In this month’s episode, Alex McHugh interviews Sarah Skwire, Senior Fellow and Director of Communications at Liberty Fund about the importance of studying literature and language, and why social scientists should pay attention to works of fiction and literary history.

We got into quite a few interesting topics, including Shakespeare, early modern debates on economics, and how literature can be an excellent site for studying social debates from multiple sides and perspectives.

Sarah’s work can be found most often in the following places:

• The “Reading Room” on OLL: oll.libertyfund.org/reading_room
• Adam Smith Works:  www.adamsmithworks.org
• EconLog: www.econlib.org/econlog

Next month, look out for Cory Massimino’s episode with Abigail Devereaux to discuss her work on complexity economics. We’ll also hopefully be publishing several bonus episodes about Ukraine in the coming month or so. It’s currently uncertain when those interviews will be done, but we’re in contact with anarchists in both Ukraine and Russia and working on getting a few dispatches together.

Review of From Urbanization to Cities: The Politics of Democratic Municipalism by Murray Bookchin

From Urbanization to Cities The Politics of Democratic Municipalism by Murray Bookchin (AK Press, 2021) 

In this updated version of the late Murray Bookchin’s initial 1987 title The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, now with an introduction by Sixtine van Outryve d’Ydewalle, Bookchin presents democratic municipalism as a defense of cities, and against urbanism. Naturally, this apparent contradiction in terms begins with a thorough examination of what Bookchin means by the city. Bookchin contends, with broad and updated archaeological and anthropological evidence, that cities are not necessarily a reflection of agricultural and economic exploitation. While criticizing the ways in which cities can (and have) urbanized into the sprawling jumble of the modern metropolis, insatiably devouring resources, land, and democratic power, he nonetheless portrays the city square as the vibrant center of cultural life that it has been in various times and places.

Bookchin begins by drawing a distinction concerning the myth of a “war” between cities and countryside. Rather, the city and countryside (or town) have always beneficially coexisted, each with its own valuable and vibrant cultural life, but, with their existence in danger, he warns, from urbanization: 

“The truth is that the city and the country are under siege today — a siege that threatens humanity’s very place in the natural environment. Both are being subverted by urbanization, a process that threatens to destroy their identities and their vast wealth of tradition and variety. Urbanization is engulfing not only the countryside; it is also engulfing the city. It is devouring not only town and village life based on the values, culture, and institutions nourished by agrarian relationships. It is devouring city life based on the values, culture, and institutions nourished by civic relationships. City space with its human propinquity, distinctive neighborhoods, and humanly scaled politics — like rural space, with its closeness to nature, its high sense of mutual aid, and its strong family relationships — is being absorbed by urbanization, with its smothering traits of anonymity, homogenization, and institutional gigantism.” (p. 3)

The city Bookchin promotes is not a cosmopolitan one, in service to global capital and ready to offer up its regional treasures on a silver platter to the trade routes of the world, but rather one of regional interests, of craftspeople and merchants meeting in the vibrance of the public square, inspired by their love for their own city, and taking part in its own interaction with the global world. He presents the vulgarity of the modern attraction to cities as one based purely on pragmatism — a short commute, a convenient location, and all the amenities of “development.” But then what is urbanity, and how is it a danger to democratic culture, in the city or the countryside? Bookchin attests that urban civilization is rather the “by-product” (p. 7) of a city, it is what you see if you soar in a 50-mile radius around any metropolis, (or just as often now, a 150-mile radius). The vast machinery necessary to support the commercial activity of a modern city, the endless stretches of suburbia providing a bedtime retreat from the rush of a city which accommodates only work-life, and the endless stretches of agricultural land subordinated to the needs of this populace, and more importantly its commercial clientele, are all the “byproducts” of the city which now blanket entire regions of physical space. Bookchin’s idea of what the city ought to be is strongly anchored to his critique of the modern “citizen” (in keeping with the latter half of the original title).

Just as the urban city is a merely corporate entity, the modern citizen maintains only an exchange relationship to their city. They follow its laws and pay its taxes or parking fees, not out of moral duty or collective goodwill, but in exchange for quality municipal services. Bookchin mercifully does not go so far as to call the urban dweller a similar “byproduct” of this commercial endeavor of a city, and Urbanization to Cities is not simply a lament for a pre-urban agora or town meeting hall.

Bookchin’s thinking has had a profound influence on modern movements as varied as the Yellow Vests’ protests in France and Kurdish democratic confederalism because of its promise for decentralized power. These practices of democracy-without-institutions are based in a storied tradition. What Bookchin shows, through examining different anthropological and historical sites to understand “the way people commune,” (p. 15) is the ways in which cities have provided (and may still provide) the opportunity for democratic power to take root.

Bookchin dismisses the view that civilizations arose to command vast economic resources or in response to technological development, such as agriculture, as the bias of a materially-obsessed modern eye. Instead, he poses a view of civilizations primarily concerned with meeting spiritual needs, developing “bigness” as a consequence of their own search for cultic demands, rather than as a result of some preexisting machinery of oppression, pointing out that:

“Here, I would like to emphasize that the earliest cities were largely ideological creations of highly complex, strongly affiliated, and intensely mutualistic communities of kin groups, ecological in outlook and essentially egalitarian and nondomineering in character.” (p. 25)

“We assume that a coercive strategy was followed by oppressive elites at the inception of city life because we read our literary accounts of Mesopotamian and Egyptian forced labor back into city lifeways in a misty preliterate era. It is easy to overlook the fact that any literary tradition of urban life, even the very early Gilgamesh epic from 2100 BCE which dates back to the beginnings of Mesopotamian city life, is already evidence of a technically advanced, often coercive, society.” (p. 25)

Traditional historical thinking may be overly sensitive to directly observable records, he argues, and in doing so impart oversized importance to that direct physical evidence. Thus, the historical record may be unjustly saturated with those remnants which bureaucratic urbanity leaves behind in abundance, namely commercial records and large buildings — evidence of their extractive prowess, maybe, but not their actual prevalence.

Within this examination of early societies, Bookchin begins the search for the proto-citizen. He finds in these ancient cities, so small that we would hardly call them towns today, the structures and social groupings that we associate today with a strong civic life — the meeting places and centers of community that evidence an engaged public. The cultural value of the city, in Bookchin’s view, is the movement from a congregation based on blood ties to one based on social kinship. In developing an idea of the citizen, Bookchin relies heavily on an examination of Athenian society, bringing his distinct ecological understanding of the interplay between city and citizen into an understanding of “processual” (p. 62) politics by which a person is socialized into the full citizen through their own interaction with public affairs.

Bookchin’s processual politics directly parallels the anarchist concept of prefigurative politics. People learn to responsibly manage their own affairs by exercising power over their own affairs and, simply enough, by managing them. In his examination of Athenian society Bookchin draws most cleanly upon his vision for city life embodied by democratic municipalism. Citified (but not urban) public spaces provide the location for meaningful and sustained interaction between the citizenry.

“In its emphasis on direct, almost protoplasmic contact, full participatory involvement and its delight in variety and diversity, there is a sense in which the agora formed the space for a genuine ecological community within the polis itself.” (p. 63)

Bookchin argues that these public spaces of informal contact between vastly different parts of even a stratified society allowed vibrant social ecologies to develop and mature. The central location of political life is this public square and not in the traditional centers of state power, represented by the formal assembly.

Therefore, the city, at least one with adequately available public spaces that allow for this “direct, almost protoplasmic contact” between social classes, offers its people the place to practice citizenship. The engaged citizen, within a proper city, can take part in the formation of public consensus, engage in public commerce, and contribute to establishing this citizenry. By taking part in the process of political action, they produce the citizenry, and in turn, their city.

Where Bookchin’s work shines is in bringing together the breadth of anthropological and historical information that helps bring to life his vision of the city. Acknowledging that attempting to find historical evidence for “how people commune” may be more difficult than a survey of impressive architectural feats or warehouses, he tackles the task quite ably. He examines Greek tragic dramas to show the ways in which tragedy, for the Greek citizen, is a means by which the citizen grows into a more dignified being. Athenian political society grew through crises and its own responses to them, and likewise, the city provides the space for processual growth of the engaged citizen taking part in forming city consensus.

While these ancient cities may have provided the garden that cultivated the first citizenries, how did the city become disconnected from citizenship? Bookchin points out a transition from the city wherein each city-dweller remained attached to their country home, or at least their ancestral village, to a particularly new, wholly urbane city.

“From the thirteenth century onward, particularly in Italy and the lowlands of modern Belgium and Holland, city-states began to emerge that were structured around uniquely urban tasks — artisan oriented, financial, commercial, and industrial — that slowly loosened urban life from its traditional agrarian matrix and provided the town with an authentic civic life and momentum of its own.” (p. 96)

Bookchin holds the development of the merchant classes and “princely” estates as a phenomenon arising out of urbanity. As Roman society collapsed, unable to draw the tributes necessary to support its vast expenditures, cities pared down to size so they could more reasonably extract their resources from the neighboring geography, and thus decaying cities and parochial fiefdoms became the norm in Europe. In this space, however, Bookchin notes the growth of a diverse array of communes and artisanal towns “marked by a rich social life, and with it a popular politics rooted in guilds, systems of mutual aid, a civic militia, and a strong sense of community loyalty.” (p. 135)

Despite this, the age also marks the rise of nation-states, but Bookchin warns: “[t]he reader who looks for a compact development toward a modern urban society will not find one here.” (p. 140) His chronicling of the rise of states is refreshingly level-headed, readily accepting that states existed in “degrees” rather than absolutes, and that most of these states did not resemble, in their relations to their people, what we expect today when we think of nation-states. He further notes the interplay between commercial development and state development, neither as opposed, nor wholly united, goals. For instance, in examining the ambivalence of Spain’s Charles V to capitalist whims, he centers how the municipal revolutions of the Comuneros are not so easily described by class analysis at a time before industrial classes have formed in the Marxian sense. Instead, Bookchin uses his formulation of the citizen as a means to describe this conflict between the socialized citizen and the bureaucratic state.

“Centralization becomes most acute when deterioration occurs at the base of society. Divested of its culture as a political realm, society becomes an ensemble of bureaucratic agencies that bind monadic individuals and family units into a strictly administrative structure or a form of ‘possessive,’ more properly acquisitive, individualism that leads to privatization of the self and its disintegration into mere egoism.” (p. 179-180)

Thus, Bookchin brings us to his definition of urbanization as a distinctly social, rather than a technological or materialist phenomenon. While he lauds economic relations in the city square of the pre-capitalist era for enhancing human interaction and enriching the social space, he marks the domination of the capitalist form as a major driver of expansive urbanity. The tendency of capitalism to accumulate indefinitely is why urbanity is now most recognizable by its detritus. In contrast to the monstrous bigness of the urbane, Bookchin puts forth a model for “human-scale” societies centered around cultivating engaged citizenship.

The site of engaged citizenry, Bookchin claims, is municipal participation. “Municipal freedom, in short, is the basis for political freedom, and political freedom is the basis for individual freedom.” (p. 234) The municipality acts as a countervailing force against nation-state domination and allows workers the ability to effect their will upon those who run social and economic affairs. Here, Bookchin relies on his distinction between statecraft — the affairs of nation-states to maintain or bolster their bureaucracies — and politics — people’s collective exercise of power. A confederation of democratic municipalities provides a balance against the interests of the nation-state in subordinating its people to statecraft.

But if Bookchin’s municipalism stopped here, it would doom workers to “simply ‘participate’ in planning their own misery.” (p. 272) Instead, Bookchin argues that confederated municipalism provides the means for municipalities to exert their citizens’ will over the most complex issues while the political process of democratic municipalism forms an active citizen, ready and able to take on this responsibility. To Bookchin, this act of participating in confederated democratic municipalism creates a citizenry capable of entirely removing state power. Critically, there are no fantasies here of the state withering away; instead, building a strong citizenry of capable and critical actors lays the foundation for power outside of, and opposed to, the state.

Bookchin’s municipalism is not provincial, nor patriotic. It is not a vision of neurotic individualism, and it is not one of thoughtless internationalism. His stated purpose was to understand the relations of how people commune; his exhaustive historical and anthropological analysis attests to his success. Bookchin deftly lays out a vision for democratic municipalism that can address modern problems and finds support for the ability of complex societies to be oriented towards the “human-scale” while meeting the needs of their citizens. More interestingly, in his emphasis on building an ethic based on active citizenship, Bookchin’s prescription for the discontents of a modern civilization takes on a comprehensive social, or even spiritual, aim. The call for creating human-scale “city” spaces (both in the town and in the country) warns against urbanity but cherishes the frenetic social fabric of the town hall, arrondissement, and agora. Bookchin’s democratic municipalism, even reprinted some forty years on, paradoxically remains a breath of fresh air and a reminder of the historical power of free and engaged association. 

De Jason Lee Byas. Artigo original: Ross Ulbricht and the Courage to Break the Law, de 9 de novembro 2020. Traduzido para o português por Diogo Ladeira Sales.

Os advogados dele dizem que não vão recorrer. As acusações pelas quais ele vai possivelmente passar o resto da vida na prisão gravitam em torno do marketplace Silk Road, que permitia aos usuários comercializarem pacificamente drogas ilegais pela internet. Embora ele tenha admitido que criou originalmente o site, Ulbricht sustentou que ele rapidamente o passou para terceiros. Ao invés de tratar de detalhes do caso, entretanto, eu quero focar em outra coisa – Ross Ulbricht é um herói, alguém merecedor de nossa admiração, alguém cujas virtudes nós devemos cultivar em nós mesmos. Ele merece nosso respeito por sua coragem de desrespeitar a lei.

Ulbricht não apenas viu uma maneira pela qual ele poderia fazer do mundo um lugar melhor e mais justo, ele viu uma maneira de fazer isso sem obter permissão da lei primeiro. Mais importante, ele agiu com base na informação que ele tinha. Ao criar a Silk Road, Ulbricht sem dúvidas salvou incontáveis vidas. Com a Silk Road, vendedores e compradores de drogas puderam comercializar em paz, sem ter de lidar com o artificialmente perigoso mercado de drogas offline. O sistema de avaliações e notas do site também permitia que compradores alertassen outros sobre produtos ruins, garantindo que as pessoas recebessem o que eleas haviam pedido.

Tudo isso foi possível porque Ulbricht não apenas tinha visão empreendedora, como também tinha coragem de correr o risco de ser preso. Ele não desperdiçou tempo com plebiscitos, campanhas ou lobby. Ele foi direto à fonte, atuando em ação direta para contornar a lei. No entanto, essa coragem especial é também o motivo pelo qual ele foi tão demonizado. A promotoria insitiu em um pedido de condenação de pena perpétua, aparentemente acreditando que a pena mínima de 20 anos não era o bastante. O juiz concordou, dizendo:

O surgimento e a manutenção da Silk Road denotavam que seu… criador era melhor que as leis desse país. Isso é profundamente problemático, terrivelmente equivocado e muito perigoso.

As ações de Ulbricht debocharam do poder do estado, assim como dos procedimentos padrão para questionar esse poder, e uma desobediência tão deliberada não pode ser tolerada.

Ao mesmo tempo em que Ulbricht estava sendo perseguido, preso e processado pelo “crime” de ajudar pessoas a vender drogas online de forma pacífica, o movimento para legalizar a maconha estava começando a ver algumas de suas vitórias mais substanciais. A lei estava finalmente começando a fazer alguma, embora muito limitada, tentativa de não arruinar as vidas das pessoas por possuírem plantas. Essa tentativa tinha que ser nos termos do estado, contudo, o que incluía o previsível pântano regulatório e os previsíveis parasitas que sabiam exatamente como nadar naquele pântano. Ulbricht fazer um experimento por conta própria, buscando laissez-faire ao invés de monopólio era algo totalmente inaceitável para o Estado.

Se a história é algum exemplo, Ulbricht pode deixar um legado que fará justiça a ele. No fim das contras, mesmo aqueles que concordam com o tratamento dado estão dispostos a reconhecer a virtude quando vista de uma perspectiva histórica. Nós vemos isso no recente esforço para colocar Harriet Tubman na nota de 20 dólares. Poucos, se é que há alguém, ainda estão dispostos a negar publicamente o fato de que Tubman não apenas foi uma heroína, mas de que foi uma heroína por causa da coragem dela de desrespeitar a lei. Ela enxergou uma maneira de libertar um monte de pessoas tratadas feito gado, e se recusou a esperar até que as leis da América branca concordassem que a escravidão era maligna antes que ela o fizesse. Agora que a lei concorda, ela é revenciada universalmente.

Às vezes essa transformação de condenação para celebração pode ser rápida. Em seu segundo discurso de posse, Barack Obama homenageou brevemente as pessoas que lutaram por justiça em Stonewall. Isso é de certa forma surpreendente, dado que os eventos aos quais ele se referiu foram revoltas, nas quais homens e mulheres homossexuais e transgênero categoricamente se recusaram a obedecer ordens policiais. Essas pessoas não se submeteram à lei escrita, mas, ao invés disso, exigiram que ou respeitassem a existência deles ou esperassem a resistência deles. Elas não apenas tiveram a coragem de desrespeitar a lei, mas de se defender fisicamente contra aqueles que estavam tentando aplicá-la. Agora, porque a lei reconhece quão inumano é deter alguém por vestir roupas insuficientemente hetenormativas, essas pessoas heróicas recebem homenagens em um discurso de posse de presidente.

