing corrupt NGOs in the UK.
As for your stuff about university graduates being the only ones intelligent enough to guide society, I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Most Africans were intelligent enough to refuse the clot shot, most Ivy League graduates were not. Furthermore, the person with the highest IQ is definitely not automatically the best leader. Keith Rainiere of the NXIVM cult has one of the highest IQs in the world, and Epstein, Paul Leroux, and Roger Thomas Clark are probably up in the 0.01% club too. I'll agree that it is in the best interests of groups of people to have intelligent leaders (I don't think even the woke argue against that!) but intelligence is not the only important trait.
As for the ideas that anarchists are against leadership, I'm curious where you got that idea. I'm sure that you could find people to argue against the very notion of leadership, but that is not the position of either the classical anarchists or people who have studied stateless societies. I would tend to agree with you that leadership is inherent to human social organization. I explain my views on leadership here: https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/what-geese-can-teach-us-about-leadership
I don't think share your view that all religions teach that we are corrupt. I guess that's a possible interpretation of the doctrine of original sin, but that certainly wasn't what I was taught. Humans are certainly corruptible, but if we were inherently corrupt what would be the point of morality?
As for Buddhism, the eight-fold path is all about righteousness, which is kind of the opposite of corruption.
As for your other post, I didn't see it... Could you link to it please?. Multiple people maintain this account.
-Crow
p.s. I personally murdered Czar Nicholas and I'd do it again. How did you know it was me?
https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/nvrmr-podcast-2-david-rovics/comment/51760224
You wrote:
"I'm not easily offended, but your characterization of anarchists annoys me. We have been on the front lines for social movements for decades whilst engineers and scientists have been building the infrastructure of domination. Now the collapse we've long predicted is upon us and you're making fun of anarchists for being downwardly mobile (i.e. poor)?"
My reply is in the link.
"whilst engineers and scientists have been building the infrastructure of domination."
How would you expect me to respond to such a statement? Same way as you responded to my criticism of anarchists perhaps? I suppose I should have expected something like that based on my experience of anarchists in BC. Different anarchists though right? Or do you agree with spiking trees and sabotaging pipelines and construction equipment? How does that win the hearts and minds of blue collar workers?
Here's the problem. Anyone with a grudge against society can call themselves an anarchist and go out and fuck things up, and unfortunately you all get tarred with the same brush, just like you tarred science with "building the infrastructure of domination." Seriously, that is pure sloganeering and I gave you a significant example of why it isn't true in my reply that you apparently didn't read.
That's why I argued for a rebranding of your efforts. Distance yourself from it. The word 'anarchist' has negative connotations for most people, so it's an uphill battle defending an ideology which can be easily corrupted. It's like trying to defend communism by arguing that it was never given a fair chance - that the concept is sound but the people carrying it out are corrupt. Well of course they are (and were). Like I said, humans are corrupt. We may be born in a state of innocence but that changes the minute we start using language, because language itself is corrupt, never mind the nonsense our parents teach us which we soak up like a sponge before we even arrive at the indoctrination centres masquerading as 'public education.' That's the corruption I'm talking about, and to make a claim to being uncorrupted to me just smacks of elitism. That's why I asked, have you ever seriously questioned your own beliefs? Easy to question the beliefs of others, which is another form of corruption - assuming we own the high ground when our thoughts and ideals are just as corrupt as anyone else's.
That is the meaning of 'physician, heal thyself' as well as "let he who is without sin...etc."
Speaking of the corruption of language:
"As for your stuff about university graduates being the only ones intelligent enough to guide society, I'm going to have to disagree with you there."
Where did I say that? I used Gaius Baltar's example of the intelligence required to get a degree, not that only university grads are intelligent enough to lead. That's clearly false going by the idiots Harvard's been turning out lately. The metric here is intelligence, not the degree itself. That should be clear from reading what he (not I) said.
as for this:
"Most Africans were intelligent enough to refuse the clot shot, most Ivy League graduates were not."
Intelligent enough, or ?
1) no access to vaccines because they were hoarded by the developed nations who promised them but never delivered?
2) wary about anything involving western medicine. I suppose you could call that intelligent, but what was at stake for them vs. someone facing the loss of years of study and a serious debt load to get there? Not a fair comparison.
