We need to talk...

Anarchy A to Z:
a guide to understanding our history unfolding for the anesthetized and apathetic

K is for Killjoy.

   So far I’ve covered some pretty intense stuff. I’ve outlined the dominant cultural traits we experience on a daily basis without the background information and words to describe their ramifications. In doing so, I have tried to illuminate the origins of the greatest succession of crises to befall planet earth in its 4 billion year history. What about meteor strikes or ice ages? Aren’t these extinction events more significant? Not really. Past extinction events are natural phenomena. They intend to keep the cosmos humble, existing as it does in its orbiting routines, sans any exceptionalist dogma.

   Life and death is a cycle that spares no star. Thus, our own insignificance. Yet we live in an age—an extinction event slowly unfolding—where a single species has done the work of a 10km piece of stellar debris. We are losing biodiversity at a rate that exceeds adaptive mutation. We have changed the surface of the earth, removing mountain tops, dredging canals to link distinct bodies of water and building wave breaks and levees to alter the process of erosion and deposition. Geologists and anthropologists have suggested designating our current era the “Anthropocene.” This does, actually, speak to our significance. But we are cast in a dingy light.    

"The problems of mankind can be solved because we created them."

- Bright Eyes, Firewall

   Humans always create the collapse. Our institutions are monolithic invaders, wrapping their specialized tentacles around us to exact a perfectly destructive order. Our culture of consumerism replaces human relationships with empty emotional bonds with lifeless objects. We are a people of debt. This debt represents disconnection between natural accounting of creation and destruction; we continue to overdraft. Our ecology is in peril. We have been unable or unwilling to implicate ourselves in the ecosystems and climate crises. We see the nonhuman as other because we fear that which what we don’t understand. When we can’t clothes ourselves in the warmth of mystery, we cannot expect to explain our crises, let alone manage them. Instead, we divide ourselves into categories that are easy to understand, narratives of group psychology and group struggle. We cling to these groups because it confirms our biases; it is an act of identity self-preservation in an unexplainable and overwhelmingly dynamic age. We cope with spectacles, and since we can argue--perhaps without challenge--that our political system and throw-away consumer culture have devolved into the most unproductive spectacles, we have to be pragmatic in our approach to resolving our crises.  

   All of this seems pretty negative. And I admit it’s hard to frame such cold and uncomfortable facts in rosy terms. Our “history unfolding” will be the unwritten history of collapse. Our society, like dozens of human societies and animal species before, has grown too complex to survive rapid change. We can cling to emerging technologies, relishing in the vanity of our intelligence, or we can accept that human beings are not the end game of evolution. We are adaptive, and we have that to our advantage as animals whose civilization contracts around them. Yet, we need to remember that humans are merely blobs of energy that by chance alone developed the capacity to become self-aware and manipulate our environment on such a large scale. Even the brightest minds in our media and political spin rooms can’t morph that nightmare into a dream.

We need to proceed with resolute pragmatism. Pragmatism is, in a sense, the opposite of idealism. Idealism is optimism. Pragmatism is pessimism. I am a killjoy.

   Pessimism dissolves the illusions of spectacle. It renders irrelevant the fear of an unknown. “Fuck it” is the pessimist's verse. But this doesn’t make her a nihilist. It makes her better prepared to survive the collapse. The pessimist will have no qualms with the end of civilization. It’s pragmatic to accept reality and start thinking of how to make do, how to salvage the best parts of our culture. We need to think about what skills we need to survive. We need to rediscover the art of food production and preservation. We need to redevelop a spiritual relationship with the land and with each other.

   If a pessimist can share one sliver of hopeful ideal, may it be that our environmental crises do not prevent our adaptation to collapse. If they do, it would be ironically fitting to be the victims of our own genius, responsible for our own extinction. Our civilization is past its peak. So, we face a difficult choice. We can prepare for the collapse with pragmatism, accepting that we must abandon all vestiges of comfort. Or we can ignore the warning signs, desperately gripping the illusion of perpetual progress. Perhaps to aid the decision, we should consider that the longer we hold on to our dying civilization, the greater probability epic violence accompanies the transition.

