I honestly don't think anarchy is something you can be taught

Submitted by ziq in Anarchism (edited )

Can someone really like being ruled and then just stop liking being ruled because someone wrote about the marvels of mutual aid?

If you're the kind of person who has long leaned on the steady, guiding hand of authority, who lives in fear of life without the blood-soaked safety nets that have been wrapped tightly around you to make you feel warm and fuzzy while the rest of the world burns just out of sight, are you really going to abandon those proclivities just because you read some zines about capitalism's failings?

If you spend your days basking in the calming radioactive glow of Law and Order or The West Wing reruns and lining up to receive the steady dopamine injections provided by Amazon Prime and the professional influencers who litter your Instagram feed, will you ever want to give that up? To give up the comforts of your cushy civilized life to take a leap into the unknown?

If it ever fell on you to slay leviathan, and watch every luxury and security you know and depend on spew out of its belly and rot, would you valiantly lift that sword and charge the beast, or turn and scarper back to civilization's warm embrace?

Does it make any sense to brand yourself an anarchist when anarchy conflicts with all your deep-seeded needs and desires? Won't it only serve to stress the fuck out of the rest of us when you lay your baggage down at our feet and demand we diminish our innate need for autonomy, our ineradicable disgust for all forms of authority, so as to not alienate poor little you and your perverse authority fetish (with Kropotkinite characteristics)?

Who are you, really?

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celebratedrecluse wrote (edited )

Can someone really like being ruled and then just stop liking being ruled because someone wrote about the marvels of mutual aid?

Yes in fact. Someone can be ruled by the desire to rule, until they understand that desire for what it is, and understand other ways of being by seeing them modeled in some way.

I've seen this in a variety of forms, and you're right that it's not likely to work in a purely theoretical frame. The illusion of having the platonic truth, however, is much easier than an actual truth, when everything is so abstracted.

You see this behavior in many children as they mature; some will be bullies, until they gain a greater understanding of themselves and the world. The work of childraising is an exercise in patience where the child is slowly coming to these understandings, making many mistakes along the way.

Of course, many remain bullies, and will as long as hierarchical society reinforces those bullying behaviors.

One way to confront this, is by thinking out in abstracts, and writing or reading about them.

But you're right, it's often not the best way to teach the vast majority of bullies, even unconscious bullies.

The best way isn't a fixed static property, it's relative to each person and more specifically each passing situation. Sometimes it takes multiple ways over a long time. Sometimes, the bully needs to lose something dear to them. Sometimes, the bully will always just be a bully.

Building an antiauthoritarian culture is hard, but essentializing anarchism as an innate individual reaction, one based in the very biology of social conditioning, a condition of risk and valor, seems like a route to cyclically retaining permanent minority status. It's also, just as you allege of the behavior you criticize, kind of elitist, and basically an inaccurate ontological map because most people of any tendancy are quite enslaved to various dogmatic thinking and recurrent conditioned behaviors. Freedom from such minor serfdoms and mental fiefdoms is not associated with politics, in my experience, although the practitioners do often seem to believe they are the one true faith.

I would know, I used to be a priestess like that.

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[deleted] wrote

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ruin wrote

As a parent to four kids (youngest is five, oldest early teens) I can see where you’re coming from but would encourage you to take a different view.

While children may parrot new words and behaviors, I see it more as a process of narrowing of thought and action to conform to the constraints of their social setting rather than a positive learning in most cases.

Our kids are the biggest anarchist project at this stage in our life. We try to raise them with a limitless expectation of freedom and a mind critical and questioning of power and control. It’s hard fucking work.

Basically, I strive to be more like my five year old. A perfect egoist anarchy is my son playing in the woods before I jump in and my expectations fuck him up.

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[deleted] wrote

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ruin wrote

I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to argue, just provide another perspective. Having four children who each developed at vastly differing rates in various aspects has been eye opening. The experience has pushed me further toward egoism and away from leftism for sure.

I personally reject a progressive view of childhood development (and the world in general) and I’m more in the camp of science=religion so no need to quote studies or development experts.

