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diff --git a/fuck-our-society.txt b/fuck-our-society.txt index 3d7c825..08e6005 100644 --- a/fuck-our-society.txt +++ b/fuck-our-society.txt @@ -1,30 +1,77 @@ -Many moons ago I was down in Laguna Beach at the now long gone Tippecanoe's clothing store when I ran across a relatively innocuous dark olive green shirt. Probably handmade, it looked a bit like an old-style baseball jersey, with an iron-on number three in red on the front pocket. On the back it had a cheery serif script that read "Fuck Our Society", flanked on either side by anarchy A's in padlocks. You bet your ass I bought it. +Many moons ago I was down in Laguna Beach, CA at the now long gone Tippecanoe's clothing store when I ran across a relatively innocuous dark olive green shirt. Probably handmade, it looked a bit like an old-style baseball jersey, with an iron-on number three in red on the front pocket. On the back it had a cheery serif script that read "Fuck Our Society", flanked on either side by anarchy A's in padlocks. You bet your ass I bought it. -I was in a band back then, I played quite a few shows in it. But this was Orange County CA in the mid to late 1990s, I didn't wear it out much. Once, on the way to a show, we stopped at Trader Joe's to grab a snack for the road and while we were standing in line I felt a tap on the shoulder. I had been conscious of wearing the shirt since I got out of the car so I turned around expecting some kind of confrontation, but it was a tiny woman, not much over five feet tall who looked me up and down and then smiled and said, "I like your shirt." +I was in a band back then, I played quite a few shows in it. My friend Ruben asked me to play with his band on the side, I'm pretty sure just because he wanted the shirt on stage with him.But this was Orange County CA in the mid to late 1990s, deviations from the norm simply didn't happen. I didn't wear it out much. Wearing it has always been a kind of performance. I haven't warn since I moved back east in 1999. -I've never really called myself an anarchist, I'm not even sure what that would mean, but anarchy was the only political-ish thought system that's had any appeal to me. But even its appeal is pretty weak. I'm just not interested in mammalian territorial status. +Once, on the way to a show, we stopped at Trader Joe's to grab a snack for the road and while we were standing in line I felt a tap on the shoulder. I had been conscious of wearing the shirt since I got out of the car so I turned around expecting some kind of confrontation, but it was a tiny woman, not much over five feet tall who looked me up and down and then smiled and said, "I like your shirt." -Still, I read most of the notable political anarchists -- Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Alexander Berkman, Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky and others, as well as the more figurative writers one might call anarchists like Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Albert Camus and Oscar Wilde. +This was really the first time I started thinking about the shirt as anything more than something for shock value. Once you get past that initial shock though, the shirt raises more questions than it answers. What is our society? Who are we? The shirt is deceptive in that way. At first is seems like banal, simplistic view of anarchy, "fuck capitalism" or the like. But it's not. The shirt isn't picking out some part that's wrong, it's saying fuck *everything*. Everything? Everything. -While I sympathized with, for example, Focker's notion that political institutions -- possibly the biggest problem humanity faces -- grow out of an irrational belief in a higher authority, particularly the singular authority of sun-god religions, at the end of the day I am not an anarcho-syndicalist. I have no interest in the political aims of anarchy. +This is not the political anarchy of historical figures like Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Alexander Berkman, Hannah Arendt or other names your probably white, probably bearded professor put on a syllabus. Most of them said *fuck what's wrong*[^1]. -And while Thoreau has been a guiding figure in my life, the others never quite sat right. For example I don't agree with Wilde's solution in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, but I definitely agree with the problem: +The shirt feels closer the anarchy you find in writers like Henry David Thoreau or Leo Tolstoy, anarchists more interested in the sum of our existence than individual parts of it. -> With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” +Despite the shirt, I've never really thought of myself an anarchist. When I was younger I had a lot of what I think is best called rage about the fucked nature of our society. Every young person capable of thinking for themselves has felt something similar. Seeking to understand or perhaps validate this unidentifiable sense of rage at the perceived injustice of the world is what led me to Thoreau and Tolstoy and then later Goldman, Focker and the rest. -I don't think the answer is the abolition of private property. I'm game to try. It might work, but you can achieve the latter without it. That is, you can abolish your own private property and stop wasting your life in accumulating things. You can live rather than just existing. Property has little, if anything to do with it. See Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning. +Even now I'm not sure why anarchist thinking appealed to me more than any other. I suppose it was an anecdote to the hierarchical, highly stratified society I grew up