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\nWhen I would look through magazines as a small child, I used to think that there must be a magical world somewhere where everything looked—and was—perfect. I could see pictures from it in those pages, the smoky air of dimly-lit rooms heavy with drama as the young models lounged in designer fashions. That is where excitement and adventure is to be found, I thought, in the world where every room is flawlessly decorated and every woman’s wardrobe is picked and matched with daring and finesse. I resolved to have an adventurous life of my own, and began looking for those rooms and women right away. And though I’ve discovered since then that romance and excitement rarely come hand in hand with the images of them that are presented to us—usually the opposite is true, that adventure is to be found precisely where there is no time or energy for keeping up appearances—I still catch myself sometimes thinking that everything would be perfect if only I lived in that picturesque log cabin with matching rugs.
\n\nWhatever each us may be looking for, we all tend to pursue our desires by pursuing images: symbols of the things we desire. We buy leather jackets when we want rebellion and danger. We purchase fast cars not for the sake of driving fast, but to recapture our lost youth. When we want world revolution, we buy political pamphlets and bumper stickers. Somehow we assume that having all the right accessories will get us the perfect lives. And when we construct our lives, we often do it according to an image, a pattern that has been laid out for us: hippie, businessman, housewife, punk.
\n\nWhy do we think so much about images today, rather than concentrating on reality, on our lives and emotions themselves? One of the reasons images have attained so much significance in this society is that, unlike activities, images are easy to sell. Advertising and marketing, which are designed to invest products with a symbolic value that will attract consumers, have transformed our culture. Corporations have been spreading propaganda designed to make us believe in the magic powers of their commodities for generations now: deodorant offers popularity, soda offers youth and energy, jeans offer sex appeal. At our jobs, we exchange our time, energy, and creativity for the ability to buy these symbols—and we keep buying them, for of course no quantity of cigarettes can really give anyone sophistication. Rather than satisfying our needs, these products multiply them: for in order to get them, we end up selling parts of our lives away. We keep going back, not knowing any other way, hoping that the new product (self-help books, punk rock records, that vacation cabin with matching rugs) will be the one that will fix everything.
\n\nWe are easily persuaded to chase these images because it is simply easier to change the scenery around you than it is to change your own life. How much less trouble, how much less risky it would be if you could make your life perfect just by collecting all the right accessories! No participation necessary. The image comes to embody all the things you desire, and you spend all your time and energy trying to get the details right (the bohemian tries to find the perfect black beret and the right poetry readings to attend—the frat boy has to be seen with the right friends, at the right parties, drinking the right beers and wearing the right informal dress shirts) rather than pursuing the desires themselves—for of course it’s easier to identify yourself with a prefabricated image than to identify exactly what you want in life. But if you really want adventure, an Australian hunting jacket won’t suffice, and if you want real romance, dinner and a movie with the most popular girl at your school might not be enough.
\n\nFascinated as we are by images, our values have come to revolve around a world we can never actually experience. There’s no way into the pages of the magazine, there’s no way to be the archetypal punk or the perfect executive. We’re “trapped” out here in the real world, forever. And yet we keep looking for life in pictures, in fashions, in spectacles of all kinds, anything that we can collect or watch—instead of doing.
\n\nThe curious thing about a spectacle is how it immobilizes the spectators: just like the image, it centers their attention, their values, and ultimately their lives around something outside of themselves. It keeps them occupied without making them active, it keeps them feeling involved without giving them control. You can probably think of a thousand different examples of this: television programs, action movies, magazines that give updates on the lives of celebrities and superstars, spectator sports, representative “democracy,” the Catholic church.
\n\nA spectacle also isolates the people whose attention it commands. Many of us know more about the fictitious characters of popular sitcoms than we know about the lives and loves of our neighbors—for even when we talk to them, it is about television shows, the news, and the weather; thus the very experiences and information that we share in common as spectators of the mass-media serve to separate us from one another. It is the same at a big football game: everybody watching from the bleachers is a nobody, regardless of who they are. They may be sitting next to each other, but all eyes are focused on the field. If they speak to each other, it is almost never about each other, but about the game that is being played before them. And although football fans cannot participate in the events of the game they are watching, or exert any real influence over them, they attach the utmost importance to these events and associate their own needs and desires with their outcome in a most unusual way. Rather than concentrating their attention on things that have a real bearing on their desires, they reconstruct their desires to revolve around the things they pay attention to. Their language even conflates the achievements of the team they identify themselves with with their own actions: “we scored a goal!” “we won!” shout the fans from their seats and sofas.
\n\nThis stands in stark contrast to the way people speak about the things that go on in our own cities and communities. “They’re building a new highway,” we say about the new changes in our neighborhood. “What will they think of next?” we say about the latest advances in scientific technology. Our language reveals that we think of ourselves as spectators in our own societies. But it’s not “They,” the mysterious Other People, who have made the world the way it is—it is we, humanity ourselves. No small team of scientists, city planners, and rich bureaucrats could have done all the working and inventing and organizing that it has taken for us to transform this planet; it has taken and still takes all of us, working together, to do this. We are the ones doing it, every day. And yet most of us seem to feel that we can have more control over football games than we can over our cities, our jobs, even our own lives.
\n\nWe might have more success in our pursuit of happiness if we start trying to really participate. Rather than trying to fit images, we can seek exciting and rewarding experiences; for happiness does not come from what you have or how your appear, but from what you do and how you feel. And instead of accepting the role of passive spectator to sports, society, and life, it is up to each of us to figure out how to play an active and significant part in creating the worlds around us and within us. Perhaps one day we can build a new society in which we can all be involved together in the decisions that affect the lives we lead; then we will be able to truly choose our own destinies, instead of feeling helpless and left out.
\n\nWe all want to be famous, to be seen, frozen, preserved in the media, because we’ve come to trust what is seen more than what is actually lived. Somehow we’ve gotten everything backwards and images seem more real to us than experiences. To know that we really exist, that we really matter, we have to see ghosts of ourselves preserved in photographs, on television shows and videotapes, in the public eye.
\n\nAnd when you go on vacation, what do you see? Scores of tourists with video cameras screwed to their faces, as if they’re trying to suck all of the real world into the two-dimensional world of images, spending their “time off” seeing the world through a tiny glass lens. Sure, turning everything that you could experience with all five senses into recorded information that you can only observe from a distance, detached, offers us the illusion of having control over our lives: we can rewind and replay them, over and over, until everything looks ridiculous. But what kind of life is that?
\n\n— by NietzsChe Guevara.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/alienation-the-map-of-despair", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/alienation-the-map-of-despair", "title": "AlieNation: The Map of Despair : Space/Time Control, Space Travel, and Space Exploration", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "In the modern world, control is exerted over us automatically by the spaces we live and move in. We go through certain rituals in our lives — work, “leisure,” consumption, submission — because the world we live in is designed for these alone. We all know malls are for shopping, offices are for working, ironically-named “living” rooms are for watching television, and schools are for obeying teachers. All the spaces we travel in have pre-set meanings, and all it takes to keep us going through the same motions is to keep us moving along the same paths. It’s hard to find anything to do in Walmart but look at and purchase merchandise; and, accustomed to doing this as we are, it’s hard to conceive that there could be anything else we could do there anyway — not to mention that doing anything but shopping there is pretty much illegal, when you think about it. There are fewer and fewer free, undeveloped spaces left in the world where we can let our bodies and minds run free. Almost every place you can go belongs to some person or group which has already designated a meaning and proscribed use for it: private estate, shopping district, superhighway, classroom, national park. And our very predictable routes through the world rarely take us near the free areas that do remain. These spaces, where thought and pleasure can be free in every sense, are being replaced with carefully controlled environments like Disneyland — places in which our desires are prefabricated and sold back to us at our financial and emotional expense. Giving our own meaning to the world and creating our own ways to play and act in it are fundamental parts of human life; today, when we are never in spaces that encourage this, it should be no surprise that so many of us feel desperate and unfulfilled. But because the world has so little free space left in it, and the circuitry of our everyday lives never takes us there, we’re forced to go to places like Disneyland for any semblance of play and excitement at all. Thus the real adventure our hearts crave has been largely replaced by fake adventure, and the thrill of creation by the drill of spectatorship.
\n\nOur time is as thoroughly occupied and regulated as our space; indeed, the subdivision of our space is a manifestation of what has already happened to our time. The entire world moves and lives according to a standardized time system, designed to synchronize our movements from one side of the planet to the other. Inside of this larger system, we all have our lives regimented by our work schedules and/or school hours, as well as the hours that public transportation runs and businesses operate, etc. This scheduling of our lives, which begins in childhood, exerts a subtle but deep control over us all: we come to forget that the time of our lives is ultimately ours to spend how we choose, and instead think in terms of work days, lunch hours, and weekends. A truly spontaneous life is unthinkable to most of us; and so-called “free” time is usually just time that has been scheduled for something other than work. How often do you get to see the sun rise? How many sunny afternoon walks do you get to take? If you had the unexpected opportunity to take an exciting trip this week, could you do it?
\n\nThese restricting environments and schedules drastically limit the vast potential of our lives. They also keep us isolated from each other. At our jobs, we spend a great deal of time doing one particular kind of labor with one particular group of people, in one set place (or at least in one set environment, for construction workers and “temp” employees). Such limited, repetitive experience gives us a very limited perspective on the world, and keeps us from coming to know people from other backgrounds. Our homes isolate us further: today we keep ourselves locked apart in little boxes, partly out of fear of those capitalism has treated even worse than ourselves, and partly because we believe the paranoia propaganda of the companies that sell security systems. Today’s suburbs are cemeteries of community, the people packed separately into boxes… just like our supermarket products, sealed for “freshness.” With thick walls between us and our neighbors, and our friends and families scattered across cities and nations, it’s hard to have any kind of community at all, let alone share community space in which people can benefit from each other’s creativity. And both our homes and our jobs keep us tied down to one place, stationary, unable to travel far through the world except on hasty vacations.
\n\nEven our travel is restricted and restricting. Our modern methods of transportation — cars, buses, subways, trains, airplanes — all keep us locked onto fixed tracks, watching the outside world go by through a screen, as if it were a particularly boring television show. Each of us lives in a personal world that consists mostly of well-known destinations (the workplace, the grocery store, a friend’s apartment, the dance club) with a few links in between them (sitting in the car, standing in the subway, walking up the staircase), and little chance to encounter anything unexpected or discover any new places. A man could travel the freeways of ten nations without seeing anything but asphalt and gas stations, so long as he stayed in his car. Locked onto our tracks, we can’t imagine truly free travel, voyages of discovery that would bring us into direct contact with brand new people and things at every turn.
\n\nInstead, we sit in traffic jams, surrounded by hundreds of people in the same predicament as ourselves, but separated from them by the steel cages of our cars — so they appear to us as objects in our way rather than fellow human beings. We think we are reaching more of the world with our modern transportation; but in fact we see less of it, if anything. As our transportation capabilities increase, our cities sprawl farther and farther across the landscape. Whenever travel distances increase, more cars are needed; more cars demand more space, and thus distances increase again… and again. At this rate highways and gas stations will one day replace everything that was worth traveling to in the first place.
\n\nA curious effect of the development of rapid transit systems is that as the distance between communities closes, the distance between individuals within those communities widens.
\n\nSome of us look at the internet as the “final frontier,” as a free, undeveloped space still ripe for exploring. Cyberspace may or may not offer some degree of freedom to those who can afford to use and explore it; but whatever it might offer, it offers on the condition that we check our bodies at the door: voluntary amputation. Remember, you are a body at least as much as a mind: is it freedom to sit, stationary, staring at glowing lights for hours, without using your senses of taste, touch, or smell? Have you forgotten the sensations of wet grass or warm sand under bare feet, of eucalyptus tree or hickory smoke in your nostrils? Do you remember the scent of tomato stems? The glint of candlelight, the thrill of running, swimming, touching?
\n\nToday we can turn to the internet for excitement without feeling like we have been cheated because our modern lives are so constrained and predictable that we have forgotten how joyous action and motion in the real world can be. Why settle for the very limited freedom that cyberspace can provide, when there is so much more experience and sensation to be had out here in the real world? We should be running, dancing, canoeing, drinking life to the dregs, exploring new worlds — what new worlds? We must rediscover our bodies, our senses, the space around us, and then we can transform this space into a new world to which we can impart meanings of our own.
\n\nTo this end, we need to invent new games — games that can take place in the conquered spaces of this world, in the shopping malls and restaurants and classrooms, that will break down their proscribed meanings so that we can give them new meanings in our accordance with our own dreams and desires. We need games that will bring us together, out of the confinement and isolation of our private homes, and into public spaces where we can benefit from each other’s company and creativity. Just as natural disasters and power outages can bring people together and be exciting for them (after all, they do make for a little thrilling variety in an otherwise drearily predictable world), our games will join us together in doing new and exciting things. We will have poetry in the factories, concerts in the streets, sex in the fields and libraries, free picnics in supermarkets, public fairs on freeways.
\n\nWe need to invent new conceptions of time and new modes of travel, as well. Try living without a clock, without synchronizing your life with the rest of the busy, busy world. Try taking a long trip on foot or bicycle, so that you will encounter everything that you pass between your starting point and your destination firsthand, without a screen. Try exploring in your own neighborhood, looking on rooftops and around corners you never noticed before — you’ll be amazed how much adventure is hidden there waiting for you!
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/alive-in-the-land-of-the-dead", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/alive-in-the-land-of-the-dead", "title": "Alive In The Land Of The Dead", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "The 20th Century has marked the end of the millennium that saw the world become colonized by and organized under Western civilization, that saw the industrial revolution and overpopulation restructure both humanity and the very surface of the earth itself. This century began with fifty years of alternating slaughter, starvation, and rabid nationalism such as the human race had never seen before. It is concluding with an ominous silence among young people in the United States and much of Europe, for with the end of the “Cold War” the idea that there really is any alternative at all to our modern living conditions and society is becoming hard to conceive of; and in the meantime, we are becoming more and more organized and arranged by the technological systems that we set up with the supposed intentions of making our lives more free and meaningful.
\n\nAs this century is ending with sentimental retrospectives and the like, what we really must do is not look back but look ahead. Now more than ever we must consider whether our modern lives as we have come to live them over the last thousand years really satisfy all our needs and desires as human beings, and prepare for the new millennium to be a new chapter in the human experiment. We must use the lessons we have learned from the 20th Century to plan for a new era in which human life can be meaningful and fulfilling, even thrilling, heroic. Or have we learned any lessons?
\n\nDon’t wait for permission, for some far-off “world revolution,” for later “when you have more time.” Demand joy, danger, passion in your life today!
\n\nThe poverty against which man has been struggling throughout history is not merely the poverty of material goods; the ennui and disorientation experienced by the members of the middle and upper classes in today’s wealthy industrial nations have revealed the poverty of Western existench itself.
\n\nThe problems that we face today cannot be traced to class conflict alone. It is not merely a question of the ruling class profiting at the expense of the proletariat, for we have seen that the profit that those with capital do make does not make their lives any more fulfilling. It does not matter whether a woman is buried alive in a prison, in a reform school, in a sweatshop, in a ghetto, in a prestigious university, in a condominium bought on credit, or in a mansion with a private swimming pool and tennis courts, so long as she is buried alive. Everyone suffers from today’s status quo, albeit differently; but whether a man is starving on his minimum wage salary, exhausted by his repetitive responsibilities at the office, or befuddled by the curious feeling of emptiness that accompanies the undirected acquisition of material wealth, he has a stake in fighting for change. So we all, rich and poor, must band together to consider our situation and struggle to alter it.
\n\nThis also means that there is no mythical “They.” Innumerable radical movements and social critics have relied upon this concept to motivate people by stirring up hatred for the “evil orchestrators” of human suffering, the enemies who conspire against us. But this kind of thinking only serves to divide us against each other, and whether we are divided on class lines, on color lines, or according to any other categories, we are distracted from the important issues and impeded in our progress. Our true “enemy” is the social forces and patterns at work between ourselves, and it is these forces which we must come to understand and to struggle against.
\n\nThis is not to say that there are not individuals whose behavior is particularly dangerous to their fellow human beings, insofar as it perpetuates or intensifies our present state of emergency. But even if these individuals do have negative intentions towards others, it is still unlikely that they possess a clear understanding of the extremely complicated conditions to which they are contributing.
\n\nWe individuals who are unsatisfied with their lives, who do feel the “poverty” of the existench that modern Western civilization has to offer, must seek out others who are experiencing similar symptoms. Together, we must construct and publicize an analysis of our situation: a theory of why human beings act and interact in the ways that they do today, and how this leads to our sensations of alienation, disorientation, and exhaustion.
\n\nThis analysis must have effective action of some kind as its necessary and immediate consequence, or else (as have the theories of a long tradition of “radical” discussion groups) it will come to nothing.
\n\nAnd this struggle presupposes participants who are fighting for themselves, to see and feel change and improvement in the course of their own lives — as we shall see . . .
\n\nWhatever solution, whatever revolution, we propose, must be present-oriented rather than future-oriented if it is to be genuinely revolutionary.
\n\nThe past and the present are both full of examples which indicate this. To consider one: Christianity demands of its followers that they delay gratification until they enter the next world, when they will supposedly be rewarded for their proper conduct; in doing so it assumes that this proper conduct is not fulfilling enough in itself to be worthwhile unless it is rewarded. This kind of thinking reflects a dire misunderstanding of the nature of human happiness; for happiness is to be found in activity, in activities that are exciting and satisfying in and of themselves, rather than in passively awaiting rewards for unsatisfying activities. Therefore it is not surprising that many devout Christians are bitter, spiteful individuals who jealously resent healthy activity and excitement in others — for they believe that they will find true happiness only in their “heavenly reward” for behavior that is not at all exciting for them, and thus must watch enviously as others freely do what they can only dream of doing in their most “sinful” fantasies. Conversely, many Christians who are happy are happy despite their Christianity, because they are able to take pleasure in their lives and deeds in this world.
\n\nTraditional Marxism takes the Christian mistake one step further by asking its adherents to work towards a revolution they will probably never live to see — that is, in the Marxist “faith,” gratification is delayed beyond the reach of human experience. It should be no surprise that today, beyond a little anachronistic romanticism about the “nobility” of self-sacrifice, the Marxist offer serves as little incentive for people to seriously fight for the “communist revolution.” In contrast, today’s capitalistic consumer market at least promises prompt gratification in the form of material goods (and the myths and images it associates with them) in return for the generally unsatisfying labor it requires. But — does it deliver true gratification to its participants?