Again, wasn’t trying to pick a fight. I’ve really enjoyed your insights and my comment wasn’t intended as a judgment. Parenting is highly personal and I don’t claim to have all the answers.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

I don't know that generalizing this observation is helpful. Some children will be bullies, some won't, some will be mirrors, and others are quite different from their parents. This isn't a monolithic category.

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

I think it's a keen observation bloodrose makes, that a lot of abused people will soon become abusers because that's what they've been taught. Children, especially are sponges, and we've even seen with AI that if it's fed bigotry, it will rapidly become a bigot. The exceptions are few and far between, but these exceptions are the people who become anarchists. The people who can overcome 20-30 years of programming and reject every coercive authoritarian thought that's been hammered into them by society.

I'd argue that a big chunk of marginalized people are what I'd call natural anarchists. Trans people, for example, living in a cisnormative society where they're constantly berated for not conforming, are going to abhor authority and want to abolish it in order to free themselves from its constraints. I think anyone who has suffered under authority is much more likely to reject it. This rejection can't be learned from books or memes, it comes naturally from a lived experience.

But then there's the other side of the coin... Trans people are informed by a lot of different things than simply their transness, which is how you end up with trans tankies who think a cyborg Stalin will make the world safe for them, essentially doubling down on authority rather than rejecting it.

I think there are abused people who work hard to overcome the abuse-culture they've been taught (anarchists), and there are abused people who will try to make the abuse-culture work for them (archists).

Anarchists don't learn to be anarchists, they unlearn abuse.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

a lot of abused people will soon become abusers

: /

I really think this is quite a bad take, considering the implications of this, and where it is situated in narratives and discourse about abuse.

For example, (part of) your point about trans anarchists seems inconsistent with this. If you applied this logic to this issue, you'd be concluding that trans people are more likely to be tankies or invested in authority.

Plenty of people suffer, and don't then inflict that suffering on others.

I do think you are onto something with your last statement, however. That's a very interesting and poignant way to put it.

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ziq OP wrote

How exactly is it a bad take? You disagreeing with something aka my 37 years of lived experience seeing abused people become abusers doesn't make it a bad take, wtf is with your judgemental virtue signalling lately? Everything I say is offensive to you, and wtf was with that "I used to be a priestess so I know better than you" bullshit? How condescending is that shit? Get over yourself.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq OP wrote

and in the future if ur gonna wokescold me, don't completely misrepresent what I fucking said for the 3rd time in 2 days.

"A lot of abused people" does not mean "all abused people" you toxic narcissist.

I said there are 2 types of abused people. Those who become abusers themselves, and those who work hard to overcome abuse culture. How can you ignore 99% of what I say, and then quote one sentence from it, ignore half the words from that quote ("a lot of"), and try to shame me? Wtf is your issue?

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ziq OP wrote

fuck off and use your actual account coward

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ziq OP wrote

a route to cyclically retaining permanent minority status

This is bad? When have majority groups ever been worth belonging to?

Do you really believe the true rejection of authority is ever going to be a mainstream view on rapidly-collapsing planet inhabited by billions, with everything you know about this world and the propensity for most humans to (re)act out of fear and self interest, guided in every decision by the constant bombardment of intricate propaganda designed to convince them to conform to the collective so as to avoid alienation from their peers? Even within anarchist circles, anarchy is a minority current, completely dwarfed by milquetoast social democracy in anarchist garb.

Do you actually envision anarchy somehow becoming a mainstream concept? Has any mainstream concept even been worth upholding? Would anarchy not be completely sapped of all its meaning if it were to be embraced by any kind of a majority, in any population sample contained within global civilization?

Why do you need anarchy to appeal to the majority? What purpose would it serve for billions of people with wildly different personalities, desires and needs to identify as anarchists? How can anarchy appeal to everyone when the vast, vast majority of people celebrate wildly archist notions including law and order, survival of the fittest, meritocracy, democracy, anti-terrorism, trickle down economics, communism, anti-abortion, men's rights, Christianity, football fandom, justice systems, fascism, agriculture, Islam, supermarkets, zoos, motorways, sweatshop shoes, airplanes, pet tigers and mink coats? Why do all these people with their strong authoritarian desires need to adopt what would most certainly be a shallow anarchist aesthetic? Would it help anarchy? Would it change their lives? Would it make existing anarchists want to continue identifying as anarchists if these people were all lining up behind them because anarchy got mainstream somehow?

