Hah!
The biggest tl;dr in your 17yr shroomery career? - I consider that quite the achievement. What can I say, I really enjoy writing, and cranking out a couple pages in the morning is one of my favourite ways to start the day. I'm well aware that few people on this forum will share my intensity of interest on the topic, but even if these posts just end up being writing prompts for my own benefit - I'm okay with that - I like the challenge of formulating my thoughts into words, and I often use my posts here as inspiration for more polished pieces published elsewhere.
The tl;dr is 'anarchy works - you can do it yourself and learn as you go'.
Threads like this are the equivalent of asking someone to explain the physics of how bicycle locomotion works - it's going to involve a lot of detail and concepts, but won't do much to help you learn how to ride a bike - the trick is to just get on the damn thing and try - you might get a few scrapes and bruises at the start, but you'll also intuitively learn how to keep yourself balanced as you go.
___ ___ ___@ Stable Genius
So when I talk about the power that a single individual can hold under capitalism, that doesn't mean that a single individual has the ability to create that amount of power on their own. It takes billions of people - some willingly, some coerced - accepting exploitative social conditions for power to become concentrated to this extent. A common way this is understood: the workers hold the power, but the bosses wield authority over that power. Bill Gates couldn't be Bill Gates if social conventions like private property and authority didn't facilitate the exploitation of billions. My point was more that, since capitalism concentrates power, it's a system that will create individuals like Bill Gates - and so instead of needing to coordinate the labour and resources of millions of workers, a single individual has the authority to control that power as they see fit.
The prisoner's dilemma is an interesting thought experiment for examining the value of selfishness and cooperation in human society. The basic question is as follows:
Quote:
Two members of a criminal organization are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge, but they have enough to convict both on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The possible outcomes are:
If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves two years in prison
If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve three years in prison
If A remains silent but B betrays A, A will serve three years in prison and B will be set free
If A and B both remain silent, both of them will serve only one year in prison (on the lesser charge).
Now, most people would say that the best result is to betray a silent partner and be set free - an example of how selfish individuals prosper, right? Except that human society consists of more than just a single moment in time - how we act today will influence how other people respond to us tomorrow. What happens once you've gained a reputation as a snitch, for example?
With this is mind, Axelrod's Tournament was born in 1980 - the idea was for well-known game theorists to submit strategies to be run by computers, and hundreds of individual games to be played out. The results were surprising - cooperative programs were overwhelmingly successful - in particular, TIT FOR TAT (cooperates on the first move, and then does whatever its opponent has done on the previous move). Selfish programs would gain immediate benefits from the initial betrayal, but over the long-term cooperative programs would stop trusting the selfish programs while they continued to benefit from their reciprocal cooperation with other cooperative programs. These were the most successful traits: Be nice (cooperate, never be the first to defect), be provocable (return defection for defection, cooperation for cooperation), don't be envious (focus on maximizing your own 'score', as opposed to ensuring your score is higher than your partner's), and don't try to be tricky (clarity is essential for others to cooperate with you).
Returning to the idea of social conventions - under capitalism, we've created certain conditions that allow selfish individuals to hold power. In later-iterations of Axelrod's Tournament, one selfish program that has proved competitive is the Southampton strategy: 60 individual programs were designed to recognize each other through a series of moves at the start - once this recognition was made, one program would always cooperate and the other would always defect, assuring the maximum number of points for the defector - a fitting analogy for the power of authority. Selfishness requires exploitative cooperation to succeed - capitalism is a system that creates these conditions of exploitation, and mass-acceptance of the accompanying social conventions facilitate it's continuation.
For example, capitalism is considered to create object-first human relationships, rather than person-first human relationships - this means that a selfish individual can gain the cooperation of others if they possess sufficient material wealth, in a way that wouldn't be possible under the alternative. Object-first relationships: I use my money to buy an item from someone - in this encounter, my money and their item are the focus of this connection - who I am and who they are, is mostly irrelevant so long as my money is legit and their item is quality. Person-first relationhips: I borrow an item from a friend - in this encounter, my personal relationship to the other person is the focus of this connection - it doesn't matter how much money I have, if I have a reputation of borrowing and never returning or paying. Continued, we also both build a form a social wealth through the interaction that doesn't require the exploitation of one or the other - people will be more likely to lend to me, if I have a reputation of taking good care of other peoples things before returning them, and people will be more likely to lend to them, if they have a reputation of unselfishly sharing their own possessions.