\n\nAgain, happiness is an active experience, not a passive sensation. Thus, a woman who cooks a recipe of her own invention for her friends may find a great deal of pleasure and meaning in this undertaking, while a man who slaves all day to cook exotic food in an expensive restaurant will find that the purchases he makes with his paycheck cannot compensate him for the days of his life he has given up. You can purchase a twenty acre estate, the latest in status-symbol automobiles, and an entire wardrobe of unique and exquisite fashions, but the pleasure that these possessions afford cannot compare to the exhilaration of spending a day freely pursuing your desires.
\n\nAccordingly, our revolution must be an immediate revolution in our daily lives; anything else is not a revolution but a demand that once again people do what they do not want to do and hope that this time, somehow, the compensation will be enough. Those who assume, often unconsciously, that it is impossible to achieve their own desires — and thus, that it is futile to fight for themselves — often end up fighting for an ideal or cause instead. But it is still possible to fight for ourselves, or at least the experiment must be worth a try; so it is crucial that we seek change not in the name of some doctrine or grand cause, but on behalf of ourselves, so that we will be able to live more meaningful lives. Similarly we must seek first and foremost to alter the contents of our own lives in a revolutionary manner, rather than direct our struggle towards world-historical changes which we will not live to witness. In this way we will avoid the feelings of worthlessness and alienation that result from believing that it is necessary to “sacrifice oneself for the cause,” and instead live to experience the fruits of our labors… in our labors themselves.
\n\nTo put it another way, our revolution must be above all a revolution in the ways we live and think. It must be a recognition and rejection of the thought patterns and patterns of social interaction that have led us to today’s unsatisfying existench, in favor of patterns of thought and interaction that will be satisfying in themselves. It must be a revolution in our motivations, replacing reward-motivated behavior with behavior that is intrinsically meaningful. It must be a revolution in our everyday lives. Rejecting boredom, exhaustion, and despair for excitement, danger, love, passion and compassion — that is a revolution worth fighting for! And certainly there are large scale, long term goals that we must fight for, to make this revolution possible for all of us in the years to come; but we should fight for these goals not out of servitude to a doctrine or cause, but because it is exciting and invigorating today to strive for difficult and worthy objectives.
\n\nAlive in the land of the dead. They eat dead food with false teeth. Their buildings have false fronts, their radio and television stations broadcast dead air. They kill time as spectators of false images. Their corporations are guilty of false advertising, and their employment ‘opportunities’ offer only murderous mistreatment, lethal boredom, and fatal submission; they demand that you meet deadlines, that you pitch tent in the death camps. Does the dead end justify the means? They inhabit dead cities and make false moves, really going nowhere at all, treading day after day the same path of despair. Even their air is conditioned. They ask you to give your lives for their countries, for their religions, for their economies, leaving you with only… Their system is organized by artificial intelligence and provides only virtual reality. Their culture will pin you down and bore you to death, their lifestyle is lifeless, their existench is a permanent deadlock. Everything about them is dead and false. The only thing that is unbearable is that nothing is unbearable. When will we demand more?
\n\n\n\n\nThe struggle is for life, for real life. Fight foul, life is real!
\n
The word “revolution” may be amusing or off-putting to the modern reader, convinced as he is that effective resistance to the status quo is impossible and therefore not even worth considering. Gentle reader, we ask that you suspend your disbelief long enough to at least contemplate whether or not such a thing might be worthwhile if it were possible; and then that you suspend it further, long enough to recognize this disbelief for what it is — despair!
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/why-i-love-shoplifting", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/why-i-love-shoplifting", "title": "Why I Love Shoplifting : From big corporations", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Nothing compares to the feeling of elation, of burdens being lifted and constraints escaped, that I feel when I walk out of a store with their products in my pockets. In a world where everything already belongs to someone else, where I am expected to sell away my life at work in order to get the money to pay for the minimum I need to survive, where I am surrounded by forces beyond my control or comprehension that obviously are not concerned about my needs or welfare, it is a way to carve out a little piece of the world for myself—to act back upon a world that acts so much upon me.
\n\nIt is an entirely different sensation than the one I feel when I buy something. When I pay for something, I’m making a trade; I’m offering the money that I bought with my labor, my time, and my creativity for a product or service that the corporation wouldn’t share with me under any other circumstances. In a sense, we have a relationship based on violence: we negotiate an exchange not according to our respect or concern for each other, but according to the forces that we can bring to bear on each other. Supermarkets know they can charge me a dollar for bread because I will starve if I do not buy it from them; they know they can’t charge me four dollars, because I will go somewhere else. So our interaction revolves around unspoken threats, rather than love, and I am forced to give up something of my own to get anything from them.1
\n\nEverything changes when I shoplift. I’m no longer negotiating with faceless, inhuman entities that have no concern for my welfare; instead, I’m taking what I need without giving anything up. I no longer feel like I am being forced into an exchange, and I no longer feel as if I have no control over the way the world around me dictates my life. I no longer have to worry about whether the pleasure I receive from the book I purchased was equal to the two hours of labor it cost me to be able to afford it. In these and a thousand other ways, shoplifting makes me feel liberated and empowered. Let’s examine what shoplifting has to offer as an alternative way of life.
\n\nThe shoplifter wins her prize by taking risks, not by exchanging a piece of her life for it. Life for her is not something that must be sold away for seven or eight dollars an hour in return for survival; it is something that is hers because she takes it for herself, because she lays claim to it. In stark contrast to the law-abiding consumer, the means by which she acquires goods is as exciting as the goods themselves; and this means is also, in many ways, more praiseworthy.
\n\nShoplifting is a refusal of the exchange economy. It is a denial that people deserve to eat, live, and die based on how effectively they are able to exchange their labor and capital with others. It is a denial that a monetary value can be ascribed to everything, that having a piece of delicious chocolate in your mouth is worth exactly fifty cents or that an hour of one person’s life can really be worth ten dollars more than that of another person. It is a refusal to accept the capitalist system, in which workers have to buy back the products of their own labor at a profit to the owners of capital, who thus get them coming and going.
\n\nShoplifting says NO to all the objectionable features that have come to characterize the modern corporation. It is an expression of discontent with the low wages and lack of benefits that so many exploiting corporations force their employees to suffer in the name of company profits. It is a refusal to pay for low quality products that have been designed to break or wear out soon in order to force consumers to buy more. It is a refusal to fund the environmental damage that so many corporations perpetrate heartlessly in the course of manufacturing their products and building new stores, a refusal to support the corporations that run private, local businesses into bankruptcy, a refusal to accept the murder of animals in the meat and dairy industries and the exploitation of migrant labor in the fruit and vegetable industries. Shoplifting makes a statement against the alienation of the modern consumer. “If we are not able to find or afford any products other than these, that were made a thousand miles from us and about which we can know nothing,” it asserts, “then we refuse to pay for these.”
\n\nThe shoplifter attacks the cynical mind control tactics of modern advertising. Today’s commercials, billboards, even the floor—layouts and product displays in stores are designed by psychologists to manipulate potential consumers into purchasing products. Corporations carry out extensive advertising campaigns to insinuate their exhortations to consumption into every mind, and even work to make their products into status symbols that people from some walks of society eventually must own in order to be accorded respect. Faced with this kind of manipulation, the law-abiding consumer has two choices: either to come up with the money to purchase these products by selling his life away as a wage laborer, or to go without and possibly invite public ridicule as well as private frustration. The shoplifter creates a third choice of her own: she takes the products she has been conditioned to desire without paying for them, so the corporations themselves must pay for all of their propagandizing and mind control tactics.
\n\nShoplifting is the most effective protest against all these objectionable attributes of modern corporations because it is not merely theoretical—it is practical, it involves action. Verbal protests can be raised to irresponsible business practices without ever having any solid effect, but shoplifting is intrinsically damaging these corporations at the same time as it (however covertly) demonstrates dissatisfaction. It is better than a boycott, because not only does it cost the corporation money rather than just denying it profit, it also means that the shoplifter is still able to obtain the products, which she may need to survive. And in these days when so many corporations are interconnected, and so many multinationals are involved in unacceptable activity, shoplifting is a generalized protest: it is a refusal to put any cash into the economy at all, so that the shoplifter can be sure that none of her cash will ever end up in the hands of the corporations she disapproves of. In addition to that, she will have to work less for them, as well!
\n\nBut what about the people in the corporations? What about their welfare? First of all, corporations are distinct from traditional private businesses in that they exist as separate financial entities from their owners. So the shoplifter is stealing from a non-human entity, not directly from the pocket of a human being. Second, since so many workers are paid set wages (minimum wage, for example) that depend more on how little the corporation can get away with paying rather than on how much profit it is making, the shoplifter is not really hurting most of the workforce at any given company either. The stockholders, who are almost always far richer than your average thief, are the ones who stand to lose a little if the company suffers significant losses; but realistically, no campaign of shoplifting could be intense enough to force any of the wealthy individuals who actually profit from these companies into poverty. Besides, modern corporations have money set aside for shoplifting losses, because they anticipate them. That’s correct—these corporations are aware that there is enough dissatisfaction with them and their capitalist economy that people are going to steal from them remorselessly. In that sense, shoplifters are just playing their role in society, just like C.E.O.s. More significantly, these corporations are cynical enough to go about their business as usual, even though they know this leaves many of their customers (and employees!) ready to steal anything from them that they can. If they are willing to continue doing business in this way even when they are aware how many people it alienates, they should not be surprised that people continue stealing from them.
\n\nShoplifting is more than a way to survive in the cutthroat competition of the “free market” and protest corporate injustices. It is also a different kind of orientation to the world and to life.
\n\nThe shoplifter makes do with an environment that has been conquered by capitalism and industry, where there is no longer a natural world from which to gather resources and everything has become private property, without accepting it or the absurd way of life it entails. She takes her life into her own hands by applying an ancient method to the problem of modern survival: she lives by urban hunting and gathering. In this way she is able to live much as her distant ancestors did before the world was subjugated by technology, imperialism, and the irrational demands of the “free” market; and she can find the same challenges and rewards in her work, rewards that are lost to the rest of us today. For her, the world is as dangerous and as exciting as it was to prehistoric humanity: every day she is in new situations, confronting new risks, living by her wits in a constantly changing environment. For the law-abiding consumer, it is likely that every day at work is similar to the last one and danger is as sorely lacking in life as meaning and purpose are.
\n\nTo shoplift is to affirm immediate, bodily desires (such as hunger) over abstract “ethics” and other such ethereal constructs, most of which are left over from a deceased Christianity anyway. Shoplifting divests commodities (and the marketplace in general) of the mythical power they seem to have to control the lives of consumers… when they are seized by force, they show themselves for what they are: merely resources that have been held by force by these corporations at the expense of everyone else. Shoplifting places us back in the physical world, where things are real, where things are nothing more than their physical characteristics (weight, taste, ease of acquisition) and are not invested with superstitious qualities such as “market value” and “profit margin.” It forces us to take risks and experience life firsthand again. Perhaps shoplifting alone will not be able to overthrow industrial society or the capitalist system… but in the meantime it is one of the best forms of protest and self-empowerment, and one of the most practical, too!
\n\n\n\n\nShoplifters of the world, unite!
\n
In a love relationship, conversely, people usually think of themselves as benefitting from giving to others, and vice versa. ↩
\nSo… you’re in a band, with a really important message, and you want to get it out to as many people as possible — so you’re trying to get really popular and sell lots and lots of records. Or perhaps you’re a political activist and you think that it’s necessary to use the mainstream media to educate people about certain issues. It seems to make sense that you should use these methods to reach people, because otherwise, who will notice you? Yes, you realize that you’re making compromises with the very system you’re trying to fight, but it’ll be worth it in the end… and we all have to make compromises, don’t we? It’s worth considering whether we really do after all, just as it’s worth questioning whether getting ahead in their system of cutthroat competition and mass-marketing can ever really help us change the world. What would happen if we stopped compromising, stopped playing their game altogether and concentrated all our efforts on creating channels of our own for spreading ideas in new ways?
\n\nOf course they want you on their television show, radio program, rock festival, major label. They don’t care whether they’re selling mouthwash or anarchist revolution as long as they can keep people watching and buying. They know that sooner or later people are bound to get bored and fed up with the mindless, passionless drivel that they normally have to offer, and they count on you to keep new ideas and styles coming for them to exploit; without that, they’d have nothing new to sell people. They know if they can find ways to sell your own expressions of outrage back to you, to cash in on the very frustration that their system creates, they’ve got you beat. They know that no message you could spread through their channels could be more powerful than the message that your use of their medium itself sends: stay tuned. No awareness you could possibly raise through television or CDs sold in shopping malls is more important than the awareness of the power of individuals to act for themselves. Television watching and supermarket shopping keep people passive, watching things that they can never take part in and people they can never meet, buying what is marketed to them by corporations rather than making their own music, their own ideas, their own lives. To motivate people to act for themselves, you have to contact them more directly.
\n\n\nWe’re taught to think of our success in terms of numbers, aren’t we? If touching one person’s life is a good thing, then touching one thousand people’s lives must be a great thing. It’s easy to see where we learned to think this way: our whole society revolves around mass production. The more units we can move, the more customers we can serve, the more votes we can get, the more money and stuff we have, the better, right?
\n\nBut maybe it’s not possible to touch a thousand people as deeply or as powerfully as one person or ten people. And maybe it’s not really so revolutionary after all to have one person or group telling everybody else what’s right. Wouldn’t it be better to try a decentralized approach where everyone works closely with those around them, instead of a few people leading an anonymous mass? Do you, or your band, or your label have to save the world all by yourselves? Why don’t you trust anyone else to do it with you? (And have you noticed how much you have to stomp all over everyone else to get that success you plan to use to spread your message?)
\n\nOne political band playing a show to nine hundred people can recite revolutionary slogans for everyone present to stand and listen to, but they remain out of arm’s reach of most of the people there, up on a pedestal as “musicians,” “artists,” “heroes.” On the other hand, one band playing an equally impassioned show to forty people, in a more intimate setting, can interact on a personal level with everyone there, and make it clear that everyone is capable of doing what they do. Thus they have the potential to spark four more bands (or similar revolutionary projects), increasing their impact exponentially. The same goes for record labels, for writers, for speakers and artists, and of course for “leaders” of any kind.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/working-within-the-system/3.jpg\")
\nMost of us don’t get much pleasure out of the things we have to do to work inside the system. We’d rather be reading books on our own than writing assigned papers for school, rather be using our skills, energy, and time to work on projects of our own choice than selling ourselves to employers. But we feel like we have to work for them, whether we like it or not. It never occurs to us how much more fun, and perhaps more effective, it could be to take our labor out of their hands and do something else with it. Sure it would be hard at first, but nothing could be harder than to have to put up with this bullshit for the rest of our lives, right? Better we dedicate ourselves to replacing it than just dealing with it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/working-within-the-system/2.jpg\")
\nBut, you protest, you’re still going to be fighting the status quo, you’re going to change things from the inside, right? That’s what they tell you, at least. Of course the system has “appropriate procedures” for people with grievances to go through to try to make things better; that’s the safety valve to release pressure when people get too worked up. Do you think the powers that be would really let anyone use their own laws and methods to depose them? If this system provided opportunities for real change, people would have taken advantage of them a long time ago. Countless generations have set out convinced that they would succeed where other had failed — that’s where lawyers and reporters come from, you know. They’re the cynical corpses of idealistic young men and women who thought the system could be reformed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/working-within-the-system/5.jpg\")
\nBesides, can you trust yourself to work “within the system” for the right reasons? We’re all programmed to want “success,” to measure ourselves by wealth and social status, whether we like it or not. Could it be that you want to become a journalist or professor of political science or rock star because you can’t bring yourself to consider any other options seriously, because you’re afraid to try cutting to the safety line that ties you to the security of a mainstream lifestyle? And how can you be sure that it isn’t that dark corner of your heart pushing you to seek success, the part that loves the attention and feelings of greatness your popularity and social standing bring? Sure it feels great to be able to tell your parents what your goals are and have them applaud your decisions… but is that any way to decide how to go about changing the world?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/working-within-the-system/6.jpg\")
\nLet’s listen to our hearts, trust our instincts, and refuse to participate in anything that bores or outrages us. We need to nourish our idealism and our willingness to take risks, not work out new ways to integrate our frustration and our desperation for change back into the society that engendered them. Remember, every day we spend “using the system” is another day longer we’ll have to wait until new networks and better ways of life replace the old ones.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/working-within-the-system/4.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/working-within-the-system/7.jpg\")
\nYes, it often seems like there’s no alternative to working “within the system” if we want to get things done and not keep our ideas quarantined within the narrow confines of the underground. But why keep the underground quarantined to narrow confines? Surely if we put all our energy into expanding the spaces in which we can interact as free, equal human beings, rather than trying to repair the burning machinery of this doomed society, we could make at least as much of an impact. Imagine what we could achieve if we kept all our potential in our own hands, and refused to waste it ever again working for their system for even a minute. There’s no excuse to let even a fraction of our lives go by doing things we don’t love, or to let any of our talents and efforts serve to prop up a world order we oppose. Instead, let’s fight so hard, and live so hard, that others inside the cages of mainstream life can see us and are inspired to join us in our complete rejection of the old world and all its bullshit. And let’s make our communities something greater than they are; let’s make them more open and more capable of offering life-support, so that others really will be able to join us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/working-within-the-system/8.jpg\")
\nThe system we live under offers only losers’ games: economic competition instead of cooperation, popularity contests in place of community, the struggle to measure up to social norms instead of the pursuit individual dreams. The reason we’re working towards something better in the first place is that everyone loses in these games — so why play them? It’s up to us to create new games, more joyful, exciting games to replace the old ones. Let’s not try to beat them at their games, but make them join us in ours!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/working-within-the-system/9.jpg\")
\nHow many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen? A computer screen? Behind an automobile windscreen? All three screens combined? What are you being screened from? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?
\n\nIs watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you have enough time to do all the things that you want to? Do you have enough energy to? Why? And how many hours a day do you sleep? How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those of millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours? The minutes and hours that add up to your life? Are you saving time? Saving it up for what?
\n\nCan you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing and people are walking around together? How many dollars an hour does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers? What can you get later that will make up for this day of your life?
\n\nHow are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by anonymous masses? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings? And who prepares your meals? Do you ever eat by yourself? Do you ever eat standing up? How much do you know about what you eat and where it comes from? How much do you trust it?
\n\nWhat are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? By thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the product rather than the process, on the future rather than the present, the present moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards? Are we saving time? Saving it up for what?
\n\nHow are you affected by being moved around in prescribed paths, in elevators, buses, subways, escalators, on highways and sidewalks? By moving, working, and living in two- and three-dimensional grids? How are you affected by being organized, immobilized, and scheduled rather than wandering, roaming freely and spontaneously? Scavenging? (Shoplifting?) How much freedom of movement do you have — freedom to move through space, to move as far as you want, in new and unexplored directions?
\n\nAnd how are you affected by waiting? Waiting in line, waiting in traffic, waiting to eat, waiting for the bus, waiting to urinate — learning to punish and ignore your spontaneous urges? How are you affected by holding back your desires? By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting in childhood, along with the suppression of everything in you that is spontaneous, everything that evidences your wild nature, your membership in the animal kingdom? Is pleasure dangerous?
\n\nCould danger be joyous? Do you ever need to see the sky? (Can you see many stars in it any more?) Do you ever need to see water, leaves, foliage, animals? Glinting, glimmering, moving? Is that why you have a pet, an aquarium, houseplants? Or are television and video your glinting, glimmering, moving? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously? If your life was made into a movie, would you watch it? How do you feel in situations of enforced passivity?
\n\nHow are you affected by a non-stop assault of symbolic communication — audio, visual, print, billboard, video, radio, robotic voices — as you wander through a forest of signs? What are they urging upon you? Do you ever need solitude, quiet, contemplation? Do you remember it? Thinking on your own, rather than reacting to stimuli? Is it hard to look away?
\n\nIs looking away the very thing that is not permitted? Where can you go to find silence and solitude? Not white noise, but pure silence? Not loneliness, but gentle solitude? How often have you stopped to ask yourself questions like these? Do you find yourself committing acts of symbolic violence? Do you ever feel lonely in a way that words cannot even express?
\n\nDo you sometimes feel yourself ready to LOSE CONTROL?
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/no-gods", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/no-gods", "title": "No Gods", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-01-11T00:35:43Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Once, flipping through a book on child psychology, I came across a chapter about adolescent rebellion. It suggested that in the first phase of a child’s youthful rebellion against her parents, she may attempt to distinguish herself from them by accusing them of not living up to their own values. For example, if they taught her that kindness and consideration are important, she will accuse them of not being compassionate enough. In this case the child has not yet defined herself or her own values; she still accepts the values and ideas that her parents passed on to her, and she is only able to assert her identity inside of that framework. It is only later, when she questions the very beliefs and morals that were presented to her as gospel, that she can become a free-standing individual.
\n\nI often think that we have not gotten beyond that first stage of rebellion in the hardcore scene. We criticize the actions of those in the mainstream and the effects of their society upon people and animals, we attack the ignorance and cruelty of their system, but we rarely stop to question the nature of what we all accept as “morality.” Could it be that this “morality,” by which we think we can judge their actions, is itself something that should be criticized? When we claim that the exploitation of animals is “morally wrong,” what does that mean? Are we perhaps just accepting their values and turning these values against them, rather than creating moral standards of our own?
\n\nMaybe right now you’re saying to yourself “what do you mean, create moral standards of our own? Something is either morally right or it isn’t—morality isn’t something you can make up, it’s not a matter of mere opinion.” Right there, you’re accepting one of the most basic tenets of the society that raised you: that right and wrong are not individual valuations, but fundamental laws of the world. This idea, a holdover from a deceased Christianity, is at the center of our civilization. If you are going to question the establishment, you should question it first!
\n\nThere is no such thing as good or evil
\nThere is no universal right or wrong
\nThere is only you…
\nand the values you choose for yourself.
Once upon a time, almost everyone believed in the existence of God. This God ruled over the world, He had absolute power over everything in it; and He had set down laws which all human beings had to obey. If they did not, they would suffer the most terrible of punishments at His hands. Naturally, most people obeyed the laws as well as they could, their fear of eternal suffering being stronger than their desire for anything forbidden. Because everyone lived according to the same laws, they could agree upon what “morality” was: it was the set of values decreed by God’s laws. Thus, good and evil, right and wrong, were decided by the authority of God, which everyone accepted out of fear.
\n\nOne day, people began to wake up and realize that there was no such thing as God after all. There was no scientific evidence to demonstrate his existence, and few people could see any point in having faith in the irrational any longer. God pretty much disappeared from the world; nobody feared him or his punishments anymore.
\n\nBut a strange thing happened. Though these people had the courage to question God’s existence, and even deny it to the ones who still believed in it, they didn’t dare to question the morality that His laws had mandated. Perhaps it just didn’t occur to them; everyone had been raised to hold the same beliefs about what was moral, and had come to speak about right and wrong in the same way, so maybe they just assumed it was obvious what was good and what was evil whether God was there to enforce it or not. Or perhaps people had become to used to living under these laws that they were afraid to even consider the possibility that the laws didn’t exist any more than God did.
\n\nThis left humanity in an unusual position: though there was no longer an authority to decree certain things absolutely right or wrong, they still accepted the idea that some things were right or wrong by nature. Though they no longer had faith in a deity, they still had faith in a universal moral code that everyone had to follow. Though they no longer believed in God, they were not yet courageous enough to stop obeying His orders; they had abolished the idea of a divine ruler, but not the divinity of His code of ethics. This unquestioning submission to the laws of a long-departed heavenly master has been a long nightmare from which the human race is only just now beginning to awaken.
\n\nWithout God, there is no longer any objective standard by which to judge good and evil. This realization was very troubling to philosophers a few decades ago, but it hasn’t really had much of an effect in other circles. Most people still seem to think that a universal morality can be grounded in something other than God’s laws: in what is good for people, in what is good for society, in what we feel called upon to do. But explanations of why these standards necessarily constitute “universal moral law” are hard to come by. Usually, the arguments for the existence of moral law are emotional rather than rational: “But don’t you think rape is wrong?” moralists ask, as if a shared opinion were a proof of universal truth. “But don’t you think people need to believe in something greater than themselves?” they appeal, as if needing to believe in something can make it true. Occasionally, they even resort to threats: “but what would happen if everyone decided that there is no good or evil? Wouldn’t we all kill each other?”
\n\nThe real problem with the idea of universal moral law is that it asserts the existence of something that we have no way to know anything about. Believers in good and evil would have us believe that there are “moral truths”—that is, there are things that are morally true of this world, in the same way that it is true that the sky is blue. They claim that it is true of this world that murder is morally wrong just as it is true that water freezes at thirty two degrees. But we can investigate the freezing temperature of water scientifically: we can measure it and agree together that we have arrived at some kind of objective truth [that is, insofar as it is possible to speak of objective truth, for you postmodernist motherfuckers!]. On the other hand, what do we observe if we want to investigate whether it is true that murder is evil? There is no tablet of moral law on a mountaintop for us to consult, there are no commandments carved into the sky above us; all we have to go on are our own instincts and the words of a bunch of priests and other self-appointed moral experts, many of whom don’t even agree. As for the words of the priests and moralists, if they can’t offer any hard evidence from this world, why should we believe their claims? And regarding our instincts—if we feel that something is right or wrong, that may make it right or wrong for us, but that’s not proof that it is universally good or evil. Thus, the idea that there are universal moral laws is mere superstition: it is a claim that things exist in this world which we can never actually experience or learn anything about. And we would do well not to waste our time wondering about things we can never know anything about. When two people fundamentally disagree over what is right or wrong, there is no way to resolve the debate. There is nothing in this world to which they can refer to see which one is correct—because there really are no universal moral laws, just personal evaluations. So the only important question is where your values come from: do you create them yourself, according to your own desires, or do you accept them from someone else… someone else who has disguised their opinions as “universal truths”?
\n\nHaven’t you always been a little suspicious of the idea of universal moral truths, anyway? This world is filled with groups and individuals who want to convert you to their religions, their dogmas, their political agendas, their opinions. Of course they will tell you that one set of values is true for everybody, and of course they will tell you that their values are the correct ones. Once you’re convinced that there is only one standard of right and wrong, they’re only a step away from convincing you that their standard is the right one. How carefully we should approach those who would sell us the idea of “universal moral law,” then! Their claim that morality is a matter of universal law is probably just a sneaky way to get us to accept their values rather than forging our own, which might conflict with theirs.
\n\nSo, to protect ourselves from the superstitions of the moralists and the trickery of the evangelists, let us be done with the idea of moral law. Let us step forward into a new era, in which we will make values of our own rather than accepting moral laws out of fear and obedience. Let this be our new creed: There is no universal moral code that should dictate human behavior. There is no such thing as good or evil, there is no universal standard of right and wrong. Our values and morals come from us and belong to us, whether we like it or not; so we should claim them proudly for ourselves, as our own creations, rather than seeking some external justification for them.
\n\nMake your own good and evil. If there is no moral law standing over us, that means we’re free—free to do whatever we want, free to be whatever we want, free to pursue our desires without feeling any guilt or shame about them. Figure out what it is you want in your life, and go for it; create whatever values are right for you, and live by them. It won’t be easy, by any means; desires pull in different directions, they come and go without warning, so keeping up with them and choosing among them is a difficult task—of course obeying instructions is easier, less complicated. But if we just live our lives as we have been instructed to, the chances are very slim that we will get what we want out of life: each of us is different and has different needs, so how could one set of “moral truths” work for each of us? If we take responsibility for ourselves and each carve our own table of values, then we will have a fighting chance of attaining some measure of happiness. The old moral laws are left over from days when we lived in fearful submission to a nonexistent God, anyway; with their departure, we can rid ourselves of all the cowardice, submission, and superstition that has characterized our past.
\n\nSome misunderstand the claim that we should pursue our own desires to be mere hedonism. But it is not the fleeting, insubstantial desires of the typical libertine that we are speaking about here. It is the strongest, deepest, most lasting desires and inclinations of the individual: it is her most fundamental loves and hates that should shape her values. And the fact that there is no God to demand that we love one another or act virtuously does not mean that we should not do these things for our own sake, if we find them rewarding, which almost all of us do. But let us do what we do for our own sake, not out of obedience to some deity or moral code!
\n\nMorality has been something justified externally for so long that today we hardly know how to conceive of it in any other way. We have always had to claim that our values proceeded from something external to us, because basing values on our own desires was (not surprisingly!) branded evil by the preachers of moral law. Today we still feel instinctively that our actions must be justified by something outside of ourselves, something “greater” than ourselves—if not by God, then by moral law, state law, public opinion, justice, “love of man,” etc. We have been so conditioned by centuries of asking permission to feel things and do things, of being forbidden to base any decisions on our own needs, that we still want to think we are obeying some higher power even when we act on our own desires and beliefs; somehow, it seems more defensible to act out of submission to some kind of authority than in the service of our own inclinations. We feel so ashamed of our own aspirations and desires that we would rather attribute our actions to something “higher” than them. But what could be greater than our own desires, what could possibly provide better justification for our actions? Should we be serving something external without consulting our desires, perhaps even against our desires?
\n\nThis question of justification is where so many hardcore bands have gone wrong. They attack what they see as injustice not on the grounds that they don’t want to see such things happen, but on the grounds that it is “morally wrong.” By doing so, they seek the support of everyone who still believes in the fable of moral law, and they get to see themselves as servants of the Truth. These hardcore bands should not be taking advantage of popular delusions to make their points, but should be challenging assumptions and questioning traditions in everything they do. An improvement in, for example, animal rights, which is achieved in the name of justice and morality, is a step forward at the cost of two steps back: it solves one problem while reproducing and reinforcing another. Certainly such improvements could be fought for and attained on the grounds that they are desirable (nobody who truly considered it would really want to needlessly slaughter and mistreat animals, would they?), rather than with tactics leftover from Christian superstition. Unfortunately, because of centuries of conditioning, it feels so good to feel justified by some “higher force,” to be obeying “moral law,” to be enforcing “justice” and fighting “evil” that these bands get caught up in their role as moral enforcers and forget to question whether the idea of moral law makes sense in the first place. There is a sensation of power that comes from believing that one is serving a higher authority, the same one that attracts people to fascism. It’s always tempting to paint any struggle as good against evil, right against wrong; but that is not just an oversimplification, it is a falsification: for no such things exist. We can act compassionately towards each other because we want to, not just because “morality dictates,” you know! We don’t need any justification from above to care about animals and humans, or to act to protect them. We need only to feel in our hearts that it is right, that it is right for us, to have all the reason we need. Thus we can justify acting on our ethics without basing them on moral truths simply by not being ashamed of our desires: by being proud enough of them to accept them for what they are, as the forces that drive us as individuals. And our own values might not be right for everyone, it’s true; but they are all each of us has to go on, so we should dare to act on them rather than wishing for some impossible greater justification.
\n\nThis question presupposes that people refrain from killing each other only because they have been taught that it is evil to do so. Is humanity really so absolutely bloodthirsty and vicious that we would all rape and kill each other if we weren’t restrained by superstition? It seems more likely to me that we desire to get along with each other at least as much as we desire to be destructive—don’t you usually enjoy helping others more than you enjoy hurting them? Today, most people claim to believe that compassion and fairness are morally right, but this has done little to make the world into a compassionate and fair place. Might it not be true that we would act upon our natural inclinations to human decency more, rather than less, if we did not feel that charity and justice were obligatory? What would it really be worth, anyway, if we did all fulfill our “duty” to be good to each other, if it was only because we were obeying moral imperatives? Wouldn’t it mean a lot more for us to treat each other with consideration because we want to, rather than because we feel required to?
\n\nAnd if the abolition of the myth of moral law somehow causes more strife between human beings, won’t that still be better than living as slaves to superstitions? If we make our own minds up about what our values are and how we will live according to them, we at least will have the chance to pursue our desires and perhaps enjoy life, even if we have to struggle against each other. But if we choose to live according to rules set for us by others, we sacrifice the chance to choose our destinies and pursue our dreams. No matter how smoothly we might get along in the shackles of moral law, is it worth the abdication of our self determination? I wouldn’t have the heart to lie to a fellow human being and tell him he had to conform to some ethical mandate whether it was in his best interest or not, even if that lie would prevent a conflict between us. Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn’t that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn’t freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission?
\n\nBesides, look back at our history. So much bloodshed, deception, and oppression has already been perpetrated in the name of right and wrong. The bloodiest wars have been fought between opponents who each thought they were fighting on the side of moral truth. The idea of moral law doesn’t help us get along, it turns us against each other, to contend over whose moral law is the “true” one. There can be no real progress in human relations until everyone’s perspectives on ethics and values are acknowledged; then we can finally begin to work out our differences and learn to live together, without fighting over the absolutely stupid question of whose values and desires are “right.” For your own sake, for the sake of humanity, cast away the antiquated notions of good and evil and create your values for yourself!
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/no-masters", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/no-masters", "title": "No Masters", "summary": "", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/no-masters/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/no-masters/header.jpg", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-07-19T03:08:22Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "If you liked school, you’ll love work. The cruel, absurd abuses of power, the self-satisfied authority that the teachers and principals lorded over you, the intimidation and ridicule of your classmates don’t end at graduation. Those things are all present in the adult world, only more so. If you thought you lacked freedom before, wait until you have to answer to shift leaders, managers, owners, landlords, creditors, tax collectors, city councils, draft boards, law courts, and police. When you get out of school you may escape the jurisdiction of some authorities, but you enter the control of even more domineering ones. Do you enjoy being controlled by others who don’t understand or care about your wants and needs? Do you get anything out of obeying the instructions of employers, the restrictions of landlords, the laws of magistrates, people who have powers over you that you would never have given them willingly?
\n\nHow is it that they get all this power? The answer is hierarchy.
\n\nHierarchy is a value system in which your worth measured by the number of people and things you control, and how well you obey those above you. Weight is exerted downward through the power structure: everyone is forced to accept and conform to this system by everyone else. You’re afraid to disobey those above you because they can bring to bear against you the power of everyone and everything under them. You’re afraid to abdicate your power over those below you because they might end up above you. In our hierarchical system, we’re all so busy trying to protect ourselves from each other that we never have a chance to stop and think if this is really the best way our society could be organized. If we could think about it, we’d probably agree that it isn’t; for we all know happiness comes from control over our own lives, not other people’s lives. And as long as we’re busy competing for control over others, we’re bound to be the victims of control ourselves. Even the ones at the very top of the ladder are controlled by their position: they have to work around the clock to maintain it. One false move, and they could end up at the bottom.
\n\nIt is our hierarchical system that teaches us from childhood to accept the power of any authority figure, regardless of whether it is in our best interest or not. We learn to bow instinctively before anyone who claims to be more important than we are. It is hierarchy that makes homophobia common among poor people in the U.S.A. — they’re desperate to feel more valuable, more significant than somebody. It is hierarchy at work when two hundred hardcore kids go to a rock club (already a mistake, but that’s a subject for another article) to see a band, and for some stupid reason the club owner won’t let them perform: there are two hundred and six people at the club, two hundred and five of whom want the band to play, but they all accept the decision of the club owner just because he is older and owns the place (i.e. has more financial clout, and thus more legal clout). It is hierarchical values that are responsible for racism (“white people are better than black people”), classism (“rich people are better than poor people”), sexism (“men are better than women”), and a thousand other prejudices that are deeply ingrained in our society. It is hierarchy that makes rich people look at poor people as if they aren’t even human, and vice versa. It pits employer against employee, manager against worker, teacher against student, making people struggle against each other rather than work together to help each other; separated this way, they can’t benefit from each other’s skills and ideas and abilities, but must live in jealousy and fear of them. It is hierarchy at work when your boss insults you or makes sexual advances at you and you can’t do anything about it, just as it is when police flaunt their power over you. For power does make people cruel and heartless, and submission does make people cowardly and stupid: and most people in a hierarchical system partake in both. Hierarchical values are responsible for our destruction of the natural environment and the exploitation of animals: led by the capitalist West, our species seeks control over anything we can get our claws on, at any cost to ourselves or others. And it is hierarchical values that send us to war, fighting for power over each other, inventing more and more powerful weapons until finally the whole world teeters on the edge of nuclear annihilation.
\n\nBut what can we do about hierarchy? Isn’t that just the way the world works? Or are there other ways that people could interact, other values we could live by?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/no-masters/1.jpg\")
Hierarchy …
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/no-masters/2.jpg\")
… and Anarchy
\nStop thinking of anarchism as just another “world order,” just another social system. From where we all stand, in this very dominated, very controlled world, it is impossible to imagine living without any authorities, without laws or governments. No wonder anarchism isn’t usually taken seriously as a large-scale political or social program: no one can imagine what it would really be like, let alone how to achieve it — not even the anarchists themselves.
\n\nInstead, think of anarchism as an individual orientation to yourself and others, as a personal approach to life. That isn’t impossible to imagine. Conceived in these terms, what would anarchism be? It would be a decision to think for yourself rather than following blindly. It would be a rejection of hierarchy, a refusal to accept the “god given” authority of any nation, law, or other force as being more significant than your own authority over yourself. It would be an instinctive distrust of those who claim to have some sort of rank or status above the others around them, and an unwillingness to claim such status over others for yourself. Most of all, it would be a refusal to place responsibility for yourself in the hands of others: it would be the demand that each of us be able to choose our own destiny.
\n\nAccording to this definition, there are a great deal more anarchists than it seemed, though most wouldn’t refer to themselves as such. For most people, when they think about it, want to have the right to live their own lives, to think and act as they see fit. Most people trust themselves to figure out what they should do more than they trust any authority to dictate it to them. Almost everyone is frustrated when they find themselves pushing against faceless, impersonal power.
\n\nYou don’t want to be at the mercy of governments, bureaucracies, police, or other outside forces, do you? Surely you don’t let them dictate your entire life. Don’t you do what you want to, what you believe in, at least whenever you can get away with it? In our everyday lives, we all are anarchists. Whenever we make decisions for ourselves, whenever we take responsibility for our own actions rather than deferring to some higher power, we are putting anarchism into practice. So if we are all anarchists by nature, why do we always end up accepting the domination of others, even creating forces to rule over us? Wouldn’t you rather figure out how to coexist with your fellow human beings by working it out directly between yourselves, rather than depending on some external set of rules? Remember, the system they accept is the one you must live under: if you want your freedom, you can’t afford to not be concerned about whether those around you demand control of their lives or not.
\n\nDo we really need masters to command and control us? In the West, for thousands of years, we have been sold centralized state power and hierarchy in general on the premise that we do. We’ve all been taught that without police, we would all kill each other; that without bosses, no work would ever get done; that without governments, civilization itself would fall to pieces. Is all this true? Certainly, it’s true that today little work gets done when the boss isn’t watching, chaos ensues when governments fall, and violence sometimes occurs when the police aren’t around. But are these really indications that there is no other way we could organize society? Isn’t it possible that workers won’t get anything done unless they are under observation because they are used to not doing anything without being prodded — more than that, because they resent being inspected, instructed, condescended to by their managers, and don’t want to do anything for them that they don’t have to? Perhaps if they were working together for a common goal, rather than being paid to take orders, working towards objectives that they have no say in and that don’t interest them much, they would be more proactive. Not to say that everyone is ready or able to do such a thing today; but our laziness is conditioned rather than natural, and in a different environment, we might find that people don’t need bosses to get things done. And as for police being necessary to maintain the peace: we won’t discuss the ways in which the role of “law enforcer” brings out the most brutal aspects of human beings, and how police brutality doesn’t exactly contribute to peace. How about the effects on civilians living in a police-protected state? Once the police are no longer a direct manifestation of the desires of the community they serve (and that happens quickly, whenever a police force is established: they become a force external to the rest of society, an outside authority), they are a force acting coercively on the people of that society. Violence isn’t just limited to physical harm: any relationship that is established by force, such as the one between police and civilians, is a violent relationship. When you are acted upon violently, you learn to act violently back. Isn’t it possible, then, that the implicit threat of police on every street corner — of the near omnipresence of uniformed, impersonal representatives of state power — contributes to tension and violence, rather than dispelling them? If that doesn’t seem likely to you, and you are middle class and/or white, ask a poor black or Hispanic man how the presence of police makes him feel. When the standard forms of human interaction all revolve around hierarchical power, when human intercourse so often comes down to giving and receiving orders (at work, at school, in the family, in legal courts), how can we expect to have no violence in our system? People are used to using force against each other in their daily lives, the force of authoritarian power; of course using physical force cannot be far behind in such a system. Perhaps if we were more used to treating each other as equals, to creating relationships based upon equal concern for each other’s needs, we wouldn’t see so many people resort to physical violence against each other. And what about government control? Without it, would our society fall into pieces, and our lives with it? Certainly, things would be a great deal different without governments than they are now — but is that necessarily a bad thing? Is our modern society really the best of all possible worlds? Is it worth it to grant masters and rulers so much control over our lives, out of fear of trying anything different? Besides, we can’t claim that we need government control to prevent mass bloodshed, because it is governments that have perpetrated the greatest slaughters of all: in wars, in holocausts, in the centrally organized enslaving and obliteration of entire peoples and cultures. And it may be that when governments break down, many people lose their lives in the resulting chaos and infighting. But this fighting is almost always between other power-hungry hierarchical groups, other would-be governors and rulers. If we were to reject hierarchy absolutely, and refuse to serve any force above ourselves, there would no longer be any large scale wars or holocausts. That would be a responsibility each of us would have to take on equally, to collectively refuse to recognize any power as worth serving, to swear allegiance to nothing but ourselves and our fellow human beings. But if we all were to do it, we would never see another world war again.
\n\nOf course, even if a world entirely without hierarchy is possible, we should not have any illusions that any of us will live to see it realized. That should not even be our concern: for it is foolish to arrange your life so that it revolves around something that you will never be able to experience. We should, rather, recognize the patterns of submission and domination in our own lives, and, to the best of our ability, break free of them. We should put the anarchist ideal (no masters, no slaves) into effect in our daily lives however we can. Every time one of us remembers not to accept the authority of the powers that be at face value, each time one of us is able to escape the system of domination for a moment (whether it is by getting away with something forbidden by a teacher or boss, relating to a member of a different social stratum as an equal, etc.), that is a victory for the individual and a blow against hierarchy.
\n\nDo you still believe that a hierarchy-free society is impossible? There are plenty of examples throughout human history: the bushmen of the Kalahari desert still live together without authorities, never trying to force or command each other to do things, but working together and granting each other freedom and autonomy. Sure, their society is being destroyed by our more warlike one — but that isn’t to say that an egalitarian society could not exist that was extremely hostile to, and well-defended against, the encroachments of external power! William Burroughs writes about an anarchist pirates’ stronghold a hundred years ago that was just that.
\n\nIf you need an example closer to your daily life, remember the last time you gathered with your friends to relax on a Friday night. Some of you brought food, some of you brought entertainment, some provided other things, but nobody kept track of who owed what to whom. You did things as a group and enjoyed yourselves; things actually got done, but nobody was forced to do anything, and nobody assumed the position of chief. We have these moments of non-capitalist, non-coercive, non-hierarchical interaction in our lives constantly, and these are the times when we most enjoy the company of others, when we get the most out of other people; but somehow it doesn’t occur to us to demand that our society work this way, as well as our friendships and love affairs. Sure, it’s a lofty goal to ask that it does — but let’s dare to reach for high goals, let’s not fucking settle for anything less than the best in our lives! Each of us only gets a few years on this planet to enjoy life; let’s try to work together to do it, rather than fighting amongst each other for miserable prizes like status and power.
\n\n“Anarchism” is the revolutionary idea that no one is more qualified than you are to decide what your life will be.
\n\n— It means trying to figure out how to work together to meet our individual needs, how to work with each other rather than “for” or against each other. And when this is impossible, it means preferring strife to submission and domination.
\n\n— It means not valuing any system or ideology above the people it purports to serve, not valuing anything theoretical above the real things in this world. It means being faithful to real human beings (and animals, etc.), fighting for ourselves and for each other, not out of “responsibility,” not for “causes” or other intangible concepts.
\n\n— It means not forcing your desires into a hierarchical order, either, but accepting and embracing all of them, accepting yourself. It means not trying to force the self to abide by any external laws, not trying to restrict your emotions to the predictable or the practical, not pushing your instincts and desires into boxes: for there is no cage large enough to accommodate the human soul in all its flights, all its heights and depths.
\n\n— It means refusing to put the responsibility for your happiness in anyone else’s hands, whether that be parents, lovers, employers, or society itself. It means taking the pursuit of meaning and joy in your life upon your own shoulders.
\n\nFor what else should we pursue, if not happiness? If something isn’t valuable because we find meaning and joy in it, then what could possibly make it important? How could abstractions like “responsibility,” “order,” or “propriety” possibly be more important than the real needs of the people who invented them? Should we serve employers, parents, the State, God, capitalism, moral law before ourselves? Who was it that taught you we should, anyway?
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/there-is-a-difference-between-life-and-survival", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/there-is-a-difference-between-life-and-survival", "title": "There is a difference between Life and Survival.", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-03-02T19:04:08Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Whatever medical science may profess, there is a difference between Life and survival. There is more to being alive than just having a heartbeat and brain activity. Being alive, really alive, is something much subtler and more magnificent. Their instruments measure blood pressure and temperature, but overlook joy, passion, love, all the things that make life really matter. To make our lives matter again, to really get the most out of them, we will have to redefine life itself. We have to dispense with their merely clinical definitions, in favor of ones which have more to do with what we actually feel.
\n\nAs it stands, how much living do we have in our lives? How many mornings do you wake up feeling truly free, thrilled to be alive, breathlessly anticipating the experiences of a new day? How many nights do you fall asleep feeling fulfilled, going over the events of the past day with satisfaction? Most of us feel as though everything has already been decided without us, as if living is not a creative activity but rather something that happens to us. That’s not being alive, that’s just surviving: being undead. We have undertakers, but their services are not usually required; we have morgues, but we spend most of our time in office cubicles and video arcades, in shopping malls, in front of televisions. Of course suburban housewives and petty executives are terrified of risk and change; they can’t imagine that there is anything more valuable than physical safety. Their hearts may be beating, but they no longer believe in their dreams, let alone chase after them.
\n\nBut this is how the revolution begins: a few of us start chasing our dreams, breaking our old patterns, embracing what we love (and in the process discovering what we hate), daydreaming, questioning, acting outside the boundaries of routine and regularity. Others see us doing this, see people daring to be more creative and more adventurous, more generous and more ambitious than they had imagined possible, and join us one by one. Once enough people embrace this new way of living, a point of critical mass is finally reached, and society itself begins to change. From that moment, the world will start to undergo a transformation: from the frightening, alien place that it is, into a place ripe with possibility, where our lives are in our own hands and any dream can come true.
\n\nSo do what you want with your life, whatever it is! But to be sure you do get what you want, think carefully about what it really is, first, and how to go about getting it. Analyze the world around you, so you’ll know which people and forces are working against your desires, and which ones are on your side… and how you can work together with us. We’re out here, living life to the fullest, waiting for you—hopping trains across the United States, organizing political protests in French public schools, writing beautiful letters at sunrise in Bangkok. We just finished making love in the corporate washroom a minute before you walked in on your half hour lunch break. And Life is waiting for you with us, on the peaks of unclimbed mountains, in the smoke of campfires and burning buildings, in the arms of lovers who will turn your world upside down. Come join us!
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/reconsidering-television", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/reconsidering-television", "title": "Reconsidering Television : Revolution in Everyday Life", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-03-02T19:29:23Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Everyone knows how insipid and inane most television programs are. It’s clear to anyone who spends an hour in front of prime time that the sitcoms, news, and commercials alike are deliberately designed to appeal to lowest common denominator levels of taste, intelligence, and attention span in the intended viewers. It has been a cliche for generations now that television is “mindless entertainment.” However, most people don’t really see this as any objection to watching television. It’s not too hard to come to associate inanity and irrelevance with entertainment, to come to assume that “being entertained” means giving your critical and creative faculties a rest — how tiresome it is to be critical and creative, anyway! And in a society that seems intent on taking nothing seriously outside of the “professional world” of production, exchange of goods and services, and accumulation of wealth (witness our general disinterest in everything from Dante to date rape), it seems only natural that we spend our leisure time in the least constructive manner possible.
\n\nBut the negative effects of watching too much television are much more complicated than they appear to be at first glance.
\n\nOur dependence upon television and other manifestations of the homogenized “mass media” to keep us entertained and (such as it is!) informed has economic, social, and, most importantly, personal ramifications for all of us. For our relationship with this media is one of spectator to spectacle, and life itself is less fulfilling for those who watch than it is for those who act.
\n\nThis spectator/spectacle relationship is revealed by the godlike status of “stars” and other public figures in our society. The media depend partly upon the glamorization, even deification, of “personalities” such as Tom Cruise, Ice Cube or Nancy Reagan for the material they collectively use to keep us watching. Certainly these people are not that much different from or more exciting than the rest of us — and the fact that so many of them can move from one role to another (from model to rock star, from rock star to actor, from actor to president of the United States) without anyone batting an eye is proof that it is their mere status as public figures, not their unusual talents in a given field, that make them “newsworthy.” So much useless information about these individuals is spewed at us daily that one can’t help but eventually pay attention… soon you know more about Madonna’s new boyfriend than you know about your own neighbors. Perhaps you even begin to live vicariously through Madonna, as the media presents her as the personification of “feminine” charm and danger, as living a life vastly more interesting than your own.
\n\nEven worse, we soon know even more about fictional characters than we do about real people. Listen to people in their casual conversation and you’ll hear how much time they waste talking about television shows, old movies, and comic book characters. When we could be making better plans for our own lives or getting to know each other better, we instead spend our time exchanging useless information the media has pumped into our heads. And of course the more time we spend wondering who will be Rolling Stone’s “band of the year” next, the less time we have to make more of our own lives.
\n\nWhen television companies, movie producers, and their ilk convince us that entertaining, exciting life is not something that exists all around us every day but instead can only be found in the lives of celebrities, or in movies, they get to sell life itself back to us.
\n\nThat is, when you spend your spare time watching television rather than traveling or falling in love or playing soccer, you come to believe that the most excitement you can have is in watching a travel show, a soap opera, or a sports game on television. And the more you watch these things on television, the more you forget that you could actually be out doing these things yourself rather than just watching them. You’d be surprised how much more exciting it is to actually make music yourself than to watch MTV — how much more fulfilling it is to make love yourself than to watch some strangers in a pornographic movie — how much more exhilarating it is to actually struggle against an obstacle yourself than to just watch an adventure movie. But the less often you leave the television set to actually do these things, the more empty your actual life is, and the more you need the television shows to make up for the lack of any real excitement in your life.
\n\nAnd that’s where the media moguls come in. They’re happy to provide you with a substitute life — at a price. Sure they’ll sell you second-rate sex and violence, vicarious excitement and affection… but you have to pay for it on pay-per-view or cable television, you have to pay to buy the television sets and the movie tickets and the computer modems, you have to buy the latest fashion or music magazine. Above all you have to listen to their commercials on the radio, read them in the magazines, or watch them in between television shows. These commercials are carefully engineered to get you to spend your money on the products being advertised… and when you do spend your money on them, you’ll need to work harder and longer at your job to make more money. In fact chances are that your job isn’t too rewarding to you either, and rather than making you feel so alive that you don’t need television anymore your job probably makes watching television seem thrilling by comparison. Similarly, you may feel so exhausted when you finish work for the day that you don’t have the energy to do anything but turn on the television… and you may even come to associate doing things with working, and thus with being exhausted and dissatisfied, and watching things with being “off the clock” and feeling “free.” So you find yourself seeking meaning in life from watching the Superbowl rather than working on your own game.
\n\nAnd this would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic: as likely than not, the job you put all your effort into has something to do with the media or marketing industry. Maybe you work at an advertising agency, or a television station, or for some business that makes and markets a product that is completely useless to humanity — but that everyone buys because it is so heavily advertised. Coca Cola is a good example. So while you’re getting burned out and missing out on real life, on visceral, intense, unmediated experience, just so you can buy a cheap substitute for it, you’re supporting the same system that is wasting your time until you die. And make no mistake about it, you are going to die — do you want to look back on a life of watching and talking about the Cosby Show, or a life of pain and pleasure, romance and struggle, love and hate?
\n\nAre you satisfied to watch other people do what you could be doing yourself, if you didn’t waste so much time watching, didn’t spend so much time working at a job you hate to buy things you don’t need… to pay for more watching?
\n\nThe solution is simple, if you want it: it’s easy to turn off your television set and go outside. Stop caring what Elvis’ daughter is doing, and start caring what your friends or enemies are doing, what your lover or stepmother is doing. Walk out of your office cell-block into the sunshine and learn to do without those fancy clothes or brand new stereo so that you will be free to live a life of challenge and excitement, a life filled with new experiences — a life where you are the master of your own fate rather than just a victim of a dull job and a few sharp advertising campaigns. Surely if you used all that energy that you waste selling shoes or programming computers for your employer, you could find a rewarding way to earn enough money yourself to more than survive… or, better yet, you could work with others towards a world in which survival does not depend upon money.
\n\nAct now or forever hold your peace; don’t talk about how bored you are, or how much you hate your job, or how amazingly meaningless your life seems (when and if you ever actually stop to think clearly about it) if you’re not willing to try to set yourself free.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/product-is-the-excrement-of-action", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/product-is-the-excrement-of-action", "title": "Product is the Excrement of Action", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Honestly, when was the last time you spent a whole day just enjoying what you were doing and feeling? Enjoying it solely for its own sake, without thinking about the future or worrying about the long-term consequences? When was the last time you spent a whole month living that way? Do you have a hard time forgetting about your responsibilities, your goals, your productivity, and just being in the present?
\n\nToday, our lives revolve around things. We measure our worth in terms of our material possessions: in terms of our control over things outside ourselves. We gauge our success in life in terms of our “productivity”; that is, our ability to make these things. Our social system revolves around the production and consumption of material goods more than anything else. Even when we are not thinking about material objects, we represent our lives to ourselves as things: we consider our accomplishments, our future prospects, our social position… anything but how we actually feel. “The end justifies the means,” we say; that is, the products of our actions, the end results of our lives, are more important to us than the process of living itself.
