THE MATRIX IS REAL - AND YOU ARE IN IT!

Increasingly, in the last two decades of his long career in comedy, the now deceased American comic, George Carlin, used to make a point of mentioning in interviews, and even in his act, that he had a problem with groups of people. He seemed to mean “partisan groups of people” by this remark, even possibly insinuating that groups, by their very nature, were liable to become partisan at all times. In making this point, Carlin would often be sure to remind his audience that he was not being misanthropic by having this attitude. He would often say that if he met individual people he would get on with them fine and without any problems at all. But, according to him, it was when they got together and organised themselves into groups that the trouble would start. This had caused Carlin to back off from society and to treat it, vicariously, as a show put on for his entertainment. He had, he said, ceased to care about outcomes and was now just hoping to be entertained by the destructive behaviour of groups of his fellow human beings and all it was to him was a particularly garish show.

I understand where George Carlin was coming from and, increasingly, as I think about the world we live in and the human beings that populate it, I see no reason to hope for any particular outcome. I won’t say that I go so far as to see it as a show either but, I think, I have learned the wisdom that Carlin learned which is that you can’t fool yourself into hoping for anything in particular from such a species as ours. This has nothing to do with being hopeful or pessimistic or, indeed, even with wanting any particular outcome one way or another in the first place. It just doesn’t seem very appropriate to me to set an entire species a goal and then want them to achieve it. This doesn’t seem remotely true or authentic to life as it actually is to me. In fact, what it does seem like is control and, as a convinced anarchist, control is never a good thing. Control is an authoritarian thing, a huge red flag to any anarchist.

Of course, control is the norm, as in the vision conjured up by the Wachowskis in their series of films set in “the matrix”. The matrix is a technological prison, the result of a war against sentient machines, but it has much to teach simple human beings in our world too. One issue that I think about a lot is the one that the character Morpheus addresses when it is suggested that all those imprisoned in the matrix, human beings grown from birth in pods whose bodies act as batteries powering the very system which enslaves them, should simply be released. Wouldn’t this both free the people and cripple the matrix at the same time? Morpheus’ answer is one that we should think about for a very long time for he explains that most people simply don’t want to be unplugged and that, after a certain time, they just become too used to their surroundings to be unplugged from them anyway. They become dependent on that which enslaves them and they have no idea that its a matrix which they live their whole lives within.

This, I think, is very much the situation in our world right now, in the world in which I observe the social media back and forth of millions of people all plugged into a matrix of their own. They watch TV, they read newspapers, they respond to mainstream media, they follow the latest “trending topics”, they are entirely led by the nose through the “bread and circuses” by a capitalist media who tell them what to talk about and what’s good to think in a never-ending scroll of life. But do you know what’s almost entirely lacking from these places? Original thought or even thought that the people have had themselves without being told what to think about or what to react to by somebody else. Everything today is about adding to a hashtag or repeating the same old topics and if you have your own thoughts or do your own thinking its probably not going to be about such things. Because its going to be about you and your own thoughts on what matters to you or your life. It might even have some emotional authenticity or some meaningfulness rather than being the utterly shallow and vapid stuff the mainstream regurgitates on a loop to never let go of your attention as it constantly massages your in-built prejudices.

And the point is the point Morpheus made: many people, most people, simply don’t want to be unplugged from this matrix - even if they ever did. They aren’t equipped to think for themselves, to imagine alternatives or to have an original idea. They can’t think outside the box for they do not even realise they are in one. They have been grown as talking bobbleheads who constantly yack about today’s talking points. And nothing else. They are on the merry-go-round of talk shows, newspapers and social media and they don’t want to get off. And why would they when they have been groomed to be addicted to these things? In that case, very much as in The Matrix itself, it is only very few people indeed who would ever have even the intuition that things could be another way or who could survive being introduced to it for the first time after a life of being force fed a narrative of what it was even possible to think about or discuss. And, by the by, such a situation does not encourage thinking for yourself, questioning, imagining, having ideas. There’s a good reason for this, too, for it might take you outside the controlled bounds of what’s thought acceptable and decent to this mainstream. You might start having rogue ideas or even simply other ideas and that’s very dangerous in a world based on control - not least to the controllers and the media they use to control it. So becoming unplugged from such controlling media might then be seen to be the most revolutionary and potentially dangerous act you could undertake… which is why people like Morpheus, Trinity and Neo are being hunted down in the first place for they are outside the matrix and so free to think what they like and even to act upon it.

Now the matrix, as we learn more fully and intricately in the sequels to the original film, is actually a grand construction for the purposes of misdirection. The reason for building it was to fool as many human beings as possible into accepting what was being fed into their minds so that they would function normally completely under the control of their overlords and in a completely docile way. Docility, of course, was absolutely vital for their control and we know that this was not always the case in various former iterations of the matrix where human beings refused to accept what they were being told - and either refused to take part or actively resisted it. This resulted in many deaths and, as the character The Architect says in the second film, “whole crops were lost”. The matrix is a system of control and its genius is entirely in not being recognised for what it is. What is the best means of control? The means you do not even recognise as control or that, even if you do, you cannot unplug yourself from. An example of the latter in The Matrix is Cypher. He knows what the matrix is, he even discusses it with agents of the system, but he prefers imprisoned ignorance to taking responsibility for his own life in the harsh reality outside it. Cypher is a powerful metaphor for many millions of people in our own world, even many millions who label themselves as concerned about the world, but who find themselves joined at the hip to this world and its system of control and cannot see any other way to live but by that system. Cypher just doesn’t want to face up to the harshness [and responsibility] of reality outside of the system [think capitalism, leaders, the authoritarianism of doing as you are told] so he will plug himself into whatever it is that fills his day and blinds him to it instead. He welcomes the misdirection because it at least doesn’t cause him any real trouble or require anything more of him but to play the role others have assigned to him. He becomes willingly docile in this respect, even to the point of betraying others to achieve it. I know you can think of those in our world who do exactly the same as this.

Yet I see another disturbing analogy to this in the many people who interact with various forms of media who label themselves as politically concerned. Some, of course, the conservatives, right wingers and fascists, use such media on purpose. They are dishonest actors who will lie, deceive and misdirect entirely to get what they want. They are goal-focused and their only goal is to win, to control and to possess the power. In this they partly act as willing agents of the matrix. They are people who have been grown and, in some cases, turned to become agents of the grand system of misdirection. They are those who want this system to dominate and they play their part in it. If you remember back to the films, anybody in the system can at any time become an agent of the system and, as Morpheus teaches Neo in one of his training sessions, “Anyone who is not one of us, is one of them.” We who are unplugged from this matrix should take note of this for, if we ever step back inside it, getting wrapped up in social media discussions or news stories this matrix has itself generated, we soon realise how completely controlled and misdirected many who think themselves on the side of right have become. They do not realise they have become Pavlov’s dogs trained to respond to the slightest stimulus and to react in predictable ways to a whole set of cues and, more to the point, they don’t realise they’ve been disabled from meaningful action - which is always physical action in the real world - by being locked into a never-ending conversation they can never win - because the point is it plays out forever: the conversation is itself control. Remember back to the matrix constructed in the film: it is destroyed not by being plugged into it but by unplugging and taking actions to destroy it and its control. It cannot be destroyed from within. It has enslaved too many people and too many have been turned into those who will willingly keep others enslaved or destroy them instead. Or maybe just keep them talking and so misdirected and distracted.

