Stirner taught me that abstractions and concepts (“spooks”) often rule us just as completely and arbitrarily as corporeal authorities, and that true freedom requires one to break free of all preconceived notions of propriety, convention, and duty. This philosophy is often called “egoism” and is treated by many as a form of nihilistic realism culminating in an almost Nietzschean “will to power”. All constraints on the ego are to be discarded in order for the self to express itself fully through its property, its ideas.
This causes understandable concern in many. The search for perfect and complete freedom is framed in terms that are positively anti-social. If adhering to ethical codes or moral laws or legal statutes or social conventions should displease you, why not throw them all out? After all, what makes them all more valuable than your own happiness? And I find this a hard argument to reject without appealing to other spooks.
Indeed, I’ve come to realize that my own moral beliefs are undemonstrable and, therefore, I often have no compelling argument to make. For example, I believe the non-aggression axiom is a valid construct - it makes sense to me and seems to align with my innate sense of justice most of the time. But there’s no way to fashion a logical argument for this position outside of the conventions instilled in us through a lifetime of social experience, the nature we can claim to share (whatever that means), or the rhetorical power with which I can persuade, or make demands on, you.
If I want you to accept the axioms I accept, I don’t know where to begin, other than to presume you’re like me in important ways that allow my sensibilities to transfer over to you. The belief that we share common access to a universal basis for truth is the precondition for any persuasive, rational debate. It underlies the motivation for reaching out to you at all, because I assume you have the innate ability to reach the same conclusion I did - somehow. If I believe my position is true, I believe that you are compelled to accept it if you’re honestly accessing that same store of truth.
The idea that you and I are similar, that there’s an inner truth available to both of us that underlies our common interest in peace and harmony, and that this common truth is mutually accessible, is typically consigned to the domain of the religious, the mystical, the arena of doctrines requiring blind faith (though it has its secular versions, such as the rationalism of the Enlightenment era). And yet, the more deeply I’ve studied the arguments of libertarians (and I certainly believe this applies to any political ideology, or for that matter any belief system, bar none) the more clearly I see that ours is distinguished from others not by our beliefs per se so much as our constructions of that universal truth we expect others to access. Hence our outrage when they appear not to, because they are not simply disagreeing with us; they are challenging our own certainty in the truth at which we’ve arrived. After all, we would not reach out to them in the first place if we did not believe they (A) are honest with themselves and us, and (B) have equal access to that store of universal truth.
What’s weird about the typical construction of Stirner’s argument that appears to predominate in libertarian and anarchist circles is the emphasis on the quest to banish every kind of spook - only to make room for the primacy of another. It typically presumes a particular conception of the individual lying nascent and pure under these layers of spooks (particular at least to the degree that the spook’s restriction of it is identifiable) but never questions whether that conception of the individual as described by Stirner is itself a spook. Stirner advocates for this ego to dominate in exactly as arbitrary a manner as any other ideation can elevate itself within the psyche. In pushing for a radical individualism, Stirner seems to be convincing the reader not to abandon all the chains and limitations of the various spooks so much as to adopt one really powerful spook to rule them all, and let that ascendency be named “freedom”.
But what next? If you follow his ideas to their logical conclusion, a totally different construction can emerge. What if we, as the unique ones, create ourselves - not merely limit ourselves, though that seems to be part of it - through the duties, moral codes, and other constructs we assume? What if that is the character of our creative task? Perhaps casting off the spooks gets us down to the core of our being, but must we stop there? Or do we channel that core to others as an expression, a unique composition of identity and “will to self-definition”?
Perhaps all of us unique ones are defined not simply by our mere uniqueness at the root of it all, but the way in which we fit together as irreplaceable components. The ego as Stirner described it may in fact not be the unique one - it may be the spook we empower to protect ourselves from the inner truths others are constantly counter-demonstrating to us. If we are threatened by others’ constructions of their inner truth, it is only because we rely on the certainty of identification with our own spooks, which stand in for a more honest, rigorous, and continuous exploration of the self.
