Chapter 1: Where Do We Go from Here?
Ever since Seattle, lot of Anarchists have been asking, “What do we do now?” Obviously the Capitalists are afraid, which is why they post 8,000 riot police outside their meetings now. So how do we build an Anarchist movement that’s big enough and powerful enough to take the protest to the next level?
You tried to take the protest to the next level in St. Paul, and it didn’t work. The St. Paul protest was a lot better organized than Seattle, but the police were better organized too, and now the Welcoming Committee organizers are in jail. I’ve been racing all summer to try to get this and my other books into print, but unfortunately, the publishing industry works on its own schedule.
Your enemies have already killed about a million people in Iraq. If you want to take the protest to the next level, you all have to face the question: What are you willing to do to threaten people like that?
A lot of Anarchists have realized that taking the protest to the next level depends on a bigger and better organized movement. That depends on building a movement that more people want to participate in. A lot of Anarchists have written a lot of literature to counteract Capitalist propaganda and to undermine authoritarianism philosophically. That’s a great idea, because this is a war of ideas. You can’t win the revolution until you erase your enemies’ ideology from the world.
Based on the number of conversations I’ve had with Anarchists over the years that have turned into quotes from Days of War, Nights of Love and Expect Resistance, either the CrimethInc. collective is really good at putting into words what a lot of people have been trying to say, or else a lot of people have read what CrimethInc. has to say and agreed with them. CrimethInc., unlike the Democrat or Republican parties, have figured out that politics doesn’t exist independently of psychology, and psychology doesn’t exist independently of biology.
Unfortunately, for some reason, CrimethInc., like most Anarchists I’ve met, assume that smoking weed and exploring their sexuality and whatever they do proves they know more about psychology than psychologists do, and know more about biology than biologists do. Then they, and you, assume that your New-Age philosophy somehow makes you smart enough to think of arguments against science that Christian fundamentalists haven’t already thought of.
If you’re an American who grew up with a TV in your house, you’ve been trained to interpret the world emotionally. Your idea of personal empowerment revolves around feeling what you want to feel, and believing that feeling that something is true proves that it must be true in some yet-undiscovered dimension of reality. Now the Anarchist movement is full of people who are trying to build a political movement on emotions and intuition, and you don’t realize just how thoroughly Capitalists have commodified the sensory input that triggers your emotions, or how thoroughly most Americans, including most Anarchists, have been indoctrinated into commodifying sensory input and positive emotions. Now you can’t figure out why an Anarchist revolution founded on Capitalist-constructed emotions isn’t threatening world governments. You’re only posing a threat that can be contained. Which is no threat at all.
No matter how great CrimethInc. or anyone else might be at writing poetry about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, as though this was The Sound of Music or something, as long as your revolutionary philosophy depends on people feeling the same way about things, you don’t have a globally inclusive revolution. Or a revolution at all, for that matter. All you have is a social club for people who feel the same way about things. As every Anarchist I’ve met knows, emotion is subjective. A revolutionary philosophy that’s based on emotions excludes everyone who doesn’t feel the same way. And if the revolutionary poet-philosophers are Americans who were raised on commercial television, now you have a revolutionary philosophy that excludes everyone who wasn’t raised to be an American consumer. Now you’ve turned the most radical political movement in the world into a marketing gimmick for New Age fake personal empowerment.
Now eight organizers of the Welcoming Committee are facing 7 1/2 years in prison for conspiracy to incite a riot in the furtherance of terrorism. A lot of Anarchists are saying that the political future of the world has come down to a duel between Capitalism and Anarchism. A lot of other people are saying more generally that the political future of the world has come down to a duel between the centralization versus decentralization of political power. But how much good is radical poetry about bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens going to do the Welcoming Committee in court? If they have to depend on something external to Anarchist ideology to defend themselves, then obviously Anarchist ideology isn’t sufficient to deal with all situations. If we’re really going to have a duel between Anarchism and Capitalism, the Welcoming Committee (or anyone else) needs to be able to pit Anarchism against Capitalism in their court trials, and stand a fair chance of winning. Otherwise, your idea of the success of the Anarchist movement either depends on brave people’s lives being sacrificed, or else it depends on brave people abandoning the movement when push comes to shove. Either way, if the Welcoming Committee can’t walk into court, talk about Anarchism, and leave it up to the jurors—citizens picked at random—to decide between Capitalism or Anarchism, you aren’t pitting Capitalism against Anarchism yet.
Well believe it or not, psychologists actually do know a thing or two about psychology that CrimethInc. hasn’t thought of, and biologists have figured out a thing or two about biology that you didn’t think of while you were busy smoking your weeeeed. The scientists who discovered global environmental unsustainability 40 years ago began studying how the environment created human psychology about 25 years ago or so. My grandparents started a parallel field of study about 75 years ago, using a hands-on, everyday life—meaning Anarchistic—approach.
My grandmother was a philosopher who discovered that people always do the best they can to try to provide for their needs, according to their own definitions of “their best” and “their needs”—not according your definitions, or to anyone else’s. As a result, everyone who knew her was amazed at how good she was at getting along with people—her whole life was inclusive of everyone. My grandfather was an engineer. Biology is engineering, because evolution is an ongoing process of tradeoffs and adaptations to changing environmental conditions. By the time official scientists discovered the official terminology, that all human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her, in my family we’d already been putting the idea to use for about 50 years.
What the CrimethInc. collective, and the Anarchist movement in general, has overlooked is that emotion is subjective, but the motivations behind the emotions are universal. We are all members of the same species because our ancestors lived in the same living conditions for all of our evolution. In those living conditions, our ancestors had to do the same things in order to survive. Those who did them survived, and those who didn’t, didn’t. That means that those who felt like doing those things survived, and those who didn’t, didn’t. That means we are descended from the people who had the genes that made them feel like doing those things, and that means that regardless of anyone’s subjective emotions, by acting upon our emotions, we do the things our ancestors had to do to survive and reproduce.
The problem is, by acting upon their motivations, our ancestors changed the world little by little. They had no way of knowing that the long-term effects of their actions were going to throw the whole world out of balance. Now people are acting upon their ancestors’ motivations in a world with nuclear missiles, a greenhouse effect, a war on terror, etc., etc.. Now most Americans can’t figure out why the political situation of the world is getting so fucked up, and are clinging ever more desperately to their government and their religious superstitions to save them.
Meanwhile, the CrimethInc. collective is trying to solve the problems by singing songs about cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels, hunter-gatherer woman felt like her life was complete and bourgeois man doesn’t feel like his penis is big enough, and Anarchists can’t figure out why more people aren’t joining you in the streets.
I’m not an Anarchist because I give a fuck about girls in white dresses and blue satin sashes. I’m not writing this book because I give a fuck how you feel about snowflakes that stay on your nose and eyelashes. I especially don’t join collectives, or revolutions, that are dominated by people who feel that their feelings about silver white winters that melt into spring make them revolutionaries. I do what I do because I want to have a global revolution that everyone can participate in and that can destroy world governments.
Every political ideology in the world, including traditional Anarchism, was founded by people who decided what kind of a world they wanted to live in, and then figured out how people would have to act to make that happen, and then tried to figure out how to get people to think the way they would need to think to get them to act that way. And you know what? It never works. Monarchies, theocracies, dictatorships, and Communist regimes have never been anything but revolutions in the making. Now the Capitalists are determined to be the next to put their necks on the ideological chopping block. But touchy-feely Anarchists using a lot of highly refined New Age philosophy to try to discourage people from learning about science because biologists and psychologists aren’t discovering what they need to be true in order for their idea of Anarchism to succeed, are no fucking different.
If you want to have a real Anarchist movement—which I do—you’ll figure out how people think first, and then figure out what kind of a political system that creates. Then you’ll figure out how that political system could be changed from the way it’s working now, by people learning to think and act differently than they do now, to create a political system that won’t destroy the entire world and that can adapt to meet the changing situations of the world without a whole lot of blood needing to be spilled in the streets.