in. The idea of creating institutions that worked so well people actually wanted to be part of them was so novel it grabbed me. Then there was the cliche destruction of anarchists past. Books like the Monkey Wrench Gang or slim black volume named the Anarchists Cookbook that I discovered on the shelves of Barnes and Noble in Fashion Island Newport Beach. -Having exhausted the political and artistic political I discovered the more immediate arachism of destruction. Personal and otherwise. These days I just channel that energy into singing P.O.S lyrics -- "probably not welcome at your protest/ Say I'm out of my damn mind/ Looking to break glass, not holding a damn sign" -- which is not to pigeon hole P.O.S, just that he's good at defining the appeal of that space. And it has appeal. Having looked at something as massive as an earthmover with a bag of sugar in hand... it has appeal is all I will say about that. It's ineffectual, but then relatively speaking almost everything is, that's the world. +It would be impossible to explain to anyone who never experienced the pre-internet age, just how revelatory The Anarchists Cookbook was for me. It was filled with recipes of all kinds of tools of destruction. It had plans for brewing bombs, bathtub napalm and dozens of other ideas that struck even my testosterone addled, rage-filled teenage brain as incredibly bad ideas. It didn't steal it because -- of course I stole it -- I wanted to blow something up, I wanted it because it was proof that there were other people out there who thought our society was fucked. -The more violent forms of anarchic behavior have their place. Yes, even destruction for its own sake. But when I wore that shirt I had something else in mind, something I have been thinking of for years now as "magical anarchy". +Between the thin black, almost self-published quality covers I discovered not polite words about political or artistic anarchy, but something much rawer, something driven by emotion rather than logic, the anarchy of pure destruction -- literal destruction. This is the anarchy no one in our fucked society wants to talk about (or even acknowledge). Political anarchy is ultimately safe. It might rock the boat, but it isn't going to sink it. + +Destructive anarchy is out to sink the boat, often for no other reason than to see what happens. It has no agenda and that ends up being one of two things to people in power. It's either terrifying or unknowable because in that world of power everything is believed to have an agenda, which is to say an aim. This is absolutely terrifying to anyone with anything invested in the status quo. This the anarchy even self-proclaimed anarchists don't like. As P.O.S sings: "probably not welcome at your protest/ Say I'm out of my damn mind/ Looking to break glass, not holding a damn sign". + +The anarchy in the Anarchist Cookbook doesn't have an aim. It's not even anarchic really. It doesn't challenge repressive power or anything else. There's no angle, there's no game. There's just a bunch of recipes for stuff, most of which even I, with only a half asleep high schoolers' knowledge of chemistry, could tell you were unlikely to do anything like what was advertised. The point wasn't that it worked, the point was that it existed at all. + +I never made a single thing from the recipes in the Anarchists Cookbook. I never even read the whole thing. Still, the book remains for me a defining moment because for the first time I realized two very important things. I realized that was not alone in how I felt about the world around me, and, at the same time, I realized that there was a road through these woods I thought I was walking in alone. + +I also ended up learning a lot about destruction. It took a while but eventually I figured out that the destruction most of us are seeking is not the healthy destruction that precedes rebirth, but rather the destruction that brings about personal power. We want to wield destruction. We seek destruction because it gives us power over others. And that's the opposite of anarchy. Grant Lee Phillips had a line that neatly encapsulated the idea for me: "Unlike the famous fable, revolution won't yield a firework show / Unlike the famous fable, revolution won't end on July the Fourth." + +I wouldn't regret pouring sugar in earthmover gas tanks, if indeed I did any such thing, but I wouldn't do it again. It's not that I have any more respect for laws, nor is it that I have any less desire to stop rampant destruction of the environment, it's that I no longer want to wield destruction as a kind of power over anything. Anarchism is finally a rejection of power, a rejection of any attempt to wield power over others. + +Curiously the original author of the anarchists Cookbook seems to have gone a similar journey. In one of his many pleas for publishers to let the book go out of print, he says: + +>The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in ... The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this. + +Destruction is only ever one part of the story. Destruction is a single point on endlessly turning wheel of death and rebirth. The wheel of karma in some religions, the alchemy wheel of creation in others. Even this is one level removed from the world though, the only reason we even see destruction and rebirth as negative and positive is because we're very attached to our current reality. + +Destruction is a problem for our fucked society though. It's a problem for all societies primarily built around male sun god religions. We don't have a wheel of karma or creation. We don't even have a female god. There is no rebirth without a female god. In our fucked society all you get is destruction, the rebirth can never happen. Even the rage against that loss, the inability to have rebirth gets trapped and cycles back on itself until it explodes in violence. + +Without the rebirth, destruction is nothing more than an ineffectual gesture. This, I think, is near the core of why the shirt wants to fuck our society. Or at least this became the core for me -- when nothing can grow out of destruction but more destruction, destruction ceases to serve any healthy purpose. + +It works something like this: rage propels you to action, action turns out to be ineffectual, which leads to more rage, which leads to more action, which turns out to be ineffectual, which lead to more rage and so on until the larger society steps in to deal with the problem.The only way to stop this cycle is to realize that you're trapped in a whirlpool of your own making, missing the larger ocean entirely. + +I was clearing out my closet in preparation for our trip and ran across the shirt again. I put it on for a bit. At first it felt starchy, a bit too tight in the shoulders. But I kept it on for a while and eventually it seemed to soften up a bit. One of us had to relax into the other. Perhaps both. + +Eventually I decided it was not coming on the trip. I fired off an email to a friend I knew would want it before I changed my mind. But I haven't changed my mind. I don't need it. The trip is already saying fuck our society in some form, a gentler form I hope. + +Somewhere in the midst of writing this piece I started thinking about anarchism again though. + + + + +Magical anarchy is to anarchy what magical realism is to realism. It's anarchy of the senses; anarchy that defies logic in pursuit of something more. It's the anarchy of travel and empathy, the anarchy of completely unzipping your head, the anarchy of gift economies, sex and psychotropic chemicals. The anarchy of finding yourself alive, existing for a time on the most beautiful planet in the known universe. + +The default mode of being in magical anarchy is empathy. Everything is unknowable as a direct experience, but you have your own history and the remarkable power to listen. These two tools allow you to construct a limited and very poor imitation of the experience of others and can help form tiny bridges between their soul and yours. It's an incomplete and sometimes nearly impossible thing, but it's what we have and we do what we can with what we have. -Magical anarchy is the anarchy of travel and empathy, the anarchy of completely unzipping your head, the anarchy of gift economies, the anarchy of completely re-arranging experience with psychotropic chemicals. And yes, the anarchy of freedom from stuff. Magical anarchy if founded on the belief that our individual experience of the world is profoundly narrow and the full dimensions of what's permissible and possible are unknowable. Given this limitation, when in doubt the safest assumption is the positive assumption. Which to say nothing is ever an "or", but an "and". For example, what any other creature on earth is thinking is unknowable, but they are thinking. All of them. The animals may not have thoughts we would understand or even recognize as thoughts, but they are thinking. It's taken 200 years, but science can even prove that they're thinking. Given that, it's probably safe to extend the same idea to the plants. Perhaps even the rocks. Perhaps the planet itself. The safe assumption would be to assume that your inability to experience the planet as a whole as "thinking" is a limitation of your observational systems, rather than proof that the planet is not thinking. -The default mode of being in magical anarchy is empathy. Everything is unknowable as a direct experience, but you have your own history and the remarkable power to listen. These two tools allow you to construct a limited and very poor imitation of the experience of others and can help form tiny bridges between their soul and yours. It's an incomplete and sometimes nearly impossible thing, but it's what we have and we do what we can with what we have. +This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you how I figured all this out and how you can too. But I don't know. I know the psychotropic compounds found in some plants helped. I believe that those compounds are here for exactly that purpose, but I don't know that they will help everyone. + +[^1]: The one exception is Goldman, who did seem to believe that almost everything was indeed wrong, and needed to be burned to the ground. But there was ultimately something tamed about most of the political anarchists of the early twentieth century -- like they were trying to tone things down to gain a seat at the table rather than acting on what they often wrote. + + +--- + + +But of course the Anarchist's Cookbook is ultimately only half of the story. It's about destruction (for the most part). That wouldn't necessarily be bad, except that in our fucked society we don't seek destruction. Destruction is the first stage of regrowth. We never seek that. We give it lip service, but that's not what we like about destruction. + + +An often overlooked part of the Anarchists Cookbook is that it's not just bomb recipes and bathtub napalm. + +The book's take on destruction is more general that that and includes recipes for brewing LSD and tk for more personal, though potentially no less violent, destruction of the ego. This would end up being the far more personally useful form of destruction, breaking down the ego to discover the fragile and temporary nature of that construct and how to escape it for longer and longer periods of time. |