TOTW: Anarchists in the Academy

The further away I get from college, the stranger the academy appears to me. My education as an anarchist came after I graduated, and as a result I was spared some of the seriousness anarchist academics seem to ascribe to pluralizing nouns like anarchy, praxis, or whiteness (lest any readers assume there was just one kind). When I look at anarchists in the academy, they mostly appear as strangers to me – an incestuous community of people who are employed (however precariously as many appear to be adjuncts) at educational institutions and whose anarchy (anarchies?) appears to consist of volumes analyzing social movements and keeping each other employed through long lists of citations of these volumes. People (with some notable exceptions) who rarely appear in the wild, and when they do pop up often appear lost and bewildered sitting behind a table with a handful of inscrutable tomes in front of them as their eyes search the room for a kindred spirit to share the joys of their latest research project and the woes of non-tenure-track positions.

At the same time, I can enjoy theory, and look with more than a little suspicion at people who say they’re beyond it or try to bludgeon you with the mantra of action above all else. Certainly not all anarchists in the academy have fallen into the abyss I’ve described above… right? Theoretically the academy can provide us knowledge not otherwise obtainable outside of it as well as the time and space to develop our own thoughts while getting paid to do so.

What are your thoughts on the academy (academies?) and how we relate to it as anarchists?

There are 105 Comments

if their job is sloppy, they do us a service in being inept technocrats and recuperators. if they're good, they help to fuck us over.
to sabotage the smooth running of "society", put your worst defects to their service. if you have any analytical talents, keep them to yourself and yours, and work at something you're terrible at, instead. that way they lose their best and brightest and come up short in their quota.

this is, of course, a completely ridiculous proposition. dismiss it completely.

I call that the George Costanza Method... hack your way to some skilled job, then be a useless slob, occasionally write BS reports that don't make any sense, avid boredom by chit-chatting and flirting around, play practical games, then find a way to be fired with workfare benefits, if possible.

Scenario 1: There's a bunch of bullies with their mantra ACTION ABOVE ALL ELSE and they swing it like a baseball bat, risking damage to your under-appreciated, sensitive and ample brains.

Scenario 2: Action can be and often is, far superior to theory, even gives rise to it in the first place. Therefore, it's much easier to waste time with dead words on the page/screen than the time spent making mistakes and learning by doing. Those who cast themselves as scribe and scholar, are bitterly resentful of this simple, timeless fact. They spend a lot of energy trying to deny it, hurling accusations of "anti-intellectualism" and habitually overestimating the importance of their role.

THIS IS NOT A GAME!

we're all living in a simulation

to the real world.

...and the academy is Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters; scenario 5.

Pretty clear what scenario you champion.

Ok you've convinced me, now tell me, what action do I take?

I don't know you. I'm a fairly smug piece of shit but what arrogance would be required to give an anon advice about something so important? I'm just not that self-assured, sorry my dear! Maybe I have all the secret, awesome schemes, or maybe I'm completely full of shit?! WHO KNOWS? The limitations of the internet, eh?

not the first time some anon asks you for advice ; )

maybe you just have that kind of face, or maybe its the tone of your voice...

nah, they prolly jus asked u to stump u

oh it's you. Look windmill-arms, given the context, I'd have thought we could safely mock poser academics here. I'll go ahead and assume you don't identify as one. You can always ask me about my projects in a less public forum if you're not just being a dick, which you'll forgive me for assuming you are :P

i sigh out loud.

my only weakness is being the victim of mistake identity, of misenditification...oh! the woes of being an anon!

i'm not the windmill poster, nor am i every single anon who chooses to use the wink and smile emoticon.

i also did not ask you the question this time around.

i was almost all the scenarios in reply tho, if that means anything to you.

i only identify as strings of text on a screen.

we'll meet again, tho you might not be able to tell, from what i see.

