I went to Anarchapulco, met Hollywood Royalty, and invented my own theory of Evolution

Maybe I´ll write a book about it one day.

In February of 2022, I traveled to Acapulco to attend Anarchopulco, the world´s premiere anarcho-capitalist event.

Now, if you are familiar with my work, you might be asking yourself ¨What the Hell, Crow? Aren´t you a diehard anti-capitalist?¨

True, I am, but in light of the fact that most of my supposedly anarchist comrades had rolled over in the face of the COVID boogeyman, I was desperate to find any anarchist with a pulse. Plus, I had a new motorcycle and Acapulco seemed like a good destination. So in the spirit of adventure, and with an open mind, I ventured forth to explore both Mexico and new political ideas.

I had some awesome adventures along the way, including squatting in Mexico City and visited the autonomous zone of Cheran in Michoacan. I want to write a book about this adventure, actually, but first I´ve got to finish writing The Motorcyle Diaries.

Truthfully, I had not given much thought to anarcho-capitalism prior to COVID. I thought of it as a U.S. thing. I don´t remember ever meeting an anarcho-capitalist in Canada. If you would have asked me my opinion of anarcho-capitalism back then, I probably would have brought up the influence on Ayn Rand on the Satanism of Anton Lavey and the neo-liberalism of Milton Friedman. Maybe I would have paraphrased Noam Chomsky´s famous quip:

Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history.

In the wake of the ideological collapse of the Left, however, I was willing to revise my opinion. Truthfully, I´d never read Ayn Rand, let alone Murray Rothbard or Ludwig von Mises. Most of what I knew about anarcho-capitalism was gleaned from a few books that I´d read about Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road. So mostly I associated anarcho-capitalism with drug-dealing, crypto-currencies, and the idea that you could get rich and fight the system at the same time. Given the fact that I grew up looking up to people like Marc Emery and Dana Larsen, this idea was easy enough for me to accept.

Also, my politics had been in state of flux for quite some time. After the failure of the Occupy movement and later the fight against the DAPL pipeline at Standing Rock, I had been disillusioned with the idea of leaderless movements.

After the fall of Standing Rock, I became increasingly interested in vanguardism and the idea of Counter-Economics. Put simply, Counter-Economics is the idea that true revolutionaries should endeavour to conduct the greatest possible amount of their economic activity outside of the regulated, taxed economy. In other words, it´s putting your money where your mouth is. Previously, I had referred to this philosophy as illegalism (which is a current of individualist anarchism), but I had to admit that counter-economics was a better term. Why break the law when you can ignore it?

In particular, I was hoping to meet Derrick Broze, founder of the Freedom Cell Network. Out of all the anarchists, he seemed to be. I absolutely loved his documentary series The Pyramid of Power, and I recognized in him an authentic anarchist voice. Indeed, his analysis was quite clearly deeper and more radical than that of Leftist anarchists like Crimethinc. and Submedia. I was particularly delighted that he placed a critique of statist ¨education¨ (particulary the Prussian ¨factory¨ model of schooling) front and centre. Furthermore, he gave the scam of fractional reserve banking the attention that it deserves, which Leftists rarely do. And finally, he was a Sun Dancer and advocated for something that he called Holistic Anarchism, which integrated a spiritual outlook into political philosophy. Everything that I knew about him impressed me.

As far as I could tell, his mission and mine were one and the same.

It bears mentioning that Derrick Broze does not identify as an anarcho-capitalist, but as an agorist. Although some people consider agorism to be a mere rebranding of anarcho-capitalism, Broze refutes this in his essay Agorism is Not Anarcho-Capitalism. That said, I don´t think that anyone would deny that the two schools of thoughts are closely related. I think my roommate hit the nail on the head when he described agorism as ¨left-wing anarcho-capitalism¨.

Anyway, I did meet Derrick Broze, as well as his number Miriam Gomez, and they were every bit as cool as I was expecting him to be, if not more so.

But I´m getting ahead of myself.

