“Capitalism is the best system we have. Only this can create a prosperous future,” argued someone in one of the corners of the Internet,
“No, your system breeds greed. Only the stairs of Communism can get us to the top of human potential,” replied another in the same dark corner.
Amidst the strife, it got too difficult for another user to hold onto his desire to be seen as a “deep thinker” and he spit out the following bundle of words: “No system with authority can work. Only Anarchism is the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Since the dawn of civilization, we have been spinning our minds to try to come up with a system that will manifest the kind of world we have always wanted in our sweetest of the dreams. And we did come up with different theories to organize at both political and economical level, and I don’t think there’s a need to mention the amount of blood and tears humanity had to spill so that one of those theories could be implemented over the entire world.
Piercing through the discussions people have today, you would find that we did not learn anything from our past mistakes, or I should say, the past tragedies.
Although clinging to a particular ideology and thinking that its global implementation would cure all the diseases spread by the virus of our distorted mind would be the most idiotic thing at any point throughout history, but continuing to do so even today when our species are on the verge of extinction shows how deeply traumatized we collectively are.
Even when thousands of years of history is earsplittingly telling us that the only end of a top-down approach is more destruction and pain, we are still charging down the same road assuming that the destination will be different this time. But one thing that separates today’s era than the historical one is that if we don’t change our approach this time, we will wipe ourselves out of this wonderful planet horrifically, which was not the case at any historical time period.
We had the room for failure back then that we don’t have now. Right now, two swords of Damocles, hanging by the horsehair, are dangling over our heads.
Our survival depends upon the fragile ecosystem around us, and a little bit of research would tell you that the once life-supporting ecosystem is rapidly turning into a destroyer of species, as evident by the fact that around 200 species are going extinct every day. The soil is losing its quality and the oceans are being choked with garbage and plastic that threatens aquatic life too. The small insects, whose contribution to our survival is significant, are vanishing at such a pace that 90% of them are already gone. (To learn more, you can check this article.)
If we somehow succeed in taking off one of the swords while the other keeps pointing toward the center of our head, it would not be something to take pride in because we would still be heading toward doom. As the nuclear brinkmanship keeps getting riskier and riskier between the US and Russia, it reminds of the last Cold War when we entered the cave of nuclear Cyclops. We somehow managed to hit the nuclear Cyclops in the eye back then, but it doesn’t guarantee in any way that we will continue to do so every time we enter its arena.
Even when all this information is staring right into our eyes and reflecting the drastic failure of our old approach, we continue to tell ourselves: “This time, it will be different” which is an excuse for not freeing ourselves from our pet ideologies.
For our egos to survive, it has to feast on as many identities as possible; the ego keeps getting strengthened with every identity it tricks the mind into clinging to. Without identities, there is no ego and we are so terrified of living without ego (which is the only purest form of living) that we do everything we can to make sure that those identities remain.
“I am a capitalist.”
“I am a Marxist.”
“I am an anarchist.”
Just so that we can have the sense of psychological safety and certainty, we keep telling ourselves and the people around us that the ideology that we subscribe to is the only workable solution to every crisis.
Capitalist says, “We never had a free market for over 100 years. Once we establish the free markets again, all the problems would cease to exist. Without giving capitalism a chance, we can’t say it doesn’t work.”
Communist says, “All the problems in the world stem from capitalism. We have to uproot capitalism to bring a change in the society. Without joining hands with other workers, we can’t overthrow the oppressive rich class and establish an equal communist society.”
Both capitalists and communists, or any other ideological fool for that matter, are geniuses in their own pigsty, but they are too blinded by the mud in their eyes that they can’t see how spectacularly a failure their ideology has been. A capitalist is the most critical and aware when analyzing the communist policies, and a communist is the most critical and aware when looking into the capitalist policies, but they both act like a dumb when it comes to inquiring their own conclusions and biases.
None of them is interested in solving the humongous problem at hand, while both of them are not only interested but invested in proving themselves correct. If their topmost concern was to throw away the status quo, which they shamelessly argue about every time, then they would have seen how stubbornly sticking to an ideology prevents the very change they advocate for.
On the paper, every ideology works. Capitalism, Communism, Anarchism, Libertarianism, Dictatorship of the proletariat, Democracy - if you read their theories, you would find each of them to be perfect in its own way but when it comes to implication, none of them has been able to divert our course of trajectory toward a total collapse.
Every revolution has failed.
Every movement has failed.
Every reform has failed.
The fact that we are standing on the verge of extinction either via climate catastrophe or nuclear nightmare is a proof that every ideology has failed to counter our self-destructive tendencies, and therefore, failed to stop us from getting this close to an apocalypse.
I know some people will get angry after reading this, which would reinforce the point I made about our mind’s tendency to cling to an identity, but this needs to be said out loud, so loud that even extraterrestrials (if there are extraterrestrials) hear this. Because otherwise we can keep babbling about our preferred ideals and nothing would change; all it would provide is a false sense of righteousness to a mind that is always in search of security and addicted to hearing “you are right.”
