Let’s not be coy about protests.

Last week Canadian lawmakers approved a bill making it illegal to wear a mask while protesting. There are similar laws here in the US, especially against the use of gas masks during protests.

Why?

Because ultimately, when you take away all the niceties and formalities,  the government wants to ensure its ability to crush you. You can’t hide your face because the government wants to be able to identify you and punish you for protesting. You can’t wear a gas mask because the government wants to be able to disperse or incapacitate you with tear gas and other weapons.

You can protest, but only as long as they remain in control, able to pull the plug when they’ve decided that you’ve had enough free speech for the day.

Many aspects of life are like this. It’s like running along in a video game and suddenly hitting a glass wall. You have the illusion of being able to acting out and making a difference, but ultimately, really ultimately, the government will make sure it maintains control. Anything that jeopardizes this control will be made illegal and squashed.

Changing my mind

There have a been a few times in my life when I’ve had large shifts in my position on various ideas and ideologies. I remember back in 11th grade AP US history reading about atheists in the context of their attempts to remove “under God” from the pledge and thinking how silly and stupid they sounded. I was a Christian at the time, but starting to have trouble with my faith. Slowly I was moving into Buddhism and I comforted myself by thinking “well at least I’m not an atheist.”

I remember doing the same thing with politics. The earliest political memory I have is from 2000, sitting on my mom’s bed late at night watching the election results of Bush v Gore, and rooting for Bush to win. Everyone around me wanted Bush to win, and I remember seeing some political cartoon about how Gore sounded like a robot. That was enough for me at the time.”

Later, as I started to begin my slow but steady drift left I remember defending myself to other people by attacking anarchists. I guess I wanted to appear still mainstream by calling out a group of people with a position I perceived as more radical than my own.

“I could never be an anarchist, that’s just ridiculous. You need order and government.”

Of course at the time I was attacking anarchists I was doing so without knowing anything about them except what was common societal knowledge on them; namely that they were violent punk teenagers that threw bricks through store windows and wanted absolute chaos.

I knew nothing about anarchists. I feel a lot of people make judgements on a groups based off of this type of common societal knowledge, aka ignorance.

Now that I’ve been reading anarchist essays I see myself starting to change. I’m at a crossroads in my life right now. I’m on the verge of making large, life changing commitments like moving to another country and lately I’ve been feeling a little lost and overwhelmed.

I’ve been struggling with what I want to do with my life, unsure if my current plan is really what I want. To be honest, I’m still not entirely certain what I would like to do in life. I’m afraid of walking away from something good, but I’m  know I can’t stay still.

In the midst of all this I’m also struggling to define myself and the society I exist in. Developing and solidifying a new concept of society is important because it’s the framework for how I examine and adjust my life priorities.

Anarchism has been very attractive because it provides the framework for I’ve been looking for. I’m finding many of the ideas very compelling and satisfying, even if I’m not overly sure of the practicality.

In an effort to be intellectually honest I’m trying to approach the ideas I’m finding in anarchism with skepticism. I want them to try and convince me, though I will admit, I am eager to be convinced.

Far from the brick throwing chaos punks of my previous understanding, I’m finding anarchism to be a life affirming philosophy focused on building healthy and beneficial relationships between individuals and society.

The wonderful thing is that there is just a wide variety of anarchist philosophy to explore. For example, there’s mutualism, anarco-collectivism, anarco-capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism,  anarcho-primitivism, and anarco-feminism, just to name a few.

I’m in the process of listening to arguments from all the various subsets and trying to decide which align the most with my views on reality. So far, the one underlying principle I’ve identified is simply “Coercing another individual into doing something they would not freely do is wrong.” From this everything follows. This principle informs how anarchists look at governments, laws, violence, sex, employment, etc. It’s really quite fascinating. Just about every aspect of life and interaction is affected by this axiom.

I’ve been viewing this experience, of changing my mind, a bit in the third person. I’m aware that it’s happening and I just find it really interesting to watch, even as I’m actively participating in it.

Laws don’t determine what’s right and wrong.

This November 5th some members of anonymous are planning on marching on Washington DC, possibly armed, to arrest the government. As noble as this idea is, in reality they’re going to be arrested the moment they put their hands on any members of the government. If they bring guns, people will be shot because all government authority ultimately rests on the shoulders of someone with a gun. What they’re attempting to do, overthrow the government, is illegal but it isn’t inherently wrong.

