Why I am an anarchist

Which still exists incidentally in modern civilization.

Anarchists don’t really have to do much. Statists are already doing very well destroying the world in various different kinds of ways which will eventually end up destroying ninety five percent of the human population.

All anarchists have to do is sit and wait to inherit the soon to be ruins of this planet left by the statists.

The difference I was talking about wasn’t ‘change’ vs. ‘don’t change’. It was more like ‘change by people behaving naturally in response to their needs and changes in their environment’ and ‘change because a handful of academics think they know how to guide society better than these natural forces would do’. It’s a mistake with culture, it’s a mistake with the economy. Or, you know. Says I. I’m against somebody saying “Everything needs to be commercialized” or “everything needs to be egalitarian” and creating an abnormal society of square pegs in round holes because enforcing the ideal is more important than actually lettings humans live their lives.

Uccisore - I agree in general terms. Wherever this top down ‘academic’ will originates, it serves as a force to cause a lessening of power differences, thus lesser power to create changes, within the populace. The curve is flattened, to rise only at an almost absolute differential as it approaches the location of executive wealth.

In a hypothetical, perfectly organic society, every point can always change a point next to it because to not be the same means to be different means to have an effect. In a totally synthetic society, every point is interpreted by every point as being the same as itself, so there is no potential to cause change in each other, no real power differences among the people. At least, in their awareness.

We are close to such a synthetic world. With the exception of the context of playful business such as sports as well as whatever happens outside of what our media consider the civilized world, all people just look up for power, they do not look to what they can do to/with each other. The direction of their desired change is toward an abstract ideal of being super wealthy. In this way no wealthy person ever affects a person next to him as if he is really very powerful. Wealth is spent in the most infantile ways because the very notion of influencing others out of inequality (being ‘better’ as in able to do greater good) is considered not just evil, but impossible.

Charities exist, but they are usually completely megalomanic and abstract. What’s being taken away is the direct chain of events between individuals. The state serves as a mediator, a filter through which every impulse must pass before it can have a substantial influence.

This may have started as the Ten Commandments - that was an advice about how to keep out of harms way within a community. And I guess it still functions like that, but with the harm (bathwater) life itself (baby) is thrown out.

Nor should you - it is an extortion apparatus, that’s the most apt description for it.

I suppose the appeal of the market is that there are already lots of companies and businesses out there who have almost nothing to do with the state, whereas there aren’t many other types of institutions with the same almost-independence, and I do share in finding that appealing.

Of course, like I say that their first port of call. If they can keep you going to work and paying taxes or sitting in your prison cell or doing whatever it is they think you should be doing, without resorting to more cannibalistic methods then they generally prefer that.

Yes, you’ve said this before and you’ve always been right. I dunno, I don’t live that healthy a lifestyle and yet I’m rarely ill and haven’t been to a doctor in years. Maybe I’m lucky, or maybe it’s because I don’t go to the doctor that I’m usually well.

I am not sure that we do. We need an alternative, a mindset that demonstrably functions better, but I don’t think we need a working model. But even if at this stage we only have a mindset that applies to individuals and small groups like families, if it works then it will catch on, because nothing makes a differences to people’s lives more than something that actually makes a difference to their lives.

Besides which, I don’t know what a non-corporate government would look like, though I’m all ears to anyone who wants to explain it to me.

To be clear, I was not objecting to you presenting that view, only to that aspect of the view itself. But there is something crucial in there that separates Christ from other figures who are considered similar. And yes, stripped of the religion, what is left? An awful lot that is nourishing.

Is this the point at which you realise you are being a hypocrite?

You’re against “change because a handful of academics think they know how to guide society better than these natural forces would do”, and “ego-maniacal experimenters and theorists that think they know better than how the culture has developed over time”, yet whether or not one is to dub you ego-maniacal, your theories and practices are in line with your judgment that you know better than how culture has developed over time… which has forever been shaped by people who think they know how to change things for the better! I would even say that culture cannot even exist without people pushing their various ways that they think are best, like you are doing by saying there is some natural way other than the way that nature has presented us with so far.

Your argument only makes any sense if you’re either simply disparaging “academics” and/or the “ego-maniacal” (but everything else in those sentences is fine), or you’re trying to distinguish between people acting according to how they think they know best so long as it is to have effect over only themselves vs. people acting according to how they think they know best when it has effect over others.

In the latter case, you’re simply arguing for a society and/or economy founded only on negative liberties aka. Libertarianism.

