Narcissistic Self-Reflection

I haven’t been doing a lot of blogging recently. Partially because I know no one reads these posts regularly so keeping uniform intervals between posts is a bit less than important but mostly because I’ve really been trying to figure myself out recently. With the end of my high school days, I think I’ve come to a better understanding of a lot of what I was feeling throughout my high school career and how that has colored my thinking on subjects from politics to philosophy, which have always been a form of escape for me and a pursuit of meaning in a world that often seems alien and meaningless. Reexamining myself, I think a change in identification may be in order; I’m just not exactly sure from what to what. All in all these changes have taken place throughout the last four years and some of the might not seem very important to someone who isn't interested in anarchism and I’ve still got a lot to sort out but my horoscope told me that today was a good day to write about my beliefs so I decided I’d muse a little on what has shifted. Besides, it’s good to reflect on yourself a little bit, even if it seems narcissistic.

I really made the move to the left of the political spectrum a long time ago and have been moving further and further that way ever since. I was a vulgar libertarian for only a short time and a Rothbardian anarchist even shorter before discovering the works of Kevin Carson which really pointed me in the direction of anti-capitalism and what might be called “true anarchism” going back to Bakunin and Kropotkin. Understanding the roots of the inequalities in capitalism to be the result not of inherent differences in human abilities (as most mainstream conservatives and vulgar libertarians do) or of plain dumb luck (like I used to believe) but of systematic exploitation which was really just a continuation of medieval hierarchal society with new gods and new machines led me into a study of the work of communists, who I used to consider my intellectual enemies (I now recognize thinkers like Nietzsche and Machiavelli, with their emphasis on individual power, to be my enemies-- In the spirit of how their works are popularly understood, not in the men themselves or even their works as a whole).

Many communist ideas sat well with me (more of those of Kropotkin than Marx); after all I consider myself an egalitarian at heart and have always detested commercialism. I also know that throughout high school, in both academics and athletics, I had my fill of competition. I considered myself somewhat anti-social, going so far as to diagnose myself with avoidant personality disorder (though I distrust psychiatry as much as anything else). Following what I thought was my anti-social nature; I lost myself in individualist literature (if one can call Ayn Rand literature. Stirner, maybe, but Rand?). Upon reflection, I can say that a good deal of my anti-social nature was due to my disgust with competition and hierarchy. If I had to talk to someone from a position of inferiority, I’d sooner just not talk to them (I never got to know any of my teachers all too well and always had a kind of paranoia that my peers were looking down on me, particularly the female ones). I had been familiar with most communist doctrines before, including the basic idea of workers’ solidarity, but they never appealed to me until I began to discover the root of my discomfort with modern society which is based on coercion, subjugation, and exploitation. Solidarity then, was not an acceptance of the collective will, as I had once thought and therefore shunned it, but instead a rebellion against their selfish competition. The idea that, as one blogger on libcom.org put it, “working too hard is anti-social behavior” really spoke to the part of me that felt alienated. It said, “Maybe you’re not the one with the problem. Maybe you aren’t the anti-social one. Maybe it’s them and their heartless competition. Maybe it’s them and their fetishification of the commodity and their obsession with money and their need to quantify everything.” In short it said, “Blame capitalism. For all your angst, just blame capitalism.” This is, of course, the all too simple answer of a self-isolated teenage boy to his suffering in a position in which all of society was saying, “You have no reason to suffer!”

So I began to refer to my friends, who had the confidence to get jobs, as wage-laborers, to modern medicine as the cult of doctorism, to a popular shopping center in our area as a den of commercialistic depravity. I had decided this society was not for me and I would make my way out to study others, rekindling my passion for anthropology.

This is not to say that I consider myself an anarcho-communist now, I am still much closer to mutualism based on Carson and Proudhon. I can’t say I consider the sensible pursuit of profit to be immoral, particularly through a useful trade. Even merchants are useful when they are turning a profit based solely upon their service of transporting goods from those who have them and are looking to sell them to those who need them. Sinbad and the Arab traders in history and the Kajiit caravans in fiction live a life full of adventure which is easy to romanticize and it’s hard to say they hurt anyone. So I do believe in a market, as I always have. A truly free market uncorrupted by coercion and those that make profit on it.

This does likely mean that some people will get ahead, though not nearly to the extent that they are able to under modern state-capitalism. But is it fair for me to declare competition immoral because it disgusts me? Is it fair for me to declare that the only just society is one completely devoid of it? No, it would be no more fair than if I had declared that the only just society is one entirely free of spiders. My opposition to hierarchy and competition is on a fundamentally lower than, say, my opposition to war and violence (it’s ironic I began this ordering of my beliefs with my opposition to hierarchy considering I’m doing so hierarchically. I was, of course, referring to hierarchy in human relations only. I believe many things but some of them mean much more than others. For example: I would die for my belief in the inherent value in a single human life but I probably wouldn’t even lift a finger for my belief that The Next Generation is better than the Original Series).