\n\nBut products are the excrement of actions. Product is what is left over when the dust settles and the pulse returns to normal, when the day is done, when the coffin is laid in the ground. We do not exist in the settling dust or the scorecard; we are here in the present tense, in the making, the doing, the feeling. Just as we try to immortalize ourselves by fleeing into the world of fixed, deathless images, we try to externalize ourselves by thinking in terms of the results of our actions rather than our experience of the actions themselves. After all, it’s so complicated to have to worry about whether you are really enjoying yourself, how you are feeling in the moment. It is easier to focus on the results, the hard evidence of your life; these things seem easier to understand, and easier to control.
\n\nModern society is centered around the production and distribution of material goods, rather than the happiness and satisfaction of its participants. thus Modern man thinks of his life in terms of what he has “to show for it,” rather than considering the life itself.
\n\nOf course today’s average worker is used to thinking about the ends rather than the means. He spends most of his time and energy working at a job that in all likelihood does not fulfill his dreams. He looks forward to payday every two weeks, for he counts on his paycheck to make sense out of his life: without it, he would feel like he was wasting his time. If he didn’t look at the “consequences” of his actions as a justification for them, life would be unbearable-what if he constantly considered how he was feeling as he bagged groceries, or asked himself if he was having fun every moment he struggled with the fax machine? Insofar as his everyday experience of life is tedious and meaningless, he needs to concentrate on the coming weekend, the next vacation, his next purchases, to fend off insanity. And eventually he is bound to generalize that mode of thinking to other parts of his life: he comes to evaluate possible actions according to the rewards they offer, just as he would evaluate a job according to the wage it offers.
\n\nThus, the present has lost almost all significance for modern man. Instead he spends his life always planning for the future: he studies for a diploma, rather than for the pleasure of learning; he chooses his job for social status, wealth, and “security,” rather than for joy; he saves his money for big purchases and vacation trips, rather than to buy his way out of wage slavery and into full time freedom. When he finds himself experiencing profound happiness with another human being, he tries to freeze that moment, to turn it into a permanent fixture (a contract), by marrying her. On Sundays he goes to church, where he is told to do good deeds in order to one day receive eternal salvation (as NietzsChe says, the good Christian still wants to be paid well), rather than for the sheer pleasure of helping others. The “aristocratic disregard for consequences,” that ability to act for the sake of action that every hero possesses, is far beyond him.
\n\nIt is a cliche that men and women of middle class and middle age have a hard time putting aside their insurance policies and investment programs to seize the moment; but, all too often, we, too, end up exchanging present for future and experience for souvenirs. We save mementos, trophies, boxes of keepsakes, old letters, as if life can be gathered, stored up, frozen for later… for later? For when? Life is here with us now, running through us like a river; and like a river, it cannot be held in place without losing its magic. The more time we spend trying to “save it up,” the less we have to throw ourselves into it.
\n\nThe worst of us, in fact, are the radicals and artists. All too often, we “revolutionaries” expend our efforts thinking and talking about a revolution “that is to come,” rather than concentrating on making revolution in the present tense. We’re so used to thinking in terms of production that even when we try to make life into something immediate and exciting, we still end up centering our efforts around an event in the future-one that we may not even live to see. And like factory supervisors, we worry more about our productivity (the number of new believers recruited, the progress of the “cause,” etc.) than about how we and our fellow human beings are feeling and living. Artists suffer from this tendency most of all; for their vocation itself depends on making products out of the raw material of real-life experience. There is something of the capitalist’s lust for domination in the way that artists mold their emotions and experiences into forms of their own making through the act of expression; for the expression of feelings and sensations, unique and unfathomable as they are, always consists of a kind of simplification. It isn’t enough for the artist to just experience and appreciate life as it really is; she comes to cannibalize her life for what is really a career, a series of products outside herself, even adjusting her life for her career’s sake. Worse, she may find that she cannot make love on a rooftop at daybreak without planning out the excellent scene for her novel (excrement!) that this will make for.
\n\nCertainly, excretion is a healthy and necessary function of the soul as well as the body, and there is a place for art in our lives as a way to pour feeling back into the world when the heart is full to overflowing; but if you keep trying to do it after it is unnecessary, you eventually force out your heart and the rest of your insides (remember the fairy tale of the goose and the golden eggs?). We must put life and experience first, we must meet the world with only this in mind, as fresh and innocent as when we were children, with no intentions to cannibalize, categorize, organize, or simplify the profound infinities of our experiences. Otherwise, we will miss what is most vital, most beautiful, most immediate in this world, in our search for things that can be pressed flat and preserved “for all time.” Imagination should be used first and foremost to transform everyday reality, not just to make symbolic representations of it. How many exciting novels could be written about the sort of lives that most of us lead these days, anyway?. Let us make living our art, rather than seeking to make mere art out of our lives.
\n\nIf we ever find happiness, it will be in the process of living, of doing what we want and living out our dreams, not in the products of our lives. If we don’t pause and enjoy the present now, when will we? So let’s stop “making history”-we’re all so obsessed with “making a mark”-and start living. That would be a real revolution. Let’s live for today, for our lives, not our “results”!
\n\n“Sometimes,” said Julia, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.” “But I tell you, Henri, that every moment you steal from the present is a moment that you have lost forever. There’s only now.”
\n\n— by Jeanette Winterson
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/bourgeoisie", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/bourgeoisie", "title": "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie : Or, The Tyranny of the Hair Dryer", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Adapted from George Orwell’s Homage to Catatonia.
\n\nDoes your father drift from one hobby to another, fruitlessly seeking a meaningful way to spend the little “leisure time” he gets off from work? Does your mother endlessly redecorate the house, going from one room to the next until she can start over at the beginning again? Do you agonize constantly over your future, as if there was some kind of track laid out ahead you—and the world would end if you turned off of it? If the answer to these questions is yes, it sounds like you’re in the clutches of the bourgeoisie, the last barbarians on earth.
\n\nPublic opinion is an absolute value to the bourgeois man and woman because they know they are living in a herd: a herd of scared animals, that will turn on anyone it doesn’t recognize as its own. They shiver in fear as they ponder what “the neighbors” will think of their son’s new hairstyle. They plot ways to seem even more normal than their friends and coworkers. They don’t dare fail to turn on their lawn sprinklers or dress appropriately for “casual Fridays” at the office. Anything that could drag them out of their routines is viewed as suspect at best. Love and lust are both diseases, possibly fatal, as are all the other passions that could drive one to do things that would result in expulsion from the flock. Keep them quarantined to secret affairs and teenage dates, to night clubs and strip clubs—for God’s sake, don’t contaminate the rest of us. Go wild when “your” football team wins a game, drink yourself into oblivion when the weekend comes, rent obscene movies if you have to, but don’t you dare sing or run or make love out here. Under no circumstances admit to feeling anything that doesn’t belong in the staff room or at the dinner party. Under no conditions admit to wanting anything more or different than what “everyone else” wants, whatever and whoever that might be.
\n\nAnd of course their children have learned this, too. Even after the death matches of the grade school nightmare, even among the most rebellious and radical of the nonconformists, the same rules are in place: don’t confuse anybody as to where you stand. Don’t use the wrong signifiers or subscribe to the wrong codes. Don’t dance when you’re supposed to be posing, don’t speak when you’re supposed to be dancing, don’t mess with the genre or the moves. Make sure you have enough money to participate in the various rituals. To keep your identity intact, make it clear which subcultures and styles you’re aligned to, which bands and fashions and politics you want to be associated with. You wouldn’t dare risk your identity, would you? That’s your character armor, your only protection against certain death at the hands of your friends. Without an identity, without borders to define the edges of your self, you’d just dissolve into the void… wouldn’t you?
\n\nThe older generations of the bourgeoisie have nothing to offer the younger ones because they have nothing in the first place. All their standards are hollow, all of their riches are consolation prizes, not one of their values contains any reference to real joy or fulfillment. Their children sense this, and rebel accordingly, whenever they can get away with it. The ones that don’t have already been beaten into terrified submission.
\n\nSo how has bourgeois society continued to perpetuate itself through so many generations? By absorbing this rebellion as a part of the natural life cycle. Because every child rebels as soon as she is old enough to have a sense of self at all, this rebellion is presented as an integral part of adolescence—and thus the woman who wants to continue her rebellion into adulthood is made to feel that she is insisting on remaining a child forever. It’s worth pointing out that a brief survey of other cultures and peoples will reveal that this “adolescent rebellion” is not inevitable or “natural.”
\n\nThis perpetual rebellion of the youth also creates deep gulfs between different generations of the bourgeoisie, which play a crucial role in maintaining the existence of the bourgeoisie as such. Because the adults always seem to be the enforcers of the status quo, and the youth do not have the perspective yet to see that their rebellion has also been absorbed into that status quo, generation after generation of young people are able to make the mistake of identifying older people themselves as the source of their misfortunes rather than realizing that these misfortunes are the result of a larger system of misery. They grow older and become bourgeois adults themselves, unable to recognize that they are merely replacing their former enemies, and still unable to bridge the so-called generation gap to learn from people of other age groups… let alone establish some kind of unified resistance with them. Thus the different generations of the bourgeoisie, while seemingly fighting amongst themselves, work together harmoniously as components of the larger social machine to ensure maximum alienation for all.
\n\nThe bourgeois man depends upon the existence of a mythical mainstream to justify his way of life. He needs this mainstream because his social instincts are skewed in the same way his conception of democracy is: he thinks that whatever the majority is, wants, does, must be right. Nothing could be more terrifying to him than this new development, which he is beginning to sense today: that there no longer is a majority, if there ever was.
\n\nOur society is so fragmented, so diverse, that at this point it is absurd to speak of a “mainstream.” This is a myth partly created by the anonymity of our cities. Almost everyone one passes on the street is a stranger: one mentally relegates these anonymous figures to the faceless mass one calls the mainstream, to which one attributes whatever properties one thinks of strangers as possessing (for the smug salesman, they all envy him for being even more respectable than they are; for the insecure bohemian rebel, they must disapprove of him for not being like they all are). They must be part of the silent majority, that invisible force that makes everything the way it is; one assumes that they are the same “normal people” seen in television commercials. But the fact is, of course, that those commercials refer to an unattainable ideal, in order to keep everyone feeling left out and insufficient. The “mainstream” is analogous to this ideal, as it keeps everyone in line without ever actually making an appearance, and possesses the same degree of reality as the perfect family in the toothpaste advertisement.
\n\nNo one worries more about this absent mass than the bohemian children of the bourgeoisie. They bicker over how to orchestrate their protests to gain “mass appeal” for their radical ideas, as if there still was a mass to appeal to! Their society is now made up of many communities, and the only question is which communities they should approach… and dressing “nice,” proper language and all, is probably not the best way to appeal to the most potentially revolutionary elements of their society. In the last analysis, the so-called “mainstream” audience most of them imagine they are dressing up for at their demonstrations and political events is probably just the specter of their bourgeois parents, engraved deep in their collective subconscious as a symbol of the adolescent insecurity and guilt they never got over. They would do better to cut their ties to the bourgeoisie entirely by feeling free to act, look, and speak in whatever ways are pleasurable, no matter who is watching—even when they are trying to advance some political cause: for no political objective reached by activists in camouflage could be more important than beginning the struggle towards a world in which people will not have to disguise themselves to be taken seriously.
\n\nThis is not to pardon those insecure bohemians who use their activism not as a means of building ties with others, but rather as a way to set themselves apart: in their desperation to purchase an identity for themselves, they believe they must pay for it by defining themselves against others. You can recognize them by their self-righteousness, their pompous show of ideological certainty, the ostentatious way they declare themselves “activists” at every opportunity. Political “activism” is almost exclusively their sphere, today, and “exclusive” is the key word… until this changes, the world will not.
\n\nReproduction is a big issue for the bourgeois man and woman. They can only have children under very precise circumstances; anything else is “irresponsible,” “unwise,” “a poor decision for the future.” They must be prepared to give up every last vestige of their youthful, selfish freedom to have children, for the mobility their corporations demand and the strain of vicious competition have destroyed the community network that long ago used to share the labor of child-rearing. Now every family unit is a tiny military outpost, closed and locked to the outside world both in their hearts and in the paranoia-turned-city-planning of their suburbs, each one an isolated emotional economy to itself where scarcity is the key word. The father and mother must abandon their selves for the prescribed roles of care-giver and bread-winner, for in the bourgeois world there is no other way to provide for the child. Thus the bourgeois couple’s own fertility has been made a threat to their freedom, and a natural part of human life has become a social control mechanism.
\n\nMarriage and the “nuclear family” (the atomized family?) as chain gang have survived as a result of this calamity, much to the misfortune of potential lovers everywhere. For as the young adventurer, who keeps her lusts strong and her appetite whetted with constant danger and solitude, knows well, love and sexual desire cannot survive overexposure—especially in the dull and lifeless settings that most married partners share time. The bourgeois husband sees the only lover he is permitted under only the worst possible circumstances: after every other force in his world has had the chance to exhaust and infuriate him for the day. The bourgeois wife learns to punish and ignore as “unrealistic” and “impractical” her every desire for romance, spontaneity, wonder. Together, they live in a hell of unfulfillment. What they need is a real community of caring people around them, so parenthood would not force them into unwanted “respectability,” so they would still be free to have the individual adventures they need to keep their time together sweet, so they would never find themselves so lost and desperately lonely.
\n\nIn just the same way, their steady supply of food, of conveniences, comforts, and diversions avail them not. For as every hitchhiker, every hero, every terrorist knows, these things gain their value through their absence, and can offer real joy only as luxuries happened upon in the pursuit of something greater. Constant access to sex, food, warmth, and shelter desensitize a man to the very pleasures they afford. The bourgeois man has given up his chance to pursue real stakes in life for the assurance that he will have these amenities and securities; but without real stakes in his life, these can offer him no more real joy than the company of his fellow prisoners.
\n\nYou can take a quick tour of all the unacted desires of the bourgeois man just by turning on his television or stepping into one of his movie theaters. He spends as much of his time as he can in these various virtual realities because he instinctively feels that they can offer him more excitement and satisfaction than the real world. The saddest part is that, so long as he remains bourgeois, this may actually be true. And as long as he accepts the displacement of his desires into the marketplace by paying for imitations of their fulfillment, he will be trapped in the empty role that is himself.
\n\nThese desires are not always pretty to see played out in Technicolor and SurroundSound: the bourgeois man’s dreams and appetites are as infected by the fetishization of power and control as his society is. The closest he seems to be able to offer to an expression of free, liberated desire is the fantasy of all-consuming destruction that appears again and again at the black heart of his wildest cinematic fever dreams. This makes sense enough—after all, in a world of nothing but strip malls and theme parks, what honest thing is there to do but destroy?
\n\nThe bourgeois man is not equipped to view his desires as anything but unfortunate weaknesses to be fended off with placebos because his life has never been about the pursuit of pleasure—he has spent several centuries achieving higher and higher standards of survival at the cost of everything else. Tonight he sits in his living room surrounded by computers, can openers, radar detectors, home entertainment systems, novelty ties, microwave dinners, and cellular phones, with no idea what went wrong.
\n\nThe bourgeois man is only possible by virtue of the blinders he wears that prevent him from imagining that any other way of life is possible. As far as he can tell, everyone from the impoverished migrant workers of his own nation to the monks of Tibet would be bourgeois too, if only they could afford it. He does his damnedest to maintain these illusions; without them, he would have to face the fact that he has thrown his life away for nothing.
\n\nThe bourgeois man is not an individual. He is not a real person (although if he was, he would probably live in Connecticut). He is a cancer inside all of us. He can now be cured.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/invitation-to-the-crimethinc-inner-circle", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/invitation-to-the-crimethinc-inner-circle", "title": "Invitation to the CrimethInc. “Inner Circle”", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "WANTED: Creative, independent men and women, tired of being exhausted by the trivial details of modern survival, fed up with being bored by modern entertainment, no longer confused by the distractions of the mass media… not content with limiting their freedom, their lives, to their “free time.” People who prefer idealism to realism, and reality to ideology. To become full-time revolutionaries. NOT armchair revolutionaries, not lunch break revolutionaries, not leisure-time revolutionaries. And not “professional” revolutionaries: rather than making a business out of “revolution.,” they must make revolution their business. Men and women who will not allow their efforts to win back their freedom to become just another job, who are ready to live according to their desires around the clock.
\n\nPunk Rockers: don’t be content with living in a world of your own making once a week, when a band plays. Demand that excitement every day, demand that self-determination every morning when you wake up.
\n\nMusicians, Artists:seek not to “make a living from your art,” as any worker who sells his labor (and thus his creativity) for money does. Seek to make art your way of living — or, even better, make living your art. For life is contagious: if you want to make others feel it, you must live it to the fullest yourself, so that it will call out to them through you. If you would make art to share with them, you must first share yourself, give yourself to your art and your life.
\n\nHuman Beings: Look at the world around us; it is a world that we have created. We transformed the old world into this one — but why this one? Is this the world we would have chosen, if we had considered in advance the question of what the best of all possible worlds might be? But before you despair, think — we created this world, it is we who make it up. Could we not make another world out of it, then, if we chose?
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/forward", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/forward", "title": "Forward!", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "People from the (rapidly splintering) “mainstream” of society in Europe and the United States today take a peculiar pleasure in considering themselves “normal” in comparison to legal offenders, political radicals, and other members of social outgroups. They treat this “normalcy” as if it is an indication of mental health and moral righteousness, regarding the “others” with a mixture of pity and disgust. But if we consult history, we can see that the conditions and patterns of human life have changed so much in the past two centuries that it is impossible to speak of any lifestyle available to human beings today as being “normal” in the natural sense, as being a lifestyle for which we adapted over many generations. Of the lifestyles from which a young woman growing up in the West today can choose, none are anything like the ones for which her ancestors were prepared by centuries of natural selection and evolution.
\n\nIt is more likely that the “normalcy” that these people hold so dear is rather the feelings of normalcy that result from conformity to a standard. Being surrounded by others who behave the same way, who are conditioned to the same routines and expectations, is comforting because it reinforces the idea that one is pursuing the right course: if a great many people make the same decisions and live according to the same customs, then these decisions and customs must be the right ones.