It does! Mean something to me. My apologies for assuming. But yeah, my face and tone are deliberately antagonistic here. I certainly didn't invent the vibe in this place tho.

aw, thanks. it's ok, understandable, no worries, it's harsh place out here.

"THIS IS NOT A GAME" game

game'nt

it would be nice if anarchists had more free schools, for help with skills and trades. Philosophy and research is something that belongs outside of the classroom, so that it isn't limited to any butt-fuckery careerism or mindless obedience.

I am very happy that I've totally abandoned the idea of "going back to the university", in society there's this binary: work shitty jobs or take out some loans for further education, and both options really suck.

If you mean the school of the streets, the school of hard knocks this qualifies as "action" and is therefore permissable internet discourse. Anything less is book learnin', theory, do nothing scaredy cat shit man. ACTION! FUCKING ACTION NOW!! PROVE YOURSELF (over the internet)! There's literally nothing left to do but ~destroy~ (vaguely), swing your arms like a windmill till someone gets punched, no one is innocent! If everyone or even just like 100 anarchists got on board with this action shit (you seen that one part in the matrix with all the guns?) we could win and maybe afterwards talk theory, because thinking before acting is for fools.

If you read this i just punched you in the brain!

A universe in which sarcasm and irony does not exit.

*exist

they meant "exit", as in a universe with only sarcasm and irony, where nothing serious can be said

I agree with you though critic_of_critics, some kind of anarchist free schools would be amazing and a worthwhile experiment (no doubt been tried before) if they could reach mature beyond the kind of similar projects i have seen in the past. Hell there could even be anarcho street smarts and action 101! What would be some courses you would like to see?

i would like it if there were lots of gardening, eco-restoration, and botany courses. It would also be nice if there was hacking and auto-repair stuff as well, but then we are getting into really expensive civilization-oriented shit. I will just say that as someone whose dabbled in auto repair, you tube isn't all that great, they tend to leave out a lot of vital details.

anarcho street smarts lol..."Lesson #1: SHUT YER GODDAMN MOUTH." hahahaha, martial arts would be better. Piss on the streets with their goddamn rigid but non-existent ethos! Take a jack hammer to the pavement!!!

Having a decent and developed free school is something I've fantasized about, i might even make it a reality if i can get my shit together...project for my old age...

Cool drinks for hot weather, hot drinks for cold weather.

IGTT 10/10

punch my brain some more!

Here are some thoughts on the academies of education as a long-time anarchist who upon leaving high school told myself once to never set foot in school again. Long story short, I somehow ended up eventually becoming a tenured professor and for the last 10+ years having been teaching. Queue terrible person chants… now!

I like that the question has academies in parenthesis, because like all things – this idea seems to have many areas. For example, some tenured anarchist university professor writing and lecturing on these things, applying and researching for grants, editing and publishing really expensive books, and other parts of campus life is how I imagine the ideal anarchist academic. Think Noam Chomsky. Or the post-anarchist tradition of professors writing on the subject.

This is far from the world I know as a professor though. Then you have smaller community colleges and professors, many of whom are adjuncts. Working as an adjunct is like the worst teaching job ever, as the pay is quite bad and the work load demanding. I imagine these people as anarchists IRL who just work teaching something, like maybe computer science to the kids. However, full-time tenured at a community college seems like it would be, if there was an ideal, the best possible place for anarchists working in the academy (maybe?).

And last, you have the secondary and elementary school teachers, often public – rarely Waldorf or other anarchist friendly alternative. Within this academy, for anarchy you have to really look hard to find the moments, like maybe an after school club. Depending on the state you live and work in, you might not even have to have a college degree, although many of the “higher ranked” states require teachers to have a master’s degree (often 6 years of college) and continual professional development and workshops / paper work over your career. Plus, you have to deal with kids all day, and sometimes their even worst parents / family. I think on some level, these are the three main areas of what could be called the academy of anarchist instructors.

