gopherhole/docs/quotes/misc/anarcho-nomadism.txt

 I ran into two interesting articles today, that both seem to be missing the same point. There's this article from iron_dwarf on the Ran Prieur subreddit and this article from MakeTotalDestr0i.

To summarize, one of these articles is David Graeber's critique of the grand myth of civilization, in which we assume that we lived in egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers, until eventually we invented agriculture and everything went to shit. Graeber rightly points out that there were egalitarian cities without monarchs for hundreds of years, that tribes of hunter-gatherers can have oppression too and that it seems to have been more difficult for us to maintain freedom and equality within families, than within societies as a whole. Even those North American cultures that had egalitarian gatherings during some seasons had families ruled by patriarchs and tyrants for the rest of the year.

Amir Taaki, like David Graeber somewhere at the top of my list of people I admire, is an anarchist of Persian origins who saw revolutionary potential in Bitcoin and went to Syria to fight for the Kurds against the genocidal Islamists of ISIS. He's back now and hopes to transform Bitcoin into something other than a multilevel marketing scheme of frat-boys staring at charts hoping to buy lamborghini's.

So, Taaki thinks he can bring Bitcoin back to its quirky revolutionary roots, Graeber thinks the archeological evidence demonstrates we can create the kind of society we want for ourselves, rather than being forever stuck with inequality as some sort of permanent bug in our social operating system that has to be chronically treated by a class of technocrats studying GINI coefficients and other metrics.

In both cases, it seems to me that the more important point goes unmentioned. Yes, there are certainly exceptions, but hunter-gatherer tribes were taken as a whole more egalitarian than most neolithic societies. We have genetic evidence demonstrating a rapid decline in genetic diversity in our species during the Neolithic revolution, simply because a small minority of men take control over society.

At the same time, Bitcoin did in fact transform into a cult of greed, far removed from its founding principles. You have to be really dense to assume that a system that utilizes 400,000 times more electricity per transaction than VISA has any sort of future as a payment option. The coders and fanboys cling onto this system, because it gave them some sort of meaningful social role and earned them some money.

Corruption, inequality, greed, these are ailments that slip into systems. The question Graeber and Taaki are asking is: How do we reform these systems back into something that functions again? The question you need to be asking yourself is: How do we avoid becoming dependent upon systems that will inevitably become corrupt?

As an example, consider the state of modern jobs. Inequality has surged in our society, but it has had a different impact on the nature of labor, depending upon the kind of skills and background you have. If you're working a low-skilled blue collar job, you can expect to be treated as a slave nowadays. You'll have schedules that dictate where you need to be standing and how many times you're allowed to use the bathroom. The reason this happens, is because employers know you have no choice. They have no need to treat you like a human being, because you can't quit your job as you're lucky to have a job in the first place.

Now imagine having a social role that's in high demand. You're now flexible. If your boss treats you like a slave, you'll quit and move to another employer. Your boss knows this and as a result chooses to treat you with dignity, because he has no other option. Your freedom ultimately depends, on your ability to have a choice and to say no. The pain imposed upon you will gradually increase as long as it benefits your employer, until the employer fears the pain imposed upon you might exceed that of the alternatives you have.

I first figured this simple principle out when I was around 12 year old, forced to attend some terrible school for rich kids. I had two kids I hung out with during the breaks, one of whom was the typical kid who programs websites as a hobby. I once mentioned in passing that I had made a website once myself with a friend. He insisted I had to show it to him, but I told him I didn't really want to, as it was very personal and not very good looking. He told me eventually that if I didn't want to spend my breaks by myself, I had to show it to him.

Of course this kid is 12 years old, so although he has the right mentality to grow into a petty office tyrant who makes a schedule for your bathroom breaks, he doesn't have the cognitive ability yet to be subtle about it. Note however, that his desire to impose his will on me is based on the fundamental assumption that I don't have a choice. Like a Silicon Valley employer who thinks he's the only alternative you have to living in a tent city, this kid thinks he is the only alternative I had to social ostracism. This wasn't true, I quite readily found other kids to hang out with.

