Dear Director Chambers-Smith,
Hi… yet again… again.
I hope these letters are benefitting you, expanding your thinking, increasing your empathy, persuading you to see that bigotry against people whose ideas for human social organization are more imaginative and thoughtful than your own is not very nice… or reasonable… or fair… or appropriate. Perhaps you’ll come to see that it is a waste of your agency’s resources to continue its campaign against my very existence.
Previously, I shared how Anarchism is the only real advocate of freedom– which is “the absence of external regulation.” So, it isn’t only that if you are an Anarchist, you want freedom; it’s that, if you want freedom, you *are* an Anarchist.
Everyone else pays lip service to a “compromised freedom,” which is really “slavery.”
Also, Anarchists are the only ones who do not suffer the trifecta of delusions that are the foundation for the Kool Aid cult called hierarchy. Thus, to be an Anarchist is to rationally apply reason to questions of social organization and reject the collective mental illness called hierarchy.
So, based on what we’ve already covered, it’s safe to conclude that Anarchists are rational, healthy-minded advocates for freedom in human society while Hierarchs are irrational and mentally ill slaves accepting a compromise they falsely call freedom.
No offense.
I would like to continue here by discussing how Anarchism alone promotes the principles of autonomy, voluntary association, cooperation, and mutual aid; while the Hierarch delusion, on the other hand, dooms us to compulsion, alienation, compliance, conformity, and obedience under the threat of force. But to begin, I think we first have to discuss violence.
Hierarchs love to call Anarchists “bomb throwing crazies,” characterizing Anarchists as violent and destructive and unpredictable. Is this fair? Let’s consider…
Every single war in the last 8,000 years was started by Hierarchs, forcing armies of strangers to slaughter one another for their nation states or religious authorities. In World War II alone, just in the area of the Russian front– a space the size of New Jersey –Hierarchs from two opposing sides butchered more human beings in an eighteen month period than the entire world population at the time of the Golden Age of Greece. That is, the equivalent of the world population at the dawn of democracy was reduced to bones and ashes in eighteen months on the Russian Front.
Can you name a single war carried out by Anarchists? Neither can I.
Harry Truman, a Hierarch, ordered two bombs dropped on population centers that evaporated more human beings than everyone killed by all of the Anarchists throughout human history. Just one Hierarch was more murderous, all on his own, than all Anarchists combined over millennia.
Can you think of a single event where Anarchists deployed weapons of mass destruction on a population center? Me neither.
Every single genocide in history has been carried out by Hierarchs in campaigns of religious, ethnic, or national cleansing.
Can you point to a single genocide waged by Anarchists? Exactly.
Over the last 8,000 years of human civilization, Hierarchs have exclusively ruled every nation state, have organized and deployed every single military attack, have exclusively imposed “order” by force of arms, have exclusively ruled, raided, invaded, occupied, and conquered in every conflict where humans have slaughtered other humans.
Nobody can kill, kill, kill like you Hierarchs.
You’re off the chain. Somebody should stop you.
On occasion, Anarchists have tried– to no avail. In the early 1900s, some Anarchists, exhausted by the continual Hierarch bloodbath, killed a king or two and shot the President of France. An Anarchist named Leon Czolgosz killed U.S. President William McKinley.
The Hierarch death machine just kept grinding along.
And, in all fairness, just as a quick side note, even when it comes to presidential assassinations in the U.S., Hierarchs are responsible for 3 out of 4 presidential killings. So, Hierarchs are still 3 times as murderous as Anarchists, even when it comes to killing the leader of Hierarchs.
This reveals an important point, I think: hierarchy has always been carried out through violence, right from the beginning, and up to today. Need I remind you, but the “few” have never ruled the “many” by recourse to rainbows and daisies and cuddly puppies; from hierarchy’s inception, the “few” ruled through recourse to clubs and spears and sharp swords. Archaeologists uncovering forgotten civilizations can tell you whether there was hierarchy or not; if they find large numbers of weapons, there was hierarchy.
The enforcement of hierarchy has evolved from clubs and spears and swords to tanks and guns and helicopters, but the program itself that you still worship and defend at all costs hasn’t come up with a single original idea about human social organization since the Bronze Age, the same period when somebody invented the wheel.
I’m not saying you should feel stuck in the past or feel stupid… but if you DO, in fact, feel stuck in the past, or, if you feel sort of stupid, that’s probably a good sign that you’re picking up what I’m throwing down. Just saying, if I were a proponent of a slavery system pawning itself off as freedom… and it was based on irrational delusions irreconcilable with reality… and it caused more carnage and human suffering than anything else in the history of the world… I might feel stuck in the past and stupid too.
But that’s just me.
At any rate, everything else aside, the principle problem with hierarchy is that it’s based on violence. Force. The few rule the many, however the few may arrive at power, by demanding obedience, conformity, compliance to their rules and laws. The many obey… or else.
However well hidden it may be, there’s always an “or else.” Laws do not enforce themselves. If laws were self enforceable, they wouldn’t be necessary in the first place. The few write laws to compel us to do what we do not want to do, not what we do voluntarily.
