![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/beauty-subversion/beauty-subversion_front_color.jpg\")
\nIn a totalitarian regime (whether it be political, like the Stalinist government of the Soviet Union, or socio-economic, like the corporate capitalism of our day), in which the whole of human relations is regulated, fragmentary resistance to any one aspect of that regime — environmental destruction, police brutality, child abuse, racism, employee ennui — can only fail. The totality itself must be contested, the basic paradigms as well as their specific manifestations… not in order to impose another totalitarian order, but to open new horizons for everyone.
\n\nFor this, a resistance is needed which does not standardize those who participate in it, in which individuals can help each other to break free in the process of creating and exploring themselves. This sketch of six oppositions is not meant as a complete map of the world of human relations, but rather as a selection of tools for the woman or man engaged in her own analysis.
\n\n— Nadia C.
\n\nWe move in spiral paths, imploding or expanding, relinquishing the world to become what we hate, or finding the faith to discover new worlds and loves. Alchemy is the process by which one moves from the vicious inner circle outwards…
\n\nAbundance and scarcity are not just measurements of the resources which exist to meet one’s needs — they are different ways of regarding both the resources and the needs themselves… which become reflected in the world.
\n\nAbundant resources exceed the need for them; they may even multiply when utilized. Most of the things which set life apart from survival — love, friendship, confidence, imagination, courage, adventure, experience — are available in abundance: the more you partake of them, the more they are available to you and everyone else as well.
\n\nScarce resources, on the other hand, exist in limited supply, and there may simply not be enough to go around. A scarcity economy is driven by the considerations necessitated by those conditions: in it, the “laws” of supply and demand are imposed first of all by a shortage, real or perceived, of needed goods.
\n\nIt might seem that scarcity is simply an inescapable fact of life, but it’s not that simple. Not all scarcities are imposed by circumstances — often, we impose them upon ourselves by the ways we assess and apply our assets. In our technologically advanced, post-industrial civilization, tools and amenities which were unheard of before are plentiful, yet most of us distinctly feel there to be a shortage of the things we need. This should not be surprising, for our social and economic systems depend on there not being enough for everybody. Everyone can have a full life — but not everyone can have a full wallet. Our society institutes scarcity and deprivation, by framing life as a desperate rush for limited material wealth and status.
\n\nThey say the only free men are the hobo and the king. They are indeed the only ones who can claim to be lords of all they survey — though for utterly different reasons: the former possesses the entire world by releasing it, while the latter still owns only what he can conquer. Here we can see the paradigms of abundance and scarcity in action as philosophies of life. Likewise, the scavenger who thrives off the excess of his society sees opportunity and adventure where the executive sees only hunger and destitution; the non-monogamous lover sees love as something that only increases in richness and depth by being shared freely, while the possessive husband regards it as a precarious prize obtained by sacrifice and hard labor, which must be hoarded and caged; the would-be rock idol or movie star needs a million anonymous fans watching his actions to validate them (thus selfhood itself is subject to scarcity in a spectator society), while the woman in a supportive, egalitarian community generally attains self-confidence and happiness to the extent that she helps others around her do the same.
\n\nOnce upon a time, humans lived in a relationship of trust with the earth, seeing it as a wellspring of abundance1: we ate fruit, which grew freely around us, naturally wrapped in a biodegradable peel and containing seeds from which more fruit trees would grow after the fruit was eaten. Today we eat candy bars, for which we must exchange our labor, of which supplies are strictly limited — and when we throw away the wrappers, manufactured from plastics and chemicals foreign to nature, we can be sure that we are adding to the slow accumulation of garbage that makes fruit trees more and more scarce. Ancient human beings lived in conditions of feast or famine, celebrating when their cups overflowed and whistling through leaner times, never having to diminish their faith in their resources by measuring them; for us, everything is a transaction, an occasion for computation and calculation.
\n\nAbundance and scarcity are above all the manifestations of opposing approaches to life: ingenuity or inertia, faith or fear. If we restructure our values and assumptions about what the cosmos has to offer us, we can enter a new world of plenty.
\n\n13. The more you can recognize the opportunities of your life, the more you can take advantage of them.
\n\n24. The more you recognize the treasures life has to offer, the more you have faith in it to offer them.
\n\n1. The less you trust the world, the less you recognize what it has to offer.
\n\n12. The less you recognize what the world has to offer, the less you trust it.
\n\nLife is existence when it feels worth waking up for in the morning. Life is written about in epic poetry, love songs, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets; survival is treated in medical textbooks, urban planning reports, and ergonomics presentations. Life is glorious, heartbreaking, extravagant. Survival, without life, is ridiculous, burdensome, absurd.
\n\n14. The more your life is in your own hands, the more it is an experience of liberty and pleasure.
\n\n19. The more full and free life is, the easier it becomes to recognize all the opportunities and treasures it has to offer.
\n\nSurvival is life reduced to imperatives, whether they be biological (get air to breathe! get food to eat! get laid!) or cultural (get air conditioning, to be comfortable! get a television, to keep up with what’s going on! get a sports car, to attract a mate!). It’s often ambiguous which class a given mandate falls into, as in the case of the computer programmer who cannot feed himself without a can opener; but the essential character of these needs is that they appear non-negotiable.
\n\nSurvival resources tend to be seen as scarce — there’s only so much food, water, housing, medicine in the world; but as the famous tramp once responded to the predictable query of a bourgeois man (“you’ve got to eat, haven’t you?”): “yeah, but not as often as you eat.”
\n\nOur era is characterized by ever-increasing standards of survival. The minimum “standard of living” to participate in society is always mounting, and it’s a full time job keeping up: getting the new format for video-viewing, learning how to use the new computer program, treating yourself with the new antidepressant… This constant technological and subsequently cultural acceleration is the consequence of an economic system based on contention, in which constant innovation is necessary both to sell new products and to keep up with everyone who uses them.
\n\nAll indications suggest that people spend more time working to meet their “basic needs” today than ever before: prehistoric human beings spent the greater part of their days in creative leisure, while with all our labor-saving devices we waste most of our lives earning the money to pay for them, using them to mow the lawn, waiting in traffic to buy more batteries for them. And of course, the more time we spend providing for mere survival, the less time we have to live.
\n\n2. The more you think you need to survive, the harder you have to work.
\n\n7. The less you live, the less you can recognize what the world has to offer.
\n\nPlay is what takes place when all the problems of survival have been solved and there is energy left over. Play is not constrained by external demands — the player establishes her own values and meanings in the course of acting. Play takes place in a condition of freedom — rather, it is the condition of freedom. In play, the individual interacts with the forces around her rather than reacting to them, creates the context for her actions as she acts rather than being shaped by the situation: it is thus that self-determination is possible. You can see play today in the collages on teenagers’ walls, in the eccentric furnishing of squatted buildings, in the break between skirmishes with the police when the insurgents dance, in the movements of lovers’ bodies together.
\n\nThe resources for play are available in abundance. As a general rule, the more one plays, the more others are enabled and encouraged to play; true playfulness is infectious. One can’t play at the expense of others for long — being “free” at such a price ends up taking a lot of work, as in the case of the “successful” executive, and doesn’t lend itself to much real, spontaneous play, as the ennui typical of the trust-fund playboy demonstrates.
\n\nIt’s ambiguous whether many of the things currently called “play” actually are: Is it play when a businessman goes golfing with his boss? When a group of young men play basketball together according to a strict set of rules, with a struggle for dominance as an ever-present subtext? How about when a young man comes home from work so exhausted that he doesn’t have enough energy to do anything besides “play” video games?
\n\nChildren, on the other hand, come into this world knowing all about play — at least until they’ve spent a few years cooped up in small rooms with the television on. We can recapture that lost innocence, for them and for ourselves, by approaching everything we do as a game rather than a struggle or responsibility — by creating environments in which we can run wild. For the best-kept secret of capitalism is that play activities can also provide for our survival needs: except in extremities, work is unnecessary.
\n\n15. The more pleasure you take in your activities, the more willing you are to share the fruits.
\n\n20. The more you approach life as a game, the more full and free it becomes.
\n\nWork provides for survival, nothing more. It always appears as a response to necessity, whether it be the need for food and shelter and life insurance, the establishment of social status, or the obligation of the Protestant work ethic. Work answers to imperatives; play creates its own rules.
\n\n3. The more you work, the more you feel the need to be compensated for your sacrifice.
\n\n8. The more you work, the less you live.
\n\nIn stark contrast to exchange trading, gift-giving is its own reward. In a gift economy, which exists whenever anything is freely shared and no score is kept, the participants receive more the more they bestow. Everyone who has shared a real friendship or a morning of incredible lovemaking knows intuitively that when the option opens, human beings return to this natural relationship.
\n\nThis is a challenge to find and share the trust and responsibility it will take to reinstate this as the basis of all human affairs, as it was before the cancer of avarice took hold.
\n\n16. The more able you are to share freely with others, the more they share with you, and the more you are thankful for their existence and open to their beauty.
\n\n21. The more freely you give and receive, the more your life can be a game rather than a struggle.
\n\nLiberty ends where economics begins. Get your money’s worth — earn your keep — there’s no such thing as a free lunch2: exchange economics posits life as a zero-sum sport between bargainers who maneuver to outbid and outwit each other in order to gain control of more fragments of the world. Free trade, the free market — these are oxymorons: where systematized competition is free to bend all humanity to its prerogatives, ultimately no one is free to focus on anything else.
\n\nExchange-economics thinking presupposes a one-dimensional scale of value, according to which everything can be appraised: if an avocado costs a dollar, and a new sports car costs $20,000, then a sports car must be worth exactly twenty thousand avocados. But such equations are absurd. Can you calculate the financial value of a friendship, the exchange rate of a clever joke for a meal tenderly prepared, the comparative worth of the sound of birds singing in the trees against the current market value of lumber? Those who would measure such things miss everything that is beautiful and unrepeatable about them; once one recognizes this, it becomes clear how pathological such calculations are in any context. As if one could “deserve” life in all its complexity and magnanimity in the first place — let alone good or bad fortune, the moment of stillness at sunrise, the flavor of avocados, the sensation of riding in a speeding car! This is simply not the way the world works — anyone who has lived and paid attention knows the best and worst things life has to offer are things no one could ever earn. To assess the commercial value of experiences and sensations, let alone trade in the very lives of the human beings around you with an eye for your own advantage, is to flatten the world for yourself and everyone you touch.
\n\nThe machinery of exchange eats quality and shits out quantity, enslaves process to despicable product, teaches that practical necessities and moments of joy and spiritual redemption alike must be earned. There is something of the old Christian theology of guilt and salvation in the ways those who hold stock in the values of exchange speak of hard work and entitlement. For these people, anything free is suspect at best — nothing obtained without sacrifice, without an exchange can be worth anything — and the act of paying for things, with the compensation they have received for abdicating their lives, is itself more important than anything they could buy: it is the way one buys oneself out of the hell of “valuelessness” to which the tramp and the adventurer are assigned, not without a little jealous spite. For them, human beings do not “deserve” happiness, comfort, even existence itself, unless they pay for it with suffering3. It should come as no surprise that many workers see things this way: if they didn’t, they would have to face the possibility that they have been wasting their lives.
\n\nLikewise, those who would refuse this system of exchange are confronted with the same accusations of valuelessness by their own bodies, when they find that they cannot get food to eat or a soft place to sleep unless they give up some part of themselves for it.
\n\nFor once some people in a society begin hoarding and trading for their own benefit, all who interact with them must adopt the same miserliness and self-interest to survive — and the most ruthless ones inevitably end with the most power, just as magnanimity and largesse find themselves disenfranchised. The world now waits for a new generosity which can defend itself.
\n\n4. Force is always present where exchange must be negotiated, where giving is not practiced for its own sake.
\n\n9. The less freely you give and receive, the harder you have to work to provide for yourself.
\n\nLove is secure, fearless, generous. Love does not make demands or judge according to standards — love celebrates, consecrates the unique, makes beauty and beautiful. To feel love is to be grateful for the whole of the past, present, and future, to feel for a moment that there is a sense to one’s existence. To be in love is not to be deluded or destitute, but to gain a sixth sense with which to perceive the real splendor of the universe. To experience love is to be connected directly to the tragedy of existence — which is not that there is not enough beauty in this life, but that none of us has the breadth or depth of self, or the time on this planet, to fully savor the magnificence the world lavishes upon us.
\n\nLove makes war upon any peace which in fact is war systematized and concealed, for love is a ruthless enemy of senseless conflict and waste. It is love, of liberty when not of one’s fellow beings, that makes it possible for us to coexist in pursuit of our own desires rather than languishing in thrall to that fat old god Discord. Those in love come to identify each other’s needs with their own, ultimately making no distinction, and overcoming the self/other dichotomy that is at the root of Western alienation: thus in love we find a way to surpass ourselves, to exalt each other and ourselves in the course of living.
\n\nTo see beauty is simply to learn the private language of meaning that is another’s life: to recognize and relish what is.
\n\n17. The more you feel love and gratitude, the more you trust.
\n\n22. The more you feel love and gratitude, the more you can give freely.
\n\nWhen you live in fear, the only way to approach the world that makes sense is with a gun in your hand. Just as the ones who see scarcity everywhere they look create a world of shortages, those who depend on force to relate to others create a necessity for it; and those born into this world of coercion inherit the cycle.
\n\nCoercion comes in more subtle forms than rape, “peace-keeping” bombings, economic sanctions. It comes camouflaged as body image standards (which even masquerade as “health” standards), psychological pressures that influence people to repress their desires, laws enforced by public opinion as well as thugs in uniform. It may be disguised as a seemingly trivial argument between friends (for anyone who seeks to establish rank, even in knowledge of trifling things, seeks a lever with which to exert force on his fellows), or that quiet self-mutilation which lovers and relatives sometimes use to manipulate each other — the inverse and identical twin of macho aggression.
\n\nSome call this a democracy — did you get to vote on what the billboards you pass every morning say, what they go on repeating inside your head all day, the trees they cut down by your house to make room for the new gas station? How about the preservatives they put in the food you eat, or the conditions in the factories that produce them? Your wages at work, or how much money the I.R.S. takes from you? These aren’t just inevitable “facts of life” — they are the manifestations of conflict as the system of human relations, every man for himself and force against us all. The leagues of intimidating red tape and the battering of women, the biased news coverage and the inhumanity of factory farms, the jockeying for ascendance between colleagues and countries, all these are simultaneously expressions of the strife at the heart of our civilization and weapons which, used by factions fighting for survival on its terms, perpetuate it.
\n\nLiving under the reign of coercion strips you of your faith, leaves you ready to use force on others, to treat them as the world has treated you. It is well known that the playground bully acts out of feelings of worthlessness, that the teenage hoodlum is moved to vandalism by insecurity and neglect; how much self-loathing and desperation must then be in the hearts of the moguls and power-brokers, whose machinations it is that keep the global market running? Whether dishwashers or directors, all who cannot feel safe enough to create and pursue their own dreams seek compensation in wealth, status, or more overt forms of power over others.