I’m not researching and writing papers for the academy, although the option is there, if desired I suppose. There are also region, state, and national organizations one can join based on the exact field of the academy one belongs to, although nothing specifically anarchist about that, unless perhaps the subject material was anarchist related. My job, in many ways really has nothing to do with anarchy other than the small moments one may find the idea in. Like Chomsky, my field is that of language. I prefer the book “Letters of Insurgents” and Sophia’s thoughts on teaching and organization / non-organization of their classes as a guiding principal; and, of course, the Modern School classics, Pablo Freire, too many to name. Today, there are certainly a lot of popular anarchists within the academy in the USA. As Sophia wrote in LoI, “I decided during my first teaching job that I wasn't going to let myself be reduced to a means of production for the production of means of production.”

On the brighter side of things - One thing I really like about this line of work is the amount of time off and vacation throughout the year. For people who aren’t consumed by the job, and it can definitely happen if you let it, there is a lot of time for other, perhaps more anarchist projects. The job has definitely taught me a lot about unions as well, with many opportunities for interaction, as the teachers union is often in the news, especially as schooling has become a major news headline. On the educational institute level, everything across the board seems to be really really bureaucratic at so many levels and it’s often a wonder professors and teachers even have time for writing or other academic pursuits with all the paper work needed for stuff.

For the last 10+ years working as a professor, I’ve never really thought about myself as an anarchist academic, especially because my job doesn’t entail me talking about specific anarchist content, but rather just another job and means of surviving doing something for a living – another worker in the mix of it all.

TERRIBLE PERSON! TERRIBLE PERSON!

j/k, you seem alright

redneck with not even a 2-year dee-gree from a community kollege.
Aside from the 700 heavy books I've managed to read despite this, plus the one I wrote and produced, academia will be irrelevant. It will die in the Collapse along with all the rest, as Jem Bendell has figured out.
Borrowing lots of $$$ to become adaptively UNfit is not my idea of a good time. Usefull knowledge, including knowing what to know, will live on in the backwoods sanctuaries.

I can understand how someone like x can wind up in the academy despite the contradictions. The vacation time is nice and you basically get paid to sit on your ass reading books to lecture about later.

The fact remains though that academic structures of learning and all types of education represent the problem of representational learning which is at odds with the will based egoistic learning of anarchy. You also share an institution with people who are more key to leviathan power then political/military and economic class. The knowledge power class represents higher order of leviathan operations then the military-political and economic trading class.

As an alternative niche one thing I would suggest anarchists and radicals look into is sex work professionalism, that profession also has a higher time preference and flexibility in regards to time off without the problems of the academy. The academy really needs to be starved to death at this point.

I'd recommend looking up Chadafrican on youtube to see a good defacing of the academic currency by someone who went through worst of being an adjunct and a graduate.

I see is academic rentiership creeping into the forum where knowledge cops try to enforce standards of quality control and plagiarism. In a pluralistic world with many competing narratives collegians will police the knowledge economy and enforce state science. This is limiting for people who indulge in emerging or pseudo science and speculative realism especially if authority is used to shut down a discourse for length or content. Otherwise I have no problem with the academy.

Notes
Against Academic Rentiership: a Radical Critique of the Knowledge Economy
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42438-019-00035-0

is the vast amount of alienation that is ingrained in the process. Schools have essentially become debt services that target "kids" who don't know enough about how capitalism works. Information control is another serious issue, good teachers would assert as little control over the various rabbit holes that pop up during informal discussions.

A lot of things, for the course of human history have required in person instruction, now there's the problem of some information that teachers giving out being irrelevant and also that there's the disciplinary and authority aspect to it. We humans have made things incredibly difficult for ourselves in the name of wealth accumulation! Maybe there will be some large reversal in the type of activities that people are involved in...definetely an inspiring thought...

will be NECESSARY for those who outlive the Collapse. And necessary for many more people if Collapse can possibly be averted.

