Why I am an anarchist

I’m saying there never really has been - there has always been limiting factors on the market, often for very good reasons and with very good consequences. Now, of course today’s corporate monopolies are almost all assisted and sponsored by the government, and to my mind it is this relationship in particular that constitutes the state. I’m saying that if you take the government out of the equation that still leaves the corporations, and they have become masters of market manipulation.

Agreed.

I’m not proposing any such thing, except whereby people enter into communism of their own accord. I’m proposing more a healthy respect for what is nourishing about the natural world, and the resisting of the privatisation and market-isation of its bounty. I would however distinguish when someone makes a farm, I recognise that private property gives people an incentive but I also recognise that it is a reality that someone who is ultimately going to die within a matter of decades causes damage to the earth in a way that outlasts them, and that this affects other people and therefore is of justifiably ‘social’ concern. The idea that owning something gives you the right to destroy it, in particular, I ardently oppose.

I broadly agree.

No apology required, this is exactly why I started this thread. I can’t register on BTL and this was the next easiest place.

I would distinguish here between the moral value judgment and the law, but otherwise I agree entirely and think you’ve broken it down very well. I don’t think there should be a legal obligation on people to help others, even if I believe in a moral obligation. I think the nature of duty-altruism is violated by having it be an obligation backed up by the threat of force, rather than an attempt to persuade and extol the virtue of. The sad truth is that in any society you’re going to get people dying who could have been kept alive, so outlawing that would be meaningless anyway.

This is a difficult one, because healthcare is, at times, an absolute necessity for survival and yet it is relatively highly skilled, rare, work which is therefore deserving of considerable reward. It bridges the natural hierarchy of needs-wants and the respective economies you’ve suggested. So I don’t know, I’d like to think something like welfare healthcare would still be possible, but without all the massive subsidising of drug companies and so on. I mean, you wouldn’t want to be dependent on the drunkard in Deadwood, would you? Nor would I. I think we can do better than that.

Yes, you are absolutely right, but our task is also to appreciate that which is valuable beyond the logic and the laws.

So, to the question that is perhaps most difficult to answer in practical terms - what about security? Almost everything the state does, it does in the name of security (it says it means our security when of course it means its own). Avoiding economic armageddon, pig flu, bad weather and terrorists gives the state mosts of its perceived legitimacy. Now, demonstrating the absolute corruptness of the state in this regard is not difficult, but the politics of security goes to the heart of what makes humans humans - our ability to imagine different possibilities, including nightmares. Most creatures simply don’t suffer from nightmares. So, even when people recognise that the state is corrupt they don’t make the jump to anarchy because ‘better the devil you know’. They can envision a worse scenario than anything you can tell them is real, and hence the feeling of protection offered by the state remains with them.

Here is one instance where I think the free marketeers haven’t thought it through, because offering up security as a commodity to an open market, in an age where people perceive all kinds of fictitious threats, is the mafia-media complex’s wet dream. Combating that would require intelligence analysis and media production of a quality much higher than the web based media is capable of, because alerting people to real threats and steering them away from bullshit, and doing so on a daily basis, is not an easy task. I got involved with all that with the intention of trying to raise the standards, what I found was that most people didn’t give a fuck. Hence my desire for a different approach, and our discussions.

This mirrors the development of the cerebral cortex in humans, developed to repress the raw power of the inner layers of the brain because it is simply more prudent to do so in order to survive more powerfully. Mandatory self-enslavement due to nothing more than successful biological circumstance.

Reflecting this aspect of human biology back outwards to society, one’s individual purpose translates into economic organisation - to which we freely are, on an individual level, happy to subject ourselves to - but apparently not on a societal level. But then individual biologies differ (but so do various different parts of our body, that all work together). Our economy must take this into account. Else we fall into the same trap of blaming the name of the institution - whether it be “God”, “State”, or “market”, rather than the common form of all three.

