In the beginning, harmony: tribes of
human beings live as one, gathering and eating and playing and sleeping
and singing and making love and telling stories together. And,
occasionally, discord: an argument breaks out, strong words are
exchanged, a blow is struck.
When this happens, the tribe meets and arrives at a resolution. Tribes that cannot do this break up, and the members starve or freeze or are hunted down by wild beasts, or join another tribe that can resolve conflicts. Conflicts between tribes are resolved in a similar manner. For thousands upon thousands of years, this way of life works and endures.
But one day, there is a conflict that cannot be resolved. Discussion, placation, even combat are not enough; the adversaries still seek vengeance. Perhaps it is a spiritual aberration, or some technological or cultural innovation that allows them to continue contending long after it is healthy, but they do not find their way back to peace as the others did before. They become machines of war. Their relationship with the environment shifts: the earth must be disciplined, now, to provide them stores of food to last through their struggle. Their relationships with each other change: they view all others as potential comrades-in-arms or enemies, appraising might above all other qualities.
The neighboring tribes do not escape unscathed. Soon they are embroiled in this conflict, and must contend with an enemy such as they have never encountered. Many of these communities perish outright; others, the ones who would survive at any cost, find that they too must become war machines. They too subjugate the earth and its animals, enslave their vanquished foes, even their own people, anything to endure in the face of this terror. They become the terror, they outdo it, and this is their undoing.
Spreading like a cancer, from tribe to tribe, strange changes sweep the face of the earth. Little tribes merge to become big tribes, and ultimately nations; temporary military leaders become hereditary monarchs; the vision of once peace-loving peoples becomes clouded with carnage. And it is not only in military matters that these tribes change. Territory is claimed and marked, and becomes the source of new conflicts. Market economics is invented: peoples who no longer trust each other insist on trades where gifts once sufficed—and scramble to outbargain each other, to cut a profit even in peacetime. Patriarchy appears: the undeclared war between the sexes, the gender roles of warrior and servant, institutionalized and enforced by each generation on the next. Organized religion is invented: now men not only vie for land, food, property, revenge, but also for each other’s minds and hearts.
All of these innovations are catastrophic for human beings. They try to offset the effects with new innovations, which are greater catastrophes. Governments, convened to protect peoples, extract taxes from them and thrive idly off their sweat and toil; police fill the streets to prevent crime, and perpetrate the worst crimes with impunity. Defending themselves from the monstrosities of civilization, these peoples breed more awful monsters.
Minor nations, hell-bent on withstanding the assaults of greater ones, arm themselves to the teeth—and go on fighting and conquering in exaggerated response to the original threat until they become great empires. So the Roman Empire finds its origins in the resistance of rural farmers to Etruscan encroachments; so the rest of Europe becomes a snakepit of competing empires, as a consequence of hundreds of years spent fighting that one. Later historians will look at the bloody wars waged on the edges of every civilization as evidence that the “heart of darkness” beyond this frontier is a bloody barbarism; but perhaps it is the peace-loving barbarians who are defending themselves from the bloodthirsty. Perhaps the true heart of darkness lies at the center of these empires, in the eye of the hurricane, where violence is so deeply ingrained in human life that it is no longer visible to the naked eye: slaves go about in the streets as if of their own volition, powerless even to rebel; gladiators slaughter each other in the circuses, and it is called entertainment.
The next military campaigns are a symptom of social viciousness, no longer a cause. Now the invisible violence of economics ordains the visible violence of armies: soldiers cut paths into the last wilderlands of barbarism so further resources can be seized by merchants, and the freshly destitute barbarians constitute a new consumer base. Whole continents are despoiled, and the inhabitants enslaved—and then their destitution is cited as proof of their racial inferiority, by the inheritors of their stolen worlds!
Missionaries are in the front lines of the assault, enforcing the reign of the jealous One and Only God as surely as the soldiers enforce the reign of brutality. Terror for territory, blood for money, money for blood, He ordains it all—as it ordains Him.
The successors of the missionaries pray directly to the market. These new priests are even more successful than the soldiers in imposing the rule of power: a day comes when shackles are no longer needed to make slaves servile, when idolatry alone is enough to keep them submissively fighting amongst themselves. Now no one can remember any other life, and son fights brother fights father fights neighbor, as the specters of fear and avarice look over their empire from above. Kings, generals, presidents rise and fall, but the system, hierarchy, remains: competition itself holds the crown, picking and discarding its champions without pity.
