How will we ever get enough anarchists together to overthrow the authoritarian regulators? this is the commonly assumed ‘positive causal view’ of anarchism. It appears impossible because we’re thinking back to front.
Minds comditioned in ‘Western’ culture have trouble thinking in terms of ‘negative cause’; e.g. a long time ago, a lot of ice and snow was dumped on the earth and its slow melt-off over centuries provides a cooling influence to keep the temperature lower than it would otherwise be. as the melting continues and the body of snow and ice diminishes, the cooling effect which has been keeping the temperature down diminishes and the temperature gradually rises .
When someone [with a Western scientific mindset] looks at the continually rising temperature that is due entirely to a diminishing of a cooling influence, they tend to ask themselves; ‘what is causing the increase in temperature that is making all the snow and ice melt?’ Western minds see everything in terms of ‘positive cause’ and so they go looking for ‘positive causal agents’, the forces that will drive up the temperature.
Another example… For most of the time, the baseline is that that sailors have a good stock of ascorbic acid in their bodies that suppresses microbial ferment, but as the dietary sourcing of ascorbic acid goes into decline on long ocean voyages, the microbial ferment suppression declines and there is a major rise in the proliferation of many usually dormant microbes that shows up as symptoms of illnesses. Observers tend to ask the question; ‘what is causing the increase in bacterial infections’? Is it the dank air in the ship’s quarters? is it the evolution of new and more virulent strains of bacteria?
Here we go again, … the positive causal assumption that we are addicted to.
What if anarchism is something ‘natural’ and in the history of Western civilization, a long trend towards centralizing power has put us where we are today where the world is dominated by authoritarian regulation based on putting intellectual idealizations into an unnatural primacy over natural experience-based intuition? in this case, a continuing ‘meltdown’ of the unnaturalness would then be equivalent to the ‘rise of anarchism’. for indigenous anarchists, “undermining the intellectual premises of colonialism (authoritarian regulation)” is a priority item.
Anarchism doesn’t have to be another fucking intellectual theory/system that has to installed as a positive causal influence, … it is already in place but a whole lot of bullshit has been dropped on top of it, and it will be once again at the surface if we scrape off the crap-crust of colonialist intellectual idealism.
“Just as ‘an-archos‘ in Greek means absence of a ruler, wu-wei means lack of wei, where wei refers to ‘artificial, contrived activity that interferes with natural and spontaneous development’. From a political point of view, wei refers to the imposition of authority. To do something in accordance with wu-wei is therefore considered natural; it leads to natural and spontaneous order. It has nothing to do with all forms of imposed authority.” – Peter Marshall, ‘Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism”
if you open the door of your icebox and all you see is a puddle on the floor, do you say, ‘fuck me, the rising temperature in my house has caused all the ice to melt’, or, ‘the melting of all the ice has caused the temperature in my house to rise’. how would you determine ‘which it was’?
Science only gives you one choice, the positive causal choice, because it assumes that the present depends only on the immediate past;“Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.
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First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.” — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics”
You often don’t include in your explanation of what ‘just happened’ something that happened a long time ago and is still having influence, like slavery of blacks and/or colonization of the middle east a century ago.
if the little girl popping her party balloons correlates with an old war veteran with PTSD going bananas, science will say she physically caused it because science “assumes that the present depends only on the immediate past instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon.”
Science is not going to let you assume anything other than positive cause because of the above assumption, therefore things that happened in the remote past like black slavery and colonization of the middle east cannot possibly influence actions in the present since, by definition, what happens in the present depends only on the immediate past. Bring on the moral judges and the retributive justice, or rather strip off this bullshit crust and what will then be at the surface once more is ‘anarchism’, natural and spontaneous order.
Submitted by emile on Fri, 05/15/2015 – 23:59
The Free 
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http://syntheticzero.net/2015/05/20/wild-ecologies-speculative-anarchism-guattaris-the-three-ecologies/
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