Theory

i’ve been working on my recording gear, i think slowly the quality is getting better. well, minus the talent, but i can’t buy gear to make that any better.

part of my recent reassessment of priorities was to redefine my social circles. until now, i mostly relied on my pre-existing connections or hobbies to help me meet people and increase my local circles. in practice, this let to very little improvement over all. somehow i still think regardless of the circles we’re in, we’re bound to empathize with a small subset of the whole group, no matter what the group is about. there are, however, differences in the size of this subset that relate directly to what the actual activity is about, i.e., self-selection of people attending.

one thing i tried was to increase the likelihood that i’d meet people equally interested in philosophical questions. meetup.com happens to work very well in sydney, and i ended up finding, and attending, a few of these meetups offered by different philosophy groups.

this brings me to this post. yesterday i attended a lecture on anarchism organized by an excellent group of people. needless to say, this is a topic that is very dear to me, for obvious-past-experience-reasons. while most of what was discussed was highly theoretical, one question was thrown at the room for the discussion: “is an entirely anarchistic society possible at all?”

i cringed. i had lived in working examples of anarchic systems (or at least, communal systems). one could argue that what i lived through wasn’t a real example because we were never really “outside” society, so never really demonstrated anything. i concede, there’s a lot of truth to that and what i lived through isn’t a proper controlled example. however, what i’d like to discuss is a completely different matter: that of political structures and their post-rationalizations, frequently oblivious to their implicit dogmas about human nature.

as the discussion progressed, the idea of anarchism was overwhelmingly ruled out, mostly based on the Hobbesian idea that humans are naturally brutes and need some kind of hierarchy to keep them under control. the modern version of this is a basic fallacy of appealing to that being a “fact of human nature”, as in, human nature is brutish therefore humans cannot be entirely autonomous, always requiring some form of “higher intellect” to prevent them from falling back into destructive behaviours. this is the old idea of the Leviathan, recycled by pop psychology and bad neuroscience magazines, using arguments such as that humans were naturally selected by living in hunter gatherer societies to cheat and to steal. while we may have been naturally selected without a doubt, i do wonder how that makes any difference to whether we cheat or not in practice.

when we discuss political models more often than not we’ll hear things like “democracy sucks but it’s the best we’ve got” or “power has always naturally organized itself the same way over and over, so anarchy isn’t possible because those patterns are part of human nature and they would repeat themselves”. i see these arguments as simple appeals to fallacious ideas of “human nature” or “tradition”. these fallacies stem from an unquestioned definition of human beings as limited, tending to be violent and power hungry, and entirely conditioned (and conditionable) by their surroundings. if we accept these premises, then obviously anarchy (or communism, or socialism for that matter) become logically impossible. but more importantly, these definitions of human beings are they themselves biased by the very political and social system in place. if we use an evolutionary argument for politics, we might end up concluding that patriarchy is good because it was “naturally selected”. i’m sure feminists would agree this is empirically verified nonsense, so i would like to steer this discussion in another direction, hopefully without (much) personal political bias. i will also not try to bridge the is/ought divide. i accept that words like “good” and “right” are problematic but they functional enough for my argument.

as a disclaimer, i am historically a leftist, but that only informs my anti-authoritarian criticism of society. my dedication to critical thinking overrides any theoretical leftist principle that contradicts peer-reviewed evidence. in that sense, i’m exploring how anarchism is possible and how it isn’t in the light of basic ideas of information and inference.

while i don’t think we are born brutish, i do think we are born with a limited capacity for knowledge and information. this means that to be entirely autonomous (i.e., make all the right decisions about our reality — no matter our definition of “right”), we either need to deal with a simplified world, as to not have too much information to deal with, or we must deal with a complex world collectively and intersubjectively. this seems to me a simple matter of evidence from history, and this is not a new idea at all (democracy and delegation have a long philosophical history of discussing this).

