What Voting Looks Like to an Anarchist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHY0KQmXPfI


Josh Brooks
Thank you master for letting us slaves choose between you and your brother. We all know that those who don’t vote can’t complain about their enslavement. In fact, slaves that don’t vote are just being bad slaves. We realize that slaving is hard work and both you and your brother can’t be master at the same time. You need a break to go engage in acts of debauchery once in awhile. So master, we were wondering if you could beat us a little less in your next term(tax cuts) we are ok with a little beating to make sure we are good slaves but maybe a little less? Also, the house slave eats more food than us field slaves. We want to vote for the master who beats up the house slaves more and give us some of his food rations. Also, we know the masters make deals with the house slave to ensure only a small amount of slaves get to be house slaves. We will vote on the master who keeps these very important deals going and makes sure that these deals involved beating the house slave once in awhile and giving us his rations.  By the way, we don’t like the slaves next door. They are brown and we want to kill them. Oh please master can you send us field slaves off to die and kill the nasty slaves next door. They have a really bad master not like our masters, who are the best masters in the whole wide farm. Why else would out children pledge allegiance to the masters of the united farms of America? We don’t like the libertarian slaves who keep talking about how we can survive without the masters in the first place. I mine c’mon, we all know that without the masters we would be raping and killing each other within seconds. So yes vote or die for your master because, everyone knows, we can always overthrow the master and install me as a new and better master.

Agnosticism in the Free Will Debate

My video on it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwQlZTQqq1o

I’d like to start off June with this short blog post on free will. I will come at it from two angles: pragmatic and empirical. When it comes to the pragmatic view, how exactly could humans having or not having free will affect our action. It will not change those that don’t care but nothing will do so that won’t work as an argument. What about prisons? If we have free will it should punish evil doers and if we do not have free will it should be a kind of hospital. I believe, without any inference to free will, that it ought to be a kind of hospital anyway, regardless of free will. So it doesn’t appear to change how I would act in any case. In fact, I mean that as an example that when people bring up cases why people should change their action based on their own belief in or against free will there is often good reasons to do or not do said action anyway.

Now not everything ought to be reduced to pragmatism. Some forms of truth are so fundamental and philosophic that its affect on action is not direct and/or doesn’t have an effect right away. Also, it may be that truth has value in itself. I’m not willing to say so one way or the other just yet. I’m not far enough along just yet. Given that, how exactly do you figure out if people have free will or not? What tests could you run? Are there any philosophic arguments for or against free will in such a way that the other side seems completely false? Ultimately, I’d say no. The pro-free will side says that we have free will because we can move our bodies and the anti-free will types simply say that you moved in such a way that you full fill your environment. Neither case fully proves either side. My moving my arm could be my doing or my natures doing, but how is anyone on earth to tell the difference? This is why agnosticism is the route to take with free will. Agnosticism for the reason it is always useful, because we simply can not know.

