A Special Set of Cojones
My thoughts on Episode 6 of HBO's The Anarchists
If you’re not ready to live truly in anarchy, don’t worry about it, because it’s hard. It takes a special set of cojones.
-Lily Forester (Miranda Webb)
The sixth and final episode of HBO’s The Anarchists really drove home the themes that most fascinated me from the beginning of the series. How does a philosophical movement advance from its initial wide-eyed idealism (or rage-filled rebellion, depending on the angle from which you view it) to something approaching maturity? What is needed in order to make a voluntary community actually functional? How does a free society deal with damaged people who may pose a danger to others? And why does thinking about all this make us a little emotional?
It was also the most painful episode for me to watch, because of the portions dealing with the illness and resulting death of my friend Nathan, and the trauma and pain his family experienced. I didn’t know, and I think I speak for many people in the community when I say this, that Nathan’s illness came on as a result of his drinking. I shared his wife Lisa’s sentiment, that if she ever saw him again she would punch him in the face for not making the change that would have saved his life and protected his family from so much suffering. I would probably hug him afterwards, but yeah. And I’m in total agreement with his son, Axiom, who said “It made me realize that alcohol is not good.”
Damaged people create damaged communities
Everyone’s damaged of course, but people who wake up to what we know are some of the most damaged people.
-Jeff Berwick
The sixth episode dealt a lot with “damaged people.” It kept coming up again and again, both in the storytelling and in the interviewees’ words. But what is a “damaged person?” Is it just a label reserved for someone who flips out, acts crazy, threatens others, like Paul Propert? Does it extend to include those—like Nathan Freeman—who have private, hidden issues like addiction that, left unaddressed, can lead to an untimely demise and a traumatic experience for loved ones? What about people who profess to be friends of such a person, and yet encourage this type of addictive behavior? Are they damaged, too?
Are we damaged when we nurse hurts over petty disagreements? When we hold grudges over these hurt feelings, but do not hold our friends accountable for glaring faults that actually do harm? When we struggle to take responsibility for our own circumstances? When we fail to help our friends in time of need? When we self-sabotage? When we hide from the truth?
But as far as living in a community, one of the things that was missing was intention. You know, after a point you just didn’t understand it. When there’s emergency, when there’s need, when there’s pain—and there’s no one around to have your back? I would question whether you’re in a community.
-Erika Harris
Perhaps the most damage is done when we pretend that we’re not damaged at all, and therefore do no work to repair ourselves.
For me, this theme was expressed beautifully by the various approaches each person in the series took in response to crisis. Some confronted their own brokenness and have since come to the point of flourishing. Some did not, suffered tragically, and brought suffering to others.
One thing that I’ve learned is, as bad as the world is, you can kind of just ignore it, really, and work on yourself.
-Jeff Berwick
The lesson here for anarchists is that we have to confront our own damage before we can un-damage the world. If we confront it, though the process may be a dark and difficult one, we can restore our own wholeness. We can begin to lead a life that is more exquisitely aligned with our values and principles. That is the path to freedom, peace, and prosperity, and only if we are actually on it can we ever hope for others to follow.
If we fail to do this—to delve into our own brokenness and repair it—then we must fail to build the communities that would bring repair and restoration to the world. Damaged people create damaged communities. But we are all damaged. So, more accurately: damaged people who are unaware of their own damage and how it affects others, create communities that can never function in full integrity. This is similar to what Jason Henza expressed with this quote:
But if you take away our comfort, our food, all that kind of stuff, we’re animals. We will do the worst things to each other. We have to see the animal side of ourselves before we advocate for the responsibility of freedom.
-Jason Henza
This holds true especially in a real-world dystopia, like the one in which we presently find ourselves. As the dystopia deepens, we may come to points of crisis as bad as or worse than the ones the subjects of this docu-series faced. When that happens, if we are unaware of our own corruption, our own evil, our own “animal side”, as Henza puts it, then all of our principles and values will fail us. It is not the surface intellectual understanding of these principles that will help us survive dystopia. It is the deep, emotional, and experiential knowing of them that will enable us to outlast dystopia and, eventually, to build something better out of its ashes.
