The Anarchist Playbook

One can acknowledge that the politicized version of fundamentalist Islam is dangerous and destructive. But so is the politicized version of fundamentalist evangelicalism. And the latter has been far more insidious, far reaching, and wreaked greater suffering, murder, and terror than any wild-eyed imam’s most evil dream. The fact that it’s being done to everyone else, or that we’re “right”, or ‘we have no choice, because “god” told us to, seems to be its primary defense. But the most heinous villains on earth say the same things. I cannot pronounce my enmity with this form of religion more strongly – I cannot voice my hostility to it, my loathing, my utter contempt in any clearer way. It is an abomination to man and anything deserving of the word “god”. Whatever strives to bring it down does a service to everyone, if only it doesn’t become the beast it seeks to slay. I don’t wish to deprive them of their rights, deny their humanity, or execute them in the streets – but I do pray their downfall. I only don’t curse their religion, because it is already accursed. They have the madness that is death run amok in the human race, infecting the mind, corrupting the sentiment, and seeking to assuage the agony of disease in human sacrifice. But even they know there is a judgment for murderers, even if they deny their guilt. It’s coming, and they will be eaten alive by an angry punishment, and I’ll gladly go with them as one no more worthy than they are, if only to see it done.

This does not mean one is excused from doing anything; apathy creates the worst problems. But all proposed solutions to any given problem will create further undesirable conditions – some forseeable and some discreet. The world allows no pure answers and no perfect actions.

Whenever you want to do something irrational, paranoid, or bigoted, on a national or local level, appeal to the will of the people, and garner bipartisan support. Claiming you’re merely representing your constituents is the ideal cop out for something that can’t stand up, reasonably, on its own. If you have to appeal to the people (ad populum), it’s always a dishonest cover for dubious logic.

Other ways of saying it:

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. – Mark Twain

If you have not paused and reflected before choosing sides; you are the majority. – William T. Kelley

In economics, the majority is always wrong. – J. K. Galbraith

Every conversation is always conducted on the level of the more stupid participant. – Vojo Stanic

Beware when all men speak well of you. – Jesus Christ

In any given situation, think of the most counterproductive thing a corporation could do, and chances are even that it will be done exactly like that. The reason people find it hard to see this rule is a simple mistake. People think corporations exist, above all else, to succeed and be profitable. I don’t believe this at all. I’ve worked for quite  lot of corporations and it was never my observation that this is their primary raison d’être. Sure, that’s their ostensible goal, the way the ostensible goal of public schools is education. But schools are terrible at education. They have vast programs of undermining and dismantling education. If that were their goal, they’re wildly unsuccessful. You could hire people at random off the street to run public schools, and tell them the goal, and you’d get better results. What public schools are incredibly successful at is instilling citizenship, as they define it. The levels of conformity they create, the numbers of willing participants in the current corporate, industrial, political, and military order are superb. There are more wash outs from military boot camps than there are from public schools – in which even the drop outs are examples of success. So likewise, lets imagine for a moment that the goal of corporations, which have an incredibly entertaining history of doing pretty dumb things (I wish there were a program similar to “funniest home videos”, about corporate foolishness – people could send in the things done by project managers, internal corporate focus groups, committees and teams, etc). Lets imagine that corporations are designed for another reason, and making a profit is, by comparison – by comparison I say, only incidental to this other goal. What if the purpose of corporations is near universal employment and maintenance of an economic social order (what used to be called economic classes) with its attendant political impulses (that is, stability and replication). If that were the purpose of corporations, they’d be wildly successful. They employ an incredible number of people – indeed corporate employment is the *standard* in the US, where getting a mortgage is tied to it, affordable healthcare is tied to it, matching retirement funds are tied to it, social and romantic prowess are often tied to it, political efficacy is often tied to it. The corporation, in fact, is the standard for self-definition that has only ever been rivaled in that role by the Roman Catholic Church in Mediaeval Western Europe. So if this were so, what would that prove, you might ask?

