Thursday, November 20, 2003

Anarchy.

Finally, we come to the issue at hand. Is it the answer, or merely another flawed solution?

Let's see here...

Let's conduct a simple exercise. Ask yourself, when did human civilization begin? 9,000 yrs ago? 10,000, maybe? With agriculture, at any rate, correct? When man started farming is when he became Man...for that is when we truly began to progress.
I'll get back to that term 'progress' in a second.
But back to civilization. I have another question for you, then. What were humans doing for the other 990,000 yrs, then? Sitting around? Staring? Living out primitive lives in wait for one of them to get the bright idea to start cultivating land,
and start us down this path we find ourselves hurtling down? How is it that they survived for 990 thousand years, these 'primitive' creatures...
"Oh I don't know, all I know is that it couldn't possibly be the right way to live. I mean LOOK at them...they lived in
caves."

So here's the thing: people back then lived in a tribal culture. In such culture each individual looked at the self as a 'self-in-group', not as 'self-as-individual'. Not as an individual in a society where the driving aim is to do just that...drive. push yourself. struggle against society rather than live in it....that is a defining feature of the 'self-as-individual' society. Tribal culture rejects that way of thinking of things. Or rather, it simply never occurs to one bred in tribal culture.
That culture, as explained, pertains to each person within it looking as oneself first and foremost as the 'self-in-group'. One has a specific task to perform within the tribe...and one will not rebel against the tribe, for it is because of the tribe that one exists. Without the tribe one would not exist...for there would be no protection. And so one finds one's place within the tribe, and protects the tribe as one would protect oneself. In fact one is protecting oneself, in essence. This, my friends, is called a self-sustaining system.
There are no rules. Why? Because there need be none...people will not work contrary to the purposes of the tribe, for that hurts the tribe...it hurts you. And hence there need be no rules set in stone.

A tangent just for a second...
What is anarchy?
Chaos? Disorder? What does society today tell you it is? It's bad, isn't it? Its fighting against the system...its fighting against order. And order is good...order is healthy. Order is what keeps this society going.
Ah, but that isn't what anarchy is.....anarchy isn't disorder for the sake of disorder, it isn't breaking rules just because they're there...
..its the absence of rules altogether.

Do you see a resemblance here? Tribal Culture.....no formal rules, yet it works perfectly. each individual is an individual second to being a member of the society....and each society is small enough for this to work effectively. Each tribe follows this theme, but each tribe is an individual element within the larger sphere of many tribes. Each tribe has no formal rules, yet the world system as a whole works so long as each tribe follows this system. This system of anarchy, which, strangely enough, works.

Alright, and how do we know that tribal culture works? Simple enough....it still exists. Look at the Aborigines in Australia, at the tribes of people living in the Amazon, in Papua New Guinea. These tribes live in isolation from our world system, this system where we inherently know that something is wrong. Yet they work. Odd, that...isn't it?


And how do we differ from tribal culture, then? Well we're children of the agricultural revolution...the prime driving thought behind which was to produce more than what was needed. Some smart people in the Euphrates valley decided that this was a good idea....and lets just say its snowballed from there. Each tribal culture fell before it, as they could not overcome this drive....this struggling mentality, until only a few were left.
Perform an experiment in your head: There is a population of 5 people. They produce enough food for five people. How many people will there be in this population after a few years?
5.
Now if food production drops to 3 people. How many people will there be after a few years?
3.
And if it increases to 8, even though there are still only 5 people in the population at initialization...
8.
And if one continues to produce more food than that which is required for subsistence? Well then it follows that the population will increase at an exponential rate, does it not? And is not this the prime thought behing wide-scale agriculture: to produce more than that which is needed.
This is why tribal culture fell in the path of this new culture....the Agricultural Revolution bred a new kind of man. One who was not content with what he had, forever wanted more.
Compare our prime values now with what i just said. They haven't changed much.
And we all agree here that something is quite wrong. Quite definitely wrong.

Tribal culture offers us something else, as well. It offers us relief from this flawed axiom that human beings are essentially flawed. This is because it doesn't base itself on struggle...on trying to somehow make ourselves 'better'. Maybe we aren't flawed, essentially? Has this ever occured to you? Or has society been shouting it too loudly for you to ever notice?

And, as we know, our current culture is so deep-rooted in this philosophy that its burnt into our skulls....from the day we're born to the day we die. And as we also know, something is quite wrong with life as we know it.

I will come back to this later. But i donot want you to read this and feel as if something great has been revealed to you. It has not. It will not until you come to these conclusions on your own, through your own independent thought processes. It is all I ask of you. Think.