Taking my distaste for hierarchy and competition (distaste is perhaps a better word to use than opposition) into account I’d say I wish to see a society much like Lysander Spooner and the American individualist anarchist wished to see, with lots of small landowners employed by themselves and carrying out some useful trade or other. This is certainly no departure from my older beliefs. I’ve always romanticized Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian and republican America of small farmers with no one coercing or being coerced, in fact it’s probably been this Shire-like dream that has colored a good deal of my political thinking.

To see where I’ve diverged from this ancient dream of mine we have to go back to solidarity. In the past couple of years, as I have studied syndicalism and the labor movement, I think there is more place in my ideology for the collective. I have no problem standing with comrades; in fact I prefer it as long as they don’t mind that I don’t do an awful lot of the talking. It was only when I was asked to stand against adversaries that I chose to stand alone.

My problem with collectivism is that it’s hard to accept half-heartedly. Halfway in between individual property rights and communal ownership is some sort of democratic capitalism, likely with a heavily entrenched coercive apparatus and likely to descend into kleptocracy, the prevailing political system of the world today. This leads me back to mutualism and the dichotomy between property in use only or property in use and holding.

Mutualism is less an exact philosophy than a set of similar trends in thinking. Its adherents generally consider themselves socialists, anarchists, libertarians and promoters of a truly freed market (as opposed to the Reganesque free market). It has its roots in Proudhon but I’m not the right person to attempt to really describe exactly what it is. A major distinction between it and the other market-loving individualist anarchists is the difference between property in use and holding and property in use alone. Most propertarian individualists consider property to be made when an individual mixes her labor and creativity with the natural world to change it in some meaningful way. Mutualists, on the other hand, might say that this amounts to little more than moving a couple of sticks around and declaring the entire forest hers.

Personally, I believe such beliefs are very much cultural abstractions and would likely vary by community in an anarchist world. The mutualist idea in practice would be a hedge against capital accumulation and large scale inequality; though I think large scale inequality is nearly impossible without a sustained application of force. If an individual is using force to protect her forest, which she considers hers by virtue of her rearranging the sticks; one could see how such “defensive force in protection of property” could actually be exploitive and aggressive force.

The difference between mutualism and other socialist anarchist philosophies is its focus on the market and trade. One would expect a mutualistic society to look quite like Lysander Spooner’s individualist America except with more workers’ syndicates and less bourgeois tastes in which workers would own a good deal of the means of production but an individual would not be entirely dependent upon the community for her lively hood and could still likely go into a trade for herself or with her family.

The mutualist idea is not an end-all answer either however, but again, these theories of morality are cultural abstractions and serve only to prevent conflict and serve the peoples’ happiness. For anyone who is interested I would recommend looking at Per Bylund’s ideas of property in use rather than in the object itself. However, these ideas are something I only wanted to address in brevity. I’m more concerned with the changes in my own thinking based on my experiences and wanted to introduce mutualism as my middle ground between individualism and collectivism in which the enterprising spirit (which I am certainly not) can create and find success and happiness and in which there is also room for the quietly loyal and all together unambitious second-rater (which I certainly am) to find do something meaningful other than be subjugated to the capitalist class; join the military, subjugate others and die; or get a government job and prop up the exploitative system.

I guess that with self-examination I’ve discovered that I really just don’t have the heart for capitalism. In fact I’m not sure any of us do. Human beings didn’t evolve to be calculators of net worth; we evolved as communal hunters and lived that way for a stretch of time that makes capitalism look like a mosquito on an elephant. False consciousness and greed can only carry us so far. You can give people symbols to be loyal to and to define themselves by (sports teams, hipsterism, bands, nation-states). You can exploit all the avarice you can find in the human soul, but in the end the things people are always the most loyal to, the things people wish they had spent more time caring for and being cared for by are not things at all but people. I remember hearing somewhere that the most mentioned dying regret of men is that they wish they hadn’t worked so much. I’m not even twenty years old yet and I already feel that way. I already know that I don’t want to define myself by what I do to make money (money is just a tool to get by in a foreign world) or by what false-consciousness symbols I’m loyal to but by the people I love. I want to live a life of comfort yes, but meaningful comfort. I want to live in a world where people don’t have to work a lot, but when they do it is out of love for their brothers and sisters. I want meaning. With every fiber of my being I want meaning and that’s really been what my pursuit of philosophical truth and political virtue has been about.