\n\nThus a mindset develops in which all human relations are seen as a conflict between mutually exclusive interests. It’s no wonder many people have a hard time imagining how human beings could live without the coercion of [what they have been taught to see as] “beneficial” forces. But competition, combat, struggles of all kinds are barriers to freedom, for they impose their demands upon all who are subject to them, distracting and simplifying without quarter. The terror-mongers insist that hierarchy is necessary to protect us from the violence inherent in our species — but hierarchy is simply the expression of the violence intrinsic to this system. The fact that hierarchy can be absent — between friends, in moments of mass teamwork, in other societies — is proof that we can live without such violence, too.
\n\nUltimately, any conflict comes down to relations of force — even those known, up to this point, as revolutions. Our dream is not to win another war, but to stage a total revolution, a war against the condition of war, on behalf of those beautiful moments when people can be thankful for each other’s existence.
\n\n5. The more you depend on force, the more you have to fear.
\n\n10. The more you depend on force, the less you can give and receive freely.
\n\nOne either invests oneself in the present, or the future: either reacts to existing circumstances and their demands, or acts to change them. You can spend all your energies surviving according to the terms set by the market economy, the expectations of parents and peers, the force of your own inertia — or risk everything to make those considerations obsolete.
\n\nFaith is the opposite of superstition. Faith means believing in the boundless possibilities of the universe — and setting out to explore them. It means knowing that if you leap off a cliff, you’re bound to land somewhere. Faith means trusting that the world is wider and richer than you could possibly see from this point, and therefore not feeling pressure to plan out the rest of your life from here. Better to sketch a route to the horizon: from there, you’ll be able to make out new vistas, and make new plans accordingly. Heaven help the people who make long term plans today and stick to them, whose lives will never be greater than what they can imagine right now!
\n\nFaith enables you to rely on your intuition when you need to: instead of being trapped by what you know, you do what you need to do. Faith gives you power over your fear. Whether you are confronting a police line or giving birth to a child or a song, faith is indispensable for capital-L living.
\n\n18. The more you trust the world, the more wonderful things you recognize in it.
\n\n23. The more you trust, the more you can feel love and gratitude.
\n\nThe one who lives in fear moves only to consolidate the present. He is not capable of free action — he is too busy reacting in advance to things that haven’t even happened yet. He can only conceive of the future — any future — as a threat. He trusts nothing to chance, and thus chance cannot entrust him with more than he already has.
\n\nIt is fear which lies at the bottom of all violence and struggle. When one trusts her companions and the world around to provide, if not what she thinks she needs, at least something equally weird and wonderful, she too can be gentle and generous. If she feels threatened by them, she grows defensive and aggressive, strikes out blindly, becomes possessed by resentment and cruelty. Vengeance becomes her greatest motivation, more powerful than any other desire: anything to take revenge upon this world which has made her feel so unwelcome and worthless. Acting on these impulses, she spreads them to others like a plague. Fear, like faith, is self-perpetuating — until something breaks the cycle.
\n\nAsk yourself — are you living deliberately? Do you approach risk willfully, or do you deny yourself because of fear? What are you afraid of? What are you saving yourself for? Do you own your body? Do you own your experience? Don’t save yourself. Don’t spare yourself. Preservation of the body or the tender sensibilities is futile — we all die someday. The question is what happens first.
\n\nThere are two possible responses to fear. One is to cower. The other is to follow your fear, to use it as a guide, to track it out past the limits of the world you know. Some things can’t be written or told. Go search.
\n\n6. The more you fear the world, the less you recognize what it offers you.
\n\n11. The less you trust, the more you depend on force.
\n\nPaleolithic man [sic], a hunter/gatherer who understood the value of sharing and mutual assistance, had nothing, why hoard things when the whole world is yours? Later, Neolithic man, who toiled in the fields, sometimes produced a surplus, which he bartered with others, and thus for him a shift occurred from being in the world to having things, mere parts of the world. The hunters and gatherers never curbed their materialistic impulses — but they never made institutions out of them. Economic Man is a bourgeois construction, the result of ten thousand years of subjugation: that is to say, etymologically speaking, living under the yoke.-Finnegan Bell’s Hunters and Gatherers Through the Ages ↩
\nEditors note — Ha! ↩
\nWe, on the other hand, don’t think much about deserve anymore; we ask, instead, what would be best for everyone, and leave it at that. Revenge doesn’t interest us, being, as it is, just another from of exchange. ↩
\n\n\n\nUntil our most fantastic demands are met, fantasy will always be at war with reality.
\n
It hijacks history classes and funerals, waylays secretaries on the way to the coffee machine, turns rails into slides and shopping malls to playgrounds — it sends lives spinning out of control. Movie directors endeavor to harness it, travel agents to peddle it, political parties to enlist it; but fantasy, like the one who pursues it in earnest, can serve no employer.
\n\nNow that every continent has been conquered and every countryside explored, nothing is more precious than passages to new worlds. Mass-manufactured faiths are haunted by a thousand dreams of escape — and fancy weaves better wings for flighty youth than pragmatism ever fashioned our forebears.
\n\nAs revolutionaries, of course we are fighting for our daydreams! When we cannot stomach another hour of this, we side with those moments we surprise ourselves, flashes in which anything feels possible, peak experiences that may last only instants — and therefore with every inhibited impulse, forbidden pleasure, unexploded dream, all the stifled songs which, unleashed, could create an upheaval like no one has ever seen. And when the dust settles afterwards, we will side with them again.
\n\nCall this escapist — perhaps it is; but what class of people is most disturbed by the idea of escape? Jailers. Right or wrong, selfless or selfish, possible or impossible, we’re getting out of here. They were shooting off fireworks through the tear gas down on the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of color. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, it is enough.
\n\n“You can see the whole wide world from up here.”
\n\n“Yes, and others, as well.
\n\nThe invitation to a new world may take a lifetime or more to extend; self-imposed outcast status may be established in order to receive the transmissions, to give the seeds soil in which to grow. The one who does this is not jettisoning herself from “life” after all, but providing its first port of entry — metabolizing, invisibly, the garbage of the old world into the new one, just as other “parasites” do.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2001/11/01/indulge-undermine", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2001/11/01/indulge-undermine", "title": "Indulge... & Undermine", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2001-11-01T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [ "anarchism", " crimethinc" ], "content_html": "Have you noticed — exhortations to indulge yourself are always followed by suggestions? Adherents of doctrines seek footholds to claim territory within you, salesmen grasp for handles to jerk you around… from new-age prophets to advertisers, from pornographers to radicals, everyone exhorts you to “pursue your desires,” but the question remains: which ones? The “real” ones? Who decides which those are?
\n\nThis just makes it clear what’s going on: a war for your soul on every front. And those much talked-about desires are all constructed, anyway — they change, they’re dependent on external factors, culture, the whole context and history of our society. We “like” fast food because we have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn’t taste much better, because the nuclear family — for those who still have even that — is too small and stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating. We “have to” check our email because the dissolution of community has taken our friends and kindred far away, because our bosses would rather not have to talk to us, because “time-saving” technology has claimed the hours once used to write letters — and killed all the passenger pigeons, besides. We “want” to go to work because in this society no one looks out for those who don’t, because it’s hard to imagine more pleasurable ways to spend our time when everything around us is designed for commerce and consumption. Every craving we feel, every conception we form, is framed in the language of the civilization that creates us.
\n\nDoes this mean we would want differently in a different world? Yes, but not because we would be free to feel our “natural” desires — no such things exist. Beyond the life you live, you have no “true” self — you are precisely what you do and think and feel. That’s the real tragedy about the life of the man who spends it talking on his cell phone and attending business seminars and fidgeting with the remote control: it’s not that he denies himself his dreams, necessarily, but that he makes them answer to reality rather than attempting the opposite. The accountant regarded with such pity by runaway teenage lovers may in fact be “happy” — but it is a different happiness than the one they experience on the lam.
\n\nIf our desires are constructs, if we are indeed the products of our environment, then our freedom is measured by how much control of these environments we have. It’s nonsense to say a woman is free to feel however she wants about her body when she grows up surrounded by diet advertisements and posters of anorexic models. It’s nonsense to say a man is free when everything he needs to do to get food, shelter, success, and companionship is already established by his society, and all that remains is for him to choose between established options (bureaucrat or technician? bourgeois or bohemian? Democrat or Republican?). We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice — and it is up to you to create these situations. Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution.
\n\nAnd those moments are not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on constantly and everywhere — and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not. “To be radical is simply to keep abreast of reality,” in the words of the old expatriate. The question is simply whether you take responsibility for your part in the ongoing transformation of the cosmos, acting deliberately and with a sense of your own power — or frame your actions as reactions, participating in unfolding events accidentally, randomly, involuntarily, as if you were purely a victim of circumstance.
\n\nIf, as idealists like us insist, we can indeed create whatever world we want, then perhaps it’s true that we can adapt to any world, too. But the former is infinitely preferable. Choosing to spend your life in reaction and adaptation, hurrying to catch up to whatever is already happening, means being perpetually at the mercy of everything. That’s no way to go about pursuing your desires, whichever ones you choose.
\n\nSo forget about whether “the” revolution will ever happen — the best reason to be a revolutionary is simply that it is a better way to live. It offers you a chance to lead a life that matters, gives you a relationship to injustice so you don’t have to deny your own grief and outrage, keeps you conscious of the give and take always going on between individual and institution, self and community, one and all. No institution can offer you freedom — but you can experience it in challenging and reinventing institutions. When school children make up their own words to the songs they are taught, when people show up by the tens of thousands to interfere with a closed-door meeting of expert economists discussing their lives, that’s what they’re up to: rediscovering that self-determination, like power, belongs only to the ones who exercise it.
\n\nShout it over the rooftops: Culture can belong to us. We can make our own music, mythology, science, technology, tradition, psychology, literature, history, ethics, political power. Until we do, we’re stuck buying mass-produced movies and compact discs made by corporate mercenaries, sitting faceless and immobilized at arena rock performances and sports events, struggling with other people’s inventions and programs and theories that make less sense to us than sorcery did to our ancestors, shamefacedly accepting the judgments of priests and agony columnists and radio talk show hosts, berating ourselves for not living up to the standards set by college entrance exams and glamour magazines, listening to parents and counselors and psychiatrists and managers tell us we are the ones with the problems, buying our whole lives from the same specialists and entrepreneurs we sell them to — and gnashing our teeth in secret fury as they cut down the last trees and heroes with the cash and authority we give them. These things aren’t inevitable, inescapable tragedies — they’re consequences of the passivity to which we have relegated ourselves. In the checkout lines of supermarkets, on the dialing and receiving ends of 900 numbers, in the locker rooms before gym classes and cafeteria shifts, we long to be protagonists in our own epics, masters of our own fate.
\n\nIf we are to transform ourselves, we must transform the world — but to begin reconstructing the world, we must reconstruct ourselves. Today all of us are occupied territory. Our appetites and attitudes and roles have all been molded by this world that turns us against ourselves and each other. How can we take and share control of our lives, and neither fear nor falter, when we’ve spent those lives being conditioned to do the opposite?
\n\nWhatever you do, don’t blame yourself for the fragments of the old order that remain within you. You can’t sever yourself from the chain of cause and effect that produced you — not with any amount of willpower. The trick is to find ways to indulge your programming that simultaneously subvert it — that create, in the process of satisfying those desires, conditions which foster new ones. If you need to follow leaders, find leaders who will depose themselves from the thrones in your head; if you need to “lead” others, find equals who will help you dethrone yourself; if you have to fight against others, find wars you can wage for everyone’s benefit. When it comes to dodging the imperatives of your conditioning, you’ll find that indulge and undermine is a far more effective program than the old heritage of “renounce and struggle” passed down from a humorless Christianity.
\n\nTo return, finally, to the original question — yes, we too are making suggestions about which desires you pursue. We would be scoundrels to deny that! But we would be scoundrels not to make these suggestions, not to extol freedom and self-determination in a world that discourages them. Exhorting others to “think for themselves” is ironic — but today, refusing to oppose the propaganda of the missionaries and entrepreneurs and politicians simply means abandoning our society and species to their control. There’s no purity in silence. And liberty does not simply exist in the absence of control — it is something we have to make together. Taking responsibility for our part in the ongoing metamorphoses of the world means not being afraid to take part in the making of our society, influencing and being influenced as we do.
\n\nWe make suggestions, we spread this propaganda of desire, because we hope by doing so to indulge our own programmed passion for propaganda in a way that undermines an order that discourages all of us from playing with our passions — and so to enter a world of total liberty and diversity, where propaganda and power struggles alike are obsolete. See you on the other side.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2001/11/01/why-were-right-youre-wrong", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2001/11/01/why-were-right-youre-wrong", "title": "Why We're Right & You're Wrong : infighting the good fight", "summary": "Can we get along? Even for those of us who would prefer to be hermits, there is no question today more important than this one—the fate of our species and planet will be decided by it.", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2001-11-01T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [ "anarchism", "harbinger", "unity" ], "content_html": "\n\n\n“Just like every coddled middle class liberal, when it comes down to it he’ll just run back home.” “Those lifestyle anarchists don’t care about anything but themselves. Don’t they understand if everyone lived like them, there would be no system to leech off?” “If they’re not going to abide by the decisions of the spokescouncil, they shouldn’t be here at all. I’d rather they were at home doing nothing than messing up our protest like this!” “How can you expect to
\n____without____? If you really cared about____, you’d____! (like me)” “I don’t want to be an activist or an anarchist or a part of this at all if it means I have to …”
Can we get along? Even for those of us who would prefer to be hermits, there is no question today more important than this one the fate of our species and planet will be decided by it.
\n\nThere is no shortcut around this dilemma. Any kind of capital-R Revolution, any redistribution of wealth and power, will be short-lived and irrelevant without a fundamental change in our relationships for social structure is an expression of these relationships, not a factor external to them. Revolution, then, is not a single moment, but a way of living: anarchy and hierarchy always coexist in varying proportions, and the important question is simply which you foster in your own life.
\n\nWe are ill-qualified to reconstruct human relations if we can’t even get along with each other in the attempt and nothing seems to create dissension and division like those attempts. Often it seems that the people who know least how to relate to others are the self-professed activists who set out to save them. Yet these conflicts are not an inescapable consequence of human nature, but rather a pattern of cause and effect which can and must be altered. This is a starting place to consider what the challenges are in undertaking this, and why we’ve had such a hard time to date.
\n\nIn a world where free, creative action is hard to get away with, we all feel impoverished, cheated of the experiences and sensations we know should be ours. We compensate as best we can, and often this compensation serves only to preserve our destitution. We seek status in wealth, power, strength, beauty, reputation, anything to soften the blows of wasted days. We compensate by seeking another kind of status, too: the feeling of being superior, a status in our own heads.