One thing we should notice about its control, however, is that it is necessarily quite sophisticated. The matrix does not stop you having your own thoughts. It doesn’t stop you imagining freedom or rebellion. In fact, these even play a part in its construction as The Architect informs us. In the same way, our own matrix does not deny us the choice The Architect informs Neo it became vital to include in the iteration of the matrix from which he himself was released and which The Oracle, another agent of the system, encouraged him to pursue. The point, however, was that even this choice was a function of the enslaving control the matrix was built to serve. The machines who controlled the human population had realised that people need to at least think they are free and have the choice to not do, as well as do, what they are told. If given this choice, they learned, people could become better controlled, better coerced, even if, in fact, they were just as controlled and coerced in reality as they always had been. 

This is very much the case today. The controlling system of authoritarian capitalism will tell you that you have a choice and, in theory, abstractly, you do have a choice. But take any action to pursue a choice undesired by these same authoritarian capitalists [such as riots or protests because black lives matter, for example] and action will be taken against you even as it is against people who become too socialist in Latin or South America or if a Sanders appears in US political discourse or a Corbyn does in British political discourse. The matrix doesn’t mind you talking and complaining all day, every day, about these things by means of the various media companies. In fact, it encourages you to - because while you are doing this, and I see this all the time on social media, you are not doing anything to dismantle the matrix and the system of control which it constitutes [even, by the way, as you out yourselves to the powers that be]. In fact, you are actively helping it perform its controlling function by doing so every bit as much as Neo, up to a certain point, was doing so by carrying out the function of “The One” which, lest we forget, was itself a function of the matrix and its system of control. 

This is another lesson to be learned. Every system of control may have those few people it cannot reach or control but this is OK if they never actually defeat the system but are themselves impotent against it. This then acts as a further reinforcing narrative for the system’s truth that it is in control and that there is no prospect of its destruction. And this is then something else to discuss eternally whilst still under its endless control. So long as you never learn the lesson that you should be trying to destroy the very system that you have come to rely on for your own survival - its making you dependent upon the very thing which is your real enemy being entirely part of the plan all along - then why should the system care what you discuss, dream about or imagine whilst still firmly under its control? Such things are actually part of its means of control so long as you don’t try to unplug, once and for all, and then see your real enemy.

In the films, of course, the matrix only comes under real threat once various characters, both “good” and “bad”, rebel from their assigned roles. Agent Smith no longer wants to be an agent of the system and, instead, becomes a threat to it. Neo, likewise, rejects his role as a further [but unknowing] agent of the same system and prefers to make his own choices rather than the coerced ones he had been making up until this point because he had been manipulated into buying into the story that the game of freeing Zion was one that had real stakes. Zion, we learn, is also just another means of control in which those few people who escape the matrix are habitually wiped out so that the cycle can begin again. Here is where we learn that a measure of rebellion is always acceptable to the powers that be for it justifies the mass of authoritarian forces which maintain it as it is and serves to keep the vast mass of unrebellious people under control. Seeing what happens to those who rebel is always a good lesson for everyone else to learn but this, again, is misdirection and its always about learning what the system wants you to learn from this perspective. The last thing the system wants is to lose the upper hand and it will allow pretty much anything which allows it to maintain its advantage and its control. So even at the end of the third matrix film, when Zion is saved and the machines have had to concede to working with Neo in order to defeat Smith, the matrix itself remains intact even at the cost of The Architect agreeing to free all those from it who want to be. But that still leaves untold millions of seemingly willing [or just uninformed] slaves, the many sentinels who are its police in the real world and the agents who patrol its digital pathways enforcing order. The matrix is itself still there as are both The Oracle and The Architect, its “mother” and “father”. Real freedom will only exist when all these do not but even the apparent self-sacrifice of Neo has not achieved that. All he has achieved is, at most, a concession with no promise that things won’t just go back to how they used to be once more.

There is so much that could be learned from this analogy and from going through it in much more detail than I have imagined here in this short essay. Yet the broad outlines are, I hope, clear and the rest of the thinking is up to you for we must each emerge from within the shadow of the matrix by taking responsibility for ourselves, our own lives and our own thoughts. We all need to become self-educating people. For we are all here, in our real world, under a system of control every bit as much as real as the one imagined in The Matrix. These systems of control have the same aims and use many of the same techniques. Their job is to control us, even without us realising we are being controlled if they can, whilst keeping us docile, sleepy, compliant, playing the roles others have decided we will play. In this, us having our own opinions and views, a feeling of free will, is vital for they can be used to keep us locked in interminable conversations that threaten nothing because we have been willingly coopted into eternal impotence. Instead of seeing our true enemy and physically working to disrupt and destroy it [the apparatus of authoritarian capitalist control], we are misdirected into endless talk and other impotent actions such as social media. This utilises the passion we feel but simultaneously disarms it - a very insidious but effective form of control. If there are some few who wake up [the song played at the end of the first film], the forces of control will send their authoritarian sentinels into battle to destroy them. This will both quell the uprising and serve as  a warning to the rest. Control is all the system wants. It will do anything to maintain it.

So, of course, this control, and the system that wants it, is the real enemy. Its not the trending topics on your social media. Its not the shenanigans going on in your favourite political party. Its not the latest injustice. Its not the raft of conspiracy theories tossed out to confuse and engage you. All these intersectional issues are just distractions at the end of the day, fragments randomly distributed to catch and hold your attention in a permanent scroll which misdirects your attention from the fact you are a slave, that you are not free, that you cannot really make your own choices but only the ones you have been allowed to make. This is not because some mad billionaire wants to secretly put a chip in your head. It is because, done right, the system billionaires are a part of will not need to put a chip in your head or physically connect you to a matrix because you will already be under control by other means. When you accept that there are states and governments and leaders and police and rich and poor and economic systems and that you can only have something if you pay someone for it - and, if you don’t have money you may just have to accept starving or having no home or dying for lack of medical care you cannot afford - then you are already under control for none of these things are given and all of them are impositions upon life itself. The system would hate you to realise this and do something about it - such as finding alternative ways to live - for that is what really threatens it and what can really destroy it. So anything that is not that realisation is fine as far as the system is concerned for anything else will not ultimately or fundamentally change it. 

That is the realisation we all finally need to have if we want to escape the systems of control and experience real freedom for the first time. And to refuse to be misdirected by all the media that now surrounds us as a very deliberate and purposeful fog.

NAZIS FROM SPACE!

As if things weren’t bad enough in our embattled world. What with people in the USA fighting for civil rights [still!] and enduring daily altercations with militarized police forces and others in a country that houses a prison-industrial complex that, amongst other things, cages children and engages in forced hysterectomies in ICE detention centres, Chinese victimization of the Uighur people which reportedly includes “re-education camps”, the ongoing apartheid in Palestine where one of the most militarized states in the world continues to wage war against the Palestinian people, and an ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic which is being dealt with, worldwide, with disparate and unequal concern and effectiveness with hope ultimately being placed in vaccines sold to the highest bidder by rapacious pharmaceutical companies, it would, perhaps, be very 2020 to conclude the year with the news that our planet has been invaded by Nazis from space. [Although, of course, it seems that we already have far too many of our own in any case.]

Yet the Nazis from space that my title refers to are not real ones but fictional ones, fictional ones, in fact, from the 1983 TV miniseries V [V: The Original Miniseries for the purposes of distinguishing it from its 1984 follow up miniseries, V: The Final Battle, the 1984-85 TV series and the 2009 reboot]. This original miniseries should be set apart from its later follow ups for while they become increasingly based in science fiction and action [and become increasingly stupid as a result] the original two part miniseries is based on an allegory and ideas. It was in fact inspired by a 1935 book by the Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Sinclair Lewis, called It Can’t Happen Here, the story of a demagogue elected US President in 1936 who is described as “fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and ‘traditional’ values.” Once elected, this president “takes complete control of the government and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force”. Readers should not be surprised to learn that the president depicted in this book has drawn comparison with President Trump and the point of the book, of course, and in contravention of its title, is that the fascism it describes can always happen here because it doesn’t take much to tip over into a fascist situation.