considering this, anarchism, defined as each individual being autonomous and deciding to the best of their knowledge what is the best outcome, is possible if a) the world is simplified and therefore computable or b) the world is complex but can be analysed in sub-problems collectively that provide a perfect global collective solution. to me, both of these are impossible, so under that light, and at the present social and political situation, anarchism is impossible in that sense. now, what makes it impossible is the present state of our capacities to approach these problems, and not our potential capacity to solve them. what constrains us is our belief in these bogus ideas of human nature, which feed back into our own self-identification with that hypothetical brutish human being.

i’ll use an analogy that hopefully will make it clearer. we as human beings cannot fly. it is our nature not to be able to fly, we are ground animals that occasionally can climb trees. if we were to say flying is impossible because human nature does not allow for it, then how come we have built planes? the mysteries of flight are virtually impossible to decipher to an individual with no prior scientific knowledge, and the engineering challenges of building a plane, drilling for fuel, regulating air traffic and so on are impossibly complex without a massive collective effort. however, it would be silly to deny that we do, in fact, “fly” around the planet. therefore, our human nature as beings that can’t fly does not inform our capacity to create conditions under which we will be able to (in this case, by jumping inside a plane).

this example shows how political bias tends to be stuck on the “we can’t fly” part of the debate, and tends to ignore the fact that societies are built collectively and based on things we ought to be and things we ought to do, and not things we are. i.e., societies express our desires to “fly”, to transcend our individual constraints, by engaging reality collectively, with our values subject to a seemingly impossible goal.

anarchism is simply another one of those goals, but it seems to us to be impossible because we have never seen it done, and we argue that it is so because “we have no wings”, or in anarchist terms, we cheat, lie and are power hungry. but what if we collectively engage this with the same mix of pragmatism and idealism as the quest for human flight? what is the difference between these two that makes one more feasible than the other?

my opinion is that we forgot that they are the same process, because politics and how society is organized are far too built into the fabric of our every day lives. we forgot that societies are no more than people agreeing on something collectively, that money is people agreeing that it exists collectively, that a lot of what we consider problems are actually a product of our own creations.

so how do i envision a possible anarchist society? (disclaimer, i wouldn’t like to live in one). i envision it in many different ways, depending on how far we can stretch contexts. i’d like to offer these ideas as open questions.

• does the population have absolute control over their own subsistence? if not, they will need power to prioritize who subsists and who doesn’t.
• does each individual in that population have the knowledge to decide the intersubjectively best outcome for the community? if not, then decisions will cause conflicts for the simple fact that they have insufficient information.
• does the collective allow for dissent? if not, then diversity will be stifled, and with it, autonomy, as autonomy is undermined by the impossibility of thinking differently.
• does the collective allow for self-correction of its own decisions, collectively and individually? if not, there is the possibility that an accidental bias in the collective will eventually undermine autonomy.
• above all, does this group of human beings have a capacity to look at its own group critically and recognize patterns such as the ones discussed by political theory and sociology? if not, then they will not be autonomous simply because they will exert authority via cheating, bullying, violence, coercion and so on.

these examples are things that need to be present in order for any of this to work properly, and i’d argue it is impossible in our current state of affairs to have anything like it. consider national borders, and how corporations exist beyond them. consider the commons and how they are privatised and at the whim of the few. consider now that you’d wish to start a commune somewhere? what guarantees would you have that you wouldn’t be raided and your resources plundered?

but given enough isolation and control over natural resources and means of subsistence, there is nothing preventing a group of critical and educated individuals from starting anything anarchist organisationally speaking. what elevates us from the brutish conditions of our subsistence is our capacity to engage reality critically, coherently, and according to abstract visions of seemingly impossible realities. like the flying steel bird, they are pure mythology for anyone unfamiliar with the scientific method and the basic principles of engineering. but for a 21st century human being, emancipated by thousands of years of reflection, flying, or anarchism, are merely ends for which we have the means in ourselves. we recognize that we have no wings, politically speaking, but we also recognize that we know how to create the conditions that allow us to fly. we created our political institutions to serve us, if they don’t, then it is only logical to abandon them and replace them with something different.