   Resolving our crises is not about throwing money and mass support behind some futile solution on a drafter's table. Resolving our crises is about managing collapse in a way that preserves that which is worthwhile and fulfilling, while simultaneously undermining any attempt for our systems of injustice to be a thistle in next year's seed.

  

Following the Yellow Brick Road (off a cliff)

Anarchy A to Z:
a guide to understanding our history unfolding for the anesthetized and apathetic

J is for Jesters

   We are consumptive little monsters, individuals suffice existing within our own minds for our own time. We want to control. Yet, because the system is designed and perpetuated through the dichotomy of Haves and Have Nots, we find ourselves as almost wholly powerless. To cope, we embrace the spectacle. Now, I can complain all day about the cult of celebrity and the reality TV show that is the Republican primary election, a spectacle bordering on blood sport replete with hissing Romans. The world is a fucked up place. We need an escape from reality, from time to time, so the history of Depression Era cinema tells. But why spend eighteen bucks on an apropos escape and a box of popcorn when our entire civilization is an illusory spectacle?

   I read, somewhere, that Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is the Communist Manifesto of the 20^th century because of its contribution to the social sciences. I wouldn’t be able to confirm it, though, because the book itself is a spectacle so complex that I need pages of written notes to decipher a two sentence passage. (I came to the conclusion that reading it is as close to dropping acid as one can get in sobriety). The idea of the spectacle is simple, and thus, expectedly powerful. Everything in the post-industrial society is a series of images meant to evoke emotion, to enslave us to power, to confirm our fears of otherness and to pacify the revolutionary impulse of freedom. Look no further than the land of OZ.

   Dorothy was a selfish girl, wanting to wander around all day, justifying the crass behavior of that little rat, Toto. She meets the Fortune Teller, whose entire economy is based on selling spectacle. Dorothy proceeds to escape reality to a land where “little people” are happy, jesters dancing around with their monstrous lollipops—a spectacle, no doubt--neither wage slaves on MGM’s payroll, nor victims of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. She meets the characters of a depressed society. The Wizard says, “Slay this evil other and I will give you what you desire.” And so Dorothy and her motley crew proceed to dispatch the one symbol of hope, the one voice that says we should not be wearing Ruby Slippers.

   Upon their triumphant return, our protagonists demand reparations. They even expose the wizard behind the curtain, but he is a sly fucker, just as the machinations of an unjust system tend to be. “Don’t be ignorant, capitalism can serve you too!” He hands over a diploma, as if departing the halls of academe improves our lot in life. “Don’t be cold, we’re just like you!” And he bestows a watch, because time is linear and we’d do best to not forget that time is also money. “Be not afraid, you will have yours soon!” And he hands a gold coin hanging on a silk ribbon, and calls it employee “appreciation”. Dorothy wakes up, but the spectacle continues. She has learned a life lesson, according to the masters of illusion. The problem is that she did not learn anything revolutionary on her psychedelic quest. She still opened her eyes on the dismal farm in the Dust Bowl Midwest; she was still wearing Ruby Slippers. The land of OZ was a nothing but a spectacular distraction, and meaningless in every way.

   Spectacles paralyze us and keep us wanting shitty-looking shoes, probably made in China by some indentured rice farmer’s daughter who will die early of breast cancer because of carcinogens in the smoke of the glue she used to attach all the pretty sequins. The shoes are an illusion of prosperity and normalcy. Our college degrees, our paychecks and awards systems all bind us to the society in which we are born. These spectacles define what is normal. If we feel like we fit into the system, we will bind it to our feet. We’ll skip down a big golden road toward the emerald towers of the American Dream. But that Dream is a spectacle. It is an illusion that does not exist.

   The “market” will recover. Home prices are on the up. Jobless claims are down. Our “leaders” just instituted new protections against mercury in coal power plant emissions. Are these a reason to be optimistic? I don’t think so. I think they are exactly the empty promises a society of the spectacle expects to be fed.