legalize pot and not tax it

Legalize and not Tax Pot
By: Josh “Greenghost2008(you tube screen name)” Brooks
 A few weeks ago, this may, I went to a legalize marijuana rally set up by the Kansas chapter of NORML. I stood next to a person who held the sign “relax and tax it.”  Fortunately only a handful of the 70 or so people attending the rally had this kind of sign. The problem is one of contradiction. While there may appear no contradiction through the ideologies of progressivism or paleo-conservatism, there is one through the liberty perspective. The first notion of legalizing pot upholds individual rights. It upholds the notion that people are sovereign over their own lives and bodies. The second part breaks this principle and claims that our lives are not entirely our own but must be used up by the state. What should be considered by those who wish to legalize and then tax is that a “principled” and “consistent” stand for individual rights is what will secure liberty. Thus I recommend people go to these rallies and do as I did. Hold signs which declare “legalize and not tax it.”
 Taxing pot may be seen as a compromise to achieve short term goals. In other words, if we can placate our masters and offer little servitude then perhaps we can gain some liberty. While this paragraph may only convince moderate libertarians, it is important that the message of liberty should never be tainted with the idea of pleasing the statists. If taxation is immoral and legalizing pot moral then these are the stands to be taken. This is the case even if the majority of the people in an area or in general would support a compromised position. This concept of giving into taxation for a little liberty runs rampant in our whole movement. Some of us try electoral politics in order to work with and compromise with our masters through the libertarian party. This kind of tactic leads to our own movements poisoning. For example, the libertarian candidate for governed in Kansas promoted and supported the fair tax. Not much more need be said on that.
 In case anyone is new to this site here is a short summation of the stand for legalizing pot and not supporting it’s taxation. Human beings are part individuals and part groups. Our personalities and beings are shaped by society but we have certain control over who we are as individuals. So a moderate position between atomism/solipsism and Hegelianism is preferred. This is important to note to bring clarity to my next point as it often gets associated with atomism and the charge that no man is am island, which a straw man of course. Robert Nozick wrote something in “Anarchy, State and Utopia” which is relevant here even if his argument against market anarchism is very weak. Basically as the individual must accept pain in order for greater benefit, statists often imply that the nation-state must except some pain in order to gain greater benefits. This makes taxation legitimate in their eyes. As Nozick pointed out, when a group sacrifices part of itself for the greater good of the group it is simply sacrificing some individuals to other individuals and there is no societal scale of pain and pleasure in the same sense that there is for an individual. This is just one of hundreds of arguments for individual sovereignty. They all share the idea that the individual’s sovereignty is superior to the state and the nation so long as said sovereignty does not infringe on other individual sovereignties.
 Now why a consistent promotion of liberty is important and why in the drug war we should fight for its legalization and not its taxation.  If we fight to legalize pot, but except the statist compromise into our midst, the problem arises of setting precedent. To avoid slippery slopes I am not claiming that every compromise with statism leads to inevitable destruction of our whole movement until we are just a brand of secularized paleo-conservatism. I’m saying that each statist compromise increases the chances of such an event occurring(indeed moderate libertarians already make us all look like paleo-conservatives minus the religion parts). In a manner of speaking, politic philosophy seeks objective truths about reality. These objectivist truths, like those of science, ought not be influenced by popular opinion but by reason. This can be difficult because of political philosophy’s close connection to electoral politics in our world. Just as you would not accept that the distance formula is something other that what it is in order to convince someone that Pythagorean theorem, you ought not promote taxing pot in order to help pot become legal. ( I’ll admit my Randian over tunes here)
 To any none libertarians, I’ll try to put this in a manner that is not full of libertarian jargon. You believe pot should be legal. You believe that a person has a right to do with what they want with their own body. If that means smoking a joint, especially sense it hurt no one, then let them smoke a joint (or what ever names people come up with). Given this, can not you see the connection to taxation. Bob hurts no one by keeping what he rightfully earns to himself.  Just as with smoking pot, keeping a hundred percent of ones earnings does not have a victim. No one is having their rights actively violated. You could argued that the poor will be less off because the middle class is not taxed but hey the a poor man is worse off economically when he or she decides not to steal. The situation is the same and only the details and scale differ. Thus taxation is a punishment of a victimless crime through the violence of the state and throwing people in jail is for smoking pot is also a punishment of a victimless crime. Since we can both agree that victimless crimes are no crimes at all why should one support ridding society of some conceptions of victimless crime and not all?
 In conclusion, a person can avoid holding contradicting beliefs by consistently advocated what they believe. This sounds so blatantly obviously that the reader might think I’m insulting their intelligence. Rather what I’m getting at is that holding beliefs that do not contradict is a project that appears easy at first but becomes a major difficult project as one grows philosophically. Just keep this in mind, especially when it comes to drug war issues, no one is the property of another.

