Which one of your views gets you labeled as "the other"?
WatDabney @ WatDabney @sopuli.xyz Posts 10Comments 1,098Joined 2 yr. ago
WatDabney @ WatDabney @sopuli.xyz
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The Mattoid - Slacker's Pain (2003)
A twenty year old essay that's still relevant today: Thinking of Jackasses - The grand delusions of the Democratic Party by Marc Cooper
I'm amazed and pleased. I almost never encounter anyone who shares my views, even among self-described 'anarchists."
Most of them carry around lists (figuratively at least) of all of the things that will be required and all of the things that will be prohibited in their "anarchism," antagonistically immune to the fact that by doing so, they've already stipulated institutionalized, hierarchical authority and thus proactively eliminated anarchism.
Very much yes.
My anarchism is rooted in my view that authority is a contrivance, and an ultimately unjustifiable one.
Tom lives alone on a desert island. That means that Tom, within the constraints necessarily imposed by simple reality (he can't, for instance, flap his arms and fly) enjoys complete freedom of choice.
The only way that that freedom can be constrained is if another person is introduced and that other person acts to constrain Tom's freedom.
So as you note, the state of affairs in which Tom's freedom is constrained beyond anything determined by simple reality is some additional element that's laid on top of the base state.
And as such, it's the thing that must be justified. Tom doesn't have to justify being free from constraint imposed by another - he already was so free, and would have remained so were it not for the fact that the other has chosen to try to introduce constraint.
Therefore, the introduction of constraint is the thing that must be justified
And there's no possible justification for it that doesn't ultimately establish a hierarchy by which the other person is seen to effectively be a superior being, such that their determination of what Tom may, may not, must or must not do is superior even to Tom's
If the tacit presumption of innate superiority isn't made, then any and all noninal justifications for authority over Tom's decisions fail, since any argument by which any other party might justify imposing their will on Tom is also an argument by which Tom might justify imposing his will on them, and any argument by which they might claim to be rightly free of the imposition of Tom's will is also an argument by which Tom might claim to be rightfully free of the imposition of their will upon him.
This is where and why institutionalized authority inevitably goes wrong, which in turn is why I'm an anarchist.