   Reality is pretty clear beyond the façade of spectacle. Even when we expose the wizard behind the curtain, he does not abandon his post. He buys us off, biding time until we sink again into submission. Hope for the future is, in itself, an escape. If hope is a spectacle too, what lies beyond the curtain is not going to be pretty.

We’re GaGa for Ourselves: Intimacy, Identity and Individuals

 

Anarchy A to Z:
a guide to understanding our history unfolding for the anesthetized and apathetic

I is for Individuals

   The 21^st century angst-driven teenager, locked in her room with the music blaring, lacks the strong cultural foundations that create normalcy and stability. “Just dance,” Lady GaGa proclaims, ”everything will be okay.” But everything is not okay. The future of our species lives in a world that is in its death throes, yet they do not possess the tools to make sense of it. Instead, they ignore them, retreating to their shells or their radical ideologies. We have created a world without the intimacy of healthy social relations, without a language of love. But it isn’t just our young standard bearers, but the standard itself.

   Without intimacy, our people cannot analyze the breadth and depth of our crises. We need a spiritual ecology, a return to holism and simplicity, but instead we socialize our system of hyper-individualism. With our identities under attack, we shy away from intimacy because in it we must sacrifice part of our self. It is no surprise that the military has one of the highest divorce rates; these men and women are indoctrinated to view others and otherness as signs of inhumanity. You can’t pull the trigger in the name of your corporate masters if you see yourself staring back at you. To divide the commonalities of the human condition is to abolish the ability to be intimate. But the methods of doing so are convenient. The individual reigns herself. All others are “others.” 

   The Have-Have Not dichotomy creates a rift, as all dichotomies do, between individuals in our society. It reinforces the individual’s psychology, whether we see ourselves among our black brothers, our vegan clan or our cohort of conspicuous consumers. These group identities confirm biases and make us more comfortable as individuals. The first questions we ask someone at a social event are generally identity based. “What do you do? What kind of car do you drive? Are you married? Kids? What kind of music do you listen to?”

As a humanitarian, as an empath for the people of Palestine and the people of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, and later as a student of Peacekeeping, I’ve sought to reduce the imperialist program to a manageable size. The science is inexact; it is a lot like chemotherapy. Sometimes you have to try it and hope it works, but surrendering a sense of control and accepting vulnerabililties and imperfections in proposals helps narrow the pharmaceutical response. In exploring the promise of deep peace, and being partly driven to explain the polarization of the American political system and its challenges, I have crafted a hypothesis to explain the failures of the Peacekeeping practitioners and their dinosaur enterprise (we’ll see if it flies with the thesis advisor). 

   In sum, identity is the cornerstone laid on a foundation of geographic determinism. But predatory corporate capitalism, with its M.O. of commodifying of every tiny piece of the planet’s surface, its inhabitants and their spirit, has expanded history’s most destructive economic system to every place worth exploiting. Some called it the end of history because there no longer seemed to be a challenger. These neoliberal neophytes clambered the halls of academia, hidden behind robes of Carnegie Fellows, missing the truth in their statements. The end of history is not the triumphalism of game theory and market dynamics, but the homogenization of the global order.

   Identity is fundamental to the human spirit. With the poetics of pop culture drunkenness as a thorny afterthought, self-realization is necessary transition in the life cycle of human social behavior. I was one of those confused and immediately defensive individuals, and you were too. Now extrapolate that process. Take flight and see yourself floating above earth with wide eyes of holism. See the villages in the Amazon, the refugees squeezed between Shell Oil’s drilling in the west and soy bean farmers encroaching from the eastern plains. Identity is the stability factor discussed earlier. It is a fundamental function of culture, the subject our socialization programs sustain. Yet, in a world that is increasingly connected psycho-spatially, and under brutal assault by an exploitative economic system manifest in the injustices we have identified, humans are radicalized into violent defense of a simple but shared identity.

 “Cogito ergo sum.”