\n\nBut the mere fact that a number of people live and act in a certain way does not make it any more likely that this way of living is the one that will bring them the most happiness. Besides, the lifestyles associated with the American and European “mainstream” (if such a thing truly exists) were not exactly consciously chosen as the best possible ones by those who pursue them; rather, they came to be suddenly, as the results of technological and cultural upheavals. Once the peoples of Europe, the United States, and the world realize that there is nothing necessarily “normal” about their “normal life,” they can begin to ask themselves the first and most important question of the next century: Are there ways of thinking, acting, and living that might be more satisfying and exciting than the ways we think, act, and live today?
\n\nIf the accumulated knowledge of Western civilization has anything of value to offer us at this point, it is an awareness of just how much is possible when it comes to human life. Our otherwise foolish scholars of history and sociology and anthropology can at least show us this one thing: that human beings have lived in a thousand different kinds of societies, with ten thousand different tables of values, ten thousand different relationships to each other and the world around them, ten thousand different conceptions of self. A little traveling can still show you the same thing, if you get there before Coca-Cola has had too much of a head start.
\n\nThat’s why I can’t help but scoff when someone refers to “human nature,” invariably in the course of excusing himself for a miserable resignation to our supposed fate. Don’t you realize we share a common ancestor with sea urchins? If differing environments can make these distant cousins of ours so very distant from us, how much more possible must small changes in ourselves and our interactions be! If there is anything lacking (and there sorely, sorely is, most will admit) in our lives, anything unnecessarily tragic or meaningless in them, any corner of happiness that we have not yet thoroughly explored, then all that is needed is for us to alter our environments accordingly. “If you want to change the world, you first must change yourself,” the saying goes; we have learned that the opposite is true.
\n\nAnd there is another valuable discovery our species has made, albeit the hard way: we are capable of absolutely transforming environments. The place you lie, sit, or stand reading this was probably altogether different a hundred years ago, not to mention two thousand years ago; and almost all of those changes were brought about by human beings. We have completely remade our world in the past few centuries, changing life for almost every kind of plant and animal, ourselves most of all. It only remains for us to experiment with executing (or, for that matter, not executing) these changes intentionally, in accordance with our needs and desires, rather than at the mercy of irrational, inhuman forces like competition, superstition, routine.
\n\nOnce we realize this, we can claim a new destiny for ourselves, both individually and collectively. No longer will we be buffeted about by powers that seem beyond our control; instead, in this exploration of ourselves through the creation of new environments, we will learn all that we can be. This path will take us out of the world as we know it, far beyond the farthest horizons we can see from here. We will become artists of the grandest kind, painting with desire as a medium, deliberately creating and recreating ourselves—becoming, ourselves, our own greatest work.
\n\nTo accomplish this, we’ll need to learn how to coexist and collaborate successfully: to see just how interconnected all our lives are, and finally learn to live with that in mind. Until this becomes possible, each of us will not only be denied the vast potential of her fellows, but her own potential as well; for we all make together the world that each of us must live in and be made by. The other thing that is lacking is the knowledge of our own desires. Desire is a slippery thing, amoebic and difficult to pin down, let alone keep up with. If we’re going to make a destiny out of the pursuit and transformation of desire, we first must find ways to discover and release our loves and lusts. For this, not enough experience and adventure could ever suffice. So the makers of this new world must be more generous and more greedy than any who have come before: more generous with each other, and more greedy for life!
\n\nEven from here, I can taste the question already on the tip of your tongue: isn’t this utopian?
\n\nWell, of course it is. You know what everyone’s greatest fear is? It is that all the dreams we have, all the crazy ideas and aspirations, all the impossible romantic longings and utopian visions can come true, that the world can grant our wishes. People spend their lives doing everything in their power to fend off that possibility: they beat themselves up with every kind of insecurity, sabotage their own efforts, undermine love affairs and cry sour grapes before the world even has a chance to defeat them… because no weight could be heavier to bear than the possibility that everything we want is possible. If that is true, then there really are things at stake in this life, things to be truly won or lost. Nothing could be more heartbreaking than to fail when such success is actually possible, so we do everything we can to avoid trying in the first place, to avoid having to try.
\n\nFor if there is even the slightest possibility that our hearts’ desires could be realized, then of course the only thing that makes sense is to throw ourselves entirely into their pursuit and risk that heartbreak. Despair and nihilism seem safer, projecting our hopelessness onto the cosmos as an excuse for not even trying. So we remain, clutching our resignation, as secure as corpses in coffins (“better safe and sorry”)… but this still cannot ward off that dreadful possibility. Thus in our hopeless flight from the real tragedy of the world, we only heap upon ourselves false tragedy, unnecessary tragedy, as well.
\n\nPerhaps this world will never conform perfectly to our needs—people will always die before they are ready, perfect relationships will end in ruins, adventures will end in catastrophe and beautiful moments be forgotten. But what breaks my heart is the way we flee from those inevitable truths into the arms of more horrible things. It may be true that every man is lost in a universe that is fundamentally indifferent to him, locked forever in a terrifying solitude—but it doesn’t have to be true that some people starve while others destroy food or leave fertile farms untilled. It doesn’t have to be true that men and women waste their lives away working to serve the hollow greed of a few rich men, just to survive. It doesn’t have to be that we never dare to tell each other what we really want, to share ourselves honestly, to use our talents and capabilities to make life more bearable, let alone more beautiful. That’s unnecessary tragedy, stupid tragedy, pathetic and pointless. It’s not even utopian to demand that we put an end to farces like these.
\n\nIf we could bring ourselves to believe, to really feel, the possibility that we are invincible and can accomplish whatever we want in this world, it wouldn’t seem out of our reach at all to correct such absurdities. What I am begging you to do here is not to put faith in the impossible, but have the courage to face that terrible possibility that our lives really are in our own hands, and to act accordingly: to not settle for every misery fate and humanity have heaped upon us, but to push back, to see which ones can be shaken off. Nothing could be more tragic, and more ridiculous, than to live out a whole life in reach of heaven without ever stretching out your arms.
\n\n— by NietzsChe Guevara
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/join-the-resistance-fall-in-love", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/join-the-resistance-fall-in-love", "title": "Join the Resistance : Fall in Love", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-03-02T19:00:07Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Falling in love is the fundamental revolutionary act, the prerequisite for resistance to today’s tedious, socially restrictive, culturally constrictive world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/1.jpg\")
\nLove transforms the world. Where the lover formerly felt boredom, he now feels passion. Where she once was complacent, she now is excited and compelled to self-asserting action. The world which once seemed empty and tiresome becomes filled with meaning, filled with risks and rewards, with majesty and danger. Life for the lover is a gift, an adventure with the highest possible stakes; every moment is memorable, heartbreaking in its fleeting beauty. When he falls in love, a man who once felt disoriented, alienated, and confused will know exactly what he wants. Suddenly his existence will make sense to him; suddenly it becomes valuable, even glorious and noble, to him. Burning passion is an antidote that will cure the worst cases of despair and resigned obedience.
\n\nLove makes it possible for individuals to connect to others in a meaningful way — it impels them to leave their shells and risk being honest and spontaneous together, to come to know each other in profound ways. Thus love makes it possible for them to care about each other genuinely, rather than at the end of the gun of Christian doctrine. But at the same time, it plucks the lover out of the routines of everyday life and separates her from other human beings. She will feel a million miles away from the herd of humanity, living as she is in a world entirely different from theirs.
\n\nIn this sense love is subversive, because it poses a threat to the established order of our modern lives. The boring rituals of workday productivity and socialized etiquette will no longer mean anything to a man who has fallen in love, for there are more important forces guiding him than mere inertia and deference to tradition. Marketing strategies that depend upon apathy or insecurity to sell the products that keep the economy running as it does will have no effect upon him. Entertainment designed for passive consumption, which depends upon exhaustion or cynicism in the viewer, will not interest him.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/2.jpg\")
\nThere is no place for the passionate, romantic lover in today’s world, business or private. For he can see that it might be more worthwhile to hitchhike to Alaska (or to sit in the park and watch the clouds sail by) with his sweetheart than to study for his calculus exam or sell real estate, and if he decides that it is, he will have the courage to do it rather than be tormented by unsatisfied longing. He knows that breaking into a cemetery and making love under the stars will make for a much more memorable night than watching television ever could. So love poses a threat to our consumer-driven economy, which depends upon consumption of (largely useless) products and the labor that this consumption necessitates to perpetuate itself.
\n\nSimilarly, love poses a threat to our political system, for it is difficult to convince a man who has a lot to live for in his personal relationships to be willing to fight and die for an abstraction such as the state; for that matter, it may be difficult to convince him to even pay taxes. It poses a threat to cultures of all kinds, for when human beings are given wisdom and valor by true love they will not be held back by traditions or customs which are irrelevant to the feelings that guide them.
\n\nLove even poses a threat to our society itself. Passionate love is ignored and feared by the bourgeoisie, for it poses a great danger to the stability and pretense they covet. Love permits no lies, no falsehoods, not even any polite half-truths, but lays all emotions bare and reveals secrets which domesticated men and women cannot bear. You cannot lie with your emotional and sexual response; situations or ideas will excite or repel you whether you like it or not, whether it is polite or not, whether it is advisable or not. One cannot be a lover and a (dreadfully) responsible, (dreadfully) respectable member of today’s society at the same time; for love will impel you to do things which are not “responsible” or “respectable.” True love is irresponsible, irrepressible, rebellious, scornful of cowardice, dangerous to the lover and everyone around her, for it serves one master alone: the passion that makes the human heart beat faster. It disdains anything else, be it self-preservation, obedience, or shame. Love urges men and women to heroism, and to antiheroism — to indefensible acts that need no defense for the one who loves.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/3.gif\")
\nFor the lover speaks a different moral and emotional language than the typical bourgeois man does. The average bourgeois man has no overwhelming, smoldering desires. Sadly, all he knows is the silent despair that comes of spending his life pursuing goals set for him by his family, his educators, his employers, his nation, and his culture, without ever being able to even consider what needs and wants he might have of his own. Without the burning fire of desire to guide him, he has no criteria upon which to choose what is right and wrong for himself. Consequently he is forced to adopt some dogma or doctrine to direct him through his life. There are a wide variety of moralities to choose from in the marketplace of ideas, but which morality a man buys into is immaterial so long as he chooses one because he is at a loss otherwise as to what he should do with himself and his life. How many men and women, having never realized that they had the option to choose their own destinies, wander through life in a dull haze thinking and acting in accordance with the laws that have been taught to them, merely because they no longer have any other idea of what to do? But the lover needs no prefabricated principles to direct her; her desires identify what is right and wrong for her, for her heart guides her through life. She sees beauty and meaning in the world, because her desires paint the world in these colors. She has no need for dogmas, for moral systems, for commandments and imperatives, for she knows what to do without instructions.
\n\nThus she does indeed pose quite a threat to our society. What if everyone decided right and wrong for themselves, without any regard for conventional morality? What if everyone did whatever they wanted to, with the courage to face any consequences? What if everyone feared loveless, lifeless monotony more than they fear taking risks, more than they fear being hungry or cold or in danger? What if everyone set down their “responsibilities” and “common sense,” and dared to pursue their wildest dreams, to set the stakes high and live each day as if it were the last? Think what a place the world would be! Certainly it would be different than it is now — and it is quite a truism that people from the “mainstream,” the simultaneous keepers and victims of the status quo, fear change.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/4.gif\")
\nAnd so, despite the stereotyped images used in the media to sell toothpaste and honeymoon suites, genuine passionate love is discouraged in our culture. Being “carried away by your emotions” is frowned upon; instead we are raised to always be on our guard lest our hearts lead us astray. Rather than being encouraged to have the courage to face the consequences of risks taken in pursuit of our hearts’ desires, we are counseled not to take risks at all, to be “responsible.” And love itself is regulated. Men must not fall in love with other men, nor women with other women, nor individuals from different ethnic backgrounds with each other, or else the usual bigots who form the front-line offensive in the assault of modern Western culture upon the individual will step in. Men and women who have already entered into a legal/religious contract with each other are not to fall in love with anyone else, even if they no longer feel any passion for their marital partner. Love as most of us know it today is a carefully prescribed and preordained ritual, something that happens on Friday nights in expensive movie theaters and restaurants, something that fills the pockets of the shareholders in the entertainment industries without preventing workers from showing up to the office on time and ready to reroute phone calls all day long. This regulated, commercial “love” is nothing like the passionate, burning love that consumes the genuine lover. These restrictions, expectations, and regulations smother true love; for love is a wild flower that can never grow within the confines prepared for it but only appears where it is least expected.
\n\nWe must fight against these cultural restraints that would cripple and smother our desires. For it is love that gives meaning to life, desire that makes it possible for us to make sense of our existence and find purpose in our lives. Without these, there is no way for us to determine how to live our lives, except to submit to some authority, to some god, master or doctrine that will tell us what to do and how to do it without ever giving us the satisfaction that self-determination does. So fall in love today, with men, with women, with music, with ambition, with yourself… with life!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/5.gif\")
\nOne might say that it is ridiculous to implore others to fall in love — one either falls in love or one does not, it is not a choice that can be made consciously. Emotions do not follow the instructions of the rational mind. But the environment in which we must live out our lives has a great influence on our emotions, and we can make rational decisions that will affect this environment. It should be possible to work to change an environment that is hostile to love into an environment that will encourage it. Our task must be to engineer our world so that it is a world in which people can and do fall in love, and thus to reconstitute human beings so that we will be ready for the “revolution” spoken of in these pages — so that we will be able to find meaning and happiness in our lives.
\n\nThis text appears in our book Days of War, Nights of Love.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/the-dead-hand-of-the-past", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/the-dead-hand-of-the-past", "title": "The Dead Hand of the Past : Those who cannot forget the past are condemned to repeat it", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Remember how differently time passed when you were twelve years old? One summer was a whole lifetime, and each day passed like a month does for you now. For everything was new: each day held experiences and emotions that you had never encountered before, and by the time that summer was over you had become a different person. Perhaps you felt a wild freedom then that has since deserted you: you felt as if anything could happen, as if your life could end up being virtually anything at all. Now, deeper into that life, it doesn’t seem so unpredictable. The things that were once new and transforming have long since lost their freshness and danger, and the future ahead of you seems to have already been determined by your past.
\n\nIt is thus that each of us is dominated by history: the past lies upon us like a dead hand, guiding and controlling as if from the grave. At the same time as it gives the individual a conception of herself, an “identity,” it piles weight upon her that she must fight to shake off if she is to remain light and free enough to continue reinventing her life and herself. It is the same for the artist: even the most challenging innovations eventually become crutches and clichs. Once an artist has come up with one good solution for a creative problem, it is hard for her to break free of it to conceive of other possible solutions. That is why most great artists can only offer a few really revolutionary ideas: they become trapped by the very systems they create, just as these systems trap those who come after. It is hard to do something entirely new when one finds oneself up against a thousand years of painting history and tradition. And this is the same for the lover, for the mathematician and the adventurer: for all, the past is an adversary to action in the present, an ever-increasing force of inertia that must be overcome. It is the same for the radical, too. Conventional wisdom has it that a knowledge of the past is indispensable in the pursuit of freedom and social change. But today’s radical thinkers and activists are no closer to changing the world for their knowledge of past philosophies and struggles; on the contrary, they seem mired in ancient methods and arguments, unable to apprehend what is needed in the present to make things happen. Their place in the tradition of struggle has trapped them in a losing battle, defending positions long useless and outmoded; their constant references to the past not only render them incomprehensible to others, but also prevent them from referencing what is going on around them. Let’s consider what it is about history that makes it so paralyzing. In the case of world history, it is the exclusive, anti-subjective nature of the thing: History (with a capital “H”) is purportedly seen by the objective eye of science, as if “from above;” it demands that the individual value her impressions and experiences less than the official Truth about the past. But it is not just official history that paralyzes us, it is the very idea of the past itself. Try thinking of the world as including all past and future time as well as present space. An individual can at least hope to have some control over that part of the world which is in the future; but the past only acts on her, she can never act back upon it. If she thinks of the world [whether that “world” consists of her life, or human history] as consisting of mostly future, proportionately speaking, she will see herself as fairly free to choose her own destiny and exert her will upon the world. But if her world-view places most of the world in the past, that puts her in a position of powerlessness: not only is she unable to act upon or create most of world in which she exists, but what future does remain is already largely predetermined by the effects of events past.
\n\nWho, then, would want to be a meaningless fleck near the end of the eight thousand year history of human civilization? Conceiving of the world in such a way can only result in feelings of futility and predetermination. We must think of the world differently to escape this trap—we must instead place our selves and our present day existence where they rightfully belong, in the center of our universe, and shake off the dead weight of the past. Time may well extend before and behind us infinitely, but that is not how we experience the world, and that is not how we must visualize it either, if we want to find any meaning in it. If we dare to throw ourselves into the unknown and unpredictable, to continually seek out situations that force us to be in the present moment, we can break free of the feelings of inevitability and inertia that constrain our lives—and, in those instants, step outside of history.
\n\nWhat does it mean to step outside of history? It means, simply, to step into the present, to step into yourself. Time is compressed to the moment, space is concentrated to one point, and the unprecedented density of life is exhilarating. The rupture that occurs when you shake off everything that has come before is not just a break with the past—you are ripping yourself out of the past-future continuum you had built, hurling yourself into a vacuum where anything can happen and you are forced to remake yourself according to a new design. It is a sensation as terrifying as it is liberating, and nothing false or superfluous can survive it. Without such purges, life becomes so choked up with the dead and dry that it is nearly unlivable—as it is for us, today.
\n\nNone of this is to say that we should condone the deliberate lies of those who would rewrite history, with the intention of trapping us even deeper in ignorance and passivity than we are now. But the solution is not to combat their supposed “objective truths” with more claims to Historical Truth—for it is not more past we need, to weigh upon us, but more attention to today. We must not allow them to make our lives and thoughts revolve only around what has been; instead we must realize that it is up to us to reveal what is true about the present and what is possible from here.
