From the 2019 game, Disco Elysium
The Deserter: (he opens his eyes and stares right through you) “It was real. I’d seen it. I’d seen it in reality.”
Half-Light: Some kind of great terror. Worse than what you’ve seen.
You: “Seen what?”
The Deserter: “The mask of humanity fall from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone — everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.
And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death… the sweetest, most courageous people in the world…” (he’s silent for a second) You see the fear and power in its eyes. “Then you know.”
You: “What?”
The Deserter: “That the bourgeois are not human.”
They’re human, and that’s a more concrete concept than “sin” or “cowardice”. Your attitude leads to executions.
If they were still human, it would be possible to reason with them. So why don’t you go and try and convince a billionaire to stop raping the planet and exploiting everyone else’s lives for their personal gain.
When you come back and report success, I’ll see them as human. I’ll even grant you success if one single billionaire willingly becomes a millionaire by any means.
This premise is false.
In between stimulus and reaction is the capacity for reason. That’s the only place you’ll find humanity.
If they lost their capacity for reason they’d be a lot easier to defeat than they are. You are underestimating your enemy.
Your contempt will undermine your ability to create an effective response to them.
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So you want to create a bourgeois revolution.
Anarchism means creating the new world in the shell of the old. Yes, that means being capable of violence, but the bulk of the work is in building mutual aid and community self-defense, not violence.
Also, by calling it violence you are admitting that they are human. You can’t do violence to an object. That’s just vandalism.
You’re just playing semantic games now.
Calling them “not human” is also just a semantic game, but it has real world consequences.
Like for instance, if something isn’t human then it is invalid to say violence has been done against it.
So therefore, any act against it is justifiable.
Like, either you believe what you’re saying or not.