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.

Refining my world view

All throughout growing up I’ve been refining my world view. Over the years it has undergone numerous changes and modifications. I’m always trying to adjust things to see how I can better make my explanations fit why the world is the way it is. Until now, the biggest shift in my worldview came when I realized that, to many, objective, independent reality doesn’t exist or matter. With this new lens I could better understand why some people, especially conservative politicians, act the way they act.

The epiphany I had recently revolves around super-organisms. The Amazing Atheist explains it pretty well right here in this clip talking about CISPA. Skip to 4:34 to get to the relevant part.

 

TAA uses the example of cointelpro and Watergate as examples of how people don’t care when individuals get fucked over, but they do care when super-organisms clash. Right now the news is full of stories about the Penn State child rape scandal. Penn State university covered up decades of child rape because it was attempting to protect its brand name. Now that the whole thing has blown up on them, all everyone seems to be talking about is the football program. What about the children who were raped? Nobody gives a shit. Why? Because Penn State is a super-organism and they only care about how that super-organism interacts with other super-organisms.

This biggest way this impacts my world view is in how I see political change, or rather the difficulty of political change. Everyone is just a cog in a semi-self aware machine. We are the system that oppresses us. We can elect politicians who can attempt to change the machine, but most often even they are unable to do so.  The system will continue to act on its own will. This really speaks to the powerlessness of the individual in our society.  If even the president is powerless to a degree to affect change on the system, what chance do you have of changing anything?

Everything that is good is bad and everything that is bad is good.

We’re all on a lifelong journey to figure this world out. Our experiences help us to construct a lens through which to see the world. 

Screw it. I’ve been trying to write and rewrite this intro for too long. I’ll get to the point.

I’ve refined my world view. Things start to make more sense to me when I look at the world in this new light. What is this revelation? As the title says:

Everything that is good is bad and everything that is bad is good

In my previous liberal mindset I thought that good meant taking care of one another, feeding the homeless, protecting each other’s rights to peaceably disagree and express that disagreement. I thought war was bad and that the government shouldn’t be killing people. I thought it was important to protect the privacy of adults and what they do in their own homes with their own bodies, be that smoking marijuana or having abortions. I felt that science was a good thing in that it often produced tangible benefits that improved the quality of life for millions. I felt that religion and superstition were bad in that they often exacerbated “problems” like suffering, oppression, and ignorance.

I believed in the axiom that pain and suffering were bad and that happiness and “freedom” (what that word used to mean) were good and that this was self-evident.

While I still strongly believe these things, I’ve come the the realization that I’m apparently deluded. You see, the world makes a lot more sense when the opposite is true. It would definitely explain a lot more things.

What caused this realization? I had an epiphany at the local Unitarian Universalist church the other Sunday. The reverend was speaking about different views of god and how many people have a childish view of god as a man in the sky who watches over them. He also spoke about how many of these people have a very myopic “just world” view.

It was then that everything clicked. I suddenly understood why conservatives seemed to be against everything I held as “good.”

If you hold that the world is inherently just, then good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Sooooo, somebody who is obscenely rich has to be obscenely good, and someone who is filthy poor must be a filthy individual.  The rich and powerful are always good because if they weren’t good then they wouldn’t be so rich and powerful! The poor and disenfranchised are always bad because they obviously did something to deserve it! (Circular logic much?) Get a fucking job!

What? There are no jobs because the people at the top gambled with the world’s economy and fucked us all? Does not compute!!! Ignore! Ignore! Ignore! Just get a fucking job you fucking slob! If you work three minimum wage jobs and still can’t get by, then there is obviously something wrong with you! Work harder! Get a fourth you lazy son of a bitch!

But seriously, if you step out side of the world for a moment and look at it with the lens that everything that is “good” from a liberal perspective is actual bad, and vice versa, and that money+power=”goodness” then everything suddenly starts to make sense.

Suddenly unchecked capitalism looks like a beautiful thing, even as the environment and people’s health are turned into commodities. Any law aimed at restricting the powerful and rich is suddenly evil in its very nature. Any action taken to make life harder on the poor and powerless is then admissible for they are demonstratively deserving of such hardship for whatever moral failings caused them to be poor and powerless in the first place.