But back to our Nazis from space for there is, I believe, several things we can learn from this fiction and that we need to pay attention to in our current lives in the contemporary world. The original, two-part miniseries V is the story of benevolent, humanoid aliens who come to Earth in stereotypical, “flying saucer” spaceships in search of various chemicals and minerals their civilisation has run out of. In return for the humans of Earth helping them out, these aliens are more than willing to share helpful technology with us as one would expect people capable of interstellar travel to possess. Initiating a first meeting with the head of the United Nations in New York, the aliens soon ingratiate themselves with the political leaders of the world but it is precisely then that more disturbing things start to happen. For example, scientists, those who naturally might have an enthusiastic interest in aliens from outer space, become an increasing target for public and media hate, both an enemy for the aliens to be wary of but also a scapegoat for the watching humans to blame. Various propaganda materials, which regard the aliens as “friends” and depict them in amicable poses with human beings, begin appearing. The aliens, termed “Visitors” in the show, deploy vast numbers of military forces in the various human communities depicted to facilitate their needs unmolested. A human spokeswoman is appointed by the Visitors so that the people of Earth may be addressed by one of their own and also, one suspects, so that the aliens can avoid interrogation by human beings directly. 

Soon enough, of course, we learn that the aliens are not all they appear to be. An investigative TV journalist, Mike Donovan, manages to sneak aboard one of the aliens’ 50 motherships hovering above various cities and discovers that the aliens have a terrible secret. They are not humanoid at all but carnivorous reptilians that eat live food such as mice or small birds - or even human beings. Their eventual plan is to steal all our water and harvest most of humanity as food. Being an investigative reporter, Donovan has a camera with him and films the alien commander eating a live guinea pig. Returning to ground, he goes to a TV studio and is about to broadcast the tape live when the broadcast is taken over by the Visitors who have now taken control of all media. In the meantime, the Visitors have instituted a “Visitor Youth” movement for young people aged 12-20 and we see one of the characters, Daniel Bernstein, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, enthusiastically joining up to this movement the members of which are actively encouraged to inform on the people of their neighbourhoods. Daniel is given a military type uniform and a laser weapon to help him perform his duties. Increasingly, we see Visitors, or their new human allies, on street corners or in public generally and those who speak against the aliens are vilified, persecuted or “disappeared” as a result. In addition, scientists begin coming forward and admitting to conspiring against the Visitors although it is noticed that, in some cases, they seem now to be right-handed where once they were left-handed and there are other dissonant things about such people as well. It transpires that the aliens have a “conversion process” by which the aliens can make processed human beings become utterly compliant to their wishes and make them say what they want. Soon enough, however, as the increased alien presence becomes more and more authoritarian, a resistance movement is begun even whilst others, including Mike Donovan’s own mother, become willing collaborators with the new alien overlords, overlords that the former civilian authorities willingly cooperate with as just someone else to take orders from. [At this point it strikes me that all the Visitors seem to have been depicted as white - although I don’t know if this was deliberate or not.]

Anyway, you get the idea, I hope, from this brief overview. V is a particularly blunt allegory of the Nazism of 1933-1945 but one in which such Nazism has come to especially the USA [the programme was American-made, after all, and was set in Los Angeles] in ways more unbelievable in the 1980s than it would be in a Trumpian context of protestors being snatched from the streets, Proud Boys’ militia roaming armed around city centres with implicit police approval and presidents using their social media presence and public appearances to vilify the press, political opponents and critics alike as traitors, potential targets for harassment and worse. And that’s before we get into the targeted disinformation campaigns and voter suppression efforts that modern technology and social interaction enables but which 1980s TV producers could not have dreamed of. Nevertheless, many of the obvious factors in a popular fascism are scarily present even in a saccharin TV miniseries presented to appeal to a family audience in the spring of 1983. We see how the fascists ingratiate themselves with the leaders before taking power themselves, how they seek to control all media, so controlling what people are told, how they vilify and arrest their perceived enemies and remove those most likely to expose them, how they perpetrate atrocities against their enemies and dehumanise them, how they encourage collaboration and propagandise their presence and intent. Does this sound very much like YOUR government in YOUR country, I wonder? 

Yet why would a slightly hokey US miniseries almost 40 years old interest me so? It is because I am an anarchist and, being an anarchist, I am, of course, extremely anti-authoritarian - and fascism is essentially a kind of popular authoritarianism. But it is not necessarily a consistent, well thought out, intelligent authoritarianism as the Italian philosopher and novelist, Umberto Eco, reminded us in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” [“Eternal Fascism”]. There, amongst 14 typical features of fascism, Eco records we find:

*A cult of tradition

*Rejection of modern thinking and the experts of the day

*Acting without thinking, thinking being regarded as suspect

*Any disagreement being regarded as treason

*A fear of any difference - making fascism racist by definition

*Concentration on social frustrations [which might need someone to blame for them]

*Obsession with plots and being under threat from enemies

*Inconsistency on whether the chosen enemies are strong or weak

*Refusal to take sides is seen as siding with the enemy

*An utter contempt for the weak in an elitism of the strong

*A cult of the hero where heroic death is also eulogised

*Obsession with machismo and weaponry which devalues both women and diverse genders and sexualities

*A fixation with the fiction of “the will of the People” or “the people’s Voice” which the fascists claim to be the authoritative interpreters of

*Fascists developing their own simplified form of language, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four where Orwell calls such a thing “Newspeak”. 

As I regard my readers as intelligent people in their own right I am sure you are able to see some, or even several, of these features active in various governments around the world today. In many cases these are governments which deign to allow their populations to vote once every four or five years in elections which these same political actors also can’t quite stop trying to rig, affect or otherwise gerrymander. At the same time, traditional and social media are being utilised to blast political messaging into the consciousnesses of people far and wide. As an anarchist, I don’t know what this is but it isn’t democracy for it is never democracy if you are being told what to think, if people are being cheated out of their vote or if your media are 24/7 propaganda messaging conduits so far divorced from truth or reality that they are essentially free-form fiction being marketed as the truth. I had cause to remark earlier in this essay that the people of 1983 would have found it hard to imagine fascism in the USA. They would find it much easier today - and not only in the USA.

For today we find ourselves living in an increasingly authoritarian, fascist world and it doesn’t matter whether you talk about the USA, Russia, China, the UK, Brazil, Israel, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia or any number of other disparate countries with quite different political histories and traditions. Politicians worldwide seem to have decided that what they love is having authority and keeping the people generally under control in order to service their own political wills which they denominate the will of the people. Those of us on the political left are sometimes prey to this political temptation as well, mistakenly thinking that control, even a benevolent control, is the answer. But it isn’t and servicing a political agenda, one, today, often coerced by capitalist actors who worship exploitation of resources as the result of wealth and power, is always an authoritarian move which curtails freedom and denies liberty equally to all. Indeed, in much the same way as various collaborators in V put their companies at the service of the Visitors so that they might profit from their authoritarianism, we see exactly the same thing happening in our own, much more real and consequential world. What these various capitalists and people with authoritarian ideologies have in common is a desire to exploit and control and what destroys them is always genuine democracy - which is why fighting for real democracy is something the opponents of authoritarianism and fascism must always do. 

