All that lives will inevitably die, but getting old is optional.
Anarchists take this challenge literally at times, joining the lineage of bombastic figures who meet an early grave, while most combat the aging process by staying “young at heart” despite their aching joints. To those who resist it, “growing up” often means trading away whimsy, delight, and Romantic notions of infinity for stress, alarm clocks, and tax forms. Anarchists have long made enemies with linear time—the type that makes you old—to escape its deleterious and conformist effects.
John Carroll’s Break-Out from the Crystal Palace likens Stirner’s negation to a return to anarchic youth one doesn’t age out of: “Stirner has in effect taken the omnipotence fantasy of the child, who believes that he has unlimited power in choice and action, and made it accessible to the adult, who is soberly conscious of the ideological traps inherent in ideals and fantasies.”
Beyond Carroll’s false dichotomy of child/adult, this comparison highlights the psychological tension for how we (re)make ourselves across a lifetime. How anarchists navigate this process reflects itself both individually as well as in the presence or absence of intergenerational relationships.
How does having Peter Pan Syndrome fight the aged tendencies of jaded certainty and stunted imagination? What are the consequences of anarchists who desire to stay petulant, feral children forever?
Comments
are you talkin' to me punk…
anon (not verified) Mon, 01/20/2025 - 11:34
are you talkin' to me punk?
more to the point, these days of stories about boomers acting like entitled brats, and other gens-of-various-sorts having the kinds of crises that people in previous eras associated with midlife, kinda throws open the whole "what does aging mean" question, or maybe that's just me. and the markers of adulthood being out of reach of so many young(er) people--like, what will be new markers? or will some generations just never feel old (with whatever bad and good feelings can go with that)?
just riffin on the topic, i guess.
i've been fascinated by this…
lumpy (not verified) Mon, 01/20/2025 - 11:55
i've been fascinated by this tech-bro immortality trip recently. peter thiel is scared to die because he's a lil bitch, but wait, there's more!
the plausible deniability era has ended and now it's tech-billionaire implausible assertion and they dare you to question their god-complexes. they will live forever and you're just too negative cuz you're an NPC!
monarchy is a good thing actually cuz tech! they're not actual racists, they just think white nationalism is a great way to keep the peasants at each others throats while they build survival bunkers for their brain jars to float in forever. AI will both save and kill us all, except for the main characters of course.
anyway, it got me thinking about how having a healthy view of death is probably essential to an anarchist politics that isn't terrible. keeps some of the worst excesses in check, ya know? human life has inherent value only because it's fragile and short. we're all equal in the sense that certain biological outcomes are inevitable, being fit and able-bodied or good looking or more clever, all of it will be leveled out in the end, back to dust and ashes. death smiles because our short little ego trips are amusing. santa isn't real and you're totally gonna die and ya know, accepting these things is probably the point of it all, so try not to embarrass yourself by having a tantrum about it like a man-child tech billionaire.
If folk really avoided…
Bo Toksik (not verified) Mon, 01/20/2025 - 14:51
If folk really avoided social conditioning and were more mindful and listened to the tone and vitality of their inner voice, they would still hear the little boy or little girl inside which speaks to them every day. But when it gets controlled and forced into the illusion of acting out a cultural script and role, it loses its authenticity and becomes the (fill space) boy, the (fill space)girl, (fill space)man, (fill space)woman.
Let's face it, adults are really just big dumb kids inside wrinkled and sagging bags of skin, and there is no need to pump it out with Botox, just age gracefully and listen to that vital voice inside.
My fill is brat-boy, nasty-girl, psycho-man, vicious-woman.
*squints*
anon (not verified) Mon, 01/20/2025 - 23:15
Hm #notsureifpedophilestuff
I take micro-doses of the…
Puffer dude (not verified) Tue, 01/21/2025 - 02:37
I take micro-doses of the poison from Carribean puffer fish before I go to bed every night, it stops my metabolism's aging process, it's like I'm in a dormant state and all cellular growth is kept on hold for 12 hrs. I'm hooked up to a respirator for breathing. Do the maths, half of my life I don't age, so after 40 yrs I've only aged 20yrs, I'm 60 but look 40, neat hey? The trust fund helped me live this lifestyle, any poor person couldn't afford the expenses, but in my waking hours I do charity work for the homeless folk, helps me deal with the nagging guilt I occassionally get from feeding homeless 20yr old meth addicts who look 60. Amor fati I say.
"Anarchists have long made…
Tim Declercq (not verified) Tue, 01/21/2025 - 06:47
"Anarchists have long made enemies with linear time"
Some solutions in General Relativity admit something called closed timelike curves. Basically circular time loops, where things play out again and again in a loop. The first such solution that was discovered was the Godel metric, it was a birthday present from Kurt Godel to Einstein, but several more have been discovered since. The big problem with these is that they quite patently do not correspond to the universe we actually live in, which is to the contrary something close to a de Sitter space. But hey, maybe someone will eventually come up with a solution in GR that has closed timelike curves as well as having a patch in it that resembles a de Sitter space.