Knowledge silos (knowing too much about too little) are not adaptively fit. Knowing what to know IS adaptively fit. "Today having power means knowing what to ignore." - Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus, pg. 402.

"Savages" (i.e. normal humans) do not even have instruction. Kids watch, ask questions, try stuff out. They educate themselves. "Savagery" is a practical, applied Doctorate, given the depth, extent, fineness, and integration of the required knowledge. There is NO such thing as low-skill laborers in normal human societies.

On to what is (badly) called mystical experience, which all "savages" have had: "You could spend years in a seminary and never know God, when a single day spent in the backwoods on 300 mcg. of LSD would do the job." - from my book, pg. 132.

The Collapse.

How is it possible that I slept on this shit? There should be some kind of newsletter for old punks that lists new bands that are good even if you're not friends with them.

Careful saying God and LSD in the same sentence or you shall become enthralled.,.

less of a literal way, the education a hunter gatherer would have received would be to watch their parents pick vegetation for example. I thought someone might correct me about this.

I'm actually really digging the "deep adaptation" paper in the sense that it's telling me things I already suspected, which is why i didn't want to read it to begin with. I'm not a big fan of thinking about the future. However, I'm finding that it's giving me reason to think about the global ecosystem in a different or more meaningful way. Maybe It's just the marjuana, i can't wait to finish reading the second half though.

Deep Adaptation paper had been downloaded 200,000 times as of Feb. 2019.
"The paper that sends people to therapy."

read overall, i think it's hard to deny that the human species is going to be going through major (perhaps "catastrophic) changes over the next couple decades. The melting of the polar ice caps compound the amount of carbon that we are putting in the atmosphere, so in my opinion it won't take any longer than 10 years before our civilization is going to get majorly fucked by climate change.

However, having a big reaction to the paper seems a little silly to me, because we still don't know what's going to happen, or if it's even possible to prepare for such catastrophic scenarios. My guess is that some people are going to move north. The place where i live is actually already a pretty sweet spot for protection from natural disasters and everything.

i sure hope bad kitty is one massive hairball of sarcasm. because if you are serious about your self-congratulatory homespun elitism , you are one of the most pathetic kitties ever.

guess what? you are not the only aging @ who lives way off-grid, who never attended school, and who actually knows how to read and write.

are they then? I'd sure like to find some of them.

What needs to happen in with anarchs, in my most humble opinion, is this: tribalization. Meaning, all crews fully reject this state of things, leviathan, capital, with NO compromise.

I believe this dire and initially uncomfortable struggle to survive outside of the totality will lead to new bands and tribes and new cultures with it. With emergent identities, both creative and nihilistic, that we can't know until the process might begin.

And not necessarily engaged in warfare vs. the State, although I would fully prepare to defend myself with arms in such a situation, and as the decomposition of this society continues, we may be able to pick off its dying corpse. Start now and we can unite against the emergnce of any Negan-type assholes, too.

What's a negan?

Also how do you respond to the criticism that what you are describing sounds a lot like what tribes magazine people talk about and do? I am being self critical with this question too, no hostility intended

Negan is a reference to The Walking Dead comics. What Perlman calls a lugal, or champion strongman.

Tribes is predicated on already extant groups, identities, and cultures. We need rid ourselves of that and creat new ones, not centered on toxic concepts like skin tones.

part of the reason why i don't even care to get to know other anarchists is there's generally a large amount of paranoia involved in their thought processes. This is not to say that I'm anti-paranoia, but paranoid people easily elevate the mood of a situation, and then we are getting into real life examples of how authority and hierarchy recuperate. The tribalist here is starting to sound awefully like a negan to me...

It used to refer to a "great" leader. A magnanimous, or "magnus". It's a common thing in the ancient world to be depicting them as physically larger than humans, at least twice larger. The (safe) narrative convention in anthropology and history is to be attributing it to a tendency in ancient mythology of aggrandizing the State leaders and their families. There could be underneath this theocratic mythology of State leaders the physical reality of a (previously existing but extinct, rather than extant ;) ) breed of giant humans, the so-called Rephaim, and earlier Nephilim. Goliath for instance was a lugal, also in his case a champion strongman. ANYWAYS... ancient history and its mind tricks. Will we ever know what was real or myth?