\n\nWe live in a society that teaches there is not enough of any valuable resource to go around, including selfhood. People on television or in books are held up as more important, more noble, more attractive than the rest of us. We grow up in households where our parents don’t have enough time for us; we are sent to schools that employ a grading system that permits only a handful to excel, and are discharged into a market that enriches a few of us while exploiting or discarding the rest. We internalize the values of this system. We become used to judging our value by what we are “better than.” We rush to despise others, their plans and ideas and habits and beliefs, in order to reassure ourselves that we have worth of our own. When we should be looking for what is positive in everything, we denounce and criticize instead just to reassure ourselves! The most insecure among us are not even able to enjoy movies and music, because it is so important to them that they have “refined” tastes; they don’t realize that when they succeed in failing to enjoy something, no one has lost more than they. If you’re going to get anything out of any movie or song or interaction (so as not to have simply wasted time!), you have to take responsibility for finding ways to enjoy and benefit from it.
\n\nIn its advanced stages, such hypercritical status-seeking can combine with a spectator mentality: from a distance, the critic passively votes for or against the efforts of others, unable to discern that such things as art, activism, community are entirely what he makes of them and that he must make something of them himself in order to get anything out of them. This spectatorship reinforces the sense that everything everyone else is doing is uninteresting or unintelligent, and thus the feeling of superiority the spectator so desperately needs. You rarely encounter a genuinely active, involved person who feels the need to proclaim her actions superior to others’; but in the spectator’s scarcity economy of self, any expression of selfhood, even the most generous and positive, can be interpreted as an encroachment, an attack1. Every achievement is something to rebel against, assail, deride as if we don’t all feel worthless, abused, hunted enough already!
\n\nThose of us who would oppose this scarcity system often have additional challenges to face in unlearning its conditioning. Many of us have come to this resistance from a place of conflict and struggle, and this sense of struggle is still imprinted upon the way we approach all our activities. Having been abused, neglected, harassed, having had to fight peers, parents, teachers, bosses, police to establish ourselves, we see selfhood as something that is obtained by fighting. We come to think of being radical as a war hence the more wars we fight, the more radical we must be. We profess intentions to create peace, but the only tools we possess are weapons. Small wonder we end up fighting among ourselves.
\n\n\n\n\n“With a little hard work, you can make yourself feel alienated by anything.”
\n
Scarcity thinking and the destructive insecurity it fosters have played a large part in shaping our notions of justice2. Passing judgment can be the ultimate compensation for one’s own shortcomings. It’s easy to get self-righteous about someone else’s mistakes, flaws, inconsistencies … for we all have them, and the more focused we are on the shortcomings of others, the less we have to think about our own. Witch-hunters who believe that they have found a real live criminal (or racist, lifestyle anarchist, class traitor, etc.), just like the ones in the movies, can reassure themselves that they have isolated the contagion and need look no further and the more vitriolic their denunciations of the enemy, the more afraid everyone else is to admit what they have in common with him.
\n\nOnce again we live in a violent world. It’s as sensible to blame any one of us for being colonized by this violence as it is to blame the oceans for being polluted. The question should not be whether an individual is guilty we all are, at least of complicity but rather how to enable all individuals to confront and transform the violence and ignorance within themselves. Often nothing can help an person to do this more than to offer him forgiveness, to trust that he is interested in communicating with you; this makes it easier for him to drop his defenses and acknowledge what you have to say. This is not to say that we shouldn’t defend ourselves whenever we have to, and by any means necessary but let’s do this for practical reasons, not out of a thirst for revenge and superiority.
\n\n\n\n\n“Righteousness is a premium currency in this post-Christian society, though it refers to a mythical world.”
\n
Objectivity thinking, on which our scarcity-oriented, authoritarian civilization is based, posits that there is only one truth. According to this school of reasoning, those who want to explain human behavior or overthrow capitalism should make different propositions regarding the best way to do this, and debate them until the “correct” one is selected. And so, in the ivory towers, intellectuals and armchair revolutionaries debate incessantly, coming no closer to consensus, developing more and more exclusive jargon, while the rest of us labor to make something actually happen. Subjectivity thinking accepts that there is no “the” reality, and infers that any “objective” reality must simply be one subjective reality institutionalized as Truth by those in power. Subjectivity thinking recognizes that people have arrived at their particular beliefs and behaviors as a result of their individual life experiences. This has an important bearing on how we interact with each other, especially in our efforts to change the world. Different people are going to have different beliefs, tactics, goals. Accept this. They don’t necessarily think differently than you do because they are not as smart or experienced or perceptive as you they may be your equals in all these regards, but come to different conclusions based on different evidence from their own lives. Respect this, while offering whatever perspectives you can yourself keeping in mind that the less you have in common, the more you would do well to listen rather than speak. When hearing a person’s position on an issue, you don’t have to immediately begin debating which of you is right. Instead, try to think of projects you could undertake together that would further the interests you have in common. Whatever ideological issues need to be worked out can be worked out in practice, if they can be worked out at all they certainly will not be resolved by another contest of egos disguised as a debate about theory3.
\n\nObviously, it’s impossible for anyone to legislate for everyone else, since every life experience is unique nevertheless, you can offer your own experiences and conclusions, for others to do with what they will (in the words of the divine Marquis: “if you can speak honestly for yourself, you will find you have spoken for others as well”). This may be seen as legislating, by those who believe that there is only one right way; but those who attack you for offering your own perspective or analysis, on the grounds that it doesn’t apply to them (or isn’t relevant to all people, starving mothers in Somalia, the transgendered community, etc.) are still working within the scarcity model.
\n\nRemember every value you hold, every decision you make, you make for yourself alone. The scarcity-thinkers will attack you as if you are deciding for everyone don’t fall into the trap of their thinking by arguing for your own methods and ideas as universals. Simply point out that you act according to your own conscience, and hope to integrate your approach into those of others just as it is up to others to do with you.
\n\nThose who still hold that there is such a thing as “objective” truth generally feel a compulsion to persuade others of their truths. This is the self-perpetuating consequence of the power struggles that go on in the market of ideas; as in any economy based on scarcity, this market is characterized by competition between capitalists who strive to preserve and increase their power over others.
\n\nIn our society, ideas function as capital in much the same way money does4. Individuals who can get others to “buy in” to their ideas obtain a disproportionate amount of control over their surroundings; large conglomerates (the Catholic Church, the Communist Party) can come to rule large parts of the world this way, just as corporations do indeed, there can be no entrenched political or financial power without ideological capital to back it up. Little “start-up companies” of competing ideas can enter the market to contest such monopolies, and sometimes one unseats the reigning creed to become the new dominant paradigm; but as in any capitalist system, power tends to flow upward to the top of a hierarchy, from which the masters, the ones qualified to employ it, decide matters for everyone else … and, just as in financial capitalism, ultimately it is not even the ruling class but competition itself that is in control. In this environment, anyone with a value or viewpoint has to rush to sell it to others before being run out of business.
\n\nIt’s hard to imagine from here what a world free from this war of ideologies would be like. Obviously, it would have to be a world free from analogous wars (for money, power, selfhood), too, for it’s foolish to insist that “one can think however one wants” when some ways of conceptualizing the cosmos are punished by exclusion or embargo. Those of us who fight for freedom from the power of gods and masters would do well to contest the dictatorships of ideology any ideology which always accompany and enable them5.
\n\nConsidering the numbers of public relations agents, televangelists, self-help gurus, and other assorted fanatics and salesmen competing to convert them, the hesitance “the masses” show to get involved in any kind of social movement is actually a healthy self-defense mechanism. Thus the biggest challenge for those who would find common cause with others to make revolutionary change is how to avoid making them defensive in the process.
\n\nRadical politics does make people feel defensive in the West today this is a greater obstacle to social transformation than any corporate control or government repression. And this is due in large part to the attitudes of the activists themselves: many activists have invested in their activist identities as an act of compensation at least as much as out of a genuine desire to make things happen for them, activism serves the same function that machismo, fashion, popularity serve for others. Activists who are still serving the imperatives of insecurity tend to alienate others they may even unconsciously want to alienate others, so they can stand alone as the virtuous vanguard. Seeing such activists in action, people who don’t have the same insecurities to placate assume that activism has nothing to do with their own lives and needs. Whenever we have an idea for a “revolutionary” project we must ask ourselves: Are we certain of our motivations? Will our words and deeds mobilize and enable, or immobilize and discourage? Are we trying to create a spectacle of our freedom/compassion/erudition, to establish our status as revolutionaries/leaders/intellectual theorists, to claim the moral high ground, to win at the childish competition of who is most oppressed (as if suffering was quantifiable!), still seeking power and revenge in the guise of liberation? People can tell when you are lording yourself over them or playing a role, just as they can sense when you are acting out of honesty and joy. They’re much more likely to respond to that, since their lives are already filled with enough role-playing and rivalry.
\n\nWe would do better to abandon the crusade to “convert the masses,” with all its patronizing implications that others are lazy, blind, weak, victimized, in need of guidance. Instead first, we ought to reach out to those who are in situations similar to ours, or ones we have been in; these people, with whom we have the most in common, are the ones to whom our perspectives can be most useful6. Finally, we can find common cause with people on the grounds of the “antisocial” things they are already doing and feeling: theft, vandalism and graffiti, “laziness,” rebelliousness, general nihilism, compassion.
\n\nThis is the real significance of the “glorification” of shoplifting, adultery, etc. that some radical propaganda indulges in: not to argue that shoplifting itself is revolution in action (or for that matter that one must shoplift to be radical as if revolution was a commodity in a scarcity economy, only available through certain channels!), but to establish connections to the daily lives and resistances of individuals who are not yet acting out of an articulated desire for revolution. The radical significance of a statement is in the effects of making it, not in whether or not it is “objectively” true. On the grounds of the private longings and frustrations people feel their hatred for busywork, the joy in transgression they find they share with teenagers and anarchists, the instinctive suspicion with which they approach all totalitarian systems a resistance can be established that proceeds from the individual motivations and standpoints of all those who comprise it, rather than the demands of political parties and dogmas. This is the only kind of resistance that can rescue us from both authoritarian power and authoritarian ideology.
\n\nWhen it comes to “under-represented” perspectives, remember it’s not your role to “represent” them, as the politicians “represent” us. Better to do your best to represent yourself, and encourage others to do the same … for example, by listening to those who already are. Some people may dismiss your perspective (as “middle class,” “reformist,” “extremist,” etc.), but there is no such thing as an illegitimate perspective it is only illegitimate to act as if any perspective is not legitimate. A lot of this goes on, often perpetrated in the name of the under-represented (an easy trick!) by those who aren’t necessarily under-represented themselves. Don’t be intimidated you can be sure that if you are feeling something, someone else is feeling it, too, and needs to know she is not alone.
\n\nAny kind of “resistance movement” is going to develop conflicts over strategy (“violent” vs. “non-violent,” etc.), as different individuals construct their own analyses and test them out in practice. To contest this diversity rather than seeking to benefit from it to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by turning opportunities to address important issues into squabbles is to wish everyone had the same life history and perspective. Teenage hoodlums are not going to find the same things liberating as middle-aged librarians do but both have a stake in liberation, and must be a part of any struggle for it. Those who would set rules for the unruly and regulations for the irregular would deny the complexity not only of human beings but also of the revolution we hope to make.
\n\nOthers are always going to have different approaches and goals than you do; the challenge is not to convert them to your own strategy (for who knows could it be they actually know better than you what is good for them?), but rather to find ways to integrate divergent methods into a mutually beneficial whole. Like it or not, if you feel that another’s tactics are ineffective or counterproductive, it is up to you to find and add the missing ingredient that can make them effective otherwise, all the energy they put into their efforts is not only wasted, but turned against them and everyone else. Under such circumstances it will be much easier to point fingers and lay blame but this accomplishes nothing.
\n\nApproaches that speak clearly to some people may alienate others even and especially proclaimed activists (though, really, the last people any given approach needs to reach or please are people who are already radicalized). In these cases, it’s important not to feel too threatened, since you may not actually be and to keep in mind that with the vast diversity of lives on this planet, we’ll need an equally diverse arsenal of outreaches. In other cases, approaches that seem to contradict each other may actually form a perfect symbiosis: as in the relationship between masked rioters and well-behaved, well-spoken proponents of social change. No one in power would take heed of the latter without the former behind them (imagine Martin Luther King’s nonviolence without the implicit threat of Malcolm X’s confrontational stance), and without “respectable” support, insurgents can easily be marginalized and destroyed. In these situations, all parties should remember that others may even have to publicly disavow their tactics in order to continue doing their part effectively7; when this happens, there should be no hard feelings.
\n\nCertainly it can be difficult to work alongside people who profess beliefs entirely different from yours and you should never work with others you fear will betray you or hijack your efforts to serve their own ends. But, again, ask yourself: are your positions significant to you as positions possessions, status symbols, badges of identity or as generalizations that exist to help you create more fulfilling moments of life? It’s common sense to integrate the differing tactics of those who share a common goal; it’s more challenging, but equally important, to put aside your compulsion to persuade everyone else of your opinions when you must, and work to create harmony between individuals who live in totally different worlds. That harmony might never be complete but it’s a nobler objective than any kind of unity enforced by standardization.
\n\nJust as a band needs musicians who play different instruments, healthy associations don’t restrict the participants with “compromises” that force them to limit themselves to the things they have in common, but instead integrate their dissimilarities into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Working and living in such arrangements, in which every person is conscious that she is responsible for making the projects and relationships work, helps one learn to see oneself as a part of the web of human relations, rather than as an automaton against the world. Under these circumstances, others’ desires must be taken as seriously as one’s own and this can actually allow an individual to be a more complete person, as her companions can represent parts of herself for her that she would not otherwise express. This makes sense, for everyone is ultimately a product of the same world we are all interconnected, each manifesting different aspects of the same interplay of forces. Without this insight, cooperation and community can only be incidental and haphazard.
\n\nEventually, for the individual experienced in living communally, it becomes possible to regard the entire cosmos as one vast, albeit dysfunctional, collective; the problem is simply how to make its workings more to one’s liking. This is not to say the fascists, sexists, etc. can go about their merry business and be “part of our collective” they’d be the first ones to deny that, and follow it up with proof! But remember, the chief argument of fascism and reactionary thinking has always been that cooperation and autonomy are mutually exclusive, that people have to be ordered and controlled or else they will be lazy and kill each other. The more we can demonstrate this to be untrue, the less appeal their claims will have. “Anyone who isn’t on both sides of the issue is obviously against me from some direction.”
\n\nPerhaps the most important thing you can do in this struggle is be there for others, help them believe in themselves, offer real compassion not the condescension of charity when it is needed. But there is no formula for this; mercy comes in the least predictable forms and from the most unexpected sources. Often it takes a person who has suffered something similar to be able to offer real succor to one who is suffering or struggling. That’s another reason why it is good that we have all chosen different paths and suffered different things, even things that seemed to isolate us why there is a place even for spoiled rich kids and homeless drug addicts and lovers who have lied and betrayed in this struggle: for who else could relate to others in those difficult situations, offer them guidance and hope? When you recognize how your own tribulations have prepared you to help others, it can make sense of experiences that seemed unjustifiable; at the same time, this may help you to see the importance of others who previously appeared without worth.