Well, if the purpose of corporations is to employ as many people as possible, to involve as many people as possible, to include as many people as can be, then it’s not preferable to do a job with one person when you can do it with three. Efficiency is not an overwhelming desirable element. In fact, if someone proposes creating efficiency, the best thing to do is involve or hire or outsource to more people who are tasked with creating efficiency, but who are most comfortable with securing the corporations expenditure on their services, the preservation or replication (if they’re contract workers) of their jobs and positions, and perhaps moving some peas around on the plate. Looked at as a system of interlocking corporations, laying off some workers from one corp, who will then go on to be hired at another corp, each company expanding and contracting in miniscule or even moderate ways, is a perfectly acceptable act of the system’s breathing and represents no impairment to its inefficiency. If this is the goal, it’s not more desirable really to do it cheaper or faster or better. In fact, if you can spend a lot of money and use a lot of manpower and man hours to do something, only to have to redo it completely, then undo it, then buy a replacement solution, underspend on the support that would make that work, then spend more to outsource it, and finally by the most expensive solution possible, that would be much more desirable, really, in the long run. You get to employ or involve a lot more people that way, for a longer period of time, and you get to magnify the number of things there are to do, and think about, and so on. You’ll still turn a profit, just not maximum profit, and you’ll catch of an exponentially large number of people in such an enterprise, versus just doing what would be most profitable.

Inefficiency, a significant failure rate, delay rate (failure to meet deadlines, underestimation of time requirements), over-expenditure (underestimation of costs, failure in planning) – these are all necessary to the ongoing purpose of corporations, when their initial claim that they exist above all else to make the most profit, is ignored – the way a fundamentalist’s claim that he exists first to follow Jesus is ignored in favor of looking at what he actually does with his time. Most certainly, it is necessary for corporations to turn a profit. They must do so in order to continue to exist. But that existence has another purpose to it. The maintenance of large, slow-moving, committee-bound, ever-growing, all-consuming corporations and corporate life is there to achieve, as much as possible, universal employment, everybody in a slot, which creates and crystalizes social order, and serves  the apparatuses (political, military, religious, social) of an commercial state.

How many coincidences does it take to make a pattern? So next time you’re asking yourself how a particular manager, or committee, or corporate power structure could gamble on this, or fail to foresee that, or refuse to reason effectively, or insist on going blindly into something (one could go on – the examples are endless), why choose to think of these as isolated, unrelated, unsystematic occurrences? What dogma persuades you, to the point of blinding you to the possibility that it is otherwise, that in fact the individual foolishnesses are incidental rather than central, accidental rather than necessary, random rather than systemic? What if the goal of corporations is what we said, and these things are needed to achieve the goal. You can hardly deny that it’s working like that – that in fact, these things do seem rather routine, and that the effect does seem to be what we said. So that would mean that you can predict these failures of effectiveness. If they’re endemic and necessary, they’re predictable and forseeable. So you see the basis of Asher’s maxim. It’s useful very frequently on a local level and, in general, does really well for the system as a whole. If it were stock, you could bet with it most of the time and win or profit more than you’d lose.

Bet with Asher’s maxims. He’s wrong perhaps 20% of the time. But the 80% would make you rich, if there was money in it.