About tribes, they're are also already being created by Left milieus... run by their own sub-capitalist politics, they aren't nice or desirable aggregates at all. I know a network like this in my area, that connects to a much wider network, and it could be totally referred to as a "tribe". They're the call-out justice crowd. Little shitty phallocrats are managing things, supported by several over-infatuating females who stand by their rooster of the coop, and several male henchmen. Very exploitative and self-absorbing gangs. I wouldn't recommend such tribes as any progressive, even less liberating "solution". The structure of these social arrangements are the reason why the Left since the '70s doesn't "work", or doesn't gain enough capital to lift itself upward enough to become the State, as they'd so much like. They only become a mid-layer of the State apparatus, getting jobs as lower social managers, especially those abhorrent MANAGERS OF MISERY, i.e. the social workers and their counterpart, the communitarian sector. If that was a choice between two, I'd rather be having your usual clean-cut money-addicted idiots in charge of municipalities and governments than those totalitarian collectivist hypocrites.

Or provide me with an instance of a tribe that didn't suck.

Almost definitely weren't any literal giants dude but it sounds like you would have thought they were "roosters" and resented all the attention they got from their ladies and henchmen lol

Ah yeah, thaaaaat's right, just being jealous and all whiny about subhumans gettin' all the chicks. Duh!

These ancient magnates were literal, actual, physical giants, as far as being statues. ;-) As for their living existence, I did say it was "mythology". But in legends, they are referred to as being physical, living beings. Was Goliath really some 12 foot tall dude? It's all Hollywood by now.

I gotta apologize for writing that. Not very clever over the net for how racists and classists love to use this designation.

, which i would advocate to anyone with concerns about the future, would allow this to happen instead of trying to make it happen. The means for ditching the leviathan are currently out of my grasp, and when serious catastrophe happens, anarchy and leviathan will be competing forces for some.

Having people that are friends that you can trust (within reason) is much more useful than a firearm, but i suppose having weaponry could be useful against the authoritarians. Eventually you will run out of bullets though, and your sword will become dull...i would love more than anything to have plans for these types of things, but plans?! Plan for a plan?! Plan for what?! LET'S HEAD TO THE COMMUNE RIGHT NOW! WE HAVE BEEN SKIPPING OUT ON A MUCH NEEDED STRUGGLE SESSION!

"Having people that are friends that you can trust (within reason) is much more useful than a firearm", for sure, but before "having" them you need to find them. They just don't fall from the sky... yet they might grow OUT from trees, instead of being offshoots still connected to the tree.

i've found that finding new friends is one of the hardest things you can look for, adults overall just aren't very trusting, not that they should be super-trusting.

oh i hope you all caught on that bit about the commune was a joke making fun of the idea of planning for disasters as a group. It would be nice to start a commune with some like minded individuals, but they can be terrible as well...

I've never done a struggle session before, it has always sounded like something the left anarchists do.

The "Negans" are inevitable. That's what the permaculture + guns thing is about.

"Barbarism" on a grand scale, with a patchwork of warlord fiefdoms and city states and ideally, some autonomous regions where ferociously independent people make incursions by the other two types very costly.

This isn't anything new. Maybe the "dark ages" weren't so dark for everyone? But only to the degree that they understood THIS AINT A GAME FOR LEFTIST PUSSIES!!!

*rant dissolves in to chest thumping nonsense*

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone.