You mentioned the Buddha. Did he also not warn us about attachments? I'm pretty sure he meant to ideas as well as material goods. You seem pretty attached to your ideology, just as I am to evidence based science. I can make a very good case for my belief in science, despite the obvious human corruption that comes with any human endeavour. Can you do likewise as I asked in response to...
"We have been on the front lines for social movements for decades."
Seems like a good subject for an article.
As for Czar Nicholas, I used that example as it's representative of the unintended consequences of acting out of the power of one's convictions, rather than a sound assessment of where that might lead to. It led to the death of the plotters obviously, but it also upended a reform program that could have led to the kind of world that you or I might be more accepting of, rather than the horrors it set in motion which lasted almost a century and cost millions of people's lives. I'm not saying that one act precipitated all that, but it was definitely a contributing factor, and is viewed as such by present day Russians who cringe at the very mention of the word 'anarchist.'
Hey... I seem to have offended you, so I'm going to reply diplomatically. I am a very opinionated person, but I'm trying to be more humble about the way that I present those opinions. I am aware that I have a habit of pissing off my readers. Your comments are often thought-provoking. Most often I agree with you in large part, and when I disagree, I find our exchanges illuminating. I honestly consider it a compliment that you write such lengthy, thoughtful comments. It shows quite a deal of respect that I'm someone worth bouncing ideas off of, and the feeling is mutual.
That said, I'm mystified that I would have to justify the part about being on the front lines of social movements for decades. To cite one easy example, anarchists were the reason the Battle of Seattle went down in history.
I refer you to the David Graeber essay "The Shock of Victory" if you are interested: https://crimethinc.com/2020/09/03/the-shock-of-victory-an-essay-by-david-graeber-and-a-eulogy-for-him
Anarchists were also very present in opposing the War on Terror, and in more recent times in supporting indigenous resistance from the Unist'ot'en Camp to Elsipogtog to Standing Rock.
I personally was involved in all of the movements I mentioned above. I have been arrested many times for my activism, been on probation, had to do community service, pay restitution, etc.
Now you seem to be telling that I'm doing activism wrong, which is what annoyed me in the first place. True, we have yet to succeed in our objective to create a free society, but I've been doing my best to do my part for a decade. In February 2020 there were rail blockades, port blockades, and highway blockades across the country. It was the most revolutionary moment in Canada since Oka and it took COVID to put an end to.
Oh yeah, I'll also mention the Quebec student strike, in which anarchists were extremely well-represented. Another example that comes to mind is the Zapatista uprising, the most successful revolution of the past 50 years. Before you accuse me romanticization, keep in mind I've travelled extensively in Chiapas. I know what I'm talking about.
I hope that you don't take this the wrong way, but what have you done? You seem to think that you know better than I do, but other than recommending that the anarchist movement rebrand, what are you actually suggesting? Do you have a strategy to propose? I agree that we need a basis of unity that has broad appeal, but at the same time, a lot of populists back demagogues like Trump and don't realize that the problem is that state itself, not its supposed leaders or figureheads.
You say "it's an uphill battle defending an ideology which can be easily corrupted", and I agree. It's definitely an uphill battle contesting the powers that shouldn't be, because some very rich people want us to be disempowered, and will attempt to thwart any meaningful social change that challenges their power. I'm not peddling a Care Bear fantasy. Real change will require protracted political struggle, and they don't call it "struggle" because it's easy.
I'm actually open to the idea of rebranding, because words are just words, but anarchism is the word for the ideology that opposes the centralization of power in the hands of a bureaucracy with a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of violence.
Plus, I only have so much influence, you know. Considerably less than, say, Derrick Broze, who has proposed Agorism as an alternative to anarchism to avoid the stigma. That term hasn't caught on. Others have proposed voluntarism, panarchism, organic radicalism, and egalitarian anti-modernism.
Voluntarism appears to be the front-runner, as it used by James Corbett, Etienne de la Boetie, and others. What do you think of the term voluntarism? Do you think that fits the bill? It does have the advantage of framing an ideology in terms of what we are for (voluntary social relations) as opposed to what we are against (institutionalized coercion).
As I've said before, a marklar by any other marklar would smell as sweet. I am an anarchist, and I own it. If another term catches on that I can identify with, great. I'm not holding my breath, though. Political labels go in and out of style. Technically, libertarian socialism is nearly synonymous with anarchism, but socialism is associated by right-wingers with authoritarian communism and/or the welfare state, whereas libertarianism is associated by left-wingers with market fundamentalism. Anarchist is the most legible label that exists for what I am. I do agree with you that we shouldn't be married to labels or even ideas, though. At the end of the day what I'm for is morality based in natural law.
On another note, I don't think that you're giving Africans enough credit. Last I checked, vax uptake was something like 6%, despite massive propaganda campaigns. It certainly wasn't due to a lack of availability of vaccines. Africans by and large saw COVID for what it was - a sketchy injection pushed by sketchy people with sketchy interests. They learned their lesson from the AIDS scam. Americans and Canadians have been subject to many fake diseases since the 70s, and a majority still haven't caught on. Most who have figured out that COVID was fake still haven't figured out that AIDS was too.
As for your defence of science, here I vehemently disagree with you. The "science" that has been pushed on the world for a hundred years is fundamentally wrong. It's an ideology packaged as an ideologically neutral collection of facts. But much of it must be taken on faith. Take the Big Bang, for instance. Where's the proof of the Big Bang? Why is it accepted as a scientific theory? And does the second law of thermodynamics actually prove that the universe will end in heat death? It's not like I disprove that, but science-believers take that as an article of faith when it's an unproven hypothesis.
I would recommend looking into Bertrand Russell and how British aristocrats pushed "scientific" atheism. There's nothing scientific about atheism. You can't prove a negative. It's as much of a leap of faith to believe that the universe was created by accident as it is to believe to it was created by a loving God. I don't know about you, but I know what leap I'd rather take.
Furthermore, atheism is ahistorical. There are abundant historical examples of miracles. I have three words for you: Joan of Arc. A secularist would say that she was schizophrenic, but that doesn't explain the fact that the voices she heard gave her accurate information. An illiterate "schizophrenic" peasant girl was able to lead an army to victory. How often are schizophrenics skilled military strategists?
Whenever presented with something that contradicts their worldview, secularists simply refuse to refuse it. Furthermore, they think that they're good guys, despite the 20th century showing that atheists can be every bit as brutal as the worst religious fanatics.
There's nothing new about science being corrupted. It was used by British imperialists as a justification of their supremacy long before COVID was a evil glimmer in Fauci's eye. Evildoers will always disguise their intentions in whatever guise happens to be convenient at any given time. Tyrants can't exactly come out and state their true intentions, so they dress up their plans according to the intellectual fashion of their times.
Now, I'm not blaming all scientists or all engineers for being in on some big evil plan or anything, and I acknowledge the incredible life-enhancing benefits of Western medicine before it was corrupted... and there is still a lot to praise. Prosthetic limbs come to mind. But the days where believers in science can claim any type of moral high ground are over.
I'll end on something you said that I agree with: anarchism tends to collect a fair number of people with antisocial personality traits. This is a big topic, but I won't deny it.
A lot of people go through an anarchist phase because they reject the values of their parents, and anarchism involves a rejection of the values of the dominant society. Eventually a lot of people grow out of this phase because we all have to make compromises in this world and a lot of anarchists can be judgemental and puritanical in the same way that adherents to other belief systems can be. What can I say?
People are people, and there are a lot of people who call themselves anarchists that I want nothing to do with. But at the end of the day, statecraft is a extortion scheme with advertising campaign. You can pretty it up with propaganda, but there's no state without a bureaucracy, and there's not bureaucracy without taxation, and there's no taxation without armed goons threatening people with violence. It's a protection racket. If you think things all the way through, you will arrive at that conclusion.
There's no getting around it. Statism is Stockholm syndrome.
First let me apologize for getting on your case. That was frustration and disillusionment speaking more than it was anger. Any anger I feel right now is towards what’s going on in the world right now, not towards you. You asked what have I done? Well, without being too specific let me say that the source of my disillusionment has a lot to do with events in my life that are similar to yours, just at an earlier time - specifically from the late 60's onwards.
My family background is British military and I was expected follow that tradition, which I wanted no part of. Why would I, when I was meeting kids only a few years older than me who had abandoned their country, possibly forever, because they didn’t want to fight in a war they didn’t believe in? That was back in the days when Canada honoured the rule of sanctuary. Not any more.
