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.”
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.
Every act against a billionaire is justified, because every act is a response to the violence being perpetuated by the continued existence of that billionaire’s schemes and machinations. The source of the Injustice comes from the position of power.
It’s not a semantic game to say that billionaires are inhuman. It’s defining humanity to exclude parasitism and include conscious thought and free will. A billionaire has neither of those things. They cannot consciously make a decision that harms their empire or they’ll be destroyed by their own inner circle. If somebody else interferes with their power they have no choice but to retaliate. There is no room for humanity. They’re merely a vehicle for wealth.
You’re going to need to give me a source on that one, I’m afraid. If you can demonstrate that that is true then I will be amazed.
I explained that statement in the very next sentence. The only choice they have is to walk forward along the path they have set out for themselves. Any deviation will result in the collapse of their empires. Anything that makes them human has been hollowed out long ago by greed and ignorance.
There are class traitors from that stratum of society. It’s not common, but the fact they can’t be reasoned with is systemic in nature, not individual.
Ultimately we’re all individually responsible for our own actions. There are systemic influences, yes. Those influences are what tempted these weak-minded egoic individuals, and by the time they’ve reached adulthood they have solidified into abominations.
I could also flip your argument over on to you and say that by defining these individuals as human beings, you are giving license to their kind of behavior. If there’s no moral damnation to being a king or a billionaire, then they are role models to be emulated. In reality, they are impoverished souls who need to cling to material wealth in order to have any self worth, and they see your material poverty as an indication of your lack of inherent worth.
And it’s not the traitors that can’t be reasoned with. It’s the establishment.
Individual responsibility is the argument of neoliberalism. If you want to change the world you need to focus on society and how it interfaces with individuals.
I have no idea what argument it is that you think you’re flipping. I’m not making a moral argument, I’m simply explaining the obvious categories that exist. That informs morality, but I haven’t appealed to morality at all yet.
Also, your moral argument fails immediately because it’s completely the reverse of the truth. If they’re not human, there’s no moral judgment to be made. I don’t hold a trained attack dog morally accountable for biting me. I hold its master accountable, because the dog doesn’t have moral reasoning abilities.
By calling them inhuman, you are absolving them of their “sin” as you call it, and you are absolving yourself of any responsibility to do the hard work of reasoning morally or objectively about this situation.
The simple reality is that they are human, and turning to outright bloodshed as a solution will not create a better society. The guillotine is the tool of the bourgeois, liberal revolution, and it presaged the neoliberal hellscape we live in now. Look into the history of the French revolution. Look at the environment of abject terror the newly forming government existed in, because they thought the individual purity of their rulers was an important aspect of their new society, and they kept executing one another. Nobody can be expected to make a better world in such conditions. Simple violence is the solution an adolescent comes up with. It doesn’t work.
All that is required to is to disarm them. They aren’t demons, they’re not vampires, they won’t haunt us and destroy us if we let them live.
Plus, watching them attempt to adapt to a life of moderation and no power to dominate and kill their fellow humans, to face the fact that they are human after all… I think that would be incredibly interesting.