O que é frequentemente tão claro em retrospecto, embora confuso no presente, é a distinção crucial entre dois tipos de lei: artificial e natural. A primeira é moralmente irrelevante e produzida pelo estado, consistindo em palavras escritas, redigidas de acordo com os procedimentos de preferência do estado, que serão aplicadas de modo confiável pelos agentes do estado. A segunda surge da própria moralidade, consistindo nos direitos e obrigações que nós já somos obrigados a respeitar. Se a segunda conflitar com a primeira, você deve sempre seguir a segunda.

A única coisa que deve segurar você é a prudência – isto é, se você vai ou não ser pego. Às vezes, entretanto, o benefício é tão grande que os riscos devem ser aceitos. Nós devemos celebrar aqueles – como Ross Ulbricht, Chelsea Manning e Edward Snowden – que tiveram a coragem de buscar justiça a despeito do que o sistema de justiça criminal poderia fazer com eles.

Hospedar sites de compartilhamentos de arquivo que lentamente tornam inexequível o direito autoral, proteger da deportação imigrantes sem documentação, esquivar-se do alistamento militar (ou desertar das forças armadas) e incontáveis outras violação de leis artificiais são atos verdadeiramente heroicos. Se você algum dia se encontrar em júri julgando esse tipo de herói, recuse-se a punir. Ao invés disso, siga as orientações da Fully Informed Jury Association (Associação do Júri Bem Informado) e questione não apenas os fatos do caso, mas também a justiça da própria lei.

A maior parte de nós nunca terá o brilhantismo de visão do Ross Ulbrich, e muito menos a habilidade de colocar ela em prática. Se você tiver, contudo, espero que tenha a mesma coragem que ele de desrespeitar a lei.

[1] Isso não deve ser exagerado, dada a prática de aluguel de prisioneiros que imediatamente se seguiu à abolição, assim como outras práticas que sem dúvida constituem escravidão de uma forma diferente.

[2] Isso também não deve ser exagerado, dada a frequência com que mulheres transgênero são assediadas pela polícia que as traça como trabalhadoras sexuais.

Di Eric Fleischmann. Originale: Some Thoughts on Liberating Medication, del 28 gennaio 2022. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Uno dei vanti principali del capitalismo vuole che sia il sistema che meglio fa incontrare domanda e offerta: se hai bisogno di un bene o di un servizio, il mercato capitalistico provvede. All’atto pratico, però, può avvenire l’esatto opposto. Un ottimo esempio in questo senso  (dal mio punto di vista di profano che ha un rapporto con l’industria farmaceutica in quanto consumatore di farmaci) è l’accesso a farmaci importanti come la EpiPen e il trattamento anti-hiv negli Stati Uniti. Il primo ha un prezzo medio attorno ai 700 dollari per due iniettori, mentre per l’altro, a seconda del tipo e a seconda che sia generico o meno, può arrivare a più di 4.000 dollari per 30-60 compresse o capsule. In media, secondo Andrew W. Mulcahy, il prezzo dei farmaci negli Stati Uniti è 2,56 volte quello di altri 32 paesi. Il problema potrebbe esser fatto risalire a come sono strutturate le aziende o all’univeralità del profitto, ma più realisticamente la ragione sta in un’applicazione inflessibile della proprietà intellettuale grazie ad accordi tra lo stato e le aziende. Questo impedisce alla vera concorrenza, che dovrebbe essere il punto forza del capitalismo, di esplicitarsi sul mercato, garantendo diritti esclusivi di produzione a entità specifiche, in genere enormi aziende ma anche piccole canaglie come Martin Shkreli. È così che riescono a mandare alle stelle il prezzo dei farmaci. Nel caso dell’insulina, il prezzo è talmente alto che, come spiega Lucas Kunce, “a determinarlo non è neanche il rapporto domanda-offerta. Semplicemente sono tre aziende che impostano il prezzo sulla base di quanti morti e quante amputazioni il mercato è disposto a sopportare prima che la gente cominci a ribellarsi.”

Il problema può riguardare tutti ma, visti i tanti problemi socio-economici, sono soprattutto i lavoratori, e in particolare gli omosessuali, i neri, i nativi e i disabili, i più colpiti. Certo, c’è il fatto che le cure costano, ma ci sono anche gli alloggi malsani, il mangiare scadente e l’inquinamento, tutte cose che incidono maggiormente sulle persone di bassa condizione sociale. Tutti fattori che creano o accentuano quei problemi che richiedono cure farmacologiche. Ai capitalisti interessa soltanto che i lavoratori abbiano un minimo di capacità professionali e che vivano abbastanza a lungo da produrre e riprodursi, e per quanto riguarda l’assistenza sanitaria e i medicinali basta che ne abbiano un minimo, o a discrezione, con diritti pieni di clausole. Come dice Karl Marx, il salario rappresenta semplicemente “i costi necessari per conservare l’operaio come operaio e per formarlo come operaio” più “i costi di riproduzione, per cui la razza degli operai viene posta in condizione di moltiplicarsi e di sostituire gli operai logorati dal lavoro con nuovi operai.” Ma anche mettendo da parte la questione (giusta) delle classi, il capitalismo o altro, il problema di base è che ci sono persone che hanno bisogno di medicine, che esistono ma per qualche ragione astratta inventata da chi ha il potere le persone bisognose non possono accedervi facilmente.

La soluzione ovvia consiste nell’eliminare alla radice l’istituzione della proprietà intellettuale, aprendo la strada a, cito Laurance Labadie, “una libera concorrenza, ovvero garantendo accesso equo ai mezzi di produzione, alle materie prime, e ad un mercato senza restrizioni, [così che] il prezzo delle merci rifletta tendenzialmente il lavoro necessario alla loro produzione. In altri termini, il lavoro dovrebbe diventare il fattore dominante nella quantificazione del valore.” E una volta eliminati tutti i monopoli garantiti dallo stato, la proprietà intellettuale e tutto il resto, non solo le medicine diverrebbero più accessibili, ma, citando Kevin Carson…

quel cartello di industrie protette non sarebbe più fonte di aumento dei costi o di rendite artificiali basate sulla scarsità. La gamma di servizi professionali e di formazione sarebbe più libera e flessibile. Ci sarebbe più libertà, più flessibilità nella gamma di servizi professionali e di formazione. Ci sarebbero ospedali zonali gestiti in cooperativa che preferiscono condividere con altri ospedali un medico specializzato lasciando l’assistenza di base ai medici di famiglia.

Oppure vedremmo una versione americana del “medico scalzo” della Cina, un medico che cura fratture o comuni traumi, fa diagnosi elementari e tratta le più comuni infezioni. Qualcuno che valuta i sintomi, ausculta il respiro, fa l’esame dell’espettorato e somministra lo zitro per la polmonite senza ricorrere a specialisti. Una persona simile avrebbe la capacità di capire quando il caso va oltre le sue competenze e occorre l’intervento di un’infermiera professionale o di un medico vero e proprio.

Fatta salva questa soluzione, efficace e radicale ma, almeno per ora, improbabile, resta un’altra strategia extrasistemica percorribile: accedere liberamente a farmaci salvavita fai-da-te tramite internet, praticamente spostando le conoscenze dalla sfera privato-aziendale ai beni comuni digitali.

L’idea non è originale, nasce dall’operato del professor Michael Lauer e della sua squadra Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, che punta a creare strumenti che consentano a chiunque di poter accedere ai mezzi curativi con un computer, degli strumenti chimici elementari e una stampante 3D per stampare certe apparecchiature mediche. Sul sito si trovano anche istruzioni su come fabbricare un “microlaboratorio farmaceutico” o una EpiPen faidatè, e disegni per la stampante 3D. L’idea di base è opera della Open Insulin Foundation, che…

sta mettendo su strumenti open source (liberi) per la produzione di insulina secondo i principi della produzione sostenibile di piccola scala e della produzione alternativa open source. [La fondazione] sta anche sviluppando strutture e protocolli per la produzione di insulina ad azione rapida (lispro) e a lungo termine (glargine). A questo si aggiunge lo sviluppo di strumenti liberi alternativi a quelli brevettati, la ricerca di scorciatoie burocratiche al fine di rendere più accessibile l’insulina e la pianificazione di piccoli impianti pilota per la produzione locale di piccola scala.

Sempre a proposito di accesso libero e facile, scrive Sebastian A. Stern, “i ricercatori faidatè che operano negli hackerspace possono contribuire significativamente a una formazione formale a basso costo (con il peggioramento dell’istruzione superiore gli spazi di apprendistato diventano preziosi e indispensabili). Lo stato ancora non è intervenuto col pugno di ferro, ma c’è da aspettarsi che lo farà visto che questo genere di libertà minaccia il sistema attuale.”

Un approccio del genere evita del tutto il ricorso allo stato e ai suoi organismi e cerca di risolvere i problemi dall’interno del sistema. E questo è logico! È lo stato in quanto sistema capitalistico la causa principale delle barriere artificiali imposte ai medicinali; tutte le soluzioni che passano dallo stato seguono la logica resa famosa da Robert LeFevre secondo cui “lo stato è una malattia che si presenta come cura”. Le soluzioni basate sull’azione dello stato, come la proposta di Biden riguardo l’insulina all’interno del programma Build Back Better, portano semplicemente a pratiche contorte e estenuanti, un problema molto serio quando è in gioco la vita. Karena Yan, parlando del “limite di costo di 100 dollari al mese sull’acquisto dell’insulina” imposto dal Colorado, nota che…

si presta alle scappatoie. Certe assicurazioni sanitarie, scoperto un cavillo, lo hanno sfruttato per non applicare il limite ai loro assicurati. Per di più, invece di imporre un tetto complessivo di cento dollari al mese su tutta la spesa, la legge permette alle assicurazioni di imporre un limite di cento dollari per ogni prescrizione mensile, il che si traduce in duecento dollari per chi prende due tipi di insulina, per via nasale e prima dei pasti, o ad azione breve e prolungata.

La Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prima o poi userà la mano pesante contro i farmaci faidatè. Per questo l’ideale sarebbe eludere le istituzioni dello stato finché è possibile. Secondo Milton Friedman “la FDA ha prodotto danni enormi alla salute pubblica aumentando enormemente i costi della ricerca farmaceutica e riducendo di conseguenza la disponibilità di farmaci adeguati, oltre che ritardando l’approvazione di quei medicinali che riescono a passare indenni attraverso i tortuosi procedimenti della FDA”[1]. Ryan Calhoun racconta di un sequestro, nel 2014, di “19.618 confezioni di medicinali su prescrizione ‘non approvati’. È successo semplicemente che la FDA ha privato le persone dei farmaci negando loro qualunque ragionevole possibilità di riaverli.” David D’Amato spiega convincentemente come “associazioni spontanee, servizi di valutazione e di certificazione non vincolanti e in concorrenza tra loro possano benissimo fornire al consumatore quelle informazioni che servono per decidere in maniera sicura e intelligente.”

È chiaro però che questa pratica attira grossi problemi. Condividere informazioni sulle cure faidatè non è illegale e, come scrive Grants Birmingham per il Time, il programma Open Insulin “sembra al sicuro dal punto di vista normativo, ma le cose potrebbero cambiare quando si arriverà a produrre medicinali.” “Se Open Insulin arriva alla fase produttiva, deve conformarsi alle buone pratiche produttive, quelle norme che la FDA impone alle industrie che producono farmaci, alimenti, cosmetici e strumenti medici. E dato che l’associazione ha in programma di condividere online, dunque a livello internazionale, le linee produttive della propria insulina, questo potrebbe attirare nuove rogne legali.” Aggiungiamo poi il pericolo immediato rappresentato dai cocktail di farmaci faidatè. Yvette d’Entremont, nemica della pseudoscienza, è fermamente convinta che “quando si fa una EpiPen le probabilità di sbagliare sono tante. L’idea è pessima.” E poi: Tutto sembra un gioco finché non capita un’infezione e ti ritrovi nel muscolo un ascesso da paura.” Io esiterei a lungo prima di provare una cosa del genere dato l’attuale stadio di sviluppo. Negli Stati Uniti, inoltre, ogni proposta di liberalizzazione dei farmaci deve essere considerata nel contesto dell’attuale pandemia, in cui ci sono persone che fanno disinformazione massiccia sui vaccini, arrivando, sulla base di “ricerche fatte per conto proprio”, a certe stupidaggini come prendere lo sverminante per cavalli; e a tutto ciò si aggiunge la crisi degli oppiacei[2]. È possibile che con la crisi e il crollo del capitalismo statalista i farmaci essenziali verranno resi disponibili tramite le succitate cooperative ospedaliere di zona e i medici scalzi in versione nordamericana a basso prezzo. Per ora io, che, beninteso, non sono né uno scienziato né un professionista delle medicina, concordo con Josiah Zayner, amministratore delegato dell’azienda di ingegneria genetica faidatè The Odin, che riferendosi all’aceto dei quattro ladri lo definisce “la realizzazione di un concetto… il primo passo verso l’innovazione.”

Dati questi seri problemi, si sarebbe portati a puntare su soluzioni più accettabili ma sempre decentralizzate e disponibili in forma di cooperative di assicurazione sanitaria, società di mutuo soccorso (magari riportate alla gloria di un tempo), opere religiose per l’assistenza condivisa, ambulatori liberi (alla maniera del Black Panther Party), cooperative per l’acquisto di medicinali (gestite da persone comuni, non da farmacisti) e così via. Come scrive Logan Glitterbomb,

un modo molto efficace di offrire assistenza di base alle persone a basso reddito passa dai [suddetti] ambulatori liberi e altre strutture gestite da sindacati di base. La presenza di queste istituzioni significherebbe puntare alla prevenzione, che verrebbe incentivata, più che alla cura, e nel lungo termine potrebbe portare ad un taglio dei costi e a una migliore salute generale. La Ithaca Health Alliance è stata fondata dalle stesse persone che stanno dietro la valuta alternativa conosciuta come [Ithaca] Hours. Si tratta di un ammirevole esempio di cooperativa assistenziale comunitaria in linea con i valori e le pratiche anarchiche. La rete, formata da 150 operatori sanitari, offre uno sconto del 5-10% ai soci. La IHA gestisce anche la Ithaca Free Clinic, un ospedale comunitario in cui operano medici, erboristi, agopuntori e altro personale, tutti volontari. L’Ithaca Health Fund inoltre offre contributi per le emergenze a pazienti a basso reddito ma anche ad altre simili strutture sanitarie comunitarie della zona, il tutto finanziato con donazioni.

Grazie a idee del genere è possibile creare un’infrastruttura sanitaria a due motori. Tolte le precedenti critiche al libero accesso alle cure faidatè, un grosso vantaggio di questa pratica è che non si limita a dare alla gente ciò che gli occorre per vivere bene, o semplicemente per vivere, ma attacca la causa principale dei costi artificialmente alti (la proprietà intellettuale) e, rendendo di dominio pubblico le informazioni, decentra le conoscenze in fatto di medicinali. L’attuale sistema farmaceutico, al contrario dei suoi predecessori non patriarcali, si basa su un’élite di professionisti fortemente qualificati[3]. È certo importante che ci siano esperti e specialisti (come evidenziato dall’ignoranza di grosse porzioni della popolazione statunitense in questa pandemia), ma non c’è nessuna buona ragione per diffondere l’iperspecializzazione e le normative stringenti, pubbliche e private, che servono solo a dare a una piccola élite di istituzioni altamente specialistiche l’accesso a importanti conoscenze.

Ma se si vuole un futuro decentrato, la liberazione della cura deve andare oltre le stampanti 3D e i kit faidatè. Bisogna arrivare a pratiche sanitarie comunitarie che elimino l’autoritarismo. Così scrive Simon the Simpler:

Una società di persone responsabili della propria salute, con la capacità di produrre da sé i propri medicinali, è una società difficilmente governabile. Oggigiorno noi dipendiamo dalle strutture di potere dell’industria della sanità e dalla specialistica: la società segreta dei medici, le facoltà mediche bianche e maschili, i decisori aziendali con i loro farmaci tossici, l’ingordigia spietata e i laboratori pieni di creature torturate. Questa dipendenza è una delle cose che ci tengono legati allo stato, incapaci di ribellarci con tutte le nostre forze o anche solo di immaginare un mondo senza oppressione[4].

Con un insieme di tecnologie mediche decentrate e un passaggio a questo genere di pratiche sanitarie, forse la liberazione della cura è alle porte.

Note

1. Non riesco a trovare la fonte.

2. Non molto si può dire oltre a ciò che è già stato detto sul fatto che la crisi degli oppiacei non è il prodotto di un inesistente libero mercato ma dello stato corporativo; una veduta veramente libertaria sul covid la possiamo trovare in Pandemia: Lo Stato Cura o Provoca? di Kevin Carson, e in Libertarianism vs Psychopathic Dumbfuckery di Andrew Kemle.

3. Vedi: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers.

4. Per non parlare del potere biopolitico della medicina moderna teorizzato da Michel Foucault, materiale per un intero articolo.

