Anarchist by design

Humans appear to be hardwired for collaboration in ways that other primates are not.

Studies comparing human children to adult chimpanzees find that human children show a strong preference for working together to obtain food while chimps tend to prefer more solitary foraging activities.¹

Human children are also more likely than chimpanzees to share the spoils of a cooperative venture, and to be concerned with the equitable distribution of resources among peers.² Researchers have found adult patterns of cooperative behavior in children less than 4 years old,³ and children as young as 14 months demonstrate the ability to cooperate in shared goal-pursuit and to altruistically help other people achieve their goals.⁴

In short, human children demonstrate egalitarian social tendencies early on, and in ways that suggest that these tendencies are inborn, a byproduct of human evolution—more evidence that we are all born anarchists.

Human societies that qualify as egalitarian, that is, societies of near-equals in which everyone has more or less equal access to resources and more or less equal power in terms of community decision-making, are found only among certain groups of hunter-gatherers. Egalitarianism is not a passive condition in these societies, but something that is actively asserted and zealously maintained.

In addition to the presence of sometimes very elaborate and intentional social leveling mechanisms designed to guard against domination by specific individuals or groups, there are several characteristic features of a foraging lifestyle that naturally limit the concentration of power and authority. All of these characteristics involve the preservation of personal autonomy and the lack of mediation between the individual and his or her access to life’s necessities.

If there is one thing that most defines our present global cluster-fuck, it’s the mediation of access: layers and layers of mediation, and at each one a dozen corporate parasites with mandibles firmly attached. 

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1.       Rekers, Y., Haun, D. M., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Children, but Not Chimpanzees, Prefer to Collaborate. Current Biology, 21(20), 1756-1758.

2.       Hamann, K., Warneken, F., Greenberg, J. R., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in chimpanzees. Nature, 476(7360), 328-331.

3.       Olson, K. R., & Spelke, E. S. (2008). Foundations of cooperation in young children. Cognition, 108(1), 222-231.

4.       Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Helping and Cooperation at 14 Months of Age. Infancy, 11(3), 271-294.

Joystick justice

It’s official. USAcorp has granted itself the “legal” right to vaporize US citizens who are “suspected” enemies-of-state without a trial. 

There are too many slippery slopes to list here, not the least of which involves the definition of “enemy-of-state,” with its shape-shifting tendencies. Today it's defectors to Al Qaeda. Tomorrow, who knows?  Maybe human rights activists, or atheists, or people who threaten the economic order by growing their own non GMO food.

I’m not too worried that we are heading for a time when you and I could be droned out of existence while we sleep just for expressing anti-state opinions, though. The memo specifically states that killing is indicated only in those situations where capture is not practical. With the privatizing of prisons and the burgeoning economic demand for cellblock livestock, capture will become increasingly the preferred alternative regardless of how “enemy” is redefined.


OK, so maybe I am just a little bit worried...

Cause and effect

I just sat through a passionate talk about the state of our planet in the grip of human-caused global warming and mass extinction. I heard all about how WE have created these problems by OUR actions. Excess CO2 in the atmosphere is a direct result of OUR industrial activities. Species are vanishing because of OUR dams and OUR highways and OUR fracking and OUR forest harvesting and OUR manufacturing and OUR dumping of toxins. 

Cause and effect

And, of course, since WE have created the problems, WE are the ones who need to do something about them by changing OUR behavior.

Right. Cause and effect.

But wait a minute here. I haven’t dammed any rivers or built any highways or harvested any forests or manufactured any toxic chemicals. And I strongly suspect that YOU haven’t either. When dealing with cause and effect it is vital that you identify the actual causes. Yes I own a car that was manufactured with the aid of dams and toxic chemicals, a car that releases CO2 into the atmosphere every time I drive it on the highways that my tax dollars have paid for.  

But my behavior was not the cause of these things. The dam wasn’t built so that I could own the car I drive. I have to drive a car because I have to commute, and I have to commute because I am forced into a lifestyle that demands it, and the lifestyle I am forced to engage was created in part by the presence of dams. My tax dollars build highways just like they build drone aircraft and the bombs they drop on unsuspecting children. But I assure you that I don’t give these dollars freely.

Because WE (you and I) have no choice in the matter—WE have several trivial options, but in the end WE are not free to do other than WE do—it makes no sense at all to say that WE are even a proximal cause.  WE (you and I) are forced to occupy part of a causal chain that is smothering the biosphere. But OUR behavior is effect. To think otherwise is delusional. The slave cannot take credit for the existence of the plantation or take the blame for the damage the cane fields do to the local ecosystem.

Setting fire to the master’s house, however, is a different matter entirely...

The tyranny of abstraction

"Humanity", "the human species", "we", "us": abstractions, psychological constructs, tools of thought.

It is, of course, difficult (impossible) to communicate about anything of any complexity without resorting to abstractions. But too often the abstraction, a linguistic convenience, is fitted with bone and flesh and sent into the world where it terrorizes and torments the very things it is meant to embrace.

Abstractions don’t have needs or goals or feelings or dreams. They can’t know joy, they can’t suffer. The human race cannot know pain. A nation cannot know fear or cold. A family cannot starve. A community cannot grieve. 

People, individuals, you and me and him and her, all 7+ billion potential targets of the pronouns you and me and him and her—and all of the other uncountable individual living beings for which we don’t have adequate pronouns—are what is important here. 

There is nothing else.