Think about it.

What is your “better world”?

Everyone, be they liberal or conservative, want a better world for their children, they just disagree on how to go about achieving that. At least that’s what everyone says, but I feel there is a fundamental semantics issue here. What exactly does one mean by “a better world”? That saying assumes we both want the same thing in the end and that we just differ on the paths, but I think that is a wrong assumption to make.

What do I mean by a “better world” coming from my liberal atheist point of view? Well my better world would be a world where people don’t tolerate corrupt politicians who lie to them, where war truly is the last resort and not the first option. In my perfect world people’s lives would not be dictated by their neighbor’s religion. The government would not institutionalize bigotry, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, or impose religious doctrine. My perfect world would be a place where race, age, gender, sexual orientation, religious preference, etc would not matter. Sure if people wanted to take pride in some aspect of their identity that would be fine, but discriminating against someone for that identity would not be tolerated. My perfect world would be a world in which people were guaranteed the things needed to survive, like food, water, shelter, clean air, and medical attention, but where the safety net was not so comfortable as to encourage living off of it. My perfect world would be a world where people were able to speak their minds without censorship. My perfect world would be a world where the government did not try to control your body, be it what drugs you put into it, or when you decide to start a family. In my perfect world the government would work towards improving the lives of its citizens through a strong public education system and strong environmental protection. In my perfect world the rich would not be punished for being rich, but the poor would not be left to die either.

Those are some of the things I have in mind when I think of a “better world”.

Yet when I listen to conservatives, their “better world” seems so….evil to me. I know it’s not nice to paint it like that, but it just honestly does feel like the antithesis to everything I hold to be good and right.

The trickiest part is how they will often use the same words I do when trying to describe a better world, but by observing their actions and how they vote, I’ve come to understand that there is at the very best a serious semantics issue.

I will put this bluntly. Based off of my observations their “better world” appears as follows:

A place world where only landowners have the right to vote, a world where everyone is assigned strict gender roles and forced to conform to them, a world where white men dominate and control every aspect of society, a world where the power of big government is used to police your bedroom and your body. A “better world” where minorities and women know their place, serving white men; a world where the government is the tool of the rich and powerful and where the poor are left to starve off and die for lack of medical attention, shelter, food and water. A world where public education is non-existent and where all the taxpayer’s money is spent buying bigger guns with which to kill people different from the white men. A world of order, control, and conformity, not diversity, change, and uncertainty.  A world where superstition and religion reign supreme, where the existence of fact is denied. A world rife with sexual repression and discrimination. A world where the environment existed solely to be exploited for profit until it was destroyed.

I’ve acquired this impression of conservatives after having watched them fight tooth and nail against promoting equality among the sexes, races, and genders. Throughout history they have always stood against anything that gave power to people other than straight rich white protestant men. They always vote to cut funding for schools and art and to use that money to make bombs. They fight any legislation that would prevent businesses from raping the environment that we all must live in. They fight against anything that would give aid and comfort to the poor who desperately need it, yet they will die defending the richest millionaires in the country. They always seem to fight against immigrants and anyone who is not white. They fight to enforce and institutionalize discrimination, they fight to enable big government to tell you who to love, who to have sex with, when to have children, where to go to church, what to read/watch/listen to in the media, and what to put into your body. They do all this while chanting “personal liberties” with a straight face. They claim to love democracy and yet they cheer people like Joyce Kaufman when they say “If ballots don’t work, bullets will!” and people like Ann Coulter when they say “We need to put more journalists in jail!” A better world would be one where people resorted to murder if they lost an election; where freedom of speech was non-existent and journalists who disagreed with you were thrown in jail??? Sure Kaufman and Coulter are just two people, but they do not exist in a vacuum. Their ideas have sway with a large group of people in the conservative party.

It just feels evil to me, pure evil. I’m not saying that conservatives are evil, I know plenty who are honest genuinely nice people, but I’m very puzzled as to why they think this would be a “better world”. I feel like I’d end up trying to argue axioms with them like suffering is bad.