in the interest of self interest

 The problem with how people see self-interest is that people believe in the insults against self-interest rather then try to understand what it means to be self-interested. The insults state that if you are self-interested you will just stump on everyone and hurt people all day long. I was arguing with a statist who openly promoted a strong centralized state who simply said that anyone who is self-interested would just "slit the throat" of people in their way to get ahead. This is simply not the case. A self-interested person is someone who considers their survival and happiness first. It does not follow that they will hurt people. In fact, I would argue that such action is bad for their self interest.
 The market is a good example of how self-interest is best attained trough positive mutually benefiting interactions. In face one is the most successfully self-interested the more they enter into these mutually benefiting relations. This is because the happiness and life of both parties are increased. It would not help McDonalds to make poisonous burgers because their business would go under.
 The problem is that unfree societies that give people the ability to use force undermines and perverts the positive nature of self-interest. In a free society, self-interest is had by improving oneself and making friends who those who are good to you(customers, smart people, friends,etc) and making enemies and staying away from people who are bad for you (liars, cheaters, government officials, jerks,etc) In unfree and semi-free societies people self-interest pulls them into truly self-destructive(ie not really rationally self-interested but irrationally) behavior. Examples of this in semi-free societies is using regulation and laws to keep out competitors(minimum wage, licensing,etc) It appears that self-interest is best in a society without compulsion. These two will result in the most happiness due to a system of self-interest where all who act selfishly help others in their own pursuit of self.
 It is important when making arguments of this size not to only argue from effect. So far I have argued that self-interest in a free society is good because it leads to more happiness. This is very utilitarian. The other argument for self-interest comes from Nozicks argument from separateness. Basically each individual person in separate from eh group. The group does not exist in the material world but is simply an important concept to help organize people. Nozick goes on to say that is why some people shouldn’t be sacrificed for the group. This is because it is not part of the group sacrificing itself for the whole group but some individuals being harmed to help other individuals. Which is wrong but it depends on the situation to explain why. If it is taxiing one group to give to another it is both for and against property rights which violates Aristotle’s laws of logic but being a contradiction.
 Also people own their own bodies. I can move my hand up and down if I wish. I can bar other people from using my body. I have power over it and can call it mine.
 These last two paragraphs have been made to build up to this point and this question. Self-interest is the unwillingness to morally submit to authority(may do so in a physical sense to avoid harm). I own my body and am an individual. It is like a in a board game. I count myself as a separate player. I don’t identify as a group of players but as a single entity which plays. This is why self-interest is important to liberty. You can’t convince a self-made and self-interested man to sacrifice his property and liberty for the common good which is really the common good only of the state. A self-interested man is a threat to conformity and the power hungry. Convince a man that he ought never to consider his own interests and he becomes that more easier to convince that his property belongs to others regardless if it justly does or not.
 This is a very broad topic and this medium isn’t made for long posts so I will conclude thusly. A rationally self-interested man in a free society is a productive and well off man. Not just materially but spiritually(in a secular sense(Greek). Self-interest does not mean doing what ever it takes to get money. Such is a person has no self or self interest. Self interest is simply the pursuit of happiness.

What is Despair?

[I hope you want consdier it breaking some kind of unwritten blog rule but I've decided to post papers that I got either a B or an A on]