Despite what CrimethInc. and a lot of other judgmental Anarchists want to believe, science is even more Anarchistic than traditional Anarchism. The universe has an inherent structure, which is why the entire universe isn’t just one big blob if ectoplasmic goo. Science is the process of figuring out how the structure of the universe makes everything fit together.
The universe works the way it works, and as mortal humans the only thing we can do is to learn how to cooperate with the universe. The Capitalists don’t understand that, which is why they have a revolution in the streets. The Capitalists keep cutting down all of our forests and filling up our air with carbon dioxide, and now global warming is about to kick everyone’s asses, and the Capitalists can’t figure out why, because their political ideology says that building more and more houses and cars is good, so they assume that proves the environment must work according to mysterious laws that no one can ever really understand. And here we are, with a growing anti-Capitalist movement all over the world, of people who realize that if we don’t want to die just so the Capitalists can drive their SUVs, we have to stop them.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot more people all over the world who’ve grown completely apathetic to politics, because nobody seems to have a political ideology that actually works. So they go right on cooperating with the Capitalists because keeping on doing what they’ve been doing is the only thing they can think of to make the best of their situation.
So basically, whoever can turn how the universe actually works into a political ideology first, wins.
Science is an ongoing process of figuring out more about how stuff works. The more people know about how stuff works, the more politically and economically empowered they are.
Science is always revolutionary, because on any given day, any government in the world that’s more than one day old was founded by people who didn’t know as much about how the world works as people do today. That’s why governments have always done all they can to prevent people from learning about science, and are still doing it today. Which is why that crap they teach in public school isn’t science at all, but How to Use Science to Propagate Capitalism. When you start leaving out critical pieces of information that conflict with your political ideology, you’re no longer teaching people science; you’re teaching them political propaganda. The Soviets tried that, and it didn’t work for them either.
It is true that historically scientists have come from the same European Christian Capitalist cultural background, have taken a lot of things for granted about the world, and have made a lot of mistakes. But believe it or not, Anarchists are not the only people who have ever thought of that. The best scientists realize that too. That’s why the scientists who make the biggest and most unexpected discoveries do it by thinking of things all the other scientists overlooked. Then they overthrow centuries of ideological dogma as a result.
It was scientists who discovered that the Earth was round, it was scientists who discovered that the Earth revolves around the sun, it was scientists who discovered that people evolved from apes, and it was scientists who discovered that humanity’s relationship to the environment is globally unsustainable. They didn’t study those things and tell people about their discoveries because they wanted to keep human thought stagnant, they did what they did because they cared more about discovering the truth than they cared about supporting political systems that were founded on lies and superstitions.
Well guess what. The United States Constitution was written in 1787. The Theory of Evolution wasn’t released to the public until 1859. The Laws of Thermodynamics weren’t discovered until 1868. That means the United States government was founded by people who didn’t know the most fundamental laws of biology or physics. The United States government is a part of the system of environmental unsustainability because environmental unsustainability is written into the Constitution. Political propaganda is preventing the problem from being solved. Solving the problem will depend on the abandonment of political propaganda.
By now, the scientists who have been working on planetary biology have broken their revolutionary discoveries down into simple enough components that third world farmers and indigenous hunter gatherers can see all the parts of it taking place all around them. Children inherit their characteristics from their parents. Everything wears out eventually. On a long enough time scale—namely, the length of time since the Big Bang—the interaction of those two things turned into the Earth as we know it. The age of the universe took high-powered telescopes to discover, but once you understand that children have been inheriting their characteristics from their parents and that things have been wearing out for an extremely long time, all the pieces fall into place.
Sane, well-informed people don’t choose suicide. The only thing holding the Empire up at this point is the public’s ignorance of how the world actually works. I write my books so that you, and rebellious 16-year olds, and Third World peasant farmers, can teach themselves more about how the world actually works than any United States president has ever known. Break the Empire’s stranglehold on the education system, and the Empire falls.
