As one looks with an even-tempered curiosity at life’s simple occurrences bound up the way that they are, one finds that we are all only trying to feel joy and fulfillment however we may before we turn to ashen corpses. There is a particular innocence to this, but a thoroughly terrorized one: terrorized by this very drive for sustaining oneself seized by those who successfully navigated existing power, using themselves to oppress others for a paycheck. It is all too commonplace to get hit with the fallout of people doing their jobs, obeying the social creed’s demand, reproducing human beings (murdering their uniqueness with an assigned gender/sex category, a name, an institutional schooling, etc.), betting on politicians in elections… everything seems so orderly while producing so much compressed chaos. The one who is looking with curious eyes at all of this must eventually find their mind and hands forming into obliterating tools if they will not simply fall in line, but selfishly realize their own freedom, shared with their loved ones or not.
We remain curious of what an active endurance for the absurd can yield in the determined pursuit of something better. Something outside of the hamster wheel. Everything that troubles us comes back to the totalizing configuration, not any one root but the broad urge to be a part of the powerful class and have everyone else be among the subject class. We know we are held hostage, even during our emotional embrace of certain radicalisms, by the moralism disseminated from power, by the myriad threats of acting out, by the known avenues of making change, by the imminent obligations in people’s lives. Such stunting anxieties are either resolved or allowed to condemn lives to miserable, slow suicides. Curiosity only endures because of this simple constant.
By curiosity we begin to study, and by studying we come to a clear understanding; we map our terrain and mark our points of action. Alas, upon gathering our gear and making our march, we find the pikes of law & order raised against our paths of direct resolution. “You have to pay up to do that,” “You have to be a politician to do that,” “You have to have a permit to do that,” “You have to have approval to do that.”
There was once a general situation wherein people under subjugation would simply arise and kill their direct oppressors, and do so successfully according to a few straightforward variables. It is from this situation that the goal of establishing a new, independent nation state persisted. But now, with new developments and critical analysis, under the stifling weight of surveillance, militarized police, “revolutionary” nationalisms that simply construct new corrupt institutions, the eternal goal of un-establishing what has been put down against our wellness and autonomy remains a suppressed, barbaric urge that the good citizens of all empires are entrusted with vanquishing. The liberal republics have woven a new sense of sanctity coming from its generations of subjects out of the antiquated revolts of mere national independence — now they think of their “freedom” only on its terms. Now they impose that brand of “freedom” on all who dare to speak out against systematized cruelty. They refuse to consider the very existence and profoundness of prisons, of the cost of living, of the descent into ritual escapism. They run from sorrow’s real cause: persisting with mandates claiming “We need the glorious nation! We need the magnificent godly yet man-maneuvered order! We need denial of self-truth in favor of God’s Truth!”
The only realistic solution to sorrow is the intentional embrace of well-cultivated potential against all that creates it. In the throes of willful delusion, willful disregard for deeper learning, willful perpetuating of the cruel and unreasonable, those who are conscious to the toxicity of the nonsense become learned on what they are up against, coming to know that one has to think and act carefully, especially in trusting others.
The simple argument (for simple people) against a sudden rupture of this order rests in the fact that many individuals are simply content with (or resigned to) their menial, distorted lives while other “delinquent types” are thoroughly discontent in what makes the former temporarily satisfied. (This is evoked by those trying to save politics and civilization when they need to cower in fear of critique, but also look like the sensible ones for easy sympathy from idiots.)
The more substantive argument is to point out that the generations that have lived under the dominant, ever-evolving order have become reliant in some way on what only a technique of that order can presently provide. This is very true: some require diabetes medication. Some require seizure medication. Some require hormone replacement medication. There are a great deal of unique needs and desires facing the oasis of certain components of relief in life that have unfortunately been devoured by the millennia of power and caste.
But these arguments do not help get away from the issue that is really plaguing us. We are not capable of being authentically well and joyful under any regime; we do not have genuine access to the things we need without sacrificing some aspect of ourselves. We do not yet know our own fullest capacity, and yet information is simply dirt cheap nowadays, if “dirt cheap” could be any cheaper. The variables for refining skills and knowhow are easily put together by those with a will to succeed. This is precisely what has generated such projects as Four Thieves Vinegar collective, who have taken it upon themselves to pursue “harm reduction for the living,” providing solutions as an “anarchist collective dedicated to enabling access to medicines and medical technologies to those who need them but don’t have them,” to name but one collaboration. These projects are the direct, accessible solutions to what the dominant order has claimed total jurisdiction over. These applications of knowledge are what begin to build new components for a new life, and demonstrate that it is individuals who accomplish things — not exclusive power-holders.