When I lost my faith in the supernatural, though I certainly don’t rule it out, I found that it’s much harder to find individual meaning in life than I had thought it was and when people do it’s usually a form of aesthetic nihilism. I thought liberalism was about clearing a ground for individuals to discover their own meaning and to an extent I was right. The problem is that people derive meaning from each other and in a liberal society, in order for them to provide for themselves and their loved ones they have to spend an awful amount of time toiling to prop up an exploitative system. A liberal society encourages competition at the expense of cooperation, which was never what I was about even when I considered myself a true classic liberal. It pushes meaning into the hands of the individual who is then left to her own devices to define who she is and why anyone should give a damn about her in the first place. This just isn’t how it should be. Mankind is a social animal and virtue and meaning and identity are all communal ideas. You cannot separate a person from their community identity and expect them to be happy. That’s why I think people spend so much time trying to define themselves with social media and fan crazes. It’s also why nationalism took on its great fervor after the rise of capitalism. With the decline of religion people needed something to be loyal to besides the market and nation-states have done a pretty good job filling in the void. We’ve lost community identity so we look for it wherever we can.

My greatest fear truly is meaninglessness. That’s something I’ve known for a long time. I want my life to mean something. I don’t care what happens to my consciousness after I die, eternal darkness doesn’t sound so bad; I just don’t want everything to have been meaningless. Meaning is what I have been looking for through my study of mankind and my search for it has led me away from my previously individualistic ideas towards more collective ones (I’ve always been more of an aggregate thinker anyways). The pursuit of Truth is the pursuit of meaning and I believe that Community and Love are where we find meaning and that is why I chose to embrace the philosophies that place enough of an emphasis on them. When faced with the choice between individualism and collectivism I still choose both just as Max Nattlau did. Human beings find comfort in both solitude and community. I suppose this is where I should give something of a closing statement, after all I was told by my horoscope to practice my writing a little, but the holes in my thought process are far from filled and my ideas are far from their closure. There is quite a bit more I should have to write before I write the end. I’ll just take solace in the fact that I found an appropriate place where the end should be, even if I haven’t quite found the end yet.

Margaret Mead and Stefan Molyneux agree!

I was reading Margaret Mead's famous anthropological study, Coming of Age in Samoa, when I noticed a similarity between an assumption she made and the worldview of Stefan Molyneux, the host of FreeDomain Radio (for anyone unfamiliar with FreeDomain, Stef is all about self-ownership and NAP and seeks to extend the bounds of morality we hold whendealing with our neighbors and friends to the interactions of societies and governments. Of course if governments observed these decencies, they would no longer be governments.

Steph, building off the rationalism of Ayn Rand, has stated that he believes the root cause of much of the psychological strife children and adolesents experience is due to an inability to reconcile two ideas about reality. For instance, if a parent tells a child not to hit but himself hits the child, the actions of the parent are irreconcilable with the words of the parent so, as well as being abused, the child grows up believing that morality is mostly talk and something that adults will throw off whenever it is convienient. This would tend to breed a cynicism and an amoral attitude whenever the child can get away with it.

Margaret Mead was also trying to explain some of the psycological strife children in America go through. Notably she was trying to answer the question whether adolescent anxiety and angst were a result of the physiological phase the body was going through or of environment conditions of the society. To answer the question, she turned to a people far different than those she originally inquired about and compared the adolescent experience of girls in Samoa with girls in America and found that there was significantly less nuerosis in Samoa and that much of the strife that makes adolescence a difficult time for the American girl did not exist in Samoa.

She cited many differences between the cultures that cause these diffences in adolescent experience, such as attitudes towards sex and death, but a lot of her assumtions drew on the idea that America, being a much more heterogenous culture, had many more internal inconsitenceies which could trouble the young mind. In America, worldviews are in constant collisions with each other, while in Samoa there is one basic path to life and one basic understanding of the universe. In America, we still believe that there is one objective truth, but we have many definitons of what that truth is, so many, in fact, that the young mind must understand that whatever any person around her believes is very likely false. If she does chose to accept some worldview as her own and embrace it wholeheartedly, she runs the risk of dealing with its own internal inconsistencies. The inability to reconcile all of these problems likely leads to a good deal of strife in the adolecents' expeirence.

I find it interesting that such different thinkers could come to a similar idea. Though the sight different examples (Stef's based on violence. Mead's based on reconciling Christianity with war and the Declaration of Independence with inequality) I do believe they are both striking essentially the same bone and that there is a lot of truth to their thoughts. Unfortunately, these problems are likely to stay, as we are not likely to give up our hetergenous society. A few suggestions I would build off both Stef and Mead are to not pressure children to make decisions early, when their minds are still adjusting to the world as is the habit of the protestant evangelising movement in America and to always treat children honestly and fairly. It is important to walk the walk as well as talk the talk when dealing with them because I believe, as do many psychologists, that experience as a child has an extreme impact on developement and if your experience with rules of morality is full of hypocrisy and dishonesty, you are not likely to hold much account in morality.

Solutions to problems like these are not easy to come by, especially considering that they are problems throughout society. Our chief method of combatence is awareness and I think the more people understand that adolecence does not have to be an especially difficult time in a person's life and that much of the difficulty is a product of the environment, the closer we will be to living smoother and more contented lives.