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ziq wrote (edited )

So if individualists understand people now as mostly selfish in a "if we won't help ourselves, no one will" way, that makes more sense, but I don't really understand why it seems like a kind of fixed position.

The thing about most individualists is they refute the idea of any kind of fixed positions. But they also hold as truth that all animals serve the self first, and any other considerations come after. You could call it a contradiction.

If we're talking about egoists - they might be happy to die to save the life of another, but they don't consider this an unselfish act. They'd be sacrificing their life for a selfish reason - be it for love or dedication to some sort of ideal.

They see love, heroism, etc as being selfish because we do these things primarily for ourselves. Mutual aid, we do it because it feels good to help others. So we do it to satisfy the self; which is a selfish act. Hope that's clear.

I get the sense that collectivists are authoritarian and that individualists as you've described them are good except for a kind of selfishness implied by their view of people.

This is how individualists feel about collectivists, yes. They feel that any attempt at global social anarchy will result in yet another failed Bolshevism-esque experiment because they see a collective as a form of power that can be corrupted. They don't believe that anarcho-communism would be that different in practice than Bolshevism.

Anticivs, for example, are certainly right about that, because any industrial society would fail their desires, whether it's fully communist or not.

A useful comparison is how Freetown Christiania no longer serves the purpose it set out to and has just become a place to buy weed. The founders got older, they lost interest in the experiment, and the whole thing is now barely a footnote in anarchist history.

But because it's just one community, its failure won't affect any of the other anarchist communes around the world.

In a global collective; failure of the system could spread like root rot and all of society could collapse like the Soviet Union did.

We would theoretically make every attempt to have Anarcho-communism be decentralized. But in practice, when billions of disparate people are involved and not just a small group of well-read radicals... And there are millions of hostile actors working to sabotage our efforts and return the world to capitalism... Any number of things could go wrong. If the people perceive global anarchism as having failed, that would be the end of it. Individualists would rather keep things on a small scale, build their small communities (or not) and exist despite the outside world.

It's also a given that the most dominant personalities would have the most influence over an ancom society. People would put their trust in leader figures - looking to them for guidance. There's a definite threat of a personality cult arising, and the personality then deciding to change things for the worse, with their followers backing them up.

There's no reason to think a global ancom society would be invulnerable to the cult of personality mentality that destroyed the USSR when today's anarchists are so infatuated with Bookchin or Chomsky and will attack anyone that criticizes them. And these are just a few thousand people, when you take anarchism to the wider population, the vast majority of people aren't going to be conscious of traps like personality cults. They wouldn't even care to reject hierarchy. Expecting billions of people to act super-enlightened and maintain an anarchist purity that they have no concept of is a fools errand.

I'm getting confused also because it seems in conflict with your your relationship to the cosmos and everything seems to be at odds with this, where you seem to be saying that seeing ourselves as unrelated to everything is a mistake. Or are you saying that though we want to feel a part of everything again, our purpose at the moment is to be individualists focused on life as individuals, before the cloud is lifted?

This is going to get a bit out there, which is why I made that reply a separate comment; it's not really related to anarchism and there's no science to it other than intuition.

When I said "when the cloud is lifted" I meant: when we die.

I think we take human form because we have stuff we need to work out. We can only address these issues if we isolate ourselves from the whole so we can focus on working through them. Every time we remove ourselves from the universal consciousness and take human form, it's to address the questions that arose from our previous lives.

For a very simplified example - if we were arrogant and brash in the last life - in this life we would work at being more humble. Every time we take solid form, we do it to reach a greater understanding. When we die and return to being one immense body of energy, we bring back those lessons we learned to the collective and its better for it.

But while we're human, we feel as if we're severed from the universe - the collective energy - and its difficult for us to see beyond the self unless we strive to reach that state through meditation or psychedelics.

But I also think of anarchism as a multi-generational project of unlearning the old world.

Totally agree.

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