Insurrection or Revolution? The ethical politics of Stirner’s egoism

At a time when the grand narrative of Revolution that we inherited from modernity and the rationalist discourses of the Enlightenment has all but broken down, what alternatives are there for conceptualising radical transformation? Despite the lack of an organised revolutionary class or movement, the left is at the same time unable to think beyond the idea of revolutionary emancipation. This failure of the radical imagination is perhaps the reason for the political deadlock the left finds itself in today. Unable to effect any sort of meaningful change, the left instead fights ‘culture wars’ and engages in identity politics against a right that is much more adept at this game. The puritanical dogmatism and religious zeal with which the endless debates over gender identity, race, the inclusion of the marginalised and so on are conducted speaks to a certain exhaustion of the radical political horizon. To found one’s politics on the recognition of identities, on the one hand, and the future promise of revolutionary salvation, on the other, is to fall into the trap of state power. The state is fetishized either as the entity that grants rights and legal status to minorities, or as the enemy that must be captured in order for freedom to be realised — an illusion that has only led to the creation of new states and new forms of despotism, as the history of revolutions demonstrates.

Perhaps it is time to abandon the ‘spooks’ of identity and revolution and to think of subjectivity and politics in a different way. It is here that I suggest we turn to the nineteenth egoist anarchist philosopher Max Stirner. In The Ego and Its Own [Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum] published in 1844, Stirner proposed an alternative, ‘egoistic’ form of political action that he termed the ‘Insurrection’ or ‘Uprising’ [Empörung] and which he contrasted with Revolution. While the Revolution was a project aimed at the transformation of external social and political relations, the insurrection was a transformation of the self. It is a way for the individual to overcome his or her own voluntary obedience to, and identification with, authority. As such, it does not preclude broader social and political changes, but these are premised upon this initial act of self-liberation — a change in the way we relate to ourselves and to others. As Stirner says, the insurrection has as its unavoidable consequence the transformation of circumstances, ‘yet does not start from it but from men’s discontent with themselves’. The insurrection can therefore be seen as a form of radical self-emancipation. It is not guided or determined by revolutionary vanguards or parties, and it does not seek to capture and control state power. Rather, it is radically anti-institutional: ‘The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on “institutions”’. The state is neither an instrument of social transformation, nor even the main obstacle to individual freedom. The insurrection refuses this sort of fetishization of state power. Rather, the individual egoist should affirm him- or herself over the state; he should no longer look to the state, either in veneration or in horror (which are two sides of the same coin), but only to himself. 

This unusual idea of insurrection is a key part of Stirner’s philosophical and ethical project of egoism. For Stirner, in a world of ‘spooks’ or ideological abstractions and metaphysical ideals — humanity, morality, freedom, rights, society, law and the state — which are a hangover from religion and yet which continue to haunt us, the ego is the only concrete reality, the only tangible thing. But what does Stirner actually mean by the ego? It is a mistake to simply conflate this with ‘the individual’, the figure of liberal and libertarian discourse, as so often commentaries on Stirner have done. The ego is a much more fluid concept that evades all such categorisations and ‘fixed ideas’. As a matter of fact, we could say that the ego is a kind of radical non-identity that cannot be pinned down to any form of subjectivity or determined by any essential characteristics. The ego is always changing, mutable, in flux — it is a process of self-becoming and self-creation rather than a stable identity. As Stirner says, ‘no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated my essence exhausts me; they are only names’. Indeed, rather than an identity at all, the ego is better thought of as a singularity. A more precise translation of the ego (der Einzige) in Stirner would be the ‘Unique One’. The subject is anarchic in an ontological sense — that is, without a stable foundation, pre-determined set of interests or rational telos. The self refuses any kind of ‘calling’ — whether that of freedom, morality, rationality, or even the recognition of his own ‘inner self’. This is why Stirner’s notion of egoism has no truck whatsoever with any kind of ‘identity politics’ — whether of majorities or minorities, whether of the included or the excluded — because the projection of an identity only confines the unique one to a pre-determined idea that imposes certain norms of behaviour and conduct, that requires living up to a certain ideal. Identity politics is the attempt to compress the unique one into fictional generalities that supposedly represent his essence but which only mutilate his difference.

Stirner’s entire political, ethical, and philosophical project is to free the unique one from obeisance to such abstractions. It is to encourage us to view the world, and ourselves, from our own perspective and to refuse to be enthralled to ‘fixed ideas’ and essentialist concepts of all kinds, in other words, the ideas and ways of living that we have simply inherited from tradition. In adopting the alternative gaze of the Unique One, everything appears as radically undetermined. The world opens up to us. The self becomes a blank canvas waiting to be recreated. 

This new way of approaching the world has important ethical and political consequences. If the world becomes contingent and open ended, this means that action can no longer be founded on absolute, universal moral and rational criteria; we come to recognise that these are just as illusory as the religious superstitions they replaced. However, in the absence of these predetermined coordinates, we are forced to make independent ethical decisions. If we no longer look to institutions like the state or to commonalities like the nation, we have the means of inventing our own autonomous forms of political organisation and community (Stirner’s paradoxical notion of the ‘union of egoists’ is one such possibility). We now no longer associate with others out of obligation or compulsion, but because it brings us joy or enhances our sense of self. If we find the language of rights and even freedom now obscure and unsatisfactory, we can deploy an alternative language of ‘ownness’ which allows us to determine our own individual path of freedom, as unique as the one who treads it.

The insurrection should therefore be seen as a kind of political and ethical experimentation that proceeds from the self and its possibilities. It is an invitation to practice new forms of self-determined modes of interaction and association, new ways of being that are indifferent to power. Anarchists have provided many such examples of this, from everyday practices such as squatting to occupations of public places and the conscious creation of alternative communities. Central to such experiments is an insurrection in the present moment, in the here and now, rather than pinning ones hopes on the great revolutionary Event. Stirner teaches us that all politics is micro-politics, that social and political change starts with changing oneself and unbinding oneself from power and a transformation of one’s ethical relations with others. As the German anarchist Gustav Landauer, very much inspired by Stirner, once put it, ‘The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by people creating new social relationships, ie., by people relating to one another differently.’

De Can Standke. Título original: Creatio ex Nihilo del 15 de noviembre del 2020. Traducido al español por Diego Avila

Increíblemente simple parece
Y no es de una sola ocurrencia
No es de valor, ni raro
Cuanto más se mira – no está ahí

Un par de ojos no resuelven
Lo que tuvo que evolucionar
Un cáncer instalado en la carne

Entra en el nido de una red secreta tejida
Eres consciente de que está ahí
Las huellas aún frescas

Un ideal desconocido, una causa asolada
Una observación sin valor, un caballo muerto y vencido
Y todo lo que queda correrá

Deja de intentarlo
Se ha ido

Escrito por Josef Pritchard. Título original: An Arch Why, del 20 de noviembre del 2020. Traducido al español por Diego Avila.

Cuando el martillo cae, y el clavo
se clava profundamente en la vena, atravesando
los que tienen las manos en el cielo, un furioso
flujo de protesta se agita, y la grieta de la presa
promete el polvo de un imperio. Los tiranos temen,

mientras el corazón reclama la sangre caída
la suya propia, nunca más debida ni más robada,
nunca será el rojo en el lienzo de la escena del crimen,
para no ser nunca más un puño de navaja. La antorcha
bajo el fuego de un pueblo dividido

de mil maneras. Huerto ahora desierto una vez huerto
y así sucesivamente. La majestuosidad como cráter de presa siente
todo el peso de la liberación contra su bastón.
Un alma condenada, en aguas turbulentas
encuentra la culpa.

No es anarquía cuando el río se enfurece
la tierra arrasada
y las raíces hambrientas
lo llaman vida y vidas recordadas.

Dersim Massacre is the name given to the events that took place in Dersim between 1937-1938 due to the disagreements between the central Turkish government and Kurdish tribes in Dersim regarding the dominance of the region. The city’s current name, whose former name was Dersim, is Tunceli. In the process of the massacre, exile, and genocide that started with the “Tunceli Law” enacted on December 25, 1935, the name of Dersim was changed to “Tunceli” on January 4, 1936. Tunceli was the State’s name for the massacre and genocidal operation that would be launched about a year later, referring to the rhetoric “The iron (tunç, bronze in Turkish) hand of the state will be felt upon Dersim.” Massacre in Dersim continued intensely until the end of 1938. With the execution of Seyyid Rıza and his friends between 15-18 November 1938, the massacre was actually ended, but the State’s aggression continued intermittently throughout 1939. Seventy-two thousand people were directly or indirectly affected by the massacre. The Dersim Massacre, carried out by the illegitimate Turkish State, which began to build a “nation-state” with the proclamation of the Republic in 1923, also had the aim of cultural genocide, considering adults were forced to relocate and the female children of those murdered were adopted.

Dersim is a region with different characteristics in terms of its ethnic identity and religious beliefs. Because of this dissimilarity, it has been faced with the politics of destruction for hundreds of years. Despite all the central authority initiatives of the State in the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the first periods of the Republic, the relative autonomy of Dersim continued. Calling events that took place in Dersim a rebellion only would be beneficial to Kemalism, the founding ideology of Turkey, because to say that there was a rebellion only would lead to a cover-up of the massacre and the genocidal policies that have continued for years under today’s flawed so-called liberal law. Because people were already exposed to very difficult conditions under the pressure of the central authority. When the Turkish army assembled an operation, the people were armed to protect themselves. Officially, the thesis is defended that there was a rebellion and that the State suppressed it. Because in order to legitimize an operation in which 50 thousand people were killed, a “rebellion” had to be used by the criminal State.

Essentially, the Turkish army was designed to protect the country from any element that propagates non-Turkish ethnic identities. Shaking the founding values ​​of the Turkish Republic may lead to the awakening of uniform-minded Turks and the disintegration of the country. Given that the Turkish people and the State have the Sevres syndrome, it is possible to say that everyone is a bomb ready to explode and that the minorities were the most affected.

Kurdish leaders were executed by the  Independence Tribunal, inspired by the court with extraordinary powers established in France in 1793. These courts were initially established to try “espionage,” “debauchery,” “reign supporters,” rebels, and mostly deserters. In later periods they implemented their fascist ideas “to maintain peace” and target potential insurgents by targeting dissident persons, and trying them in state courts wherein they had no opportunity to defend themselves ( often these decisions were executions) — a short example of how the law is the legitimation of state ideology.

We have seen what the somehow self-governing Dersim suffered in the motherland where they have lived for thousands of years. It is obvious how far the State can go by using its territorial integrity as an excuse; it has designed its laws and founding values ​​to hide and legitimize these devilish events even after a hundred years. Another heartbreaking thing I can say in light of the Dersim massacre is that the world today sees Erdogan as a dictator, but the main opposition party is the CHP, which is the party of Atatürk, who carried out these massacres. A good future cannot be built in this country without opposing Kemalism, which is the founding values ​​and ideology of the criminal State.

For the 13th installment of The Enragés, host Joel Williamson met with William Gillis to discuss Will’s article titled “Bad People: Irredeemable Individuals & Structural Incentives.”

William Gillis is a second-generation anarchist, lapsed physicist, and transhumanist, who has been interested in the egalitarian potential of markets since 2003. Will is the former Lead coordinator at C4SS whose writing can be found at the Center as well as humaniterations.net.

To get early access to episodes like this one, bonus content, and more, support C4SS on Patreon today!

American Incompetence, not Afghan Corruption: A Post-Mortem of Good Intentions

Like most children in Palestine, many of the first foreigners I met were well-intentioned volunteers and academics working for, and funded by, international non-profits and institutions. I idolized these young, lively, and worldly supporters of the Palestinian cause throughout my childhood. However, with adolescence comes cynicism. Despite being at least a decade younger, my friends and I could easily recognize the disorganization and ineffectiveness permeating many of these organizations. And while my view of the volunteers as individuals started to shift, the structural issues stemming from what we dubbed “The NGO culture” — the stifling of local grassroots efforts and long-term solutions by transient initiatives led by college students on a semester off — were by far the most worrying. Fortunately, over time the trickle of criticisms broke through into global discourse. By the late 2000s, terms like “white savior industrial complex,” “voluntourism,” and “trauma porn” were prevalent even in mainstream publications.

One can easily argue that this awareness of the potentially problematic aspects of non-profit work remains prevalent today. Anecdotally, during my graduate studies in the US, I became involved with a non-profit aiming at helping individuals experiencing displacement. I was elated to discover that cooperation with community members and grass-root initiatives, regular reflections, and careful considerations regarding the consequences were minimum requirements for a program even to be considered. When a university program we collaborated with wanted to send sophomores to refugee camps in Lesbos to hold “art therapy” classes for refugee children, our board turned down the offer unanimously. When a representative of another NGO pitched a program sending college students to volunteer as kids’ soccer coaches in “refugee camps in Africa” (one would-be volunteer admitted to never having played soccer), we simply never called back.

Moreover, even big traditional institutions began to tread more carefully. Universities were wary of getting involved with voluntourism programs. A genuine effort was sometimes made to include stakeholders in the decision-making processes. And many grants began to require reflections and post-mortem evaluations as conditions for funding.

Considering the above, the discourse surrounding recent events in Afghanistan is especially perplexing on the face of it. The very week after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, most major US news networks, including PBS, NBC, and CBS, published videos and headlines quoting John Soko — the Obama appointed Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction — on how the rampant “endemic corruption” in Afghani institutions was a major driving force behind the downfall of the US-supported government. Still, one might have expected the major media networks to uphold the patriotic American mythos. What is truly surprising is the parroting of these talking points in “progressive” circles.

While researching a podcast series on Afghanistan, my team and I have interviewed half a dozen non-profit staffers and academics that worked in Afghanistan during the 20 years of the American occupation of the country. When asked what might explain the fragility of US-supported institutions and programs in Afghanistan, without fail, each and every interviewee paraphrased John Soko’s opinion. The absurd notion that provincial attitudes by Afghans led to the collapse of modern, American-designed, programs somehow became an accepted truth, and not one dissenting voice could be found.

One interview with academics from a renowned American university especially stood out to me. And while it is an interesting case study, I believe this initiative embodies many of the issues common in these types of programs. These academics were instrumental in organizing the extraction of close to 100 Afghans they collaborated with on a USAID-funded program. The initiative between the University of Kabul and the American university in question aimed to improve the agricultural yields of particular plants. The interviewees discussed in length the creation of a central database on the University of Kabul servers and the Masters’ students their program was supporting. The students selected were over 80% women as the academics felt that the gender ratio was too imbalanced in the Afghan team (the program was later marketed as gender-transformative). After the Taliban took over Kabul, the servers had to be wiped to protect the anonymity of the individuals involved. The interviewees lamented that this “necessary research” is now lost. The Afghan refugees are currently trying to register in a European university as their degree from Kabul is not internationally accredited. The program’s total cost was in the tens of millions of USD.

While one applauds the commitment to the safety of the Afghan colleagues, it is hard not to question the logic behind some critical decisions made during the over five-year run of this program. Afghanistan is notoriously decentralized, and UN think-tanks repeatedly emphasized that only local community-driven initiatives can succeed. Moreover, during the American occupation, online access peaked at around 13% and was mostly restricted to major cities using foreign infrastructure. Reading through the material released by the program, it is unclear how local farmers would be able to access or benefit from the centralized online database. The data collection would have been done by sending the Afghan staff (mostly women) from Kabul to farms all around Afghanistan multiple times a year. Finally, does a Ph.D. in Biology qualify one to lead a “gender-transformative” program?

After the interviewees asserted that corruption was the reason American initiatives in Afghanistan will not be sustained (how corruption relates to this specific program remained unclear), I pressed them on what they could have done to ensure this initiative has a lasting impact. The response was a deafening silence, even three months after termination, and despite giving dozens of interviews about their role in the rescue of their colleagues, a team of distinguished academics did not meet to do a post-mortem or reflect on the five-year multi-million dollar program.

The lessons learned through years of reflection on aid efforts in other communities were ignored in Afghanistan, and we are all reaping the bitter fruits. We must challenge the propaganda and assert that American incompetence, not Afghan corruption, is the reason for over twenty years of progress being unraveled in less than a month. 

I wanted to thank Cory Massimino for inviting me to submit a few thoughts on the topic of this important C4SS MES exploring the interrelationships between anarchism and egoism. Given the broad areas highlighted for conversation, I’d like to focus briefly on these two topics:

1. What does egoism have to say about intersectional approaches in which oppression is understood as mutually interlocking phenomena, like the bars of a birdcage?
2. Does egoism ignore the insights offered by the dialectical methodology usually associated with Hegel and Marx? Or are John Welsh and Chris Matthew Sciabarra (who respectively interpret Stirner and Rand through dialectical lenses) on to something?

The short answers to these questions are “Much”, “No”, and “Yes.” But this requires some elucidation. 

My comments here are an extension of my reconstruction of Ayn Rand’s legacy as a dialectical project (see especially my book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical [Sciabarra (1995) 2013]). For Rand, the concept of “egoism” can never be disconnected from the larger context in which it must be embedded so as to give it transformative meaning. 

The Dialectical Rand

First, let me stress what it means to be dialectical. Dialectics is the art of context-keeping. As such, one of its core methodological principles is that one cannot examine any fact, event, issue, or problem by neglecting its place in a larger systemic context examined across time. Every fact, event, issue, or problem is constituted by a cluster of relations—that is, its connections to other facts, events, issues, or problems. These connections cannot be ignored without doing irreparable damage to our ability to grapple with and/or resolve the issues or problems at hand. Tracing relations is key to understanding how a fact, event, issue, or problem came to be what it is—while providing a necessary grasp of what it can be, might be, or ought to be. 