The OP just seems like a dishonest rationalisation that the market is any different from God or State. Maybe the market just hasn’t yet developed capital letter status. It’s just another form of the same meta-individual purpose…

The market is the God-State of mediocrity because price is the average “quantified” value that everyone is individually willing to sacrifice for something. Only it is mixed with the God-State of elitism because prices are set more by those in power than those without. Think of it like a bell-curve (Gaussian distribution) but shifted “to the right” where the y-axis is degree of market-value influence. The more luxury the item/service, the further shifted to the right. Adding all markets together, you get a cumulative distribution function. This has power as the y-axis.

The common criticism of solutions such as “evening out the distribution of power” (equality) is that the volume under the curve has to be constant, lessening the power of the rich to the benefit of the poor (only the volume might even decrease if we allowed this).
I propose we make more use of the poor without compromising the power of the already rich. The poor don’t need keeping down, they need their potential to be realised. The rich already have that.

I suppose I am advocating some kind of Hindu system, except instead of being based in endogamy it would be based on individual preference with “castes” infinite and self-formed. Any incentives based on superiority are internalised within each “caste” so there’s still competition. Only I’m fairly sure that such a system needs an overall direction of the “brain”. But that would take us back to the conundrum of which “overall purpose” we are to bow down to: God, State or Market…

Much the same as saying “[any type of economy] works in theory but not in practice”. One can either say that such a theory did not take sufficient account of the nature of the people using it, or it did not sufficiently discriminate between people using it - disallowing those that would otherwise ruin it.

The problem with this ideal is that essentials need other services applied to them in order to be available. Water, food, clothing and shelter need raw material extraction, often manufacture, and always distribution. Farming has to be intensive and localised in order to provide for so many people, necessitating distribution, and even security and supervisory analysis. Water needs to be treated because we’re so fucking dirty. Clothing and shelter need to be constructed… All these services have to be applied to the essentials in order for them to become available - services that don’t come for free.

I wouldn’t worry too much about him - Das Experiment isn’t a real anarchist, he’s just one of those young men who, frustrated by poor employment prospects at the point in his life cycle where he’s at his peak of testosterone production telling him to go out and make his mark on the world, has made the mistake of identifying with anarchism as a sort of displacement activity.

Silhouette - fascinating analogy to the brain. I will respond later, have to ponder this.

Stoic - I know Das Experiment, he’s done more politically already than 99% of the sites members will do in their life. People who actually have their words followed by actions are extremely rare, and it’s an ugly fact that the mobs of this site consistently try to put down such a person who actually manages to make a mark, have an influence, do something.

Thankfully this in no way reflects on DE’s actual actions, but only on the site and the general quality of its posters - your unintended suggestion that having a set of testicles makes one less of a man.

I’m nearly 31, therefore nowhere near the peak of testosterone production, I have two jobs (one working for a charity, one self-employed selling my book and writing another) which embody my moral and personal principles, and I have actually done quite a lot in recent years to try to undermine the state and demonstrate that ordinary people can do things better than governments can.

Edit - for those that don’t know, I’ve produced two feature length documentaries that, whatever you think of the production values, are rigorously researched. Given that they are investigative documentaries, that is their purpose, and that I had no money and no training, the research was the important bit and everyone who has watched my films has praised the quality and quantity of research in them. Plus the production values aren’t that bad, they’ve both been watched by over 100,000 people, all over the world. This year I published my first book which broke even in less than three months and has now made enough money for a second print run, and to fund the first print of my second book. I’m not saying this to brag, but to illustrate what’s fucking possible if you actually bother to do something with your life. And now I’ve done these things I don’t have much choice but to continue - it would be madness to stop now.