I maintain that the genuine political act is the quest for self-knowledge, or rather, a continual dedication to increasing honesty with oneself. The rest is arbitrary expressions people choose in order to get at that essential heart in others - indeed, if they didn’t assume the existence of that heart they wouldn’t bother to make the effort! Too often, they mistake the expressions for that which is being expressed, that which is truly being sought by all of us with various degrees of fidelity. You can argue ethics, morality, and logic all day with others and not convince anybody of anything nor discover anything that helps you better understand the human condition, because it is a condition of billions of unique truths, all equally valid.
In the same way that Nietzsche dared the individual to will himself to power, one can dare to create oneself by choosing his spooks, his constraints, his individual expressions of the universal as he understands it. It is an act of consummate creativity to define your own moral and ethical context as an expression of universal truth. The key, however, is to recognize that others do the same, and to see the interpersonal dialogue as a continuation of the meditation on the unique one - not some challenge to your ego. You approach the universal through the individual, not as a rejection of it.
If I express frustration with those who advocate for universal principles, such as particular conceptions of human rights, justice, moral codes, etc. it is not because I reject the reality of a transcendent universal truth. Instead, it has more to do with the manner in which some advocates appeal to it, as if their conception were binding on me. Often such arguments end up coming off more or less as breathless assertions of one’s ego, seeking conformity and not understanding, and certainly not an appeal to the common truth we should share.
In fact, it is precisely because of my firm grasp of what it means for a truth to be universal - that it has no need to be forced on another, either through the brute force of rhetoric or that of violence - that I do not insist on your consent to it. In fact, I welcome your dissent. We are each equally the conduits of the universal if we’re worth convincing at all. In order for me to be assured that I am articulating something “true”, the last thing I want to do is to extract your consent to my position. Above all, I want your honest feedback to help me integrate your unique insight into my search. The earnest seeker of truth places a higher value on testing it than merely believing in it.
Stirner closed his magnum opus with the phrase, “All things are nothing to me,” as if that were the end of the matter. Be that as it may, creativity and freedom end up manifesting most universally as the ability, nay, the daring to make something of that nothing, and to do it in the unique way only you can. That is a magnificent and glorious idea to me - indeed, it is what I believe I am, and what I believe you are.
It is why I will never demand you are compelled by some universal law “out there” to adopt my beliefs. Such arguments amount to hand waving, and no honest person resorts to them knowingly. For the precise reason that I believe some things are universal, I dare to trust you to find it yourself, in your own unique way - and if you can construct it better than I, then the benefits accrue to us both. It is in that manner of unique togetherness we approach a less distorted, more useful conception of the unnameable principle which impels us to associate in the first place.
]]>With whom, economically and culturally, should or does the contemporary poet or artist identify?
I appreciate the question. My personal opinion is that I see no difference between the answer to this question and the answer to the question, “With whom should anybody identify?” You either see an unjust system as acceptable or not. How honest you are with yourself about the actual decision you’re making is the real matter, and I don’t think anybody scores perfectly in that area.
The range of self-honesty among artists is probably on par with the general population. Some honestly find an elite-organized society appealing (it’s a cliche to mention nowadays, but let’s remember Hitler’s artistic inclinations). I’d agree that artists tend to have more empathy than your average person, but not that all do without exception. And business, prejudice, religion, and other forces invade art to varying degrees of distortion like every other aspect of life.
Any genuine resistance should begin, and in fact is beginning, to engage more directly with the conservative political economic vision of the status quo. As long as these ruling class systems are accepted as the default starting point by which others are compared, any truly revolutionary cultural impact artists can make is hedged against, as a rule. But the burden of moving the center of discourse is by no means borne solely by artists - everybody has talents that they can and should put to better use in order to convince one’s fellow man that more is possible in our world. Artists and poets can inspire the imagination, but it takes a lot of people doing the imagining to realize material change.
