----- Original Message ----- From: "Gordon Fitch" <gcf at panix.com>
>
> In the hypothetical no-fly anarchy, our anarchists aren't
> specifically against airplanes; they're against shooting people
> merely to get airplanes. Because the shooting is somehow
> messed up by anarchist activities, the airplanes don't happen
> to get built. There's no need or desire to stop people from
> building airplanes voluntarily, but it just doesn't happen to
> happen because of the decline of shooting people as a regular
> practice and the (as yet unexplained) connection between
> shooting people and building airplanes.
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Friends of anarchists are against shooting people to get airplanes or anything else too. How would anarchists stop the shooting without pickup weapons themselves?
> Liberalism is full of paradoxes, on of them being the
> melding of an apparent rational skepticism with a set of
> absolute and unquestioned religious beliefs even when these
> fly in the face of both experience and intention (e.g. the
> credo in the Declaration of Independence.) In a way, it's a
> continuation of feudalism, an improved version, which makes
> room for and incorporates certain anarchistic ideas like
> personal autonomy into a (somewhat) cleaned-up context of
> domination. Given that human beings seem to prefer to deal
> with social problems in the worst way possible which yet
> achieves the needed result, maybe there was no other
> politically possible way out of the feudal state.
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There isn't a mode of thought that humans have brought forth that is contradiction free. In that sense liberalism, with all it's warts is a stop-gap; Winston Churchill's quip and all that. How is anti-governance the solution to the problems of governance and interdependency?
> It appears to me that, because of that very creativity, we do
> not have the conservative choice of simply accepting the tragic
> nature of human life and muddling on. As technology and
> accumulation make more and more humans more and more powerful,
> the likelihood that continued aggression, competition and
> violence will destroy the world steadily increases, so that
> our choice becomes not one between socialism and barbarism --
> we chose! -- but between anarchy and self-annihilation. So
> we may have to tragically abandon the delights of tragedy.
==============
Accepting tragedies is not the same as asserting *the tragic nature of human life.* Our complexities make neither the tragic nor the comic nor the absurd the overarching mode of our species self-definition. It's also entirely possible that technologies and modes of generating social surpluses may lead to a serious diminution of aggression and competition. We're still choosing and struggling to escape the barbarism. Do you get out of bed in the morning or evening because you're an anarchist or because you're a human being wondering and wanting to see what your fellow ex-chimps are going to do next?
Ian