This principle exists everywhere however. Consider spousal abuse. The reason women were abused by husbands for generations, and modern boys are now regularly emotionally abused by their girlfriends, is because one partner has power over the other partner. The reason this power exists, is because the person has no genuine alternative, or at least believes themselves to have no genuine alternative.

A big solution to this problem, would be non-monogamy. People who have multiple partners have little incentive to put up with a partner who behaves in an emotionally abusive manner. As non-monogamy becomes more widespread, relationships in general will become less abusive. When we return to work, the same principle can apply. A person who works for multiple bosses, will have greater freedom to terminate his arrangement with a boss who behaves in an abusive manner.

Similarly, we need to have the freedom to move to different locations. A government that doesn't have to fear its citizens leaving, is a government that's free to behave in a tyrannical manner. The rich already have this freedom to move to foreign places, which is why corporations and wealthy individuals now find that governments around the world now dramatically reduce their taxes. However, poor people need to have this freedom too.

There are multiple ways to go about this. The European Union allows you to move from one nation to another. However, because the Union itself has a government that makes increasingly more decisions, it means you're practically still stuck with the same government. Instead of unification, we need devolution. Consider the example of Spain. It would be ideal to have not just Spain as a country, but to have an independent Basque country, as well as an independent Catalonia, Galacia and Andalusia, with citizens free to migrate between these nations. This is how Europe effectively functioned in the 19th century, as citizens were typically free to move to another country and America as a whole functioned as an alternative to the tyranny we endured in our own nations.

The current situation however, is a mere start. Ideally, we wouldn't have a single government operate within a particular geographical location, but to have multiple governments we can choose from. This sounds far-fetched to us, but this is exactly how Europe functioned before the emergence of the sovereign nation states of the post-Westphalian era. Living in a particular territory of the Holy Roman empire could mean being subject to a local count, as well as to a prince, a bishop, the Holy Roman Emperor, and even the Pope himself had a say in a nation's domestic affairs. There was no clear ultimate ruler of a particular geographic location. Today, the emergence of supranational organizations like the IMF, the European Union, the World Trade Organization and a wide variety of NGO's has similarly led to a situation where nobody is genuinely in control anymore.

Finally, ideally we wouldn't just have the option to choose between employers, but to choose freedom from work. Far fetched? This situation has existed throughout history. Today we call it retirement and apply it to old people. In the past it was called the "rentiers class" and simply meant being rich. The black death decimated the population of Europe, leading to an era of unprecedented liberty, as wages grew dramatically. Peasants spent large parts of the year idle and could simply choose to refuse to work.

What matters more than the conditions you live under, is whether you choose the conditions you live under. With choice comes freedom. For this reason, for much of human history, we didn't see the city as a source of oppression, but as a source of freedom. The countryside was a place for oppression, in the city you had a choice. You could apply to join a guild, you could beg, you could play music, you could steal, you could work as a prostitute or you could jump aboard a ship. In the countryside, you're just stuck toiling the fields.

For the same reason, cryptocurrency is ultimately a source of liberation. Before the current era, you had government controlled currencies and that was all you had to work with. Today we have Bitcoin, but more importantly, we have the means to design our own currency with which we choose to perform economic transactions. Rather than working on "improving Bitcoin", we need to realize the simple fact that we have a choice to seek out alternative systems. There's nothing out there that requires us to participate in Bitcoin.

The problem that leads to hierarchy, is that humans have a habit of slipping into stasis. From stasis comes dependency, from dependency comes power, from power comes hierarchy, which then leads to the loss of freedom. Bitcoin leads to a hierarchy, because the people who run the subreddit, the forum, the exchanges, the miners and the Github repository control the system, your "full node" doesn't decide jack shit. True freedom requires never being dependent upon any single phenomenon in your environment.

To achieve such freedom, the solution has always been to forever be on the move. To stay stuck in a particular situation, means to develop dependence on the factors that surround you. The means to nomadism have always differed, but those who desire freedom and autonomy have historically tended to seek out nomadism. In the past it meant wandering around with herds of cattle, trading goods between cities. Today nomadism can mean many things. Some achieve it by playing music, others become digital nomads, whose source of income is entirely derived from the work they perform on their laptop.

This is what the archeological and anthropological evidence demonstrates. There are hierarchical societies that don't practice agriculture. However, what tends to be going on in those cases is that people depend for nutrition on a particular location that delivers large amounts of food. As an example, a tribe might live in a desert near a river that's full of fish, or a tribe might live on an island. This leads to the emergence of hierarchies, because there is property over which ownership can be enforced and people have no real option to leave. Egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers exist, because anyone who wants to make a bathroom-break schedule for the whole tribe or expects you to fill in a TPS report for every mongongo nut you bring back to the campfire wakes up in the morning and finds that half the tribe has left.

Finally, the most important thing to understand is that freedom in our society is ultimately a mental choice. If you're working as a minimum wage slave for Amazon, you're stuck in that position because of the mental space you're stuck in. You come to believe you have no choice, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It seems to me that such mental inflexibility itself is a problem many people suffer from, it's a problem that tends slips in as we age. The personality trait openness declines as we age. When you take psychedelics however, your openness can be increased to levels of a young person again.

Most people are mentally bound to conditions they shouldn't live in. As an example, consider my own case. With the salary I earn, I could be considered rather poor if I had to live in Amsterdam. However, I live in a small town in a house that's going to be demolished, so I manage to save roughly a third of my salary every month. Similarly, there are people who earn huge wages, but live in San Francisco. The problem in those cases is that people are geographically bound to conditions that lead to poverty. The New York Times recently had an article, insisting that even wealthy people are actually poor, because if you consider the lifestyle they lead their salaries are inadequate too.

However, there's nobody out there forcing them to attend diners with their colleagues after work or to send their kids to private school. This is a case of mental poverty, a poverty of imagination. There are people in their thirties who had such jobs back in their twenties, retired and never work a day in their life again. The worst form of mental bonding however, is found in the form of religions, ideologies and traditions. Even if you have all the choices in the world available to you, you won't make use of them if you believe there's a guy who showed up thousands of years ago and appointed a bunch of guys in fancy dresses who can judge on his behalf how you should live.

I'm an anarchist, but I'm more of an individualist anarchist than most, in the sense that I think freedom is a choice you have to create for yourself, it's generally not going to come about by a revolution. I believe in propaganda of the deed, but I think the best propaganda is generally not to go out and kill someone, but by living the kind of life you wish to live. Consider the case of the trainhoppers who were immortalized in Mike Brodie's photo series. This is what effective propaganda looks like.

I struggle to think of people who are more free. They are free in ways we don't even think about. Consider the fact that you spend every morning dousing every part of your body in water, using soap to remove grease from your hair, then using a brush to cleanse your teeth, before applying a variety of perfumes to your body. This is a social obligation I would happily go without. I feel less oppressed by Peter Thiel and Bill Gates than I do by minimum-wage earners who frown when I'm not wearing clean clothing.

Freedom is found by being perpetually on the move. We should aim to be like the wild grazers, who are perpetually journeying. Any place we graze too long is a place that will lead to our deaths. As human beings, we inhabit multiple spaces, mental as well as geographical. The overpopulated tech-boom cities should be fled from as readily as we should flee from toxic relationships, toxic cultures and toxic mentalities. If you think there is some kind of system, some ideology, some kind of government, or some group of people who can liberate you, you are mistaken. The liberators of today are the tyrants of tomorrow. Freedom is always going to have to be something you'll have to seek out for yourself. Keep moving.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/accountt1234/comments/82osw1/anarchonomadism_the_perpetual_flight_from/