Realizing it, frankly, means slowly building and growing counter-institutions and organic, human-scale communities that can give people an identify and context independent of the status quo. Kevin Carson is a big fan of the old Wobbly slogan about “building the new society within the shell of the old”. To see rejection of the status quo as primarily a question of violence is mistaken. In order for such a rebellion to even be possible, much creative, positive work will have had to take place.
It’s kind of like what John Adams said during the debate over independence with Britain: the question isn’t whether to separate, but whether or not to formally acknowledge the separation between Britain and America that has already occurred. Similarly, the question isn’t whether the revolution will be violent, but to what degree the establishment will suppress the rejection of the regime that will have already occurred. Any armed struggle is far less important and completely at the mercy of the creative forms of insurrection, such as building counter-institutions like mutual aid societies, militias and community patrols, local businesses using their own transactional forms and instruments that fly under the state’s radar, building local economic networks for distribution (say, in emergencies to start), etc.
If one focuses on the violence brought about by change, it is far too easy to be discouraged. It may feel hypocritical to advocate for change when so much suffering is possible and when one benefits from the current state of affairs. But supporting the status quo as an effort to minimize violence is far more hypocritical, ignoring the ocean of violence exercised on behalf of this system every single day, at home and abroad. As white, middle class American men we have the privilege of occupying a societal position where this violence is not apparent. But it’s still real.
So if a moral cost to action is weighed, the cost of complacency and inaction must also be considered in comparison. Calling what we enjoy now “peace” is just as empty as calling revolution “justice”. In our hearts, we know neither is a pure good or pure evil, and dangers lurk on all sides. Faced with such daunting moral calculus, what is the concerned individual to do?
A more responsible approach would be to simply look at the world honestly and decide the manner in which one wants to contribute to it. We live within a system that is positively saturated in violence; escaping it is not an option, but acknowledging it is. The issue to my mind is not whether we will achieve a personally consistent and non-hypocritical approach to our condition (as Derrick Jensen once said, the genius of our system is that it’s impossible to live in it and not be a hypocrite) but whether we will act according to our values or resign ourselves to spectating. Moral certainty has never been a pre-requisite of moral actions, and we are dishonest to believe so.
The honest path is, I feel, to acknowledge the complexity of our situation instead of pushing it down and ignoring it because it’s uncomfortable. I think you can live a normal life and still work for human freedom and dignity. Contributing money and time to social or political causes, or building mutual aid institutions to solve your own problems, or engaging in conversations to open others’ minds - all of these things are individual acts of transforming self and, by extension, the society in which the self moves and has being. We need changed minds, not changed politics or economics; too often the cart is put before the horse.
What I think is important to understand about the anarchist perspective is that individual transformation, not some grand, outward historical event or abstract ideological mass realization, is the essence of revolution. These small, individual creative and social acts scale up spontaneously to the large, outward events that historians study, to be sure. But it’s a mistake to see the events as causing the change. The real change already occurred in the hearts and mind of the people. The events are at best lagging indicators; the personal transformation of individuals and the emergent social paradigm shifts are the material change we seek.
Revolution is a correction to the political order similar to a stock crash: the tumult comes from the delayed realization of the inherent imbalance that existed all along. If a social correction becomes violent, who is more to blame: those who prize their own hegemony over addressing injustice and suffering, or those willing to risk their lives to address it? Blaming violence on those who want change is an attempt to take the spotlight off those who fuel the system that caused the instability in the first place. Ultimately, those with the money and power will determine how violent the correction becomes, just as they decide right now how violent their “peaceful” rule is.
To put it another way: the reason I’m an anarchist and advocate for change is not because I think I know how the world should be organized. The goal is to change minds about what is possible, so that human potential can be explored more fully and people can live in a world that makes sense to them, that they have a stake and say in. The improvement over our current condition will come from all of us working messily and disjointedly towards it, not from one easily-identified leader or one tidy systemic model or one clever ideology. As Karl Hess once said, “Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.”
