Reality, Humans, Fascism and Anarchy

First there is reality. It simply exists and it is true and absolute. Existence is its defining nature. And everything that exists is a part of it. Things that exist are the way they are and operate the way they do.

Within reality there is a planet and on that planet there exist a variety of life forms. Among them there is a form of life which calls itself human. A human has an apparently rare quality on this planet. It consciously perceives itself and the reality around it (awareness) and is capable of processing the perceived information (thinking), assigning values to it (feeling) and choosing a manner in which it will partake in the processes of reality (acting).

When a human combines awareness (perception of reality) with thinking (processing the perceived), it learns. When it combines the learned with feeling (assigning of values) it forms choices and acts.

So a human is constantly, like everything else in reality, answerable to reality itself. Absolute reality is the backdrop of its existence. However, uniquely, and because of the ability to perceive differently, process the perceived (think) differently and assign values to the processed information (feel) differently every human individual creates a sub-reality of its own. How successfully a human is to pursue any particular goal involving reality depends on how much overlap there is between the individual sub-reality and the absolute reality on which it is based.

This is because this sub-reality, this combination of perceived and processed information mended by feelings, is what individual’s actions really come from. And individual’s actions are always applied to the backdrop of his existence, the external absolute reality itself.

There exists many of human individuals. Currently more than 6 billion (and growing). They all, being human, perceive the same reality and then process it (think), value it (feel), and act upon it. However, since they are not all exactly the same, the information they perceive, processing programs they employ and the values they assign are different. Every human perceives, thinks, feels and acts differently.

When humans perceive, think about and feel about other humans they create human communities in which they share thinking programs, feeling programs (values) and even acts to create human cultures.

These thinking programs as well as the information that results are what humans often call “ideas”, “concepts”, “beliefs” and “knowledge”. And those feeling programs (values) are what humans often call “morals”, “ethics”, “right”, “wrong”, “good”, “bad”, “love”, “hate” etc.

Thinking programs affect feeling programs and vice versa. Together they are, after all, what creates the sub-reality of an individual.

These cultures inevitably contain shared ideas on how should humans interact with each other in any of their pursuits. There are two fundamental ideas.

1. My sub-reality must override yours at any cost.

An individual may feel so strongly about its sub-reality or any of its subsets and believe its overlap with absolute reality to be 100% without compromise. This may lead it to believe that every other human within a given community or the entire planet should share that same reality.

Such humans call for unity and believe that unity is strength. Indeed, such a human believes that the more people believe his own sub-reality to be the only true result of the whole perceiving-thinking-feeling the stronger that idea becomes for he sees legitimacy in numbers.

Many times, other humans who do not necessarily share that same exact sub-reality, because in truth, they cannot, believe in the idea of unity in hope that they could get their own sub-reality be the one under which to unite. So they too believe that unity means strength.

Basically, human individuals approach the idea of unity in hope that unitedness will happen under the premise that they individually carry.

The result of this is perpetual war. Individuals whose minds carry one sub-reality fight those who carry another. They represent these subrealities with different flags, logos, slogans or just desires and acts. A war between those who believe they must rule and those who believe they shouldn’t be ruled. A war between classes, cultures, nations. The extreme result is what humans commonly call fascism.

2. My sub-reality is my own. Yours is your own. Be and let me be.

While an individual may feel strongly about his sub-reality being 100% overlapped with absolute reality, it may also realize that it is not the only one believing so and that it is therefore less harmful, to its own sake, to let others learn for themselves why what they believe is wrong than for it to force this belief to others and end up in a state of war.

Such an individual leads himself or herself only, and nobody else unless asked. Such an individual sees the war things others have created as illusory (borders, countries, governments) and unnecessary.

They find strength in diversity rather than unity.

Such individuals are, on this planet today, still a rarity and often potentially or actually oppressed.

Such individuals are commonly called anarchists.

Ever since they have existed, humans have been tumbling between these two fundamental ideas on social organization: fascism and anarchy and consequently the two states of mutual affairs respectively: war and peace, chaos and order.

I wrote this post in a cold tone, as if observed by an alien who has been studying humans for a long time, deliberately, in order to present things “as is”, and polute with emotional exclamations and statements as little as possible. My hope was to express a little bit of an epiphany that I had tonight on the relation between reality and human affairs. What inspired thinking that led to this post is this interview with Alan Moore

I’m not sure if I succeeded in terms of clarity, but I let it out.. and now it’s on the record and I can build on it. Feel free to comment.

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3 Responses to “Reality, Humans, Fascism and Anarchy”

  1. Hi bilbophile, thanks for a comment.

    So basically, to sum up your classifications, just to make sure I understood them as you meant them, there are these types of people:

    1. Ignorant, not at all aware of the distinction between their personal sub-reality and absolute external reality, hence susceptible to conformism and manipulation by whoever’s views are popular.

    2. Those who do realize the distinction, but believe their sub-reality is merely incomplete, not necessarily incorrect.

    3. Those who know the distinction and believe their sub-reality may be both incomplete and “different”, or as you said “at odds”, with absolute reality, but that is is nevertheless the “right” reality, so they try to actually change external reality itself sub-reality of their own.