Speaking of that, my ex-wife, Spanish, from a family divided by their civil war, was and still is a human rights worker. I think I mentioned that in another post. So my early education was draft resisters, and political refugees. Chile, Argentina, El Salvador. Some had been in Pinochet’s prisons.
I lived in Spain briefly with my ex, and got to know her family story. Franco was still in charge at the time, so plenty of guys with machine guns. ETA was active and a few bombs went off while I was there. The border was even closed for a time, so my wife was stuck. Her dad was a Franco guy, a practicante. Half-way between a nurse and a doctor. Her uncle was a captain in the Republican army. Offered early release from prison at the 5 year mark if he renounced taking up arms against the state, he refused to sign and did the full 20 year stretch. His Novia waited the entire time to marry him. I played chess with the guy and almost won. His wife was delighted by that. I was 20 at the time and these people made a very big impression on me.
You mention activism. My first taste of that was occupation of a section of land adjacent to Stanley Park. It was big deal at the time, but few remember it now. Basically it was about stopping development of a hotel adjacent to the park. Hey wouldn’t you know it! Found an article about it:
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/this-week-in-history-1971-all-seasons-park-springs-up-at-the-entrance-to-stanley-park
One thing the article doesn’t mention is that the site was flying a couple of really big North Vietnamese flags. I saw those and I was like, WTF? How does that help our image with the public? Had some interesting conversations with the ‘hippies’ over that one. We didn’t call ourselves hippies BTW. We were freaks. I think the freaks may have been anarchists, some of them anyway, but the central theme was "don’t be laying any trips on me, man" if that makes sense. Like the Residents said in “Unavailable” “there are causes that haven’t been given a principle yet” The guiding principle for us was skepticism. Of all things, including ourselves. Still my guiding principle.
I stayed away from activism after that and a few other fiascos, like the Christmas parade that turned into a riot. Emotions ran pretty strong back then. Kennedy made that speech around the same time, where sometimes you have to throw yourself into the machine, or words to that effect. That’s suicidal IMO and can cause more harm than it sets out to correct. Look at J6 for example. Those people walked right into a trap and a few of them lost their lives. You see any serious moves to get them out after how many years? They’re forgotten already, just like Assange. Just like my wife’s uncle. Better to take the long view and recognize that change happens at the margin, not as a mass movement. Better to educate yourself in the history, strategy and tactics of your opponents who’ve had a long time to hatch their plans. There’s direct action, and there’s subversion. Not many people have the patience for the latter. It’s like that Chinese proverb about moving the mountain. Let me see if I can find it.
Yep, here it is at the 18:44 mark. Ain’t the internet wonderful?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-REw_YsBxto
Take my ex’s uncle for example. An intelligent man, a dedicated communist. But what exactly was the point in refusing to sign? It made an impression on me at the time, but in retrospect, he could have married his novia (all those years she waited!) and got the hell out of Dodge. Cuba would have taken him, or they could have moved to the USSR. With his experience he’d have been a colonel in no time, teaching other communists how to defend themselves. Wouldn't that have been a better choice? He’d have had children too. Like in the Chinese proverb.
This is turning into a major essay so here’s the short list of things I’ve become disillusioned with:
The Counter Culture. The Psychedelic Movement. The Punk Thing. The New Wave Thing. The Rave Thing. The Do Your Own Thing Thing. I probably missed a few, it’s been a long time. More recently, the Vaccine Skeptic Thing. Not too many skeptics in that camp. Selective Skeptics I calls em.
The problem with anything you can describe as a movement is they become corrupted, both from outside and from within. Some are fake to begin with. Just a front for something else or simply a way of tracking malcontents. Proud Boys spring to mind, but there’s plenty of other examples. For me, what applies here is that old adage about generals fighting the last war. These tactics don’t work anymore. In a mass media environment all they do is provide footage for the MSM to slant in any direction they choose.
So, a different approach is what I’m on about. No clue what that is yet except that the moment people start calling it a ‘movement’ I’m out.
On the science thing, I think you’re confusing Science with scientists. Not the same thing. Science, however flawed, is the only belief system that looks back on itself and corrects its own errors. It does so grudgingly, but the fact that it happens at all is something to cling to because no other belief system does that. Science is the Missouri of the epistemological swamp. It’s the only State that has “Show Me” as a basic principle.