…but you say “I’m not a libertarian”.

And what a ridiculous ideology it is anyway, with which you deny acquaintance - one that either ideally suggests that a society/economy of agents ought to live freely from the unwanted effects of one another, as though such a practically impossible scenario could be called society/economy, or it realistically knows that such an idealisation of freedom ends in people impinging on the freedoms of others and thus it can only pre-emptively contradict itself by ensuring that this cannot happen. Lol. You say you are against “enforcing the ideal” so there’s no way you could be affiliated with a doctrine solely founded upon an ideal.

So let’s just say I’m missing something here, rather than jumping to conclusions that you simply haven’t thought this one through. What would that be?

By observing outcomes and how well they fit in with my knowledge of people vs. other people’s knowledge of people - in terms of both quality of prediction correlation with these outcomes and quantity of accurate predictions - in the eyes of others as well as in my own.

Towards the end of your post you accused me of being a Marxist because I reluctantly forced a simple answer to an admittedly vastly complex question. I don’t really feel like doing it again - not because of the association with Marx but because I have no time for ridiculous irrelevant accusations and your contempt and hatred for strawmen.

Not really, people who squander their abilities are going to act in ignorance with or without any electoral system. With one, they contribute heavily to an outcome dominated by political parties that are equivalent to tabloid media in the way in which you describe. Without one, they contribute heavily to something indistinguishable.

To address your slant to Socialists, they are revolutionary, and revolution isn’t a process of indirectly democratically voting on who to have in power like we have now. It literally forces an outcome. Within the Socialist framework, democracy is hugely emphasised at all levels, which become increasingly independent as Communist principles become established and people eventually realise how much better they are and turn away from Capitalist principles by their own accord. Thus the State withers away, giving way to Communism, which is equally democratic. Only the democracy of both Socialism and Communism is free of the opportunistic deception and manipulation and you’re rightly against - it’s simply open, transparent and factual.

This is the kind of thing that I’m talking about when I refer to “what Socialism actually is”, as opposed to the nightmarish distortion that everyone seems to associate it with - as inspired by corrupt and/or Totalitarian governments adopting the name simply because of its good reputation, and dramatic media representation.

Socialism isn’t about forcing people to play nice, it’s about prohibiting people from playing mean when it comes to peoples’ means to live. The former would be a terrible thing, but the latter certainly is not.

You make a lot of dire predictions, and i’ve noticed that many of them do not come true. In any case, even if 95% of the world gets wiped out suddenly, i wonder what makes you think the remaining 5% will be anarchists content to live a hunter gatherer lifestyle?

I disagree with this. I think these forces tend to cause a [i]change[/i] of power differences, and billing the change as a lessening is a sales pitch.   Because of natural aristocracy, there's always going to be power differences, the levelers are just seeking (knowingly or not) to change the rules of the game in such a way that people and merits they favor rise to prominence.   So for example, when somebody says we ought not solve problems with violence, they are (often as not) saying that we OUGHT to solve problems with cunnning, manipulation, or money.  Power doesn't change, how you get it does.  The rest of what you said, I found pretty spot-on and insightful, yes.

A working model only in the sense of a logic that is applicable to every kind of crisis situation we can project. What’s important in the future is to have a critical mass of conscious humans. The state has been necessary only in so far as humans weren’t in the position to value without remorse or fear. These conditions aren’t excess or accident, but conditions of the mind. Only by healing (making whole, completing) the mind do these dispelled. And unlike mystics want, this is done by the toughest and most radical honesty.

We’ve reached agreement on most if not all of these issues. Peculiar how rare that is.
I’d like to offer that Silhouette means well and is realistic. The system is in place and it’s an evolving dragon of popular will, i.e. common sense. I’m sure Von Rivers and Silhouette could find terms on an objective morality. What I would consider a contingency plan wherein every situation is contingent - to the friction between irreducible self-valuings.

It’s awesome that our branch of online philosophy is gaining momentum, has gained a momentum – it lets me relax a bit and include a lot of what I’d strictly consider challengeable ideas, allies and practical truths. There’s no enemy except illogical division - a division of self-valuings holding compatible values. This is the common human (post Babel) condition and result of a belief that the other is other in such a way as to require to change to similar in order to be justified.

Rather, the other, in this system of surplus, is an agent of the self. The self, the human self will no longer ever be the animal, but a God by virtue of his resources, which are other humans turned God in this manner.