 Kierkegaard wrote a book entitled The Sickness unto Death under the pen name of Anti-Climacus. The title of the book may be a joke on Hegel’s idea the struggle onto death between lord and bondsmen. The name of the pen name may also be a slight against Hegel. The book is also written as a parody of Hegelian writing. Given all of this, The Sickness does have interesting points about the nature of despair. It talks about what it is and where it comes from. It states simply that despair is to wish for death but be unable to die. Kierkegaard gives a solution in the end of the book but it may be more existentialist for this paper to focus on despair and let the reader dig him or herself out of the pits of despair with only faint reference to a solution.
 Anti-Climacus starts this book with the famous line “A human being is spirit.”(Hong 351) Spirit is self, which is a relation of a being relating itself to itself. This writing style may be a connection to Hegel’s way of writing. A way of thinking of this is that the self is split between a desired self and the real self. Despair often comes from a kind of cognitive dissonance where this relation of selves breaks down. On page 355 of the Hong anthology a famous example of Caesar is brought up. In this example a man lives by the code “Caesar or nothing,” implying that he will only be happy if he becomes Caesar. When the person fails to become Caesar, the person despairs over the failure. Anti-Climacus says that the person is not despairing over his failure; he is despairing over the person who has failed. He wishes to rid himself of himself. It’s a desire for a nonphysical suicide. His despair comes from the inability to die.
 There is also a categorizing of despair in this book. There are three kinds of despair, or sickness of spirit/self: despair to will oneself to be oneself, despair not to will one self, and in despair not to be conscious of even having a self. The will to not will to be oneself establishes itself entirely in the frame of the relation but does not break free of the relation of itself and itself. This can cause the person to become suicidal in a sense because their method leads them into an infinity loop. The will to be oneself leads someone to establish himself based on the thing which created the relation in the first place. It is not entirely clear from what Anti-Climacus wrote but that appears to refer to god. This establishing oneself based on god may be the key to surviving despair.
This marks Kierkegaard as different from Stirner, as Stirner was an atheist and had only himself to establish himself. There were no gods to fall back onto for him. Anti-Climacus would say that Stirner, and atheism in general, would fail to handle despair because it would try to handle despair on its own. Someone who is conscious of his own despair and tries to solve that despair alone will fail to break the framework and near prisonlike relation of the self relating itself to itself. It also causes the person to live in a misrelation of self to self. In other words, the person doesn’t have god to help him out and lead him out of himself. Stirner would reply that god is imaginary and nothing to him as all things are nothing to Stirner. God is simply a sanctified spook of humanity who ought to be ignored like all other spooks of history.
Despair is what separates humanity from animals; being cured of despair is what separates Christians from normal people according to Kierkegaard. Despair isn’t all bad because of this. Humanity would be a vastly different creature if it were unable to feel despair. Despair is to not be able to be in a possible state of despair (you are already there). It gets rid of being in a state which despair could come and puts a person in the situation they need to be in, in order to choose the solution to their despair. Thus bring the problem in a state of relative safety.
Despair comes from the misrelating of self only to self and also from the immense weight of ultimate choice. One is held down by the fact that no matter what they do, they destroy all other possible lives. The person must live with the self they have created and this sickness may lead to the spiritual (in other words non-physical) death of the person if they cannot accept this self they are in. They are stuck wishing to rid them self of their self. This is not a death in the Christian sense, which is simply passing on into eternal life. It is the death of the person as the person can become a sort of zombie in the philosophic sense; a being wishing to die but unable to die.
It is important to remember that this book was written under a pen name so may not be what Kierkegaard himself believes. Regardless, it still presents ideas that can be used and then argued against. If this book is true, then despair is an inescapable part of human life. Even if it is, no philosopher may come across the perfect solution. It is up to each solitary individual, to borrow a term from Kierkegaard, to solve despair. Not only is this book in parody of Hegel’s style it still is of the kind of importance of Hegel to understanding the self. Even if Kierkegaard would disagree, this is kind of a sequel to Hegel. In Hegel the struggle was between two minds. In Kierkegaard it was a conflict of one mind against itself with only the divine as a rope out of crisis; the crisis of the inability to die.

