Jewish anarchists weigh-in on how people can organize and act in the changing terrain. For a zine PDF, go here.
All of these are good points, and good to do.
My fear is that most Americans do not talk to their neighbors , do not sit outside and mingle, do not go to church, mosque or temple, or to bars or places of sin, even. They sit at home, go to work. Back and forth, exhausted.
Two generations ago people had stronger community ties. Most people were still exhausted and exploited but complained face to face about it, to neighbors and people in the community they did not know. And that made all the difference to power social movements .
Something is broken here, in my community and I suspect other places, I don’t know how to fix it and have not seen any good fix proposed by others.
I think with time things will change for the better, but many things have to help
That’s been my point for a while now. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted over a year. It could only be maintained because of the social bonds and connectedness of the people involved. In almost every way it is a better point in time to be alive than any other except for that of social connections. In the US at least people are more isolated than they have ever been and their sources of reality/truth blunted.
Social movements and change seem to not only need events and hardships but individuals that can harness and rally people.
There are so many different things to blame for it, but I think cars are a big culprit. They insure that infrastructure is designed to keep people separated from each other. Not specifically or with intent, but that is the result.
Somebody (I forget who) once said that we just ended the second industrial revolution. What they meant was not factories, but people being shuffled about and breaking bonds. In the first industrial revolution, in France and England, a lot of people moved from the countryside to the cities. Here, in the USA everyone and their family has moved at least once, and maybe more , and changed jobs and careers. It probably had more effect on society than the first, once cars and computers and the internet was all in there too.
Europeans were less affected the last generation, than in the USA, because I think on average they moved around less. But with North America being so big, we in the USA are all like a lot of shaken up marbles who lost their heritage, most family (no more distant relations network for most) and are adrift.
I think its natural to shut down a lot of social interaction with so much disruption. Pretty sure any significant, rational political progress absolutely depends on us marbles getting our bearings back (dad joke)
I agree with all of this and find myself in the same rut. There is a lot of talk of solidarity and community in progressive, leftist, anti-fascist, and anarchist forums online but I have yet to see any of it in my own life. At this point, I don’t even go back and forth to work because I work from home.
Does anyone have a clue as to how we can at least get the ball rolling? My spouse tried to arrange a meetup group but the most attendees we have had in a year has been like 2 or 3, and we’ve only had one attendee attend multiple events.
I’m really interested in seeing a solution.
The only good thing about this mess is it also hampers the fascists from organizing in person. Which is the only reason their demonstrations are small now
This affects not just them but all political activities and grassroots. It’s an equal opportunity handicap that gives the established parties all the advantages.
I think if people had better places to hang out at , or a movement to make a chain of bookstores, stuff like that, it could help. The French discovered democracy in parlors back in 1700s and such franchises of meeting places have been used over and over again the last few hundred years… and there is nothing wrong in reinventing the wheel
I have often thought that social media is missing a local, small scale form of platform that is based more upon where you actually live than shared, long tail interests with others around the globe and other things that don’t really build local community.
What exactly is a “place of sin”? What religion do you use to define what is a sin or not?
Wherever I can have fun, it’s a flexible definition
I knew Legoland was up to something!
The other really famous saying from the Pirkei Avot is also relevant now:
If I am not for myself, who is for me? And being for my own self, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?"
The really interesting part of that quote is: what am I?
Modern culture would have us define ourselves as a lonely and isolated centres of awareness trapped inside a human body. But if I must define my environment to define myself as an organism (e.g. I don’t exist in a vacuum of suspended emptiness) then the definition of ‘l’ includes the environment.
What’s missing in modern culture is a definition of ‘I’ that’s all encompassing and all inclusive. I am me because you are you and the two are inter-dependant. I’m not religious but I do have an interest in theology and philosophy. When Jesus said “I and the Father are one”, he meant literally, only the Catholic church would have you believe he’s a special edge case and the good word, that we’re are all one, never got out.
I challenge anyone reading this to put disbelief aside for a day and temporarily accept that everyone you meet is another version of you in disguise. That you all share the same source of consciousness that has been differentiated by your genetic container (your body) and unique experience/perspective, and see how your attitude towards others changes. Or in other words, take the philosophy of ‘Treat others the way you would want others to treat you’ literally.
Personally, I define ‘l’ as the whole cosmos. I don’t know how I do it but neither do I know how my stomach digests. A doctor could explain how digestion works but that doesn’t help them digest any better than me. It just happens.
Treat others the way you would want others to treat you.
Which, interestingly, is also in the Pirkei Avot! The old rabbis were definitely onto something.
In general I agree, but I have one suggestion re: communication strategy.
I’ve thought similarly regarding the shared nature of the human condition and what that means for how we consider one another. But I’ve puzzled over how to properly share the idea, or rather the feeling, and experimented with different approaches.
So far, I’ve learned that once you start changing basic definitions of fundamental concepts, such as the self, you quickly lose others’ attention. This might be due in part to the prominence of that rhetorical pattern in a long history of mystic and gnostic traditions, for which it often seems confusion is the point, and “don’t ask me how i do it” is the answer (unless there is a “donation” for the instruction). For example, imagining “I as the cosmos” is fairly inaccessible to anyone who hasn’t spent the last few weeks stripping away layers of the self (or isn’t on at least some ayahuasca).
Martin Buber’s I and Thou spends a few hundred pages describing your idea, which boils down to (1) our notion of others (“thou,” the intimate version of “you”) being animated by an outward projection of self, and (2) our notion of self being constructed from inward reflections of ourselves in others’ eyes. Anthropomorphism, ascribing human personalities to animals, is an (otherwise curious) side effect of this distinctively human behavior.
As a social mechanic, it begets empathy and requires trust. Its antithesis is othering which always requires fear. It lends credence to the idea that the more you understand someone — their experiences, their motivations, their dreams — the harder it is to hate and the easier it is to love.
So if you’re looking for a way to communicate this notion of humanistic atonement (at-one-ment) to others, in a way they can use, consider how one might dispel fear and learn to trust.
