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Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!
We were robbed of a truly incredibly human being when Graeber passed away. I'm a huge fan of "Debt: The First 5000 Years". And I'm heartbroken that "Bullshit Jobs" was the last publication he produced.
You may be happy to know he and David Wengrow wrote The Dawn of Everything. It was published posthumously but his fingerprints are all over it. Great book to boot! Pirate Enlightenment was also published posthumously. Haven't had a chance to read it but I think it's safe to assume it's great too.
I really loved it (Pirate Enlightenment) as well. It's not as life changing a read as Debt or Dawn, but its a nice story and gives a little hope in the emergent nature of democracy. Who doesn't love a pirate story?
That only applies to news articles, not political essays. Those have titles not headlines.
Betteridge talks about something fundamentally different. Read the essay, it's really short.
I skimmed it. It's bullshit. Reminds me of the "not technically a lie but essentially a lie" bullshit that the door-to-door "have you heard the Good News" religious bastards would try to sucker you in with when I was a kid in the South. A lot of "like us" type bullshit.
If you're stupid enough, you might think it makes sense. But it's a fairytale.
I'm not saying the author is stupid. I'm saying he's maliciously pandering to stupid people.
Let's take a super quick example.
If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police? If you answered “yes”
I'll try to get past my gag reflex at how condescending this is. But sure. Start with an eminently, universally reasonable position.
The most basic anarchist principle is self-organization
Still sounds fairly reasonable, but the intelligent among you might be thinking "hmm, sounds pretty reductive"
Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that other people are. But if you think about it, don’t those people all feel exactly the same way about you?
Now we've gone fully into "only really dumb people aren't skeptical at this point" territory. I mean, first of all, in the interest of saving your mental health, it's a decent idea to ignore any statement that starts with "but if you think about it". However even going past that, you get to the premise: "I'm a good person, therefore everyone is a good person!" Which is...like...seven-year-old logic.
Anarchists argue that almost all the anti-social behavior which makes us think it’s necessary to have armies, police, prisons, and governments to control our lives, is actually caused by the systematic inequalities and injustice
This is the part where we go off the deep end. The author hopes you're either not paying attention or are really stupid at this point.
Yeah I was like "maybe I was wrong" but then I came to that part and just had to laugh.
I would love to assume that everyone is benevolent - but they simply are not. It's not like there aren't sufficient examples of states without police or military power. They surely don't correspond to this fantastical view.
Look at how people responded to the COVID pandemic and you will see that human beings are terrible at looking out for their community.
I read your comment, then I read
I'll try to get past my gag reflex at how condescending this is.
again and I thought to myself: "Hell, if that's not the pot calling the kettle black!"
With that much antagonistic priming, any political essay will be interpreted as gondescending bullshit.
If you're that easily swayed into believing something is bullshit, I can see how you got into anarchism.
You shouldn't see it as bullshit because of "priming". You should see it as bullshit because it's bullshit.
If you're that easily swayed into believing something is bullshit, I can see how you got into anarchism.
Well, fuck you and your bad faith style of arguing, too.
I'm not saying the essay is thorough or even a complete rundown of anarchist ideology. It's more a easy-going rebuttal of societal contract theory, based on the presumed everyday life experience of the reader. Suggesting that this essay is a conclusive summary of anarchism and the reason why people "get into anarchism" is about as strawman as it gets.
The essay simply explains one core tenant of anarchism: that humans rely on cooperation and trust on a core fundamental level in everyday situations, even in capitalism. Societal structures collapse once that base-level of cooperation doesn't exist.
How is that "bullshit"?
The essay simply explains one core tenant of anarchism: that humans rely on cooperation and trust on a core fundamental level in everyday situations, even in capitalism. Societal structures collapse once that base-level of cooperation doesn’t exist.
Because people who will not cooperate may be rare, but they are not vanishingly rare. They are common enough that we need explicit rules backed by the violence of the State to enforce them. Everyone knows this at a base level too. That loud neighbor. That guy flipping you off in traffic. The woman at the store eyeing the jewelry case a little too hard. If we didn't have laws, and cops to enforce them, these people would do what they wanted regardless of what anyone else wanted.
Which leads to the follow-up bullshit of "if you just destroy the protective power of the State, all the bad people will actually be good people!" Yeah and rainbows shoot out my ass when I fart, too.
Lol, and you complain about Graeber writing bullshit. xD
In what way is your "bad person" example any better that the waiting for the bus example Graeber gave?
If humanity was that sellfish, it would have died out about 100000 years ago. You're spouting unscientific bullshit and act as if you're the only reasonable person in the room. Classic lib moment.