Given an inescapable dilemma, corporations choose ideology over success. The more dominant the corporation is, in its field, the more likely this is. Case in point: the mortgage industry. They lost countless dollars by letting homes foreclose because they refused to renegotiate fair mortgages. Their attitude? Those people don’t deserve refinancing. We were right, they were wrong. They shouldn’t get a new deal. Those homes were boarded up, leaving ghost towns, with values in the small fractions of the home’s potential sales price, even taking the bust into account. Many of them are impossible to sell. The neglect, lack of maintenance, and deterioration will reduce some of them to little more than their land value. Overwhelmingly, they could have offered 6% fixed interest rates, made a profit, with no loss whatsoever, and been in great shape. Ideology was more important that success. Many mortgage companies went belly up with their losses. Ideology was more important that survival. The reason people don’t figure this fact out about corporations is that they’ve been steeped in a kind of quasi-capitalist doctrine that says corporations are out for their own interests, their own survival, their own profits above everything. Most people who swallowed that doctrine find it difficult to conceive of one thing – ideology – being even more important to corporations than all of that. They have failed to realize that corporations are, by definition, structure, and arrangement, first and foremost, constructions and institutions of ideology.  They are intellectual inventions. Reifying them as some sort of primeval given that have always been around is a Protestant-like belief in the aeternal doctrine – of capitalism. Looked at as, primarily philosophical constructions of fairly recent vintage, again like Protestantism is in religion, we see that no matter what they claim to be concerned with, their self-definition is the essence of their existence. They are not, in fact, primordial. They are constructed of ideas – and those ideas – the way corporations see themselves as defined out of ideas – the very possibility of the existence of such an entity – will generally be chosen over the continued existence of the specific corporate entity. They will choose to lose, and even to fail, before they will choose to allow for a world where their self-definition is no longer meaningful and can’t exist. A simpler way to say it is that corporations will prefer failure over change, but then you have to be talking about a certain kind of change that goes beyond mere evolution of techniques and marketing. Again, I think Protestantism is an apt example. Not for nothing is Weber’s thesis, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

The human engine, the nexus of mind, will, and body, is designed to turn thought into intention, and intention into action. Add in depravity, and man will always find a way to do any evil thing he thinks of. He might try to stop himself, but he will seed the idea in others. He might collectively overcome his desire for it, but individually, somewhere, someone will make it happen.

I’ve seen good minds, even great minds, swallowed, effectively – eaten – by ideology. Have you ever met a brilliant fundamentalist, mis-using his intellectual powers to sell people on a bankrupt ideology? Ever seen the ingenius neoconservative trying hard to reconcile his support of torture, “preventative war”, and the death penalty with his claim that life begins at conception and is infinite in meaning and value? The ideology of power, of control, of authority – most of the destructive ideology I’ve seen is of this kind – it has to do with following someone or something  - with attributing an unaccountable authority to a nebulous source of power. But I suspect all ideology is suspect. The moment someone is no longer thinking or listening, but is merely frozen in the “right” – in the “way things are” – it’s over. Half of intelligence is the willingness to keep thinking and the ability to keep hearing. Friends sometimes ask how I can fault or condescend to groups I once joined, people I once identified with. I don’t fault them per se – I fault their thinking – but mostly I feel bad about watching minds become calcified, petrified, because they’re unable anymore to breathe and to grow.  Ideology has killed the minds of most of the people I ever cared about. Or, if you prefer, ideology was the bludgeon, and the murderers were those that wielded them, even if they did it to themselves.

Ideology is poison. I think people take it out of despair, the way someone does heroine the first time, or the way someone lets danger into their embrace, because they can’t find the way to feel alive without a little self-destruction.

I can’t take credit for this maxim, really. It was Paul Austin who said it to me in my nice 2-bedroom campus apartment when I was first in graduate school. But here’s the gist of the reasoning. Marriage, as currently conceived in Western culture, is a feudal institution. Like all feudal institutions, it’s about an exchange of obligations under a tradition of feudal law, no different than serf to vassal to lord, no different than how mediaeval Western monarchs were obligated to the Vatican.  The obligation, quite right, consists of an exchange of (in modern terms) stability, safety, security – including financial security (what the husband is supposed to provide – just ask most would-be wives what they’re looking for), for consistent sex (at least until the kids are born) – just ask most men what they are looking for. Yes, they’ll dress it up as love and companionship, but you can get that with buddies. The difference is kissing and such. Want more evidence? Up until the 1960′s (i.e. just recently), what were the traditional Western (Roman Catholic or Protestant) wedding vows? And remember, most people (probably your parents) were married in a church. Well, they varied somewhat, but they were versions of the same text. Here goes:

• Woman: “With my body, I thee worship.”
• Man: “With all my worldly goods, I thee endow.”