maybe this is naive idealism, or maybe it’s simple pragmatic social engineering. i do think there is a deeply rooted anti-human narrative that comes from a hangover from 20th century horrors, but that narrative is as flawed as any other naturalistic fallacy. we create our own social and political realities, so we can also question them, undermine them, and create entirely new ones along the way. anarchism is just another one of these possible ideas. lease out a plot of land and keep the gates open. you will be surprised by what happens if people squat it.

no matter the mindset, like Icarus, we will always build wings not from an embarrassment of not having been born with them, but from an irrational urge to fly closer to the light — an endlessly curious quest for the illuminating beauty of reality and our capacity to engage it and expand it.

a beautiful song for a beautiful poem («Madrigal á cibdá de Santiago» – Federico García Lorca)

i’ve been having lots of free time. one of the consequences of free time, at least for me, is that i picked up a bunch of new hobbies. but recently i decided to have a good look at what i was getting from them, versus not doing them at all.

intrinsic and extrinsic are usually used in terms of the subject (me). but instead, i’ll be addressing these in terms of the activity, which is already extrinsic, but to do this i will consider intrinsic and extrinsic as referring to within the activity and outside the activity, regardless of the person doing the activity.

when diving into a new activity, frequently we feel that things we learn while doing it extend to our lives elsewhere. i add this type of consequence to an extrinsic goal that comes from that activity. identically, if we feel compelled to do things in that activity that do not exist elsewhere, then we are following goals intrinsic to that activity.

when i moved here and realized i had all this free time, i decided to finally take up something i had always wanted to do, martial arts. it is perhaps the clearest way of looking at the big divide between the two. right on this topic, here’s a podcast episode about it.

some martial arts have ranks, say, Xth Kyu, Xth Dan and so on. these are intrinsic to the activity, in that they mean nothing to the outside world, and they don’t translate directly into every day things that we can use. on the other hand, mastering a particular move or skill instead, is an actual extrinsic goal. it doesn’t matter if you are an Xth Dan if you still can’t do a certain move that is needed to, say, survive a dangerous situation. being an Xth Dan might increase the odds that you do, but that is just because the intrinsic (Xth Dan) comes tied to the extrinsic (the new move).

i found, in my case, that the extrinsic effect of my activity was stunning. physically i felt better, i was more confident, my posture was much better, and i didn’t chicken out as much. i had chickened out frequently before in fight situations. but i also found that the intrinsic goals were tricking me into wanting to go up the ranks, not for the moves, but for the sake of it. being congratulated on going up ranks felt good, even though it was purely symbolic. all in all, if i balanced what leaked from this activity and what it sucked me in, it was a great net balance: a few hours a week had a tremendous effect on my everyday life. sure, i wouldn’t rise up the ranks as fast, but in the end that is my point: intrinsic goals sometimes distract us from what really matters.

another hobby, a slightly more embarrassing one, is card games. with my free time, disposable income and need to meet people, i joined a games shop and started playing competitive card games. again, i tried to look at it from an intrinsic vs. extrinsic perspective. the results, now, were different.

playing cards was, save learning how to be a good loser, had little to no extrinsic goals. all the popularity, success, progress, etc, came from following the intrinsic goals blindly. there was no other way. no quantifiable effect on outside life besides losing vast sums of money. great champions of the game still had no visible effect of the game in their lives (save a few rare exceptions). it seemed that in this case, this hobby had to go.

identifying extrinsic goals in an activity is important, in my opinion, because it allows us to choose between activities that complement (or don’t complement) our own intrinsic motivations in life. in my case, i’m highly motivated by personal improvement in terms of awareness and depth of knowledge, so martial arts and music are very compatible with this. on the other hand, the competitive nature of gaming, and its intrinsic “unlocked badges” and “experience points” do little to advance my personal goals, or at least that’s what i’ve found.

another casualty was couchsurfing. don’t get me wrong, i love it. but with time its effect on my life has become almost deleterious. it made me loathe meeting new people, and made me prejudiced against most people that i meet, assuming they are just like every other pampered backpacker. in this case, there is little in couchsurfing that is intrinsic (ok, maybe number of friends), but on the other hand, the extrinsic goals made my life better, then worse. over time, i went from eagerly learning from new people to be bored and tired of them. i had changed, but the guests hadn’t, and in sydney they were only getting more stereotypical. so i moved on, and that hobby is gone, at least for now in sydney.