Every ideology has failed because none of them focuses on changing the individual. You would never find a single word about the transformation of the individual; you will read Mises and Hayek, Marx and Engels, Proudhon and Bakunin, Rothbard and Nozick only to find that none of them has the complete transformation of the individual as the central point of their teachings. Everyone has a “beautiful” idea that they came up with some day and think its worldwide imposition would initiate the golden age for humanity.
So far, every beautiful idea in theory turned out be an ugly idea in practice.
We want to change the world without changing ourselves, which is no different than saying I want to drink the water without opening my mouth. The world is a gross manifestation of what we are as individuals. If the individuals are greedy, hateful, violent, exploitative (not only in the gross but subtle forms), how can you expect a system to work that promotes generosity, love, peace, honesty?
You can impose it but you can’t make it work.
I am not saying this to create a sense of hopelessness in you, neither am I saying this because I am an emotional moocher, I am saying what everyone would say once they zoom out of their ideological cage: Old paths won’t lead to new destinations.
How difficult is it for me to side with any of the prevalent “isms”? Not even a bit. I can add my voice to the millions of others who are saying the same thing day in and day out, year in and year out with no results. I can add “capitalist” or “communist” or “anarchist” in my Twitter Bio and gain sympathy from the respective groups, but is that really going to change the world? Millions have come before us who tried to change the world with the same approach, and all they could give us is a bunch of books and a world on the precipice of disaster.
When the house is on the fire, debating about which room is better is the most moronic thing one can do.
If we ever succeed in steering ourselves away from our current path to annihilation, it will not be because of any “ism,” because thinking that a new “ism” will save us is what got us to this point in the first place, it will be because we were sincere enough to admit that we have been doing it wrong all the time, and we peeled away our old mental patterns that blocked the human consciousness to evolve and prevented us from transcending into our true nature.
I hope you will ponder over what I am saying.
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As a primitivist I read your post with great interest. I'm pleased to find someone else in opposition to total ideology and institutionalism. But a few points must be made so I'll try to be brief. First, possessive individualism is an ideology, too. Liberal political scientist C.B. MacPherson wrote the 1962 book on it, which consolidated Locke, Hobbes, and other ideas into a modern normative form fit to the Western liberal order. (In his defense, at least he called BS on Milton Friedman.)
Neoliberal ideologues such as George Stigler and Ronald Coase, no less important to the neoliberal project than headliners like Friedman or Hayek, proposed theories of the total transformation of the person through their particular epistemology. They sought to refashion the embodied human in history and society into a mere reactor to a "rationalized", reduced present. https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Mirowski-Hell-is-Truth-Seen-Too-Late.pdf
Your conflation of anarchism with the several named statist philosophies is a category error. Anarchism seeks an end to ideological submission and totalitarian order, which I think you too are proposing. But anarchists, drawing from a dialectic perspective rather than an objective perspective, focus their interest on relations rather than properties, which IMHO is a wiser and more fruitful tack.
Anarchist author Jason McQuinn offers what he calls critical self-theory, a "non-ideological critique of ideology" that he claims has always existed beneath our recognition. He calls for no particular grand journeys, no liminal spaces, only that we become our own theoreticians. In other respects CST seems well aligned with the ideas you're laying down here. His claims are interesting. I'll excerpt just some here:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-mcquinn-critical-self-theory-the-non-ideological-critique-of-ideology.pdf
>Critical self-theory is intentionally presuppositionless, non-ideological theory. It is, most broadly, consciously or critically thinking for oneself. It includes the set of all non-ideological critiques of ideology. As such, it is the only consistently self-critical and non-self-alienating form of theory — including critical theory. By default it is a libertarian or anarchistic theory, if only because it begins not just from outside any and all ideological premises, but by definition from each of our own lived experiences in opposition to every form of dependency or enslavement — that is, to every self-alienating form of institutional or ideological submission. It is the critical theory of the common person and common people, and not of the privileged elite or their lackeys — who attain their status through their complicity with the institutions of modern slavery — because through it we refuse any identification with these institutions.
Your thoughts?
Hello Harry, i am here because your comment at Caitlin's substack expresses sentiments that we share. I maintain that an idea is something that you have but an ideology is something that has you, or does your thinking for you. Can we recognize/create a base for a more healthy narrative that does not include ideology? I say yes we can. If interested, please visit my stack and let me know if you see value in this approach. The first article provides good perspective on my thinking. Short version; We interpret our perceptions within the frame of a split model of reality. This model, that declares the spiritual and physical to be fundamentally different places God far away, makes room for stand in authority, measures success through ability to manipulate objects, creates hard boundary conditions for objects, and so much more. Instead, we could have as an initial (unproveable) assumption the idea that the spiritual and physical are basically the same thing, and possibly create a relationship rather than object based narrative. Ah well, it's worth a try anyway.