Indeed, it is with the “ought” that the moral enterprise is concerned. But the ought is inextricably connected to what is; there can be no sundering of the relationship between values and facts. And no project for radical social change can move forth without paying attention to the real, objective conditions that exist. 

It is with a deep regard for those real, objective conditions that Rand grounds her ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, ethical, and political principles. One can reject her conclusions and still acknowledge the dialectical intentions at work as she crafted her integrated philosophic worldview. 

A Dialectical Egoism

In the realm of ethics, Rand’s approach rests on a dialectical core. The dialectical notion of relation is key here. Her “objective” approach seeks to resolve the tension between the “classical objectivist” view on the one hand (a view that Rand re-characterized as “intrinsicism”) and the “subjectivist” view on the other hand. For Rand, value is not something intrinsic to reality, not something to be apprehended out there; nor is it something intrinsic to consciousness, with no relationship to the facts of reality. The fundamental fact that every organism faces is the alternative of existence and nonexistence. For human beings, it spells the difference between life and death. But even here, Rand does not put forth a survivalist ethics. She rejects the view that human beings should aim for “a momentary or merely physical survival” (Rand 1964, 24). She sees moral values as part and parcel of the project of human flourishing. Or as Jack London once put it: “The function of man is to live, not to exist” (see Burton 2021). For Rand, “to live” is to flourish, to live up to one’s highest potential in a way that neither sacrifices oneself to others nor others to oneself. That kind of “sacrifice” is at the base of all master-slave relationships, in Rand’s view—a view echoed by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche.

Rand is keenly aware that people tacitly accept and practice cultural mores that typically divide them into reciprocally dependent masters and slaves of one sort or another. Her aim is to transcend this lethal dualism by emphasizing that values emerge from the relation between existence and consciousness. For Rand, value is a relation. Values are agent-relative; they cannot be separated from the valuer and the valuer’s purposes.

In The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, Rand (1964), like dialectical thinkers before her, addressed seemingly opposed perspectives, in an attempt to identify their common root, thus showing them to be false alternatives. She does this throughout her philosophic critique, in her oppositions to the dichotomies of mind and body, the ideal and the material, the analytic and the synthetic, reason and emotion, the rational and the empirical, the moral and the practical, and so forth. (Rand’s intellectual protégé, psychologist Nathaniel Branden [1986] 1993, 241), would later extend this to an analysis of the culturally-induced dualism of gender categories.) Within ethics, Rand repudiates the false alternative of “conventional selfishness”, which entails the sacrifice of others to self, and “conventional altruism”, which entails the sacrifice of self to others. For Rand, these conventional moral codes share the implicit premise that human beings should be treated as sacrificial animals.

Some of Rand’s critics have dismissed her views as solipsistic or atomistic, focusing on some of her infamous quips: “Man is a contractual animal” (Rand 1972, 127). Or “there is no such entity as ‘society’” (Rand 1964, 92). As a polemicist, Rand was fond of triggering people with in-your-face, over-the-top comments such as these. But they are distortions of her larger, more enriched perspective.

First, we can’t drop historical context. Rand was educated under the Soviets (see Sciabarra and Solovyev 2021) — from whom she learned a dialectical approach to social analysis. She came to America during a time when the “oversocialized conception of man” (as sociologist Dennis Wrong [1961] characterized it) was in vogue. During this period, the “social” became a euphemism for the subordination of the individual, the dissolving of the unique human personality into an undifferentiated mass. As a neo-Aristotelian, Rand rejected both that oversocialized conception and the atomistic “reified abstraction” of “economic man” as false alternatives. She argues that it is precisely because we are social beings that we require a certain constellation of social relationships that will enable us to act efficaciously and creatively, to exchange the products of our efforts, and to cooperate in free association with one another. 

That the individual is inescapably a part of a cluster of relationships was best summarized by Nathaniel Branden (1980, 61):

“There are a thousand respects in which we are not alone. … As human beings, we are linked to all other members of the human community. As living beings, we are linked to all other forms of life. As inhabitants of the universe, we are linked to everything that exists. We stand within an endless network of relationships. Separation and connectedness are polarities, with each entailing the other.”

Rand and Branden both argued that since our growth, creativity, and our very capacity to flourish are dependent upon a certain systemic and existential context, it is also true that the absence of this context will necessarily lead to a set of social practices that are inimical to human flourishing — and survival. 

Rand, Frye, and Oppression

Keeping these insights in mind, we can easily see how Rand’s approach would have coalesced nicely with the themes presented by Marilyn Frye in her essay “Oppression” (from her book, The Politics of Reality — a more Rand-friendly title would be hard to come by!). Frye (1983) proposed an illuminating analogy to the ‘birdcage’ in helping us to understand the dialectically interconnected aspects of what it means to be oppressed. She writes:

“If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in the moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.” (4–5)

In Russian Radical, I present a reconstruction of Rand’s understanding of social relations as filtered through a trilevel model by which to grasp the dynamics of power — and the requirements of freedom.

In this trilevel model, social relations are examined by Rand on three distinct levels of generality. These levels — the personal, the cultural, and the structural — can only be abstracted and isolated for the purposes of analysis, but never reified as wholes unto themselves. They are preconditions and effects of one another. On Level 1 (L1), the personal, Rand analyzes relations of power from the vantage point of the individual’s ethical and “psycho-epistemological” practices, or implicit (tacit) methods of awareness. On Level 2 (L2), the cultural level of analysis, relations of power from the vantage point of language, pedagogy, education, aesthetics, and ideology are the focal point. On Level 3 (L3), the structural level of analysis, relations of power are examined from the vantage point of political and economic structures, processes, and institutions. 

One would think from this model that the “ethical” is a purely L1 relationship. But Rand makes it clear that an exclusive focus on L1, without exploring its implications as filtered through L2 and L3 in their reciprocal connections, is to commit the fallacy of the frozen abstraction. In this context, this fallacy consists of substituting one particular level of analysis for the wider abstract class (or whole) to which it belongs. Indeed, relations of power have a deleterious impact on the individual’s moral life, but this impact is a reciprocally related cause and effect of each of the other levels — and all the levels in the totality of their interrelationships. Relations of power are manifested on and perpetuated by personal, cultural, and structural dynamics. They are the ‘birdcage’ if you will. And it is only by challenging and changing these dynamics across all their manifested modalities that it becomes possible for human beings to begin dismantling the cage, so as to take flight, free as birds.

Egoism and Anarchism

I should point out that while Rand the “egoist” rejected anarchism, advocating a voluntarily financed government as a means of transcending the ‘false alternative’ of anarchism versus statism, her view of government is as much of an ahistorical Weberian Ideal Type as is her conception of “capitalism: the unknown ideal” — quite different from “capitalism: the known reality.” It’s not that Rand was unaware of that known reality; it’s that the social system she found most conducive to human flourishing has simply never existed. One may reject Rand’s particular arguments and even her worldview and still appreciate the dialectical analytical models with which she operated to explore the broader context — the personal, cultural, and structural interrelationships — so crucial to our understanding of human freedom and flourishing.

Human Benevolence

In conclusion, it should be noted that there is nothing in Rand’s work that would oppose communitarian mutual aid. I argue in Chapter 13 of Russian Radical that “The Communitarian Impulse” is a profoundly important outgrowth of Rand’s moral vision. In a passage highlighted in this last chapter of my book, Rand portrays, in a single instant of time, her ideal of the human community. In her novel, The Fountainhead, architect Howard Roark is on trial for having destroyed a public housing project. As he prepares for his self-defense, he stands before his peers. Rand ([1943] 1993) writes:

“He stood by the steps of the witness stand. The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear. The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, in loneliness, a man thinks of the bright words he could have said, but had not found, and hates those who robbed him of his courage. The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one’s own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name —fear — need — dependence — hatred? Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd — and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone’s approval? — does it matter? — am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free — free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room.” (678–79) 

Ultimately, it is this exalted moment of human benevolence that Rand’s project seeks to universalize.

References

Branden, Nathaniel. 1980. The Psychology of Romantic Love. New York: Bantam.

———. [1986] 1993. The Art of Self-Discovery. New York: Bantam.

Burton, Jamie. 2021. Where M’s touching tribute to James Bond at the end of No Time to Die originates from. Newsweek (9 October). Online at: https://www.newsweek.com/m-quote-james-bond-no-time-die-ending-1634622. 

Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Berkeley: Crossing Press.

Rand, Ayn. [1943] 1993. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.

———. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New York: New American Library.

———. 1972. A nation’s unity, part two. The Ayn Rand Letter 2, no. 2 (23 October). In The Ayn Rand Letter, Volume I-IV (1971–1976). Palo Alto, California: Palo Alto Book Service.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. [1995] 2013. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew and Pavel Solovyev. 2021. The Rand transcript revealed. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 21, no. 2 (December): 141–229. Online at: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/ayn-rand/article/21/2/141/287740/The-Rand-Transcript-Revealed.

Wrong, Dennis. 1961. The oversocialized conception of man in modern sociology. American Sociological Review 26 (April): 182–93.

Okumak üzere olduğunuz makale, Alex Aragona tarafından kaleme alınmış. 16 Temmuz 2021 tarihinde “There Are No “Anarchist Systems” without Anarchist Fundamentals” başlığı altında yayınlanmıştır.

Anarşi ve Anarşizm hakkındaki tartışmalar, çoğu zaman, ekonomik ya da politik yapıları organize etmenin rekabetçi yollarını düşünmek üzerine olmaya meyilli. Bu yalnızca skeptikler ya da kinizm savunucuları ortadayken gerçekleşmemekle beraber samimi bir şekilde devletsiz bir gelecek isteyen insanların düştüğü bir tuzak olabilir. Bunu düşünerek at arabasında arabayı atın önüne koyuyorsunuz. İster birini anarşist düşünceyle tanıştırmaya çalışıyor olun, ister kendi entelektüel yolculuğunuzu yapıyor olun, anarşiyi önce sistemler ve yapılar açısından düşünmek birçok nedenden dolayı yanlış bir başlangıçtır. Bunu yapmak temel ilkelerin kaçırılmasına yol açabilir.

İstenmeden de olsa bu, anarşist fikirleri (ve anarşist düşünce tarihini) mevcut organizasyon biçimlerine yalnızca bir alternatif olarak sunar. Bu şekilde, anarşizmin özünde, kendi yaşamlarımızın ve tüm insanlığın değerliliğini anlamakla başlayan, insanlar arasındaki etkileşimlerin ve dinamiklerin (hiyerarşi, otorite gibi) geçerliliğinin nasıl değerlendirilmesi gerektiğini anlamakla başlayan temel bir fikir ve değerler dizisi olduğu gerçeği atlanır.

Anarşistler ve anarşizmi öğrenenler, anarşist düşüncenin iskeleti sayılabilecek temellere öncelik vermeli ve bu ilkeler bir başlangıç noktası olarak alınmalıdır. Bu tür temeller hemen hemen her zaman basit bir şekilde kişinin genel olarak hiyerarşileri ve gücü nasıl değerlendirdiğine ve bu güçlerin hangilerinin (eğer varsa) mazur görülebileceğine bir ışık tutar. Güç kendini meşrulaştıramıyorsa var olmamalıdır. Başka bir deyişle, anarşist -hangi sosyal veya ekonomik sorun söz konusu fark etmeksizin- şu yollardan eleştirel bir bakış açısıyla yaklaşmalıdır: 1) Hiyerarşileri ve güç dinamiklerini anlamak ve tanımlamak, 2) Söz konusu hiyerarşi ve dinamiğin kendini meşrulaştırıp meşrulaştıramayacağını değerlendirmek ve 3) Bundan negatif sonuç alınırsa feshedilmesini istemek.

İlk iki madde arasında dolaşmak nispeten kolaydır – aslında, anarşist geleneğin birçok alanının gurur verici bir yanı, insanlığın çoğunun, benzer türden ortak bir temelle, etkileşimleri ve dinamikleri adil veya adaletsiz olarak yargılama kapasitesine sahip olduğu hükmüdür. Örneğin, herkes, bir ebeveynin veya vasinin üç yaşındaki bir çocuğu trafiğe atılmasın diye tutmasının, yetki ve güç kullanımının haklı bir yolu olduğunu kabul eder, halkın bir sezgisidir bu. Ancak bir ebeveynin yetişkin çocuklarından birini yere bir içecek döktüğü için küspe gibi dövdüğünü ve ardından bunu “kendi çocukları” olduğu için yapabileceklerini iddia eden de aynı sezgidir, fakat bu meşrulaştırılamayacak bir yetki uygulamasıdır ve ortadaki otorite feshedilmelidir. Nihayetinde, eğer herhangi bir otorite veya dinamik meşru kabul edilirse -ebeveynin üç yaşındaki çocuğunu tutması gibi- anarşistin görevi, meşru ve meşru olmayan kuvvetin koşullarını ve kişinin aradaki sınırları ne zaman aştığını düşünmektir.

Üçüncü madde biraz daha aldatıcı ve elbette, sadece bir otoritenin dağıtılması gerektiği ifadesini sunmakla bitmiyor. Her sosyal ve ekonomik ayarlama, kurum ve benzeri sahip olmadığınız bir otoriteden kurtulmak, az önceki düşünce deneyindeki kötü ebeveyn konusu kadar basit değildir. Ve birçokları, modern toplumda bize sunulan ve zevk alınan şeylerin çoğunun adil olmayan ve hatta derinden adaletsiz yollarla yapıldığını savunacaktır. Eğer durum buysa ve diyelim ki bir devletin dağıtılması gerekiyorsa, anarşist, böyle bir düzenleme, kurum ve dinamik tarafından sağlanan arzu edilen etkileri veya eylemleri anlamakla, daha sonra da gerekçelendirilebilecek bireyler arasında gönüllü eylemler yoluyla oluşturulan düzenlemelerde ve yapılarda bunların nasıl devam ettirilebileceğini anlamakla görevlidir.

Bu tür temel ilkelerden yola çıkmak, makroekonomik ve makro-toplumsal gözlemler üzerine daha karmaşık anarşist (ya da piyasa temelli) çalışmaları incelemeyi ve bunlarla boğuşmayı çok daha anlaşılır ve tutarlı hale getirir. Aslında, anarşizmin servis edildiği bazı açılarda anarşizmin, sadece bir devlet yokken (sanki anarşizmin tüm olayı buymuş gibi) sosyal ve ekonomik çerçeveler için bir tür cetvelle çizilmiş basit bir taslak olarak görünmesine yol açan şey bu ilkelerin yokluğudur.

Bir iş sahibi ile işe alınan yardımcı arasında, ödenmesi gereken bir ücret ve haftalık çalışma saatlerini öngören bir sözleşme düşünün. Pek çok piyasa anarşisti, bu tür bir düzenlemeyi belirli koşullarda kabul edilebilir hatta tercih edilebilir görebilir, fakat kalan koşullarda sorgulanabilir ve belki de rahatsız edici derecede sömürücü, aynı zamanda modern kapitalist toplumda üretim ve ticaret dinamikleriyle (efendiler ve ücretlileri) ilgili daha büyük sorunlara bir örnek olarak hizmet ediyor olarak görebilir. Bazılarının kafaları bunun mantıksal olarak nasıl tutarlı olabileceği konusunda karışabilir ve kendilerini piyasa anarşistlerinin kafalarının karıştığı ve nihayetinde olgunlaşmamış ütopyacılar olduklarını dile getirirken bulurlar. Gerçekte, bu yazıda tartışılan anarşist temelleri anlamadan bu duruşlardan herhangi birinde gerçekten neler olup bittiğini anlamak son derece zor olacaktır. Kişi, şu veya bu sözleşmenin tam olarak neden meşru olup olmadığını veya gönüllü bir sözleşmenin meşruluğunun nasıl sorgulanabileceğini çözümleyebilecek birçok farklı soru işaretlerine ve yollara yönelir. Sadece anarşist temellerden yola çıkarak, gerçekten serbest bir piyasa ortamında bir istihdam düzenlemesi ve bir dinamiğin nasıl göründüğü belliyken, büyük resimde bir devlet-kapitalist şirketokrasi bağlamında başka bir şey olduğunu anlamaya götüren bir düşünce çerçevesi oluşturulabilir.

Bu anarşist temeller, çoğu zaman, bireylerin minimum kısıtlama altında kendi istedikleri yolda ilerleyebilmeleri için maksimum fırsata erişebilecekleri nokta olarak gösterilir. Bir kişi (en azından ben kesinlikle öyleyim) anarşist temellerin insanın en doğal eğilimleriyle uyumlu olduğunu söyleyebilecek kadar cesur olabilir, bunlar: yaratıcılık, problem çözme, topluluk duygusu, iş birliği, meraklılık ve arzu, adalet ve adil olmak.

