Tuesday, 2 November 2010
From the ashes of the old...
...rise the blogs of the new.
Anarchyland has written the first words of a new blog. He doesn't have time to run it himself at the moment, so he has enlisted some reprobates and maniacs to look after it. One of them is me.
I still have the keys to Old Holborn's place although I haven't been over to scrawl on his walls for a while. I must remedy that at once. My long rambles don't exactly fit his style so I'll keep this short.
That's the scary part of blogs for the control freaks of the Righteous. Knock one down and another stands up. There is no leader, no management, no structure and no central control. You can't break the chain of command because there isn't one. You can't target the leadership because there is none. Taking down one blog is meaningless. Another pops up in its place. Nobody orders that to happen, it just does. We'll work together on one specific task then we'll dissipate. We are self-sufficient but we form teams when we need to. We do not live rule-free or amoral lives, but we do not accept ridiculous rules nor do we accept unnecessary rules imposed by the threat of force.
There are those who say 'anarchy means violence and everyone out for themselves'. They say this because they want us to fear anarchy. Their biggest fear is that we will see what anarchy looks like and think that maybe it's not all that bad. They are terrified that we will realise that we don't need people to wield power over us and tell us what to do. They dread the day when we say 'It's okay, we can do this ourselves, we don't need you. If something needs a team effort we can arrange that amongst ourselves, thanks.'
The deepest fear of the Righteous is that we will see what anarchy really looks like, and realise it is not what they told us it was. So they divert attention from it and deride the one place where its true face can be seen and where its manner of working is clear.
Blogland is anarchy.
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9 comments:
"There is no leader, no management, no structure and no central control."
Watch out! Someone's bound to point out that's the same recipe for success for terrorist cells and guerilla organisations... ;)
From my blog:
In response to Leg-Iron and the guys at Big Head Press, and their buddies at the Anarcho-Capitalist FAQ.
Yes, I should be working on my NaNoWriMo story
You guys are making the same gruesome mistake that Karl Marx made, that of misjudging humanity as something not too dissimilar from yourselves. That is wrong and the clearest instance-proof is in Somalia. That is the true embodiment of anarchy, in all of its glory.
Anarchy is the absence of not only order but law as well. It is the total absence of any sort of imposed social framework. Everyone has absolute freedom, including the freedom to walk up to anyone else and put a bullet into their brain pan, or threaten to unless the victim agrees to become their slave. That is anarchy. Anarchic societies follow the rules of violence first and the ones that know those rules best come out on top, always. It is thereby that anarchy always devolves into Warlordism, as has happened to Somalia. From there, it is a short step to fascist tyranny.
Remember that we are a species of omnivorous predators. Predation is wired into our genes as a first instinct. Take a modern human and throw them into a feral environment and you would be amazed at how quickly they would become a predator. Any random group of humans will quickly negotiate a leader (for various definitions of negotiation, including violence).
Be careful of what you wish for, you might get it.
Read the full article with links there.
Slamlander,
Anarchy means 'no rulers', not 'no laws'. It's a mature politics which requires voluntary mutual agreement and a clear sense of the rule of law. Can't act like a civilised human being? There's no reason for anarchists to have anything to do with you, and no police state abrogating their right to self-defence. Merchant ships used to go armed for a reason...
There's likewise no place for the Righteous and their (sole) institutional capture tactic in such a polity; hence their utter, utter loathing of it.
What you're talking about isn't anarchy: it's chaos, and it generally self-organises after a while thanks to peoples' mutual self-interest. What? You think the Wild West is still going on now?
From there, it is a short step to fascist tyranny.
Anarchy doesn't lead to fascist tyranny, or to its' mirror twin socialist totalitarianism: discontent with incumbent state apparatuses (often nominally democratic) does.
"What? You think the Wild West is still going on now?"
No it isn't, it grew into Barack Obama's America.
@Chris and @Anon:
Rulers enforce the laws. Without enforcement, there is no law. What you are talking about doesn't scale to any sizable degree. That was Marx's problem.
To put it another way, all it takes is one sole wolf out of a thousand sheep and the sheep are in trouble. This played over and over throughout the American West (mid-west, now) because there was no other law.
You might also read about the transition between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise in Feudalism. The modern monarchies are direct decendants of those early warlords (fascist tyranny).
Anarchy->Chaos->Raider Bands->Warlords->Monarchies
BTW, I grew up in the American West and it hasn't been civilized all that long, only since 1906 or so. Remember that George Patton learned to fight in the Indian Wars.
I also remember ranchers riding into Kelso, CA, packing six-guns, in the 70's.
Slamlander; You can have laws without rulers.
A police force should be working for the people, not for the government. That police force can enforce a few simple and logical laws without being overseen by a whole army of empty suits who are paid to make up more and more insanities.
The 'leader' should be working for the people, not the other way around. Otherwise we have leaders who are above the law and who do as they please while forcing the 'slaves' you mention to hand over large amounts of whatever they earn.
That's what we have now. Is it really worth keeping?
I never said that but history tells us that most societies come from "rule by force of arms" and eventually go back there. In fact, it never really goes away.
Police are definitely a part of that and history proves that they are needed. However, who watches the watchers? Who makes the laws? What is the definition of "common decency"?
The process of answering those questions gets you back to governance in rather short order, the next question is "of what form?"
"A pure democracy is the worst form of tyranny ever known to man."
The reasoning behind that statement is what the UK is discovering right now. Humans, in aggregate, aren't very nice. A faceless mob has no compunction about commiting murder whereas 100% of the individuals in that mob may be pacifists. A pure democracy is nothing less than mob rule and often, it's a lynch-mob.
No, Anarchy does not scale beyond a rather small village and only then if it has no neighbors, at all. Libertarianism has a somewhat better chance but only if everyone is suitably armed.
I've just read Pat Nurse's latest post which links to an alarming article in Spiked.
Any bloggers who thought that the danger was over with the demise of NuLabour might like to reconsider.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9840/
Jay
Slamlander - I will have to think on this further.
However, the system we have is far too broken to fix. There is no way to reform it. Anarchy might be the only way to start again.
I'll come back to this when I've let the thoughts gel.
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