    As you’ve explained, they do seem to be the most dangerous of the lot. The first two ones are predominantly just followers, of the less and more inquisitive type, but not quite there, not quite as ambitious as the third group, which feels enlightened and right to mold the world to the image of their sub-reality, causing incredible horrors in the process.

    > Thus, the “be and let be” group appears to be only a sub-set of those aware of the difference between the objective reality and the sub(jective)-reality.

    Good point.

    > That is why people often only discover the virtues of pluralism when they cannot use the force.

    If by pluralism you mean diversity, and a way of acting without force, then yes that’s quite true. If you can’t use force to get your way respecting the fact that others are different is all you’ve really got left.

    I think though it is sooner possible that *everyone* is able to use force than it is that nobody will. The fact that most people still don’t use force on a daily basis, but rather voluntary interactions, seems to indicate that it is not just the inability to use force that compells people to respect diversity and that humans may very well be capable of living in diversity. Free markets seem to prove this very well on a larger scale.

    In my opinion, the only thing that gets in way of this order in diversity is institutionalized force, perceived as legitimate in its continuous violent disruptions of the free market and it’s diverse nature.

    > What to do when concerted action is needed and no agreed consensus can be reached?

    I actually think you already answered your question in your previous paragraph. :) I suppose you just didn’t follow its conclusion all the way through.

    If instability is a problem and like any problem, it is best to resolve it in an efficient manner, then it can be done through diverse action - basically through a free market.

    Otherwise it would not be efficient because the cost would be too high. In trying to solve one problem you end up creating an even bigger one.

    > The problem of literal anarchy is that no state is created to defend “the community” - the partnered citizens - a gang of bullies will and they will extort protection money calling it tax.

    Which already happened. That’s why we have governments.

    However I don’t think the solution you’re proposing is the answer, perhaps because we see the cause of the problem a little differently.

    I believe the answer really does lie in the efficiency of diversity which you previously described.

    The cause, I believe, is simply the prevalence of an idea, more than anything else, the idea that some coercion is legitimate (morally acceptable). Without the prevalence of that idea, no gang of bullies - no government, can form.

    Even if a minority of people continue believing in legitimized coercion, they may simply fail to have the critical mass to pose a significant threat to the rest of the free market actors, because these free market actors can and will defend themselves and devise, through competition that free market bears, ever increasingly more efficient methods of doing so.

    In short, if majority of people stopped believing that a certain group of people has any right to bully the rest and acted from that belief, the bullies would lose their power.

    > literal anarchists, who have a problem when opposing organised groups as shown above;

    As described above, I don’t think they do, actually.

    > Thus in their case unity should be achieved only in matters of common interest which do require unity for their resolution.

    “Common interest” is about a voluntary consensus reached by all of the people involved in a decision. So if you have 500 people who would be directly affected by a particular decision and only one of them opposes the proposed solution, you do not have common interest. Majority forcing the rest into submission nevertheless is exactly the kind of problem we get, that I described above. In trying to solve the problem of bullies among us, we became bullies ourselves.

    It is actually obvious that this never worked. Governments were created for the sake of security of the people and became themselves the biggest threats to people’s security. This comes down to a simple equation that violence breeds violence and you can’t fight violence with violence. Coercive monopolies, which governments essentially are, never worked as solutions to the problem of protecting people from violence.

    Instead they just legitimize one of the gangs and proceed to wage war against the dissident, and yes, even in a totally minarchist society where government does nothing else but manage a police force, there are dissidents - like those who wish to establish a competing police force to offer protection.

    However, since coercion is exactly what I profess against, I would not force anyone to accept that idea, to agree with me and to accept anarchy. I can only hope to persuade people that it is the right idea to embrace and one that is beneficial for all of us. I don’t believe in violent revolutions. So rest assured I wont be the one condoning horrors being done in the name of freedom.

    The truth is, one that only matters to me, that I can already be free. I can already live my anarchy. All I need to do is eliminate fear as an element that affects my decisions and then choose to live a life that I want to live. Insights that I have about reality of how the rest of the people in the world organize, about how economies work and about the nature of abstracts other people see as real, are on my side.

    > While the sole universally accepted matter is that of preventing foreign and domestic coercion against individuals

    My point is that you cannot prevent coercion by using coercion.. obviously. So governments, of ANY sort, are simply out of the question.

    > What matters is that in order do be dominant, the adepts of individuality/liberty must prove themselves more successful than their competitors.

    You only need to compare the way free market works with the way governments work, and their outcomes.

    > Until now, there have been no documented case of actual anarchy and “lands of the free” have been a minority in terms of both lifespan and population.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities

    A lot of the times, though, governments did screw up the picture, but again governments are born only when majorities start believing in legitimacy of violence.

    Cheers

  2. Damn, looks like while ediing my comment I accidentally deleted yours bilbophile. :(

    WP makes it a little too easy to do that… Gonna try restore it if possible.

    My apologies.

  3. [...] personal values to it (good vs. bad = desirable vs. undesirable). This process is what creates my sub-reality, my world - built on the foundation of the absolute real world around me that I perceived, [...]

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