Nihayetinde bu temeller, anarşist düşünce için başlangıç noktalarıdır. Bugün sistemlerimizde var olan devasa şirketler olmadan uygun fiyatlı ayakkabıların misal nasıl üretilebileceği; grup kararı almayı gerektirecek ne tür yapılar var ve bu kararların neye uygulanacağı ya da uygulanmayacağı; tüm bu tartışmalar anarşist temellerden sonra gelir. Anarşist temeller olmadan, tartışma söz konusu olduğunda yüzeysel bir anarşi konseptine sahip olursunuz. Bu basit konsept, yalnızca vergilendirme gibi yüzeysel meseleler söz konusu olduğunda, devletlerin olumsuzluğunu dile getirme kapasitesine sahiptir.

Açık olmak gerekirse, evet, kesinlikle anarşist düşüncenin önemli bir yönü mevcut sistemlere ve düzenlemelere yönelik keskin eleştirilerdir, ancak bu, mevcut düzenlemelerin birçoğunun neden insan onuruna ve adalete bir hakaret olduğunu açıklamadan bir şey yapılmış sayılmaz. Önerdiğimiz alternatif düzenlemeleri ve sistemleri hangi temel eğilim ve ilkelere dayandırmalıyız sorusuna cevap vermeden bir şey yapılmış sayılmaz. Çekiçle yapabileceğin tek şey bir şeyleri kırmaksa, onu nasıl kullanacağını bilmiyorsun demektir.

What I’ve said so far presents a dilemma for how anarchists should approach morality.

If my first post is correct, we can’t ignore Stirner’s challenge. A morality that refuses to answer the amoralist requires systemic self-sacrifice with nothing in exchange. Such moral cannibalism would differ from other forms of domination only in its pervasiveness.

Yet if my second post is also correct, we can’t follow Stirner and ditch morality. Spelling out the anarchist vision requires irreducibly moral concepts, and a commitment to that vision will only be stable with moral motivation.

To find a way around those pitfalls, it’s instructive to consider something Stirner says on the first page of The Unique One & Its Property. After rejecting the call to make the cause of truth or love his own, Stirner considers the reply that God makes these causes His own. Stirner retorts that God pursuing these causes as His own is quite different from any of us pursuing those same causes as our own. This is because God is said to be love and to be truth. Thus, when He pursues the cause of truth or love, God is not pursuing an alien cause but His own.

I’d like to consider a question Stirner was not bold enough to ask. Might we be like God?

Your Authority

One way that the analogy can’t work is literal identification of any given person with moral values. Obviously, you are not identical with justice, courage, benevolence, or any other virtue. Nonetheless, your cause might include the cause of these virtues in a subtler way.

To get at that subtler connection, let’s step back and observe something about pursuing your own interests. 

Suppose you’re visiting a friend who lives in Decatur, GA. You mistakenly believe that Decatur is just west of Atlanta, but it’s actually to the east. After flying in, you board public transit to reach your friend. You go westbound, but you should have gone eastbound.

But by what authority “should” you have gone eastbound? 

Well, yours. Your cause involved getting to Decatur, and going westbound frustrated that cause rather than promoting it. If someone corrects you, they do so based on what you were already trying to do.

What I want to highlight about this is that by choosing, your will imposes commands upon itself. Even if you want to go westbound, you should not, because that westbound trip would be mistakenly made in service of a more fundamental activity that requires you go eastbound.

In this case, your will requires going eastbound as an instrumental means – if you want to get to Decatur, then you should go eastbound because that’s the quickest way to get there. However, since it’s merely an instrumental means, the command to go eastbound can be overridden when there’s a better way that involves going westbound. (Perhaps someone with a car is waiting for you there.)

But sometimes your will is not so flexible. Say that you set out to play “Never Meant” by American Football on guitar, but instead play something that sounds like “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Here there is no possible circumstance where playing those notes instead is a better way to play “Never Meant.”

That is because playing the right notes in the right order for the right amount of time is a constitutive means to playing the song, not an instrumental means. Playing the right notes and such is part of what it means to play the song, and so if you are to play it at all, you must play it that way.

Thus, having any cause at all necessarily makes demands of you. Sometimes these demands are quite strict.

There is no authority but yourself, but this does not mean there is no authority. It does not even mean that there is no authority to which you must bow. It means exactly what it says: your own authority is the one to which you must bow.

Your Cause

Perhaps the Stirnerite can concede that your cause imposes limits on itself in the way I’ve spelled out. But so far, those limits have been minimal: if you want to get to Decatur from Atlanta, you need to go east. To play a song, that’s the song you have to play. This doesn’t really have the sound of morality.

However, those examples were just to establish the general point that we take actions in the service of prior projects, and the aims of those prior projects have authority over those lesser actions. If there were some grand project in service of which you took all your other actions, that project could regulate what you do in a way that would be recognizably moral.

In other words, the task here is to figure out just what your cause really is.

On a first pass, the thing that would best qualify for a maximally grand project is “trying to live a good life.” Everything you do is done within your life, and when assessing whether other large projects are worth it, they are assessed by the mark they might leave on your life as a whole.

Much of what matters for “living a good life” is driven by a pursuit of excellence that might not sound paradigmatically “moral.” “Should I go to college?,” you ask yourself. “Yes: I want to be a surgeon, and that requires going to medical school, which requires going to college.” Or perhaps “No: I want to start a business. That doesn’t require a degree, and the time, money, and energy that a degree requires might hold me back.”

But stepping back further, the reason you want to be a surgeon might be that you want to make your money healing others, and this might come from the aim of being a benevolent person. The reason you want to start your own business might be the aim of being an industrious person.

There might be other reasons, of course, but they will often lead to the same place: pursuing a life that can be described in a particular way. 

When you think of the lives you revere, these will frequently be persons you can describe with words like honest, kind, industrious, benevolent, wise, courageous, friendly, and just. In other words, you think of lives that are virtuous.

We seek lives we can take pride in, and thus lives with the virtues we revere in others. And we don’t just want these terms applied to us, we want them to be true about us. 

Once we have the project of living a good life in view, with its ancillary projects of pursuing the various virtues, our authority places significant demands upon us. If you are to be a just person, you must be a person who acts based on what justice requires. Thus, when justice demands you not to injure another person, you demand of yourself not to injure that person.

Morality is not an external force binding your will from the outside. It is the bounds of your will itself.

A Moralist Egoism

This is why I’ve taken pains to refer to the Stirnerite position as one of “amoralist egoism,” rather than just “egoism” simpliciter. The alternative I am offering here is a kind of egoism, too: a moralist egoism.

A moralist egoism solves both problems in my previous posts. It requires no self-sacrifice, just a proper understanding of self-interest, so it is not a system a moral cannibalism. Since the pursuit of our cause makes real moral demands of us, we have moral order, and with it a stable commitment to anarchism.

But as soon as this moralist egoism is on the table, there are serious objections both to its status as a moralism and as an egoism.

Among the objections from unconvinced moralists is that it reduces to a perverse sort of “moral narcissism.” If your reason for helping another person is to stock up on virtue points, it doesn’t seem like you’re really all that benevolent. The truly benevolent person would act on the fact that another person is in need, not their own self-image.

This is true as far as it goes – but once we go that far, we can also see the answer to this objection.

The person who does as virtue requires out of moral narcissism, this objection tells us, is not really virtuous. So, the person who seeks to be virtuous will also seek to cultivate the right motivations, acting first on the pursuit of virtue until by habituation they respond directly to the situation itself.

The properly habituated person is still acting on behalf of their own cause, though: they have shifted their psychology to better pursue their cause. The fact that they are not, in the moment, consciously thinking about the fact that their own cause is the ultimate justification of their action does not mean that it is not the ultimate justification. They just refuse to let this thought become fixed in a way that blocks them from achieving their cause.

Unconvinced egoists will feel that there’s been a slight of hand here. Yes, if your cause is structured by this grand project of “living a good life,” construed in this virtue-ethical way, then sure, you get an egoism that looks very much like moralism. But individuals are unique, and it seems a bit of a leap to say that this holds in any objective way.

One way of answering this challenge might be to follow Aristotelians and say that something about human nature structures our interests in a way that requires virtue. Another might be to follow Kantians and say that there is something about the structure of agency itself that means only certain sorts of ends can be coherently willed.

I suspect something is right about both those answers. However, I’m not going to make either case here.

That’s because the basic challenge here can be answered with much tamer claims.

First, note that objectivity is not the same as universality. If a cup is sitting next to you whether you’re aware of it or not, it’s objectively true that a cup is nearby. It’s not universally the case, though: it’s only true with respect to you that a cup is nearby, not necessarily for anyone else.

Accordingly, all that needs to be true for morality to make objective demands of you is that your cause is properly situated in this way. This might be for Aristotelian reasons, it might be for Kantian reasons, or it might be for some other reason. In any event, if you do pursue living a good life in a way that includes being like persons you revere in recognizably moral ways, morality makes objective demands of you. If you find yourself unshakably seeing your life this way – feeling guilt when you’ve done wrong, resenting others’ wrongdoing in any way beyond personal annoyance, thinking highly of others for their virtue – then those objective demands are unshakable.

Rather than abstract philosophical argument, then, I point again to a method of self-honesty. If you respond to your own actions and those of others in this recognizably moral way, ask yourself whether it seems right to respond in that way. 

If you feel more clear-eyed when engaged in would-be wrongdoing, and more clueless in your later regret, then perhaps there is a case for saying that your cause is not structured in a way that creates moral demands. Perhaps, then, what moral feeling you have is merely a fixed idea holding you back from pursuing your true interests.

Perhaps there is an ideally-coherent Caligula who can take this self-reflection as a confirmation of his amoralism. But I suggest that reflection because it is not true for me, and I suspect it is not true for you.

And just as I suspect it is not true for you, I suspect you suspect it is not true of others you know. 

People are different, often radically so, and this does create variation in morality’s demands. What courage requires of a champion fighter who sees a mugging in progress is likely not what courage requires of me. But it’s unlikely that we are so radically different that “courage” itself is an inapplicable standard for either of us.

Thus, you are safest pursuing your cause by pursuing virtue, and you are unlikely to be engaged in moral cannibalism when applying those standards to others. You know the objectivity of morality by self-examination, and its universality by reasonable inference. 

An Eternal Union of Egoists

A moralist egoism has another advantage for anarchists. This is that our causes converge into an eternal union of egoists, not just those temporary alliances of convenience that a Stirnerite might embrace. 

It’s not just a happy coincidence that we benefit from one another. Rather, it is in my own interest that I refuse to deploy aggression or domination against you, and it is in your own interest that you refuse to deploy aggression or domination against me.

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is in your interest. When I am stronger than you, I fight for your freedom because that is in my interest.

With morality built into the nature of self-interest, our causes are aligned. Human interaction is fundamentally positive-sum, and your freedom is my freedom.

There is no authority but yourself, and that authority extends no further. Anarchy is moral order, and moral order is anarchy.

Anarchy Is Moral Order

As I argued in my previous post, anyone who cares about morality needs a good answer to the amoralist challenge posed by someone like Stirner. As I also said there, this is especially true for those moralists who are also anarchists, since a morality without such an answer begins to look a good deal like the domination anarchism resists.

Here I will stress again that this challenge is especially pressing for anarchists, and that this is because anarchism depends upon morality. This is true both as a conceptual matter, and as a practical necessity for any stable commitment to anarchism.

That anarchism depends upon morality doesn’t establish morality’s claims. It could still be true that the amoralist challenge is unassailable. This would just give us reason to join Stirnerite Dora Marsden in rejecting anarchism in favor of a self-elevating “archism,” in which “there is no authority but yourself” and you seek to extend that authority over others when possible.

But for an anarchist discussion of amoralist egoism, I think it’s important to have the contradiction in mind.

Anarchy & Morality: The Conceptual Connection

What do we mean by “anarchy” and “anarchism?”

Anarchy is cooperation without power. 

This does not mean the absence of competition, it does not mean the absence of coordination, and it does not mean the absence of rules. It means that these things occur in a way that does not involve the subordination of one person to another person or group of persons. 

This subordination can occur through aggression, in which one person initiates force against another. It can also occur through domination, in which less-direct forms of coercion make it such that one person must consistently follow the commands of another.

A full discussion of aggression and domination would need to say much more. I won’t be doing that here. However, I will note a couple of important distinctions that are necessary if these rejections of aggression and domination are to be meaningful.

First, notice that rejecting aggression does not rule out all force. It rules out the initiation of force. But spelling out what is aggression and what is defense is a bit more complicated than it might seem.

The most obvious way this is true is in cases of property rights. To resist going off on a tangent there, let’s make the point in terms of something even communists agree you can own: a toothbrush.

Suppose I want to use my toothbrush for normal toothbrush things, but Max wants to paint with it. The two uses are inconsistent, and without some further incentive, I won’t consent to it being used that way.

Now suppose further that Max ignores this and takes my toothbrush with the intent of so-using it. I see him, grab his arm, and yank it out of his hands.

“Ah! You say you reject aggression, but here you’ve initiated force!,” Max whines. This might sound silly, but note that while Max was not touching me at any point, I did grab his arm.

The reason Max’s complaint is specious is because the toothbrush was mine, I had title to it. Thus, he aggressed by grabbing what was mine.

But what kind of title is that? It’s not just the legal title; surely no anarchist would count as aggression taking back stolen property when the state endorsed that theft. We can extend this point to say it is also not socially-recognized title, it is a kind of moral title. 

You can probably see where this is going. Before getting there explicitly, consider a similar distinction necessary in talking about domination.

Domination involves someone being able to command another person, and that other person being compelled to obey them. It’s important in talking about domination that what must be obeyed is the person, not a principle. What matters is that the dominant party has commanded something, not the reasons for that command.

This distinction is important. Suppose that the rules of some association prohibit Max from bullying others in it. Suppose further that those same rules are shared by most other associations, and Max can’t really find a safe place to engage in bullying others. Does this mean that Max is dominated, since the social order effectively compels him to not bully others?

No – a principle of non-domination is itself the grounds on which Max is prevented from bullying, not just that people don’t want him to be a bully. He is compelled in the name of reasons, not persons.

The point is this: to make sense of a rejection of aggression, we need a way to distinguish aggression from mere force, even when it is not directly against our bodies. To make sense of a rejection of domination, we need a way to distinguish domination from mere social compulsion. In the first case, we do this by appeal to moral title. In the second, we do so by a distinction between persons and principles.

In both cases, the necessary distinction rests on moral concepts. 

Without any morality to which we can appeal, the distinctions fade away, and rejections of aggression and domination start to become meaningless. Thus, “anarchism” becomes an incoherent position, and the yearned-for “anarchy” an impossible state of affairs.

Anarchy & Morality: The Practical Necessity

Perhaps the Stirnerite anarchist can find some way of formulating the idea of non-aggression and non-domination without appeal to moral claims. This would make anarchy a conceptual possibility without morality, and so their amoralist anarchism would become coherent.

Or perhaps they might reduce anarchism to a certain attitude towards institutions and social arrangements that rejects states and anything else moralists might regard as “aggression” and “domination,” even if the Stirnerite rejects “aggression” or “domination” as descriptors of what they oppose. If this could be spelled out clearly, it might also be a way to make anarchism coherent without morality.

I am skeptical. Instead of litigating that point further, though, I’ll stress a second one: morality is still a practical necessity for anyone’s anarchism to be a stable commitment.

I don’t mean this in the lazy way of “ah, but why would you even want to be an anarchist, instead of just trying to rule over other people?” There are countless good reasons for an amoralist egoist to prefer anarchy, especially with market anarchist economic analysis in mind.

Take morality totally out of the picture. Would you rather be a god-emperor in the ancient world, or, say, a bookseller in the Oklahoma City of 2021?

The perks of being a god-emperor are pretty obvious: you can casually decide to have giant pyramids or statues dedicated to you and your friends, you can have plays performed in your living room every day, and just generally demand anything of anyone you know and have it provided for you. All you need to do is make sure don’t get overthrown by your subjects or conquered by some other god-emperor.

But a little reflection will put you solidly in Oklahoma City 2021. Many diseases that might prove the god-emperor’s mortality would mean no more than a weekend’s hospital stay for the bookseller. Whatever messages the god-emperor wants to send to another god-emperor halfway around the world will take a while to get there, with little certainty that it even will. Whatever message the Oklahoma City bookseller wants to send to send to his friend in Japan will take about a second. And the plays performed for the god-emperor probably can’t hold a candle to the films of David Lynch, easily available on the bookseller’s phone. 

It’s tempting to respond “Okay, but I’d rather be the god-emperor plus have all that technology,” but this misses the point. The technological explosion that allowed for all those things was institutionally incompatible with god-emperors. It could occur only in an environment where governments eased up on their extraction and regulation enough for market processes to do what they’ve done. 

Given that governments still very much engage in practices of extraction and regulation that hold back innovation, this gives us an amoralist egoist reason to prefer being the average person in a future anarchy even to being President of a liberal-democratic state.

And a mature amoralist egoist will also recognize that true friendship requires some level of equality: many people will fawn over the god-emperor for his favor, but few will just enjoy his company. Even for those who do, the god-emperor can never be too sure. Well before morality comes into the picture, there are solid reasons to reject total power.

But the real problem comes when we see that our usual choice is not between total power and total freedom. Instead, it’s generally on the margins: a new or intensified instance of aggression or domination versus no such change or eliminating (or softening) an instance of aggression.