it’s interesting to see these things over time. i imagine more martial arts will make me steadily feel good about them, plus make me better at it, in a somewhat logarithmic fashion. gaming, on the other hand, seems like a decaying exponential in that the big things we get from them, the realizations and the insights, are available from the start, but as we dive in it will just tend to suck life out of us. and then activities like couchsurfing are unstable over time, because what they give us depends on how willing and open we are to them, and how much of it we have done.

i felt it was important to share this idea because a lot of the time we are dealing with intrinsic systemic goals that add nothing to our lives. being promoted sometimes means losing out on much more only to get that extra 5k a year, that we wouldn’t need anyway if we were satisfied with what we have. identically, getting the ideal fit body, or the ideal musical skills to be a pop star, sometimes feel like going up ladders that lead nowhere but to a bigger fall. in this sense, i’ve been more and more keen on using this as a yardstick. what is the activity i’m in giving me in terms of my own personal motivations? what is it baiting me in terms of its intrinsic goals? how much am i being drawn to one or the other? this has become key for me, since it seems we live more and more in a forest of intrinsic goal-trees and the broad spectrum goal-horizon has become harder and harder to see.

some galician tunes on irish pipes

life in a big city has its frustrations, and one of mine is how i can be so hard to separate between genuine one-to-one interaction and a one-to-one interaction that favours a third party

consider talking to a stranger. at times it is hard but possible, and definitely some contexts help more than others. one of these is commerce. i’m reminded of a friend with a crush on the cute coffee shop attendant, too shy to ask them out. my friend would frequently shop there mostly because that interaction was possible, and hinted at the possibility of something more. except there was nothing more but commerce. many times commerce encourages the worker to be excessively friendly or sociable to bring sales up. we’re left with this strange feeling of not being able to tell apart whether someone is being friendly or just trying to get a bigger tip. sadly, it’s usually the bigger tip

while being street wise might help, i can’t help but think that somehow we’re heading towards a state of affairs where commodification permeates everything we do: should i friend this person on facebook? should i instagram this event? should i like this post? how will my reddit karma be affected if i express how i truly feel about this? basically gauging our interactions based on third-party metrics we have no control over

the prototype of this is what we already see and have seen for a long time: the salesman. a big smile, a taken-care-of appearance, perfectly tilted eyebrows to encourage trust. there’s a sense of unease when someone like that knocks on our door: it’s too obvious they’re there for something they will profit from. but when a cute bartender gives us a free drink and smiles, things are not as clear. there is a strong emotional response that is hard to disconnect from what it might be: not flirting, but probably a veiled promotion for that new drink. the reason why this keeps happening is because the vehicle for the interaction is itself commerce. inside a club, everything that happens that’s positive creates more business. on facebook, everything that happens and generates clicks means more business too. in a way, there is a panoply of third parties that benefit from the fusing of the commodified interaction and the uncommodifiable one and profit greatly if the two are indistinguishable

i grow weary of how this has quickly become ingrained in mindsets, to the point where one might hear “all friendships imply that each party has something to gain, so if a company gains something too there’s nothing wrong with that”. sure, relationships of mutual interest have always existed. what concerns me are these invisible structures that shape how we interact, exploiting our instincts, feelings of empathy or our sweet spot for smiles. third parties thrive on predictability, well behaved data, docile personalities. it is no surprise, then, that the social media intense world is a docile and non-confrontational one. netiquette, that has existed for as long as the internet has existed, expresses this bias clearly. it’s only a democracy while we all agree, so if you don’t, you will get downvoted to oblivion, unfriended by those that fear social repercussions, and so on

today, yet again, a beautiful fund-raiser approached me with smiles and warmness. who would i be smiling back to? the exploited underpaid worker that has had to smile all day without meaning it, or the CEOs and managers that are enjoying luxury thanks to the exploitation of human nature? these thoughts send shivers down my spine every time this happens. and yet, i can’t help but to smile back. it seems the profit someone makes out of our connection doesn’t outweigh how powerful it is in its simplicity. it’s almost as if the 21st century way of controlling us is with soft cushions and comfy chairs

