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innerspaceboy · 11-12-2016, 06:52 PM

Having just discovered this fantastic thread, I pored over all 20 pages and enjoyed many of your dialogs. I'll attempt to contribute, but I invite each of you to correct any of my misconceptions, as I’m a novice to political philosophy but am reading all I can to develop a more cohesive understanding of both my position and of the practical applications of anarchic principles.

I confess that I empathized with OccultHawk’s contempt for the automobile early in the thread. National suburbanization in the US was engineered to sustain the industrial factory system after WWII and to create a dependency on the auto and oil industries. But I understand that while I’ve personally lived and worked successfully for years without a vehicle, my circumstance is practical for only a small percentage of the population who can cycle to work and have little reason to travel beyond the mile radius of their homes. So while I share his distaste for the evils of the auto industry, I acknowledge that its utilitarian function far outweighs its evils in a first world society. (Though of course, immediate motion is direly necessary toward less environmentally catastrophic fuel standards.)

I recognize the distinction between private and personal property and reject private property as a capitalist means of worker exploitation, and feel quite the same about wage slavery. I also recognize that the practical implementation of an anarchic philosophy in the West is impossible without making fundamentally radical changes to institutionalized education. From the industrial revolution onward, America was reconditioned to be poorly-educated, under-informed, (or more often misinformed), and to be wholly preoccupied with consumption, ego, and social image. Selfishness is held as a principal virtue and fear is the catalyst for all actions of ignorance and hate.

Fortunately, nationalism and authoritarianism have not been as culturally despised by the youth culture of our nation since the peak of our cultural history in the late 1960s. However, the indisputable corruption of our entire election process has left the youth feeling helpless in a nation run by banks and corporate lobbyists, further perpetuating this cultural condition of social and economic slavery.

The conditions for anarchism or socialism appear to depend largely upon altruism, egalitarianism, social empathy, pragmatism, and rationalism in the philosophy and actions of a society. But there has been such a carefully-engineered ignorance in the West to preserve the status quo and to keep power centralized among an elite few that I cannot imagine an effective transition to autonomous self-governance without the demolition of the existing State. (Fortunately, the present government appears to have a good handle on achieving this by their own hands.)

My personal alignments with anarchy are primarily concerned with the post-scarcity digital economy. Like Dotoar touched upon, I am a tremendous supporter of crypto-rebellion / cypherpunk / crypto-anarchism and Barlow’s more utopian vision of Gibson's cyberspace. (But by the same token, I am aware of the corporate ownership and control of the web, hence my advocacy for cryptographic safeguards.) My actions in the world of filesharing embrace the anarchic kopimist philosophy and the classic hacker mantra, “information wants to be free.” This is liekly my most Libertarian value, although I find my ideals of social welfare and mutual aid aligning closer to mutualism, anarcho-syndicalism or libertarian socialism / anarchy.

My greatest internal conflict is my dependency on five controlled substance prescriptions in order to function each day. I fear (though perhaps incorrectly) that these products of industrialized medicine might not be so readily available in a state of anarchy.

A very pragmatic friend challenged my ideology quite simply by claiming that in a stateless society it would be incredibly difficult to create a company like Google (specifically with regard to the empowerment it provides to a culture with increased access to information). He also challenged barter economies saying, “the problem with anarchism is that it’s hard to trade CDs for Band-Aids at 3 in the morning.”

I’m thoroughly enjoying this thread and will be reading on with keen interest.