Fundamental question of economy: do the parts amount to a greater potential for the individual than the individual does by himself?

The popular will isn't common sense, at least not as I understand it.  Common sense would include what is common to us all, and by us all, I mean those who are dead as well as living- lessons learned can be temporarily forgotten, and at any given moment in time, we are often on that razor's edge between forgetting a lesson of the past, and being harshly reminded of it's importance by nature.  The popular will is an expression of the now, and the now only, and often as not, that isn't 'popular' at all, it's what a handful of academics and politicians and pundits have directed.  You can see that with polling- what people think about issue A if you ask them right after crisis B, as opposed to right before.  I know 'popular opinion of the moment' isn't what Rousseau meant by the popular will, but, if you discount history and the aristocracy of the dead, it amounts to the same thing. 

I think human nature may be like a rubber band, stretched and distorted by various influences, but with a natural tendency to snap back into place, and what we call ‘evolution’ may often times be a look at an action with considering the reaction.

This is true, but what I mean is that the relatively underprivileged section of the population, which I see as anyone who is not above the law in some respect, is pushed to interpret itself as pawns, voters, people who have a minuscule influence on a system that’s on the whole immutable.

What I mean is that, by what Chomsky (with whom I don’t always agree at all) calls the Manufacture of Consent, people are made to interpret their influence, their ‘potential to affect’, in terms of a rather abstract apparatus, the representative segment of the state, rather than in terms of the human right next to them.

Of course, people continue to influence each other directly, but it’s not the main code of the paradigm, so to speak. We’re taught that our most significant power “to do good” is in our right to vote - rather than to spend capital on the world around us.

Look at how the possession of wealth is portrayed everywhere in our culture. It’s supposed to buy you large mansions, jewels and cars, that’s basically it. Basically, wealth is portrayed as utterly ineffective.

So where it is true that we’ll always have a scale of power, the segment that is not “on top of things” is very much undifferentiated, passive, useless. This does not need to be this way - if only wealth were interpreted as the power to have an hard affect completely separate of the channels of politics, the world would instantly go back to a much more natural and ‘anarchistic’ dynamic, much in line with the ideal that brought about the US constitution.

The core of every power structure is its code of human value - if it manages to make humans interpret their power-value in terms of the already existing state, you have taken away all their power to determine their fate.

I’m afraid you are right here, and my conciliatory statements toward what I understand of Silhouette’s notion of Socialism were overly optimistic.

Personally I think that whatever ever was the purpose of Socialism has been long fulfilled in the west, most of it already had been realized in Germany in the 19th century. General voting rights, education for all classes, no more child labor, minimum wage and a couple of other such things.

But in a socialist state it is necessary that the bureaucracy keeps increasing without any added useful work done. In a massive administration such as required for a state which acts as a moral agent, which is what I think Silhouette is aiming at, you end up with half the resources being spent on the administration itself (not that which is being administered) – an increasingly massive fortune is spent on government employees who are doing the work that a fraction of their number could do much more effectively.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson’s_law

That is assuming a best case scenario as far as the administrations agenda is concerned.

I had a political science professor say pretty much the same thing- that all the actual important stuff Marx ever wanted is basically realized now in the United States, and further pushing in that direction isn't warranted.  Of course, that makes Marx pretty off base if true, since we did virtually nothing that he recommended in order to get here other than public education and some relatively half-assed social welfare. 

Necessary? I figured it WOULD increase because socialism creates a system where only those skilled at manipulating the bureaucracy can enjoy luxury, so that’s where all the talent is going to go. But is it mechanically necessary by how socialism works?

Parkinson’s law neatly explains why socialists, feminists, and race-baiters are as busy now as ever.

OK Sil,

But if those other people are stupid wastrels, like you say, who cares what they think? How is that an adequate measure of you being more knowledgeable about other people than other people? The thing seems either circular (people are stupid, therefore I’m more knowledgeable) or self contradictory (stupid people saying I’m knowledgeable, therefore I’m more knowledgeable than them).

In any case, I reject your view of people. I don’t see people in those terms, I think that sort of cynicism is always open to being used as a justification for ordering people around and forcing them to do things. I’m not interested in forcing anyone to do anything.