First, Anarchapulco. Anyway, it bears mentioning that Anarchapulco is obscenely, disgustingly, expensive. I shit you not - a ticket will run you $1200 USD. In other words, it´s an event for the obscenely rich. Pretty fucking offensive to hold an event in Mexico that the vast majority of Mexicans can´t afford. It definitely does offend my sensibilities as an anarchist. But that´s a topic for another day.

Luckily, I was able to volunteer, which means that I was able to get my foot in the door for a mere $300.

Soon, I learnt that many of those who travel to Acapulco each February don´t bother with the official event, and that most of the action happens outside of its structure. Some years back, certain members of the Anarchapulco community (Derrick Broze and Etienne de la Boetie2, to name a few) got sick of the price-gouging and egomania of the event´s main organizer and decided to throw their own event, which is called Agorapulco.

(By the way, Vice made a mini-doc about Anarchopulco / Agorapulco, which featured Derrick Broze. It´s a very unsympathetic portrayal, but good for a laugh.)

If I were to go to Acapulco in February again, I wouldn´t fork out for Anarchapulco. I´d go straight to Agorapulco, which is where the cool kids are at anyway.

But I won´t lie. I had a great time at Anarchapulco. The vibe was good, it was fun, and I met some very cool people. At that time, it was tremendously gratifying to be in the company of people who weren´t drooling, lobotomized zombies. Probably the most interesting experience I had was meeting Sean Stone, son of the great Hollywood director Oliver Stone. He had followed in his father´s footsteps to become a film-maker and documentarian, and gave the keynote presentation on the first day.

I was unfamiliar with his work, but I loved his message, which had to do with the power of story-telling, and its importance to any political movement.

Afterwards, I approached him and requested an interview. He readily agreed. Despite the fact that he is basically Hollywood royalty, he was friendly, thoughtful, and down-to-earth. I kind of figured Hollywood people would have their heads up their asses, but not him.

Our conversation left me with a lot to think about, and if you can tolerate the terrible sound quality, I encourage you to watch the following video.

Due to the terrible sound quality, I doubt many people will listen to this interview, so I´ve made a little transcript of one excerpt of it.

CROW - This is the Big Question, this is the Great Work. How do we weave all of these different strands into a tapestry that really gives meaning to what´s going on in the world right now? And this is my question for you - What is that Grand Narrative?

SEAN - The Grand Narrative is the awakening of Consciousness to the Matrix of Control that has been inherited by us for centuries… The human that was unconscious is slowly becoming more conscious, not only of the fabric of control, but also of the multidimensional nature of that control and of the multidimensional factors that are involved in our existence. And this, I think, is going to be the great story of the coming century, that of becoming meta-human… not only meta-human in terms of interacting with machinery, but also interacting with other dimensions of existence - a greater spiritual awareness, a greater attunement to energy, to understand that this is just an energetic experience…

CROW - So you think that the ultimate truth is that we are consciousness experiencing itself, and that some kind of evolution is going on?

SEAN - Yes. Because the evolution is in physical reality, because there´s always evolution in physical reality. Our physical reality has to mirror our spiritual reality. They cannot be separate. So as spiritual awareness grows, there are ramifications in physical reality.

We go on to talk about evolving past the linearity of time towards a cosmovision within which time is understood as being cyclical, and some other trippy shit. But it was the part about the evolution of consciousness that stuck with me most.

Curious about what Sean meant by Meta-Human, I watched his documentary MetaHuman. The film was quite mind-bending and I wasn´t quite sure what to make of it. It presents humanity as being on the cusp of some kind of quantum leap precipitated by a new phase of technological development. It spoke about many of the same things that transhumanists are on about, but without the vitaphobia and materialism. Maybe I should go back and watch it again, because I remember it presenting many interesting ideas, but at the end of the day, technophilia´s not my cup of tea. What goes up must go down, and the human conceit that we are about to become Gods is as old as time itself.

