Submitted by ziq in AskRaddle (edited )

I've been accused of essentialism twice today but it occurs to me most of the things anarchists believe can readily be described as essentialist. All cops are bastards? No gods no masters? No platform for fascism? It's all one big essentialist parade.

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GlangSnorrisson wrote

I don’t think any of your examples are essentialism but I’m definitely not an expert.

As far as all power corrupts goes, it might be that there are some “incorruptible” folks in the world, but “power, broadly speaking, has a marked tendency to push people towards horrible behaviour, with a few exceptions we can only suppose” is a lot less elegant.

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Hibiscus_Syrup wrote

I don't think that all power corrupts necessarily, it just provides the conditions for corruptions. Power is also what decentralises our preferred decentralised societies, and those decentralised nodes that ward off the state end up becoming its cogs if the state takes over. The emergence of a state power requires those mechanisms that ward off the state in the first place, but similarly those mechanisms have the power to unmake the state.

I think that anarchism can in one way boil down to a rejection of all relations of policing, but it doesn't need to be framed in those terms.
I'm fine with small decentralised gods that have no coercive power, and masters are just a kind of police to me.

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mofongo wrote

What is essentialism?

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ziq OP wrote

I didn't know either until someone accused me of it yesterday.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism

Really it's just some elitist philosophy-nerd catchphrase where they use the word as a crutch to attack ideas they perceive as threats to whatever thousands year old philosophical dogma they've decided to fuse with their identity, without actually having to explain why they find your idea so worthy of scorn. Passive aggressive af.

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[deleted] wrote

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macwa wrote

Can you show me what they said that made you upset? I can't find it.

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[deleted] wrote

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existential1 wrote

Thanks for posting, I must have missed all of this context. After having read these posts, I'd say I can see why people would argue but there will be no resolution. Both sides aren't necessarily wrong, and are completely correct if viewed from their own point of lens. And neither side seems to be interested in (or capable of) expressing the empathy necessary to close the gap. But, that's life on the internet.

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macwa wrote

That wiki made me even more confused to be honest.

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helloguysmaster wrote

Power corrupts when it's based on arbitrary rules, e.g. I might have more power than you because people like me more, but that doesn't mean that I am corrupt or that you are oppressed. On the other hand, if I use the laws of capitalism to exploit you then I am corrupt.

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Bezotcovschina wrote

I do believe in merits of approaching every statement in Discordian "Every strict statement is false" manner.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

All power corrupts

I think this slogan is kind of vague, for example I think that power co-created between people can be both thrilling and benign, even quite good. I don't like the slogan "all power corrupts" because it kind of excuses the choices of people in power, and let's them feel better about their decision by blending into a larger trend or mass. It also has its theological roots in the monotheist virus, Adam and Eve, fall from grace, etc. I associate it with liberals, not really with anarchists, if I'm honest.

All cops are bastards

Well, anyone who signs up to enforce evictions and rack up convictions, is a bastard. This is just the appropriate, subjective definition of what a cop is, for someone who feels more likely to be targeted than privileged by a criminalizing system. I think that, far from essentialism, this is a quite specific and precise turn of phrase which does not type people inherently as "assigned cop at birth", but rather judges people based on their actions and organizations on an ongoing basis.

No gods no masters

This is a demand, it's not a statement of how the world is. It is a goal, not a description of the present, so it cannot be reductively essentialist in the way that you are implying from the pattern set by the first two phrases you mentioned.

No Platform for fascism

ibid

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d4rk wrote

Depends on the nature of that power, because power is inherently just a freedom to do to an object. The "all power corrupts" well yes in the case of power over people who are not objects to begin with.

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Majrelende wrote

What would be an object, in this case?

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d4rk wrote

The definition of what is an object, what is a subject and what can be considered the appropriate nature of coercion should have been solved in a debate long ago. There's usually a Authright argument to this that I keep on receiving one time with one of my peers saying that

a woman pushing a child into the world coerces her vagina and cervix to coerce her child to remove it from it's place optimum care to one where suffering is a certainty and abuse of powers above it, seemingly, is a fact of life.

So the nature of the uses of a tool justifies the existence of the tool and at the same time defines "what is an object".

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d4rk wrote

If one uses a computer one coerces authority on that computer as one who has the freedom to use it as a tool to an end. You can use it to calculate, write or in my case use social media, all of these programs, mechanisms and electrical functions is subject to a cybernetic will to restrict a certain flow of current in an attempt to create theoretical signals that can also be cybernetically analyzed.

Having a freedom to oppress a computer is definitely not controversial.

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