Human Iterations

(#10: It's impossible to speak of regional liberty.)

An Anti-Primitivist Essay

The idea that some parts of humanity can be free while others are not is conceptually incoherent. Insomuch as anyone anywhere is oppressed, I am oppressed. I mean that not as a trite greeting card summary of solidarity in liberty, but in recognition of a basic psychological principle. To speak of being personally “free” in any sense while others are not is to leave whatever remains of the “self” a laughably meaningless shell.

Far from being revolutionary, such thinking is the definition of alienation.

Power is a social psychosis and, as such, it is ultimately something we can only dissolve away individually. But even the possibility of inaction or satisfaction in the face of such power structures is ultimately the acceptance of them in ourselves. The internal dissolution of our personal power psychoses is inseparable from external action.

You can't coherently talk of achieving any measure of liberty in the absence of empathy, and empathy presupposes some semblance of universalized identity. Without such one person's freedom would necessarily impinge on another's and any strong notion of liberty would collapse. We refrain from swinging our fist into another person's face not because of some arbitrary external structure or law, but because we recognize ourself in that person. We seek not freedom from one another, but freedom from rule. To attack ourself would be to surrender to some rule, structure and limitation. In hitting another person we of course decrease the net capacity for dynamic connection and integration in our society, but more saliently we internalize a psychological approach to the world that is irreconcilable with anything other than structures of control. The only situation in which we could speak of some people having completely abolished the power psychosis in their own lives is one in which everyone else has as well.

Empathy (and consequently morality, ethics and everything else created from its inspiration) stems from the abstract possibility of transitivity of selfhood. It's why we instinctively frown on punching teddy bears or torturing squirrels; the cognitive structures we associate with our sensations of them are a reflected version of ourselves. The child who acts out violence against her teddy bear isn't physically hurting anyone, not even from a panpsychic viewpoint, but such external actions are indicative of an internal intent of violence against society and, by proxy, herself.

We interact with the world by neurologically forming imprints of the world around us. We simplify our perceptions into informational structures, into Darwinianly evolving models that allow for greater traction in our contact with the world. Modeling rigid systems of limited complexity in our minds is easy, the interaction of uncountable billions of atoms can be simplified into a "lever" or "pulley." And, accordingly, we can demonstrate a great deal of control over such systems. But systems of non-linear dynamics pose a greater challenge. Other people are preposterously, if not infinitely, inhibitory to the successful creation of such macroscopic constructs.

The way we all initiate substantive contact with other people is to, on some level, see ourselves in them. We can only deal with other people by shedding off the contextual trappings of our own position within the world and reconstructing theirs around us. As a consequence, to accept their enslavement or oppression is to accept our own.

The King, by his participation in the kingdom, is just as much a slave to the power psychosis as his subjects. But so to is the monk who gathers berries in the forest, even though the King's men may not be able to find him for torment. That there could be an entire band of monks gathering berries far from the kingdom does not make them more free. Nor does it really make the sum society more free. That a thousand could live freely while one man chains another is impossible. By inaction they accept, in acceptance they are complicit, and in complicity there is nothing but arbitrary moderation. The presence of regionally inconstant degrees of overt acts of physical oppression does not make for varying degrees of liberty. We are all on the same level there. Whereas if one man chains another and we do react, so long as we remain in action rather than completion, our actions and our own lives are still bound by that chain. Only when the chain is actually gone can we speak of achieving greater liberty, and even then it is a universal reality, not regionalized.

Tribal dispersion, though it may present some of us immediately with some of the trappings of a truer anarchy, is inherently oppressive.

Given that we have knowledge of the rest of humanity, the choice to withdraw and concentrate all our efforts within some social sub-set leaves us not only complicit in the oppression of those we push off beyond the periphery but also in violence against ourselves. To preempt this by erasing our knowledge of the rest of humanity would be even more direct violence and contribute nothing but cowardice to the same reality. No tribe, commune or region can truly flourish in their own anarchy while the rest of world sees violence and oppression. The psychological effect of alienation from others, of such localized preoccupation, is the internalization of a certain rigidity. The acceptance of structure. Turning people into our technology.

The fermentation of rigid social structure is a direct result of alienation.

Any society that dismisses externalities and focuses social value on those near at hand is really making social value a result of context and physical structure. As such it is redefining others into nothing more than the structure of their relationships and functional value to other structures. As a result, the we become nothing more than a hollow structure, the organic human soul transmuted into a structural identity. In such a world, I am this structure and you are another structure that may or may not function to the benefit and sustainability of my own structure.

The resulting society looses its warmly integrated dynamics and its internal relationships instead become matters of incredibly complex, yet rigid, mechanism. Because of the internal rigidity of personal identity all interactions are polarized towards the control of that identity's (ie informational structure) environment. Small rigid structures can be controlled, but other people's identity structures are too complex. If both extended systems are rigid then both will collapse violently.

No matter how pretty an isolated section of society may behave in contrast to the rest, oppression without will eventually manifest within. In the face of gross oppression worldwide, regional secession or ingrowth is capitulation and the collapse of such tribes inevitable.

We are one.