Thus, it is no surprise that even in countries that do have so-called democratic elections, in places that disingenuously bleat on about their love of democracy, we find scandals emerging from behind the scenes about ways the same people who have claimed to love democracy have tried to cheat it. It is equally unsurprising that shadowy figures have been revealed to be operating out of the limelight, putting their fortunes at the disposal of both political parties and political campaigns determined to dupe the gullible and control both trade and politics by putting them into the hands of the blessed few. Recently, in both the USA and the UK, apparent threats to such an agenda arose in the forms of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn but both were swiftly attacked on all sides - not least by members of their own parties more beholden to the agendas of authoritarianism and capital - and were despatched, once more, to the bubbles from which they had emerged. Such people the authoritarian-controlled and influenced cast as cranks, people out to take away what’s rightfully yours, and, funnily enough, authoritarians who want to impose “socialism” on you. It is, of course, propaganda. But when you control the vast majority of the media its very hard to hear someone tell you anything else and, even if by osmosis, you can be sure that certain numbers of people will come to believe it.

This is just one reason why democracy should be the chosen weapon used to defeat both authoritarianism, our political enemy of the day, and capitalism, its economic counterpart. By “democracy” I don’t necessarily mean voting for democracy is simply the factually expressed will of the people and that can be expressed at any time - for example, by protesting, by organising strikes, or by organising boycotts. All of these are democratic actions for we should not allow the very idea of democracy to be controlled by the few who, paradoxically, even want to define what “democratic” is - to their own benefit, of course. Democracy is the voice and action of real people being heard and not simply this as it is expressed through processes denominated as such. Democracy is the constant ability to “speak truth to power” and to act in pursuance of freedom for yourself and others. In this sense, fighting for such democracy and freedom is always a matter of resistance against those who would wish to exploit and control you whether these be commercial or political actors. It is a fascist impulse to want to control and to claim to speak for some fictional mass of the people. It is a democratic impulse that is expressed when people take action or speak out from the authentic experience of their own lives and ask to be heard.

As an anarchist, of course, I do not believe in any leaders or authorities and insist on my own democratic responsibility for my own life at all times. I believe in the purest democracy there is which is the uncoerced agreement of equally free people who are then at liberty to speak for themselves, make their own choices and, in mutual cooperation with others, make their own community arrangements for how they shall live. I do a lot of thinking about this for it is not, and can never be, just some utopian idea. Anarchism expresses itself as a genuine, workable, practical means of living for human beings in the real world and so anarchists everywhere must at least try to think of ways in which it can actually be lived at the same time as they employ strategies to frustrate and destroy the authoritarian capitalism we see all around us in the contemporary world which chains up and controls others. The answers, for anyone on the political left and not just anarchists, are always going to be practical. It is about doing and not just talking for it is only actions that change circumstances. So, with that said, let me close this short essay with a few suggestions in regard to things we can do right here, right now to change an authoritarian situation into a democratic one:

*Talk to friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances about your political situation

*Identify people who share social values of human solidarity and mutual aid

*Build networks with others that offer support to the vulnerable and needy

*Find ways to subvert the ongoing forms of power in your community or workplace

*Think, with others, about ways you can form your own, self-sufficient communities 

*Detach yourselves from corporate systems of provision and media so you are not reliant upon them

*Remember that together we are stronger but alone we can be picked off one by one

*Educate others about the importance of real democracy and how both capitalism and authoritarianism try to destroy it

*Train yourself to be aware of what is going on in your society and become more ready and wiling to respond to it

Taken together, these things might not stop Nazis from space but they are at least a start in working for freedom against the interests of those who would just see us as people to exploit or things to control and consume. In the end, resisting fascism, authoritarianism and capitalism is up to those who would work to oppose them and who are prepared to speak out and act for themselves and others. Without such democratic and socially libertarian voices its a free home run for those who want to exploit and control. So it is always a matter of active resistance and of those with a will to resist.

ANARCHISM IS NOT SOCIALISM AND ITS NOT CIVILISATION

I have been reading the works of two differing anarchists, the American Lucy Parsons and the Italian Errico Malatesta. Both are regarded by modern students of anarchism as genuine anarchist voices from the past. But when I read them I have problems and they are problems I have with those who conceive of anarchism generally as a matter of human, political action generally. These problems are not concerned with their words condemning the actions of government and the human lack of need for such an entity. Both equally well expose government as the exploiter of the many for the benefit of the privileged few, and for the capitalist class in general, equally well. Both show how government and corruption by capital interests are unavoidable bedfellows just the same. On this, we have no disagreement. 

                                   Lucy Parsons and Errico Malatesta

It is, however, when we come to what replaces this in their various rhetorics that the differences emerge. Parsons, for example, talks about our need to be “civilised” as if “civilisation”, and the values of such a thing, were our friend. Malatesta, on the other hand, whilst keen to remove the yoke of government, is equally keen to replace it with another yoke called “solidarity” or, in other places, “voluntary solidarity” although, in that latter formulation, it is not clear that this is voluntary since, throughout his 1891 pamphlet “Anarchy”, he seems to argue for its necessity in replacing government in society rather than our ability to forego it. Indeed, Malatesta in that same document suggests that the “freedom” he and anarchists like him want is “not an absolute metaphysical, abstract freedom”, something which he imagines can be perverted into oppression, but the freedom “which is the conscious community of interests”. Malatesta imagines that if we had this then we would have the freedom which is each member of society chipping in and doing their bit quite willingly and cooperatively.

Yet my mind goes back to one of my imagined forebears in spiritual and philosophical anarchism - Diogenes the Cynic. Judged by the civilised and - let us speak plainly - socialist standards of Lucy Parsons and Errico Malatesta was Diogenes, who defaced coinage, took advantage of whatever natural food and shelter he could find and lived a mostly solitary life [albeit he mingled with others] an anarchist? By their standards, no. But this then becomes exactly the point at issue and that point is the values involved. There is a certain type of anarchist - Malatesta and Parsons may well be two examples of such - for whom anarchism is basically socialism and for such people these two are not so much constant bedfellows as they are regarded as the same thing. I am not one of these people and, for me, anarchism neither implies nor requires socialism - nor is socialism necessarily anarchism at all. There are obvious 20th century examples of why this is so. Russia and the Soviet Union, for example, might have been socialist but this was not anarchism. And, to be honest, I find it just as hard to imagine how state socialism, which is what any socialism founded on the basis of national borders would be, is any kind of anarchism at all. 

Yet this is not the root of the problem. For the root of the problem we need to go beyond the reordering of the deckchairs on the Titanic of society that those such as Parsons and Malatesta undertake. Such people survey society and see oppression, poverty, squalor, the domination, economic and political, of some by others, and they condemn it as unjust, unnecessary and unconscionable. I am with such people entirely when they do that and largely for the reasons that they give. A modern, capitalist state is an engine of exploitation that aims to profit a few at the expense of the many and no genuine anarchist could stomach its continuance for any longer than it takes to replace it. However, for all its many irredeemable faults, such a political organisation of society has obviously had certain consequences. It has created a certain kind of civilisation, the kind we see around us today. Indeed, such states have been precisely the process of ever deeper and more thoroughgoing “civilisationing” of human society. This has created not just certain material conditions as the contexts for increasing numbers of lives but a whole raft of expectations - civilised expectations - which certain self-proclaimed anarchists have then seemed to take up and take over as if these were to be incorporated in something properly called anarchism. Diogenes had expressed anarchism as a rejection of civilisation at the level of a 4th century BCE Greek city state. In recent centuries, we’ve had anarchists who wanted to anarchise 19th, 20th and 21st century civilisation rather than to replace or ignore it.

In order not to be misunderstood at this point I should like to make it plain that, contrary to notable anarchists of past and present, people like Parsons and Malatesta, I want to question if the anarchist progress we seek is simply a matter of the political reorganisation of society for the purpose of retaining the imagined benefits of civilisation but by means more politically palatable and justifiable. Should government be kicked out and “solidarity” [which is really Malatesta’s word for socialism] be put in its place, are we any better off? Are we more free? Is this anarchy? What, to question Lucy Parsons, has being “civilised” got to do with any of this when someone like Diogenes [and perhaps also the proto-Daoists] would have told us that being civilised was exactly the problem? Is there a place here for the naive idealisms of those who would tell us that, were human beings set free from the yoke of government, a sentimental feeling would descend upon them and then all human beings together would suddenly work as one for the good of all, old enmities forgotten and old values set aside? It is true to say that both Parsons and Malatesta point out that a good deal of education might need to take place before such things could be achieved - and surely both do realise that people are educated primarily by that which they become used to - but a fundamental question remains in place for both of them and all those like them who see anarchism as the work of political reorganisation of society: does your kind of freedom give me, and any others, the freedom to ignore the context you wish to impose upon things and to mind our own business? Those who care about political organisation will, it seems to me, insist on their preferred options for they are saying its something we must determine, create and keep in place. Such things are a form of civilisation.

So, as I read Parsons and Malatesta, I am not always so sure that their version of freedom leaves us what I would call anarchistically free. They both seem to want a de facto political organisation to be the case in the world. They both configure the world socially and want to determine the context for social interaction taking place to provide for the needs of human beings. In short, they both, and certainly not only they in the history of political anarchism, imagine civilisation continuing, if in ways more politically suitable to their tastes. They are, I think, thinking of people as classes and imagining the world based on what they regard as the right relationships between these classes. They have become obsessed with a certain kind of political theorising, one that focuses on a socialist/capitalist binary opposition. This is their first, and a fatal, mistake, one the Daoists of old did not imagine when they imagined the Daoist idyll, as they sometimes did. Their thinking has been shaped by the world of their experience and its values in a way they might not have realised so that what civilisation wants they want too - but just by better means, as they see it. 

Yet people are not classes. People are individuals. People may think for themselves, act for themselves and decide their own needs and priorities in life for themselves. Indeed, most of us would imagine some kind of coercion to be taking place where such things were inhibited. Civilisation has told people that certain standards and certain things are things that they should expect to have and be induced to want and, in some but not all cases, anarchists, perhaps persuaded by the need to have a convincing rhetoric for civilised people, seem to want them too. But I can’t go along with them. Civilisation, its values and its tendencies, are the problem and not the solution. An anarchised civilisation is a contradiction in terms. Its anarchy or civilisation, as the first anarchists suggested, and not anarchy and civilisation. You can’t have anarchy and an organised economy for anarchy says things will organise themselves without it being any kind of organisation at all. So you might have to choose between anarchy and Netflix rather than imagining you can have both. You might have to do without mobile communications devices if you want social justice and equality. You might have to source your own food and maintain your own shelter and do without wasting your time watching You Tube videos if you want an end to government.

I am, of course, suggesting that anarchism, anarchistically configured, does not concern itself with the world. That, in fact, is exactly what the anarchy of nature is [and so often the anarchy of those taking their cues from nature as the first anarchists did]. It is not concerned with how things turn out for everyone or the prosecution of an ideologically acceptable plan for the world. It has no plan: it just takes place for it is not civilised. It is at odds with that kind of anarchism which is a political motivation for the pursuance of social and organisational goals. Anarchy has no goals and anarchism is merely the practice of life where one is free - and not least free from civilisation and its centralising tendencies. In this, I have no doubt that human solidarity would be a good thing in many cases and I don’t think that, in every case, “civilised” values are uniformly bad. Yet neither do I think that these are things that should be mandated or should be goals. There shouldn’t be any goals: this is anarchy! If any given person is not free to not want what you want, to not act as someone else prescribes, than I see no anarchy here. I see the coerced compromises of civilisation [even a socialist civilisation!] which become the hegemonies of a privileged few or the forced customs of collectives - and I see both as equally undesirable. So anarchism for me is the dissolution of borders and the annihilation of countries and the concept of nationality. It is a revaluing of all values, as Nietzsche described it, because anarchism is, first and foremost, a matter of values and not of politics and political organisation. It is about each person at the personal level and not about how people are organised when thought of as groups or classes of person. Anarchy, first of all, is the situation we as living human beings are in, a state and condition of our existence, and not something we may or may not create. Anarchism that rushes straight to how society is politically ordered is more concerned with ideological organisation than anarchy’s disorder as order. It is anarchism that has forgotten that no leaders means no leadership except that which each being has as a part of its own constitution.

But now you’re scared because my anarchism seems a lot more anarchic than yours. Its dangerous and not safe. Its anarchy that you don’t control! [What else would anarchy be?!] You might actually have to take responsibility for the whole of your life under my description of such an anarchism. The safety net is hard to see here. But did Diogenes talk about a safety net? Did Zhuangzi imagine us worrying about medical care for society? Civilisation does that, promising you long life and peace so long as you participate in its game. Do you believe this lie it cannot demonstrate in practice? Anarchy and anarchism, on the other hand, now becomes the spiritual and philosophical thing I have been claiming all along it is exactly because of this: it is a matter of differing values. Its a matter of asking what your life is and how it comes to be and you can’t go any further with anarchy and anarchism until you have answered this question. Many, of course, well known anarchists included, never ask this question and assume that civilisation, and the values it promotes and supposes, is what life is all about: what it provides, an imagined anarchist society should also provide. Therefore, such people never question if civilisation has got life right or not and neither do they ask how civilising activities have shaped and affected the people it has maintained and supported. Yet its exactly that that the spiritual and philosophical anarchists do put in question. Is life about its length, as a civilised person might maintain, or its quality regardless of length, as a spiritual and philosophical anarchist might maintain, for example? Is it about “social wealth”, as the civilised Malatesta suggests, or individual freedom in a world that is a natural anarchy, as a spiritual and philosophical anarchist might suggest?

Be of no doubt that where you land in answering these questions will determine what values you have. For me, anarchism must be more thoroughgoing than wanting to supply the same kind of life to people, albeit one with more equal distribution of resources in a world more free of coercion, on better political terms. As I have already described it, this type of anarchism seems little more than reorganising deckchairs on the Titanic so that everybody gets a bit more of the sun on the way down. This, it seems to me, whilst not a bad outcome, is an inadequate one and one in which anarchism is reduced to a political theory and so restricted from being genuine anarchism. As my metaphor suggests, its an epic missing of the point. Such a genuine anarchism would be an anarchism of values and goals, a real freedom rather than a freedom to be told to live in another way that isn’t like the old way you were told to live in before. Enforced socialism is no more anarchism than statism, government or capitalism is. Genuine anarchism is self-knowledge, self-education and self-determination, albeit in a world where you are not the only thing that exists.

You might reply that socialist civilisation is better than capitalist civilisation though and I wouldn’t really disagree. But I’m an anarchist and not a socialist and anarchism is not socialism! I believe in freedom pushed to its farthest possibilities and that means freedom from societal values, from civilising, as much as it means freedom to share values with others. It means freedom from the centralising tendencies of the socialist human being as much as the capitalist one and we may note here that both might equally want “civilisation”, regardless of their other profound differences, for civilisation services both equally well. It means noting that civilisation itself is far from a benign outcome of human existence and activity, one that has, in myriad ways, produced multiple forms of harm. Even as I write this there is a global panic about Covid-19, a corona virus, the spread of which has been magnified and enabled many times over by the existence of civilisation even whilst that same civilisation argues over how, or even whether, to stop its spread. This has all been made incredibly more complicated by civilised people’s need to carry on with their civilised lives, the form of life many of them are now entrapped within in their metropolitan existence. Numerous civilised people have hoarded supplies leaving the most vulnerable with little or nothing. “Yay!” for civilised values and the world it has created by creating networks people could take advantage of in order to hoard. Such forced centralisation, a by-product of the civilisation project, has endangered us all. It is not clear that socialism would have saved us either although in more socially-minded countries they seem to have got it under control better than those not so socially-minded.