some awesome (pipe) music from valencia, though they mix many sounds from all over

for a long time i felt the information overload was somehow focused, as if the overload wasn’t an overload of everything, but of specific things. i’d like to look into this in terms of asymmetry of information. i’ll go through some examples, including one of my pet peeves, social media

one of the main things about the way we perceive things is that our understandings of those things make us induce extra things about what we’re seeing. simplifying, if someone is wearing a lab coat, we will instinctively think that they somehow know more about something because it looks like they do. say, an actor with no training in pharmacy can be hired to do an ad for a bogus product, but since they look like they have a say, we will feel they have a say. since we are dominated by our emotions rather than reason for the most part, we will then attribute that feeling of authority to a real projected authority. if something looks like it is something, then it must be. it’s a common way we simplify the complex world around us, creating on one hand prejudices and biases, but on the other hand, very efficient ways of dealing with the world. say, if it looks like a door, it must be a door, so i will try to use it as the previous doors i’ve seen. we’ll see how this is important

i’m focusing on feelings because for a long time i’ve believed (though for the most part i can’t prove) that the way we feel about things defines more about our actions than the way we think about things. feelings decide, then we rationalize. obviously, critical thinking protects us from this, but then again, one can’t be critical 24/7

one of the feelings that is incredibly interesting for me is the one that marketing and advertisement exploits, in the form of smiles, beautiful faces and engaging scenes and actors. if you have a billboard with a beautiful half naked person looking straight at you the feeling we get is immediate and real. it is a beautiful person looking at us, maybe we’re special, maybe that person wants to do something with us. in reality, it is a beautiful person that was made up to be beautiful (by lighting, make up, surgery, etc), looking into a camera and pretending to be engaging with that camera or the photographer. it is someone that was hired by a panel, stood in a room for hours posing in fake engaging scenes that will be perceived as a real human connection. when someone stares at a camera that will broadcast something to millions, be it a billboard or a tv, we are creating a one way asymmetrical connection between the actor and the targets. asymmetrical because the actor didn’t engage anything but the camera and did their job, but on the other hand, everyone that will see that ad or video will feel engaged by that very same actor. they will feel there was something there even though there wasn’t, and that feeling will be multiplied and copied thousands of times. each one of these individuals will feel engaged by someone they will never meet, never really engage with, but already feel connected to them, creating a strange sense of on one hand familiarity but on the other hand isolation and loss (there’s that beautiful person looking at me again, but i’ll never meet them and they’ll never be mine). funny enough, this can go to extremes as far as making fans go crazy over being touched for a few seconds by one of these actors (i’ve been calling them actors, but performers in general, celebrities, etc). the power of this asymmetry means that all these fans have a feeling of being connected to someone who doesn’t know (and most of the times, doesn’t care) who they are or how they feel about them. in my opinion, this emotional asymmetry creates a permanent feeling of ineptitude, of loss and of longing – ideal characteristics for a consumer and a submissive citizen. a property of this asymmetry is that it will always create an imbalance and a craving on the masses for that particular feeling that was being sold. again, if it looks like that singer really loves me, they must, so i’ll love them back. never mind they were singing to a camera and only interested in the sales

applying this same reasoning to the way social media works in most platforms, one sees that this same idea of broadcasting something an audience will “individually” connect with is there too. if i tweet “i love you” and have one million followers, each one of those will feel the message was for them, even though it’s a form of diluted love. one might ask, if someone writes something like that to one million people, how could they ever express it? probably they won’t. but since social media is about sharing thoughts and things that matter, but also about popularity, what are the things that are most guaranteed to be successful? the very same individually engaging things that tap into those good feelings, but can be told to anyone. we encounter this pressure to share things that are going to be perceived as engaging and that will make people want to read and connect with. but the vast majority of things we encounter every day aren’t like that: most of what we do and what we encounter throughout a day are menial, boring, uninteresting things that don’t matter, so we won’t share that. we will just share what “matters”. but if everyone broadcasts only what matters, to someone listening it will seem that things that “matter” happen all the time, and that each individual’s life in comparison is lacking. if we have 10 friends online and each shares one meaningful thing in one day, and we had one meaningful thing happen to us, that day will have 10 times more goodness happening in other people’s lives than in ours. and again, if someone else looks like they have a lot going on, then we feel they do