Everyone in these relationships of violence still wants, desperately, to escape, but again and again they bear the seeds of this violence with them, destroying every refuge as they enter—as the refugees who flee to the “New World” do, and the Communists who overthrow the Czar. Even those who do escape, like the artists whose communes gentrify neighborhoods, whose provocative innovations set precedents for the next generation’s fashion photography, only pave the way for the steamrollers that will follow in their footsteps.
Violence reaches an all-time high. Schoolchildren, mailmen, formerly the very picture of sociability, begin to gun down their companions in cold blood. Ministers molest altar boys, fathers batter their daughters, teenagers rape their dates. Prisons overflow. Millions perish in holocausts across nations and decades, and the maimed survivors initiate subsequent holocausts. Nuclear missiles point at everyone, until the imminence of the final holocaust can only be discussed in platitudes. Now we are all on death row, all political prisoners. Even in the loftiest citadels of the United States, protected by the most sophisticated and well-equipped military in the history of the solar system, white-collar workers with full benefits and life and health insurance are no longer safe—airplanes crash, skyscrapers fall. Terror threatens us all.
Tonight a Palestinian youth struggles to work out the equation: have his enemies filled his world with enough misery that he feels more hatred for them than he does love for life? He thinks of his crippled father, of his bulldozed house, of his departed friends—who computed this same equation daily, always coming to one conclusion, until the day they came to another.
Where, through all this, is love? It is still here, in the forms it has always taken: families eating together, friends embracing, gifts given simply for the pleasure of giving. We still forgive, converse, fall deeply in love; it even happens occasionally that new tribes federate to confront a common antagonist—not out of malice, but for the sake of peace, hoping to conclude conflicts as they were in the days before warfare and commerce. These moments, even when they occur between only a few individuals, are as powerful and precious as they ever were. And they are still infectious, as infectious as violence and hatred, if only they can find unarmored hearts in which to catch hold.
The world now waits for a war on war, a love armed, a friendship which can defend itself. Anarchy is a word we use to describe those moments when force cannot subdue us, and life flourishes as we know it should; anarchism is the science of creating and defending such moments. It is a weapon which aspires to uselessness—the only kind of weapon we will wield, hoping against hope that this time, through some new alchemy, our weapons will not turn upon us.
We know that after “the” revolution, after every revolution, the struggle between love and hatred, between coercion and cooperation, will continue; but, then, as now, as always, the important question is—which side are you on?
When this happens, the tribe meets and arrives at a resolution. Tribes that cannot do this break up, and the members starve or freeze or are hunted down by wild beasts, or join another tribe that can resolve conflicts. Conflicts between tribes are resolved in a similar manner. For thousands upon thousands of years, this way of life works and endures.
But one day, there is a conflict that cannot be resolved. Discussion, placation, even combat are not enough; the adversaries still seek vengeance. Perhaps it is a spiritual aberration, or some technological or cultural innovation that allows them to continue contending long after it is healthy, but they do not find their way back to peace as the others did before. They become machines of war. Their relationship with the environment shifts: the earth must be disciplined, now, to provide them stores of food to last through their struggle. Their relationships with each other change: they view all others as potential comrades-in-arms or enemies, appraising might above all other qualities.
The neighboring tribes do not escape unscathed. Soon they are embroiled in this conflict, and must contend with an enemy such as they have never encountered. Many of these communities perish outright; others, the ones who would survive at any cost, find that they too must become war machines. They too subjugate the earth and its animals, enslave their vanquished foes, even their own people, anything to endure in the face of this terror. They become the terror, they outdo it, and this is their undoing.
Spreading like a cancer, from tribe to tribe, strange changes sweep the face of the earth. Little tribes merge to become big tribes, and ultimately nations; temporary military leaders become hereditary monarchs; the vision of once peace-loving peoples becomes clouded with carnage. And it is not only in military matters that these tribes change. Territory is claimed and marked, and becomes the source of new conflicts. Market economics is invented: peoples who no longer trust each other insist on trades where gifts once sufficed—and scramble to outbargain each other, to cut a profit even in peacetime. Patriarchy appears: the undeclared war between the sexes, the gender roles of warrior and servant, institutionalized and enforced by each generation on the next. Organized religion is invented: now men not only vie for land, food, property, revenge, but also for each other’s minds and hearts.
All of these innovations are catastrophic for human beings. They try to offset the effects with new innovations, which are greater catastrophes. Governments, convened to protect peoples, extract taxes from them and thrive idly off their sweat and toil; police fill the streets to prevent crime, and perpetrate the worst crimes with impunity. Defending themselves from the monstrosities of civilization, these peoples breed more awful monsters.
