On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 09:20:15PM -0000, xorcist@sigaint.org wrote:
On Sun, 18 Sep 2016 16:22:44 -0000
"I tried being an anarchist but there are too many rules."
Gold.
:)
Hah. Glad you got a kick out of it. That one got me laid once, in fact.
We can hope for the occasional 'benevolent' dictator. They might be rare, but they occasionally get into a seat of power.
For sure. I'd be an avowed monarchist if I could have even a 25% chance that the king would be a Marcus Aurelius. I don't think that such men are rare, in fact. I think they are smart enough to avoid politics. Politics attracts the worst of the lot.
I remain marginally hopeful you will never be proven wrong on "that which exists, exists."
But hey, I'd love to proven wrong on that too :)
Lol. Yeah, I don't think I'll get proven wrong on the existence part necessarily. But maybe someone will come up with a clever way to culture jam and get a whole bunch of quality people into the fold questioning the need for centralized institutions of power. You know, the main problem with anarchism is that there are no doctors and engineers to speak of. Its mostly political ideologues, and change-the-world hippies and freaks. A few ivory tower professors. Great people, in my experience, but you don't get solid respectable, work-a-day "professional" types that way, and they are the key.. the backbone, to any real social movement. That's why the hippies failed in the '60s. They couldn't get enough middle-class normies to smoke grass and fuck freely. It was too scary for them. In Zen monasteries, the roshi, the master, is treated like "one of the guys." You can make jokes, and poke fun at each other. That sort of thing. There is no grand show of deference inside the monastery. That is for the outside world. The roshi will wear fancy robes, and everyone will bow and all this. Because the knew that if you lived without authoritarianism, and showed it to the general public (especially a rigid society like Japan), it would be dangerous. But, you make a big show of bowing to some guy, and people think "oh ok.. they must be OK, they have structure like everyone else." But the monks know its all nonsense.. its just for show. It's an act, a play they perform. I've often thought that a successful anarchist movement would need to incorporate something like that.. as social camouflage.