]]>You’re free to use these images for the purposes of promoting the Alliance.
]]>There are many reasons to oppose this scheme. Governments like city council have too often used taxpayer-financed carrots to entice developers into making precisely the bad decisions that led to an oversupply and crash in the real estate market. If the project fails, will these City Council members be around to reimburse the taxpayers for either the stimulus money or the project tax revenue we lost by financing this? No, they’ll be several years out of office by then, in all likelihood. Let’s not insult citizen intelligence with pledges of accountability, now.
Remember: if the developer will not even risk his or her own money to fully fund the venture and its expected tax bill, he or she is implicitly attesting to his or her opinion that the risk outweighs the benefits. By giving this stimulus money to the developers, we are betting that city council knows better than industry professionals how to judge whether developments will be profitable and successful. Granted, these professionals were usually awful at predicting the crash of the last years, but is it likely that politicians even less informed in the area will make a better choice?
This is corporatism, pure and simple: an alliance between private business interests and government to shape the laws and lives of its constituents in ways that promote a particularly narrow and undemocratic agenda. The best case scenario is this: politicians get more tax money to spend, while the private developer gets a lot more money to spend. No guarantee that we - the people actually living here - will benefit at all.
In fact, any increased revenues will probably be handed out to special, connected interests. How do I know? Well, because that’s how taxpayer money is being used right now. The council does not inspire confidence in taxes actually doing anything substantive besides fueling more and more speculative development.
It’s important to realize that the entire project, from its beginning, has been contested by residents. That a neighborhood has fought against different incarnations of this project for years should rule out any applicability of stimulus funds to this project. Appropriating money not directly collected by the city is just a way to bypass citizen oversight and hide corruption that may be involved. Stimulus money should be used only in an uncontroversial manner that clearly benefits the general welfare.
This is all on top of the fact that we just learned of a new fire station being built on the edge of our neighborhood. We’re already losing part of Canoe Run Park to another stimulus-driven project. Maybe right now isn’t the best time to be handing out money for yet more development in this small, vulnerable neighborhood?
It should be remembered that this development negatively impacts the character of a designated historic neighborhood. Residents sacrificed a lot of autonomy about their property to protect it. If I want to put up a picket fence, it takes two months of filling out forms, putting together a case, and begging for approval. But you want to throw up condos on the river? Please, help yourself to the city treasury. If historic neighborhood designation is to have any meaning, it needs to apply to everybody.
How good of a neighbor will somebody be if they have to be induced by millions in free money to even consider building near you? We in Springhill are trying to revitalize our neighborhood after thirty years of neglect by the same body now threatening us. That City Council can only see imagined future tax revenue - even as it empties its pockets to get the shovels ready - speaks to the poverty of vision in our city government.
]]>Just wanted to throw some news items out there. As you may have noticed, commenting is now available via Disqus. I plan on importing the old posts and comments over the next month. Let me know if you experience any problems.
As for leftlibertarian.org, that project has proceeded splendidly. I’m now pretty sure that I’ve caught up with all the old, non-defunct feeds it was aggregating from before. Let me know if I’ve missed you. I will not be importing legacy content from the old site, since, well, it exists elsewhere. I will be continuing to tweak the site, with particular emphasis on truncating posts more cleanly and consistently. I also need to generate a list of all the blogs I aggregate; shouldn’t be too difficult.
]]>The new site has a Google Reader account associated with it (leftlibertarian.org). Instead of going out to a list of feeds, downloading them, databasing posts, and generating web pages on requests, I just grab a JSON encoded version of my reading list as if my site were a Google Reader user and generate pages off of that! Super fast, super lightweight, super easy (once I figured out how I wanted to go about it).
The cool thing about this is that the API makes available just about all of the Google Reader features, including starring, comments, sharing, etc. The Google Reader web application is really just a front end for a rather powerful backend. Over the long run, I’d like to leverage these features to make the site more socially driven and dynamic but without needing a database or anything but a basic web server, cron, and ruby.