Stirner

(Disclaimer I may not agree with a lot of what Stirner says but I want to portray his views in a fair way. Also a book called the Nihilistic Egoist and Stirner‘s the Ego and his Own are the best books on the subject.Here is my video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i55lqh88_8)
 Imagine a throne of god. A new atheism comes by and god comes down from the throne. These atheists think of what to do with this throne they now have. They put all sorts of things on the throne: Love, humanity, community. Stirner is the man who plants the dynamite under the throne to blow the throne up so that nothing will ever be god like again. Stirner rejected creating concepts or ideals and then treating them as axiomatic ideals. Such ideals result in the hampering and destroying of the individuality of the ego. Stirner starts his philosophy in nihilism, rejecting everything that is held religiously. In his sense of the term anything held lofty and high over the individual is incorrect and religious. There is nothing above the individual and all things external to the individual are nothing.
 Stirner advocated a kind of nihilistic egoism in which the only cause that he excepted was his own cause. He doesn’t make himself into this new god. He does not put himself on the pedestal. Instead he sees himself as something to be used up as he sees the external world as something to be used up. It is a kind of radical hedonism based on the meaninglessness of life.
 This where the next interesting topic comes in: Stirner and existentialism. Both types of thinking start out in a nihilistic position that life is essential meaningless and the external world dubious. This is where the sameness ends. Existentialists often have a solution to over coming this nihilism. For Kierkegaard it was god, for Sartre community, etc. Not for Stirner. For Stirner, this escapism does not prove the validity of absolutes or fixed ideas as he calls them. These escapes do not give meaning to life as nothing truly can give meaning to life. In fact these are merely denials of a terrifying nihilistic truth. For Stirner the way to go is to live in this nihilism to use the creative nothing which is the self to produce and push forward the self against anything which will hold it back with its dogma. Be that a god, love, morality, or the state.
 Stirner even rejects freedom and liberty as candidates for godhood. Freedom is simply freedom from. The better alternative to freedom is owness, a kind of self ownership. A freed slave is only a freed slave unless he pushes with his owness and takes liberty. His freedom from bondage does not make him a free man, his making himself and freeing himself internally is what will truly fulfill his liberty externally.
 On property, Stirner says that power is what makes property appropriated by the ego. I own something because I can make others not use what I own. Ideas too are property of the egoist. I own an idea to use the idea. Here Stirner sounds similar to pragmatism except that truth is something to be own and used rather then something that happens to be useful. In a way this also leads to a detachment from external realty and truths to the point to were the egoist could potentially see the world apart from himself rather than see himself with in the world.
 Stirner is really in a category of his own. He really can not be placed anywhere as his ideas are so unusual that it would be difficult to find a group that would except him. Although he was an anarchist, his arguments are very different from other anarchists. He is not promoting anarchism in the name of peace like the anarcho-capitalists and he is not promoting it in the name of equality like the anarcho-socialists. He is an anarchist out of nihilism, a rejection of all moral concepts. This rejection leads to a further rejection of the states authority. His anarchism is still similar to normal anarchist thought in that it advocates replacing the state with some kind of system of groups. His argument is simply creating unions of egoists who will self-interestedly apply their self-interest and individuality in a stateless society. Like he often does, he does not develop this idea enough in order to truly be able to picture what a society would look like. Few would try such a thing with so little to go on.
 Given that he still comes up with usable ideas along the way. One of his ideas is similar to Franz Oppenheimer’s idea of the political/violent and the economic/voluntary means of attaining wealth. Stirner’s union of egoists is a voluntary organization where everyone gets to assert their self-interest and individualism. Contrasted with the state which demands the ego submit to the state. The state fights the egoist and the egoist fights the state. Again it is unclear how this kind of society would operate.
  A more radical anarchist idea that Stirner had was that crime is a good way to asset ones individuality and rebel against the state. He developed a similar concept of insurrection. Basically, insurrection is a kind of passive civil disobedience where one does not out oneself at to much risk of being arrested but rather where one asserts oneself by getting away with repelling against the systems structure and ideals(all ideals in fact)
 Stirner, an odd philosopher of the 20th century. His massive influence on Marxism, existentialism, and atheism make him important to read. His philosophy terrified the philosophic community at the time and caused a reaction to him. Stirner’s ideas strike at the very heart of the modern world. Can you read him and not be changed some how?