But how do we build these types of relationships while capitalism still exists? Well, if we take a lesson from TIT FOR TAT - or follow the bicycle analogy above - we just need to start. We can't control how others act, but we aren't preprogrammed computer strategies - we can make a conscious decision to stop cooperating with selfish authority, and to start the process of reciprocal cooperation.
___ ___ ___@ ashfiken
That's almost a chicken or the egg scenario - a hyper-consumerist society will create materialistic individuals, and materialistic individuals will create a hyper-consumerist society - but what came first? - and now that it's started, how do we break the cycle? This isn't even a problem confined to capitalism - Shiva and Buddha were talking about attachment to the material world thousands of years ago. I would say that I agree with the spiritual consensus (as might be inferred from my account name) - attachment to the material world is an intensely personal journey that can't be forced -
only I can catch the ox of my mind. I don't have the power to necessarily influence materialism on a societal level, but I absolutely have the power to influence materialism on a personal level.
So the next question becomes 'how great of an obstacle do selfish people pose to an anarchist way of living?' I think we can take some insight from my above response to Stable Genius: reciprocal cooperation is a powerful force - but so is cooperation with authority. An authority who commands mass obedience might, in an ultimate sense, hold more power - consider the massive military power possessed by nation-states today, for example - but there's still a significant difference between being 'too strong to defeat' and 'strong enough to win' - the last two decades in Afghanistan shows us exactly what that means. Materialism might be too great an obstacle to ever completely remove, but it's not too great an obstacle to ever completely stop us either. None of the '-isms' of this world are.
It's not a question of whether we can win, but of how we wish to live. I don’t participate in anarchist struggle because I think it'll save the world - I participate because I know that one day the whole world will be destroyed - and when that day comes, I want the story that ends to be a story of beauty and tragedy and resistance to tyranny - I want the story I lived to be a story of joy and courage and togetherness. I fight because I know that there's no guaranteed happily ever after, there's no salvation waiting for us at the end of history - there's just what we do together today. That's all the beauty and meaning in the world that there'll ever be, and it's more than enough.
But isn’t it more difficult to fight? Aren’t we setting ourselves up for gratuitous suffering, taking on such powerful adversaries? Wouldn’t it be easier to give up and go with the flow? Whether we choose to fight or not, we will suffer - that's the only certainty in this world - impermanence is a far more formidable adversary than either materialism or the state. What do we want the context of that suffering to be - will we suffer in pursuit of the things that are most precious to us? - or will we suffer meaninglessly, attempting to flee from pain and uncertainty, as if that could protect us? I’ve long made peace with the fact that I'm participating in struggles that can never be definitively won - it’s not a question of simply overthrowing a single government or destroying the state as a social form, but the never-concluded process of challenging hierarchy and oppression in all the different forms they can assume - this is not a project that will ever be complete.
For me, accepting that my actions cannot derive their meaning from some future goal is intertwined with the process of coming to terms with my own mortality. Recognizing death as inevitable, I don’t hurry any faster towards it - my attention shifts elsewhere, to everything that's
not death, however small it may be - the germination of a single seed holds more meaning than all the swirling galaxies of dust dying a slow heat-death. We may be defeated by our enemies - we're certainly doomed to become dust ourselves - but if these things are so, then the entirety of what is meaningful consists only of those moments when something else is happening, something other than death - be it a loving interaction between two friends, the maintenance of an anarchist social centre, the development of a grassroots music tradition, an explosion of rioting, or the toppling of a government. The fact that each of these moments has occurred will remain forever, immutable, in defiance of the void. This is what enables me to take action - however humble, however imperfect - and to learn from my actions, make contact with others, and take action again. The history of anarchy as the lived experience of human beings is comprised of such actions, and it'll continue to live on in eternity - long after every empire has triumphed and been destroyed - long after the earth has been swallowed up by the sun. Everything else is just death and taxes.