There Will Be No Revolution
by George Potter
[From this Claire Files forum post]
Wow. What a tangled, wordy, fighting against itself thread this is.
I am a Frontierist. I stopped being an 'anarchist' because of crap like this thread. It's ridiculous. The infighting, demonization, deification. You all should back up and look at what you are saying, chill out, have a beer, drink some tea, smoke a j, do whatever it is you do to calm down and think about this.
Allow me to be blunt: There will be no revolution. Not in the classic sense. EVER. The great mass of humanity is doomed to statism. They don't even consider it doom. They love it, kiss it, and idolize it. This is what they want.
But we don't really need a revolution, folks.
I am writing a manifesto, which sums up my views on anarchy, minarchy, and the state. In a sense, I have been writing it since the age of thirteen, because there hasn't been a day since that year that it hasn't percolated through my thoughts. When finished, it will be entitled The Use Of Tools: A Human Manifesto. I mean that subtitle seriously. It's not a political manifesto. 'Politics' is just the Game Of State, pure control freakery institutionalized.
What humans do is build and use tools. That's our defining charachteristic. That's the reason we are the boss of this planet. We aren't the strongest, or the fastest, or the best clawed or fanged. What we are is the smartest damn animal on the planet. And our 'smarts' are focused almost entirely on building and using tools.
When I was thirteen years old I had a very vidid, very compelling dream. I was alone in a deserted city. I was walking up the streets. No surprise that it looked like a city in a movie, since that was the only examples of 'city' I'd ever seen. It was two years in the future until I would be in the backseat of a car, heading away from everthing I knew, as we bypassed Atlanta at night and I saw it laid out and shining.
After just a bit of (rather pleasant I remember) wandering along this impossible city, I encountered an old man with a cane, very nattily dressed, waiting at a bus stop. He looked, like all old men in my dreams, like a mixture of Robert Heinlein and my father.
He smiled and nodded. Then, after a moment, said:
"There is nothing created by human beings that is not a tool. Did you know that?"
My first thought was to disagree. Of course there must be something. Tools were such a ...basic thing.
Before I could, the bus was there, with the stealth and surprise they only gain in dreams. The old man smiled and nodded. "Think about that." he told me, and was gone, and then I was awake.
It was dawn, around 5 am. No matter how I tossed and turned I couldn't get back to sleep. So I decided to take the old man's advice. I started to think about it.
And I've been thinking about it for 18 years.
This is what we do, folks.
And guess what? The state is just another tool. Ignore the meatbags at the controls for a moment, and look at it. It's just a tool for organization and social control. The machine of state is amoral like all other tools. The morality of this tool is the morality of its user. Sadly, almost all of it's users are criminals. No surprise, it was started by criminals, pure bandits, when agriculture was invented. Agriculture demands that a growing population must stay rooted in the same spot. They live in that spot, producing wealth. Not long after, bandits happened along. Rather than join in the production of wealth, they saw it would be easier to just terrify the hardworking farmers into giving them tribute.
At that moment in history, the State was born. The kings and emporers. To hell with fancy titles. Parasites. That's all they really are. But the nature of the human beast is pragmatic. They not only accepted this tool, but praised it. Hell, when those other bandits ruling those other people tried to invade and steal the harvest, didn't our bandits rush forward and fight them off, rallying us all together? Yeah! Go our bandits! Kickass. Never mind that they were only protecting their claimed territory. Never mind that they spent our lives in the battle. We won didn't we? I mean, most of us are still alive, and most of them are dead, right? Good show. What's the alternative? Being responsible for our own defense? We used to do that. It was messy and hard. We like this better.
Stupid, weak, lazy people dominate the human race. They are the engine of the state. They are uneducatable. They are unconvertable. They love their bandits, and they'll smile when their bandits kill you for challenging their rule.
Just a big, ugly, pervasive machine.
But worms turn. They do.
Population density is the key. It started with agriculture. Agriculture demands people stay clustered together and spread slowly. Agriculture is the reason cities got built. As someone (Elias, I think) pointed out, anarchy has existed. The best example, recorded and verified, are the trappers and mountain men and explorers who rejected the swelling cities of the East for the untamed lands of the west. They didn't put down roots, they kept moving, they made their own law and stuck by it.
Frontierists. :)
All you see is natural. All you see is the evolution of the tool using animal named human.
Before agriculture humanity was a nomadic pack animal. It still is, really. It's bone deep, in the genes, riding the helix. The waveform of the human race is an expanding sphere, the anarchists heading outside, those who 'settle' decaying to statism within. All natural. We are a tool using, resource exploiting animal. We live on a cosmic speck of dust. The entire universe awaits us.
We have two optimistic options.
Hyperconnection is the first. The main problem with the human race is that we communicate poorly. Spoken and written language is so linear and limited. But it dosen't have to be. This thing we are communicating on now is the seed of what will be.
What happens when we stop sitting at our computers and start wearing them? What happens when the superbroadband, massively encrypted wireless second gen internet ( I call it the 'Overnet') becomes widely available? What happens when servers no longer reside in buildings but in the pockets and purses and very bodies of billions of people? what happens when you can communicate with almost anyone anywhere at anytime? What happens when your comp allows you to read the physical signs of another person and tell if he or she is lying or trying to fraud you? What happens when 'money' becomes an electronic data point in it's entirety, so encrypted that no one can figure out where it came from or went? What happens when the symbolflow (my term for the whole of human communication) becomes near perfect and near instantaneous? What happens when a truly voluntary and productive collective is established among the majority of our poor monkeykin species.
I don't know. But I can hope. The last thing out of Pandora's box was hope, and to hope I will cling.
I hope that the entire connected body of my brothers and sisters will finally turn and look at those bandits. See them for the parasites they are.
And if that happens, brothers and sisters, the state is DEAD. We've started this fire. But we don't have the right tools to let it rage at the moment. They are coming. Hope. Believe.
The second option is Frontierism in the raw. The exploration and (more importantly) exploitation of off earth resources. The golden dream of Heinlein. Go ahead and LET the damn state put colonies on the moon and the NEO's and Mars and beyond. LET them. Those people won't obey for long. Because they will diverge. They will be the new trappers and mountain men and explorers. They will, in the early stages, go through a trial by ordeal never imagined by the human race. Only the smartest and strongest and most ambitious will survive. The human race will diverge. It will build spectacular new tools. It will reach for the stars. It will become better. It will run and keep on running. The human waveform will at last be unleashed. It will head into the black at as close to the speed of light that it can possibly achieve.
Hope was the last thing out of Pandora's Box, brothers and sisters.
And I will cling to it.
