Inspiration

I just want to pay homage to a movement that's had a huge impact on me in my adult life.

Now I don't know about you, but until I was about 28, whenever I thought of anarchy, I thought of what would happen if there were no rules - ANARCHY! - and spotty pubescent boys spraying anarchy signs on walls and scribbling them on pencil cases.  And 'The Young Ones'.  And then I met the love of my life who happened to be an anarchist punk rocker, and he started to alter my perceptions.  

And then when I was 30 I read this.  And I would have to say it changed my life.  I read it early in the morning after a blissfull market experience, crying my eyes out as I suddenly felt less alone as a  human.  I started to see Anarchism as a discussion of human sovereignty.  And autonomy.  And it opened a whole heap of discussions about who I really was, underneath all the layers of enculturation I'd endured throughout my early life.  I went on to read a book that CrimethInc. published called 'Days of Love, Nights of War', and that equally rocked my socks.  Insight after realisation after altered perspective grumbled and murmured in my earth.    Of course, as with everything, I took the bits I liked and left the rest, but there was this one bit......

Currawong read it a few times from a soapbox at the market we helped to birth in Macclesfield, South Australia.  We read it to anyone that would sit still long enough to listen.  It's the introduction to the book, before the disclaimer where it claims no rights at all, and encourages folk to reproduce and transmit it in any way possible, especially and best if done at the unsuspecting expense of a corporation.

And it goes like this...........

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Think about your direct

bodily experience of life.

No one can lie to you about that.

How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen?  

A computer screen?  Behind an automobile windscreen? 

All three screens combined?

What are you being screened from?

How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?  

(Is watching things as exciting as doing things?  Do you have enough time 

to do all the things that you want to?  Do you have enough energy to?)

And how many hours a day do you sleep?  How are you affected by

standardised time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with

those of millions of other people?  How long do you ever go without

knowing what time it is?  Who or what controls your minutes and hours?

The minutes and hours that

add up to your life

Can you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing

and people are walking around together?  How many dollars an hour

does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers?  

What will you get later that could make up for this day of your life?

How are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by 

anonymous masses?  Do you find yourself blocking your emotional 

responses to other human beings?

And who prepares your meals? Do you ever eat by yourself? Do

you ever eat standing up? How much do you know about what you

eat and where it comes from?  How much do you trust it?

What are we deprived of by labour-saving devices?  By thought saving devices?  

How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the 

product rather than the process, on the future rather than the present, the present 

moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future?

What are we speeding towards?

Are we saving time?  Saving it up for what?

How are you affected by being moved around in prescribed paths, 

in elevators, buses, subways, escalators, on highways and sidewalks?  

By moving, working, and living in two- and three- dimensional grids?  

How are you affected by being organised, immobilised, and scheduled.......

instead of wandering, roaming freely and spontaneously?  Scavenging?  Seeing?

How much freedom of movement do you have - freedom to

move through space, to move as far as you want, in new and 

unexplored directions?

And how are you affected by waiting?  Waiting in line, 

waiting in traffic, waiting to eat, waiting for the bus, waiting for 

the bathroom - learning to punish and ignore your spontaneous urges?

How are you affected by

holding back your desires?

By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting 

in childhood, along with the suppression of everything in you that 

is spontaneous, everything that evidences your wild nature, your 

membership in the animal kingdom?

Is pleasure dangerous?

Could danger be joyous?

Do you ever need to see the sky?  (Can you see stars in it any

 more?) Do you ever need to see water, leaves, foliage, animals?  

Glinting, glimmering, moving?

Is that why you have a pet, an aquarium, houseplants?  

Or are television and video your glinting, glimmering, moving?

How much of your life comes at you

through a screen, vicariously?

Do videotapes of yourself and your friends fascinate you, 

as if you are somehow more real in image than in life?

If your life was made into a movie, would it be worth watching?

And how do you feel in situations of enforced passivity?  How are

you affected by a non-stop assault of symbolic communication - 

audio, visual, print, billboard, computer, video, radio, robotic 

voices - as you wander through the forest of signs?  What are

they urging upon you?

Do you ever need solitude, quiet, contemplation?  Do you remember

it?  Thinking on your own, rather than reacting to stimuli?  Is it 

hard to look away? 

Is looking away the very thing that is

not permitted?

Where can you go to find silence and solitude?  Not white noise, but

pure silence?  Not loneliness, but gentle solitude?  

How often have you stopped to ask yourself questions like these?

Do you find yourself committing acts of symbolic violence?

Do you ever feel lonely in a way that words cannot even express?

Do you ever feel ready to

LOSE CONTROL?

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Quite stunning isn't it.  And it had quite an impact on everyone we read it to.  And a foundational role in our enthusiastic mind explorations into Human Animal Wildlife Sanctuaries, and being Flowmads, and Intentional Mobile Communities, and Self Taught Guilds, and just about everything.  And into getting tremendously active in environmentalism.  

And it's interesting to note that the person of the year last year for Time magazine was the anonymous protester.  Of whom I've known quite a few.  And that hooks in with reading an article a while back, where a reporter was trying to interview the modern protest movement, and realised he couldn't.    There was no hierarchy or bureaucracy or ambassador to contact. There's no big umbrella representation, for a whole bunch of anarchistic cells, brought together by mutual respect and passion, and into respecting everyone for the sovereign independent human that they are.  

There are huge changes happening in the world, and we all collectively take our roles in them, but the role of the protester or activist or ecowarrior is definitely one on the frontline in the war that's being fought for our souls and the future of the planet.  And many of them have taken wisdoms from anarchist texts or people like I've mentioned above, in their search for a more authentic life and world.  

The basics that I gleaned from reading anarchist theory, come about the closest I can think of, to opening up the creation of alternative realities suggested by the principles of chaos theory and quantum physics.  Things happening and people connecting through the laws of attraction and repulsion and time being a construct, and spontaneous urges becoming conscious creations, and instead of seeing  anarchy as a scary absence of all rules.....it can instead be seen as a reflection of conscious harmony.  Of deeper rules and connections of which we're only barely conscious, that operate on a continuum of balance.  

Maybe by being less controlling of all of our domains, we could allow more spontaneous freedom and acceptance and respect for all the myriads of ways that balance can form.  

But this is just a short post to say thank you anarchy, and thank you in particular CrimethInc., for having such a tremendously inspirational impact on my life.  

Thank you.