Why do I do this to myself?

Why has the frustration and pain of being an activist got worse? I’ll try to explain. I used to be very tribal. Once I’d found a political home, I’d defend it and my comrades vigorously. Any nagging doubts I had were packed away in a box and hidden in a dark cupboard. That was until the point when it started to become clear that what I thought was a ‘for ever’ political home was changing and going off in a direction I couldn’t travel in.

Beyond the label…

I’ve written this piece because there are a few things about who supposedly ‘owns’ the movement and what anarchism actually is that I want to try and clarify. In part, it was written in response to some of the ongoing sniping that’s going on between various factions in the movement. If this sniping is all people see of anarchism, then it may well not have much of a future.

The masks have slipped right off the faces of the ‘be kind’ brigade

All of this came from activists who exhort others to ‘be kind’. A courtesy they’re unwilling to extend to anyone raising questions and concerns about their beliefs. Anyone questioning them is told that the issue is ‘not up for debate’. Anyone questioning them is subject to abuse, threats and as we have increasingly seen, actual violence.

Freedom, Slavery, and Magic Spells

If we are responsible and respected in the cocreation of a meaningful narrative, an open source operating system, and an open-ended world view, we are free.

Free, we challenge authority and stand our ground. We refuse to follow dictates that would do us and others harm. And we think and act outside the box of prescribed remedies.

Honesty vs tribalism

Looking back over the last six years, the issues I’ve had with now former comrades stem from me wanting to find out the truth of a situation as best I can and to then formulate what I felt was an honest opinion. What I found was that some of the opinions I formed were at variance with what could best be described as the prevailing orthodoxy. I don’t use the term orthodoxy lightly but, on a range of issues where I has differences with comrades, it transpired that there was very little room for an open and honest debate.

Attachment, connection and a search for meaning

Among the various currents of protest against the way the Covid situation was leveraged to accelerate the 4IR, there are those of us doing what we can to join the dots and understand what’s being done to us and why. In the process of doing that, a fair few of us have moved beyond the political labels we once had and we once, sometimes proudly, wore.