So you’d be wrong about all of this. The fake anarchists are currently sitting in a park somewhere waving a sign saying that other people should be looking at and/or doing something about something. Feel free to go and hassle them into doing something more useful with their lives, but leave me out of your childish fantasies. Who knows why Carleas made you a moderator, at least Pav was a reasonably nice guy (though a coward who perma-banned me days before quitting the forum for good), but you’re just a complete dick.

fc----I don’t know this de…exactly what has he done…I need to know in order to compare him to me…

I don’t see a difference at all anymore between government and corporations. In Holland, virtually all the news about what the government does is about how well it obeys certain corporate interests in curbing other corporate interests. What I mean is, the government of the state is the corporate boardrooms. The parliamentary system is now almost pure sham. It has become so in recent decades, after the collapse of the USSR. Before that there was still a powerful political dichotomy within the state.

That is a very good point.

This all depends on our [the states] conception of viable medical technology. I disagree with that conception for about 80/90%, though of course not with all of it. I am certainly well aware that both diseases and treatments are created in order to drawn funds into certain industries, and that cheap and simple cures are legally banned, destroyed and their creators murdered. So there’s all that, it’s uncomfortable to talk about really. But the medical industry is at the very core of the corporate state, there’s literally nothing that anchors it deeper, it outperforms even the military branch.

That’s why I found that value had to be placed at the very root of logic itself, for logic to be able to operate on truly significant levels.
value always precedes logic. Logic is the basic instrument of operating value. As a tool, it is worthless or worse when we do not first clearly perceive what is valuable to us.

Very true and in this light we should look at Silhouette’s point about the brain.

What’s important to know is that our state is not the only problem. There is an even greater problem with the Islamic religion. We can not break down our own state before the Islamic hegemony has been dismantled. Both are the result of fear, the pretense of security. We can not break down any state on any other ground than having found a true security. And such true security only arises from properly understanding what makes organisms tick. Hence, I say we must start with the logic of value. We must start from the ground up even when the massive security machines are still expanding.

The only way to approach a solution is to seek to eliminate, on a psychological level, the causes for people to become uprooted and excessively violent, universal threats. You can’t ever eliminate the threats implicit in the will to power, itself - that should not be the purpose. We can only seek to reinvent the concept of power altogether. This is the sort of thing that (the legend of) Jesus is about, and as sorry I am to bring up a religious figure, we may perhaps look at the philosophy of Christianity as a means to disconnect the self-valuing from the state and to generate a spontaneous self-value-based order locally.

I have grown tired of the Nietzschean view of Christianity. I rather prefer the Napoleonic view now.

People who can not value themselves in terms of the world around them will value the death of those around them in terms of their own self-value. So what is required is to make the world appear differently. As it will always be clear that the world is will to power, it is necessary to come to terms with power, to value power itself in terms of our power to value.

I am aware that my practical ideas are only viable in a context that is not real at this point. But we are living in a context where virtually nothing that I consider to be viable is possible. So my task so far has been to establish a kind of Vestal flame in the middle of the wilderness. I have not actually started the work of building a political form, nor am I sure this task should fall onto me. This layered form of economics is one of the first practical forms I’ve come up with.

Such discussions are very difficult, because I have to make sense in two contradicting contexts at once. The current state needs to be used in order to cause its own gradual dissolution. My mentioning of Christianity should be seen in this light. In general, I can easily see Marxism as well as anarchism as related to early, pre-church Christianity. And value ontology may be interpreted even as a rational definition of what once was called ‘the Christ’ – the anointed one, ‘God within’.

ill try again

Why don’t you read DE’s own post?

i’m NOT an anarchist because i don’t trust people be sensible, look after themselves, and functionally coexist without oversight by an authority. i lack that faith in humanity. It strikes me as dangerously naive.

fc----I don’t know this de…exactly what has he done…I need to know in order to compare him to me…
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ill try again
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Why don’t you read DE’s own post?
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I did…

There is one thing that represents the only sanity involved in establishing a State - Commonwealth.

And it is that concept that is then used by the sociopaths through obfuscation, terrorism, and misdirection that allows the common wealth to be twisted into the common poverty.