I called you a Marxist because you’re a Marxist, or at best a post-Marxist. You identify the problem as capitalism per se, you believe in socialism, you are a Marxist. I don’t necessarily use that label as a derogatory term but regardless, it fits. Given that this is fundamentally an argument about what humans are, and therefore what kind of politics naturally flows from that, this tendency you refer to is very important to our disagreement. I would genuinely appreciate it if you would take the time to outline it.

The electoral system (indeed ‘democratic’ culture in general) is one of the main reasons they squander their abilities. They think someone else is taking care of stuff in roughly the right way because they expressed their opinion a few times.

Can you give me a couple of examples of when socialism has been open, transparent and factual in the last couple of centuries of human history? I’m someone who has a lot of time for socialism in some senses of the word, but is radically opposed to socialism in other senses of the word. Thus, I can only work with actual examples rather than theory - the anarcho-capitalists insist that the ‘true free market’ will function in a way that is akin to what you’re outlining, but they never seem to be able to give me examples substantiating this. Hence my scepticism regarding capitalism and socialism, and my attempt to see what it good in each that can be preserved and encouraged and advanced, and the bad in each that must be attacked and overcome if we are to actually make a better world for what is already an inherently good humanity.

I think they adopted ‘socialism’ because it was a good myth to sell to the public, and at the time a popular one amongst the working class. The idea that we all work to ‘pay into’ this massive system of managed interactions and thus we all ‘get out of’ this system the things we need and many of the things we want is enormously attractive. It’s just a massive, horrible failure in reality, and I think the reasons for that could only be overcome by turning humans into something else, which I’m also radically opposed to doing.

It depends on what mechanism you use and how you define ‘playing mean’. This is why I ask for examples, I want to know what you think this would actually look like, beyond the Marxist rhetoric because trust me, I’ve read all that, considered it for a long time, and not found it persuasive. What persuades me about socialists is when they actually do things that benefit their fellow humans, which quite a few have done at various times and in various ways. Even the welfare state as it was originally conceived and set up in the UK wasn’t such a bad idea and certainly benefited a lot of poor people, but the long term consequences of that have been that it has turned into an enormous system for social control. It hasn’t made anyone free, and hasn’t produced the sort of society you have described (which for the record, in theory, I think is rather nice-sounding and not one I’d have much objection about living in, if it could be achieved).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Challe … s_Minister

This series is still the best exploration of the practical problems of government I’ve ever seen on TV, and it’s a 35-year old sitcom.

Do you mean stuff that Marx considered important ot that the proefessor considered important?

Marxism was instrumental in realizing the things I mentioned in Europe.
But yes, America realised a number of things which may be considered Socialist without Marx.

I’m not an expert on Marx, though.

I think so. As Socialism is a statist system, meaning that the central value-standard (moral and economic agent) is the state. Such an arrangement has value gravitate to those who represent that agent - the people who enforce it, who ‘‘are’’ it.

It also explains why half of the governments budget is spent on time-wasting, obstructing and obfuscating of purpose, and thus why mankind is utterly incapable of doing anything other than blindly groping for short term gain.

If the planet becomes uninhabitable in 40 years, it is wholly due to the principle of the State. In the end it only serves to prevent people from checking the destructive influence of other people. The exact opposite of what it is intended to accomplish.

A good way to express it.
The socialist world becomes merely one living entity.
The rest are merely drones serving it.
… easily replaced by much more efficient machines.

You don’t need socialism for that to be true, it’s true anyway.

I mean that we managed to keep private property private, income more or less up to the income-provider, and profit-driven capitalist investment as the financial model that drives business, and still have a world in which people can get fulfilling labor if they work towards it as a goal, aren't slaves to a company, and in general have 'outs' to reduce or avoid being alienated from their labor.  Oh, and we managed to do it in an age in which almost everybody was religious.  So we've come a long way towards curing his problems, without taking the extreme measures he suggested.  If Marx was born in the 70's, it seems unlikely that he would have seen enough wrong with labor to have bothered proposing Marxism. 

People who push for a socialist state now are basically ideologues who just want it that way, not because there are grave problems to which it would be the solution.

Ya, I’m speaking of the U.S. here.

Eh! One of the benefits of being a conservative is that I see all most such situations as being a both/and rather than a either/or.  The State prevents us from checking the destructive influence of others in some ways, helps us do so in others.  There's no ideologically pure answers, just an infinite series of individual cases requiring individual scrutiny.

They’ll be forced into situational anarchism by default of the world’s destroyed infrastructure. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t.

Murphy’s law.

Wow, you have a lot of disturbing faith in the system.