However, I feel that if you asked the common Joe/Jane on the street, anything illegal is wrong. I imagine their reasoning would be something as terse as “Well of course it’s wrong! It’s illegal. Things that are illegal are bad!”

Unfortunately, I feel a lot of people in our society have this mentality when it comes to laws. It extends from a view of morality instilled in us from childhood:

Mother and father say something is wrong, therefore it is wrong. Mother and father say it is wrong to break the law, therefore anything illegal is wrong.

The problem is that the law is not some perfect measure of good and bad. It’s written by other human beings, human beings who often have ulterior motives. Governments are living organisms, hive minds, composed of a plethora of smaller beings. All living organisms have a survival instinct. As such, one of the first things made illegal by any government is the overthrowing of that government.

There was a legal academy where I went to high school. Basically, it was some extra-curricular courses students could enroll in if they were interested in going to law school after high school. The idea was to give them foundational knowledge of the American legal system to help better prepare them for law school. The types of people who joined this legal academy were the type of people who loved to watch crime dramas on television, to read about crime mysteries in books, and enjoyed crime fighter comics like Batman and Judge Dredd.

I’ve noticed that later in life these type of people tend to be more conservative and had an obsession with crime and punishment. Their black and white view of right and wrong and over eagerness to punish perceived rule breakers always irritated me. They’re like some annoying self-righteous asshole kid on the school playground that always has to run and taddle on you, desperate for praise and recognition from the authority figure.

The big problem then becomes: What if the people writing the laws write unjust and wrong laws to protect their own misdeeds? What if the right thing is made illegal? Of course this happens all the time in real life. Coercive governments the world over write laws that protect their own interests and attempt to sanction their own crimes. Businesses with enough means bribe governments to write laws to manipulate the market and protect their own interests. It’s common practice.

So how do these crime and punishment types deal with this reality? They don’t. The compartmentalize it, ignore it, or rationalize it away with the just world hypothesis. Such complexities are not within their limited and comfortable range of comprehension.

And so this coming Monday those members of anonymous that march on Washington will experience the government’s monopoly on violence and will be branded criminals by the very people they’re trying to help. Never mind that their crime was trying to do the right thing.

Discovering Goldman

Have you ever had a bunch of ill formed thoughts floating around in your head? You have a general feeling of what you’re trying to get at, but you don’t know how to put it all together and articulate it. It’s extremely limiting and frustrating  Have you ever felt stuck like this only to discover someone else who had the same ideas, but who was able to solidify your thoughts and eloquently express them? It’s an amazing and exciting feeling, like coming up from under the water and gasping for breath.

I had this experience yesterday when I stumbled across an essay by Emma Goldman. I had been aware of her loosely and recently subscribed to a podcast Audio Anarchy. My interest in anarchy as a political philosophy has been growing for some time. I guess one of the things that got me curious about anarchy in the first place was just how socially maligned it is. I’m just naturally curious about anything the rest of society seems to reject in a knee-jerk fashion and without much thought. I think that’s also what got me interested in investigating atheism years ago.

I had a rough idea of what anarchism was before discovering Goldman, but nothing substantial. I knew that it meant freedom from coercion  and that most people incorrectly believe it is synonymous with chaos and violence.

The particular essay I discovered was “Anarchism: What it really stands for.” The Audio Anarchism podcast was reading it in two parts and I was really blown away.

For a while now I’ve had this loose idea revolving around how society seems to be moving people towards something akin to farm animals. I’m reminded of the scene from the Matrix where Morpheus explains to Neo how people have been turned into batteries.

 

I don’t think we’re anything like the batteries analogy, but I feel that in our society there is this general trend towards farming our productivity.

Get married, buy the house, the minivan, have kids, go to your job, go to church, keep your head down, watch football, consume corporate media, talk about American Idol, take one vacation every 20 years, work like a dutiful cog. All this is aimed at keeping you in a neat little box with the illusion of freedom and choice.

In her essay Goldman references Ouida who says:

“the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.”