Building an antiauthoritarian culture is hard

Building an anti-authoritarian mass-society (i.e. a majority) would be an impossibility, not merely hard. Mass-society isn't capable of rejecting authority because it's an authoritarian construct held together by coercion, threat and violence. No mass of people, no collective can ever successfully overcome authority simply due to the fact that a mass of people is an authority. There is no way to scale up anarchy to fit the needs of a mass society and still have something resembling anarchy left.

Of course, many remain bullies, and will as long as hierarchical society reinforces those bullying behaviors.

Children are sponges for better or worse, but I'm talking about fully formed adults. People that have already paid into the system for years and will now spend the rest of their days propping it up at all costs in order to get their value from it. This is why the system keeps chugging along even as the planet rapidly goes down in flames. The majority of people have committed to the system to varying degrees and most are unwilling to break that commitment if it will cost them anything to do so or make them feel as if they've wasted their lives in service of something that would no longer exist. Look at all the backlash from people old enough to have paid off their student loans when anyone suggests younger people's loans be dismissed.

The minority willing to give up their entitlements and make do without the security blanket of states and capital are anarchists. Most people raised inside the system aren't anarchists and have no interest in sacrificing their "rights" to be anarchists, and no amount of culture building is going to change that. They will react violently to any suggestion that their savings be rendered worthless, that their property values be abolished, that the police that protect their property values and savings be dismantled, or that lowly migrants be given equal status as them in society. Anarchy is the polar opposite of every greed-and-fear-fueled desire they have.

essentializing anarchism

Is that really so bad? Doesn't anarchy have a few essential properties in its makeup that all anarchists should be expected to appreciate? Shouldn't every anarchist reject authority and embrace autonomy, freedom of association, mutual aid, direct action? Is that too high a bar to set?

A lot of times I feel people drop dogmatic shame-phrases like 'essentialism' to tarnish ideas without actually doing any work to consider why the idea needs to be rejected. More often than not, they wish to reject the idea simply due to whatever internalized dogma they've decided is unassailable.

If I need to be an essentialist to say anarchists should actually desire anarchy to be anarchists, and not simply have some loose appreciation for socialist academics, then I'll wear the label proudly. I'm an essentialist.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

When have majority groups ever been worth belonging to?

It has been worth belonging to them, when belonging to them brings the means of existence. When have minority groups ever been worth belonging to? Much more rarely than that.

You can only be who you can be, and it's not a good life that is lived inauthentically or against one's principles. But it is a terrible life, to be lived only partially and in perpetual frustration.

If living in frustration is, as you are saying, just the immutable nature of reality for the authentic anarchist, well then there is no reason to be anarchist. If there is no goal to eliminate hierarchies except in your direct frame of reference, one isn't really anarchist, as much as one is someone engaged in private life apart from anything political, cultural, or social at all.

This kind of thinking not only is built upon misanthropy, but also reproduces it. It also goes against the fundamental worldview of intersectionality, which to the contrary sees human beings as flawed, deeply divided, yet drawn together by oppressive forces which unite against us.

This self-consciously minoritarian anarchist worldview, has no future, nor wants one, and is content to be determined by the course of events around it. It is the ideology of spectation, the rejection of history, and really leads back to neoliberalism's aggressive and paranoid reiteration, its penumonic phrase:

This is all there is. There is nothing else. Things can only be this way.

However, if living in frustration is simply one of many ways that anarchists can exist; if there is a world where social change actually does happen, albeit in intermittent bursts and indirect pathways and through supra-human timescales; if the collapse of economic homeostasis allows and in fact promotes the growth of things to replace it; if there are, for each and all of the many multiplying crises, a window into future possible worlds, with their own horrors and catharses; then perhaps it is not so good to think of ourselves as tortured artists, separate from a perceived mass, whom we look down upon from our perch of understanding.

Is that really so bad? Doesn't anarchy have a few essential properties in its makeup that all anarchists should be expected to appreciate?