It’s of course true that protectionism harms people living under governments that engage in it. But that doesn’t mean that the people in protected industries don’t receive short-term benefits. If moral considerations are categorically blocked from view, plenty of rent-seeking seems perfectly rational. 

And I don’t just mean familiar things like a tariff here or an occupational license there. Writing under the pseudonym Tak Kak, Stirnerite James L. Walker defended the murder of Chinese migrant workers by white workers who feared a threat to their income. 

Obviously, the broader political and economic order was a much bigger obstacle to those workers’ livelihood than immigrants. Indeed, immigration to the United States economically benefits virtually all Americans, including those white workers. 

Professing a form of individualist anarchism, Walker probably understood all of that. But the question here wasn’t about all immigration in general, and “just overthrow the existing political and economic order!” wasn’t an immediate option. Murder was.

This is an extreme example, but many temptations to aggression and domination will be rational on the margin if moral considerations are blocked from view.  

Pledging Allegiance to the Black Flag

That said, there is also an easy fix here to maintain the amoralist egoist’s commitment to anarchism: a personal attachment to the anarchist vision. With such an attachment, acts incompatible with anarchism will taste sour, and even the amoralist egoist will accept losses that could only be avoided by aggression and domination.

But attachments come and go. When I was a child, I rooted for the Dallas Mavericks, since they were the closest NBA team to Oklahoma. Once Oklahoma City got an NBA team, my attachment to the Mavericks faded. 

For the amoralist egoist, anarchy is not a “fixed idea,” it is completely contingent on arbitrary appreciation. Once class positions or social circles change, or perhaps even just when boredom sets in, moral reasons won’t be there to stop anarchism from going the way of the Mavericks.

Here the amoralist egoist might protest: “Sure. But for the meantime, I am committed to anarchism, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.”

In response, I’ll just say that I think most amoralist egoist anarchists sell themselves short. 

I agree that most Stirnerites will probably stay anarchists, and I agree that most of them won’t even have lapses like Walker’s. Benjamin Tucker, also a Stirnerite, wrote furiously against both Marsden’s “archism” and Walker’s defense of racial terror.

In imagining themselves losing their attachment to anarchism, the Stirnerite is likely to find that prospect horrifying, or at least highly regrettable. This is the case even though their interests, amorally construed, would then be different after such a change.

I think those Stirnerites that this well-describes already have what is practically necessary for a stable commitment to anarchism. But this is because they are moralists. Instinctively, they revolt at the idea that anarchism is yet another phantasm preventing them from achieving their full potential. There is something real that makes it different from their passing attachment to a sports team.

Of course, they also have explicit beliefs to the contrary. People are complicated, and we aren’t always aware of where our real allegiances lie. It is difficult to read Benjamin Tucker without thinking this was a person morally outraged by the state and its crimes, regardless of how he officially spelled that out.

Uncovering those more implicit beliefs is a process of self-honesty: when it comes down to it, can you confidently say that it would not be worse for you to abandon anarchism for some other political passion, if your class position or social circles changed in such a way that this new positioning might better fit you? That nothing would be lost if you were to, arbitrarily, become a Maoist or an integralist or a run-of-the-mill Democrat or whatever else, since no political perspective is objectively better than any other? 

If there is a nagging feeling that yes, this would be a real error even if such a repositioning would be easier, there may be something about your commitment to anarchism that is stuck deeper than any commitment to the Dallas Mavericks. Perhaps this is because it is a fixed idea, clouding your perception and turning you against yourself. Or perhaps it is instead a fixed point in the actual nature of things, a feature of moral reality to which you are accountable.

But if my last post is correct, the difference between those two possibilities might not be so important. 

So here is where we are: without a solution to the amoralist challenge, morality is just another system of domination, and thus incompatible with anarchism. Yet an amoralist anarchism is also not an option, either conceptually or practically. Thus, answering Stirner’s challenge is necessary if “anarchy” is to make any sense and anarchism is to be anything other than a passing delusion.

Di Duane Fuller. Originale: Commentary from an Anarchist Prisoner, del 18 gennaio 2022. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Sono un detenuto anarchico e posso confermare quello che si dice spesso, che si può capire molto di una società guardando le sue prigioni. Guardate i suoi dongioni e ci vedrete, in forma concentrata, come in un microcosmo, il marciume di tutto il sistema. Oggi questa analogia tra il carcere e la società di cui è un riflesso contiene qualcosa di particolarmente significativo. Perché, e constatarlo fa male, siamo tutti prigionieri di una società in cui i roboanti proclami di libertà e giustizia non sono altro che retorica vuota.

Oggi, in questa nostra società, noi siamo circondati da quella stessa ricchezza, da quel progresso scientifico che non fa che promettere la libertà. La libertà è così vicina, e allo stesso tempo così lontana. Ed è la stessa sensazione che provo ora, mentre aspetto la prossima liberazione tra qualche mese e sento tutto il peso di quarantasei anni di carcere.

Chiuso in questa cella, sono qui che aspetto con impazienza il momento in cui tornerò al movimento dei miei amici compagni, a quella libertà di muovermi che mi è stata tolta in carcere. La vita che oggi vivono persone di tutte le razze somiglia in modo impressionante alla vita in carcere che ho vissuto e ancora continuo a vivere. La ricchezza e la tecnologia che ci circondano ci dicono che una società libera, umana e armoniosa è a portata di mano. Ma è anche molto lontana, perché le chiavi le ha in tasca qualcuno che non vuole aprire le porte della libertà. Siamo tutti prigionieri, costretti a vivere nell’orrore del razzismo, la povertà e le guerre, con tutte le frustrazioni e manipolazioni che accompagnano questa esistenza. Ci hanno rubato anche i sogni, la possibilità di immaginare la libertà, la coscienza che se solo avessimo le chiavi… se solo potessimo strapparle ai nostri secondini, alle compagnie petrolifere, ai fabbricanti di automobili, a tutti i giganti aziendali coi loro protettori, la razza codarda dello stato. Se solo riuscissimo a mettere le mani su quelle chiavi, potremmo trasformare le nostre visioni, i nostri sogni, in realtà. La condizione di tutti è molto simile alla mia condizione di prigioniero, ricordatelo. Perché se lo dimentichiamo, perdiamo la voglia di libertà, la voglia di lottare per la liberazione.

Questo posto distrugge ogni capacità di ragionare se l’uomo perde la fiducia nei suoi simili. Il pensiero può perdere ogni briciolo di coerenza. Il chiasso, la rabbia eruttata dalla gola, il rumore della frustrazione che viene dalle celle, le mura, le chiavi dei secondini, il baccano delle porte di ferro che si aprono e si chiudono, il suono cupo di una latrina di ghisa, gli odori, le feci per terra, i corpi sporchi di menti storpiate, il cibo marcio. I momenti di pace sono così lontani che è facile perdere la speranza. E poi le guardie con i fucili, i manganelli e i lacrimogeni. Per evitare il terrore, per evitarlo ad ogni costo.

Il terrore del carcere, la funzione sociopolitica del carcere, un terrore che si autoalimenta. Le carceri sono armi politiche. Sono strumenti che servono a tenere sotto controllo quegli elementi della società che minacciano la stabilità dell’intero sistema.

In carcere, le persone che anche solo potenzialmente turbano l’ambiente sono confinate, punite, e a volte trattate con psicofarmaci. È così. Il sistema carcerario è un’arma di repressione. Lo stato vede nelle persone di ogni colore, specialmente nelle giovani generazioni, gli elementi più ribelli della società. Così le carceri traboccano di giovani di ogni genere sociale. Chi ha visto la strada e i ghetti sa quanto è facile per un fratello o una sorella cadere vittima dei tantissimi poliziotti.

Sono decine di migliaia (negli Stati Uniti, ndt) i detenuti che non sono mai stati condannati ma semplicemente sono lì, vittime, alla mercé di difensori d’ufficio insensibili, incompetenti, spesso spudoratamente razzisti, che insistono a dire che devi ammettere la tua colpevolezza anche se sanno che tu sei innocente quanto loro. Ma anche quando una persona ha commesso un crimine, occorre cercare le cause profonde. E le troviamo non in queste persone in quanto individui, ma nel sistema capitalista che più di ogni altra cosa crea criminali.

Chi ha fame nella pancia deve rubare per sopravvivere, chi ha fame nello spirito deve commettere atti antisociali perché non è possibile soddisfare i propri bisogni in uno stato basato sulla proprietà. Non credo di sbagliarmi di molto se dico che il 90% dei crimini commessi non sarebbero considerati crimini o non esisterebbero in una società incentrata sulla gente.

Mi hanno chiesto chi sono. Ho risposto che sono un rivoluzionario. Qual è il mio crimine? Ho sempre lottato per la libertà. Da quando sono qui? Da quando sono nato.

La mia vita ruota attorno alla lotta contro lo stato e i tiranni che violano i diritti dell’uomo e degli animali. Se sono ancora vivo è per poter dare una speranza alla mia gente, agli innocenti, devo essere libero per liberare tutte quelle persone meravigliose che lottano con me. Tutti, fratelli e sorelle, devono vivere e lottare assieme contro la terribile realtà di uno stato fascista che vuole incarcerare la società e portare avanti il suo programma politico di sottomissione di questa nostra società.

La mia libertà è il risultato di una grande lotta di popolo che mi ha permesso di tenermi in contatto con i compagni, che non mi ha fatto mancare le forze, che mi ha fatto sperare nella liberazione di un confinamento dispotico che finirà tra tre mesi, dopo quarantasei anni. A rubare le chiavi sono stati i giovani, i Neri, i bruni, gli Asiatici, i Nativi e gli studenti e i lavoratori bianchi. Loro hanno aperto le porte e hanno lasciato entrare gli altri, fratelli e sorelle, affinché si unissero alla nostra lotta per la libertà.

As Stirner means the term, I am not an egoist. I see morality as crucial, both to anarchism and to life in general. However, I think Stirnerite, amoralist egoism gets something very right about morality that most people get very wrong.

In the next couple of posts, I’ll be saying more about why I reject the kind of egoism usually associated with Stirner, but here I’ll focus on the thing it gets right.

Stirner’s Challenge

There’s a general consensus that doing the right thing and doing what’s best for you just aren’t the same thing. 

It may be true that the person who tries to do the right thing will generally have a better life than the person who doesn’t. But that’s just a correlation.

It may be true that, on a social level, a community marked by moral behavior tends to produce better results for its members than one marked by immoral behavior. But that’s also just a correlation – and more about the benefits to you of other people being moral, not you being moral.

At some level, self-interest and morality are commonly understood to come apart.

This creates a problem. 

Suppose we’ve already established what the “right” moral theory is, at least on morality’s own terms. This might be a utilitarian one about creating the greatest good for the greatest number, a deontological set of rules for properly respecting persons, some set of virtues to seek and vices to avoid, or the code of your favored religion. 

In any event, it’s at least intelligible for someone to ask, “Alright, sure, that’s technically ‘the right thing to do,’ but why should I do that when it’s better for me not to do that?”

Suppose Peter Singer is right that it’s morally unconscionable to make a habit of getting coffee from high-end coffee shops, since that money adds up, and it could instead be going to the Against Malaria Foundation. Okay, fine, but why should I care more about morality than a nice cup of coffee?

This is the “amoralist challenge.” Why be moral in those instances where morality has clear costs and ignoring it has clear benefits?

On first pass, this question doesn’t even seem to make sense. I’ll ultimately argue a couple posts ahead that it also doesn’t quite make sense on full reflection. But there’s a medium level of reflection where it does make sense, and that’s what I want to focus on here.

Failing Stirner’s Challenge, or, How to Be an Amoralist Without Even Trying

To reach that medium level of reflection, let’s consider a couple of answers to the amoralist challenge.

The first is an appeal to divine punishment or divine reward. When it’s all said and done, it’s said, God will punish wrongdoers and reward rightdoers. So, even if you could get away with it now, you shouldn’t rob that store because you won’t really get away with it in the end.

The second is to reject the question altogether. It’s not the job of a moral theory to persuade everyone to do the right thing, someone taking this tack might say, it’s just to tell us what that right thing is. If someone really doesn’t feel bound by morality, theory ends and practice begins: we don’t argue with the person who says “why shouldn’t I murder people when I can get away with it?,” we just stop them from murdering people. The only “answer” we need to give the amoralist is to fight them. 

Both those answers fail.

Notice that the first answer doesn’t really say that the amoralist is wrong in thinking that when morality and amoral self-interest conflict, amoral self-interest is the higher calling. It just says that God will make sure that it’s in your amoral self-interest to do what’s right. It’s not so much that God is all-good and we should do as He would for that reason, it’s that God is all-powerful and so we should do what He says for that reason.

That’s why that first answer is unpopular, even among theists. But the reason I bring it up is that the much more popular second answer is actually just a secularized version of the first.

This is because the second answer pointedly refuses to speak to the amoralist in terms of reasons. “If you don’t do as we say, we’ll make your life Hell” is no better an answer than “If you don’t do as we say, you’ll go to Hell.” 

In the first answer, there is no right standard, just God’s will and yours, plus God’s power to subject the latter to the former. In the second answer, there is no right standard, just the Morality Club’s will and yours, plus the Morality Club’s power to subject the latter to the former.

If you’re an upstanding person by the standards of the Morality Club, you might now be thinking “Okay, fine, whatever! There’s no further justification to morality beyond itself. So what? I’m still committed to doing what’s right. If someone else isn’t, too bad, I’m still going to keep blaming them and holding them accountable to that standard. If nothing else, they don’t think there’s any higher standard than that either, so they don’t have any grounds to complain about it!”

Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than that. If this is where the conversation ends, the amoralist does indeed have grounds to complain in a way that the moralist doesn’t.

The Morality Club claims to operate in terms of reasons. The amoralist egoist makes no such claim. They just want to do something, and then they do it.

The Morality Club claims to value honesty. The amoralist egoist makes no such claim. They just want you to do something, and then they do what is necessary to get you to do it.

And if the conversation ends on the “okay, fine, whatever” reply, then the Morality Club does not defend itself in terms of reasons, and it does not operate honestly. In other words, if you buy into the Morality Club’s ideals, then this would mean you should stop buying into the Morality Club’s ideals. Since the amoralist egoist does not hold to these ideals, they do not act inconsistently in ignoring them.

At best, then, the moralist who gives this sort of answer just is an amoralist egoist in disguise. The only difference between them and the explicit amoralist is that the crypto-amoralist would be more condemnable if morality really mattered.

If you don’t think morality matters, I suppose this needn’t bother you, and you can keep on acting like it matters. But if you think morality might actually matter (and I certainly do), you should be very concerned to find a better answer to the amoralist than “fight them.”

And if you are an anarchist, libertarian, or even simply a liberal (and I am all three), you should be very, very concerned to find a better answer. Because if morality has no rational hold over us, it has only whatever social, psychological and physical hold that people give it. And if it has no rational priority, it is just one perspective among many. When we put those two things together, we get the following result: morality is a system of control, by which those who have thrown their lot in with the Morality Club seek to dominate those who have not, privileging their own arbitrary interests with massive amounts of social, psychological, and physical coercion.

So, anyone who morally rejects domination must have an answer for the amoralist. Otherwise, they do not really reject domination per se, just domination practiced by those outside of their chosen gang. 

Moreover, without any such answer, the Morality Club’s domination would be much more perverse, and much more pathetic than the domination it rejects. 

At least other forms of domination will acknowledge that they are systems of control, and at least they expect what they expect of you in virtue of the coercion they can wield against you. By contrast, a Morality Club deprived of any rational ground just whines that you should do what they demand because they demand it. It is not enough for you to realign your actions to theirs, you must realign your motivations, such that you no longer need carrots and sticks to do their will.

In fact, no other system of domination has ever been so bold all on their own. Whenever they go that far, it can only be through some attempt to consolidate power with the Morality Club. When the State demands you obey it without compulsion, it is because they claim a moral obligation to obey the law.

Once the Morality Club is out of the picture, we can make a more honest assessment: If I don’t do what the State says, and the State catches me, then I can expect them to punish me. Alright, now I can make a judgement of the costs and benefits and act accordingly. But through its partnership with the Morality Club, the State tries to bypass that process and get my obedience on the cheap, even when the benefits of disobedience outweigh the costs of punishment.

So, that’s why the amoralist needs a real answer. Because otherwise, morality is itself at the heart of the deepest immorality, and justice itself is the gravest injustice. Any moral case for “anarchism” would then not be anarchist, but just another siren song guiding your obedience to an arbitrarily selected aristocracy, in this case one consisting of those people whose interests happen to line up with that of the Morality Club’s.

Answering Stirner’s Challenge

To be clear, there is also something right about the answer-refusing answer. If morality is going to get off the ground, it cannot be hostage to every psychologically possible doubt. At some point, we have to be able to say that the problem is in the doubter, and their defective reasoning will not lift them above morality.

Yet it is exactly that kind of answer that we need to have. It must be a defect in the amoralist’s reasoning, and they must have a reason to accept morality’s claims, even if it’s a reason they can’t see. Morality must speak to them in their own voice, even if they refuse the call.

Morality is a realm of reasons. To answer the amoralist is to show why that realm is inescapable, why there is no perspective from which we can stand back and declare the whole thing nothing more than a deranged power-game. 