The site is very much beta right now. I’m using a HTML parsing library to truncate posts, so if you see anomalies there or have any other comments, let me know. admin atsign left libertarian period org
]]>When considering each competing interpretation, it’s most interesting and instructive to note which institution plays the victim and which the oppressor. After all, the quote is often used by people who assume the legitimacy of both big business and big government. The quibble lies solely with the relative power of one party relative to the other.
To my mind, the victim/oppressor dichotomy is positively self-reinforcing. In this case, the ontological dynamics serve to restrict what might be a broader conversation about not just the powers that be, but the powers we might have alternatively. Even radicals reinforce these established concepts: capitalists must have an articulable definition of the corporation and of the government to be able to ensure the victory of one over the other. Same for radical communists. If they didn’t have set definitions of each institution, how would they understand the conditions of success towards which they strive?
Nobody ever considers the political climate in which Mussolini made this remark; nor do they consider the indeterminate nature of the concept of “state” and “business”. And so they divide themselves into left/right positions and jockey for supremacy without instead challenging the ground rules of the game. Take this article by Nelson Hultberg, where he advances a position in the debate about whether the Federal Reserve is a public or a private entity:
For example, Exxon Corporation is considered a private corporation. So let’s compare it to the so called “private” Federal Reserve corporation. Does Exxon have its CEO and board of directors appointed and confirmed by the government? No, but the Fed does. Are 97% of Exxon’s profits turned over to the federal Treasury? No, but the Fed’s profits are. Can Exxon be voted out of existence tomorrow by Congress? No, but the Fed can. Therefore despite what our courts maintain, the Fed is not a private corporation; it is a government run cartel.
But this is simply not true: corporations most certainly can be voted out of existence by a deliberative body, as corporations are chartered according to laws that legislatures enact. In fact, before the Civil War, corporations had to be granted a charter by a deliberate act of the state legislature, and usually for a limited time and only for limited purposes. In the same way that government supplies fiat, artificial money that we are bound by law to honor, it supplies fiat, artificial entities that we must recognize.
Congress may not preside over the appointment of anybody to the upper echelons of Exxon, but it certainly doesn’t butt out, either. It’s constantly looking over the shoulders of those executives, regulating the corporation to stabilize and protect it minimally from management’s potential malfeasance with property it has little stake in. And surprise, surprise: those who rise to the highest levels of corporate business tend to be those who can best navigate the bureaucracy government has established. Direct appointments by senators might at least be more honest.
But the point of this post is not to rehash Reagan’s old line about government being the problem. At its root, government is one aspect of a system of collusion designed to privilege some over others. The radical socialists of the 19th century understood this when they critiqued the aristocratic, nascent industrialist class that had started pulling together this giant system that would give advantages to those who knew how to navigate it. We find ourselves subject to an interlocking directorate, as C. Wright Mills would put it, involving elites in government, business, academia, and other core institutions of society. These elites are not necessarily intelligent, or even competent at management - they are skilled at maneuvering through the bureaucracy and rituals of the highly structured society we live in.
The radicals of the 19th century saw the state as larger than just the government. The state was composed of all those who benefited from the status quo. Government, business, academia, and other institutions work to stabilize this status quo as the basis of their privilege. So when Mussolini talks about a merger between corporate and state power, he is not talking about fusing business to government - that alliance already exists, and most people back then knew it, too.
Mussolini was talking about bringing all aspects of society under a smaller group of technocratic, autocratic managers. The full power of society could only be leveraged by total submission of the individual. Today, that’s hardly necessary; the system has become so suffocating that its a trivial matter to convince most people to give up and become a cog in the machine. And we’re not going to reach those cogs as long as we talk in terms of the machine’s operating manual. The state is more subtle than the conservative “government vs. business” paradigm.
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