I think you are responding to the word essentialism in the abstract, rather than the in-context point i was trying to make with the word. Self-consciously identifying as an enlightened, subordinated minority is...not the way I want to be anarchist.

Sure, there are people who call themselves anarchist, who don't really apply that. And there are perils to complying with majoritarian thinking; majorities are rarely needed. But framing oneself as a minority, is different than rejecting majoritarian thinking; it in fact, reifies the binary, no?

I will say, it is my opinion that, it is bad to think anarchists embody something superior to what is, because we'll never find out what will be, unless we give that world a chance to develop. And that means engaging with it as equals, as people part of a larger whole, with all that whole's properties both negative to our desires, and some which are positively affirming of our shared desires as anarchists.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq OP wrote

A person's nature isn't something they're born with, it's something that develops over time, but especially during childhood, which is quite literally our formative years. It's my nature to need solitude, not because I was born a loner, but because years of traumatic experiences have led me to avoid people.

Btw using an alt to call me an essentialist is cowardly and makes me not give a shit what you think. Your knee-jerk reaction to the word 'nature' tells me everything I need to know about who you are.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

k so that's just completely redefining "nature" to mean its opposite (nurture).

When has anyone ever uttered the words "it's in your nurture"? Never. That's not a sentence. "It's in your nature", however, is an incredibly common phrase used everyday to describe someone's character.

My personal nature has certainly been influenced by my genes/blood (because of my various disabilities) that have affected the way I interact with the world in multiple ways, but society's reactions to my existence, especially in childhood, have been far more influential to my nature than my shitty genes.

I abhor authority because of the way people have forced it on me or exploited me with it, not because it's something I inherited from my bloodline or whatever the fuck you're trying to claim I said. No one is born with the capacity to hate authority. It's something that comes from our lived experience, especially during our formative years.

Imagine making an alt to attack me for saying it's not in everyone's nature to be an anarchist... It was such a harmless comment, a common phrase everyone uses. Have you considered that maybe your pissy reaction to my completely inoffensive comment and your current attempt to tell me what my own ideas mean says more about your politics than mine?

Yet you're now claiming this is something that can develop over time?

No, my point was that you can't learn it from a book. It's something that's instilled in you by your formative experiences. If you're not already averse to authority, you can't become averse to it by reading Kropotkin.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

I haven't backpedaled on anything.

I had no idea what you were talking about at first and it took a half hour of reading about essentialism before I realized your comment was an attack and that I'd offended you somehow. Then it took you attacking me further in a different post before I realized you were using an entirely different definition of nature than I was, and that's what set you off.

You tried to ascribe the obscure scientific definition of 'nature' onto my usage of the word when I was using the far more common colloquial definition ("disposition, temperament"), and then you mocked me for your misconception. You could have just asked me to explain what I meant, but you went straight for the snark.

Are you seriously going there? This is literally the argument rightwingers use to deflect from their shit

I see this is a pattern with you so I'm just going to disengage before I stress myself out trying to appease your impossible standards for discourse. It's never fun when the person misconstruing your words to paint you as a conservative then accuses you of acting like a reactionary for defending yourself.

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rot wrote

My #1 worst fear might be that i'm wrong about ppl. That most of us really do need leadership and that mutual or community efforts are doomed, that capitalism or state control is the default and that we're too weak to care for ourselves

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celebratedrecluse wrote

I share this fear.

weakness, like strength, is produced by the conditions and choices which surround and permeate such a condition.

We are both as weak as you fear, and as strong as you hope. More than anything else, we are elastic, stubborn, and above all adapatable. our ancestors have survived catastrophes we cannot imagine, created catastrophes we are still dealing with, betrayed our basic principles, died for a chance at something better. We have abandoned our friends, killed our dreams, and hollowed out our relationships. And yet, we all made those friendships, had the dreams, started those connections. For every loss, there were innumerable moments of creative destruction, passionate caretaking, the love which made the loss stick so prominently in our tears.