Some ways of mapping out that realm will suggest it is all-pervasive, others will not. Thus, the amoralist challenge will also help us in figuring out what morality looks like. Because whatever it’s like, it cannot be a system of moral cannibalism, by which the interests of some are simply sacrificed to the interests of others without any further justification.

That is why, while I reject Stirner’s conclusions, I think the kind of challenge he offers is the most foundational question of ethics. It cannot be ignored.

It’s never been easy to know what to make of self-styled free-marketers who see global capitalism as a real-life instantiation of their values. Given the deep and decisive role of state violence in the creation of global capitalism, they’re either unaware of the basic facts, and so unqualified for their positions, or engaged in a project of active dishonesty. We must assume it’s the former. At Liberty Fund’s Econlib site, Pierre Desrochers laments “the increased popularity of the local food movement,” which, he argues, translates in practice to “the very definition of wealth destruction.” Writes Desrochers,

Alternative food system activists who believe the time to make excuses for agri-business is over and that we must radically change the way we do things should perhaps ponder a bit longer why countless people worked so long and so hard to develop our globalized food supply chain.

Taken on its own terms, the argument is plausible: it doesn’t make sense, for example, to grow pineapples in North Dakota, which would be horribly inefficient, energy-intensive, and harmful to the natural environment on net. But Desrochers doesn’t quite get around to explaining just how it is that food from thousands of miles away could be cheaper than food from a local, biodiverse farm down the road. Defenders of global agri-business — with its collusive land theft; its clear-cutting, monoculture, and destruction of priceless ecosystems; its criminalization of traditional practices existing outside of the corporate global market; its “piracy of knowledge and biodiversity of the poor of the world”; its campaign of violence against tribal peoples, peasants, and nature itself — should perhaps ponder a bit longer why countless people have worked (and continue to work) so long and so hard to fight a neocolonialist system, cynically called “free trade,” imposed and maintained through the physical enclosures of productive lands and the enclosures of ideas themselves as the private intellectual property rights of rich Western companies. Too many free-market types want to pretend that economics alone — that is, absent insights from sociology, politics, or history — gives us all the explanation we need. They repeat the watchwords “specialization,” “comparative advantage,” and “free trade” as if hundreds of years of global capitalism and its precursors were simply peaceful, libertarian phenomena. What the moment seems to call for is a new history of global capitalism, a history that damns global capitalism precisely because it represents the culmination of generations of crimes against individual liberty and free markets. Here in the real world, making palm oil, for example, so inexpensive has meant subsidizing big business to the tune of billions and irreparably harming both people and their places, some of the most complex ecosystems on the only planet we have. 

As Pádraig Carmody and David Taylor observe, discussing land theft within the African context, “In effect, land grabs represent a reinscription and deepening of sociospatial power inequalities associated with previous eras.” The violent, state-backed dispossession of people living in the global South is among the most salient features of the processes associated with capitalist globalization. To ignore it, to pretend that our food is so cheap because we embraced the liberal system of free trade, is laughable on its face. But, importantly, the observation of such facts entails no “denial of comparative advantage” in principle, but an affirmation of libertarian ideas and a recognition of the evidence before us. We might have assumed that defenders of market mechanisms and of sound economic principles would know better than to merely repeat the dogma that local food is actually more expensive without asking why or looking to see the extreme violations of their beloved free market that underlie such cheap prices. Do the prices really reflect economic conditions? Or are they the result of a process that subsidized big agri-business and left colonized peoples bereft of their rightful inheritance. To facilely suggest that food from afar is less expensive as a matter of course, as a natural and inevitable result of specialization and trade, is the height of naivety. Again, believing that most people come by their opinions honestly and promote them in good faith, we must assume naivety, a common condition among those who confuse capitalism and simple freedom of exchange. 

That it is less than polite for a comparatively rich, white Westerner to challenge the conventional narrative I readily admit. But it’s clearly necessary to remind capitalism’s apologists that the defenders of a food system that is local, ecologically and socially sustainable, and not monopolized by politically-privileged corporate power have in fact pondered our globalized food supply chain for many decades now. Economists know economics, but they often seem willfully blind to history and politics as confounding factors operating on the law of supply and demand. This is nothing new, of course. Here, the American land reformer and libertarian Joshua King Ingalls was characteristically perceptive:

It cannot fail to be seen how appropriate is the teaching of ‘laissez-faire’ by the professors and scholars produced by institutions supported and upheld by the very opposite practice. That such institutions do not encourage any investigation of the industrial problem is not to be wondered at.

If we’re serious about testing the validity of the prices we see in our grocery stores, we in the rich West have a moral, social, political duty to return the land to the people who own it — the people who worked it for millennia before colonists stole it. As Vandana Shiva observed more than twenty years ago, our deepest obligations to both each other and the biosphere were redefined as crimes, as a partnership of state and corporate power laid the groundwork for the environmentally and socially destructive system that rules the world today. Not only is corporate globalization predicated upon clear violations of stated libertarian principles, it has predictably resulted in just the kind of lifeless authoritarian system libertarians say they don’t like — a system of, in David Graeber’s words, “total bureaucratization.” Graeber couldn’t have described global capitalism more astutely when he observed “the gradual fusion of public and private power into a single entity, rife with rules and regulations whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profits.”

In some of the very poorest and hungriest countries in the world, governments and powerful corporations have for decades worked together to establish industrial farms designed to feed people in other countries. In a legitimate free market, this is unobjectionable. In a historically violent system in which the people who live in these places are victimized and cut out of the decision-making process, cheap food comes at a high price. Must all libertarians necessarily be back-to-the-land localists? It’s hard to say. What is much easier to say is that the global food system we see in practice is much less about the merits of comparative advantage than it is about stealing from people less powerful.

The prefix “eco-“, as in ecology and economy, is rooted in the ancient Greek “οἶκος”, translated as “house,” “home,” “shelter,” or “habitation.” Our home, (the home that we all currently share in common: our planet and its biosphere), is the focus of this essay — even as the title is an irreverent and playful response to Stirner’s “The Ego & Its Own.” My aim is to outline our inextricable interconnectedness with our environment and to explore some of the implications. If one seeks “to think of oneself” accurately then one should carefully consider how one relates to the physical reality we all inhabit. That said, I value caring deeply about others beyond their direct relation to myself, but laying out more than a sketch of why is beyond the scope of this essay. I think Albert Einstein put it nicely:

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. One experiences oneself, one’s thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of one’s consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

First, though, some kind of descriptive egoism seems obvious to me because of the way our mind-body-environment interfaces function. Discrete individual egos seem to exist. One peers out at the external world from within oneself, deeply confined by the limits of one’s awareness and knowledge. I think a basic descriptive egoism has utility as a frame, but it is also starkly limited and contingent. One’s ego is a fragile phantasm utterly dependent on the continued functioning of critical external systems like our biological human body, our environment, and the dynamic interplay between these systems, as well as the continued functioning and integration of various internal subsystems and aspects of our psyche, our brain’s two hemispheres, etc.

However ephemeral and context-dependent, this basic individualization of consciousness is still deeply relevant. The way in which each individual’s internal cognitive processes are relatively decentralized and relatively disconnected from other individuals is arguably the strongest justification we have for the use of something like markets and prices to reveal our intersubjective evaluations in the face of scarcity. Being able to coordinate effective responses to collective action problems (with as little destructive and wasteful conflict as possible) requires somehow integrating the insights and local knowledge distributed across unique and separated minds. Technologies (ways, techniques, and processes) for facilitating this integration (like maps, language, trade, and social norms) are imperfect but vital.

As far as normative or prescriptive egoism, the points emphasized here may be framed as appeals to some kind of expansive or enlightened self-interest. But since I see value in identifying with and empathizing with radically different lifeforms and consciousnesses outside my own, regardless of notions of “self,” I don’t particularly identify as an egoist. However, I do find approaches that center individual agency valuable, and I aim to explore and integrate some insights and concepts relevant to egoism. I will leave it to self-professed egoists to reconcile these ideas with their egos, if it pleases them. 

To make explicit my ideological sympathies and to specify adjectives for my anarchism: permaculturist and transhumanist are closer to my position. Down to build solarpunk utopian futures now. To shape our changing environment is to shape our changing minds and bodies, and vice versa. I explicitly value and seek universal liberation and biosphere (re)generation, and have a deep concern for long-term future consequences.

While symbolism, vexillology, and aesthetics are not nearly as important as underlying concepts and values, I will nevertheless indulge my ego and briefly mention that I incidentally share with some online egoist anarchists an apparent affinity with some blue-green color (synthesis of transhumanism and permaculture, the diffusion of earth and sky) and the color black (anarchy, soil, space). Were I to literally fly a flag — in order to observe wind patterns of course — I fancy it might feature such colors.

photograph of Earth from lunar orbit, taken on December 24th, 1968

We Live in a Solar System

A perhaps widespread attitude seemingly opposed to egoism (and individualist perspectives more broadly) might be summed up in the memetically potent phrase: “We live in a society.” While this is arguably true to varying degrees depending on the individual, it seems to me that almost everyone already acts like they live in a society. Almost everyone, and certainly everyone engaged in philosophical discussion, structures their actions and behavior around and in relation to other people. Most humans, social apes that we have evolved to be, tend to be viscerally and constantly aware of this on some level.

But the fact that we live on a big rock hurtling through the cold empty vacuum of space seems to be largely ignored by most people most of the time. The breathability of our atmosphere and our entire food web, heterotrophic lifeforms that we are, depends on our autotrophic co-earthlings: photosynthesizing, oxygen-exhaling, lifeforms (plants, algae, many bacteria) that in turn derive their energy from the radiation emitted by an enormous nuclear furnace around which we orbit at the comfortably warm distance of just a few hundred light-seconds. These facts are acknowledged, but rarely centered, their implications left mostly unexamined.

One implication is that although our star seems poised to eventually expand and burn up all life on this planet, it currently showers us with a relatively consistent and predictable stream of energy. Instead of shaping our built environment in ways that ignore or squander this temporal gift, we could instead shape it to gracefully receive this energy, build homes that passively shelter us and grow gardens that directly and sustainably meet a wide range of our needs. The resilience of our life support systems — our ecological infrastructure — is directly dependent on its functional diversity (adaptability), on how harmoniously interconnected (cooperative or mutualistic) it is, and on how effortlessly (passively) it maintains itself.

I contend that considering this physical reality, this environment, this home that we all inhabit, is at least as important for grounding our philosophical discussion alongside concepts like “society” and “self.” One’s eco-system should be at least as important as one’s ego system — perhaps moreso, considering the latter utterly depends on the former. This is not to draw some imaginary line between humans and the rest of life, as the perhaps problematic word “nature” implies. Nor is it to say that imagining radically different contexts can’t be illuminating or that striving towards radically different possible futures isn’t desirable. This is just part of the recognition that one’s freedom and wellbeing is inextricably interwoven with the freedom and wellbeing of all, and an insistence that our discussion begin where we are.

The Uncommon Commons of Spaceship Earth, Biological Diversity as Morphological Freedom, and the Ongoing Extinction of Uniqueness

Uniqueness, the quality of being distinct and different from others, being the only one of a kind, is something egoists apparently value and/or appeal to. I do not dispute that an individual human mind is unique, and thereby special in perhaps an unquantifiable way. But at the risk of speaking paradoxically, humans are not alone in this uniqueness. I realize that an egoist may object that it is only their own uniqueness that they value, not uniqueness more generally, but considering again how fragile and contingent egos are, this seems short-sighted and unimaginative. I value uniqueness in a more universal sense, and so I want to draw attention to some other expressions of uniqueness.

Compared to what we’ve been able to observe of the cosmos, our planet seems to be quite special, at least apparently uncommon in its capacity to sustain complex life. Earth is like an island surrounded on all sides by the deepest, darkest, coldest of oceans, a tiny oasis amidst a vast empty desert, a refuge from the infinite and deadly vacuum of space, not just to ~8 billion humans, but to the many trillions of individuals of the many millions of different species who live here. And if any of those inhabitants may be considered unique, then it follows that the planet they inhabit is that much more unique too, at least insofar as it hosts such unique inhabitants.

Of these millions of different species, humans have a disproportionately massive impact on the rest. While humans only make up ~0.01% of the total biomass on earth, human-made materials now weigh more than all life on earth combined. In one sense this fact should fill us with hope and inspiration that we have the ability to shape the world, potentially for the better. Unfortunately, much of what we’ve made, by weight, consists of sprawling plains of asphalt and mountainous landfills full of plastic and a wide variety of geologically novel chemicals painstakingly manufactured only to be carelessly discarded, all-too-often to the detriment of other species. It is a shame that humanity’s astonishing creative capacity has been so largely turned to such short-sighted and downright abusive ends.

During our time aboard spaceship earth, and especially lately, humans have made monumental and drastic renovations, often without giving much consideration to the effects on our co-inhabitants. While our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors were not immune to short-sighted thinking, (some apparently hunted megafauna to extinction on multiple continents), some of our ancestors also developed lifeways significantly more in harmony with other species. We have much to learn from their successes and failures. And we have many bad habits to unlearn. 

A huge portion of the ongoing waste, pollution, and destruction of ecological networks today is often either directly orchestrated or indirectly incentivized by states and other power structures. Relationships of domination and constraint exacerbate human tendencies towards shortsighted and careless interactions with the complex network of lifeforms surrounding us. Thanks to a combination of widespread negligence and concentrated malevolence, the current rate of extinction of species is estimated to be about 100 to 1000 times higher than the background rate, an ongoing mass extinction event sometimes called the Anthropocene Extinction. 

The ongoing deforestation of the Amazon, where ancient forest gardens are being bulldozed and burned to make way for soy monocrop and beef cattle agriculture, is just one vivid example of a place where this mass extinction is particularly sharp. These hyper-bio-diverse rainforests provide many valuable ecosystem services, just a few of which include sequestering carbon, helping to seed regular rainfall through evapotranspiration, and helping to prevent flooding and erosion by holding water in tree trunks and roots. People in Indigenous communities have sustainably thrived and cultivated an abundance of food, medicine, and materials in this interconnected network of rainforest ecosystems for thousands of years.

Not only might this wanton ecological destruction trigger a tipping point that changes Amazonia from a net carbon sink to a net generator of atmospheric carbon, potentially catastrophically accelerating climate change, every single species lost to extinction represents the loss of an entire evolutionary lineage of accumulated local knowledge, the loss of a finely-tuned biological technology. 

Every single species lost to extinction is a form of being, an active expression of morphological freedom, a declaration of uniqueness spoken over millennia, silenced. Not only does this loss mean the squandered possibility of potential cures for diseases, but it means a tangible loss of freedom for everyone, the choice to sustainably interact for mutual benefit with this unique species lost forever. This extreme loss of biodiversity — this loss of uniqueness — is an ongoing and horrific tragedy that we should try to slow down, stop, and ultimately reverse.

What’s happening to the Amazon is unfortunately also happening to various degrees all across spaceship Earth. Extremely short-sighted and wasteful “development,” often forcibly imposed by states and other power structures, alongside our collective failure to learn from and value our fellow earthlings, is destroying the habitat of other species as well as our own. It need not be so.

Directly stopping ecocide in the immediate term requires physical defense and strategically effective direct action by the people whose land and lifeways are threatened. Total liberation and the complete reversal of ecocide will ultimately require abolishing the state, capitalism, and all power structures wherever they are found. This is no small task and not something to take lightly. However, one small and relatively low-risk (yet still deeply radical) way of acting in solidarity with these efforts is to boycott products that are currently produced via exploitation and ecological destruction. 

Even this is far easier said than done, and cannot merely consist of checking the labels on the stuff we buy. Rather than mindlessly consuming the products of a violent and wasteful system that obscures and externalizes their true costs, we must rediscover our own capacity as producers ourselves. Not as producers of endless plains of asphalt and toxic streams of “disposable” plastic packaging, but rather as dynamically adapting co-producers of conditions in which life can thrive.

Garden or Die; Alliances with Plants

So long as we cannot directly feed on sunlight, we are dependent on our autotrophic co-earthlings. We must develop symbiotic relationships with plants, become their partners alongside fungi and bacteria, and learn to care for their needs so that they can continue meeting ours.

It is possible to build comfortable habitats for humans without annihilating the habitats of other species. It is possible to practice intensive horticulture in ways that not only outcompete industrial monocrop agriculture in terms of yield per acre, but that also increases the health and biodiversity of local ecosystems. “Permaculture” describes an essential part of any strategy aimed at keeping our home planet habitable. Permaculture is necessary both in the short term, to avoid the worst of the catastrophes that humanity has already set in motion, and in the long term, if we are to have any hope of sowing the growth of life beyond this finite planet, of spreading consciousness and agency across the emptiness of the cosmos.

As humans, we have a choice. We can continue on the path of destroying the biosphere for the short-term benefit of a privileged few, intentionally blinding ourselves to the harm our actions cause to those just out of our sight. Or we can build passive homes and cultivate abundant gardens that meet our needs without harming anyone, that instead promote the freedom and flourishing of all. 

We can shape our changing selves and we can shape our changing world. We must strive to look beyond the narrow confines of our human egos and cooperate to take care of the planet we all share in common, our home.

Pale Blue Dot – photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (the Earth appears as a blueish white speck)

I’d like to close this essay with some words by Carl Sagan,

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Oleh: Roderick Long. Teks aslinya berjudul “What Makes Police Brutality Possible?” Diterjemahkan oleh Ameyuri Ringo.