Minor nations, hell-bent on withstanding the assaults of greater ones, arm themselves to the teeth—and go on fighting and conquering in exaggerated response to the original threat until they become great empires. So the Roman Empire finds its origins in the resistance of rural farmers to Etruscan encroachments; so the rest of Europe becomes a snakepit of competing empires, as a consequence of hundreds of years spent fighting that one. Later historians will look at the bloody wars waged on the edges of every civilization as evidence that the “heart of darkness” beyond this frontier is a bloody barbarism; but perhaps it is the peace-loving barbarians who are defending themselves from the bloodthirsty. Perhaps the true heart of darkness lies at the center of these empires, in the eye of the hurricane, where violence is so deeply ingrained in human life that it is no longer visible to the naked eye: slaves go about in the streets as if of their own volition, powerless even to rebel; gladiators slaughter each other in the circuses, and it is called entertainment.
The next military campaigns are a symptom of social viciousness, no longer a cause. Now the invisible violence of economics ordains the visible violence of armies: soldiers cut paths into the last wilderlands of barbarism so further resources can be seized by merchants, and the freshly destitute barbarians constitute a new consumer base. Whole continents are despoiled, and the inhabitants enslaved—and then their destitution is cited as proof of their racial inferiority, by the inheritors of their stolen worlds!
Missionaries are in the front lines of the assault, enforcing the reign of the jealous One and Only God as surely as the soldiers enforce the reign of brutality. Terror for territory, blood for money, money for blood, He ordains it all—as it ordains Him.
The successors of the missionaries pray directly to the market. These new priests are even more successful than the soldiers in imposing the rule of power: a day comes when shackles are no longer needed to make slaves servile, when idolatry alone is enough to keep them submissively fighting amongst themselves. Now no one can remember any other life, and son fights brother fights father fights neighbor, as the specters of fear and avarice look over their empire from above. Kings, generals, presidents rise and fall, but the system, hierarchy, remains: competition itself holds the crown, picking and discarding its champions without pity.
Everyone in these relationships of violence still wants, desperately, to escape, but again and again they bear the seeds of this violence with them, destroying every refuge as they enter—as the refugees who flee to the “New World” do, and the Communists who overthrow the Czar. Even those who do escape, like the artists whose communes gentrify neighborhoods, whose provocative innovations set precedents for the next generation’s fashion photography, only pave the way for the steamrollers that will follow in their footsteps.
Violence reaches an all-time high. Schoolchildren, mailmen, formerly the very picture of sociability, begin to gun down their companions in cold blood. Ministers molest altar boys, fathers batter their daughters, teenagers rape their dates. Prisons overflow. Millions perish in holocausts across nations and decades, and the maimed survivors initiate subsequent holocausts. Nuclear missiles point at everyone, until the imminence of the final holocaust can only be discussed in platitudes. Now we are all on death row, all political prisoners. Even in the loftiest citadels of the United States, protected by the most sophisticated and well-equipped military in the history of the solar system, white-collar workers with full benefits and life and health insurance are no longer safe—airplanes crash, skyscrapers fall. Terror threatens us all.
Tonight a Palestinian youth struggles to work out the equation: have his enemies filled his world with enough misery that he feels more hatred for them than he does love for life? He thinks of his crippled father, of his bulldozed house, of his departed friends—who computed this same equation daily, always coming to one conclusion, until the day they came to another.
Where, through all this, is love? It is still here, in the forms it has always taken: families eating together, friends embracing, gifts given simply for the pleasure of giving. We still forgive, converse, fall deeply in love; it even happens occasionally that new tribes federate to confront a common antagonist—not out of malice, but for the sake of peace, hoping to conclude conflicts as they were in the days before warfare and commerce. These moments, even when they occur between only a few individuals, are as powerful and precious as they ever were. And they are still infectious, as infectious as violence and hatred, if only they can find unarmored hearts in which to catch hold.
The world now waits for a war on war, a love armed, a friendship which can defend itself. Anarchy is a word we use to describe those moments when force cannot subdue us, and life flourishes as we know it should; anarchism is the science of creating and defending such moments. It is a weapon which aspires to uselessness—the only kind of weapon we will wield, hoping against hope that this time, through some new alchemy, our weapons will not turn upon us.
We know that after “the” revolution, after every revolution, the struggle between love and hatred, between coercion and cooperation, will continue; but, then, as now, as always, the important question is—which side are you on?
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