I believe that some of us will survive, and will have enough desire to avenge our losses, that control systems will be forced to in turn adapt and change to our persistence and stubborn conviction to exist. In the dance of the subaltern, there are always steps ahead, and though there is rhythm, there is no necessity that one stays in place, or even with one's dance partners.

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videl wrote

maybe most people do but i'd settle if they would just leave me out of it

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Hibiscus_Syrup wrote

I think that building anarchy as a multi-generational project is one which we try to maximise the conditions where people can have affinity with anarchism. Liberals etc are a dead end, but working to change the the way that people on a broad scale are open to and embracing of the ideas is how making anarchy looks at a general level.

Of course there's not real time for this since the world is dying, but since anarchism is a tension and our work was decentralised, fluid and temporary anyway, it doesn't affect too much, so far as I can tell.

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macwa wrote

Why are so many Raddle.me users against civilization? What's wrong with being civilized?

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ziq OP wrote

As civilization progressed, city-states and then nations were structured the way families were structured in agricultural society: A patriarch who everyone has to obey. The patriarch made everyone in the household work to produce wealth for the patriarch, which produced wealth for the local lord, which produced wealth for the king.

Society has been structured that way ever since, despite lords and kings being renamed to politicians and billionaires.

The only way to break with archy is to recognize how it formed and dismantle it brick by brick, going all the way back to the invention of agriculture / grain stores.

With agriculture comes surplus, and if there is a surplus, it will create power for the person or persons who possess the surplus, and they will inevitably use their power to control and exploit others, in order to gain more power and more control.

The very basis of civilization / capitalism / statism is surplus, which can only be accumulated via agriculture, which is the foundation of civilization and all the systems contained within it.

Without surplus, there is no concentrated power and thus no more institutional exploitation to maintain that power. There are no haves and have-nots. No masters and slaves. Without surplus, without civilization, archy is suffocated and anarchy thrives.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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helloguysmaster wrote

I don't think you can hate authority just by reading a book, but I do think that life experiences can. Personally I used to see nothing wrong with most of anything before I fell into some kind of depression for about 6 months; while it didn't happen immediately, over the course of the years since then I have started to realize that there are more and more things wrong with everything than I could have ever imagined before. In other words, the system must negatively affect you before you can decide that the system is negative.

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ziq OP wrote

Yes. It's certainly a prerequisite to being an anarchist. But a lot of non-anarchists are constantly fucked by the system and still choose to prop it up, so it's not a golden ticket.

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CaptainACAB wrote

Yep. Theory is empowered by confirmation-bias; if I didn't already favor anarchy, I'd probably just use anarchist theory to criticize anarchism; the only reason that I would need to read theory is to build on what I already believe in. No one with a positive perspective on insurrectionism would suddenly switch to Marxism-Leninism, Fascism, or "Anarcho"-Capitalism just by reading some book unless they already harbored some sympathy towards that specific ideology or its values. I think the word to emphasize here would be "taught"; anarchy has to be "learned" through experience, observation, or intuition rather than through reading a book, watching a video, or being taught what to think and feel by another human being.

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send_in_the_tanks wrote (edited )

for me i get angry at most things i see. i tends to be a manufacturing of the capitalist ideology the celebrity's or the influences as they like to call themselves. i know people that spend all shopping and looking at Instagram and other mainstream social media. there is also work exploitation slavery the foxxcon suicides the list goes on. it makes everyone sad. so yes i would like spread a anarchists ideology or a markist ideology. but as whether or someone can goodbye to social media and TV there are like drugs there have been countless study's into that

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Bezotcovschina wrote

Everyone is tainted by civilization. Everyone grow up under constant conditioning by state. Systems of oppression are planted its seeds into everyone of us long time ago.

People can change their views dramatically - I did several times. I don't think only a particularly traumatic experience can turn a perverse authority fetishist (with or without Kropotkinite characteristics) into a person with desire of not govern and not being governable.

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stealThaInternet wrote

you are born into anarchy. anarchy is the only world you know as a child. To say that it can be learned is false. Anarchy rules our minds.

our existence is interdependence and until we can unlearn the idea that we are just leaching, dependent, 'tax on the system' we will always form hierarchies and enforce authority because we won't believe we are worthy or have the ability to rule ourselves.

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