That said, I was impressed by one part, that of Deepak Chopra´s take on evolution. He proposes a tweak to the Darwinian idea that evolution is driven by random mutations and natural selection, suggesting that perhaps we would do better to think in terms of unpredictable mutations, rather than random ones. This tiny little frame shift opens up the possibility that evolution is in fact being guided by some intelligence, or ordering principle.

This harkens back to Terence McKenna´s novelty theory, which hypothesizes that nature is in fact a ¨novelty-preserving engine¨ and the apparent randomness present in the universe is something akin to the Gods playing dice. Whereas the rolling of dice might indeed include an element of randomness, that randomness exists within the logic of something which may be purposeful, meaningful, beautiful, joyful, and fun.

In other words, we are not adrift in a sea of meaningless electrical activity inexorably proceeding into entropy, but an eternal flowering of the life-force of the universe. We are not an accidental experiment of an uncaring universe, but manifestations of divinity. We are not adrift. We are surfing the cresting wave of infinity in the midst of a tremendously fertile ocean of potential through which the creative genius of the universe passionately pursues heretofore unimagined forms of self-expression.

It really is a thrilling idea. If my father were alive today, he would be overjoyed that intelligent design is back in style.

Suck it, Darwin.

Since this time, I have continued to think about both the Great Narrative.

Back in June, I wrote a blog post called Whose Great Narrative? (which is also available as a ready-to-print zine), in which I critique the pathetically shallow vision presented in Klaus Shwab´s book The Great Narrative. In it, I write:

The globalists are right about one thing, though. The world does indeed need a new Great Narrative, and one will surely materialize in the years to come. Nature abhors a vaccuum.

The task before us, then, is to come up with our own Great Narrative – a Great Narrative for the people, which places this moment in time in its context, which tells us how we got into the mess that we’re in now, and also where we are going, or at least where we want to go.

I also spent a lot of time this Summer thinking about the evolution of consciousness, which eventually led me to come up with an anarchist theory of evolution.

And around the same time I was developing this theory, I encountered a book which significantly clarified the project of the Great Narrative.

Ronald Wright, in A Short History of Progress, begins by asking three crucial questions - Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? These three questions are the three essential questions that any functional mythology must answer.

As mythology is a term more often used to refer to ancient cultures than our own, we would do so well to define the term Myth.

Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture’s deepest values and aspirations … Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time.

In an anthropological sense, there is no such thing as a culture without a mythology. However, the Mythos of any given culture may well be imperceptible to members of that culture, for the same reason that water is imperceptible to fish. The Mythos of any given culture is not seen as Myth by members of that culture, but as Reality.

This begs the question - How then might we understand the Mythos of modern civilization? What answers does our culture offer to Gauguin´s questions? What is the central Myth of our culture? Liberalism? Capitalism? Democracy?

None of these fit the bill. Remember, the defining characteristic of a true Mythos is a quality of being unquestionable. Liberalism, capitalism and democracy are widely discussed in political discourse, and innumerable critiques of all three are endlessly debated. We must look deeper. We must look for something which is not up for debate.

Ronald Wright places himself in the company of anarchists such as Jacques Ellul, Fredy Perlman, John Zerzan, and Paul Cudenec when he names the Myth of Progress as the central Myth of Western civilization. He writes:

“Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology — a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become ‘myth’ in the anthropological sense.”

Wright defines Progress as:

“the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind … that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is toward improvement.”

If there is one thing about which both communists and capitalists can agree, it is that technological Progress must proceed at all costs. Economic growth must continue. The system depends upon it, and so humanity must serve the Machine. That alone is imperative.

So it is not true that there is no modern religion - there is, and it nothing other than the slavish devotion to Technik, which is nothing other than Power, and justifies itself with the Myth of Progress.

The rulers of the world may transgress against every moral principle known to Man, but they will never transgress against Technik, which is their God. Indeed, they are its slaves.

Really, not so much has changed since the days of the Aztecs.

Then, as now, the Gods demand Blood.