\n\nOften we have our hands full dealing with our own pain, filled with too much bitterness and confusion to be able to offer others anything, least of all mercy. This means it is all the more critical that we not miss the opportunities we do get to be good to others whether or not they have “earned” it, whether or not we understand them, whether or not we think it will make a difference.
\n\nWe would-be revolutionaries so frequently frame our project in martial terms: we set out to Fight Racism, Smash Fascism, Destroy Capitalism, Eat the Rich. This enables us to see ourselves as noble crusaders and more importantly, to have adversaries, which reassures us of our own righteousness. This reassurance is apparently more precious than the success in our efforts it replaces and prevents at least, it is so long as one hasn’t yet tasted that success. We have to remember in every instant that our enemies are not human beings: our enemies are the conditions that make us enemies.
\n\nA world entirely without enemies is not possible it’s not even desirable, for most but understand, war is business as usual for capitalist society: Exxon vs. Shell, U.S.A. vs. Iraq, Communists vs. Anarchists, lover against lover and parent against child. Even if we could kill every last rapist, C.E.O., head of state, police officer, and housemate who won’t do the dishes, that violence would remain in the world as the venom and fury of those who survived them (not to mention the ways those murders would leave their mark on us) that’s karma for you. Revolution is what happens when you create situations that make the old conflicts all that inertia of resentment and insecurity and antagonism irrelevant.
\n\nOf course warfare is necessary sometimes we have to fight all efforts to keep us at war with each other, and for some of us this will mean violence. But, as the venerable sage once pointed out, “if it’s you against the world, bet on the world.” So many of us alienate ourselves so needlessly from others, eventually relying on some abstraction (“the working class,” “the imminent insurrection”) for camaraderie once every companion of flesh and blood is gone, or, worse, concluding that cooperation is simply impossible when history shows that it is possible, just not for you, until you’re ready to be more patient, considerate, humble, forgiving.
\n\nWhen you can be generous enough not to blame another for her incoherence, selfishness, mistakes, bad ideas, even acts of violence, you can discern what she has to offer you. When you can put into practice a form of justice that takes responsibility for setting things aright, you can heal, rather than impotently dispensing guilt and glory. When you can be patient with impatience, when you can resist contemptation, when you can refrain from being self-righteous even and especially with the self-righteous, you can do your part to liberate all of us prisoners of war.
\n\nDoing things you enjoy will help you not to take your frustrations out on others as will working with people you like, whenever it’s possible8. There’s nothing noble or revolutionary about “sacrificing yourself for the cause,” especially when it makes you impossible to be around. At the same time, it won’t and shouldn’t always be possible to surround yourself with people who see things the way you do: be ready to leave your comfort zone, and bring a generous heart when you do.
\n\nThis is dedicated to all those who have done this over the years, who have taken it for granted that for all their clumsiness, people from other backgrounds and advocates of other tactics really did desire to coexist and cooperate with them: to the men and women of the working class who took the time to explain to bourgeois activists how they were alienating them, even when the latter did not at first know how to listen; to the women who not only demanded that men recognize the existence and effects of their sexism, but also acknowledged the fears and anxieties they felt; to the survivors of abuse who went on to give counseling to both abused and abusers. Without them, we would assuredly have torn each other to pieces already. It’s frightening to let your guard down, it’s hard to swallow your pride (even when clinging to it would mean betraying yourself) but this is the only way to help others do the same. Until they can, we will live in this barren world of shields and swords, each of us a city-state unto herself. Some anarchy.
\n\nDon’t be intimidated by the colossal challenge of “saving the world”; there are as many worlds as there are people save yours, the one made up of the life you share with the ones around you. Where one flower blooms, a million more will follow.
\n\nI would like to be someone with whom no one would feel she had to be ashamed of any part of herself. I would like to be able to regard the actions of others without feeling threatened by them or becoming defensive, even when they are defensive with me to see others in the context of their lives, not my own. I would like to know how to set limits on how far I rely upon people, so as not to risk losing my ability to respect them. I would like to be able to look those adversaries who should be allies in the eyes and say Like it or not, this is who I am. This is what the world has made of me, and we must all live with the consequences. I can’t feel or believe or act differently than I do, let alone change the decades of life behind me that have wrought this. I don’t want to compete with you for moral high ground or anything else. Unless you’re prepared to kill everyone who doesn’t line up with your standards, or to endure this impasse of animosity indefinitely, you’re going to have to accept me on my own terms, as I hope to do with you. You are as responsible as I am for making what goes on between us positive for us both or for the world of strife we will live in otherwise.
\n\nThe other expression of this same affliction is hero worship, in which one projects all the qualities one finds admirable onto others. This is similarly crippling, of course, and inevitably leads back to the same hostility and scorn for the only thing you can do with individuals or groups you have put on a pedestal is knock them off. ↩
\nThe self-righteous activists sense of justice is derived from the same origins as the justice system which feeds todays prison-industrial complex: a Christianity that emphasized individual responsibility over the cause and effect of social conditions, in order to invent, advertise, and sell the ultimate scarce commodity salvation. In a state of truly mutually-beneficial social relations, such threats as incarceration and hellfire would be unnecessary the threat of expulsion from the community would be dismaying enough. ↩
\nAlso in taking sides against others, you can forget that everyones positions are fluid; forcing someone to act as a partisan of one side can trap them into identifying themselves with that side exclusively. ↩
\nIdeas, like other forms of capital, are considered private property, and protected by law in the cases of plagiarism and copyright infringement, for example. ↩
\nThis statement, paradoxically, rests on ideological assumptions of its own but perhaps this kind of self-contradiction is the first, necessary step in the disarmament of ideology. ↩
\nWhen the locals began joining in the street fighting, we showed them how to make their shirts into masks so the police couldn’t identify them, and how to use lime juice to protect themselves from the tear gas thats anarchist leadership in action, or what we have in place of it: sharing our skills with others, spreading power, instead of concentrating it. ↩
\nAs the black-masked corporate window-smasher yelled at the law-abiding liberal protester who tried to restrain her: It’s not your job to stop me from making your cause look bad, but to distance yourself from my actions as much as you have to to keep the respect of the demographic you’re trying to reach! Its my job to make something happen here so they’ll have to listen to you in the fucking first place! ↩
\nConsensus-based organizing can sometimes create unnecessary conflict and interference. Organizing autonomously and trying another free association whenever one isn’t working can give you the freedom you need not to resent others, so you can work well with the ones around you. Revolution may involve learning to live and act cooperatively, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to be friends. ↩
\nOver a century ago, a famous writer quipped that the industrial worker was “a mere appendage of flesh on a machine of iron.” Today, that description can be applied across the board: each of us is no more than an appendage of flesh on the vast machine that is our society, for our lives and communities are atomized into isolated sectors. If we want to change the whole of life, we must first become whole again.
\n\nModern man’s activity is compartmentalized: it is divided and subdivided into separate components which can only interfere with each other. He experiences life as an ongoing conflict between achievement, romance, social responsibility, fitness, relaxation, adventure, and so on, because all these pursuits seem to be mutually exclusive. He would like to spend more time with his wife, but if he doesn’t stay at the office another hour he won’t be able to advance his career, and then he has to go to the gym to firm up his belly and ward off poor health… and there’s that damn vacation at the beach to plan for, and world news to catch up on, before he even gets to think about being romantic with her. Perhaps he buys that Mozart CD that the advertisements said would relieve stress and help focus his concentration skills—hoping some new medication will serve to fend off the symptoms of a life in which he never does anything for its own sake! Perhaps he would like to get involved with some sort of volunteer social work, but doesn’t know where he would fit it into his schedule; he has a hard enough time just taking the time out to watch his favorite sitcom, and even that doesn’t provide him with much relief from his busy life. Meaning, of course, is absent everywhere when life is disjointed; without unity of self in his pursuits, the modern man can find no lasting satisfaction in any one of them.
\n\nCompare this with the integrated, holistic life of the “savage” or young adventurer. For her, there is no distinction between working and playing, between spending time with her friends and lovers, taking care of her practical needs, and seeking pleasure. She moves through the world, finding sustenance and getting exercise from the same activities, using her creativity with her friends to weave a daily life that is both challenging and familiar, at once adventure, livelihood, and religious ceremony.
\n\nPerhaps you’ve experienced this kind of lifestyle before, when you were doing something that incorporated every aspect of your being into a perfect equilibrium. We all need to find ways to integrate our lives, so that we will not always be trying to make impossible choices between equally necessary pieces of ourselves… and if we want to make this world a better place, we have to find ways of living that are revolutionary in their very nature; for politics, activism, or social responsibility as a separate domain of life, as a hobby or part-time operation, can never outweigh the effects of the rest of life.
\n\nMy friend Mark practices Yoga to focus and relax himself. He is also an artist and musician, who often travels around the country with his work. Mark realized one day that when he neglects his exercises on the road, he still feels focused and relaxed in ways that he simply couldn’t at home without Yoga. He concluded that the voyage itself must be a kind of Yoga, perhaps the same kind of Yoga referred to by Ken Kesey in his eulogy for Neil Cassady:
\n\n_
\n\n“His life was the yoga of a man driven to the cliff-edge by the grassfire of an entire nation’s burning material madness. Rather than be consumed by this he jumped, choosing to sort things out in the fast-flying but smog-free moments of a life with no retreat. In this commitment he placed himself irrevocably beyond category.”
\n\n_
\n\nJust as our individual lives are fragmented by compartmentalization, our society is fragmented by ever-increasing specialization. Every sphere of life is relegated to the care of an elite core of specialists, who administer it without consulting the rest of us. Every profession is divided and subdivided: from scientist to chemist, from chemist to biochemist, from biochemist to pharmaceutical neurobiologist until no one outside a handful of experts can understand what is going on. At that point, the division of knowledge itself becomes authoritarian, for it grants small groups of people vast powers over others who cannot even fathom what those powers are.
\n\nBecoming a specialist is a self-selecting process: only those willing to concentrate on learning one subject to the exclusion of all else can excel at it. Thus the engineers and computer programmers with the greatest skills are willing to work for the government building weapons of mass destruction and cracking the codes of “subversive” groups, for they have never taken the time to reflect on what the effects of their efforts might be. They simply do what they have been taught to do, for whoever provides the chance to do it.
\n\nEach expert in this system of specialization is able to do his job well, in a vacuum, but unable to see the larger whole. Without an analysis of the part he plays in society, he sees it as an external force, acting on him without his participation. And the people who form the various parts of the machine are unable to relate to each other to take action together when they want to change something about the world they are making, separated as they are spatially and socially and psychologically into their individual spheres; in fact, each tends to conceive of problems in terms of its needs versus those of the other components of the machine: the library would get the funding it needed if only it wasn’t going to the linguistics department, etc.
\n\nSpecialization also discourages the rest of us from being well-rounded and understanding the workings of our society. Painting is left up to artists, the maintenance of our cars to automechanics, social change to professional politicians or amateur activists. The more complicated technologies become, and the more alienating the terminology used by those who work with them, the fewer of us are able to exercise any control over our environments: “Call the repair man,” we chant, waiting in intimidated ignorance and powerlessness. Similarly, all of us but the recognized “artists” miss out on the joys of being creative in the aesthetic world. The true value of a painting cannot be captured by purchasing it in a gallery and hanging it on the wall; it lies in the moment when the painting is conceived, when the artist is comparing sketches with her comrades late one night, arguing about narrative and form, and has a sudden, exhilarating insight. This is something we must all take part in, each with our unique talents. The supposed divinity of artists, and the expert credentials of the art critics who deify them, just like the genius of scientists and the arcane knowledge of locksmiths, have fooled us into denying ourselves this irreplaceable pleasure.
\n\nThe role of the political activist as authority and expert paralyzes the rest of humanity in correspondingly disastrous ways. Saddest and most absurd of all is the way so many political activists unconsciously act to alienate others, the very others with whom they hope in theory to find common cause. Conditioned to believe that they need to be superior to others to have value of their own, and believing in the scarcity economy of self which demands that they stake out their identity in contrast to the identities of those around them, today’s insecure activists mistakenly presume that they somehow benefit from showing off how much more knowledgeable, more committed, and more ethical they are than everyone else.
\n\nSpecialization within political circles is equally crippling. Oblivious to each other’s efforts and the strength they could wield as an alliance, single-issue activists agitate about their chosen topics in parallel ghettos; marginalized into a thousand individual campaigns, they exhaust themselves trying to cure the symptoms of the dominant system, rather than developing a resistance that could undermine the world order that is ultimately responsible.
\n\nWhen being active is no longer an off-putting specialty, and partisans of different struggles are able to find common cause, the world will finally change.
\n\nSomewhere across the world there is an underground circus or punk rock band on tour as you read this. Unbeknownst to themselves and others, they carry with them the seeds of a new and yet ancient social structure, which could totally transform the ways all of us live and interact. Within the group, responsibilities are shared and valued equally, and whenever someone wants a break from doing something or is curious to learn about something else, people switch roles. No one member’s participation is less important than anyone else’s, whatever their individual strengths may be, for the cooperation and contentment of each is crucial to the functioning of the group. Each member’s daily activities satisfy her various desires: she feels at home with her friends while she travels through new environments, she makes art that simultaneously entertains and educates others, she gets exercise and learns new things repairing the van, she has adventures collecting food and other supplies through an urban hunting and gathering that does not conflict with her anti-consumerist ethics. Best of all, she no longer has to distinguish between her own needs and those of the people around her, which eliminates the greater part of the stress of human interaction. Together all the participants function as an extended family, and the positive atmosphere is so strong that over time they are able to lose some members and gain others without losing any momentum.
\n\nYes, we’d have to downsize and restructure our whole civilization to follow the lead this merry little band offers, but for the past few centuries we’ve been struggling to deal with the difficulties of not living in such communities—and we haven’t had much success. If we’re going to struggle anyway, it might as well be towards a utopia in which our lives encompass can everything the cosmos has to offer.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/ultimatum", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/ultimatum", "title": "ULTIMATUM", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2025-10-10T15:26:43Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Unless you grant our demands, from the close of the millennium at midnight, New Year’s Eve, onwards,
\n\nhappiness, self-esteem, and mental clarity will be held hostage from the populace by a ruthless elite of advertising executives and other psychologists, utilizing a constant barrage of propaganda upon all five senses to maintain their power 1;
\ncorporations will steal the most precious hours from the lives of millions of human beings, converting them into useless trinkets, pollution, tedium, and work-related injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome 2;
\nthose trapped within the frontiers of this ever-expanding hell will take their apathy and anger out on themselves and each other with firearms, addictive drugs, and abusive relationships 3;
\ngovernments will lay claim to what lives remain, to destroy in more efficient ways 4;
\nand all those who contest this will be mocked, starved, beaten, jailed… branded terrorists by the real terrorists 5.