when we cater to this paradigm of individual broadcast and consumption, filtered to make each shared item more popular, we are creating a mass of airbrushed and made-up lives for an audience to see. if all we share are meaningful and interesting things and hide the menial and downright banal things we do, we are effectively doing “plastic surgery” on our lives so they fit this paradigm of popularity. and since there will always be more “meaningful” broadcast messages than our own, we will always feel we have done less, felt less, lived less, because it looks like everyone is living more

the issue here is both asymmetry, in that we are looking at multiple shared things as an individual, which pretty much guarantees that things that happen to us will be fewer just out of sheer numbers, and the problem of inducing things based on biased data. if our sample of other people’s lives is social media, we will be basing ourselves on a doctored, media ready version of people’s lives, not a real historical account

the challenge will always be, in my opinion, to see the through the billboard and realize that this is all part of a poorly conceived marketing ploy to make us want to sell our lives for the highest bidder, liker or follower. popularity is hardly a good measure for quality or meaningfulness, and above all, every time someone in a photo or a post is engaging us “personally” in a broadcast message, they will continue to contribute to the erosion of the feeling that life is being lived fully, since in comparison to this mass media broadcast, it is lacking in many ways

no wonder we feel uglier, lonelier, less apt and less skilled. in a mass media world, only the masterful and popular are promoted, so in proportion, we will always be lower on that pyramid. it seems the bias for popularity has overcome the fully horizontal nature of networks, and that has made us live in a strange made up plastic world where lives are incredible and we will never be able to get there

how can we protect ourselves? how can i live my life without being “engaged” personally by scantily clad men and women whose looks are surreal? how can i live without being told i should have more, be more, do more? how can we let urbanization turn our lives into this terribly oppressing environment? if we are to be a city species (as it seems we are becoming), how can we build cities so that they empower and nurture each individual, and not make them feel like a cog in a machine?

kilfenora jigs, a recently discovered favourite

ever since i moved i’ve felt different in a lot of ways. mostly i would say it was due to the clear lifestyle changes: new job, new culture, new language and so on. but along that came a feeling of uneasiness, something i had a hard time putting into words until now.

when i lived in lisbon, the clear and visible corruption of governments and the economic sector and the consequences of bad policy in everyday life were so blatant that i had no trouble in being aware of them at all times. this gave me a strange comfort, in that somehow my individual shortcomings were irrelevant when considered together with the massive financial crisis. in a way, i wasn’t even aware of my psychological limitations, since i could attribute everything that would possibly go wrong to these blatant outside forces. the oppression here was explicit in that it was known by me and everyone i interacted with, creating a sense of individual innocence. i had no weight on my shoulders — everything was the crisis, the politics, the corruption. i was on one hand suffering anti-democratic influences in my everyday life (in this case in the form of the economic oligarchy’s manipulation of my everyday livelihood) but on the other hand free in my mind: i knew i had had no role in it, no responsibility for what was going on, and that carried with it a feeling of dignity from being oppressed by these economic forces but at the same time emancipated by my own education

fast forward to my life in sydney. all of a sudden, the social state worked, employers were nice and worried about work ethics, i had no money issues or any political concerns whatsoever. in a way, i could no longer blame “the system”, because in a way the system worked fine. all of a sudden, i had to analyse why things would go right or wrong including my own capacities in the equation

life here is not only easy, it is promoted dogmatically as such, with an almost obsessive promotion of success, happiness and indulgence. this means that somehow for me there was no explicit blaming possible, no innocence by default. this made me start to experience an entirely different type of oppression: that of the implicit rules and values of an apparently functioning society. the constant exposure to beautiful people (in a superficial sense), to beautiful objects (in a materialistic sense), to wealth and exterior happiness started creating in me a sense of inadequacy that i never felt before