\n\nSo what can we embrace in place of History? Myth, perhaps. Not the obscurist superstitions and holy lies of religion and capitalism, but the democratic myths of storytellers. Myth makes no claims to false impartiality or objective Truth, it does not purport to offer an exhaustive explanation of the cosmos. Myth belongs to everyone, as it is made and remade by everyone, so it can never be used by one group to lord itself over another. And it does not paralyze—instead of trapping people in the chains of cause and effect, myth makes them conscious of the enormous range of possibilities that their own lives have to offer; instead of making them feel hopelessly small in a vast and uncaring universe, it centers the world again on their own experiences and ambitions as represented by those of others. When we tell tales around the fire at night of heroes and heroines, of other struggles and adventures and societies, we are offering each other examples of just how much living is possible. There may be those who will threaten that the whole world will unravel if we stop concerning ourselves with the past and think only of the present. Let it unravel, then! A lot of good history has done us until now, repeating and repeating itself. Let’s break out of it once and for all, before we too tread the circular path that our ancestors have worn so bare. Let’s make the leap out of History, and make the moments of our daily lives the world we live in and care about—only then can we make it into a place that has meaning for us. The present belongs to those who are able to seize it, to recognize all that it is and can be!
\n\n— by Nadia C.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/the-domestication-of-animals-and-of-man", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/the-domestication-of-animals-and-of-man", "title": "The Domestication of Animals… and of Man : A CrimethInc. Special Report", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Throughout the history of Western civilization the relationship of human beings to other animals has never been particularly “civil.” What was once an uneasy coexistence swiftly became a relationship of domination and exploitation as humankind became more organized and technologically developed. In recent years, animal rights activists have brought international attention to the treatment and living conditions of animals in factory farms, zoos, circuses, and laboratories, but a serious discussion has yet to begin about the lives of the animals that exist in an environment that strikes much closer to home–the lives of domesticated animals, of our own household pets. A consideration of the lives our pets must lead reveals that they too are exploited in their relationship with human beings; but more than that, it also reveals something to us about ourselves.
\n\nCertainly there are plenty of happy, well-adjusted domesticated animals who manage to lead lives that are, for them, exciting and fulfilling. Still, history shows us that human beings in the worst of conditions, even during such periods of suffering and abomination as the Holocaust, have often managed to enjoy life, to fall in love and forge friendships, to find meaning in their day to day existence; for human beings are durable and resilient, and like all animals will adapt as well as they can to survive and thrive in any situation. So the fact that many animals–or humans, for that matter–are happy in our homes is by no means adequate reason to set aside a consideration of the merits of domesticated life.
\n\nLet us consider the usual contents of the lives of today’s domesticated animals. Life begins, for most of them, in what we would refer to in human terms as a “broken home.” Young dogs and cats are routinely taken from the company of their mothers and siblings at an extremely early age and thrust into an alien environment, whether it be a crowded, chaotic pet shop or the home of their new owner. Many of them are mistreated and abused (it is not at all uncommon for a dog, house cat, or parrot to have a phobia of human males, for many of them are abused by men in their youth), and many more are orphaned. More often than not, when domesticated animals reproduce it is looked upon as an unplanned inconvenience by their human owners, and the unwanted offspring are treated accordingly. Consider how difficult it is for young men and women who grow up in “broken homes,” or in the adoption agency/youth reform program circuit, to become happy and self-confident, and it will become clear how difficult growing up must be for today’s domesticated animals.
\n\nBut a difficult childhood is the only the beginning of a difficult and unnatural life for today’s typical house cat, gerbil, or parrot. For not only are the environments (i.e. cages, little glass boxes, six-room apartments and houses with climate control, and–at best–suburban back yards with the lawns mowed and bushes trimmed) which they must inhabit drastically different from those for which nature prepared them, but their role in the lives of the human beings who control their fate is itself unnatural. Most human beings who keep animals regard them as if they were, in some senses, toys rather than real animals. That seems like an unfair charge, but consider the usual relationship of these humans and animals, and the assumptions upon which the human owners keep these animals. Certainly these owners try to provide for the animals’ needs, and often offer affection, but the fundamental role these animals play in the homes and lives of these people is the role of entertainment (and, often, of surrogate family/friends as well). That is, the animals are kept by the human beings in the expectation that they will bring some sort of fun, and perhaps love, in their owners’ lives. Their role is not to be animals, that is, to hunt mice, to fly south for the winter, to chase down elk, to sharpen their claws where they please, to mark their territory with urine and court members of the opposite sex. Rather, they are expected to be modern court jesters or courtesans in the Western household.
\n\nThe ramifications of this relationship between animals and humans are many, but we can see that this arrangement is not exactly in the best interest of the animals involved when we consider the “adjustments” human beings customarily make to their pets to make these pets fulfill their domestic roles more effectively. House cats are the most obvious example: their owners routinely declaw and sterilize them so they will better fulfill their role as polite toys, rather than real animals, in the home. Having and using claws is a pretty basic part of being a cat; a cat without claws is like a human being without fingers: it may get used to the situation, and even figure out how to enjoy life despite the alteration, but something will be missing from its life forever.
\n\nSimilarly, though some say that sterilization is humane and makes life simpler for these animals, is this a simplification any of us would willingly choose for ourselves? Sterilization affects more than just the sex lives of animals; it changes their hormonal balance, changing their very personalities. A sterilized cat will often gain weight, slow down, become less spirited. Sterilized cats and dogs are easier for their owners to deal with in a number of ways, but this must come at a cost to their enjoyment of life itself. A frustrated female cat in heat may not seem to be enjoying life very much, but if you take away a being’s desires, what meaning is left for it to find in life? Left with its natural inclinations either surgically removed or frustrated by an environment much different than the one for which nature designed it, the sterilized cat will often become dull, grouchy, and fat–for eating the food its master provides is the only pleasure left to it.
\n\nMost of us can quickly call to mind an overweight, pathetic, neurotic dog or similarly maladjusted house pet that we have met at some time in our lives. These animals are the casualties of the exploitative relationship that exists today between humans and domesticated animals. Expected to be content as mere playthings, to eat standardized pet food that comes out of a box, and to live in quarters that are painfully cramped compared to their natural environments, it should come as no surprise that these animals are no longer as energetic or as passionate as wild animals. Once healthy and self-sufficient in their natural environment, these animals are now forced into humiliating dependence upon human beings who do not–cannot–permit them to live the lives that they would find fulfilling.
\n\nThis is not to say that there is any truly viable alternative to domestication for these animals today. The “outside world” is no place for them to run wild or reproduce in; their natural habitats, for those animals who could still adapt back to them, have been changed beyond all recognition by pollution and other forces. The emerging new global environment, pockmarked by fields of asphalt, forests of steel, and cliffs of concrete, is only hospitable to pigeons and cockroaches. Compared to life in the “outside world,” domesticated life is a lesser of two evils for house cats and parakeets alike.
\n\nAnd this is what is most tragic about this situation: there is no way out of the technological, over-organized world we have created; no way out for animals or humans. For we are really not much different from the animals we keep in cages and fishtanks in our homes: We too live in small, climate-controlled boxes, called apartments. We too buy standardized food to eat at McDonalds, food much different from the food our ancestors had evolved to eat. We too can find no outlet for our spontaneous, “wild” urges, castrated and declawed as we are by the necessities of living in cramped cities and suburbs under cramping legal and cultural restrictions. We too cannot wander far from our kennels, leashed as we are by 9-to-5 jobs, by apartment leases, even by political boundaries. And if we did wander far, what would we find? Forests, jungles, wild plains, majestic canyons? These are swiftly disappearing as we work around the clock to wrap our world in a skin of concrete, to make sure that all the grass is watered by sprinklers and all the swamps are drained and surveyed to be turned into office space. And what we don’t transform into bigger cages and fishtanks for ourselves, we will surely make useless with pollution, if we do not reconsider and redirect our actions on a massive scale.
\n\nPerhaps we can learn about ourselves from the example of our own pets. We might do well to learn from them that real happiness does not follow from merely providing for food, physical health, and safety, but from much more complicated elements of life. The solution to the problem of the emotional poverty of domesticated life for animals, and for humans, is clearly not a simple one. We must begin by reevaluating what life should be for humans and animals alike, and what our society must be so that our lives can be meaningful and fulfilling. And we do not have too much time to waste; for already we have bred dogs that do not know how to survive without leashes, and soon there may not be any going back for us either.
\n\n“You [white folks] have not only altered and malformed your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it to yourselves. You have changed men into chairmen of boards, into office workers, into time-clock punchers. You have changed your women into housewives, truly fearful creatures. I was once invited to the house of one. ‘Watch the ashes, don’t smoke, you’ll stain the curtains. Watch the goldfish bowl, don’t lean your head against the wallpaper; your hair may be greasy. Don’t spill liquor on that table: it has a delicate finish. You should have wiped your boots; the floor was just varnished. Don’t don’t don’t’ That is crazy. You live in prisons you have built for yourselves, calling them ‘homes, offices, factories.’“
\n\n-John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer Seeker of Visions. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994 [1972], 121.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/vanguard-of-the-sexual-revolution", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/vanguard-of-the-sexual-revolution", "title": "Vanguard of the Sexual Revolution : CrimethInc. Task Force #69", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "An ad hoc committee consisting of all the people at any given time who are having sex that either is broadening to their personal horizons, is socially prohibited, or takes place in a barely concealed public space. It often includes fresh young lovers, reckless life — artist types, and men and women of all ages entering into unexpected affairs; masturbating adolescents who live with their parents are always considered honorary members. Conquest-seeking “libertines” are excluded on principle, of course. Here is the V.S.R. manifesto, composed by Nadia C. in a library one night when she hadn’t made love for an agitating three days… or perhaps on a still Christmas morning after a night of passionate sex with a woman she had wanted for years.
\n\nBecause we get to have so little honest, intimate, beautifully dangerous sex that they can sell us flat images of it instead. Because we spend so much more time contemplating these representations than having sex that when we do sleep together, it is more a meeting of roles than of individuals — and not supportive or satisfying roles, at that. Because the most radical of us would still rather speak fancifully of total revolution than dare a moment of actual experimentation in a field that really matters, like our beds. Because as long as our own sexualities are constructed by the media of silence and the culture of violence, each of us is a Trojan horse bearing our own enemies (the values of domination and submission, the paralysis of fear and shame) everywhere we go.
\n\nIt’s time to stop being spectators and start being actors (or agents, if you prefer, the double meaning being very much intended), to take our desires back by converting our sex lives from passive recreation into active re-creation. And to do this, we must first replace the representations of sex in our lives and all around us with real sex.
\n\nOur numbers are greater than you think. You are one of us each time you transform “public” space — not by “privatizing” it [it’s already deprived of anything personal at all, thus the irony that the “public” is actually the least public of spaces], but by making it into real people space, by doing something in it that truly feels liberating… for example, fucking (on the roof of the police station, at the shore on the rocks just below the art museum window, etc.). Not that public sex is always itself revolutionary sex, but such sex is always revolutionary in that it takes lovemaking out of the narrow confines in which it is permitted — that is, in which it is permitted to languish, caged and stripped of the spontaneity that is its life’s blood, just as we languish with the rest of the world stripped of it.
\n\nThey shall know us by the innocence of our guilty smiles, holding hands as we walk out of the fog in parks at night: transformed and transcendent, unbowed and uninhibited in this dry and dreamless world — by used birth control devices(1 and 2) left in university classrooms and office bathrooms — by growing numbers of women who know exactly what they want and men who aren’t afraid to touch one another. We will be the spark that ignites the new sexual revolution: armies of lovers laying down their responsibilities and picking up each other, as weapons, to fight against the smothering joylessness of this world. To quote the skinheads’ anthem of homophobia and intolerance back at them, we refuse to “stay in the closet because it’s safe in there” — precisely for that reason! As we’ve learned time and again in this struggle, our only safety is in danger.
\n\n\n\n\nLovers of the world, unite — you have nothing to lose but your shame, and a world of pleasure to win!
\n
— Reprinted from the ninth annual Bulletin of Saboteurs.
\n\nFor the revolution of the erotic and the erotica of revolution, contact:
\n\nCrimethInc. Vice Squad
\nPO Box 13998
\nSalem OR 97309 U.S.A.
… although it’s worth pointing out that most of the birth control methods/devices in use in our culture today are themselves far from radical or liberating. Another aspect of the commodification of our lives in general and sexuality in particular is that we’re supposed to buy a product for everything, even the most natural and personal of our activities, like sex … more often than not, a chemical product that fucks around with our bodies in a hundred scary ways, too. Look around and you’ll see that there are alternatives… not just to the birth control methods on the market today, but also to the traditional ways of making love and being sexual that mainstream culture offers us. For this revolution must first and last be about redefining what sex itself is and can be. ↩
\nOf course there are those who will read this entire manifesto as an exhortation to littering, based on the extravagance of this single phrase… to such dreariness I can only respond with a merry FUCK YOU! ↩
\nHere’s an exercise to try at home. You will need a working stopwatch, or another timepiece that measures seconds. Before you begin, seat yourself in a comfortable chair and loosen your clothing.
\n\nWatch the second hand as it passes around the face of the clock. Picture the moment of your death, perhaps many decades in the future, or perhaps only a few years or months (who can know?). Wait for the second hand to reach the starting point at the top of the clock face, and then watch as it records the passing of one minute of your life. Now imagine the clock counting down the minutes of your life to the moment of your death. Try this exercise picturing this moment a few decades in the future, then repeat it picturing the moment next year. Repeat it picturing the moment of your death next month. Next week. Tonight. After all, you never know.
\n\nNow observe the minute and hour hands on the clock. What were you doing at this time twenty four hours ago? Forty eight hours ago? One month ago? What will you be doing at this time in a week?
\n\nImagine that the moment of your death is one month away. Consider–if you knew that this was true, what would you be doing right now? What would you be doing at this time tomorrow? Repeat this step, imagining your death to be one year away. Does this make very much difference in your thoughts about what you would do today and tomorrow if you knew the date of your death?
\n\nCompare your activities over the last twenty four hours to the activities you would have chosen if you had known that you would leave this world in one month or one year. Compare your activities over the last month, the last year, the last decade to those you would have chosen if you had known that on this day you would have only thirty days or twelve months left to live. How different would your life have been if you had known the date of your approaching death? Would you be ready to die in a month or a year, having lived the life that you have?
\n\nChances are, at least as far as we all know, that most of the people who read this text and participate in this exercise will live for many more years or even decades afterwards. But still, look at the second hand of the stopwatch, and follow it as it records the passing minutes, counting down the minutes of your life that remain to you as they slip away. Are you living the life that you want to live? Are you living a life that, at any given moment, you could look back upon with satisfaction if you suddenly realized that it was about to end? Are you living the sort of life that you would wish upon a human being, a life that is exciting and full, a life that is well spent, every minute of it? If the answer is no, what can you do in the time that still remains to you–however long or short that may be–to make your life more like the life you would like to live? For we all do have only a limited amount of time granted to us in this world–and so we should use it with this in mind.
\n\nIf you find, looking back upon your life, that you have spent years living without any consideration of your mortality, this is really not unusual. For our social/cultural environment does not encourage us to think much about the limits that nature places on our lives. Death and aging are denied and hidden away as if they were shameful and embarrassing. The older members of our society are hidden away in “retirement homes” like lepers in leper colonies. The billboards, magazine photos, and television commercials that meet our eyes at every turn show only images of healthy men and women in the prime of their life. Cemeteries, which once memorialized the dead and preserved a place for them in the thoughts of the living, are now forgotten in abandoned neighborhoods and overgrown with weeds. When a man dies, the rituals which once would have celebrated his life and brought the subject of human mortality to the thoughts of those who survived him are now often regarded as mere inconveniences. Death is impolite and embarrassing, it is considered bad etiquette, for there is no place for it in today’s busy world of corporate mergers and record-breaking conspicuous consumption. Our busy schedules and glossy magazines neither make allowance for it nor offer any explanation of how it might be relevant to our value system or our lives.
\n\nAnd indeed if we were to stop and ponder the subject, perhaps we would find that when we seriously consider the limits of our time on this planet, keeping up with television comedies and having a good sum seem less important than they did before. Our cultural silence about human mortality allows us to forget how much weight the individual moments of our lives carry, adding up as they do to our lives themselves. Thus we may squander countless hours watching television or balancing checkbooks–hours that in retrospect we might have done better to have spent walking on the sea shore with our loved ones, cooking gourmet meals for our children or friends, writing fiction, or hitchhiking across South America. The reality of our future death is not easy for any of us to come to terms with, but it is surely better that we consider this now than regret not doing so later when it is too late.
\n\nOur modern denial of death has a deeper significance, beyond its functions as a reaction to our fear of mortality and a selective blindness that helps to preserve the status quo. It is a symptom of our ongoing struggle to escape from the cycles of change in nature and establish an unnatural permanence in the world. Our mortality is frightening evidence that we do not have control over everything, and as such we are quick to ignore it, if we cannot do away with it altogether–a feat towards which our medical researchers are slowly working. It is worth questioning whether this would even be desirable.
\n\nSince the dawn of Western civilization, men and women have hungered for domination not only of the world and each other, but also for domination of the seasons, of time itself. We speak of the eternal grandeur of our gods and empires, and we design our cities and corporations to exist into infinity. We build monuments, skyscrapers, which we intend to stand forever as testimony of our victory over the sands of time. But this victory can only come at a price, at this price: that though nothing passes away, nothing comes to be, either–that the world we create is a static, standardized world that can hold no surprises for us any more. We would do well to be wary of fulfilling our own darkest dreams by creating such a dystopia, a frozen world in which no one must fear death any more, for everyone exists forever and no one lives for even an instant.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/1997/09/11/the-unabomber", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/1997/09/11/the-unabomber", "title": "The Unabomber: : A Hero For Our Time", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "1997-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Pop quiz: what is it called when one of the finest minds of a generation picks a few individuals who are personally involved in the destruction of the environment (a timber-industry lobbyist) or of the attention span and reasoning ability of tens of thousands of Americans (an advertising executive), and kills or maims them in the pursuit of finding a voice for his concerns about social issues… concerns that otherwise would be heard by very few? Clearly, it is murder.
\n\nAnd what is it called when a nation of overweight barbers and underpaid clerks, of lazy unemployed middle class intellectuals and talk-show-educated housewives, of cowardly fast-food-chin managers and racist sorority girls, conspires to execute this murderer in the name of protecting the glorious status quo from his obviously deranged “mad bombings”?
