on 3/29/00 7:08 PM, b at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> (Don't hesitate to ask should you ever want
> me to email you copies... ;-))
Bruce: Don't tell me you actually practice what you preach?!? How mutually
aiding of you. ;) I might just do that.
> With my interpretation on your words... something like covering my butt, I
> would say 'yes', you've got that right. But I'd add to this one condition, a
> specifically 'anarchist condition'. In the main, and from our present social
> condition, the anarchist consciousness is a pre-condition of any 'mutual aid
> society'. Anarchists are not in the business of forcing people to think in
> particular ways, nor do they support a coup by some sort of anarchist
> vanguard that would then reassemble society along anarchist lines. We desire
> no power beyond that which we naturally have as individuals. So 're-shaping
> man's consciousness' is not the line of business an anarchist society would
> wish to be in, specifically if this extended beyond frank and free
> discussion to include any coercive element.

Yeah, I thought the mental policing element might be off track.

It's a dicey business, this teasing out of evolutionarily built-in
characteristics from the cultural ephemera, or whatever you want to call it.
Clearly people around the world are different; to what extent those
differences can be imported into other cultures is always conjectural. This
is my way of saying that I don't know to what extent my "non-anarchist"
consciousness is the result of cultural conditioning or simply the way the
vast bulk of humanity, including me, seems to be wired.

I mean, do we have any sustained examples of an anarchist society in action?
Even my main man, the anarchist (IMO) author Thomas Pynchon, always portrays
anarchist values as unbearably fragile. I'm thinking right now of the
deaf-dancer scene in The Crying of Lot 49--no one can hear the music being
played, but somehow they all dance as couples without running into each
other. It's a wonderful image, but it's hardly a platform one could expect
to build a revolution on.

I take it we all would like to live in a society run along libertarian
socialist lines, at least in the abstract. The question is, how would we get
there from here? It took, what?, 50,000 years of evolution, the vast
majority of it spent under conditions not even remotely like we live in
today, to produce modern homo sapiens. How can we possibly expect to
identify, let alone overcome, that biological endowment in a matter of even
a dozen generations? Is this where we invoke that old apothegm, optimism of
the will, pessimism of the intellect?
--
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA