C4SS Feed 44 presents William Gillis‘s “Anarchy is a Scale-Independent Proposition” read by Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford.

Thinking or acting from a big-picture perspective is–if not The Problem–then at least a major root cause of everything miserable about our world. Any claims, theories, ideals, or motivations that extend our frame of reference beyond our immediate lives are predicated in the same mistaken arrogance, a mistake responsible for the seemingly intractable poison within the left and activist struggles, as well as so much more. In response we must ward ourselves from the ideologies, the grand constructs, the stories that dwarf the particulars of our immediate perceptions, our social circles, our daily struggles. Most of all we must reject the search for universals and focus only on the “human sized”.

Often this narrative quickly segues to pattern-matching this “big-thinking” tendency in terms of some unified Judeo-Christian tradition (under the assumption that there’s only a tiny chance of running across anyone with a strong claim to be part of a different tradition). At this point the narrative really picks up steam: There was once polytheism/animism/spiritualism but then all the little gods and little tribes got ground up by the big universal monster and now there’s just universal stuff, and we should just break things apart again until they’re back on a “human scale”–ala Dunbar’s Number–where we can better keep track of everything. And, supposedly, therefor stop our thought from growing “out of control.”

Feed 44:

http://www.c4ss.org/
http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB