Anarchoblogs from Occupied Cascadia

People send me questions, this is the second time I answer them, so this entry is called “Ask a Question 2.” Let’s go!

Name: Marco den Ouden
Website: http://marcodenouden.com
Comment: What do anti-natalists think of adoption as an alternative to having children the natural way?

Antinatalists are obviously very positive towards adoption as an alternative to procreation. The fact that almost 150 million children await adoption means the decision to procreate is that much more unconscionable. Adoption is just a good idea all-around.

That being said, it must be pointed out that most parents are not qualified to raise their own children, and adoption does not change that dire fact. The conditions which make people bad parents also apply in this case.

Name: travis
Comment: Hi,

Why do you say about solipsism that “is patent pseudo-philosophical nonsense”? This look like a nice explanation on solipsism: http://www.uncoveringlife.com/refuting-the-external-world/

All the best!

The argument on these entries you linked basically reduce themselves to “all we really have are perceptions (of what?), therefore there is no reality, only perception.” But this is asinine. For one thing, all we’re doing is relabeling “reality” with other words, but whatever we call “reality” still exists. It’s just relabeled “perception” and “dream”.

I found this part particularly interesting:

“If you are still having doubts or are still under the belief that a external world exist independent of us, contemplate this:

If an external world does not exist, we would have exact the same reasons to believe that it does as we have now. The objects of our experience would still behave in accordance to the laws of physics. There would still be the regularity and predictability we are used to, because that is how the dream is designed.”

What the author is actually admitting here is that there is no way for em to distinguish between the proposition that an external world exists and the proposition that an external world does not exist; but this only proves that the entire enterprise is meaningless, because there’s no way for us, even in theory, to tell whether it’s true or not. Which is what we should expect if this was a simple relabeling of “reality.”

From the intuitionist standpoint, such intellectual gyrations are easily understood. There is no “purely logical” way of proving the validity of a given moral value (or even that moral values can have validity), that a painting is beautiful or that reality “really exists.” All those things are founded on human intuitions. Without them, we can endlessly argue in a circle that there are no values, or no such thing as beauty, or no “real reality.” But since our use of logic is also founded on intuitions, such arguments are ultimately groundless.

From Everyday People.

I’ve written about why free will is philosophical and scientific nonsense. But there is a deeper problem with the concept of free will: it’s not even falsifiable.

If free will could be true, it would mean that we can “choose” between alternatives when confronted with a decision. In real life, we can’t prove this in any way because we can’t retake the same decision twice. Every decision is different, and we don’t have a time machine to go back to any decision we’ve taken in the past. So not only is free will not scientifically valid, but free will cannot possibly be scientifically valid!

Sure, one can still believe in free will even though it cannot be scientific. But the same can be said of other unfalsifiable belief systems like Creationism or astrology. So that’s not a particularly interesting question.

Here’s a more interesting question: why do they believe? The way they talk, I think the answer has to do with wanting to feel like you’re in control. They believe that without this belief in free will, humans must necessarily lose control over their morality and become depraved.

You will probably note that this is the exact same thing they say about atheists. I will address this later.

When I talk about “being in control,” I am referring mostly to two things: 1. understanding what’s going on and one’s role with a reassuring certainty and 2. being able to make choices based on these understandings (note: this is not the same thing as the control mentality I’ve discussed before, although obviously they are related). We’re talking here about control at any level: control over oneself, control over family, control over one’s environment, control over life, control over one’s future.

Take a simple example such as Christianity and the afterlife (which represents control over one’s future). The believer knows that there is a Heaven and a Hell, and that people go to either of them when they die. The believer’s duty is to believe in Jesus’ plan of salvation for them. By choosing to do so, one can ensure an afterlife in Heaven, with absolute certainty.

When faced with the rebuttal that ey might not actually go to Heaven, the believer has little response but to reiterate eir faith, because it is the faith that brings certainty. If one has faith, one will go to Heaven. The issue here is not to actually know anything but rather to live in the utmost confidence. Reliance on facts cannot bring certainty and therefore cannot fulfill the desired function of making one feel in control.

Perhaps the most recently famous case of an ideology which sells an extreme form of control is The Secret, which tells you that you can get whatever you wish for, if you wish for it the right way. Another such case is Scientology, which claims that at the highest levels you can achieve “cause over MEST” (mastery of matter, energy, space and time).

Of course such ideologies can never deliver what they sell. But it is also no coincidence that both ideologies are almost ridiculously optimistic, i.e. that suffering is secondary and that one can lead a charmed life, if one follows a certain method to the letter. Optimism, like positive thinking, always buckles under the weight of reality, and control provides the way to reassure oneself that everything is going according to one’s will.

Positive thinking is another ideology which relies heavily on control. I have previously highlighted the proto-fascistic language used to symbolize the amount of control a positive thinker must maintain. It requires the individual to repress natural urges and bottle emself up, a surefire recipe for loss of control and guilt.

Many conspiracy theories feed into this need also. It may seem strange to posit that believing that one is ruled by shadowy and omnipresent forces leads one to feel more in control, but it is the certainty involved in “knowing” the secret truth that is reassuring:

The power structure: government, academia, corporations… take your pick. Whatever flavor of paranoia you favor, it can fit into the widespread panic that shadowy elites are not just in control of your life but actively hiding the truth from you. Clearly, this reflects the complexity of modern society and the alienation many feel from the structures of power, which impact our lives from afar. Unable to understand how society actually functions, it becomes reduced to a conspiracy by powerful elites keeping us from our alien destiny. By revealing this truth, their power will evaporate and you, the powerless Everyman, can finally take your rightful place among the chosen. Yes, you, the lowly middle-class worker drone who hates big government and thinks that PhDs want to keep you oppressed, you too can commune with aliens and stick it to the Man.

Control implies reassurance through belief. In the case of failure of a traditional belief (such as the failure of Creationism), the one thing a control freak can never say is “I don’t know,” because this completely nullifies the effect of belief. Instead of saying “I don’t know,” the believer must either make up false data, or ignore the problem. In real life, individuals and groups will choose one or the other branch as the new tradition to follow (“theistic evolution” or “Intelligent Design”).

Coming back to the issue of depravity resulting from loss of control, I’ve mentioned that free will proponents and religious people share the belief that once you abandon their pet belief system you will lose control of yourself, murder, rape, steal, and so on (that is to say, you will no longer be a moral agent but be reduced to what they see as an animalistic state, even though other species can be moral agents too).

What’s interesting is that it seems to me that the believers implicitly prove that their supposed control is really entirely subjective. Some free will proponents argue that even if free will does not really exist, we must still promote it as a concept because otherwise people will go rampant. So they admit that it is the belief, not the fact of the matter, which retains control. Likewise, religious believers claim that atheists are evil even though [they also believe that] God exists. How is that possible unless it’s the belief that’s operating, not God?

Of course it seems obvious to us that control is subjective. The concept of losing control is hard for people to imagine, but it remains solely in the imagination. Despite the belief that people can “lose control” and become animalistic, there really is no such thing as a nihilist. There are people who claim to be nihilists, but as far as we can tell they behave more or less like everyone else.

The thing about deconversions to atheism and determinism is that they are not a loss of control but a loss of meaning. And a loss of meaning is always temporary, because the creation of meaning is second nature to human beings. We do it all the time whether deliberately or nilly-willy, and we even have whole masses of people whose job is solely to do this for others. It does not take long for a new atheist or determinist to realize the meaning vacuum, and then to start filling it up (so what happens after we die? how does the universe work?).

The human mind, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If nihilism actually means anything, its meaning must lie in that short, unstable period between abandoning one framework of meaning and replacing it with another or others. Such a state cannot be permanent.

I do want to make clear that I am talking here about illusory mental control which really refers to meaning. I am not talking about actual control over one’s bodily or mental functions. That’s an entirely different issue, and one which is genuinely worrisome and scary.

I think we can observe from true believers that control does not work. The more people obsess over being in control, the more that need controls them in turn. The attempt to control oneself leads to obsession which leads to compulsion. The supposed signs of “loss of control” are observed in all kinds of people, including true believers. All that is left is a hollow shell of the procedures which supposedly bring about control, such as religious rituals, self-censorship, aggressiveness and passive-aggressiveness, and childish dogmas.

It is a common myth propagated by men that women have rape fantasies, and that therefore they want to be raped and to be subservient to men. This is of course absolute bullshit. Elkballet debunks this dangerous myth.

While people do usually attempt to blame women for being raped, generally if people can accept that a rape actually happened, the woman is not responsible.

And voila, the “rape” fantasy is born. If she is not responsible for the sex, then it does not make her a whore to enjoy it (which it shouldn’t anyways). If women did not have to feel guilty about sex, enjoying sex, or masturbation, they wouldn’t feel obligated to blame it on someone else in their fantasies. In other words, in case you didn’t catch this, women do not fantasize about rape, they fantasize about being able to enjoy sex guilt-free. But because most of these women have no idea what a situation of completely egalitarian seduction and sex would look like, in order to feel guilt-free they fantasize about an anonymous pleasurebot coming in and ravishing them. Society puts into women the idea that if they say to someone, “yes I would love to have sex” she is a whore. So in her fantasy, she has to imagine not having said yes in order to be ravished. In the real world that would be rape. But that is not what rape is. Rape is the most soul-destroying horrific crime on the face of the Earth (short of murder) and no woman fantasizes about being raped. Women fantasize about guilt-free sex in a word that makes them feel guilty about having sex.