There's nothing more projectual than having an insurrectionary grade point average (other than scateboarding)

phd here. after 10 years in them, i hate universities. they're corrupt shit institutions that manufacture assholes. anything "humanitarian" that they purport to do, they fail at miserably. they generate plenty of money, hierarchy and acquiescence though. they should all burn.

there's no shortage of smart books and essays produced outside of institutions.

for your insider commentary here.
No need to burn the universities. The economic infrastructure enabling them will collapse, as most of what they do becomes irrelevant. They will be abandoned.
Serious hypocrite here. I mine academia books/research papers for info. Not everything they do is a waste of time. "Reverting to savagery" means I study what I WANT to, not what some authority tells me to.

The Subhumans (both the British and Canadian bands--but particularly the British incarnation) are both excellent, highly intelligent and articulate punk bands who make far more sense than most of the idiocy being "argued" on this forum...why are they being dissed?

Yep, Subhumans (UK) were my Crass... Like Amebix, underrated band. Back in the late '80s they were the shit among skaters and punks, when the Crass crowd went into more extreme metal.

College killed my love of reading for a while. But it came back and lead me to anarchism and other things. However, it did introduce me to some interesting political books.
They spend a lot of time developing new buildings to show progress. They have their own police force and can take over a whole city for school housing.

is a way that they appear that they're "going somewhere" and secure more funding, the local university built a bridge and an underground path that cost millions of dollars while one of my friends who went their as a teenager owes over 40k for student loans. Universities do not give a shit about their students, except their ability to puff up their aura of prestige and productivity.

downtown to ride our skateboards on campus and get lunch. Usually the drivers would let us on free though we weren't students. We were little kids and enjoyed a life of adventure and urban exploration. Knowledge flows from universities and gives a college town a peculiar character. Now knowledge flows globally from the cloud.

Under the Sign of The Black Mark: Interview with Members of Gruppo Di Nun
https://diffractionscollective.org/under-the-sign-of-the-black-mark-inte...

Alien Rhythms
https://zinzrinz.blogspot.com/2019/04/alien-rhythms.html

Crowlean satanists are and have always been just a bunch of harmless privileged White liberals, not unlike the rest of the academic Leftie crowd, haha. Now that the Church is mostly out of the picture and Christianity owned, where is your argument in favor of staying privy in your elite academic circles and deprive others from your share of the pie? Because there can only be a pie if there is exclusion in the first place. It's an old trend of the priest class and its mandarins.

Your pub(l)ic face is just a bunch of lies garnered in nice website designs. Only true satanism is anarcho-nihilism, only true atheism is that of the one that admits cosmic ignorance, so to look at the facts laid bare, without make-beliefs. The an-nil doesn't need private circles confined between walls to go naked, they do in broad daylight because they aren't impressed by society's norms and morality. The truth is what drives us, makes us learn and understand. Our minds are driven by it. That's the part you post-truthers don't get.

I reject the trickery of masters like Crowley's and Corwley's spiritual masters, as they, too are liars. Just like Crowley Space under the single rule of the Void, the Unknown, and those who pretend to know it are the alpha and the omega of authoritarianism.

"hierarchy" former meaning in Greek is the "guardian/master of the secrets" or a "rule by secret". Now you know what you're into and what anarchists aren't. Gtfo, obscurantist.

You forgot about the more true satanists being the ancestral paleo-nihilists who roamed the primeval mists long before the anarcho-nihilists found po,itical consciousness!

Your blatant disregard of the correct etymology of hierachy is very disturbing and verges on the evil and unholy blasphemies of the Spanish Inquistion.
The word comes from the Greek hierarchēs, which was formed by combining the words hieros, meaning “supernatural, holy,” and archos, meaning. “ruler.” Hierarchy has continued to spread its meaning beyond matters ecclesiastical and governmental, and today is commonly found used in reference to any one of a number of different forms.

You can't follow the thread? "Supernatural" is conceptually adjacent to "mysterious", therefore "secret".

Zoolander centre for trolls who can't think good. For ANTS!

Spoiler: the secret is hierarchies are bullshit

13:43 bothering to return. Esoteric is the best nuanced term, let's just leave it at that without getting your panties in a twist mkay!?

