The sixth and last episode of HBO’s The Anarchists airs tonight.
I’m excited to see the conclusion, and I still have two (which might turn into more than two) essays-in-progress detailing my thoughts on the series as a whole. It has been a cathartic experience for many of us in the community who know the characters personally. I can only imagine how much more cathartic—and painful—it has been for the subjects of the film, especially those who experienced the traumatic shooting event in person.
Episode 4 was hard to watch.
As many friends of Lily Forester, John Galton, and Jason Henza have attested on social media and in blog posts since the airing of the third and fourth episodes, the re-living of their traumas has been gut-wrenching. Many tears were shed during the show’s visceral recollection of what happened.
Like many from the community, I remember the day Lily and Henza posted their desperate pleas for help on Facebook, immediately after Henza was shot and John was killed. It was terrifying—knowing that they were in danger and needed help, but they were hundreds or thousands of miles away and there was nothing you could do. I am so grateful to the anarchist expats in the Acapulco community who came to their aid. They are badasses and heroes whose service should never be forgotten.
At the same time, I’m a little disappointed in some of the members of the community in Acapulco who either ignored the pleas for help or who turned Lily and Jason away in their hour of need because of fear of blowback. I mean, I get it—Paul Propert was still at large and who knew what he was capable of. It made sense to keep Lily and Jason out of the well-known anarchist houses for their own protection as well as for the safety of others. But without even a little help in the form of money or a lead on somewhere safe to stay? I don’t know all the details of the local aftermath, of course, but from what was said in the series, it sounds like the community could have stepped up quite a bit more than they did, and it’s a shame they didn’t.
Add this to the list of needed decentralized solutions for a stateless society, right alongside medical mutual aid and private security firms: we need a protection network with safehouses and financial assistance for refugees and victims of violent crimes.
The crux of the matter
Episode 5 picked up beautifully on one of the themes I expressed in my first response post to the series: how do we grow and mature our movement, not only as an intellectual ideology, but as a practical approach to life and society?
To me, it all comes down to responsibility. Personal responsibility, and, as a natural extension, community responsibility. Intellectually, we understand that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. And the majority of us do pretty well at being responsible for our own lives and livelihoods. But my sense is that we are not quite to the point of radical responsibility we need to be in order to bring about a voluntary society.
When statists demand explanations about how society would work without the state, it’s common for anarchists to respond with something along the lines of, “It doesn’t matter how. What matters is that the state is a criminal, murderous institution, and it must be eliminated in order to achieve a moral and peaceful society. We can figure out the ‘how’ later.”
In a way, this is a reasonable answer. Why should we sit by and play victim to the state’s murdering and thieving ways, year after year, decade after decade? Why should we wait to try a voluntary society until each possible fear and contingency is fully planned for? It would be impossible to account for all voluntary ways of solving all societal problems in advance, and in the meantime, the immoral state’s abuses continue unabated. It would be more moral—supremely more—to end its bloody reign than to sit and wait for someone to come up with all the answers.
But in another way, it’s really a non-answer. The real answer would be to go out, each of us, in whatever way we can and with whatever skill sets and resources we have at our disposal, and build a voluntary alternative to some pressing societal problem. Then, when the statists bang on about how anarchy “could never work”, we’ll have our ready answers to point to—not just ideas that sound good on paper but actual real-world demonstrations.
To render the state obsolete through viable, already existing alternatives. There was a lot of talk along those lines eight or ten years back, but somehow I think it got lost in the sauce of all the drastic state encroachment we’ve seen in recent years, in spite of (or perhaps in response to) all the many great disrupting and decentralizing market phenomena.
This is not to say that no anarchists or voluntaryists are doing this real-world demonstration of our ethic. Many are. Often quietly, without much fanfare. Not with projects that make the evening news. (Although a few infamous endeavors do come to mind.)
This is part of what I mean by “radical responsibility.” Not just talking about the changes you’d like to see, but doing whatever you can to peacefully and consensually bring them about in the real world. Even if you only have a sliver of a corner of a piece. Because someone else has another sliver, and someone else a larger chunk, and someone else knows how to weld all that shit together.
And that right there is why Juan Galt’s sage words from Episode 5 are so very, very important for our movement.
A lot of us are not trained in either conflict resolution or negotiation. Or compromise. So how are you going to have a cohesive, functional society without a conflict resolution strategy? Without any plan at all?
-Juan Galt
I think Juan was referring specifically to the problem of Paul—the seriously unhinged, demonstrably dangerous, and possibly murderous intruder on the free enclave of expats in Acapulco. And that’s an important topic, one that I’ll get to in a future post.
But I think it applies on an even deeper level. The entire series, from start to finish, has highlighted the conflicts that arose within the community, and this is great food for thought for all of us who hold the voluntaryist truths to be self-evident. Before we even begin to think about how to deal with the dangerous elements in society—the crazy, the criminal, the psychopathic—we must learn how to get along with folks who are basically sane, peaceful, and decent.
In order to bring about a voluntary society, cooperation and collaboration among voluntaryists is imminently preferable to spats, personality conflicts, infighting, and drama that prevents working together productively. We stand by—we live by—the maxim of free association, but that’s not good enough to make the ideas work. Not if many of us tend to be divisive and catty about whom we will associate, or cooperate, with. Voluntaryists disassociate from non-criminal, non-insane people all the time, even in our own movement, even people who agree with us on The Two Most Important Things: self-ownership and the non-aggression principle.
Why? So they can clique up on the internets? So they can be in their own little echo chamber? What is this doing to build a free society? Nothing at all. And even if the person or people in question are putting forth great and valiant efforts to pave the way to voluntaryism in the real world, by cutting off potential collaborators due to simple, overcome-able personality conflicts, they are essentially saying “I don’t care if you may have a vital, missing piece. I don’t like you, so there.” It’s some real compulsory school playground shit. Na-na-na-na-boo-boo.
I’m not saying that no personality conflict is ever worth disassociating over. I’m saying that I really don’t think most of the conflicts I see within the wider voluntaryist community are. I think they’re mostly just obstacles in the way of us putting our ideas into action.
And so when we talk about not having any plan at all, part of that is not having solutions in place for how to deal with the mentally ill, or criminals, or other potentially dangerous elements in society. But behind that failure to plan is, plain and simple, our own shortcomings. We’re too hardheaded, shortsighted, and egotistical to get together, make a plan, and see it through to fruition.
I invite y’all to chew on that while you finish up watching the last episode of The Anarchists.
Thank you for reading!
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-Starr
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