> The parent/child thing of yesterday was an allusion to the aborted
> conversation about Judith Bulter's Psychic Life of Power that almost
> began this list: if the human subject is founded in subjection, that
> subject may come to fear the loss of authority as threatening psychic
> cohesion. We are, of course, on alert not to produce a little
> authoritarian, but some degree of coercion comes with the territory.
I
> think the idea that undergirds a lot of anarchist thought - not just
> Bookchin but Chomsky, who's said as much - that humans are hard-wired
> for freedom (or are born free but are everywhere in chains, as some
> old Froggie put it) is wishful thinking.
Yeah, but the urge to rebel against the parent-figure seems to be hardwired too.
Seth
*********************
Seems to me that there are different kinds of authority. There is the kind which a Spanish teacher has which a student accepts. Both teacher and student gain from this relationship. The student gives the teacher the authority to teach and the teacher gets the satisfaction of imparting knowledge to an attentive student. The flow of authority comes from the bottom and flows back to the student from the top. Of course, the student has to be mature enough to grant this authority and the teacher must be wise enough to to allow the flow of authority and power to come about this way. This kind of authority is the essence of communism, "a FREE association of producers."
On the other hand, we have political, top down authority. This kind of authority is exercised by parents on children when they have to stop them from running across the road at a busy intersection. The child is not yet mature enough to be able to discern limits of safety. This type of authority also morphs, later in the person's life, into the kind used by people who have political-economic power to order adults around, not for the adults' benefit, but for the masters' own aggrandizement. With all due respect to Froggies (who might have actually enjoyed being tied up), I seriously question whether this kind of power-social relation is "natural". It seems more like a neurosis to me.
I rather think that humans are socialized, in the present, to be wage-slaves to their masters. They are born with a screaming will to be free, but are socially taught to channel that urge into submitting to people who seem, somehow, almost mystically, to possess power because those people can both inflict pain and grant small amounts of political power to their best, most trusted supplicants.
And yes, there is a general confusion here with the person's parenting past and other cultural norms, like giving one's freedom/power to a god. The point, of course, is to change this social relation, to get the creators to see who they really are, sans fetish and seize the power, they ordinarily give away, for themselves.
Thralls unite! You have nothing to lose but the nooses around your necks. ;D
Best, Mike B)
Read "Penguins in Bondage": http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/
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