This is but one current example and I encourage everyone to think about civilisation and the pitfalls of its existence and the problems it creates. They are things at least some anarchist forebears thought were destructive of a proper humanity. I also encourage people to compare it to the anarchism of actionless action that I have spoken to in my series of books on the subject of anarchy. My argument here, as part of that wider argument, has been that anarchism is not socialism even though anarchists may choose to act socially or even out of social concern. It has also been that anarchy and civilisation are two very different and, in my view, incompatible things. If you look at the characteristics of anarchy as I have discussed it in four books it is not something deliberately organised with set aims and purposes or desired outcomes. Anarchy, and so any anarchism that models its manner of operation, has no desired outcomes but only the outcomes that can, at any given time and place, happen. 

Accepting this would, no doubt, require a change of mind in a great many who now consider themselves anarchists yet who would also not like to lose the relatively comfortable, civilised lifestyles that they have been in receipt of thanks to civilisation - if they can help it at all. Unfortunately, though, they must choose. This is because anarchism, whilst being about the exploited workers on poverty wages and the corporate conglomerates who wants to poison your land so that its executives can become billionaires, is also about whether having a mobile phone is compatible with social justice or if owning luxury possessions is compatible with the world taking place as it can without desire or intention. I think its not and so I see civilisation and anarchy as antagonistic as Diogenes did and as the first Daoists did, those who placed simplicity far above civilisation - thought of as values. They were those who thought the antidote to civilisation's ills was simplicity. So I see civilisation as the problem rather than, as sadly all too many do, as the standard. And so I see authentic anarchist living, the practice of an anarchist life, as not something that civilisation gets to define or standardise. “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without,” The Buddha is reported to have said. Doing so, it seems to me, he suggested that organising the world, even in ways we might imagine better, is not our concern. And besides, it will organise itself anyway along much more properly uncivilised, anarchist lines. All by itself. That is what I think Cynics and Daoists alike once understood very well.

And its the only way it can.

This is an extract from the fourth and final book in my series on spiritual and philosophical anarchism called There is Nothing to Stick to. It will be titled The Spiritual Anarchist's Philosophical Handbook. The three volumes published so far can be read here. 

ANARCHIST LITURGY

What follows in this blog is the brief contents of an anarchist liturgy. Both terms perhaps need some explanation, not least from my perspective in even presenting such a thing. Over at least the past year I have been working on writing three books under the title There is Nothing to Stick to which, as they turned out, became the basis for what I eventually conceived of as a philosophical and spiritual form of anarchism. This was based on a conception of all of existence rather than the political circumstances on one tiny planet, our planet, although, as is the nature of the thinking that went into it, it inevitably connected one with the other intimately. Anarchism, then, is consequently my description for the state of all existence everywhere and not simply a political thing related to human activity. When I describe something as anarchist in this sense, as with the liturgy below, I am using anarchy in this sense, the widest most spiritual and philosophical sense possible. "Liturgy," on the other hand, is used in a religious sense [although in my case not at all religiously] as a form of linguistic ritual and participation in something greater. You can, I hope, already see why this might be useful given my conception of anarchy. The purpose of such liturgy, here certainly spiritual and mysterious, is to give a form of words to our participation in the great anarchy which is existence itself. 

A word about the text. The text itself is not my own words or ideas although, in a few cases, I have rewritten a prior translation for what I regarded as better clarity. The text comes from numerous ancient texts such as the Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi, the Dhammapada, the "six words" of Tilopa, some words ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth, and one or two other [Zen] Buddhist texts such as Faith in Mind and the Mind Inscription. Here sources are important in that where something comes from gives it a context and also not important in that things should be judged on their content and not their identity. In short, do not let their provenance in Taoism, in Zen or elsewhere disturb you. What matters, if anything, is what they say and what they mean. They express a worldview, an ethic, an attitude, a practice of life, at once spiritual, philosophical, anarchist. My practice in using them is simply to read through them, which takes a few short minutes, and to silently ponder them. But you may use them as you like. There are no rules. This is offered to readers humbly for their thought and consideration. If it is of use and stimulates further thought and meditation - good! If it does not, also good! You can read how and why I came to such ideas by clicking the link to my more fleshed out thinking above or by reading other articles from this website.

Peace to you all.

It is said that in olden times those who ruled everything under Heaven wanted nothing and the world was fulfilled; they practised non-action and the whole of life was transformed; they were immensely deep in their stillness and the many families of the world were calm.

The action of non-action is called Heaven.

The words of non-action are called Virtue.

To love all humanity and to bring success to them is called benevolence.

To unite that which is not united is called greatness. 

To go beyond barriers and boundaries is called open-handedness. 

To have a vast multitude of diverse things is called wealth. 

To have and to hold Virtue is called guidance. 

To grow in maturity in Virtue is called stability. 

To be aligned with the Tao is called completion. 

To refuse to allow anything external which distracts you is called perfection. 

The one who clearly perceives these ten things will also be magnanimous in their ventures and their actions will benefit all life.

At the great Origin there was nothing, nothing, no name. 

The Whole arose from it; there was One without form. 

In taking different forms, it brought life and became known as Virtue. 

Before any shape was given their roles were assigned, various and diverse but all linked to one another. 

This was their lot. 

The forces worked on and things were created, they grew and took distinct shapes, and these were called ‘bodies’. 

The bodies contained spirits, each distinct and mortal. 

This is what we call the innate nature. 

Train this innate nature and it will return to Virtue; Virtue at its best is identical with the Origin. 

Being of the One is to be ultimately formless and this formlessness is vast. 

This is like the opening and shutting of a bird's beak, where the opening and shutting is like Heaven and Earth united. 

This unity is chaotic and disorderly; it looks stupid or foolish. 

This is known as Mysterious Virtue, being, without knowing it, part of the great Submission. 

Let me tell you about the way: 

There is a way that leads to vision, 

A way that confuses confusion. 

At the end of this way there is no sorrow, 

This way leads away from the world, 

But it is you who must make the effort to walk this way

Because you must follow the way to become free. 

And this is that way: 

Everything is transient, 

Everything is sorrow, 

Everything is unreal: 

This is the way.

Therefore:

Don’t remember, don’t project, don’t think.              

Don’t analyse, don’t control, let go.

No past, no future, no now.

No solution, no intention, no attachment.

This is the way.

Congratulations to the person who has toiled and has found life!

Follow the way of water and not a way of your own!

If you want the way to appear,

Be neither for nor against.

For and against opposing each other - 

This is the mind’s disease.

Without recognising the mysterious principle

It is useless to practice quietude.

Do not seek the real;

Just extinguish your views.

Living and dying while forgetting desire —

This is original nature.

Life is not life

And death is not death. 

The way makes no such distinctions. 

Things are not as they appear;

Yet neither are they otherwise. 

So you should only cease to cherish your opinions. 

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.

In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.

Less and less is done 

Until actionless action is achieved.

When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

The world is ruled by letting things take their course.

It cannot be ruled by interfering.

Practice non-action.

Work without doing.

There is nothing to stick to.

Be passersby. 

AN UNAPOLOGETICALLY PERSONAL AND SPIRITUAL EPISTLE FROM THE ANARCHIC EAST

Dear reader, grace and peace to you and thank you for reading this far into this project. This project itself began by quoting several sayings from the Chinese, Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching here. It was not remotely my intention in doing that either to promote Taoism or to make my readers Taoists. Put most simply, I am indifferent about whether that appeals to my readers or not. But I did make use of it because, when I read it, it opened up a new experience of life for me, a life that was not about rules and right and wrong and canonised directions or decisions but that was about flexibility to circumstances, flowing with life like water, simplicity, humility and a natural, dispassionate compassion for all things. I was taught not to strive and struggle and resist the things around me but to become soft and flow with them. All things pass, I came to understand, and the nature of nature is change. 