- Rene Descartes

   “I think. Therefore, I am.” The individual is a difficult phenomenon to navigate. It is rooted in basic brain function of self-realization, a pseudo spatial-temporal coping mechanism that underpins our basic philosophical questions. It was articulated in ancient philosophy. It was revived during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was exploited to serve the basis of the Westphalian order in the bastardization of human social psychology we call nationalism; here, its destructiveness is obvious. American culture is particularly wedded to the frontier myth of the rugged individual, man versus the wilds of an untamed continent, always a victim but always the victor. It would come as no surprise that American enfranchisement requires at least a subconscious fist bump to images of individual ruggedness.

   The individual was lastly spun, so far as this conversation is concerned, as a culture of poverty. No irony is spared in the relationship between the mythological rider of the white horse--galloping from the gunslinger movies sets of California and into the White House, carrying proudly the individualist narrative perfected in the PR rooms of General Electric—and the process of hyper-individualizing, and thus dividing the American public.

   In the new world order, the individual is responsible for raising their standards, and, therefore, poverty is an individual choice. This narrative is incredibly useful for those piloting the collapse because it absolves them of wrongdoing and saddles the individual with guilt. But the individual is only as capable as the system in which they operate. Our systems of patriarchy, racism, scientific skepticism etc. create the ideal environment for exploitation without repercussion. And we are only beginning to see the ramifications. This American Life posed an interesting question recently: what country do you want to live in? 

   When a crowd jeers a gay serviceman or cheers for death by health insurance market, we know we are in trouble. Our social identities have been and continue to be under assault. They are being destroyed to so those that command the narratives of history can reconstitute all human social relationships as hyper-individualized, neoliberal, Social Darwinian fiefdoms. It creates spectacles to entertain us and to pacify us. It prevents individual human beings from recognizing that their uniqueness contributes to broader patterns of healthy social behavior.

“The control of a large force is the same principle as the control of a few men:

It is merely a question of dividing up their numbers.”

― Sun Tzu

   Hyper-individualism hampers the human need for friendship and intimacy, components of self-actualization and necessary to evolutionary enlightenment. It condemns any spirit of confederated cooperation that may allow us to confront our crises. It foments divisions within the ranks of the dispossessed. Instead of rising as one, we dance in our rooms alone. Hoping that out there, somewhere, is our “biggest fan,” someone to follow us around and be our Paparazzi.

Fancy a Three Way? Or Prefer to Fuck Yourself?

Anarchy A to Z:
a guide to understanding our history unfolding for the anesthetized and apathetic

H is for Haves and Have Nots

   I went to D.C. for my anniversary (I’m married, and I don’t think I revealed that yet either) to attend Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity. Aside from the gasp of disappointment when Stewart introduced his mystery guest, Kid Rock, the signs stole the show. Simona (that’s her name, and I’m not allowed to call her “my wife”) and I had a number of signs. The one relevant to today’s topic read: “Hey Sarah and Christine, wanna three-way?” Now I thought this was pretty clever. A lot of people got a kick out of it, even ones with impressionable tweens. There it was, a couple attractive ladies setting their sights on positions of power.

   A woman stopped me, toward the end of the event, and asked to take a picture of me with the sign as part of some photography project. I forget exactly what she said, but I remember thinking it was benign. A year later, almost, I was reading some essays on progressive politics and a strange revelation crossed me. My eyes stung and watered, but I suppose that could have been the knife of grey smoke protruding from the tip of my Camel Light.

   What my sign actually said, in that strange moment of clarity, was that I am a chauvinist. I was disrespecting, by making light of their gender, women aspiring to power. I was carrying on a long tradition of exploitation. I thought back to that day and I remember that the woman with the camera was on a bicycle… and she didn’t shave her underarms. At that moment, I felt as naked as the Chewbacca hiding under her bony, and presumably vegan, arm. Does speaking truth to power about the subjugation of women and the deep patriarchy in our system mean that a woman must lie to and exploit a man to make amends, to get even?