Learn how to verify if something is a true common wealth before presuming it to be, and the sociopaths lose all power to corrupt the only good purpose of a State.

This is in agreement with my analogy between “archies” and “theisms”:

a(n)-archy : a-theism
mon(o)-archy : mono-theism [cf. Christ as “King”]
olig(o)-archy : poly-theism [“few” and “many” being relative terms]
pan-archy : pan-theism

“Panarchy” here does not refer to how the word has already been coined; instead, it refers to the positive form of anarchy, even as pantheism (“all is divine”) is the positive form of atheism (“nothing is divine”).

James - Yes. A question of economy, of proper investment and distribution. A functional concept of value is all that is required. What do you think of the three or more layer system?

Sauwelios - what would you suppose a pan-archic sociery would look like?

Turtle - you don’t need to compare Das Experiment to yourself. You can just read what he says, and consider if you agree or disagree.
I was only responding like this because Stoic Guardian pretended to know what DE does besides when he writes these posts. He doesn’t. It’s weird behavior for a normal poster, but even more out of place for a mod.

This seems like a valid comparison to a significant degree. The limit is that a brain stands in relation to other brains, other beings - not just its fellows but also its prey and hunters. The Earths population does not have such external references.

I see the market as fundamentally different from State and Church, as it does not need a moral requirement.
It’s a matter of basic necessities, tastes, will to power, suffering and bounty - very much like life. It has no need of an interpreter, an authority, a representative - it’s not fake. It is of course not very accommodating to weakness, but it isn’t cruel by nature - it gets to be so because it is artificially tilted and skewed in the struggle between governments and between governments and citizens.

What’s wrong with averaging out value-estimates to facilitate a fluid system of transactions? I’d say long as the identities of the valuers are not averaged out, that’s fine.

What do you mean by that exactly?

I’m not sure I understand. Could you rephrase that in terms of limits? What does the upper right corner (x,y) represent?

I regard these as the most excellent economic ethics.
Yes, away with the dogmas of scarcity and zero-sum interactions.

a purpose is indeed always a necessary condition of a coherent collective. That is why I do not want to declare an a priori collective, and where I agree with the idea of spontaneous economic segregation based on values, I do not think that such can be established or maintained from above. It’s a bit like relativity - there is no objective reference frame.

Value ontology, a mathematical extension of it, would serve as the ground for transforms to communicate, translate values from realm to realm.

Perhaps the state should exist only as a set of mathematical operations.

I think all top down systems operated by humans are bound to that.
Have you read the book Parkinsons Law? (not the guy of the disease)
I just got my hands on that - it’s amazing how elegantly it predicts the clogging of any kid of administrative system.

This would be resolved, theoretically, by the redistribution of people across land, and the de-specialization of agricultural industries. I think that’s a very good idea anyhow. Urbanization is, quite obviously to me, very dangerous and self-destructive. I love cities, as I love humanity, but I would be happiest with expanses of land and a proper physical context from which my values are drawn.

I suppose I am some kind of anarchist also, but I wonder about this part. If people are creative, intelligent, good natured, compassionate, innovative and funny, why are so few of them anarchists? I actually don’t find myself thinking those adjectives when dealing with most people, but I thought I would ask it via the anarchist issue to you. If they have been in some way brainwashed not to consider anarchism, isn’t this showing a limit on their intelligence and creativity? If it is some other factor that stops them, what is it? I have to say I don’t find most people compassionate. If you are a legitimate victim - the criteria for determining this varies - they may exhibit the form of compassion and some likely also actually feel it, but it seems like a lot of people fall outside ‘justified recipient of compassion’ status. I also find a lot of blame out there. Here’s what you did wrong. If you thought more positively… and other non-compassionate reactions to people who are suffering or not succeeding. I am not advocating that one wander around glopping one’s heart on the problems of others. In fact I see a lot of Active cruelty - most of it attitudinal, some of it acted out. Anarchism, it seems to me, depends on the qualities you mentioned. I am not sure where the discussion can go if you experience people as generally fitting those qualities and I do not, but I want to explore it a bit and see how we are each reaching our conclusions.