We are all human beings and we all live on the Earth. If the public ever learns how much they have in common with everyone else in the world, we won’t have governments anymore. From now on, we’ll have social structures (which most people will still refer to as governments out of habit) living in the shadow of a dual power system. If everyone in the world knows more about how the world works than the president of the United States, American politicians will be left with the choice of whether to adapt or… not adapt.
Various scientists have been combining environmental science with human psychology to try to figure out how to create a decision-making environment that will make environmentally sustainable decisions feel like the best ideas to people. They refer to their ideas by various names that won’t get them fired from their university positions. But basically, they started out studying biology and they ended up discovering Green-Anarcho-Socialism.
The basic solution is really a lot simpler than they think it is. Environmental sustainability depends on people ceasing to destroy the environment, and on social justice. The environment works on a long time scale, which means environmental sustainability depends on the long-term effects of the decisions people make. But people who are faced with short-term threats to their lives and safety can’t afford to concern themselves with the long-term consequences of their actions. Hence the Green Socialism part.
Anarchists have already figured out how to change people’s decision-making environments. If you pay to host giant Capitalist meetings, your stores get smashed. If you torture animals, your research labs get destroyed. If you host the Republican National Convention in your city, your streets get blockaded until the National Guard shows up to hold everyone at gunpoint to prevent public debate from interfering with democracy.
To take that to the next level, all you have to do is to decentralize decision-making power. To do that, all you have to do is to teach people more about how the world actually works than any of our politicians currently know. What decisions will get made, no one can say for sure. The point is, if people learn enough to make informed decisions, informed decisions will get made. Our universal human motivations create a universal decision making structure of humanity, which creates a universal political system of humanity that doesn’t depend on any politicians to control.
And it doesn’t matter how much politicians learn about that universal political system of humanity. If they don’t learn about it, they’re going to fuck up and be overthrown. If they do learn about it, they’ll overthrow themselves in the process. Anarchists have always known that centralized decision-making power can’t be trusted. Now scientists have figured out the same thing. Except their version isn’t political ideology. It’s chemistry. Any politician who claims to know for a fact that centralized authority can ever be trusted, is claiming to know something about science that scientists have never discovered.
This is not to say that centralized authority can be eliminated any time soon, because the environment and human decision making work on different time scales, and the environment works according to some laws that people don’t naturally perceive. Environmental sustainability will depend on decisions being made, and carried out, on whatever timescale is necessary to keep the environment from killing everyone. But this is to say that a centralized authority whose authority depends on the disempowerment of the public has already failed at environmental sustainability, because it has made social injustice possible, and therefore, inevitable.
An environmentally sustainable so-called “government” would be a social structure unlike any the industrialized world has ever seen, because its leaders would recognize that their ability to serve the people depended on an effective Anarchistic dual power system. They wouldn’t depend on the National Guard to keep them safe from the Anarchist movement; they would depend on using their brains to figure out how to build a society that wasn’t going to destroy itself and whose people wouldn’t need to have a revolution to save themselves from. Instead of hiding from the public behind 8,000,000 riot police, they would be using the public school system to train everyone how to be Anarchists. That is, they would be keeping themselves honest, by teaching everyone about how the world worked and the common ground they shared with everyone, to be able to keep themselves safe and healthy no matter how badly anyone fucked up the government in the future.
Or as a wise man once said, people should not live in fear of their governments. Governments should live in fear of their people.
Unfortunately, a lot of Anarchist conservatives still think they can win the revolution by helping to discourage people from learning about science.
Face it: Any time a majority of people who share the same beliefs takes over any group, they turn their beliefs into the mainstream of the group, which attracts more people who share their beliefs and excludes people who don’t share their beliefs. Before the Anarchist movement can get anywhere, someone is going to need to start an Anarchist movement within the Anarchist movement to overthrow the American consumer Sound of Music Anarchist mainstream.
If you believe in the revolution enough to learn how to wash pepper spray out of your eyes, I hope you’ve got guts enough to read one book by someone who has a hell of a lot more practice at thinking outside the box than you do, about why the Anarchist movement just isn’t radical enough.