Any questions? Yes, yes, I’m “terrible” and not ‘romantic’ and all that. I’m actually quite passionately romantic in some ways, but I’m just not deluded that that has anything at all to do with marriage. Marriage – in the main – in the Western tradition – is exactly what Mr. Austin says it is. Yes, I know we’ve “practically” said it’s an exchange of sex for money, and therefore a form of prostitution. First, I never said “practically”. Second, I’m not the first to make this observation. I think Victor Hugo might have, too, and quite a lot of other folks. That’s what a feudal contract is, my dear – an exchange of value for value, where the obligations of both parties are clearly delineated in the ritual reading and consenting of the contract. What do you think a divorce is? You sue for divorce. It’s a suit brought, in feudal law, for breach of contract. Perhaps the husband isn’t providing and protecting, or perhaps the wife slept around. It’s only been in recent years that a wife could sue for the husband sleeping around, you know. Didn’t used to be like that, at all. So yeah, people write their own vows, and get married at the justice of the peace (a legal entity), or in Vegas (a financial one – good place for a gamble), but the feel, the vibe, the attitude when people are dating, planning their lives, or just hooking up, is generally the same equation. It is what it is – deal with it. If you don’t like it, don’t get involved in it. But let’s not pretend. Am I saying all marriages are like that? No, of course not – and every mother’s baby is beautiful and smart. No, here’s the thing: marriage, prior to feudalism, prior to the second millenium in the West, was a religious mystery, with much more emphasis on other things. The rite was very, very different. And yeah, it may seem self-serving to say that my people are still keeping that right, and I wouldn’t get roped into one of these feudal things if you paid me. Truth is, though, the Western country in which I live doesn’t just accept the mystery created in the Church. Nope, you still have to go down and get the paperwork done at some government office. So yeah, I’m in it too. Doesn’t matter what I feel – I can be sued for breach of contract, and I can be held, by the power of the state, to my feudal obligations. Like it or not, the vassal and serf thing is still going on, which is why one particular historiographical school (Read Kantorowicz “The Kings Two Bodies”) insists that there is no “modern” era in the West, that the tripartate construction of ages (Ancient, Mediaeval, Modern) – which was originally an occult fiction (read about Joachim of Fiore, and check out Strayer “On the Mediaeval Origins of the Modern State”) – is just that, a fiction – and that we are still living in a society with an essentially feudal structure and set of arrangements. Why do you think people keep doing it? Is it impossible to think of a different model? Like I say, some of us are using a *very* different model, but the state still makes us sign that contract. Keep in mind, I’m not knocking the model, if that’s what you want. There’s a logic in it. Women have an impulse to secure an inheritance for their offspring, and man wants efficacy by the seed of his loins taking shape in the world and extending his name (or identity, if he doesn’t keep the name) into the future, past his own death. In that sense, the way most people do marriage is an animal means of preserving the species, thereafter preserving desirable traits (every couple thinks some of its traits are desirable, if not every individual does), and ultimately trying to defeat death – the central philosophical and visceral/tangible problem of the world and of the West, as my people has always said it is. Not criticizing marriage, and not even criticizing the Western/feudal construction of it. I want the species to survive. I do think it creates a lot of problems – from overconsumption to urban sprawl to gender issues (there’s a reason women wore those big skirts back then – now the skirts are gone, but the limp wristedness and constantly seeking a strong (feudal) leader – like George Bush – or even Barach Obama – a strong “executive” remains. Feudalism is a cause of many serious social, political, religious, and cultural problems, and very practical ones right down to whether people starve or get medical care.

