cheese it, the cops!

dictator parts

anyone who thinks we should chill out and let syria take care of itself might listen to this. if bashar were here, i'd carefully disassemble him using an axe and mail the best bits to vlad putin.

individualism and collectivism

perhaps after the entry below, i should clarify my thinking on collective agency. now, i do not conceive human individuals as hermetically sealed distinct souls: i think that we are in constant interchange and actual merger with other persons (but note: also with all sorts of things, including animals and inanimate objects, far far underrated by 'social constructionists'). i think our thinking takes place to a large extent (but not exclusively) in language or in relation to language, which is a collective continual creation. however, we are also distinct from one another in a variety of ways, and in a literal sense consciousness is centered in specific human bodies: you can't exactly feel my pain, e.g. so we're in this constant interchange between the intrinsic and the relational, between distinctness and merger.

the political applications of the idea of collective consciousness, however, have been obscene. the government is nearly always conceived as the will of 'the collective': it's how we all take care of each other, put into effect the values that make us one. the basic falseness - the extreme disingenuousness - of this view is demonstrated by the fact that the state rests on coercion. in reality, collective consciousness in this sense (which could be right-nationalist or left-socialist/communist) is something its advocates do not actually regard as an underlying reality; it is something that has to be forged by force operated on individual bodies. if the state was really an organic expression of our underlying real identities, you wouldn't have to hold a gun to someone's head to force them be what you claim they essentially already are.

also when someone is putting forward a conception of collective agency, i often basically hear them saying: you have to agree with me, you can't genuinely disagree, because this is who we are. in other words, it's a disguised form of self-inflation - ironically enough. what it means is: i speak for you. if you disagree with me, you can't be one of us, etc.: the vision is at its heart tyrranical. whatever the truth about our non-distinctness from one another, i will insist that with regard to absolutely anything most or even everyone believes, dissent is possible. even if what everyone else believes is our very collective essence, even if it is the very best that humanity has ever thought, it is always possible for you to disagree. we need to respect that, for one thing, because otherwise people will collectively accept any old fad or slop or propaganda. maybe opposing obamacare is a monstrous betrayal of who we really are all together. but when people say crap like that (and if the people you hang around do not say things like that, you are not a professor) all i hear them doing is trying to twist my arm to believe whatever's fashionable at the moment in their demographic. the claim is itself at best manipulative. and where sheer coercion fails, we resort to what we might call draconian peer pressure.

so the basic objection is: you're saying this is our very nature, but your every action gives that the lie.

gulp

my basic way into anarchism might be framed like this: in virtue of what, precisely, does michael bloomberg have the right to tell me what i can and cannot drink? i simply reject - or rather, refute - all candidate justifications, starting with the idea that i've agreed to abide with what elected officials proclaim; i'm telling you that i have not. i don't recognize the epistemic authority of the researchers to whom bloomberg appeals. the idea that he represents the majority will - if such a notion makes any sense - is one i regard with indifference: what most people believe, as i have actually proven, is less likely to be true than its negation. he has no more right to tell me what to drink than i have to tell him, and if by the democratic miracle he has become everybody, i assert that everybody doesn't have any more right to tell me what to drink than i have to tell everybody. but i will make a deal: i'll let you tell me what to drink, michael, if you let me tell you what to think. however, once you think along the lines i will prescribe, you will have somewhat more respect for the autonomy, dignity, and equality of persons.