Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

I do not exactly label myself an adherent of #anarchism, but I am intellectually curious: I would very much like to know if social harmony might not require Law.

That is what we are taught, as Americans raised and schooled and entertained with conventional American values: society is impossible without Law, without obedience.

I remember to this day having a liberal political science teacher in high school, a fellow I appreciated because he assigned an entertaining variety of texts (including a somewhat goofy 1970s environmentalist tract, Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia) who told a story of an animatronic Abraham Lincoln at a Disney park, programmed to tell visitors to obey the law.

Ecotopia - Wikipedia

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

I have no idea whether Disney's animatronic Abe Lincoln actually commands people to obey the law, mind you. The high-school political science teacher, I think, wanted his students to regard the Disney display as propagandistic and unseemly: Lincoln's best and most quotable moments are about principles other than obedience.

My point is that obedience to the law is broadly taught as a fundamental principle of U.S. society and daily behavior. The #Democrats are useless and fatally compromised, as pollitical opposition, because they've become overly attached to The Law, the established systems of recognized authority and legal enforcement, as the universal standard of truth. They speak of the U.S. Constitution as if it were the Bible. There is a civic religion, a irrational reverence of the governing traditions and legal precedents of the United States.

But there comes a time when one must break, totally and completely, with the old ways. The Founders were not gods; they did not found a perfect government and an infallible system of Law.

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen

The U.S. federal government has been seized by a gang of criminals. All the institutions and traditions established and maintained by that government must already have been fatally flawed, if they were able to be warped so readily to the advantage of the Republican fascists.

That's my view, anyway: the U.S. #Constitution defined a government shot through with exploitable weaknesses, and surely it's relevant that most of the people who agreed to the Constitution were slave-owners and schemers in business and property. Hasn't it been ridiculous to regard the political writings and doing of such men as if they were the deeds of geniuses and great philosophers, beyond question and off-limits to alteration by later generations of purportedly lesser citizens?

Apr 9 at 11:41pmWeb
Show threadEsslar22d ago
@mxchara Charles Tilly wrote a paper in 1985 in which he argued that all nation-states are protection rackets, aka criminal enterprises. What we have in the "United States of America" is a nation-state, a protection racket undergirded by violence and threats of violence. Also: David Graeber's short "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology" is what got me into anarchy more than any other book or writing. He writes about "structural violence" or how violence is so much a part of our lives that we don't even really think about it.