Well, after I posted that, I realised the significance of the number 4, and indeed, I now think the four resonate with the four natural castes (temperaments) I discern. The iNtuitive Thinkers are then the natural pantheists, the iNtuitive Feelers the natural polytheists, the Sensing Judgers the natural monotheists, and the Sensing Perceivers the natural atheists. This suggests that the philosopher needs to go down from pantheism to polytheism—as you have suggested before—in order to appeal to the noble knight crusaders. A panarchic society could then only be a society of philosophers—which Strauss in his “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari” cryptically calls “a society of robbers”, by the way.

Because the state has built itself up to the point where it is the path of least resistance. To be an anarchist these days you have to avoid the state on a frequent basis, whereas in the past you could largely just ignore it.

Besides which, my argument is that inasmuch as people are creative, intelligent, good natured, compassionate, innovative and funny, they are anarchists. Inasmuch as they are other things, they are not anarchists (though not quite because the list we’re repeating is not complete), because that is what ‘anarchism’ means to me, it means the advancement of those aspects of humanity. A society that advances those, even if it still has a government, is inherently anarchic, or perhaps value-archic.

Yes, but I never said these characteristics were limitless, nor that they summed up the whole of humanity. Humanity is capable of the opposite of these things, of course. Though now you’ve asked, I see these aspects of humanity that I am trying to advance as limitless in potential, whereas the statist aspects are inherently destructive and self-destructive, and so would inevitably lead to death and hence are not limitless in potential.

Like I say, I think it is the state making itself the path of least resistance. It’s made so much easier to run into the slaughterhouse because you get a free toy if you run into the slaughterhouse, whereas if you refuse to go anywhere near the slaughterhouse then the slaughterhouse guards come and try and take your toys off you. So I say turn the toys into weapons to undermine the very existence of the slaughterhouse.

You’re talking about people’s compassion towards people they only know through vicarious media coverage of crime and so forth. I’d argue that’s a terrible measure of how compassionate humans are, as indeed the reactions brought on by mediated reality is one of the main things driving human shitiness. It’s kinda like saying ‘these people with their hands chained to a wall aren’t doing much landscape gardening, thus humanity is crap at landscape gardening’.

OK, that analogy is flawed for all sorts of reasons, but you see what I mean, it’s just a bad measure of what humans are, because it’s a mechanism being used for turning them into something else. No doubt digitally replicated human beings (the ultimate transhuman social control method) would have no compassion whatsoever, because ‘compassion’ would be irrelevant and meaningless by that point.

The vast majority of that behaviour is inspired and provoked and managed by the state, or rather by the people who make up ‘the state’.

It not only depends on those qualities, it IS those qualities (by the way I’ve come to see it).

Well, we need to define the disagreement more clearly - do we mean that ‘people generally fit those qualities’? I don’t. I’m not saying these are the overwhelming characteristics of human nature, I’m saying they are utterly natural qualities that almost all humans have, and that they are what is most self-nourishing and therefore valuable about human beings. Politically, I’m saying they are the vital components of an anarchistic society, and so how well we advance those characteristics so they become a more common part of people’s behaviour and attitudes is, in fact, the measure of how anarchistic our society is.

I hope I’ve clarified here - there is a tendency in Western culture towards cynical fallacies, such as confusing ‘you sometimes do selfish/inconsiderate things’ with ‘you are selfish/inconsiderate’. We tend to generalise what is bad about people and trivialise what’s good about them. If we can turn that one around so we just have a more realistic appreciation of what we are, what we can be, and what we want to be then that’s a political-philosophical goal that is worth accomplishing. Plus it isn’t anyway near as hard as one might think it is.

You are an anarchist merely because you cannot clearly see anything better to be.
Although I might suggest that you instead learn and teach people how to clearly see.