To engage with reality in this way is an act of getting beyond the barrier, of getting outside the confines of the acceptable, of exiting the hamster wheel. Reality held in static captivity has always been challenged in order for people to have free play with conceptual and material matter. For every rule, there has been un-rule. Un-rule had been the necessary step beyond the suffocating limitations of church and crown in order to move what liberals call “progress” in a direction some consider “forward.” The transition from abject feudalism to liberal capitalism is one malignant example of what they praise, while besmirching the anarchists for pursuing the whole of freedom.
We are not unruly up to a point. Our unruliness has nothing to do with “progress.” We are not humble participants in any history written by the chroniclers of the ruling order. We do not seek to be The Bad Guys in the annals of Bad People — but we know there is little choice. We know we are so very much more. We are agents of selfish desire transmuted into loving fruits. We are innovators of solutions. We are wild organisms demonstrating the cultivation of freedom, of a desirable existence beyond merely existing in the society so many are resigned to. Our wisdom is expressed by anarchist scientists, anarchist poets, anarchist shamans, anarchist healers, anarchist warriors. The content of our wisdom is this: I am the most important person to me, who I refine and use to assist those whom I see a part of myself in, which is why I am not sacred even to myself. My importance transcends the sacred, and is revealed as something completely unique. The same goes for those whom I see myself in. Our “dastardly selfishness” is only the impulse to be unconstrained in one’s intentions. If one’s intention is to do baseless harm, then substantive harm will come unto them without scruple with any authority over “legitimate punishment.” But if one’s intention is well-deserved kindness, participation and aid, then only the desired fruits of coming together will find them. If one’s intention is to be isolated and rid of all people’s opinions and associations affecting them, so it shall be.
For a long time, it was the anarchists who gave unruliness many names and portrayals. It was anarchists wrestling with the worst desperations of humankind who mapped the distinct regions of social life in which to apply anarchist methods of interaction and solution in order to harness the fruits of unruly endeavors. Now it must no longer be a requirement to be an anarchist in order to understand and embrace unruliness. The unruly must be all former subjects, regardless of their philosophical or political interests — so long as they have a yearning for untainted freedom in their hearts. The unruly come to be so by their recognition of their castes and their willful deviation from their conventional characteristics, by their hostility toward all that has given them caste. They have no unifying model but that which arises from joint agreement and personal judgment. The method is unruliness, and the end is unruliness. Unruliness that amplifies the sublime, unnameable substance in all with breath and form against all that contains and suppresses it.
We do not need to fixate on any perfection of anarchism or anarchy. We do not need a flawless theory when the practice is simply nonexistent. (The two have always been preached to be in balance, but many like to simply make a hobby out of theory with total rejection of practice.) We need an anarchism arising from the soil in our souls that sufficiently realizes the unruly dream, that fleshes the smiles on the individual persons newly marveling their freshly planted freedom. This means definitions determined from real, palpable content — not from epistemological scripture. Unruliness means libraries looted of their precious gems and all their trim used for kindling.
Anarchism and anarchy as concepts are worthless without sincere development seen and felt in the material realm which translates to unruliness. Anarchy must be no more than the vehicle for that matter. It cannot be the defining condition that people consciously mandate. It must be the transparent container for each person’s transcendence of all imposed conditions, including anarchist conditions. The anarchist condition is descriptive for the better, yes. But what it points to cannot actually be described. It can only be discovered and lived.
Are we stagnated subjects of order, its philosophy, its toothless herd? Or are we unknowable organisms with self-created purpose still waiting to be enacted? We ought to have a curiosity freed from victimhood, one that simply brings things into being where they are wanted, not where they are obligations of the here and now. This unruly curiosity is the primal intent to make use of oneself and one’s surroundings. To lift oneself up out of one’s filth, imprinting on the ground the steps out of servitude and into self-alignment with one’s deepest desires.
If we are to live unfree for all our days, we might as well die now to rush toward the freedom from All. But if there is any will to dissolve the intolerable specter of heaven for the obedient and hell for the freethinkers, we need to act like it. The innocent yearning for a comfortable and stable life must become an intentional and resolute project against rule, against what denies our very nature, against what makes life hell.
Co-authored by the Effrenatum collective