when i was living the peasant life under an incompetent government and a crippled economy, i had nothing to live up to but my own sense of ethics, since society was not an example to follow. in fact, i felt most of my ideas validated by the mistakes the government would make. now, since everything is easy and functional, i start to hit my own limitations, be it how smart i think i am, how attractive or how talented. these pressures are created by these implicit forces that exist in a society devoted to these ideas of success. successful careers, successful families, success in everything. this standard is too high for anyone: it’s a standard that guarantees that individuals will always feel inadequate, because any goal in a pyramid will mean the number of people at the top will always be outnumbered by the ones at the bottom, no matter the hierarchy. but these pressures are also entirely unnecessary and virtual. if i were to transplant my state of mind from one place to the other, i would be incredibly happy here. but with the easy life came these artificial standards that i was never exposed to. i started feeling like the guy that has a car but since everyone has two, feels like he has no good way of driving around. my guess is that these forces came with the dominant cultures, that work in terms of competition and pyramidal structures of power. nowhere is this spelled out, since it’s not part of any law or government. but it is everywhere in how people act with each other. never before i’ve been more told what to do “for my own good” by random strangers. it’s almost like taking a $1,000,000 mortgage is the right thing to do because that’s how you “make it”, even when that doesn’t mean anything. or when you work out too much because that’s how you’re “meant to look”, or when you spend lots on gadgets or ikea furniture because that’s what your money is for

in a way, i felt freer in a society where i knew where the boundaries of my cage were, explicitly, than in a society where the boundaries of my cage were inside my head, in a twisted mix of outside conditioning that implicitly controlled me directly through my thoughts. to this day i’m still not sure how to live here and how to deal with this pressure. i brush it off thanks to some self analysis, but it contributes to a strange erosion of my dignity, in that thoughts of inadequacy come up much more, even if they are unfounded. i know i’m a great engineer, i know i’m not ugly or unattractive, i know that i’m not poor any more, but permanent exposure to these artificial standards makes me feel it isn’t so

this path of self discovery has coincided with my slow distancing from the anarchist groups here, and from non-authoritarian activist groups in general. i’ve been slowly realizing that by not making rules and hierarchies clear and explicit, not only in what they are but how they come to be, is a dangerous game to play that will inevitably lead to the most manipulative, charismatic or passionate to naturally bubble up to power. when there is no clear distribution of power done by some kind of accountable supra-entity, we fall back to our basic tribal instincts that make us much more susceptible to be manipulated, consciously or unconsciously, by someone with charm and charisma. i’ve slowly been realising that the real (ideal) role of power is not to press but to protect the oppressed, to prevent these natural tribal behaviours to bubble up, to put bullies back in their place, to prevent victimisation of anyone. in a way, this means that even though i’m still a leftist, and certainly not a communist or a socialist, i’m also not enticed by the anarchist way of getting things done. too much time is spent trying to have no power structure, to the point that the collective becomes structureless and with it, powerless. the best moments of community work i’ve ever had were possible thanks to a common vision but above all, a sense of structured progress that i feel lacks in a lot of activist groups these days

both these points tie in with each other in that i see transparency and explicit definitions of power and motives to be more empowering to the individual than letting us loose with all the possible implicit forces that are stronger than us. with this i don’t mean we’re born evil at all — i mean that we have our shortcomings and that the job of collectivising into structures of power should be focused on liberating us from these implicit oppressive forces, even if it means to be oppressed by explicit (and therefore, controllable) forces

i’m reminded of the film ‘the day the earth stood still’ (the original 50s one), in which the superior race submits wilfully to killer robots with a higher standard of morals than they individually posses and with it achieve a peaceful and flourishing society. does this mean, then, that neither right nor left are good paradigms any more, and that our new insights into our own shortcomings as a thinking animal might be the first step into politics that’s done with one foot in empirically tested truths and the other in ideals that go beyond our ancient tribal baggage? i certainly think that time is coming