Super Awesome Blog

I walk from my apartment building to the bus, a trip that takes about 5 minutes. In the summer it is a pleasant affair, with a sunny sky, warmth from the sun and a cool breeze. The last few months have been nothing like this of course. Winter has been especially harsh here, and 5 minute bus trek becomes a 10 minute exercise in pain tolerance.  In the winter this frozen crucible is tempered by the 10 minutes of warmth afforded by the the bus trip to work. Usually it’s a boring ride so I’ll read a book or a paper. Yesterday I forgot to bring anything, which I realized about half way through the walk to the bus. Turning back would mean another 2.5 minutes of icy hell… so it looked like my trip would consist of exciting views of local apartment buildings that have been frozen over.

Fate, it would seem, had other things in store for me. There next to my seat on the bus was a slick looking paper magazine entitled “Fighting For Our Lives: An Anarchist Primer.”  The price? “Absolutely Free.”  Well, what would you expect? The introduction is a stream-of-conscience rant, extolling the virtues of being homeless and promoting a variety of illegal acts including breaking an entering in an office building to stealing food and sleeping under cubicles, spraying graffiti, kicking in corporation windows (which the publication hastens to point out was covered by the five o’clock news,) all wrapped around a Utopian world where there are no corporations and “we write our own songs” extolling how wonderful life is when you’re free.

What really grabbed my attention, as I’m sure it was intended to do, was the second to last sentence:  “One of us even assassinated the President of the United States.” Assassinating a public official? Virtuous?  The side column continues the rambling:

“I’m speaking, of course, of anarchists-and when people ask me about my politics, I tell them: the best reason to be a revolutionary is that it is simply a better way to live. Their laws guarantee us the right to remain silent, the right to a public trial by a jury of our peers (though my peers wouldn’t put me on trial – would yours?) – what about the right to live life like we won’t get another chance, to have reasons to stay up all night in urgent conversation, to look back on every day without regret or bitterness? Such rights we can only claim for ourselves- and shouldn’t these be our central concerns, not the minutiae of protocol and survival?”

So the central thesis of “Fighting For Our Lives” is basically that anarchism is a better way to live. One wonders how such a system would work when a trial by jury is so flippantly disregarded. Perhaps no fundamentalist anarchist would put another on trial, but neither would a fundamentalist communist, or a fundamentalist Christian, or any other extremist put their own peers on trial. The statement is revealing of the monocular view taken by so many extremists that the world would be perfect if everyone was just like them. Troubling still was the highly violent tone of the entire document, outlined disturbingly in the preface which states:

“In the beginning, harmony: tribes of human beings live as one, gathering and eating and playing and sleeping and singing and making love and telling stories together. And, occasionally, discord: an argument breaks out, strong words are exchanged, a blow is struck. When this happens, the tribe meets and arrives at a resolution. Tribes that cannot do this break up, and the members starve or freeze or are hunted down by wild beasts, or join another tribe that can resolve conflicts. Conflicts between tribes are resolved in a similar manner. For thousands upon thousands of years, this way of life works and endures. But one day, there is a conflict that cannot be resolved. Discussion, placation, even combat are not enough; the adversaries still seek vengeance. Perhaps it is a spiritual aberration, or some technological or cultural innovation that allows them to  continue contending long after it is healthy, but they do not find their way back to peace as the others did before. They become machines of war. Their relationship with the environment shifts: the earth must be disciplined, now, to provide them stores of food to last through their struggle. Their relationships with each other change: they view all others as potential comrades-in-arms or enemies, appraising might above all other qualities. The neighboring tribes do not escape unscathed. Soon they are embroiled in this conflict, and must contend with an enemy such as they have never encountered. Many of these communities perish outright, others, the ones who would survive at any cost, find that they too mustbecome war machines. They too subjugate the earth and its animals, enslave their vanquished foes, even their own people, anything to endure in the face of this terror. They become the terror, they outdo it, and this is their undoing.”

Similarly blusterous paragraphs continue unabated for pages and pages. What I think is so misguided about this outlook is the delusion that mankind was better off when the entire species lived in small villages and tribes, murdering one another over petty issues that are eventually settled by a (likely) unelected council of elders. A society where the weakest and those who do not cooperate with the system are left to starve or be eaten, and where technological advances are solely derived from war and conflict.
I contend that agriculture and survival through seasons, not conflict with neighboring tribes, is what led to society as we know it today. The authors refer to this as a war against the Earth itself, storing foods through the winter to fuel war making. This outlook is plainly false. Simply because a way of life lasted for “thousands upon thousands of
years” does not necessarily make it correct or ideal. Lifespans for human beings before agriculture were abysmal, and I simply do not accept that constant sporadic fighting and murder mediated by tribal leaders is a superior system to what we know today. “Fighting For Our Lives” states that we should spend more time singing our own songs, living our own lives free of organized society as we know it today. The twelve pages dance around this issue, but the central
theme is there: modern life is wrong in almost every way. In this hypothetical future world inhabited by anarchists, where we have returned to a less complicated and certainly a more diminished lifespan, where murderous behavior is considered normal as a release valve for the tribe I wonder what kind of songs would be sung? None that I would want to be a part of. However I doubt I’d have any time to write songs…

I’d be too busy fighting for my life.