Another way to get there is something called Poincaré recurrence. Basically this says that for a conservative physical system there exists a finite time before it will return to a state arbitrarily close to any previous state. For the observable universe that would mean a very, very, and I can not emphasize this enough, *very* long time, but a finite time nevertheless. While technically this isn't exactly the same as circular time - time is still linear as opposed to the closed timelike curves where the time dimension really does loop back on itself - it's effectively the same thing as it just repeats the same states over and over again. One good thing about this is that by the Bekenstein bound the number of possible states of the universe is finite, so it wouldn't just return to being arbitrarily close to a previous state but to *exactly* a previous state. A bad thing about this is that the observable universe is not a conservative system, so Poincaré recurrence technically doesn't even apply in the first place.
Anyway, that's all I can give you as far as having a problem with linear time goes.
whoever finds it useful to…
anon (not verified) Tue, 01/21/2025 - 08:44
whoever finds it useful to do their work or play or whatever primarily in the mode of whimsy is free to do so, but as usual this kind of question seems to me to itself reify and to invite reification of the dichotomy it claims to reject. "to stay petulant, feral children forever" is to fetishize those qualities assigned to children, if not children themselves; being- or becoming-child is presented at best as a vital and at worst as a virile strategy or opportunity to oppose whatever it is that is imagined to be so intrinsically undesirable about "growing up."
i prefer an approach that acknowledges what an honest critique of this child/adult dichotomy should clarify: that the supposedly child-like qualities like petulance, playfulness, imperiousness etc are as present in various ways in the behavior and language of "boomers acting like entitled brats" as the supposed adult-like qualities like jadedness, pragmatism, conformism are present in various ways in the behavior and language of 8 year olds navigating the school system or 2 year olds establishing their boundaries. there is no "inner child," there is the collection of strategies and habits of control that a person has developed for, and has had developed against, themselves in their particular context, however long they have had to collect and refine them. identifying, critiquing, and dispensing as appropriate with those strategies may enable one to more freely express and experience those qualities that are seen as child-like, but only wherever and with whoever one is, in the full partiticularity and specific character of those facts--there is no removal or separation of oneself from age any more than death. thats just a power fantasy
ITT:
anon (not verified) Tue, 01/21/2025 - 08:45
A bunch of irrelevant aging anarchos coping and seething about getting old.
DEAL WITH IT, MF!
"What are the consequences…
anon (not verified) Tue, 01/21/2025 - 09:38
"What are the consequences of anarchists who desire to stay petulant, feral children forever?"
One consequence is that most people won't take you seriously if you act like a petulant feral child into adulthood. Work through your childhood traumas, at least consistently make the attempt to do so. Why? Because you will become more effective in whatever it is you do if you are able to let go of, by means of working through, the specifics of your personal story. Once you have perspective on your own story you may find the world becomes that much more legible to you.
Being petulant and bratty beyond its toddler usefulness says to others that you are not to be trusted, you will put the onus of responsibility anywhere but your own sholders, and that attitude is not the sign of a decent fighter.
The fact that anarchists are…
anon (not verified) Tue, 01/21/2025 - 10:49
In reply to "What are the consequences… by anon (not verified)
The fact that anarchists are trying to make a case for acting like "petulant feral children" is incredibly embarrassing.
This subculture is a loyal…
anon (not verified) Tue, 01/21/2025 - 21:06
This subculture is a loyal expression of the infantile character of the United States.
I just finished listening to…
anon (not verified) Wed, 02/05/2025 - 10:45
I just finished listening to the “forever young” convo yesterday, and I
really enjoyed it.
I could relate to some of the things yinz said (sorry, I’m a
pittsburgher now). And I liked that bit of the convo when Cam was
talking about the gap between generations. I think there's usually a
lack of willingness between generations to try to understand each other.
One of the things that I really appreciate about the conversation is
because it didn't feel like talking down on other generations, it was a
very thoughtful talk <3
At the end, the discussion about challenging being comfortable, got me
thinking a little more. On the immediate level, I would agree 100% about
the importance of challenging your comfort zone.
But for some reason the podcast also made me start to think about what
kind of "being comfortable" is worth challenging, and when "being
uncomfortable" is just your body telling you that you should not do this
to yourself at that moment.
One of the problems with our societies (that we're so tired of hearing
about) is that it forces people to follow what’s expected from them. And
that's what punk most fought against.
So, I think, in this case, challenging your comfort means listening to
your body instead of subjecting yourself to the norms. All the things
that we are tired of hearing about: women do not have to have children,
relationships do not have to be forever or with just one person, etc
etc.
That said, I do think that punk and anarchist environments can sometimes
put a pressure on people, stating what is expected from people on a
"scene". (I think Cam maybe pointed something like that). And yes, it
usually happens when we're super young. But even when we do fucked up
things because of that (I certainly did), I tend to think that it's a
good experience even to learn your own boundaries. (I think learning
from our mistakes is a more powerful way of learning, that's why I'm so
wise lol - jk)
But I also think, that as you grow older, one of the perks is being more
comfortable (ha!) in listening to your body's boundaries (or pace), and
stop giving a fuck to what is expected from your, whether are the
conservative society or the anarchist environment.
anarchists Alexander…
Revolt (not verified) Wed, 02/05/2025 - 11:51
anarchists Alexander Yaroslavsky and Svyatogor advocated universal immortality
Add new comment