\nThese travesties will continue without mercy or quarter until all our demands are met. This is not negotiable. These are no idle threats. Hell, all these things are happening right now, and have been for decades.
\n\nEach individual should seek a life that will constantly broaden her horizons, that will give her the experiences she needs to discern exactly what her greatest desires are. The important things cannot be taught or explained. Go search.
\nWe need to create ways of satisfying our individual needs that simultaneously provide for the needs of others. Otherwise, every time we take care of our own needs, we simply reinforce the system of scarcity that makes others suffer—and it is in no one’s best interest that we live in a world of mutual distrust and misery.
\nGift giving must replace exchange as the standard economic, social, and emotional transaction. And while everything still belongs to the hoarding exchangers (the “possessed,” we call them, those would-be possessors), let theft, squatting, trash scavenging, etc. enable us to begin this gift economy immediately.
\nWe need control over all the resources of this society, not just the fragments we receive as individual consolation prizes, and we need social arrangements in which this control can be shared to everyone’s advantage. It’s not just a question of being free to pursue our desires, but even more so of being able to participate in the shaping of them—and for that, we must share power over the world that does the shaping.
\nWe have the guns for war. They are the simple, infectious pleasure of breaking rules—the loneliness shared by prom queens and executives on long business trips alike, both ready to abdicate their roles the instant someone offers them a world populated by people rather than chess pieces —the outrage rightly felt by anyone who has had to go fruitlessly in search of a restroom through the crowded streets of a city, who feels in his very gut just how out of place human beings are in these new metropolises.
\n\nWhat we need is a new radicalism, one that can offer both the opportunity to make a total revolution, and the courage to seize it, to those who today make their revolutions only by halves: the middle-aged adulterers and teenage elopers, the bank robbers and shoplifters, the Peace Corps volunteers and block-burning rioters, religious mystics and hikers of the Appalachian Trail, militiamen and members of Alcoholics Anonymous, free software advocates and fired construction workers, and everyone else who has everything at stake in the formation of a new world and no idea how to get there. A radicalism that can join the cause of the landless farmworkers in Brazil to the raw fury of the dilettante anarchist vandal of the West, without any implications of charity work or youth reform; one that can demand that we surpass the oppressive role of art in this society, without denying or demeaning the solace the solitary adolescent poet finds in it. One that can give real form to the false promises of adventure implicit in “rebellious” rock music and fashion… one that can integrate the needs of the violent young hoodlum with those of the single mother, the art-school intellectual, and the runaway child. One that can integrate the “violent” with the “non-violent” resistance, showing that this is a false dichotomy, just like the self/other dichotomy—and every other dichotomy.
\n\nMy mother started smoking when she was thirteen. She calculated that she’s probably spent enough money on cigarettes to retire early, if she had it back; but instead, we grew up with billboards advertising cigarettes next to our school, and now my brother smokes too. It’s finally illegal for them to advertise cigarettes on billboards, so the same corporation has invested in other products, and other billboards… ↩
\nNone of us ever got to know my grandfather—he was always so tired when he came back from work that he didn’t talk. When he retired last year, his employer gave him a watch. We still don’t know him… I guess at this point all he knows how to do besides work is watch football on the television, and drink. ↩
\nTwo nights ago, my friend was raped at knifepoint by a boy who asked for a ride at a party. She had been one of the only women I know who hadn’t been raped or sexually abused yet. It’s very hard for me to let anyone touch me anymore. ↩
\nMy uncle became addicted to heroin after he was drafted to serve in Vietnam. He finally fought free of the addiction, but now he’s dying of Hepatitis B. ↩
\nMy lover was making puppets for street demonstrations when the F.B.I. and police stormed her building on a fabricated excuse. They teargassed everyone at the door, and began attacking people at random as they destroyed all the puppets (which the papers would later refer to as “weapons”). When she tried to get between her friend and the policeman who was beating her with his nightstick, she was beaten herself, and then charged with six felonies for “assault.” The news networks are celebrating the police for maintaining order in this city. ↩
\nIntellectuals have quite an aptitude for displacement — when they suffer from the ennui of their dry, disembodied existence, they respond to this suffering not with action but with more desiccating and disembodying. All too often their real discontent ends up being diverted into theory and abstract analysis, and from there back into career and status… and thus, more status quo.
\n\nIdeology creeps quickly into any language, languages that seek to oppose it no less. It might well be that the language of radical theory, dreary and unbearable as it was with so many academic code words and so much talk about “responsibility” and self-sacrifice and the inevitability of history, would have died out on its own (and right on time!) if we had not revitalized it with our reference to real life needs and fantasies. But now our innovation has become a routine of its own, and we all know what to expect from the mouth of any radical: the same old standard-issue rhetoric, but now even more disheartening, for it comes dressed in the robes of our own hearts and dreams. All the talk about joy and seizing pleasure and desiring freely seems as stilted and forced to our ears today as the Marxist class struggle diatribes of twenty years ago. You can talk all you want about spontaneity and pleasure, but once you’ve written the word “passion” a thousand times in redundant, repetitive demands for immediate change, it loses whatever power and beauty it had to start with.
\n\nSo what can we do about all this?
\n\n…chants the chorus of anguished anarchist robots. Well, exactly — and, at the same time, no, not at all! For heaven’s sake, if it’s passion you want in your life, the last thing you should do is make up more slogans about it. This little disclaimer is itself a pernicious little thing, just more talking about talking about life — put the paper down, stop conceptualizing, and get out there and do something real, something that escapes the claws of routine! No more expounding, rationalizing, glorifying…distrust any words or symbols that attempt to capture the things that make life matter — political pomposity above all! Words can only hold reality by accident, and then only for brief moments. Cornered by the inertia of our own rhetoric, we must finally take a stand against description — and for expression, but in action alone, the only place where it can be free and unburdened by the dead weight of ideology. That is to say — it is only sufficient to speak when, by speaking, you are acting. So unless you have hit upon a way to turn all this theory into actual life — throw this treatise aside!1
\n\n— Message courtesy of the CrimethInc. Action Faction
\n\nThe treatise, of course, goes on from this point, undaunted, forgetful of its own demands, as ideology always does and is. ↩
\nCrimethink can be reached from the subway station only by means of a daring double somersault. It is only a multiple orgasm away from the checkout counter of the grocery store, and a mere lobbed brick distant from the witness bench of the courtroom, but it is much harder to access from the closed playpens of your homes, schools, workplaces, and punk rock clubs—only a mystical revelation or masterless revolution will suffice. Crimethink riots rather than diets, so as to love itself body and soul.
\n\nCrimethink cannot be captured by the cameras of the photojournalists. Crimethink dies on its feet before it lives on its knees, but it’s more likely to be found on the run in between… just like you, perhaps.
\n\nCrimethink is the burning bush in the desert of industrial society, which can still be found between the thighs of the most mercilessly free and beautiful. Crimethink is revenge for that fucking flag they put on the moon.1
\n\nCrimethink doesn’t speak, it acts, and only speaks when speaking is acting. Crimethink stakes out its dominion where the body is the jagged edge of the world, stopping proudly short of the abyss of abstraction. Crimethink says to you: I put a spell on you, because you’re mine.
\n\nFor the market manages the managers, hierarchy bosses the bosses, capitalism owns the owners, but a crimethinker is truly a human being, free and wild.
\n\nOne must be enough of a crimethinker to adopt a crimethoughtful stance towards one’s own crimethink. Crimethink is not CrimethInc.—it is, rather, the spirit of playful destruction that saves CrimethInc. from itself.
\n\nCrimethInc. throws up contradictions around itself like fences, to protect itself from ideology, from stiffening—yet still sends out a call to revolt that will be heard in every corner of the Occupied Territories by this year’s end. 2
\n\nListen hard to silence, and you’ll hear thunder deep inside.
\n\nCrimethInc. is the hip gnosis of a new youth rebellion that goes beyond both youth and rebellion. CrimethInc. is a Non-Prophet Organization: it is full of love, but if it comes down to pledging allegiance, it will be nadaist rather than dadaist, or -ist at all, for that matter. CrimethInc. is beautiful: it’s ugly… in a world where every old pretty thing has been copyrighted by the greeting card companies, the calling card companies, and the credit card companies, it is a foray into the unknown, to seek new veins of joy before we all suffocate like yeast in our own excrement.
\n\nCrimethInc. is the cure for the cancers with which they propose to cure cancer. CrimethInc. sweeps through the streets with fire and banners, and steals through the classroom in xeroxes and whispers. CrimethInc. pilots the rudderless ships of the Movement movement, coded into the paths of those nomads who trade bondage for vagabondage; CrimethInc. smashes tourism and all other despicable formulas for running in place.
\n\nCrimethInc. is the Last Loosening: it is here by order of those out of order, so that nothing may ever be in order, or made to order, again. O ye rabble without a cause, CrimethInc. is the ticket out of here you’ve been waiting for—if you’re willing to cash it in yourself, that is. CrimethInc. is very much more what you do than what we do.
\n\nCrimethInc. is constantly in effect at lockdown face-offs on city blocks, in banks that are being robbed, on airplanes passing over the Brazilian desert at sunrise. It maintains office hours in squats under riot squad siege occupied by boys and girls who have escaped the suburbs to fall in love. Take the last night train from La Plata to Buenos Aires, and if the doors are open so you can sit on the steps of the train listening to the young passengers beating out a samba rhythm on the seats and singing along behind you as the Argentinean night speeds past, you might realize there is a letter or a novel you need to write—and at that moment, you’ll enter an outpost.
\n\nCrimethInc. is present wherever anything or anyone is on fire. CrimethInc.’s field of operations extends as far as there is crimethought, and beyond, into some places where it is impending or unnecessary:\nit speeds through Arctic waters in the wake of comets fallen and swallowed up by the cold,\ninto mythical Russian cities ringed by vast rivers at the end of winter—the crack of thawing ice bellowing into the night,\narriving at the magnetic poles3 where compasses spin,\nand moving on\nto the bottom of the ocean where the waterlogged\ncorpses of whales lie.
\n\nObviously, gentlemen, if you fear for the morality of your wives, the education of your children, the peace of mind of your investors, the submissiveness of your mistresses and house pets, the solidity of your armchairs and privatized prisons and factory farms, the manner in which your whorehouses are licensed and the security of the State… then you are right. But what can you do? You are rotten, and the fire has been lit.
\n\nBut as for you would-be revolutionaries, radicals wedded to a license without limits, girls and boys who love without leave, we urge you:
\n\nMore rigor in your recklessness!
\nMore ambition in your hedonism!4
When you’re young,
\nand it feels like you’re invincible,
\nit’s because you are.
\nFrom this moment forth,
\nno one shall ever die.
Crimethink is the first stirrings of a new world, smuggled across every border in the heads and hearts of a dissident nation of millions, thrown through plate glass windows on notes tied to bricks. It is everything that evades control—the stolen sick-day at the seashore, the shared meal free when the manager is away, the city street liberated for an hour during a demonstration… the proud look in her eyes when she walks into the principal’s office holding her girlfriend’s hand.
\n\nCrimethInc. is the underground railroad from this world to the next. Hop on.
\n\n…and you know why they put it there? Because there’s no oxygen, so we can’t burn it. ↩
\nDon’t believe us? Well, you’ve heard it, haven’t you? ↩
\nIt’s important to point out here that the magnetic poles are not actually fixed—they wander across the surface of the earth. That is, in fact, exactly the kind of voyage sanctioned and undertaken by CrimethInc. operatives: invisible, detectable only by effects registered thousands of miles away, yet of global implication… ↩
\n…and vice versa, vice being the key word. ↩
\nIf the two-party relationship system is the pinnacle achievement of a hundred thousand years of human loving, why is adultery so common that it’s practically counted on as material for bourgeois drawing room humor … and employment for a whole army of marriage counselors? If all any of us truly desire is our “one true love,” why can’t we keep our hands off everyone else?
\n\nIf you really want to know, you should cut straight to the source and ask the adulterer himself. Or maybe you don’t have to go that far—maybe you’ve had adulterous affairs or inclinations of your own, as the statistics suggest.
\n\nGrowing up in an environment dominated by capitalist economics teaches certain psychological lessons that are hard to unlearn: Anything of value is only available in limited supplies. Stake your claim now, before you’re left all alone with nothing. We learn to measure commitment and affection in terms of how much others are willing to sacrifice for us, unable to imagine that love and pleasure could be things that multiply when shared. In a healthy relationship, conversely, friends or lovers enable each other to be able to do and live and feel more. If you feel, in your gut if not your head, that monogamy means giving something up (your “freedom,” as they say), then the patterns of exploitation have penetrated even into your romantic life. Such cost-benefit calculations just don’t compute.
\n\nWe all know that Good Marriages Take Work. There it is again, work: the cornerstone of our alienation culture. Wage labor, relationship labor-are you ever not on the clock? Do you accept stifling limitations in return for affection and reassurance, the same way you trade time for money at your job? When you have to work at monogamy, you are back in the system of exchange: your intimacy economy is governed, just like the capitalist economy, by scarcity, threat, and programmed prohibitions, and protected ideologically by assurances that there are no viable alternatives… again, just like the capitalist economy. When relationships become work, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shop-floor discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands of the world chained to the machinery of responsible reproduction-then it should be no surprise that some individuals cannot help but revolt.
\n\nAdultery, in stark contrast to the Good Marriage, comes naturally, arriving without even being invited. Suddenly you feel transformed: awakened from the graveyard of once-vital passion that has been your relationship, to feel that excitement again. You shouldn’t be feeling any of this, damn it, and yet it’s the first time you’ve been carried away by pure, unforced happiness in who knows how long-and oh, the sweet optimism of something new, something that isn’t yet fucking predictable… it’s as if surprise, risk, gratification, fulfillment were again genuinely imaginable possibilities. Who, if they could feel what you’re feeling right now, could possibly demand you resist?
\n\nThe adulterer gets a crash course in just how occupied the space and time he lives in is. It immediately becomes clear just how little free time he has, time when he is not under observation—it turns out that the workday does not end when he leaves the workplace, but extends in both directions before and after it, consuming practically his whole life. The domination of his space, too, is revealed: how many places are there for him to spend time with his new lover, places he need not rent with money, respectable explanations, and the image of social responsibility? In what few moments of his life is he not held to guidelines imposed by outside forces, guidelines which plainly have nothing to do any longer with his emotional and physical needs?
\n\nThe adulterer becomes a virtuoso of petty theft, stealing the moments of his life one by one from their “rightful owners”: his spouse, his employer, family and social obligations. Just like the vandal, he resists the ownership of his world in the only way he knows how-by tiny and largely symbolic acts of daily sedition, out of which he carefully constructs an infinitely fragile alternate universe. There he hides, in spirit when he cannot in body, hoping not to be found out and called to account for what he has become: a traitor to the entire civilization that raised him.