Jika ada pertanyaan, apa yang harus dilakukan sekelompok besar orang jika mereka menyaksikan beberapa orang bersenjata menyerang dan menyiksa secara brutal seseorang yang tidak bersenjata?

Jawabannya sudah jelas: datang membantu korban dengan cara melucuti senjata pelaku dan mengalahkannya.

Tetapi pada tanggal 14 November 2006 lalu, ketika mahasiswa UCLA Mostafa Tabatabainejad diserang di perpustakaan universitas, sekitar lima puluh mahasiswa yang terkejut dan marah berdiri, memprotes dan berteriak tetapi tidak melakukan intervensi apapun meskipun para penyerang jauh lebih sedikit jumlahnya dan hanya dipersenjatai dengan senjata yang tidak mematikan.¹

Mengapa para mahasiswa tidak ikut campur? Karena para pelakunya adalah polisi kampus.

Ketika Tabatabainejad, yang tidak dapat menunjukkan kartu pelajarnya, diminta oleh petugas keamanan untuk pergi, dia menolaknya. Penjaga itu kemudian menghubungi polisi kampus. Di sini akan ada pernyataan yang berbeda: polisi mengatakan Tabatabainejad menjatuhkan dirinya ketanah dan menolak perintah untuk segera pergi, sementara sebagian besar saksi mata setuju dengan klaim Tabatabainejad bahwa dia pergi dengan damai tetapi memprotes ketika polisi mencoba memegang lengannya saat dia akan pergi meninggalkan mereka.

Bagaimanapun, polisi kemudian menyetrum Tabatabainejad berulang kali dengan taser² saat dia menggeliat dan berteriak di tanah dalam sebuah insiden yang direkam oleh kamera ponsel seorang saksi mata. Ketika mahasiswa yang ketakutan di sekitar memprotes perlakuan brutal dan meminta nomor lencana petugas polisi, petugas dilaporkan mengancam akan menyerang para saksi mata yang protes secara damai ini juga. “Tabatabainejad mendorong pengunjung perpustakaan untuk bergabung dengan perlawanannya,” dalam pernyataan seorang petugas kepolisian.

Apakah polisi kampus berhak memaksa Tabatabainejad untuk meninggalkan perpustakaan? Apakah dia korban racial profiling?³ Apakah dia menjadi lemas sebelum atau setelah disetrum? Pertanyaan-pertanyaan ini, betapapun pentingnya, bersifat sekunder. Apa pun jawabannya, faktanya tetap bahwa penggunaan senjata berbahaya yang brutal dan berulang kali oleh petugas terhadap seseorang yang tidak pernah menggunakan atau mengancam kekerasan sangat tidak sesuai dengan pelanggaran apa pun yang diduga dilakukannya.

“Berhentilah melawan kami!” Teriakan seorang petugas yang terdengar pada rekaman amatir tersebut. Tapi menurut pengakuan polisi sendiri, perlawanan yang dilakukan oleh Tabatabainejad adalah hanya “merobohkan dirinya ketanah.”

Apakah dia menjadi pincang dengan sengaja atau sebagai akibat yang tidak disengaja dari sengatan listrik, dalam kedua masalah ini, menjadi pincang bukanlah “perlawanan” dan bukan merupakan ancaman di mana menyetrum bisa menjadi respons pertahanan diri yang sah, terutama mengingat perbedaan dalam jumlah.

Diminta untuk menunjukan nomor lencana oleh seseorang, saya hampir tidak perlu menambahkan, adalah permintaan yang sah dan juga bukan tindakan yang dapat menjadikan ancaman setrum adalah respon yang sah.

Singkatnya, sekelompok penyerang bersenjata, menolak untuk mengidentifikasi diri mereka kepada para saksi mata, berulang kali melakukan serangan kekerasan dan menyakitkan terhadap pengunjung perpustakaan yang tidak bersenjata dan tidak menggunakan atau mengancam kekerasan. Biasanya siapa pun akan berpikir bahwa dalam kasus seperti itu, para saksi mara memiliki hak mereka untuk terlibat secara paksa untuk melindungi korban. Dan biasanya, saya bertaruh, para saksi mata ini akan melakukan hal itu dengan tepat.

Tetapi ketika para penyerang mengenakan seragam polisi, entah bagaimana mereka menjadi kebal dari aturan biasa yang berlaku bagi kita semua. Apakah beberapa saksi mata menahan diri untuk tidak terlibat karena mereka takut (dengan aparat)? Mungkin. Tapi kebanyakan dari mereka, saya kira, bahkan tidak pernah mempertimbangkan untuk terlibat secara paksa; seragam penyerang mencegah pemikiran alamiah itu terjadi.

Ada suatu masa ketika mereka yang berada dalam posisi otoritas hukum secara harfiah dianggap sebagai makhluk yang secara inheren memiliki tatanan yang lebih tinggi, berhak atas status khusus yang dibebaskan dari aturan moral biasa. Doktrin itu dikenal sebagai hak ilahi para raja. Saat ini kami mengaku telah melepaskan doktrin itu; Deklarasi Kemerdekaan dengan berani menyatakan bahwa “semua manusia diciptakan sama.” Tapi kita masih terlalu cepat untuk memperlakukan pembawa kekuasaan resmi sebagai ras yang terpisah.

Ketimpangan tersebut bisa dibilang melekat pada institusi pemerintahan itu sendiri. Semua pemerintah, bahkan yang konon demokratis, memberikan hak-hak tertentu kepada agen-agen mereka yang tidak dimiliki oleh penduduk lainnya. Dan persetujuan kita dalam pemerintahan yang memungkinkan kita memandang polisi, bahkan polisi kampus, bukan sebagai orang yang sederajat tetapi sebagai majikan kita — yang memungkinkan mereka lolos dari pelanggaran seperti ini.

Mari kita menembus tabir mistifikasi dan melihat kasus ini sebagaimana adanya: sekelompok kecil orang biasa menyerang orang biasa lainnya sementara kelompok orang biasa yang jauh lebih besar berdiri “tanpa daya.” Profesi penyerang tidak relevan; penyedia layanan kepolisian tidak perlu diatur sebagai lembaga dengan otoritas yang lebih tinggi — sebuah “pemerintah” — untuk melakukan pekerjaan mereka. Kami tidak percaya pada raja dan kaisar lagi. Bukankah sudah waktunya untuk mengatasi gagasan tentang pemerintahan seperti itu?

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCLA_Taser_incident

2 Taser adalah senjata kejut listrik yang umum digunakan sebagai senjata pertahanan diri polisi.

3 Racial profiling adalah tindakan mencurigai, menargetkan, atau mendiskriminasi seseorang berdasarkan etnis atau agamanya. Baca selengkapnya di https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_profiling

Okumak üzere olduğunuz makale, Alex Aragona tarafından kaleme alınmış. 26 Kasım 2021 tarihinde “Political Realism vs Apoliticism” başlığı altında yayınlanmıştır.

Siyasi realizm ve apolitiklik kavramları genellikle birlikte anılır, ancak birincisinin hak ettiği ilgi çoğunlukla ikincisine yöneltilir.

Genel olarak siyasi realistler, politikacılara, hükümetlere, kurumlara, kanunlar yazarken toplumları ve ekonomileri düzenleyen politik faktörlere karşı pratik bir tutum sergilerler. Siyasal ideolojinin öncüleri görülen toplumsal ya da siyasal iktidar konumlarındaki insanlara ya da demokratik kurumlarda kitlelerin kaygılarını temsil eden daha yüksek ideallere sahip, halkın “mütevazı” hizmetkarlarına inanmak yerine, siyasal gerçekçiler onları daha farklı ve gerçekçi bir yolla ele alıyor: Bu da nihayetinde kişisel istekler/ ihtiyaçlar ile bir eylemi yaparlarsa önlerine sunulabilecek çeşitli ödüllerin dengesine göre hareket eder ve tepki verirler. Gerçekten de bireysel politikacıların ya da siyasi faallerin davranışlarını -kendilerini sunma biçimleri, seçmenleriyle etkileşim kurma yolları, çeşitli konularda kullandıkları oylara nasıl karar verdikleri vb.- bazı şeyleri -seçim dönemlerinin ve başkan değişiklerinin onlar üzerinde meydana getirdiği baskılar, neleri dikkate alıyorlar hayatlarında vb.- dikkate alarak düşünmek kamu politikası dünyasının ve bunda rol oynayan faktörlerin daha iyi anlaşılabileceği büyük resmi çizebilmemize olanak sağlar.

Örneğin, bir siyasi realist, ABD’nin Irak’ı işgali gibi bir olayda ABD’yi, çoğu kişinin aksine teröre karşı savaşan ve anayasal demokrasiyi yayan iyiliksever dünya polisi olarak görmeyecektir, retorik odaklı hikayeleri yutmayacaktır. Bunun yerine, birden fazla faktörün, farklı çıkar ilişkilerinin ve ABD devletinin başka bir ülkeyi işgale varabilen saldırganlığının farkında olur. Başka bir deyişle, belki de başka bir ülkenin parlamentosunun demokrasi idealleri eşliğinde işlemesi gibi bir endişe söz konusu değildi. Ancak, gerçek olayla “ilgili ya da ilgisiz” şeylerle uğraşmak ve Ortadoğu’daki “her şeyi süpürmek” için 11 Eylül terör saldırılarını bir bahane olarak kullanmak, ABD’ye daha önceki yararlılığını yitirmiş bir diktatörden kurtulmak, bölgedeki Amerikan çıkarları oldu.

Siyasi bir realist, yerel, il veya eyalet, federal düzeyindeki seçim siyaseti, siyasi ofisler ve partilerin günlük işleri olarak adlandırdığımız şeylere zaman ve enerji harcamamayı seçebilir. Örneğin, tek bir oyun bir seçimde belirleyici faktör olma şansı genellikle sıfıra yakın olduğu için başkalarıyla bu yolda örgütlenmiyorsa oy vermeyi bırakabilir. Veya, bir siyasi parti için pasif bir gönüllülük yolundayken, parti sonuçları üzerine çok az etkisi olduğunu veya hiç etkisi olmadığını veya politika oluşturma üzerine herhangi bir etkisinin olmadığını hissedebilir. Dahası, kabinedeki isimler gibi aklını siyasi ayrıntılarla doldurmayı bırakabilir.

Bununla birlikte, bunların hiçbiri, genel olarak siyasetten ve kamu işlerine yönelik farkındalık ve ilgiden tam anlamıyla geri çekilmeyi gerektirmez. En radikal siyasi realistler ve mevcut iktidar/ siyaset sistemlerinden en çok hayal kırıklığına uğrayanlar, simgesel katılım biçimlerinden ayrılabilirler, ancak aynı zamanda kendilerini ve başkalarını sosyal adaletsizlikler, sınıf meseleleri ve bireylerin hayatlarını etkileyen diğer faktörler konusunda eğitmeye adamış olabilirler. Başka bir deyişle, siyasi realistler sıklıkla kendilerini, farkındalık yaratmayı ve/ veya kurumlar/ sistemler üzerinde dış baskı oluşturmayı amaçlayan eğitim, organizasyon ve aktivizme haklı olarak katılabilirler ve burada bir çelişki yoktur. Sonuç olarak, siyasi değişim süreçlerinde rol sahibi olabilmenin etkisiz yollarına zaman ve enerji harcamayı bıraktılar ve çabalarını etkili olduğunu inandıkları yollara çevirdiler.

Apolitizm daha farklı ele alınmalıdır. Bunu, yalnızca bazen siyasi realizm tarafından yönlendirilen bir ilgisizlik ve sinizm biçimi olarak düşünmek daha doğrudur. Apolitik bir kişi, yaşamın herhangi bir siyasi veya kamusal unsuru hakkında düşünmek veya fikir edinme konusunda endişelenme/ kasıtlı kaçınma durumu sergileme eğilimindedir. Bu duruşu veya durumu zorunlu olarak özel hayatlarının her zerresinde yaşarlar. Bu konum veya bu şekilde var olma durumu birçokları için “rasyonel” olarak haklanabilir ve her zaman suçlanabilir bir durum değildir. Örneğin, sadece haftanın sonunu getirmeye odaklanmış çok düşük gelirli birinin sınıf mücadelesi üzerine düşünmeye ayıracak bir dakikası olmayabilir (Tabii, bunu doğal, farkında olmadan ve okuduğunu iddia eden diplomalılardan daha tutkulu bir şekilde yapmaları da nadir değildir.)

Bununla birlikte, maddi ya da başka türlü mücadele etmeyen herkes için apolitiklik, nihayetinde bir ayrıcalık zirvesidir ve siyasi güç devletinin en kötü etkilerinden bazılarını kasıtlı olarak ya da değil, destekleyen, altında yatan, gülünç derecede saygısız bir tutumdur. Gerçekten de eğer bu kaygısız hâldeki kişi gerçekten mevcut düzende bir rol sahibi olmuyorsa mevcut düzenin veya kurumların başkalarını daha iyi veya daha kötü yönde nasıl etkileyebileceği ve değişimi daha iyiye nasıl götürebileceği konusunda hiçbir düşünceye sahip olmamak mazur görülebilir. Ancak durum muhtemelen pek böyle olmaz, çünkü birlikte yaşadığımız mevcut sosyoekonomik sistemler ve kurumlar, doğaları gereği kamusal alan ve siyaseti ile bir dereceye kadar iç içe geçerler.

Bu göz önünde bulundurulduğunda, hepimizin nihai olarak ya mevcut düzenin adaletsiz yönlerinin sürdürülmesine katıldığımızı ya da aktif olarak eleştirmek ve ona saldırmak için çalıştığımızı söylemek zor değil. Apolitiklik bunu sunuyor gibi görünse de günümüzün kamusal ve politik koşullarında sürdürülebilecek tarafsız bir konum gerçekten yoktur. Bir soygun sırasında birinin dövülmesini izlemeyi ve bir şey yaparken olaya karışmamayı seçmenin, en fazla onu tamamen durduracağını veya en azından adaletsizliğe dikkat çekmesini istemeyi seçmenin tarafsızlıkla tamamen alakasız bir konum olduğunu düşünün. Aslında bu düşünce deneyi, “hiçbir şey yapmamanın” (kasıtlı ya da değil) en kötü ihtimalle durumu onaylayan veya destekleyen bir seçim olarak görülebileceğini ve en iyi ihtimalle herhangi bir karşılık vermeye değmediğinin düşünüldüğünün sinyallerini veriyor.

Şimdi, bu tür bir apolitikliğe yönelik eleştirilere en güçlü itirazlardan biri, ilgisiz kalanların veya herhangi bir kamu meselesinden uzak kalanların, aslında kamu işlerinde meydana getirebilecekleri negatif etki ihtimalini sıfırladıklarıdır, çünkü böyle bir sonuç da mümkündür ve katılım her zaman olumlu olmak zorunda değildir -kamu işlerinden anlamadığını söyleyen zeki insanları düşünün. Bununla birlikte, bu düşünce biçiminde son derece samimiyetsiz ve tembelce bir şey var gibi görünüyor. Olumlu bir potansiyel etki yapabilecek, ancak belki de tam tersini yapacak olma riskiyle karşı karşıya kalabileceğiniz ihtimali, elleriniz kirletmemenin veya karışmamanın en iyisi olduğunu sinyalleyen duruşu sergilemek, çoğu zaman kişinin kendi mevcut başarısızlıklarını, anlayışlarını ve yeteneksizliğini onaylamaktır. Ayrıca, mevcut düzenin kendi hayatınıza dikkat etmeye değmeyecek düzeyde küçük rahatsızlıklar getirdiğini söylemek üstü kapalı bir iddiadır. Belki de doğrudur, ancak bir kişiye sadece küçük rahatsızlıklar getiren düzen, başkalarının hayatlarını haksız bir şekilde maksimum düzeyde etkileyebilir ve zarar verebilir. Onu umursamayı bıraktığınızda kaybolmayan gerçek budur. Aslında, birçok yönden, hiçbir şey yapmamanın gözle görülür bir maliyeti olmadığı varsayımına bağlıdır.

Dünyanın adaletsizlikleri biz gözümüzü başka yöne çevirdiğimizde kaybolmuyor. Siyasi meselelerle nasıl ilgilendiğiniz konusunda kendi seçimlerinizi değerlendirmenin temel bir yolu, eylemlerinizin veya eylemsizliklerinizin olası sonuçlarından sorumlu olduğunuzu kabul etmektir. Ve çoğu zaman, kamusal alan hakkında kendi farkındalığınızı artırmak için küçük bir zaman yatırımı yapmanın bile olası sonuçlarından biri, adaletsizliğe karşı başkalarının eğitilmesine ve örgütlenmesine katkıda bulunabileceğiniz küçük yolların farkına varmaktır ve en küçük çabaların bile başkalarının hayatlarında nasıl büyük farklar yaratabileceğini keşfetmektir. Apolitik olma ya da olmama kararı, eğer bir seçeneğin lüksüne sahipseniz, karakterinizi belirleyecek bir seçimdir ve kendinizi değerlendirebilmeniz, cesaretlendirmeniz ve eleştirebilmeniz -ve başkalarını- için uygun bir konumdur.