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Between Chaos and the Man

Between Chaos and the Man

Section titled “Between Chaos and the Man”

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  • Anarchists do not reject order or rule or governance but insist that in a healthy society these things cannot be imposed from above—from some arche, some authoritative source. Rather they emerge from negotiations between social equals.
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  • When complex phenomena arise from simple rules distributed throughout a large population—as can be seen best in social insects and slime molds—modern humans tend to be puzzled. For a long time scientists thought that there had to be intelligent queens in bee colonies giving directions to the other bees, because how else could the behavior within colonies be explained? The idea that the complexity simply emerges from the rigorous application of a handful of simple behavioral rules is hard for us to grasp. Bees and ants demonstrate how anarchy is order. It’s a shame that Proudhon did not know this.
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  • So long as people were free to choose, if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn’t the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people.
  • At another point in the story Odo quotes herself: “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” Is this statement profound—or fatuous? I think it’s fatuous in our current social order, in which choice is always already governed by the logic and power of consumption: that we choose is an illusion that it’s the business of Business to maintain. But if you ask yourself in what circumstances might this sentence be necessary wisdom, maybe it will look different. If the whole formulation strikes you as individualistic, perhaps you might reflect that one cannot truly have individualism until one has individuals. And if the question of what might serve to form genuine individuals is one that anarchism cannot answer—well, perhaps anarchy can.
  • So this is what I have come around to, this is how I have made sense of my obsession with anarchism: the first target of anarchistic practice ought to be whatever it is in me that resists anarchy—what resists negotiation, the turning toward the Other as neighbor and potential collaborator. I return to Odo’s line, “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice,” but I add this: The responsibility of choice arises when I acknowledge my own participation, in a thousand different ways, in the imposition of order on others. This is where anarchism begins; where the turning aside from the coldest of all cold monsters begins; where I begin. The possibility of anarchic action arises when I acknowledge my own will to power. Self-dispossession begins when I say to myself: Je suis Sabul.