Laws are enforced by law enforcement. The word, “enforcement,” has 3 syllables, “en-force-ment.” The important one is that syllable in the middle: “FORCE.” There is no enFORCEment without FORCE.
Cops carry guns. There are no nonviolent uses for guns.
Wherever hierarchy exists, whenever the few rule the many– however the few obtain power –the many are forced to obey, comply, conform… under violence and the threat of violence. This means the many are alienated from power, which resides elsewhere, with the few.
Just a quick note, but in the U.S. we have a convenient myth to distract us from this truth, a narrative that government is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This myth is actually quite laughable. If government were just an extension of people being people, it would not be government. It would just be a continuation of everybody living in some hippy-dippy utopia. Government is power… wielded by the few… withheld from the many… despite well intending slogans.
Where you have “of the people, by the people, for the people,” you don’t have laws imposed to make people do what they don’t want to do… and you don’t have Secret Service whose job is to stop them many from killing the ruling few.
In the U.S., you have a sales pitch (“of the people…”) that’s very Anarchist, but a system that’s very Hierarchist. Anarchism is the fulfillment of that sales pitch. By an Anarchist understanding, we are equals and we are free, each autonomous and possessing dignity. No one can compel you; they must persuade you.
In such a world where each of us is free, where none of us has power over the other, our relationships and associations are voluntarily entered into. We choose our relationships with equals rather than being compelled by rulers.
In such a world where power is distributed, there are no bosses, no kings, no authorities to whom we must bend the knee. Equals do not command other equals.
THAT weirdness only happens in the Hierarch delusion.
Instead, we have freedom to choose with whom we cooperate and collaborate, with whom we organize ourselves for mutual benefit between equals. In the absence of rulers and bosses we have a community of the willing, collectively deciding through consultation and consensus how to maintain our community, stockholders in its success, contributors and beneficiaries.
Now, anyone indoctrinated in the Hierarch delusion will immediately respond, “That will never work.” I will address the practicality of an Anarchist world in later correspondence but will simply say here that not only could this work, but it has worked. In fact, for more than 4 million years, over 99% of human existence, humans lived in nonhierarchic, consensus-based communities… prior to the advent of hierarchy… and they lived quite well, it seems.
It is not just possible for humans to live in such egalitarian communities, but we are literally designed for it. We inherit DNA from thousands of generations of people who successfully lived and thrived in such societies. If they could do it, we could do it. We are, genetically and biologically, continuations of those millions of years of nonhierarchic success stories.
In my experience, there is only one group who insist a society of free humans could never work. The term for such people is, “assholes.” Assholes are absolutely convinced that, without imposition of force, everyone would behave as badly, as viciously, as stupidly, as the assholes themselves would behave. It is in the nature of assholes to project onto the entire population their own incapacities, incompetencies, and flaws of character endemic to assholes themselves.
Because they are assholes, they imagine everyone else to also be assholes.
If it were true that it is the nature of humanity to be assholes, we would have gone extinct long ago, before hierarchy had the collateral effect of allowing assholes to thrive.
Hierarchy is, objectively, an asshole factory.
But, to everyone who genuinely worries that the absence of hierarchy could lead to a world of “all against all,” defined by brutality, violence, the strong subjugating and exploiting and devouring the weak, I urge you to look out your window; the imposition of hierarchy has brought you the very world you fear most.
The difference between the dystopia you mistakenly imagine under Anarchism and the dystopia you experience under hierarchy is that the predators in your imagination have mohawks and face tattoos and nose piercings, while the predators running this current dystopia wear suits and carry briefcases and tell you how good you have it… and that you should stop daydreaming and get back to work.
Apart from the question of fashion, the current dystopia is very real. Whatever can be said against Anarchism, it couldn’t do worse than this. By all historical evidence, it would do far, far better.
Just a quick observation before I close: I realize I can’t go questioning the deeply held myths that are central to how people see themselves and their world. Both Galileo and Copernicus did that, insisting in their eras that the earth was round and circumnavigated the sun… and people in power wanted to burn them at the stake.
Here, now, I’m committing a grave sacrilege far more dangerous than Galileo or Copernicus; I’m suggesting the very social structure from which you derive identity and meaning is a swindle, a complex of delusions designed to enslave and imprison you, and you cannot see the cages from the inside.
I suspect that’s part of the reason your predecessor designated me a gang leader… had me tortured for a year… isolated me at supermax… then blacksited me in place… and weaponized the disciplinary process to make me look like a super-terrorist who should never be released… and began the process of illegally renditioning me… all because I had the audacity to to question his deeply held belief central to his understanding of his own identity and the world… but you guys no longer burn heretics at the stake.
I’m also questioning your central beliefs.
I guess I have to hope you’re not an asshole.
The truth is dangerous.
Stay dangerous.
Freedom,
Sean.
***
Feel free, as always, to send this whole series to ODRC Director Annette Chambers Smith:
Director Annette Chambers Smith
Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
4545 Fisher Rd., Ste. D
Columbus, OH 43228
annette.chambers-smith@odrc.state.oh.us
Mongoose Distro 