   Don’t get me wrong. I’ve come to terms with the systemic patriarchy, a rift of color in the mosaic of injustice. But I am a spiritual man, so I recognized my role, I relinquished my inability to truly understand the depth of our social psychology to the mystery of the universe, and I moved forward with a different perspective. Jay! Tomlinson—the mind behind Best of the Left—had a lengthy discussion on positions of privilege and power. I’m a straight, white, American male. I am a Have. And this should somehow make me guilty by association, even if I work toward enlightenment and am willing to lead a column into battle for justice.

   The language of Occupy buries this dichotomy deeper into the social consciousness. Given the dismal economic report cards showered on the public in that odd, bureaucratic say-something-but-don’t-say-anything way, I can’t help but think this is at least partially useful. Contrary, should we not be aspiring for the spiritual whole of ecology, and not besetting ourselves to the fear of unfairness? Shouldn’t we be looking for paths not yet explored, using our struggle as a vehicle to access the mystery that surrounds us? I think we should. And I think it is the failure of every revolutionary struggle to limit its paradigm to the clichés of Marxist historicism.

   Some have said, but too few, that the 99% versus the 1% isn’t actually correct, because it really is the 100% against the nonhuman and nonliving. It is the 100% tearing the blank pages from the back of our human history book and burning them with noble vanity. The 99%, as a meme and as the widely accessible part of the message, doesn’t want to deconstruct the system. It wants to reallocate resources. Without establishing the basis of an ecological economy, all of our rhetoric will turn to a desert, just as the Midwest will under the relentless feedback of infrared radiation and greenhouse gases.    

   To the feminist that exploited me, I must ask—with Wendell Berry as witness: do you despise me for my powered privilege, seeking to have a seat at table of myself and my ilk? Or do you pity me because you respond to the fear impulse that suggests you will never gain my respect as a woman? I’ll tell you. If you take insult, as a woman, for me making baseless sexual advances on two of the most obscenely anti-sexual women to grace the political stage, then I pity you. Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell would not be in any class with me if I were a woman. Gender issues may be your passion, but your ability to bear children makes me a Have Not. I will not respect you because you demand power, just as I will not respect Allen West because he’s black—he’s still a tea-bagger douche selling his constituents for a mere moments caress of the Ring of Mordor. I will, however, respect you because you are an individual and because you hold a unique but equal role in social relations. Just as I respect my wife’s (ha!) wishes to bear a name and an identity, I will, yours, to forgo purchasing razor blades and eggs. I will not be exploited and wear that shame as consequence of my being born fair-skinned, with a dick that likes to fuck the opposite sex.

   We are both citizens of empire, and framing our struggle as one of Haves and Have Nots does not redress the fact the pilot-less abstractions we call capitalism and the state will continue along if we remain divided. We need to persuade those that profit on exploitation of the working-class, women, minorities and the environment to adopt our frame of mind. We need to open the door to the mystery and remove their fears of failure and destitution. We can all Have if we do it smartly. That is, if we recognize that the Original Affluent Society (thanks Marshall Sahlins!) had its needs met without the empty fear of scarcity.

   We need to become the New Affluent Society, but we need to get in bed together if we’re going to make it work. And if we’re going to do it together, we need to understand where the “individual” fits into the equation. If we can’t take a fictional sexual advance lightly, if we choose to establish lines between groups or classes of individuals, between Haves and Have Nots, we will most certainly find ourselves alone in our social revolution. And when we’re alone, we only fuck ourselves.  

Big Bang Theory

Anarchy A to Z:
a guide to understanding our history unfolding for the anesthetized and apathetic

G is for God. 

   God. Some of us love it. Some of us love to deny its existence. Some of us see it in a sunset. Some of us are inspired to spill blood for it. Anarchists are no proponents of religion. No Gods, no masters is their battle cry, but we have to recognize the centrality of religion, even in a secular society. Understanding what god is can help liberate us from fear.