\n\nSociety, personified by his unfortunate spouse, demands that the adulterer be honest and frank about all things, when it will only punish him for this. It attempts to secure his compliance through routine interrogations (“who was that on the phone, dear?”), surveillance (“do you think I didn’t notice how much time you spent talking to her?”), search and seizure (“and just what the hell am I supposed to think this is?”), and more serious intimidation tactics: the threat of total expulsion from the only home and community he is likely to know. The adulterer who would like to be able to tell the truth is forced to use the Misery Quotient to compute whether he can permit himself to: divide your current unhappiness by the harmful consequences of contesting it, multiply by your fear of the unknown, and then think twice about whether you really need to act after all. This is the same formula used by exploited migrant workers and children locked in private school hells, by battered wives and sexually harassed secretaries.
\n\nWhat our society is missing here is the wisdom to know that telling the truth is not just the responsibility of the teller. If you really want to know the truth, you must make it easy for people to tell it to you: you must be genuinely supportive and ready for whatever it may be, not just make self-righteous demands or play good cop/bad cop (“just tell me, I promise I’ll understand… you did WHAT?!”). That can only lead to evasive action, or at best to the subject of your cross-examination finding ways to lie to himself as well as you. Neither our society nor, consequently, its cuckolds and cuckoldesses, are ready for the revelation of truth that the adulterer has to offer; it is only safe in the sheltering ears of his illicit lover.
\n\nInevitably, despite the best intentions and most secretive schemes of the adulterer, people get hurt. More to the point: people already were hurting, only invisibly, in the enforced happily-ever-after of domestic silence, or else such drastic measures would not have been necessary in the first place to bring dead hearts to life. Would it be better that the routines and illusions of the marriage remain undisturbed, forever, so that everyone’s ennui could proceed on course to the embittered end? Could it be preferable for the unsuspecting partner to go on measuring her value as a lover and spouse according to the standard of a fidelity that boils down to self-denial, a standard which has already been violated in spirit of not in letter? Of course, instead of cheating you could always have gone to counseling, been “honest” with your spouse instead of yourself and turned away from the new landscapes you saw about to be born in the eyes of your potential lover, trying instead to achieve a passable imitation-substitute with your officially sanctioned partner-or resorted to medicating yourself into numb submission with television or Prozac, if that failed…
\n\nTo cut to the heart of the matter: is it ever really wrong simply to desire not to be emotionally dead? What vast measures of self-confidence and entitlement would it take the modern married man or woman to risk feeling alive, unarmed with the twin weapons of self-justification and self-abasement, the excuses and apologies and self-recriminations? The adulterer discovers that he is trapped in the life he had adopted under the encouragement and threats of the established romantic standard, and, despite his best attempts to restrain himself, has begun to plot an escape. Were he to reflect lucidly on his situation, his secret self might rebel and begin to ask the important questions: What kind of life does he really aspire to live? How much freedom and fulfillment does he deserve to feel? How has it come to be that he hurts others just by reaching for what he needs for himself?
\n\nThe fact is, people always get hurt whenever someone contests the long- entrenched order, even “innocent” people, and sometimes not the same innocent ones who were suffering at the hands of the old regime. That’s why anything less than complete prostration to the status quo is considered bad ethics. But once the itch to mutiny has struck, the alternative to it becomes unthinkable (consider how much thinking those who opt for it do)… so the adulterer takes it upon himself, often unwillingly but without being able to resist, to do things that hurt others, but no more than he absolutely has to. If he were prepared to embrace and proudly proclaim his outlawed desires (rather than ultimately rejecting them in a fit of apologetic revisionism: “I didn’t know what I was doing!”), and take responsibility for the further pain that would cause, he would finally stand in a position from which he could step out of the circle of hurt that is the scarcity economy of love. But he lacks the courage and analysis for this final act: that is why he is still a mere adulterer, one who makes half a revolution-and the worst half, at that.
\n\n“What about the children?” demand the shocked sentries of the bourgeoisie when they hear about yet another marriage endangered by an affair, terrified that their own strayings might come out next. Well, what about them? Do you think you can protect the next generation from the tragic tension between the complexity of desire and the simplicity of social prohibitions just by knuckling under yourself? If you smother your own aspirations for happiness, displacing them instead onto your expectations of future generations, you will end by smothering your children as well as yourself. Your children would be better off growing up in a world where people dare to be honest about what they want, whatever the consequences. Would you prefer that they learn to beat their own longings into flattened reminders of shame and remorse, as you do?
\n\nAnd it’s worth pointing out that nuclear-family monogamy, which these self-appointed judges would protect from the assault implied by adultery, is the very thing that replaced the broader, more fluid, extended family structures of the past. By all accounts, children were better cared for in those environments, and their parents had more freedom as well. Could it be that adultery is a blind, desperate lunge for the extended community that we once had, from the cage of the contractual relationship-or at least could act as a stepping stone to a new form of it?
\n\nUltimately, adultery is only possible because the questions it asks are left unanswered. Just like the shoplifter, the rioter, and the suicide, the adulterer makes only half a revolution: he violates the decrees of authoritarian convention and law, but in such a way that they remain in place, still dictating his actions-be those actions obedient or reactive. He would do better to expose what he is and wants to the whole world without guilt or remorse, and demand that it find a place for him and his desires, whatever they might be—then his own struggle could be the starting point for a revolution in human relationships from which everyone might benefit, not just a flash of isolated passion and insurgency to be stomped out before it even becomes aware of itself.
\n\nLet us shelter and defend him from the shaming of this society whenever he does step forward, so that he may do so-for he acts, as we do, out of a passion burning unquenchably for a new world.
\n\n“Hell yes I cheated!”
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/one-dimensional-man-in-the-three-dimensional-world", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/one-dimensional-man-in-the-three-dimensional-world", "title": "One Dimensional Man in the Three Dimensional World : Why abstractions, norms, and absolutes are an assault on humanity and existence itself.", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-10-23T08:30:40Z", "tags": [ "anarchism" ], "content_html": "“A woman can never be too rich or too thin.”
\n\nThe anorexic and the body builder are both pursuing ideals that recede before them. Once one starts to measure oneself against a one-dimensional standard, such as strength or slimness, too much is never enough: the goal is always ahead of you, no matter how far you go. These ideals cannot be reached in this world… but if you follow them far enough, they can lead you out of it, into the abyss which is their true domain — as Arnold Schwarznegger’s early heart problems, and the suicides of our rock stars and sex symbols, clearly attest.
\n\n\nIt’s true that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hollywood actresses, and others like them were practically factory farmed by this competition-obsessed society; but the rest of us are infected with these values too — think of us as free range versions of the same livestock. All our judgments, all our conceptualizations of the world refer to absolutes and ideals: Sara is pretty, but not as pretty as Diana, who is not as pretty as the girl on the magazine cover; Jane is smart, but not as smart as the boy who was accepted to Harvard, who clearly is not as intelligent as Albert Einstein was; serving free food is revolutionary, but not as revolutionary as setting a police station on fire. We are truly one-dimensional thinkers: unable to see each individual quality or action for what it is alone, only able to apprehend it in terms of how it compares to others…the implication being that there is some fundamental scale against which everything can be compared. This is one way of conceiving of the world, yes, but not the only way, and not the best way in most circumstances, either.
\n\nThis way of thinking makes everything into a competition, for those who don’t want to accept their inferiority; it makes us disregard the value and unique significance of every event and entity, in favor of finding a place for them in the system of calibration. The truth is that every human being really does have a value unlike any other, every radical action and approach is important to “the revolution” in irreplaceable ways (the important question is not which means to apply, but how to make them complement each other), and we desperately need ways to articulate this to ourselves. We need a language with which we can celebrate through description, not comparison. Without this, no matter how clearly we know we should value every little thing for its own sake, we are trapped by the assumptions of our own means of expression:
\n\n\n\n\n“I love you,” whispers the young girl.
\n
\n\n\n“Do you love me more than anyone else, more than anything?” demands the boy.
\n
\n\n\nI love you… differently, because of what you are. Not more, not less — there’s no comparison with love, for love cherishes what is. Love is not judgment, it is measureless, matchless…” she replies — but he has already turned away.
\n
Where did this obsession with one-dimensional standards come from? It originated with language itself: where one word serves to represent many different individual experiences, abstraction is already present. When you say “sunlight, “ it seems as if you are designating a thing that exists in the world somewhere, when actually you are referring to a multitude of experiences, all different but with some very basic similarities. What is most precious in experiences is not the lowest common denominators, but the once-in-a-lifetime particulars — but words leave those out entirely. What use is a word that only applies to one moment of one individual’s experience? That is not a currency that can retain value from one to another, and thus is useless for communication. Communication is a necessary part of being human; but it is crucial that each of us remembers that no word or concept could ever capture the infinite depth and complexity of a single instant of life.
\n\nThe birth of Western civilization, which is founded upon one dimensional thinking, occurred in ancient Greece, when Plato took the abstraction of language one step farther. Plato declared that our abstractions referred to some “higher” world of ideals, in which “courage” and “honor” and “justice” exist in their pure form; in doing so, he turned everything backwards, placing our broad generalizations before the experiences they are drawn from, and claiming that it is those vague generalizations that have truth. Thus he took the reference point of our concepts out of the world altogether, suggesting that our real experiences in it are unimportant, irrelevant. Paul, the founder of Christianity, extended this philosophy into the world of religion: the “ideal” existed in heaven, and the earth was the flawed, evil imitation of it.
\n\nIdeas and doctrines alone were not enough to bend human experience of the world to the system of absolutes, of course. Against the wisdom of bodily experience, in which the unique qualities of every entity and event are encountered up close, they were powerless. But slowly, it became possible to enforce the doctrine of the ideal upon the world of daily perception.
\n\nIt began with the end of the barter system, and the beginning of subdivided time. Suddenly, everything had a certain, set value, and the day was divided into measured segments. Time and worth cannot really be measured — the man who has truly lived knows that the stopwatch cannot capture the way time speeds up when he is in bed with his boyfriend and slows down when he is “on the clock” at work, he knows that the best and worst things in life cannot be “deserved” or earned, let alone appraised — but the pay-by-the-hour jobs of the exchange economy forced people to measure them anyway, and the habit sunk in.
\n\nSoon, everything was measured and calibrated: women’s clothing sizes, for example. Until the end of the nineteenth century, women’s clothing was made by hand, for individual women. A woman was seen as possessing distinct personal qualities, not as a “size 6” or “plus size.” It’s very telling that over the last few decades, the perfect ideal of the woman has been described numerically — “36-24-36” — and anything that varies from that perfect Platonic form is less than beautiful. Women now occupy a scale of value according to their measured weight. Some struggle with scales every morning, hoping the number will be lower so their value will be greater.
\n\nIt only remained for brand names to finish reducing the real complexity of the world to the empty simplicity of abstractions. Once upon a time, human beings had gardens; in those days, every fruit or vegetable was unique, and looked it. Now our food is scientifically engineered to total uniformity, and comes with a brand name identifying which absolute it represents: the supermarket’s generic brand is the Platonic form of the “inferior banana, “ the name-brand banana is the perfect incarnation of the banana as abstraction, and the archetypal banana of the rich, eco-elitist consumers comes marked “organic.”
\n\nThose who would resist these attempts to bend the real world to the flatness of the conceptual world often fall into the same practices. The world of political theory is rife with abstraction and one dimensional thinking. Many make it through childhood with their ability to appreciate the irreplaceable details of life intact, only to fall to the maladies of generalizing and idealizing when they begin to read theory and attempt to form an “analysis” of life: their impressions and emotions are converted into an ideology, and where their struggles and goals once referred to real people they now see those people only as playing pieces in a war of symbols.
\n\nUltimately, the pursuit of “ideals” which cannot exist in this world constitutes a rejection of this world, the real world, and thus of life itself — as demonstrated by the sad fate of the body builders and anorexics who take it to its logical extreme, the grave. We are so used to denigrating this world, saying it is a fucked up, imperfect place — and so it appears, compared with our “perfect” standards and ideals, which seem so perfect only because they cannot exist. A truly radical resolution would be to embrace existence just as it is, as the only thing that matters, to proclaim that this world itself is heaven, made for our total enjoyment and fulfillment… and then, to ask: If that’s the case, how do we act accordingly? What have we been doing wrong all this time?
\n\nIn doing so, we would finally have to accept and embrace ourselves exactly as we are, in all our diversity and variety, and free ourselves from the shadow of the false heaven of Plato and the advertising agents, where “real” beauty supposedly resides. Liberated entirely from standards, from the lingering ghost of Christian judgment and condemnation, we could see that what we are must itself constitute the measure and meaning of beauty, of dignity and magnificence, if such concepts are to exist at all.
\n\n\n\n\nI took off my paint-splattered jacket and my shirt, and gazed at myself in the mirror of the airplane restroom. What I saw was something I had only glimpsed before in the eyes of my most adoring lovers: the curves and textures of my skin, the scars and tattoos and lines cut into it painted a picture together, telling a life of wild adventure and undreamable extremes, a story more poignant and thrilling than any other. I was beautiful — beauty itself was incarnated in me, as the vessel of a world of struggles and longings and triumphs bigger than anything that could fit in any book. It was a moment of blinding brilliance, but I rested comfortably in it, confident, as if I had known through all the squalor and desperation that I was simply being primed for this. And, for once, I felt that I could live a hero’s life as well as die a warrior’s death.
\n
\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/there-is-a-secret-world-concealed-within-this-one", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/there-is-a-secret-world-concealed-within-this-one", "title": "There Is a Secret World Concealed Within This One : The Lives We Lead and the Lives We Wish We Led", "summary": "This world, the so-called \"real world,\" is just a front...and all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2000/09/11/header.jpg", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-10-23T18:12:02Z", "tags": [ "anarchism" ], "content_html": "It is only now that I can recognize your beauty and deny no part of my own.
\n
This world, the so-called “real world,” is just a front. Pull back the curtain and you’ll see the libraries are all filled with runaways writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees and sympathizers, all the receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to show how alive they still are… and all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us.
\n\nYou can taste it in the shock and roar of a first, unexpected kiss, or in the blood in your mouth that instant after an accident when you realize you’re still alive. It blows in the wind you feel on the rooftops of a really reckless night of adventure. You hear it in the magic of your favorite songs, how they lift and transport you in ways that no science or psychology could ever account for. It might be you’ve seen evidence of it scratched into bathroom walls in a code without a key, or you’ve been able to make out a pale reflection of it in the movies they make to keep us entertained. It’s in between the words when we speak of our desires and aspirations, still lurking somewhere beneath the limitations of being “practical” and “realistic.”
\n\nWhen poets and radicals stay up until sunrise, wracking their brains for the perfect sequence of words or deeds to fill hearts (or cities) with fire, they’re trying to find a hidden entrance to it. When children escape out the window to go wandering late at night, or freedom fighters search for a weakness in government fortifications, they’re trying to sneak into it — for they know better than us where the doors are hidden. When teenagers vandalize a billboard to provoke all-night chases with the police, or anarchists interrupt an orderly demonstration to smash the windows of a corporate chain store, they’re trying to storm its gates.
