2024.08.24
I'm not going to be citing sources for everything here, this is just where I'm at in my thinking as I continue on this now year-long quest into studying Anarchism.
However, I will say that the main influences for my overarching comprehension, rely on the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, as well as the book I'm currently working through, 'The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia' by James C. Scott. In the background are the various other authors I've read in the past year, including Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, and then stuff I've read further back that I'm now seeing in a new light by Belloc, Chesterton, Tolkien, and my all time favorite, Illich.
And I suppose that I needed to fit these new ideas into some framework I already had, and that ended up being the Omega Point.
That there is a procession happening over the course of history, a progression towards an inevitable perfection.
This allows anarchism to fall into a necessary place within the organism of humanity.
Anarchism (and thus the voluntarism, mutualism, conviviality, and personalism contained therein) precedes the development of the state, and it continues to this day, growing like the weed that pokes through the concrete and grows in the paved wasteland.
It cannot only be found on the edges and peripheries of state oppression, but right under it's very nose.
Whenever two people voluntarily decide to help each other, anarchism exists.
And thus it makes sense that it is only so recently in our history as a species, that we've begun to explore this phenomenon.
Only the ever-growing reach of states into the lower levels of the human network, made the study of this thing necessary.
We needed to describe the thing that we knew should be there, but was being diminished.
And the closest analogy I can use to describe it, is a mycelial network. Anarchism is the human network, moving nutrience and information around, because that's what human beings do. Not through greed or duty or coercion, but just through the fact that we're human.
This also makes it obvious that the state has some role to play. Like a tree benefiting from the mycelial network, and also benefiting it, especially when it dies; a state can only exist because of the underlying anarchic network, and when it dies, it gets incorporated back into the network.
This fits into the framework of the Omega Point, because an evolutionary growth that has been around long enough, even with it's many integral evils, must be playing some part in the overall development of humanity, even if that part is only allowed to remain in order to purify the whole.
So while the state may eventually become vestigial, at least right now, it is doing something for us.
Even if all that is, is teaching us the importance of anarchism.
.jpg){kind=link}