   Two distinct pathways developed early in human history. The first was to subscribe certain natural phenomena to acts of a deity, a power unknown. These were often anthropomorphized, but not necessarily. God, in all religion, explains the origins of human life. Even the most complex sciences cannot explain the origin of energy, although they certainly refute the Creation myths of all religious traditions. The second pathway declared that it was not a pluralist society of gods that dictated the unknown, but a single entity. This conceptualization emerged with a tribe of herdsman that relied on this single entity to explain distinct but varied topography and flora. As they travelled, the mystery of the world could not be explained as the individual domains of individual gods. The awe of the mysterious was more accessible to the pastoralist, lest we suspect Abel’s fruit was rotten.

   Monotheism dominates global religion. This is largely due to the success of imperialism and imperial systems, and political systems of control. As Rome dissolved slowly, as the U.S. will in turn, its last rulers attempted to pacify the steppe peoples by instituting Christianity. Constantine created laws to loosen discrimination against Christians and severed many of its ties to Judaism. Islam surfaced as a desert spin on Christianity, without the “son of god” falsity. If we add the Protestant Reformation to this mix, the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient god of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is continually evolving enterprise. It was an enterprise based on fear of the unknown, and it employed the control mechanism of fear.

   Before the Westphalian order, before the cornerstone of nationalism had been laid, God served Western civilization’s greatest inspiration for violence. And it still does today. Now, religion is not dormant by any measure. All one has to do is turn on Fox News and watch God’s.Own.Party battle it out for the title of most pious one. The antiMuslim, antisecularist rhetoric is a problem, and one might argue perfectly aligned with the end game of American fascism. Indeed, it is imperative we understand how fear has given way to the behemoth of the state, releasing it to proliferate and legitimize existing systems of hierarchy and injustice and to trample on individuals so long as it allows us the illusion of control over the things we can’t explain. However, if we ever want a just society, we have to abandon fundamentalism in all things. Religious fundamentalism serves the public’s interest not at all and the human history’s, even less. Yet, the biological wiring of fear causes us to turn to religion and God for our answers to our greatest philosophical questions. And in these questions, we may find the idea of god, neither as a master nor a vengeful spirit demanding submission to its will, not as the antithesis of reason, but as a path to a social revolution.

   In investigating the anthropological origins of statism, I entertain the idea that the priestly classes of our earliest civilizations were the first states--although without the modernity of ideas like sovereignty. Atheists can, however, choose to view God as the executrix of absolute power and dismiss the idea as contrary to the fundamental tenants of anarchy, but that too would be to resort to secular fundamentalism. We must recognize that human beings want answers that are not there. States, like god, fill a void inherent in every human being. They help dispel fear. Therefore, if we expect to end injustice and create the world we want to live in, we cannot ignore one of the most basic human responses to biological fear.

  A much more useful way to conceptualize god is contained in Robert Jensen’s All My Bones Shake. While we seek justice, the end of empire and ecological balance, we need to stop squabbling over the existence and nature of god and instead focus efforts on much more constructive pursuits. Simply replace the word “god” with “mystery” and fear disappears. Our inhibitions will become much more malleable. Mystery itself is relegation to powerlessness, an acceptance that not all things can be controlled or explained. To abandon the injustices of global predatory corporate capitalism, we need to accept that we did not get it right the first time. If we want to remake the world, we have to accept that we may not get it right this time either. The future is a mystery and we’d do well to accept it.

   The world would be unjust without the state and without capitalism. But if we view god as the mystery in the universe—a word to describe the indescribable—then, we can begin to erect a social consciousness and a culture of justice. We cannot right the wrongs we witness simply by pushing power from one class to another. We cannot redress the disparities we have created by changing the tax code. We cannot plant a forest big enough to reconcile their rape if we do not plant the seeds of something bigger… and brighter.

   We need another big bang. We need a moment where we cleanse ourselves of fear and bias. But we can’t calculate our way there. We need to turn inward, to an individual spirituality, to reconnect with what we have already lost. If we can accept that we do not have the answers to remedying our crises, we can simply accept that exist. If we embrace the mystery of the unknown, we can begin to reflect on the present and get to work doing something—anything at all!—about the coming shit storm.