According to the earliest Taoist texts, when human nature is aligned with the rest of nature, order and harmony are the result. Taoism is, in this sense, a therapeutic understanding of existence. From this perspective, the purpose of the kind of self-cultivation the Tao Te Ching and Taoism itself recommends, something which also accords with the thoughts of many others I covered so far this project which have broadly promoted an anarchic ‘self-creation’, is to return to a mode of existence that is natural, but that has been obscured by social conditioning. This is essentially what the Cynics of the Greek world complained about too, that being less natural was bad and that being more natural was good. One Taoist remedy, repeating certain actions such as physical exercises or meditation, in such an understanding, is a way of training the body so that it is free to react in a spontaneous, natural way. It is similar to the experience of practicing one's shots in basketball and then making a key basket in the big game — the preparation through repetition makes it possible to act, at a certain moment, without thinking, in pure spontaneity. This accords well with the training aspect to this common to Taoism and to Cynicism, which acquaints one with nature, reality, in order to mimic it, just as it comes to be, and with the habitual practice of those such as Nietzsche, Cage and Goldman in There is nothing to stick to who, all in their own ways, exhorted human beings to more natural lives - and to practices and not simply beliefs.

Yet it is clearly the case that, throughout history, human beings can deviate, and have deviated, from the natural chaos of things, their natural law and order, and have gone after artificial and conventional things of their own imagining. When they do so, often they have brought destruction upon themselves and those around them. Confucian scholars, who were rivals to the Taoist scholars who wrote the Tao Te Ching, were criticized there for imposing rules and social expectations upon people. According to the Tao Te Ching, social mores, the artificiality and conventionality of human culture and threats of punishment, cause more harm than good, as they are methods of forcing appropriate behaviour rather than allowing it to occur spontaneously and naturally which is the Taoist wisdom on such things. That we naturally become the change we seek from such teaching is, in fact, the point of it. This way is to change yourself naturally - rather than to be pushed this way and that and beaten into shape artificially - which is the target in view. Authenticity here matters. It is especially the point where knowledge and knowingness is foreign and innocence is nature in its manner of operation. This is to flow with the river rather than to swim against its current because you are possessed by the idea that you know better. 

So, in this case, the only way to encourage appropriate behaviour is by modelling it. If, for example, a ruler is a person of impeccable character, those he leads will naturally follow. But how is the ruler to become the ideal role model, thus insuring harmony for his empire? As an 8th century Taoist master said to a Tang emperor, "Who governs his body, governs the country." The way forward, then, is to practice self-cultivation and to engage in self-examination. To live according to a nature which gives us nothing to stick to will not come all by itself. It will involve us forgetting a great many things. In fact, one thing common to all the thinkers and thought I have highlighted in this project is that human cultures, in their knowingness, have, in some way or to some extent, usurped a more natural mode of life we should rediscover by imposing things upon us we should forget. But this is not a matter of going back, as if it were better in the old days: it was always available to us and it still is today. It is not a matter of time or place but it is a matter of attitude, orientation and habitual practice. It is a matter of us having all we need if only we can let go of the things erroneously added.

In Taoism the central idea regarding nature and the natural is relationship. We cannot approach nature as a thing to be mastered but only as a partner in a relationship. The goal is to become a natural part of the anarchic environment. The way to discover that environment is to turn to nature in its manner of operation. For this reason early Taoist philosophers left the cities to learn from nature and primitive people living in remote mountain villages. They hoped to eventually bring human civilization into the natural chaotic state much as the Cynics did around the same time but in Greece and the Hellenistic and Roman empires instead of in China. In Taoism nature is taken to be infinitely wise, infinitely complex, and infinitely irrational. It is divine chaos or anarchy, not divine order. Yet, as chaos, it is order. One must take a personal yielding stance and abandon all intellectual preconceptions and culturally-inculcated habits. The goal is wu wei, acting without action, or non-action, doing nothing contrary to nature but existing as it exists. Nature does not need to be perfected or improved or subjected to human ideas of order. It is we who need to change; it is we who need to come into accord with it. It is we who need to attain to its naturalistic rhythms and not us who need to impose our measuring, instrumentalising mentality upon it.

Part of the Taoist aim in this is to sidestep the observed dualities of life. To this end Taoism historically rejected all dichotomies, even the most fundamental one of being versus non-being. The goal of Taoism is to attain that which precedes duality. The only way to discover this original source is to observe nature. During peak experiences in nature, the deep meets the deep. Yet the Tao, which we may think of as nature, is a divine chaos, not a random accident. It is fertile, undifferentiated, and teeming with unrealised creation. It is the mother of everything in nature as nature births itself; it is a great darkness that operates spontaneously to give birth and life to all things. Taoists, as naturalists, seek not to be saved or to win, but rather to return to the original source of ‘the Ten Thousand Things’ which is the term the Tao Te Ching uses for the superfluity of things in nature. They see creation not as a single event, but an ongoing process that has no beginning and no end. Its divine play is taking place right here and right now. The wise person becomes like an animal or a child, participating joyfully in the profoundly irrational and anarchic (dis)order. He or she learns to trust or accept the chaos. Is that not what being ‘natural’ would amount to?

Consequently, Taoists have always avoided anthropocentrism for they recognise that we are just one of many things and not a special thing, a chosen thing nor a necessary thing. Unlike other spiritualities, they have never lost their animal gods. Ancient Chinese shamans put on animal masks in order to communicate with these animal gods. Their spirit-animals were links between the worlds of people, ancestors, and gods. There was a tradition of animal frolics during which one became a particular animal, such as a crane or a bear. These rituals are still meaningful. Taoists speak of a direct knowing that resonates in the belly when one has direct contact with nature. It is not with the head but with the belly that one can participate in the sacred madness of the ancestral gods. It is only with the belly that one can appreciate the eternal flux and the underlying unity of the Ten Thousand Things. This is not to say, however, that we knowing moderns, fixated with ‘the intrinsic nature of reality’, have to take this literally and too seriously as if what can be empirically demonstrated is all that matters. How do we ‘empirically demonstrate’ a feeling or an idea or a context? Instead, we should appreciate it for its poetic, postmetaphysical resonances and for the relationship it signifies with things beyond us that are not about reified concepts of knowledge or understanding or truth. Here context is much more important and flowing with things that are all around us, rather than classifying them in a table or chart, is appropriate behaviour. If human beings are not chosen or special or necessary and if, instead, they are just beings in an environment, then that becomes the important thing.

The idea to write this particular essay came to me because I held a poll on my account on the social media service, Twitter, some time ago. In that poll I asked respondents what it was they believed in. I gave them the choices of ‘the Good’, ‘God’, however they chose to define it, ‘nature’ and ‘evil’. 73% of the responses chose ‘nature’ and yet, as I never enquired as to what those voting anonymously meant by ‘nature’, I have no idea what they think they were voting for. I suspect that not too many of them were very sure either but that the other options seemed even less appealing, as they conceive of them, than nature did. In this project I am trying to fill out some ideas about what ‘nature’ might refer to and what some of the consequences then are, including what living ‘according to nature’ might then entail. Having read the essays in this project and thought about it some more, I wonder, then, if quite as many might then still choose nature as a consequence? Then again, it may be that some who chose ‘nature’ might have thought that it entailed god, the good and evil as well although, in my view, at least two of those are ruled out specifically once we take the view that nature does not speak, has no opinions and has no canonical function at all.