\n\nWhen you’re making love and you discover a new sensation or region of your lover’s body, and the two of you feel like explorers discovering a new part of the world on a par with a desert oasis or the coast of an unknown continent, as if you are the first ones to reach the north pole or the moon, you are charting its frontiers.
\n\nIt’s not a safer place than this one — on the contrary, it is the sensation of danger there that brings us back to life: the feeling that for once, for one moment that seems to eclipse the past and future, there is something real at stake.
\n\nMaybe you stumbled into it by accident, once, amazed at what you found. The old world splintered behind and inside you, and no physician or metaphysician could put it back together again. Everything before became trivial, irrelevant, ridiculous as the horizons suddenly telescoped out around you and undreamt-of new paths offered themselves. And perhaps you swore that you would never return, that you would live out the rest of your life electrified by that urgency, in the thrill of discovery and transformation — but return you did.
\n\nCommon sense dictates that this world can only be experienced temporarily, that it is just the shock of transition, and no more; but the myths we share around our fires tell a different story: we hear of women and men who stayed there for weeks, years, who never returned, who lived and died there as heroes. We know, because we feel it in that atavistic chamber of our hearts that holds the memory of freedom from a time before time, that this secret world is near, waiting for us. You can see it in the flash in our eyes, in the abandon of our dances and love affairs, in the protest or party that gets out of hand.
\n\nYou’re not the only one trying to find it. We’re out here, too… some of us are even waiting there for you. And you should know that anything you’ve ever done or considered doing to get there is not crazy, but beautiful, noble, necessary.
\n\nRevolution is simply the idea we could enter that secret world and never return; or, better, that we could burn away this one, to reveal the one beneath entirely.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/beyond-democracy", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/beyond-democracy", "title": "Beyond Democracy?", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:31Z", "tags": [ "anarchism", "democracy" ], "content_html": "text courtesy of special agent Rolf Nadir
\n\nNowadays, “democracy” rules the world. Communism has fallen, elections are happening more and more in those poor underdeveloped third world nations you see on television, and world leaders are meeting to plan the “global community” that we hear so much about. So why isn’t everybody happy, finally? For that matter—why do less than half of the eligible voters in the United States, the world’s flagship democracy, even bother to vote at all?
\n\nCould it be that “democracy,” long the catch-word of every revolution and resistance, is simply not democratic enough? What could be more democratic?
\n\nNo they can’t. Being president means holding a hierarchical position of power, just like being a billionaire: for every one president, there have to be millions of people with less power. And just as it is for billionaires, it is for presidents: it’s not any coincidence that the two types tend to rub shoulders, since they both come from a privileged world off limits to the rest of us. Our economy isn’t democratic, either, you know: resources are distributed in absurdly unequal proportions, and you certainly do have to start with resources to become President, or even to get your hands on more resources.
\n\nEven if it was true that anyone could grow up to be President, that wouldn’t help the millions of us who inevitably don’t, who must still live in the shadow of that power. This is an intrinsic structural difficulty in representative democracy, and it occurs on the local level as much as at the top. For example: the town council, consisting of professional politicians, can meet, discuss municipal affairs, and pass ordinances all day, without consulting the citizens of the town, who have to be at work; when one of those ordinances inconveniences or angers some of the citizens, they have to go to great lengths to use their free time to contest it, and then they’re gone again the next time the town council meets. The citizens can elect a different town council from the available pool of politicians and would-be politicians, but the interests and powers of the class of politicians as a whole will still be in conflict with their own—and anyway, party loyalties and similar superstitions usually prevent them from taking even this step.
\n\nIf there was no President, our “democracy” would still be less than democratic. Corruption, privilege, and hierarchy aside, our system purports to operate by majority rule, with the rights of the minorities protected by a system of checks and balances—and this method of government has inherent flaws of its own.
\n\nIf you ever happened to end up in a vastly outnumbered minority group, and the majority voted that you must give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe in recognizing the authority of a group simply because they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us—and those it does threaten are already silenced before we can hear their misgivings.
\n\nNo “average citizen” considers himself threatened by majority rule, because each one thinks of himself as having the power and righteous “moral authority” of the majority: if not in fact (by being so-called “normal” or “moderate”), then in theory, because his ideas are “right” (that is, he believes that everyone would be convinced of the truth of his arguments, if only they would listen sincerely). Majority-rule democracy has always rested on the conviction that if all the facts were clear, everyone could be made to see that there is only one right course of action—without this belief, it amounts to nothing more than the dictatorship of the herd. But such is not always the case—even if “the facts” could be made equally clear to everyone, which is obviously impossible, some things simply can’t be agreed upon, for there is more than one truth. We need a democracy that takes these situations into account, in which we are free from the mob rule of the majority as well as the ascendancy of the privileged class…
\n\n…and the protection afforded by the “checks and balances” of our legal institution is not sufficient to establish it. The “rule of just and equal law,” as fetishized today by those whose interests it protects (the stockbrokers and landlords, for example), does not protect anyone from chaos or injustice; it simply creates another arena of specialization, in which the power of our communities is ceded to the jurisdiction of expensive lawyers and pompous judges. The rights of the minorities are the very last thing to be protected by these checks and balances, since power is already reserved for those with the privilege to seize it, and then for the lumpen majority after them. Under these conditions, a minority group is only able to use the courts to obtain its rights when it is able to bring sufficient force upon them in the form of financial clout, guileful rhetoric, etc.
\n\nThere is no way to establish justice in a society through the mere drawing up and enforcement of laws: such laws can only institutionalize what is already the rule in that society. Common sense and compassion are always preferable to adherence to a strict and antiquated table of law, anyway, and where the law is the private province of a curator elite, these inevitably end up in conflict; what we really need is a social system which fosters such qualities in its members, and rewards them in practice. To create such a thing, we must leave representative “democracy” for fully participatory democracy.
\n\nFreedom is not a condition—it is something closer to a sensation. It’s not a concept to pledge allegiance to, a cause to serve, or a standard to march under; it is an experience you must live every day, or else it will escape you. It is not freedom in action when the flags are flying and the bombs are dropping to “make the world safe for democracy,” no matter what color the flags are (even black!); freedom cannot be caught and held in any state system or philosophical doctrine, and it certainly cannot be enforced or “given” to others—the most you can hope is to free others from forces preventing them from finding it themselves. It appears in fragile moments: in the make-believe of young children, the cooperation of friends on a camping trip, the workers who refuse to follow the union’s orders and instead organize their own strike without leaders. If we are to be real freedom fighters, we must begin by pledging ourselves to chase and cherish these moments and seek to expand them, rather than getting caught up in serving some party or ideology.
\n\nReal freedom cannot be held on a voting ballot. Freedom doesn’t mean simply being able to choose between options—it means actively participating in shaping the options in the first place, creating and re-creating the environments in which options exist. Without this, we have nothing, for given the same options in the same situations over and over, we’ll always make the same pre-determined decisions. If the context is out of our hands, so is the choice itself. And when it comes to taking power over the circumstances of our lives, no one can “represent” us—it’s something we have to do ourselves.
\n\nIf the freedom so many generations have fought and died for is best exemplified by a man in a voting booth, who checks a box on the ballot before returning to work in an environment no more under his control than it was an hour before, then the heritage our emancipating forefathers and suffragette grandmothers have left us is nothing but a sham substitute for the true liberty they lusted after.
\n\nFor a better illustration of real freedom in action, look at the musician in the act of improvising with her companions: in joyous, seemingly effortless cooperation, they actively create the sonic and emotional environment in which they exist, participating thus in the transformation of the world which in turn transforms them. Take this model and extend it to every one of our interactions with each other, and you would have something qualitatively different from our present system: a harmony in human relationships and activity, a real democracy. To get there, we have to dispense with voting as the archetypal expression of freedom and participation.
\n\nNo one can represent your power and interests for you—you can only have power by acting, and you can only know what your interests are by being involved. Politicians have made careers out of claiming to represent others, as if freedom and political power could be held by proxy. Now, inevitably, they have become a priest caste that answers only to itself—as politician classes have always been, and will always be.
\n\nVoting is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of that priest caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish control of our communities to these politicians in the same way that we leave technology to scientists, health to doctors, living environments to city planners and private real estate developers; we end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities.
\n\nThe fact is we don’t have to simply choose between presidential candidates, soft drink brands, competing activist organizations, television shows, news magazines, political ideologies. We can make our own decisions as individuals and communities, we can make our own delicious beverages and action coalitions and magazines and entertainment, we can create our own individual approaches to life that leave our unique perspectives intact. Here’s how.
\n\nWhat are the democratic alternatives to democracy?
\n\nRadically participatory democracy, also known as consensus democracy, is already well-known and practiced across the globe, from indigenous communities in Latin America to postmodern political action cells (“affinity groups”) in the United States and organic farming cooperatives in Australia. In contrast to representative democracy, consensus democracy is direct democracy: the participants get to share in the decision-making process on a daily basis, and through decentralization of knowledge and authority they are able to exercise real control over their daily lives. Unlike majority-rule democracy, consensus democracy values the needs and concerns of each individual equally; if one person is unhappy with a resolution, then it is everyone’s responsibility to find a new solution that is acceptable to all. Consensus democracy does not demand that any person accept the power of others over her life, though it does require that everybody be willing to consider the needs of everyone else; thus what it loses in efficiency, it gains tenfold in both freedom and goodwill. Consensus democracy does not ask that people follow a leader or standardize themselves under some common cause; rather, its aim is to integrate all into a working whole while allowing each to retain her own goals and ways of doing things.
\n\nIn order for direct democracy to be meaningful, people must have control over their immediate surroundings and the basic matters of their lives. Autonomy is simply the idea that no one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live, that no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential—or for that matter how the environment you live in is constructed. It is not to be confused with so-called “independence”— in actuality, no one is independent, since our lives all depend on each other (“Western man fills his closet with groceries, and call himself self-sufficient”)—that’s just an individualist myth that keeps us collectively at odds. The glamorization of “self-sufficiency” in the present cutthroat-competitive society really constitutes an attack on those who will not exploit others to “take care of themselves,” and thus functions as an obstacle to community building1. In contrast to this Western mirage, autonomy is a free interdependence between those with whom you share a consensus, with whom you act freely (i.e. without waiting for permission or instructions from anyone else) in order to cooperatively establish self-management of the whole of life.
\n\nAutonomy is the antithesis of bureaucracy. For autonomy to be possible, every aspect of the community from technology to history must be organized in such a way that it is accessible to everyone; and for it to work, everyone must make use of this access.
\n\nAutonomous groups can be formed without necessarily establishing a clear agenda, so long as they offer the members ways to benefit from each others’ participation: the CrimethInc. Collective, the Dada movement, and knitting circles of the past and present all offer evidence of this. Such groups can even contain contradictions, just as each of us does individually, and still serve their purpose. The days of marching under a single flag are over.
\n\nAutonomous groups have a stake in defending themselves against the encroachments of others who do not believe in the rights of individuals to govern themselves, and expanding the territory of autonomy and consensus by doing everything in their power to both destroy the structures of coercive societies (including those of representative “democracy”) and replace them with more radically democratic structures. For example, it’s not enough just to block or destroy highways that are creating noise and air pollution; you also have to provide free transportation by means such as communal bicycles and community repair centers, if you want to help others replace the competitive/authoritarian relations of car dependency with cooperative/autonomous means of transportation.
\n\nAutonomy means direct action, not waiting for requests to pass through the “established channels” only to bog down in paperwork and endless negotiations. Establish your own channels. If you want hungry people to eat, don’t just give money to some high-handed charity bureaucracy; find out where food is going to waste, collect it, and feed them. If you want affordable housing, don’t try to get the town council to pass a bill—that will take years, while people sleep outside every night; take over abandoned buildings and share them, and organize groups to defend them when the thugs of the absentee landlords show up. If you want corporations to have less power, don’t petition the politicians they bought to put limits on their own masters; find ways to work with others to simply take the power from them: don’t buy their products, don’t work for them, sabotage their billboards and buildings, prevent their meetings from taking place and their merchandise from being delivered. They use similar tactics to exert their power over you; it only looks valid because they bought the laws and social customs, too.
\n\nDon’t wait for permission or organization from some outside authority, don’t beg some higher power to organize your life for you. Act.
\n\nIndependent autonomous groups can work together in federations without any particular group holding authority. Such a social structure sounds utopian, but it can actually be quite practical and efficient. International mail and railroad travel both currently work on this system, to name two examples: while the individual postal and transportation systems are internally hierarchical, they all cooperate together to get mail or rail passengers from one nation to another, without an ultimate authority being necessary at any point in the process. Similarly, individuals who cannot agree on enough issues to be able to work together within one collective should still be able to see the importance of being able to coexist with other groups. For such a thing to work in the long run, of course, we need to instill values of cooperation, consideration, and tolerance in the coming generations—but that is exactly what we are proposing.
\n\nIn a social arrangement which is truly in the best interest of each participating individual, exclusion from the community should be threat enough to discourage violent or destructive behavior. It is certainly a more humanitarian approach than authoritarian means such as prisons and executions, which corrupt the judges as much as they embitter the criminals. Those who refuse to integrate themselves into any community and reject the assistance and generosity of others may find themselves banished from human interaction; but that is still better than exile in the mental ward, or on death row, two of the options which await such men today. Violence should only be used by communities in defense, not with the smug entitlement of post-divine judgment with which it is applied by our present injustice system. This applies as well to the interactions of autonomous/consensus groups with the “outside world” which does not yet abide by cooperative or tolerant values.
\n\nSerious disagreements within communities can be solved in many cases by reorganizing or dividing the groups. Often individuals who can’t get along in one social configuration will have much more success cooperating in another setting, or as members of parallel communities. If consensus cannot be met within a group, that group should split into smaller groups who can achieve it internally—such a thing may be inconvenient and frustrating, but it is better than group decisions ultimately being made by force by those who have the most power and ruthlessness at their disposal. All the independent communities will still have it in their best interest to coexist peacefully, and must somehow negotiate ways to achieve this…
\n\n…that’s the most difficult part, of course. But we’re not talking about just another social system here, we’re talking about a total revolution of human relations—for that is what it will take to solve the problems our species faces today. Let’s not kid ourselves—until we can achieve this, the violence and strife inherent in non-consensus relations will continue, and no law or system will be able to protect us. The best reason to transcend representative democracy is simply that in consensus democracy there are no fake solutions, no easy ways of suppressing conflict without resolving it, and thus those who participate in it must learn to coexist without coercion and submission and all those other nasty habits we are so tired of in our present society.
\n\nThe first precious grains of this new world can be found in your friendships and love affairs, when they are free from power relations and cooperation occurs naturally. Take this model, and expand it to the whole of society— that is the world “beyond democracy” for which the heart cries out today.
