- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?
If you answered “yes”, then you are used to acting like an anarchist!
Are you a member of a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of general consent?
If you answered “yes”, then you belong to an organization which works on anarchist principles!
Do you believe that most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don’t really care about the public interest? Do you think we live in an economic system which is stupid and unfair?
If you answered “yes”, then you subscribe to the anarchist critique of today’s society — at least, in its broadest outlines.
Do you really believe those things you tell your children (or that your parents told you)?
“It doesn’t matter who started it.” “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” “Clean up your own mess.” “Do unto others…” “Don’t be mean to people just because they’re different.” Perhaps we should decide whether we’re lying to our children when we tell them about right and wrong, or whether we’re willing to take our own injunctions seriously. Because if you take these moral principles to their logical conclusions, you arrive at anarchism.
Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil, or that certain sorts of people (women, people of color, ordinary folk who are not rich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters?
If you answered “yes”, then, well, it looks like you aren’t an anarchist after all. But if you answered “no”, then chances are you already subscribe to 90% of anarchist principles, and, likely as not, are living your life largely in accord with them.
The big difference there is that you can make biodiesel from an extremely common waste product (grease) in your back yard. Grease cars are very DIY, whereas oil mining operations really aren’t.
As far as the amount of oil we use currently, a lot of that is going to be related to the unnecessary infrastructure of social hierarchy. Consider, for a moment, remote work. Employers who run offices tend to want their employees to come into the office every day, which leads to millions of people commuting on a daily basis. Not only do they have to burn the fuel required to move their cars from point A to point B, but they’re stuck in traffic so they’re constantly wasting momentum (and thus fuel) by braking and idling.
Pivoting to the office itself, now you’ve got a bunch of people hanging out in a big open space that needs to be climate controlled. Often this space has massive, bare windows, which isn’t fantastic for heating efficiency. Offices aren’t really built for efficient human habitation.
When people refuse to come back to the office, switching jobs or retiring early, they’re helping to make things more efficienct by taking power away from the points where it’s concentrated. Flattening out the hierarchy is better for all of us and better for the planet.
Centralized hierarchies really just take the work that’s being done by much smaller groups of workers and claim credit for it while imposing an unnecessary organizational infrastructure over the top of them and taking the value of their labor. If you work at a corporate restaurant the food you’re selling isn’t prepared by some huge corporate infrastructure, it’s prepared by the people who work in the restaurant. If they weren’t getting their supplies from the company that owns the place, they’d be getting it elsewhere.
These sources of collected power want us to think we need them. They want us to think that because their name or their logo is on the side of a building they’re the reason anything gets done. But the reality is that it’s the people actually doing the work, and they often don’t really need someone telling them how to do it from up on high.
“they often don’t really need someone telling them how to do it…”
I don’t share that level of optimism. So many current laws are written in blood, so to speak, because people are lazy or just ignorant even ignoring the crappy incentives in capitalism and hierarchies. I absolutely want standards for bridge construction, for example. Or food handling. Gotta get all that grease from somewhere, right? Doesn’t take a jack in the box to give people e. coli. Got any ideas for a pessimist on that kind of point?