Goldman, in this same essay, also touches on the feelings of disillusionment, the impossibility of change, that led me to stop paying attention to our current political system:

It may be claimed that men of integrity would not become corrupt in the political grinding mill. Perhaps not; but such men would be absolutely helpless to exert the slightest influence in behalf of labor, as indeed has been shown in numerous instances. The State is the economic master of its servants. Good men, if such there be, would either remain true to their political faith and lose their economic support, or they would cling to their economic master and be utterly unable to do the slightest good. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

There are lots of other nice nuggets in that article, and I look forward to reading more from her, but I’ll leave you with her nice summation of what Anarchism stands for:

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

Class warfare in The Dark Night Rises.

*spoilers*

I went to go see the new Batman film last night and while it’s an entertaining movie, there was a strong undercurrent of class warfare all throughout that drove me nuts.

I read a really great description of Batman from a reddit user dopplerdog:

Batman is a romantic figure. He is the embodiment of the Nietzchean will to power, anUbermensch. He fights for law and order, a bourgeois order which respects hierarchy and property. In his world there are people who work within the prevailing order, and criminals who are outside it. His role is to enforce his idea of justice on those outside his notion of bourgeois order. He doesn’t wish to subvert the order, but rather to save it from itself, because it has become corrupt.

It is fascist because it is a reactionary fantasy to “correct” unilaterally and by force the problems afflicting liberal democracy, by going beyond the limits set by the system. The aim in this fantasy is to restore a mythical order in which hierarchy and property are respected.

One of the first big action sequences we see is Bane and his thugs shooting up a stock exchange. The rich traders are there being polished and snobby, then shoe shiner, janitor, and Bane dressed like a delivery driver pull out guns and start shooting up the place. The thugs weren’t disguised as other traders, no, they were disguised as working class average Joes. The police show up and there is a dialogue exchange between an trader and two cops. I can’t remember word for word, so I will paraphrase:

Trader: “You have to get in there! This is a robbery! He has full access to whatever whatever!”

Cop: “I’m not running in there, it’s not my money. My money’s in my mattress.”

Trader: “Well if you don’t stop him that money might be worth a lot less than the stuffing in your mattress!”

I find it wonderfully ironic that Bane is holding the traders hostage because this is exactly the reverse of what is going on in our society. Back in 2008, when the economy collapsed, our large financial and commercial institutions held everyone hostage. The message was simple: Either you bail us out for our irresponsible behavior or we take the entire world economy down with us.

“Too big to fail” was the euphemism used for blackmail on a global scale. Four years later and nothing has changed. No one has been arrested, the corrupt and broken system remains in tact, and anyone who speaks out against it is denounced as promoting “class warfare.”

The character of Bane uses populist, anti-capitalist rhetoric throughout the film. He claims that he is starting a revolution for the people, giving the city back to the people. He laments the corruption in society and the injustice of a system used by those in power to keep themselves in power. Bane brings up several real issues affecting society today, but by having Bane be the one to voice them, Nolan is single-handily dismissing the issues and painting those who raise them as terrorists. Way to try and frame the discussion so there is no discussion at all.

Cat Woman, who is much more morally ambiguous, also uses populist rhetoric from time to time. She tells Bruce Wayne that there is a storm coming, that soon all the rich people will be thrown out into the cold harsh world and will know what it’s like to be one of everyone else. This actually takes place in a montage that shows rich people being rounded up, their homes looted, and criminals being released from prison.

The whole thing just reminded me of the period immediately after the French Revolution known as “The Terror.” I was further reminded of this when Nolan shows the rich being sentenced to death in sham trials before a “people’s court.” I couldn’t help but laugh when one of the rich decries the lack of due process. In Nolan’s mind the rich and powerful stand as beacons of justice and human rights. In real life things are exactly the opposite.   The “right” to due process has become yet another casualty of war. Eric Holder, the attorney general made it clear that “due process doesn’t necessarily mean judicial due process.”

Throughout the chaos Bane establishes a military dictatorship of sorts, declaring martial law and rounding up those still on the streets for execution. His rule is anything but a populist revolution. He is simply using the rhetoric of such to try and win people to his side, not that he cares either way because he’s planning on blowing up the city regardless.

Queue patriotic shots of police officers being heroic and marching down the villains, people coming out of their townhouses while those in power talk about prosperity and order, and the entire thing is a reactionary circle jerk with Batman as Jesus Christ.