Each one of us is human, and we are each therefore broken in some way, probably in many ways. But as visionaries—gazing out upon the brokenness of society, seeing the core problems, knowing many of the answers, and wishing for change—it is incumbent upon us to confront our own brokenness individually. This is the only way we can ever bring the vision to reality. It must begin with you. And me.
Beyond unflinching self-honesty, the process of restoration involves deepening our commitment to our own values. And since our primary value is freedom, it involves becoming more intimately connected with the value of responsibility, from which freedom follows. For the radical concept of unfettered freedom to be proven, radical responsibility must be adopted. And that does, indeed, require from each of us a “special set of cojones.”
That may not look the same for everyone. For some it might be a truly and completely agorist lifestyle. For others it might look like being the lone person dissenting in a herd of conformity. You might develop your special set of cojones on the day you decide to stop complaining about some area of statist oppression and instead to do something about it, something that you can accomplish within your own locus of control and sphere of influence. Or you might grow your pair the minute you decide to admit that you were wrong and offer restitution to anyone you may have harmed.
In some fashion, each of us must let our cojones drop. Otherwise, despite all of our grand visions and intellectually pure assessments of morality, we are a neutered force against the darkness of dystopia.
Are we ready?
Why it makes us emotional
There’s quite a few people who came here who were just damaged. You know, just because they didn’t fit in, in society. But they kind of felt like they had a bit of a—a bit of a community.
I don’t know why that makes me emotional.
-Jeff Berwick
For those of us on the ideological fringes, for those of us unwilling to conform to the irrational, morally corrupt beliefs and behaviors of the status quo, community can be hard to come by. It’s hard in the first place to find people who like you, who “get you” like that. And then when you do find them, they probably live in Narnia or north of the Wall.
But none of that stops our deeply felt longing for connection with others. This longing is a feeling that all human beings share, no matter how much we may try to cover it up, fill the void with false solutions, or deny its existence. It is the longing for union. This may be a difficult truth for anarchists to accept, committed as we are to the ideals of individualism and disunified as we are with the greater society. But it is true, and it is in each one of us.
When we come together in an attempt to form communities—whether geographically based or online—it is really this core human longing that we are trying to address and fulfill. And if these communities are then strained and splintered, a deep well of sorrow is plumbed. The sorrow of being separate, alone, and thus far unable to connect and unify into healthy, integral wholes with other individuals.
That is why it makes us emotional. And that is why, when our attempts fail, we must take a deep look in the mirror, learn from our failures, and keep trying.
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I would go farther and say that *the* core failure of the proponents of anarchism has been to speak of principles first, and community second, if at all. The NAP is nothing but gravity. It's nothing but the naked state of our nature. It is essential, but not sufficient, to be a better world. When we share principles, we have a common culture, and around that culture, we build a community. We find the "strangers we can trust." I think it is easier to be intimately close with people within whom I have major cultural differences than it is to interact casually with that same category of people.
If I am clear that I must a) work on myself, and, b) recognize and navigate the necessary human condition of social organization and take responsibility for what I want it to be, *then*, and *only then,* can I start talking about the eggheaded and abstract attenuations to a larger audience. I better *live* those principles on every level, internally and externally, before I go around saying everyone else has to, too.
I definitely had a lot of feelings watching the last episode.
I don't think it's just a coincidence that a disproportionate number of anarchists were adopted. (Well, I don't know if that's a fact - but seems like a lot of my anarchist friends were also adopted). So for those people, maybe it's easier to disengage from a statist belief system that a birth family might have anchored into our NL programming (or never engage in the first place). Like we might tend to be more 'stateless'. I dunno. It would also make sense that perhaps there is more propensity for individualism - and - also a longing for somewhere to deeply belong.
This episode also made me want to know Lilly and Jason. I never had the pleasure of meeting them before.
'But if you take away our comfort, our food, all that kind of stuff, we’re animals. We will do the worst things to each other. We have to see the animal side of ourselves before we advocate for the responsibility of freedom.
-Jason Henza
It's a very hard thing to look at and admit to. Hardly anyone ever does it.