...just not that accurate. Greek etymology of "hierarch" refers to an authority figure "presiding the sacred rites". Not exactly the guardians of secrets, but basically the *priest class*. So yeah, Crowley is, like, a total hierarch, just like the disciples of his IP brand of "magick" are hierarchists, as they bluntly accept his narrative as the key to their spiritual, personal, professional, perhaps even political empowerment.

As for Osman Spare... we're talking about somebody else entirely, who never intended to patent his writings and start a cult around these, and him. The nature of his relation to Crowley makes it likely that Crowley profited from his work. He was an astute scholar of metaphysics like a Paracelse, or John Dee, or the witches subcultures.

G03 posted either, just too esoteric/exoteric at least for my mood at the moment. Too bizarre, too occult. But 11:15, you are just making more generalizations that don't necessarily apply to what was being said:

"Crowlean satanists are and have always been just a bunch of harmless privileged White liberals, not unlike the rest of the academic Leftie crowd, haha."

so what's with the extremely id-priest language here? Group x is just a "bunch of white privileged liberals?" You are aware that by using the internet itself makes you "privileged"? You likely have some sort of european ancestry as well. Not that anyone has a reason to envy you, ha. Privilege is a real enough thing, but knocking people for "being privileged" is just too vague and un-skillful of an insult for me...

""hierarchy" former meaning in Greek is the "guardian/master of the secrets" or a "rule by secret". Now you know what you're into and what anarchists aren't. Gtfo, obscurantist."

just more assumptions and generalizations, and assuming that G03 was referring to a greek hierarchy. Maybe your mad cuz he was seemingly talking positively about universities? Is everyone who has any pleasant memories of universities therefore one of its lackies? Well, G03 is a little bit of an obscurantist, but I don't really hold that against him...

a few things here. First GO3 and G03 look very similar so I don't blame anyone for getting them mixed up at a casual glance. Second I read widely for exposure to concepts and to increase my knowledge of the world. If I post an article it isn't necessarily an endorsement of all the ideas contained therein. In fact the interview with Gruppo Di Nun is so chock full of shit I can't imagine being fully onboard with all of it. It IS refreshing to know there are people weirder than me in this world and sure under the right circumstances I might like to meet them ∆

They're just inverted X-tians, filling in the rituals of the other side of the dualist currency which borrpws some things from the Manichianist crazies.,.

to Christianity. If you're over it why still talk about it? Still using biblical myths to spice up your imagination. Same with metal, they just can't let Satan go. I have a tendency toward emptiness or 0. I don't need near all that mythos or conceptuality. Sometimes I get a little negative -0 sometimes a little positive 0+ but I like to return to stasis, equilibrium or equipoise and the unborn. Magic is part of life, sometimes more sometimes less but we all have it and learn to use it along the way. I do have some praxis though like qigong, taiji, kuji-in etc. Also a sort of vapid unsorcery or hyper normality so I can blend in with the world when I want and not be uncomfortably weird all the time. A transmorphic neuroplasticity and active imagination to theme or decorate the world my way. Neotechnical nirvana. I still think Gruppo Di Nun is interesting and if they weren't into all that stuff it would be a boring interview°

poverty of thought

that chip is sand in your brain

siliconosis

Will you people ever fucking learn the basics... The good vs evil moral dichotomy is not a Christian principle.

Manicheans were the disciples of Mani, i.e. an heretic gnostic Christian sect that was banned early by the RRC. They were the dualists, in continuation with Zoroastrianism. There's is no such thing as Evil as a moral absolute in any of the gospels or even the book of apostles. Evil was always used by Jews and Christians in the relative and non-metaphysical way. It is "evils", or diseases, or afflictions, or suffering, or maybe some filthy behavior, but nothing more.