– to be expected. The BBC and Yahoo finally commented about

 4 hours ago.

(1PM PST March 22)  The most informative clips come from 

independent  sources  however, See:


http://revolution-news.com/spains-marches-dignity-reach-madrid/ 


http://rt.com/news/spain-protest-cuts-crisis-509/ 

A model organisation

Dignity March columns advancing towards Madrid

Gender Fatigue pointedly titled her entry for this video “Dustin Hoffman Breaks Down Crying Explaining Something That Every Woman Sadly Already Experienced.” Male privilege, ladies and gentlemen…

Daniel Mackler is the spiritual successor to Alice Miller and a tireless fighter for children’s rights. In this important entry, he discusses the situations in which one should definitely not have children, and why.

2) You feel your life is incomplete.

It is a myth that children make parents’ lives complete. If your life feels incomplete without children then your job is to find a way to make it complete BEFORE you have children. Lives are made complete by internally resolving one’s traumas, not by adding new and perfect young lives to adult ones that are already traumatized. Children should not be brought into the world to meet any of YOUR needs. It is your job to meet their needs, and to devote yourself to this end. Not the other way around.

3) You are lonely and want love.

No child deserves a lonely, needy parent. Your child will not love you. That is a myth. Your child needs you – and needs you desperately – and if you think your child loves you then you, along with most of our culture, have mixed up love and need. Now granted, if you need your child to love you, your child will quickly pick this up on his emotional antennae and will adjust his behavior toward actually loving you…but this will be devastating and perverse for his emotional development. Learn to love yourself fully before you have kids.

1. Proudhon's own writings. We are fortunate to have a great deal of Proudhon's work now available online, including quite a number of the manuscripts. There are a number of articles that remain uncollected and there are some omissions in the Mélanges volumes. There are also omissions and questionable edits in the volumes of correspondence. And there is an enormous amount of translation to be done. But the body of work that is readily available is remarkable.
2. The contents of the newspapers that Proudhon was affiliated with. The most serious problem with the Mélanges collections is that the articles are lifted from their original context, and we can tell very little about the conversations that Proudhon was involved with. There were allies and adversaries of Proudhon active in the same papers, and some of those figures were very significant voices. 
3. The works of Proudhon's collaborators and literary executors. Some of Proudhon's circle produced lengthy works, like Langlois' L'Homme Et La Révolution and Darimon's various histories, which continued or contextualized Proudhon's own work. A number of these figures also figured in subsequent chapters of radical history, often as adversaries in the stories told by Bakunin, Louise Michel, etc. 
4. The workers of The Sixty and the "Proudhonian" workers in the International. The last phase of Proudhon's career saw him increasingly involved with the French workers' movement, and the individual workers influenced by works like The Political Capacity of the Working Classes went on to take part in the International, in a variety of cooperative ventures, and in politics. But, again, our understanding of them is complicated by the fact that they were opposed on some key points to what became the dominant currents in the International and the anarchist movement. 
5. The collectivist anarchists. The collectivists made attempts to present themselves as the true inheritors of Proudhon's legacy, and it has been difficult to evaluate those claims, given the fairly obvious misunderstandings between factions and the fairly rapid eclipse of anarchist collectivism by anarchist communism. 
6. The later, isolated Proudhonians. There seems to have been a steady stream of writers with an interest in developing Proudhon's thought, but without close ties to other elements in the anarchist movement. Joseph Perrot, P. F. Junqua, Edmond Lagarde, and a number of other explicit disciples of Proudhon published a fairly extensive literature.
7. The mutualists and individualists in the United States. Proudhon's ideas made a fairly immediate impact in the U. S., beginning in the 1840s, and aspects of his thought remained influential as the mutualism of figures like William B. Greene gave way to the individualism of Benjamin R. Tucker, James L. Walker, the various mutual bank enthusiasts, etc. 
8. The tradition of Josiah Warren and equitable commerce. Although Warren held Proudhon's thought in something like horror, the French mutualist tradition and the movement for equitable commerce became thoroughly mixed in the development of individualism in the U. S. 
9. The exiled French workers in the United States.  While the French-speaking workers appear to have had limited contact with the American mutualists and individualists, we do find connections to Greene through the International, and we find fairly major developments of Proudhon's ideas in the works of figures like Claude Pelletier.
10. Other influences on Proudhon, Greene, etc. Some thinkers, such as Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux, inevitably come back into our story because of their importance to later thinkers.