\n\nThe death penalty. And rightly applied, too, in defense of the right of forest clear-cutters and professional liars to continue bending our world to their vision without the danger of being molested by those who prefer redwood forests to Quik-Marts and sonnets to detergent slogans.
\n\nSeriously, and rhetoric aside, what is the difference between the two situations? In one case, a single person evaluates his situation and decides upon a course of action he feels is right. In the other case, millions of people, who are not very used to making up their minds by themselves, feel strong enough all together to strike out blindly against an individual who does not remain within their boundaries of acceptable behavior.
\n\nNow, our gentle and moderate reader would no doubt like to object that it is not fear of the free-standing individual that prompts the outcry against this terrorist, but moral indignation—for he has taken “innocent” life in his quest to have his ideas heard, and that is wrong in every situation.
\n\nBut this nation of petty imbeciles is not regularly outraged about the taking of innocent life: as long as it fits within the parameters of the status quo, they don’t care at all.
\n\nHow many more people than the Unabomber have tobacco companies maimed and killed, by using advertising to addict them at a very young and uninformed age to an extremely harmful drug? How about the companies that advertise and sell cheap liquor in impoverished neighborhoods filled with alcoholics? How many citizens of third world nations have suffered and died at the hands of governments supported by such corporations as Pepsi Co., or even by the U.S. government itself? And how much animal life is destroyed thoughtlessly every year, every day in death camp factory farms… or in ecological destruction brought about by such companies as Exxon (our reader will remember the Valdez) or McDonalds (one of the better known destroyers of the rainforest)? No one is particularly concerned about these abuses of “innocent” life.
\n\nAnd indeed, it is harder to be, for they are institutionalized within the social and economic system… “normal.” Besides, it is hard to figure out who exactly is responsible for them, for they are the results of the workings of complicated bureaucracies.
\n\nOn the other hand, when one individual attempts to make his criticism of these destructive systems heard by the only really effective means, it is easy to pick him out and string him up. And our hypocritical outrage about his wrongdoings compared those of our own social institutions shows that it is his ability to act upon his own conclusions that truly shocks and frightens us most of all.
\n\nOur fear of the Unabomber as a freely acting individual shows in the attempts our media has made to demonize him. Details of his life, such as his academic achievements and his ability to live a Thoreauan self-sufficient existence, that would normally occasion praise, are now used to demonstrate that he is a maladjusted freak. Random and unimportant details of his life, similar to details of any of our lives, such as failed love affairs and childhood illnesses, are used to explain his “insane behavior.” In speaking thus, the press suggests that there is no question at all that his actions were the result of insanity, pulling away in terror from the very thought that he might be just as rational as they. Newspapers print the most arbitrary and disconnected excerpts of his manifesto that they can combine, and they describe the manifesto as being random and disconnected—they even describe it as “ramblings” with a straight face, despite the well-known short attention span of today’s media.
\n\nBut it is not necessary that we accept the media’s typical over-simplification of the case. The Unabomber’s manifesto has, as a result of his efforts, been published and widely distributed. We can all read it for ourselves, not just in disconnected excerpts, but in its entirety, and decide for ourselves what we think of his ideas.
\n\nDo not be frightened by the Unabomber’s willingness to stand out from the crowds and take whatever actions he believes are necessary to achieve his goals. In a civilization so stricken with mindless submission to social norms and irrational rules his example should be refreshing rather than horrifying; for his worst crimes are no worse than ours, in being citizens of this nation… and his greatest deeds as a dedicated and intelligent individual far outshine those of most of our heroes, who are for the most part basketball players and cookie-cutter pop musicians anyway.
\n\nAt least, given the chance as we are, we should read his manifesto and come to our own conclusions, rather than allowing the press and popular opinion/paranoia to decide for us.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/1997/09/11/washing-and-brainwashing", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/1997/09/11/washing-and-brainwashing", "title": "washing . . . and brainwashing : \"Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness\"", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "1997-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2026-08-30T19:45:14Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "\n\n\n“Dirt is matter out of place.”
\n\n—British anthropologist Mary Douglas in her foundational work, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
\n
\n\n\n“The remaining noticeable characteristic of ‘Che’ is his filth. He hates to wash and will never do so. He is filthy, even by the rather low standard of cleanliness prevailing among the Castro forces in the Sierra Maestra. Once in a while, “Che” would take some of his men to a stream or pool, in order that they might wash. On those occasions “Che” would never wash either himself or his clothes, but would sit on the bank and watch the others. He is really outstandingly and spectacularly dirty.”
\n\n— slanderous description of Che Guevara from the 1958 C.I.A. dossier
\n
Even in the most anti-establishment of underground circles, I’m amazed by how frequently I hear people complain about people they call “hippies” or “crusty punks.” “These crusty punks came in here and smelled up the whole place,” they’ll say. What great transgression have these people committed to be so reviled? They have a different orientation to the question of “cleanliness” than the rest of us do.
\n\nWhere do our ideas and values about so-called “cleanliness” come from, anyway? Western civilization has a long history of associating cleanliness with goodness and merit, best summed up by the old expression “cleanliness is next to Godliness.” In ancient Greek plays, evil people and spirits — the Furies, for example — were often described as filthy. The Furies were dirty, aged, and female, exactly the opposite of how the playwright who described them saw himself; their filthiness, among other things, identified them as an outgroup — as alien, animal, inhuman. Over time, cleanliness became a measure with which the “haves” separated themselves from the “have-nots.” Those who possessed the wealth and power required to have the leisure to remain indoors, inactive, scorned the peasants and travelers whose lifestyles involved getting their hands and bodies dirty. Throughout our history, we can see that cleanliness has been used as a standard of worth by those with power to ascribe social status — and thus, the “Godly,” the self-proclaimed holy ones who stood above the rest of us in hierarchical society, proclaimed that their cleanliness, bought with the labor of the others who were forced to work for them, was a measure of their “Godliness” and superiority. To this day, we accept this traditional belief: that being “clean” according to social norms is desirable in itself.
\n\nIt should be clear from the history of our ideas about “cleanliness” that anyone who is critical of mainstream values, any radical or punk rocker, should be extremely suspicious of the great value placed on being “clean” according to traditional standards. Besides, what exactly does “clean” mean?
\n\nThese days, cleanliness is defined more by corporations selling “sanitation products” than by anyone else. This is important to keep in mind. Certainly, most of these products have an uncanny ability to cut through natural dirt and grime — but does removing natural dirt and grime with synthetic chemicals necessarily constitute the only acceptable form of sanitation? I’m at least as frightened by these manufactured, artificial products as I am of a little dust, mud, or sweat, or (god forbid!) a stain from food or blood on my shirt. At least I know where the dirt/”filth” came from and what it’s made of!
\n\nThe idea that it is worthwhile to use chemicals (whether they be deodorant, detergent, or shampoo) to eradicate organic dirt has some frightening implications, too. First, it supports the old Christian superstition that the biological body is shameful and should be hidden — that our bodies and our existence in the physical world as animals are intrinsically disgusting and sinful. This groundless idea has been used to keep us insecure and ashamed, and thus at the mercy of the priests and other authorities who tell us how to become “pure”: once, by submitting to their holy denial of the self, and now, by spending plenty of our money on the various “sanitation” products they want to sell us. Also, as capitalism transforms the entire world from the organic (forests, swamps, deserts, rivers) to the inorganic (cities of concrete and steel, suburbs of asphalt and astroturf, wastelands that have been stripped of all natural resources, garbage dumps) the idea that there is something more worthwhile about synthetic chemicals than natural dirt implies that this transformation might actually be a good thing… and thus implicitly justifies their profit-motivated destruction of our planet,
\n\nIn reality, these corporations are far less concerned with our actual health and cleanliness than they are with selling us their products, anyway. They use the high value we traditionally have placed on sanitation to sell us all sorts of products in the name of cleanliness… and who knows what the real, long-term health effects of these products are? They certainly don’t care. If we were to become ill in the long run from using their special cleansers and hi-tech shampoos, they could just sell us another product — medicine — and keep the wheels of the capitalist economy turning. And the shame about our bodies (as producers of sweat and other natural fluids which we deem “dirty”) that they capitalize on and encourage also aids them in selling us other products which depend upon our insecurity: diet products, exercise products, fashionable clothes, etc. When we accept their definition of “cleanliness” we are accepting their economic domination of our lives.
\n\nEven if they agree about the questionable nature of today’s sanitation products, most people today would still argue that sanitation is still healthier than filth. To some extent this is true — it probably is a good idea to wash your feet if you step in shit. But, aside from obvious cases like that, there are a thousand different standards of what is clean and what is dirty across the world; if you look at different societies and civilizations, you come across health practices that seem suicidal by our sanitation standards. And yet, these people survive as well as we do. People in Africa a few hundred years ago lived comfortably in a natural environment that destroyed many of the very prim and polished Western explorers that came to their continent. Human beings can adapt to a wide variety of environments and situations, and it seems that the question of what kinds of sanitation are healthy is at least as much a question of convention as of hard-set biological rules. Try violating a few of the “common sense” rules of Western sanitation some time, and you’ll find that going a few weeks without a shower and eating out of garbage cans aren’t really as dangerous or difficult as we were taught.
\n\nPerhaps the most important question when it comes to the unusual value we place on traditional “cleanliness” is what we lose by doing this. Once, before we covered up our natural scents with chemicals, we each had a unique smell. These scents attracted us to each other and bound us emotionally to each other through memory and association. Now, if you have positive associations with the scent of the man you love, it is probably his cologne (identical to the cologne of thousands of other men) that you enjoy, not his own personal scent. And the natural pheromones with which we once communicated with each other, which played an important role in our sexuality, are now completely smothered by standardized chemical products. We no longer know what it is like to be pure, natural human beings, to smell like real human beings. Who knows how much we may have lost because of this? Those who find me disgusting for enjoying the scent and taste of my lover when she hasn’t showered or rubbed synthetics all over herself, when she smells like a real human being, are probably the same ones who shudder at the idea of digging a vegetable out of the ground and eating it rather than eating the plastic-wrapped, man-made fast food that we have all been brought up on. We have become so accustomed to our domesticated, engineered existence that we no longer know what we might even be missing.
\n\nSo try to be a little more open minded when it comes to the “crusties.” Perhaps they just smell bad to you because you’ve never gotten a chance to discover what a real human being smells like. Perhaps there might be something worthwhile about being “unwashed” in the conventional sense that you haven’t noticed before. The moral of this story is the moral of all anarchist stories: accept only the rules and values which make sense to you and really are in your best interest. Figure out what’s right for you and don’t let anybody tell you different — but also, make an effort to understand where others are coming from, and evaluate their actions by your own standards, not according to some standardized norm.
\n\nBody smells are erotic and sexual. Capitalists don’t like that because they are impotent and opposed to all manifestations of sensuality and sexuality. Sexually awakened people are potentially dangerous to capitalists and their rigid, asexual system.
\nBody smells remind us that we are animals. Capitalists don’t want us to be reminded of that. Animals are dirty. They eat things off the ground, not out of plastic wrappers. They are openly sexual. They don’t wear suits or ties, and they don’t get their hair done. They don’t show up to work on time.
\nBody smells are unique. Everyone has her own body smell. Capitalists don’t like individuality. There are millions of body smells but only a few deodorant smells. Capitalists like that.
\nSome deodorants are harmful. Capitalists like that because they are always looking for new illnesses to cure. Capitalists love to invent new medicines. Medicines make money for them and win them prizes; they also cause new illnesses so capitalists can invent even more new medicines.
\nDeodorants cost you money. Capitalists are especially pleased about that.
\nDeodorants hide the damage that capitalist products cause your body. Eating meat and other chemical-filled foods sold by capitalists makes you smell bad. Wearing pantyhose makes you smell bad. Capitalists don’t want you to stop wearing pantyhose or eating meat.
\nDeodorant-users are insecure. Capitalists like insecure people. Insecure people don’t start trouble. Insecure people also buy room fresheners, hair conditioners, makeup, and magazines with articles about dieting.
\nDeodorants are unnecessary. Capitalists are very proud of that and they win marketing awards for it.
\nYou know it’s true. Otherwise, why does everyone cringe when you say the word? Why has attendance at your anarcho-communist theory discussion group meetings fallen to an all-time low? Why has the oppressed proletariat not come to its senses and joined you in your fight for world liberation?
\n\nPerhaps, after years of struggling to educate them about their victimhood, you have come to blame them for their condition. They must want to be ground under the heel of capitalist imperialism; otherwise, why do they show no interest in your political causes? Why haven’t they joined you yet in chaining yourself to mahogany furniture, chanting slogans at carefully planned and orchestrated protests, and frequenting anarchist bookshops? Why haven’t they sat down and learned all the terminology necessary for a genuine understanding of the complexities of Marxist economic theory?
\n\nThe truth is, your politics are boring to them because they really are irrelevant. They know that your antiquated styles of protest — your marches, hand held signs, and gatherings — are now powerless to effect real change because they have become such a predictable part of the status quo. They know that your post-Marxist jargon is off-putting because it really is a language of mere academic dispute, not a weapon capable of undermining systems of control. They know that your infighting, your splinter groups and endless quarrels over ephemeral theories can never effect any real change in the world they experience from day to day. They know that no matter who is in office, what laws are on the books, what “ism”s the intellectuals march under, the content of their lives will remain the same. They — we — know that our boredom is proof that these “politics” are not the key to any real transformation of life. For our lives are boring enough already!
\n\nAnd you know it too. For how many of you is politics a responsibility? Something you engage in because you feel you should, when in your heart of hearts there are a million things you would rather be doing? Your volunteer work — is it your most favorite pastime, or do you do it out of a sense of obligation? Why do you think it is so hard to motivate others to volunteer as you do? Could it be that it is, above all, a feeling of guilt that drives you to fulfill your “duty” to be politically active? Perhaps you spice up your “work” by trying (consciously or not) to get in trouble with the authorities, to get arrested: not because it will practically serve your cause, but to make things more exciting, to recapture a little of the romance of turbulent times now long past. Have you ever felt that you were participating in a ritual, a long-established tradition of fringe protest, that really serves only to strengthen the position of the mainstream? Have you ever secretly longed to escape from the stagnation and boredom of your political “responsibilities”?
\n\nIt’s no wonder that no one has joined you in your political endeavors. Perhaps you tell yourself that it’s tough, thankless work, but somebody’s got to do it. The answer is, well, NO.
\n\nYou actually do us all a real disservice with your tiresome, tedious politics. For in fact, there is nothing more important than politics. NOT the politics of American “democracy” and law, of who is elected state legislator to sign the same bills and perpetuate the same system. Not the politics of the “I got involved with the radical left because I enjoy quibbling over trivial details and writing rhetorically about an unreachable utopia” anarchist. Not the politics of any leader or ideology that demands that you make sacrifices for “the cause.” But the politics of our everyday lives. When you separate politics from the immediate, everyday experiences of individual men and women, it becomes completely irrelevant. Indeed, it becomes the private domain of wealthy, comfortable intellectuals, who can trouble themselves with such dreary, theoretical things. When you involve yourself in politics out of a sense of obligation, and make political action into a dull responsibility rather than an exciting game that is worthwhile for its own sake, you scare away people whose lives are already far too dull for any more tedium. When you make politics into a lifeless thing, a joyless thing, a dreadful responsibility, it becomes just another weight upon people, rather than a means to lift weight from people. And thus you ruin the idea of politics for the people to whom it should be most important. For everyone has a stake in considering their lives, in asking themselves what they want out of life and how they can get it. But you make politics look to them like a miserable, self-referential, pointless middle class/bohemian game, a game with no relevance to the real lives they are living out.
\n\nWhat should be political? Whether we enjoy what we do to get food and shelter. Whether we feel like our daily interactions with our friends, neighbors, and coworkers are fulfilling. Whether we have the opportunity to live each day the way we desire to. And “politics” should consist not of merely discussing these questions, but of acting directly to improve our lives in the immediate present. Acting in a way that is itself entertaining, exciting, joyous — because political action that is tedious, tiresome, and oppressive can only perpetuate tedium, fatigue, and oppression in our lives. No more time should be wasted debating over issues that will be irrelevant when we must go to work again the next day. No more predictable ritual protests that the authorities know all too well how to deal with; no more boring ritual protests which will not sound like a thrilling way to spend a Saturday afternoon to potential volunteers — clearly, those won’t get us anywhere. Never again shall we “sacrifice ourselves for the cause.” For we ourselves, happiness in our own lives and the lives of our fellows, must be our cause!
\n\nAfter we make politics relevant and exciting, the rest will follow. But from a dreary, merely theoretical and/or ritualized politics, nothing valuable can follow. This is not to say that we should show no interest in the welfare of humans, animals, or ecosystems that do not contact us directly in our day to day existence. But the foundation of our politics must be concrete: it must be immediate, it must be obvious to everyone why it is worth the effort, it must be fun in itself. How can we do positive things for others if we ourselves do not enjoy our own lives?
\n\nTo make this concrete for a moment: an afternoon of collecting food from businesses that would have thrown it away and serving it to hungry people and people who are tired of working to pay for food — that is good political action, but only if you enjoy it. If you do it with your friends, if you meet new friends while you’re doing it, if you fall in love or trade funny stories or just feel proud to have helped a woman by easing her financial needs, that’s good political action. On the other hand, if you spend the afternoon typing an angry letter to an obscure leftist tabloid objecting to a columnist’s use of the term “anarcho-syndicalist,” that’s not going to accomplish shit, and you know it.
\n\nPerhaps it is time for a new word for “politics,” since you have made such a swear word out of the old one. For no one should be put off when we talk about acting together to improve our lives. And so we present to you our demands, which are non-negotiable, and must be met as soon as possible — because we’re not going to live forever, are we?
\n\nMake politics relevant to our everyday experience of life again. The farther away the object of our political concern, the less it will mean to us, the less real and pressing it will seem to us, and the more wearisome politics will be.
\nAll political activity must be joyous and exciting in itself. You cannot escape from dreariness with more dreariness.
\nTo accomplish those first two steps, entirely new political approaches and methods must be created. The old ones are outdated, outmoded. Perhaps they were NEVER any good, and that’s why our world is the way it is now.
\nEnjoy yourselves! There is never any excuse for being bored… or boring!
\nJoin us in making the “revolution” a game; a game played for the highest stakes of all, but a joyous, carefree game nonetheless!
\n\n— by Nadia C.
\n\n" } ] }