Yet the third, god, is not, a priori, ruled out and I note that Taoism, my own personal impetus to begin this project, does not formally disdain the notion of gods although neither does it specifically focus on them as the point of what it is about or what it does. This, I think, is wise for we cannot rule out the notion of god even if, as I have written about in my essay Endless Impossible which I will post in the near future, the idea of gods as persons seems vaguely absurd. Yet there are other ways to understand divinity, if understanding it is what we are supposed to do with it, and I’m not sure at all that it is. One way, in fact, has been to think of it as something very like nature and Taoism, in this regard, is quite mysterious in regard to what ‘the Tao’ may refer to. That it is not a person or being seems clear but, as with the Jewish God of the Hebrew Bible, it seems we can say more about what it is not than about what it is. For we hopefully more natural, more flowing with nature, more antiepistemological folk, I would hope that we can lose any possible anxiety about that. There are things we do not need to know and things that wisdom dictates are not necessary to our existence in a harmony of all things. This, I suggest, is one such. As Richard Rorty has informed us earlier in this project, there are some vocabularies which go out of date and become useless to us for they are speaking a language which now appears inadequate in the light of our current beliefs and with what we regard as our direction of travel. 

So in what has come before in the blogs previous to this one I have taken a naturalistic spiritual tradition, Taoism, added in some antimetaphysical and hermeneutic philosophy of self-creation from Nietzsche, sprinkled in some of the artistic and aesthetic practices of the Zen Buddhist, John Cage, mixed in a dash of the anarchic politics of Emma Goldman flavoured with a little Cynicism from ancient Greece, and here baked it together with Richard Rorty’s antiepistemological pragmatism, the Cynic-flavoured Judaism of Jesus of Nazareth, some humanistic musings on our experiences of nature, and extrapolated it all back in a naturalistic, Taoist direction. In doing so I have not, I think, obligated you to become a Taoist, a Nietzschean, a Cagian musician, an anarchist, a pragmatist of especially Rortian bent, a follower of Jesus, an incurable romantic for natural vistas or engaging with the elements or, in fact, anything else. The whole point of this project, initially entitled “There is nothing to stick to”, a phrase which remains the motto at the heart of what has been going on, is exactly that there is nothing to stick to. Yes, I really mean it. I really do mean in the face of lots of potential readers who have been taught to believe and who, consequently, feel in their bellies, that there is, in fact, much to stick to that, actually, there isn’t. What we have been schooled in is a form a life but only a form of life. It is a culture but it is not nature. It is The Matrix but it is not the world outside it. Here Rorty’s hopeful, future-oriented pragmatism shines a searchlight on our future and asks us where we want to go which might, to some, seem quite a strange and, perhaps, even unasked question in a world in which, so often, things are set out before us as the conventions to follow, the guidelines inside of which we must stay put, if we do not want to be seen as weird, or strange, or idiosyncratic or even dangerous. 

Yet one message of this project is that it is one of possibility, of opportunity and of self-creation. We are, none of us, limited by what we are told we can be. We are limited only by what we can be and that may be something as yet unimagined simply because, as people of culture but not of nature, it has never occurred to us that we could be anything except that which we were told or that which human culture guided us to accept as the natural order of things. But nature is not order; nature is anarchic disorder. If we open our eyes to that and disentangle ourselves from cultural anchors which try to resist and control nature’s less interested existence, who knows what might come to be?

So please remember: there is nothing to stick to.

On another occasion I once wrote a short book for myself full of Taoist texts and other things of my own creation. At its beginning I wrote this poem which was meant to bring together a number of Taoist views in a compact way:

Something from Nothing.

Nothing from Something,

Ever Returning,

The Unending Tao.

With a Mind like the Seashore,

Devoid of Intention,

With Actionless Action,

We Flow like the Stream.

All Knowledge is Empty,

All Striving is Useless,

All Time is Deceiving,

All Separateness False.

Walk the Way of Humility,

Abide in Simplicity,

Be the child of Compassion,

Be at one with the Tao.

Reading it, we can pick out several themes:

1. That something comes from nothing and something goes back to nothing in a circular process of return.

2. That “the Tao”, which means “the way”, is the term for the whole, things being thought of as a holism.

3. That the mind is thought of as a seashore which should not cling to thoughts but let them be washed away without any concern.

4. That the natural principle of “actionless action” is maintained and upheld.

5. That imagery of a river flowing and of being “like water”, as in the Tao Te Ching, is used as a metaphor for human living.

6.That life is not a matter of either knowing or striving in the sense that it is not about either the imagined knowledge, truth or understanding gained or the effort one puts into life.

7. That time is an irrelevant invention and that events do not happen on a timeline.

8. That the separateness and objectivity of things is illusory.

9. That humility, simplicity and compassion are recommended as ways to live.

Yet, after some thought on what has already gone before in this project, we can add a few more ideas to this simple and compact list to flesh it out a little and give a fuller expression of Taoist proclivities:

1. There is a concentration on the present and a consequent de-emphasis of both past and future which dissolves any notion of the diachronic narrativisation of either the self or events.

2. There is a focus on emptiness and particularly emptying the self of thoughts, narratives and emotions. Emptiness is regarded as openness.

3. Consequently, the self is thought to be illusory, a fiction.

4. Malleability and flexibility are promoted as beneficial life traits.

5. Peace is the goal of life, both within the individual and, due to its view of all things, within the context of a harmony of all things together.

6. Life is not thought to be about possession - either of anything in particular or in general.

7. Due to its abandonment of the self and the consequent de-emphasis of the individual ego, there is a greater affirmation of everything else instead and a rebalancing and recontextualisation of things in relation to other things. In the difference of all things, a completeness is seen.

8. There is no set of rules or morals, nor any algorithm for deciding such things.

9. There is a sensibility, a kind of being, that is beyond words.

10. The existence of all things is not thought something that is yours to control.

What stands out to me about all this is how some of the key imagery of Taoism, water, the seashore, emptiness, is not exactly imagery which promotes what many, especially in the West which is my main personal frame of reference, would regard as “moral” in such places. An attitude to life which can easily be characterised as “go with the flow” does not seem too morally robust and might easily be imagined to be completely inadequate to a world of criminality, viciousness and hate. Yet here we must remember that Taoism is not primarily a morality but is, instead, a way of living and a way of understanding all things in one. It is actually an anarchic amorality, it is naturalistic and seeks to site human beings in the context of, and in relationship to, all others things. As such, in the Tao Te Ching we read the following:

"When the great Tao is forgotten, kindness and morality arise. When wisdom and intelligence are born, the great pretense begins. When there is no peace within the family, filial piety and devotion arise. When the country is confused and in chaos, loyal ministers appear." (Tao Te Ching, 18)

Here the world of which we are aware, the world of contention, arises only because the Tao has been forgotten, buried by other things. Yet it is when we forget such things as I have mentioned above as being core aspects of Taoism that we begin to need things like morality or, even worse, law. We see a similar thought made mention of in the past in the words of Dr Martin Luther King when he says:

"While it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless."

Here it is law which cannot mandate a morality but can restrain those determined to impugn it. Taoism, on the other hand, reminds us that it is only when the Tao is forgotten that people need morality to separate right from wrong and better from worse in the first place. But even then, as Dr King said, there are still those who need law to remind them of the civilised need for morality. Taoism itself is about a proclivity, an attitude, a disposition. It is fundamentally one of letting go. It says that if we live in humility, compassion and simplicity with all things without striving for this or that, without a desire to possess, then the result will be more peace. So it implies, if not directly says, that morality is an observed need if, and only if, you do not do this. It is when you forget or cover over the anarchic disorder of the universe that then you have to start the messy business of right and wrong, something which in Taoism’s naturalistic view only comes into focus once the amoral, non-purposive harmony of all things is forgotten.