\n\nIt seems a challenging prospect to get there from here… but the wonderful thing about consensus/autonomy is that you don’t have to wait for the government to vote for them to apply these concepts—you can practice them right now with the people around you, and benefit immediately. Once put into practice, the virtues of this way of living will be clear to others; they need no pointing out once one is experiencing them firsthand. Form your own autonomous group, answering to no power but your own, and create an environment in which you chase down freedom and fulfillment for yourselves, if your representatives will not do it for you—since they cannot do it “for” you. From such seeds, the real democracy of the future will grow.
\n\nNext time we state our demands and grievances and they refuse to acknowledge them, saying “just be thankful you live in a democracy,” we’ll be ready to respond: That’s not enough! …and know clearly what we want instead, from our own experience.
\n\nThe politicians’ myth of “welfare mothers” snatching the hardworking citizen’s rightful earnings from him, for example, divides individuals who might otherwise unite to form cooperative groups with no use for those politicians. ↩
\nToday it is impossible to avoid hypocrisy in any struggle against the status quo.
\n\nThe political and economic structures are constructed so that it is practically impossible to avoid being implicated in their workings. Today, whatever a man thinks of the employment opportunities available to him or of our economic system itself, he has almost no choice except to work if he does not want to starve to death or die of an illness for which he could not afford health care. If he does not believe in material property, he still has no choice but to buy all the food and clothing he needs and to buy or rent living space (that is, if he is not ready to live at odds with our very effective legal system)—for there is no free land left that has not been claimed by someone, almost no food or other resources anywhere that are not someone’s “property.” If a woman wants to distribute material criticizing the capitalist system of production and consumption, she still has no way to produce and distribute this material without paying to produce it, and selling it to consumers—or at least selling advertising, which encourages people to be consumers—to finance production. If a woman does not want to finance the brutal torture and slaughter of animals in the name of capitalism, she can stop eating meat and dairy products, purchasing health products which are tested on animals, and wearing leather and fur; but there are still animal products in the films in her camera and the movies she watches, in the vinyl records she listens to, and in countless other products which she will be hard-pressed to do without in modern society. Besides, the companies she buys her vegetables from are most likely connected to the companies who make meat and dairy products, so her money goes to the same ends; and these vegetables themselves were probably picked by migrant workers or other oppressed labor.
\n\nAnd at the same time, modern Western culture is so deeply ingrained in our minds, indoctrinated with it as we are from an early age, that it is practically impossible to avoid being influenced in our actions by the very assumptions and values which we are struggling against. After a lifetime of being taught to place a financial value on the hours of our lives, it is hard to stop feeling like one must be rewarded materially for an activity for it to be worthwhile. After a lifetime of being taught to respect hierarchies of authority, it is very difficult to suddenly interact with all human beings as equals. After a lifetime of being taught to associate happiness with passive spectatorship, it is hard to enjoy building furniture more than watching television. And of course there are ten thousand more subtle ways in which these values and assumptions manifest themselves in our thoughts and our actions.
\n\nThis does not mean that resistance is futile. Indeed, if our choices today are so limited that we cannot act without replicating the conditions from which we were trying to escape, resistance is all the more crucial. This does mean that “innocence” is a myth, a counter-revolutionary concept which we must leave behind us with the rest of post-Christian thinking. The traditional Christian demand upon human beings is that they be innocent, that they keep their hands clean of any “sin.” At the same time, “sin” is so difficult for the Christian to avoid (as counter-revolutionary activity is today, for us) that this demand leads to feelings of guilt and failure in the believer, and ultimately to despair, when he realizes that it is impossible for him to be “innocent” and “pure.” In fact, by forbidding “sin,” Christian doctrine makes it all the more tempting and intriguing for the believer; for whether the mind does or not, the human heart recognizes no authority and will always seek out that which is not permitted to it.
\n\nWe must not make the same mistakes as Christianity. The demand that people be free from hypocrisy, free from any implication in the system, will result in the same effects as the Christian demand that people be free from sin: it will create frustration and despair in those who would seek change, and at the same time it will make hypocrisy all the more tempting. Rather than seek to have hands that are clean of implication in the systems we struggle against, we should aim to make the inevitable negative effects of our lives worthwhile by offering enough positive activity to more than balance the scales. This approach to the problem will save us from being immobilized by fear of hypocrisy or shame about our “guilt.”
\n\nBesides, demands that we avoid hypocrisy deny the complexity of the human soul. The human heart is not simple; every human being has a variety of desires which pull him or her in different directions. To ask that a human being only pursue some of those desires and always ignore others is to ask that he or she remain permanently unfulfilled… and curious. This is typical of the kind of dogmatic, ideological thinking which has afflicted us for centuries: it insists that the individual must be loyal to one set of rules and only one, rather than doing what is appropriate for his or her needs in a particular situation.
\n\nIt might well be true that the whole self can only be expressed in hypocrisy. Certainly a person needs to formulate a general set of guidelines regarding the decisions he will make, but to break occasionally from these guidelines will prevent stagnation and offer an opportunity to consider whether any of the guidelines need reevaluation. A person who is not afraid to be hypocritical from time to time is in a great deal less danger of selling out permanently one day, because he or she is able to taste the “forbidden fruit” without feeling forced to make a permanent choice. This person will be immune to the shame and eventual despair that will afflict the person who strives for perfect “innocence.”
\n\nSo be proud of yourself as you are, don’t try to get the inconsistencies in your soul to match up in a false and forced manner or it will only come back to haunt you. Rather than holding inflexibly to a set system, let us dare to reject the idea that we must be faithful to any particular doctrine in our efforts to create a better life for ourselves. Let us not claim to be innocent, let us not claim to be pure or right! But let us proclaim proudly that we are hypocrites, that we will stop at nothing, not even hypocrisy, in our struggle to take control of our lives. In this age when it is impossible to avoid being a part of the system we strive against, only blatant hypocrisy is truly subversive—for it alone speaks the truth about our hearts, and it alone can show just how difficult it is to avoid living the modern life which has been prepared for us. And that alone is good reason to fight.
\n\nThe CrimethInc. collective is a perfect example of the difficulties a subversive organization will encounter in seeking to avoid hypocrisy, and of the liberating possibilities that embracing hypocrisy can create.
\n\nHarbinger exists to criticize such modern phenomena as advertising, which is fundamentally an effort on the part of modern businesses to influence people to purchase their products whether or not this is in their best interest. And yet CrimethInc. must sell advertising in the pages of Harbinger in order to finance its publication. Harbinger exists to warn against those who would sell ideologies that prescribe certain kinds of thinking and acting, whether or not these manners of thinking and acting are in the best interest of human beings. And yet, in order to compete with these forces, CrimethInc. too must sell an ideology of sorts: an ideology of “thinking for yourself,” but an ideology all the same. Certainly we may claim that our products, our ideologies, really are in the best interest of human beings, but isn’t that what every corporation and political party claims?
\n\nThus it is impossible for us in CrimethInc. to pursue the goals we seek without simultaneously betraying those goals. Just as we strive to fight against the system, we replicate it. Selling “revolutionary” ideas is still selling ideas, and as long as buying and selling are taking place, nothing truly revolutionary is happening. Indeed the fact that “revolutionary” ideas are being used to perpetuate the status quo means that whatever resistance there might be is neutralized and assimilated from the start.
\n\nOn the other hand, activity is better than inactivity, and perhaps the efforts that we make here will still be able to have positive effects despite being necessarily compromised. And perhaps our willingness to point out where we are compromised will prevent those compromises from rendering our efforts useless. It might be possible to incite genuine to change in the lives of human beings, despite the implication inherent in any kind of activity today; and even if it is not, it must still be worth a try.
\n\nOf course, perhaps this sort of idealism will only serve to trick us, with the best of all possible intentions, into betraying the very ideals which we seek to promote. Perhaps we are sealing our own fate by transforming whatever genuine desires for change people may have into ultimately ineffectual activities such as purchasing “revolutionary products” and discussing the ideas of others rather than creating their own. Perhaps the advertising we sell in Harbinger will only lead people to purchase the products advertised (and thus be forced to remain trapped in the wage slavery system), rather than just harmlessly raising the funds necessary to publish our demand for the end of this system. Or maybe this hypocrisy is merely a cover that allows us to go about our business of revolution without appearing to be much of a threat, by making us appear to be another innocuous, pseudo-revolutionary group; perhaps we only appear to be hopelessly compromised so that the forces that have a stake in the status quo will not recognize the threat that we do pose until it is too late. And it might even be that CrimethInc. is actually orchestrated by those very forces, to lead those who do desire change astray into expending their efforts uselessly! Even then, it might have unforeseen effects… Who can tell for sure?
\n\nThe thing is to act, to act joyously, not to accept that we are helpless to effect change, even if we really are. For if we seek to resist the roles and lives set forward for us, if we fight a spirited fight against the forces that would keep us in despair, if we dare to act on our own and to act passionately and joyously, then that is in itself the revolution we seek.
\n\nWe have all been taught from our youth that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Whenever a child has an exciting idea, an older person is quick to point out either that this idea has been tried before and didn’t work, or that someone else not only has already had the idea but also has developed and expounded upon it to greater lengths than the child ever could. “Learn and choose from the ideas and beliefs already in circulation, rather than seeking to develop and arrange your own,” seems to be the message, and this message is sent clearly by the methods of “instruction” used in both public and private schools throughout the West.
\n\nDespite this common attitude, or perhaps because of it, we are very possessive of our ideas. The concept of “intellectual property” is ingrained in the collective psychosis much deeper than the concept of material property. Plenty of thinkers have appeared who have asserted that “property is theft” in regard to real estate and other physical capital, but few have dared to make similar statements about their own ideas. Even the most notoriously “radical” thinkers have still proudly claimed their ideas as, first and foremost, their ideas.
\n\nConsequently, little distinction is made between the thinkers and their thoughts. Students of philosophy will study the philosophy of Descartes, students of economics will study Marx-ism, students of art will study the paintings of Dali. At worst, the cult of personality that develops around famous thinkers prevents any useful consideration of their ideas or artwork; hero-worshipping partisans will swear allegiance to a thinker and all his thoughts, while others who have some justified or unjustified objection to the conceiver of the ideas will generally have a difficult time not being prejudiced against the ideas themselves. At best, this emphasis upon the “author-owner” in the consideration of propositions or artwork is merely irrelevant to the worth of the actual propositions or artwork, even if the stories about the individual in question are interesting and can encourage creative thinking by themselves.
\n\nThe very assumptions behind the concept of “intellectual property” require more attention than we have given them. The factors that affect the words and deeds of an individual are many and varied, not the least of them being her social-cultural climate and the input of other individuals. To say that any idea has its sole origins in the being of one individual man or woman is to grossly oversimplify. But we are so accustomed to claiming items and objects for ourselves, and to being forced to accept similar claims from others, in the cutthroat competition to acquire and dominate (before we are acquired and dominated) that is life in a market economy, that it seems natural to do the same with ideas. Certainly there must be other ways of thinking about the origins and ownership of ideas that warrant consideration… for our present approach does more than merely distract from the ideas.
\n\nOur tradition of recognizing “intellectual property rights” is dangerous in that it results in the deification of the publicly recognized “thinker” and “artist” at the expense of everyone else. When ideas are always associated with proper names (and always the same proper names, in point of fact), this suggests that thinking and creating are special skills that belong to a select few individuals. For example, the glorification of the “artist” in our culture, which includes the stereotyping of artists as eccentric “visionaries” who exist at the edge (the “avant garde”) of society, encourages people to believe that artists are significantly and fundamentally different from other human beings. Actually, anyone can be an artist, and everyone is, to some extent; being able to act creatively is a crucial element of human happiness. But when we are led to believe that being creative and thinking critically are talents which only a few individuals possess, those of us who are not fortunate enough to be christened “artists” or “philosophers” by our communities will not make much effort to develop these abilities. Consequently we will be dependent upon others for many of our ideas, and will have to be content as spectators of the creative work of others—and we will feel alienated and unsatisfied.
\n\nAnother incidental drawback of our association of ideas with specific individuals is that it promotes the acceptance of these ideas in their original form. The students who learn the philosophy of Descartes are encouraged to learn it in its orthodox form, rather than learning the parts which they find relevant to their own lives and interests and combining these parts with ideas from other sources. Out of deference to the original thinker, deified as he is in our tradition, his texts and theories are to be preserved as-is, without ever being put into new forms or contexts which might reveal new insights. Mummified as they are, many theories become completely irrelevant to modern existence, when they could have been given a new lease on life by being treated with a little less reverence.
\n\nSo we can see that our acceptance of the tradition of “intellectual property” has negative effects upon our endeavors to think critically and learn from our artistic and philosophical heritage. What can we do to address this problem? One of the possible solutions is plagiarism.
\n\nPlagiarism is an especially effective method of appropriating and reorganizing ideas, and as such it can be a useful tool for a young man or woman looking to encourage new and exciting thinking in others. And it is a method that is revolutionary in that it does not recognize “intellectual property” rights but rather strikes out against them and all of the negative effects that recognizing them can have.
\n\nPlagiarism focuses attention on content and away from incidental issues, by making the genuine origins of the material impossible to ascertain. Besides, as suggested above, it could be argued that the genuine origins of the contents of most inspirations and propositions are impossible to determine anyway. By signing a new name, or no name at all, to a text, the plagiarizer puts the material in an entirely new context, and this may generate new perspectives and new thinking about the subject that have not appeared before. Plagiarism also makes it possible to combine the best or most relevant parts of a number of texts, thus creating a new text with many of the virtues of the older ones—and some new virtues, as well, since the combination of material from different sources is bound to result in unforeseeable effects and might well result in the unlocking of hidden meanings or possibilities that have been dormant in the texts for years. Finally, above all, plagiarism is the reappropriation of ideas: when an individual plagiarizes a text which those who believe in intellectual property would have held “sacred,” she denies that there is a difference in rank between herself and the thinker she takes from. She takes the thinker’s ideas for herself, to express them as she sees fit, rather than treating the thinker as an authority whose work she is duty-bound to preserve as he intended. She denies, in fact, that there is a fundamental difference between the thinker and the rest of humanity, by appropriating the thinker’s material as the property of humanity.
\n\nAfter all, a good idea should be available to everyone—should belong to everyone—if it really is a good idea. In a society organized with human happiness as the objective, copyright infringement laws and similar restrictions would not hinder the distribution and recombination of ideas. These impediments only make it more difficult for individuals who are looking for challenging and inspiring material to come upon it and share it with others.
\n\nSo, if there truly is “nothing new under the sun,” take them at their word, and act accordingly. Take what seems relevant to your life and your needs from the theories and doctrines prepared by those who came before you. Don’t be afraid to reproduce word for word those texts which seem perfect to you, so you can share them with others who might also benefit from them. And at the same time, don’t be afraid to plunder ideas from different sources and rearrange them in ways that you find more useful and exciting, more relevant to your own needs and experiences. Seek to create a personally constructed body of critical and creative thought, with elements gathered from as many sources as possible, rather than choosing from one of the prefabricated ideologies that are offered to you. After all, do we have ideas, or do they have us?
\n\n" } ] }