Now for the U.S. traditions of Christianity... well they're a whole different mess, and yes, some of those have accepted pure moral dichotomies, just like many other principles that got nothing to do with their own Good Book.

I don't care the concept of Manichean dichotomies or the gospels other than the fact i can read the texts and learn from it. We can all learn from mysticism because none of us really know what the fuck is going on in this universe anyway.

In the current modern society that we are all exposed to and understand better than living in the ancient middle east, some people clearly believe in good and evil in absolutes, if you don't believe me, then go talk to an average christian or secular moralists like the "privileged liberals". Most think there is a concrete "right" and "wrong" or "good" and "evil". This way of thinking certainly had an insidious way of manipulating my behavior throughout a lot of my life, the only difference is that now I'm more aware of my actions and my mind.

"Will you people ever fucking learn the basics... The good vs evil moral dichotomy is not a Christian principle."

That is an absolutist statement if there ever was one, when will you learn the fucking basic fact that words are given their meaning through people?! Not people that existed thousands of years ago, but people who are still alive.

There can be good and bad things without there being dualism or a dichotomy. Ever heard of a spectrum, differential infinitesimals or multifaceted beliefs? Just go for a walk in a forest teeming with animals. Dualism is lazy and simplistic thinking.

"...little if nothing to do with Christianity."

then clearly you didn't go to christian school as i did, or you live in such an ultra-gentrified yuppy environment that doesn't have any "christianity" in name.

i guess the various anons are calling to erase dualistic thinking and dichotomies entirely, i would like to see y'all try. I thought it was obvious enough not to be mentioned: all words are relative to the user and the situation. For example, if a cop says that "there are bad people out there", you can safely assume that he's talking about people instead of abstractions or spirits. If a priest talks about "good and evil", it can be assumed that good and evil are autonomous spiritual entities.

"some people clearly believe in good and evil in absolutes"

Of course I don't deny that... It's all over the place, yet has -at least on the surface- little if nothing to do with Christianity. You got socialists behaving the same too.

I get that it ain't that useful to draw the line between Manichean dichotomy and Judeo-Christianity, yet there's still that liberal narrative that uses this amalgamation as their bogeyman. Unless in social contexts where Christianity still dominates, this tendency is chasing a ghost, while the actual Leviathan thrives.

Crowley lived in Hastings on the South Eastern coast of England. Stuart Christie moved there some time ago. As did the current Editor of Peace News, the alleged anarchist Milan Rai. You have been warned.

As probably one of the few anarchists without a degree, never mind an advanced one, I find anarchist academics useful and I can't see why there is so much anxiety and loathing about them.

but for what purpose?

They're just another group of anarchist workers. We could equally ask the same question of any anarchist or anyone else discussing anarchist issues.

and i do not think that universities are always terrible, but for the most part they just control and profit from information, many of the people in universities play a role in polishing the system

imo there can be anarchist circulating through it, but that's understandable as far it's done for self-serving purposes, as this wider tendency of taking what you want from it... but paying astronomical fees to work for it, in the hope of getting a nice career in a few years? Here's the thing that's delusional and dumb.

Of course you may have your "success" through it, that's not where the delusion is. Get a PhD and become a teacher... but so what? I could contend, tho that there may be one or two good contributions anarchists can bring to history as academic practice... but compared to making our own history outside? Academia is a vehicle for career opportunism, but at the same time you gotta bend over and format yourself if you want the finest grapes. Otherwise, some campuses can be okay institutions to parasite as a transient. In my town they're one of the very few (or only) places where you can hang out in the cold winter, and get different kinds of goodies for free. Also some potential for vandalism and agit-prop, if you think there's a receptive audience for it... but keep in mind it's just students. Young people with a tendency for "big talk, do-little", who for the most part didn't went through the hardships of dealing with society out in the open.

So in a way it's big money being put to work, so that the plebeians can quietly benefit from it behind the curtain. Between that and the homeless shelter, or coffee shops, it's pretty obvious...

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