But I’m not criticizing the individual relationship between some man and some woman. As one of my fathers said, “The way of a man with a woman – who can know it?” Such a thing is utterly unique and can’t be judged. In that way, I break with the West and all its books and seminars and social chatter about how marriage is supposed to work, and what the model/ideal marriage is like (think Plato and the forms vs. the particulars). I think individual persons are absolutely unique in all of time and space, and marriage is the union or attempted union of such persons, and produces something likewise unique, whatever you think it is you’re doing, and whatever cellular contract you signed (wouldn’t it be interesting if they expired in 2years like Sprint or T-Mobile?). In  other words, the contract was never the whole story, even with people who think it is, which is something a lot of them find out after it’s assented to or signed. All of the attempts to explain it, or explain it to others, or legislate it for others (I just love it when someone gives me marital advice, or tells me we’re doing it wrong), are attempts to reduce marriage to the contract – to something transferrable – something standardized. Nope, before there was the contract, there was something else. I’m not going to preach my religion to you, here, but I’m also not taking notes from the West – it has nothing to teach us – it has said what it has to say. When it comes out of its feudalism, maybe we’ll check in again.

When someone says “there’s no such thing as objectivity”, they only mean that no one else has objectivity. Clearly, they don’t believe that about themselves, or they wouldn’t be offering this very proposition, which masquerades as objective. What they mean is, “My ideas aren’t subject to superior arguments from anyone else. I’m immune to tests of logic, because your arguments are subjective.(no word about their own).” They just don’t have the courage to say that – so now you know what kind of person you’re dealing with. This kind of talk usually precedes some goofy biorhythmic aura nonsense that, if you don’t accept with wide-eyed awe like Charlie Manson was filling your head with wisdom, you’ll be told that you’re not enlightened enough, you have a reptilian brain, or some other thing that means your thoughts are subjective and, of course, the wisdom being imparted is objective (immune to criticism or skepticism). No one really believes there’s nothing objective, or else to walk out into traffic would be the same as to stand on the curb would be the same as flying around with Peter Pan in mushroom land. People that really believe nothing is objective die quick deaths, and their philosophy dies with them, because it’s not livable.

The moment someone says “I just” believe it or says you don’t believe because you’re not enlightened enough, you’re done – you’re dealing with something unarguable, because it doesn’t submit itself for comparison to reality.

Anyone can be kind to me, if they think I’m more or less what they are. That doesn’t make them particularly kind. I prefer people who are kind to foreigners, aliens, and outlanders, and to those things most people regard as less sentient. If a person is kind to people who aren’t, at their core, what they are, then perhaps they are kind. Christ expressed this sentiment — to paraphrase: “Do you love your own and people who do good to you?That’s no credit to you – even the ignorant do the same. I say love your enemies.”

Over the years, people have said to me (as though I’ve committed an ideological crime), “You think most people are stupid!” Well, yeah, of course. I’d say ‘foolish’, but I’ll accept stupid if it means that. People are idiots. What do you want? Need evidence? Come on, turn on any media source. It doesn’t even have to be the news – just look at what people are doing for entertainment, or what they eat, or how they drive. People are idiots. Idiocy is the fastest growing commodity – if you can find a way to invest in it, you’ll get rich. That’s what Bernie Madoff did – it’s just smarter to find a legal way to invest in stupidity. The only reason I don’t is ethics and morality – I think it’s wrong to take advantage of people’s stupidity. Doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s there. And look carefully whenever the ‘common person’ is exalted and raised up; it is not a common person at all, but a lord of the common people. That applies to idiots, too. You see some guy who does something incredibly stupid on a news program, or in traffic? He may indeed be an idiot, but he only gets away with it, because he’s cleverer than the people providing the context for his idiocy – he’s a Lord of the idiots, but otherwise he’s not unique. What’s smarter, the bull that dashes out into traffic and gets hit by a car, or the cow that stands there watching and just going moo? At first glance, the cow didn’t do anything stupid. Yeah, the cow didn’t do anything – anything at all. Sharp as a tack, right? No, not standing out doesn’t make you a genius. Eventually, though, all the cows would have followed the bull out into traffic – it’s just the perspective of time.

At any given moment, we are communicating in scores of languages. The fact that we no longer acknowledge them – consider it impolite to do so, and evil even to notice (akin to witchcraft) – doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Our postures, gestures, myriad little movements, dilations, tone, cadence, pauses, breaths, pulse at the side of the neck, pallors, pheromones, and more that can be observed or experienced through the various senses of others. From goosebumps to bodily oils, people are speaking enormous volumes in mere moments. Even our pretenses reveal what we want others to believe. “You don’t know me! You don’t know anything about me! Not unless I tell you!” Ever heard that? I’ve heard it a lot – it’s what you get when you respond to the other channels the person is broadcasting on – the social fiction is that we’re only communicating didactically – it’s only word-concepts that are coming across. Ever since the Enlightenment, and before it with the Protestant Reformation, we’ve dismissed as unreal those things that are not presented in word-concept format. No incense, no robes, candles, or stain glass windows – just an auditorium, an audience, a pulpit, and words. Words in a lab report. Words we carry around in thick, black, leather books and read to our minds. Concepts, like the vocabulary words at the back of a textbook that are 9/10 of college education. Or the tautologies that make up most of our ideologies, from religion to politics: this is that, what she said is racist, what he did isn’t democratic, what you’re doing isn’t “biblical”. The culture is basically Protestant you see, even if you’re an atheist. You nice lab boys who pride yourselves on being rational are practicing the same religion – you’re just using different vocabulary. But go back before all of that, and we understood the reasons for bells and smells – it’s because communication, broadcasting, occurs on many, many, yes many channels. Iconography – my own people argued (and held sway in the West until 1014)  that the supreme mode of communication was non-verbal and the deepest prayer is without concepts. We cannot hide, except from those who cannot see, and each reaction against this knowledge reveals still more. We are nude, down to the soul which, despite all our philosophies to the contrary, is still integral to the body. The moment that we stop collaborating in the pretense that we are each covered up, clothed, protected, safe, we can begin to realize what it means to live in community with others. Each of us desires, irrefutably, to be known, and needs, deeply, an interaction with others that exceeds the limitations of intellect. To have these, we must allow the social walls that occupy even our most intimate relationships to crumble. We must look for the friend who will, on his own initiative, break down the first one in spite of us, and without welcome. We must keep watch on these walls, since they are walls of the thinnest sort, with the obvious singular purpose of being breached. Each barrier is a confession of our desire to be penetrated, entered, overcome, known, connected, vulnerable, revealed, woven together with others. The emperor has no clothes. The Edenic attempt to snatch a fig leaf and cover ourselves is futile. The bawdlerization of genitalia on the statue of David or the walls of the Sistine Chapel, like the ‘book burning’ of the iconoclasts and those who whitewash icon-clad temples into mere auditoriums,  is an attempt to reduce communication to a single dimension, to fix the radio on one channel and break off the knob. When you look and see, when you allow for the possibility that the airwaves are rife with content, that a person is communicating on all channels – all the time, you who claim you have no religion – you who bow down at the altar of the culture – then you realize you are no longer safe, and can finally rejoice. Ender says that it is impossible to truly know someone and fail to love them. That’s my experience, too. Finally, then, we can stop guarding that secret desire — to be wanted. Which all we big, strong, grown men hide, like timid little boys, slapping each other on the shoulders because we’re desperately afraid that the other channels will bleed over. It’s not even afraid that it’ll make us gay, or women – no, gay people and women are afraid too – it’s that we’re just afraid, period. Just scared little boys hiding under the covers from what we are, people who speak so many languages (and can’t help it), that we are not safe in out skins and skulls, but are vulnerable to the world, to everyone, or at least to anyone who is looking at you. It’s interesting to watch big, tough guys turn away, run away with their eyes, when you look at them, really look, and they can almost hear all of their own broadcasts in your eyes. Women, on the other hand, either show deathly terror (that’s most of the time), or abject wanting (which means you’ve got to be careful, or you end up in bed all the time, naked in every way.)