Episode

Today we talk about some potential security threats that may emerge in an Anarchist society.
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[@user-hr7lm3pm3d]

How could we incorporate Byung chul han's other, systematically into society?. Some religious values do so by pushing people to respect property or the neighbourh's wife (and im not religious myself), but as science and the methods of distribution of knowledge have advanced, it has pierced the veil of what we could think as supernatural, as the idea of a god, and by propelling us "forward", by casting light and making every shadow dissapear, it has ruined our possibility to mystify that shadow, and psychologyly we may animalisticly need to proyect ourselves onto that shadow, to feel that there is something there that we have yet to experience, so we can keep on desiring and not see, but exactly just glimpse at the future, we may have ruined our future, by doing things that show us what that future could be, we made of nothing, of that shadow, a something, and we are now depressed at the thing we have found there. We now depend on science, but even when we want to pretend its the most objective way we humans can interpret reality, we are ineherently mystical creatures, we cannot only think of what it is, what light shows us, we must proyect ourselves onto the darkness, the unknowk, so we have started using science as our new god, because we can no longer create cultural futures in a mystical way, we can only expect science to do it for us, and in return we can only live in what technology proposes, using every new advancement in the same old ways, instead of infinetely learning things on our phones, we just end up using it to numb ourselves, we do that we every new phone or device, yet when we do get our hands on that new technology, we "corrupt" it. I dont think we can go back, like in a primitivist sense, to any "true" reality though, as what we have done with technology, with the tools we have available now, is more or less what we have done through our whole history, only now that our technology and organizations create things much greater than each individual self, to the point where we wonder if AI is more smart than us, that the art the AI produces is greater than ours. We change society which changes our humanity by changing the tools and techonologies we interact with, and which we use to interact with each other. Any solution would probably be flawed, but i dont think money as it exist today with its laws could help us, we kind of designed on the fly money, we kept adding rules to it, and even if it represents part of our intrinsic desires, our need to just do, ignore other's needs, our need for independence, the power it gave us is of an inmense machine by which we indirectly harms others,(and done ad nauseaum it ends up affecting us in return, as we do not live in isolation, but inside many systems) but allows us mentally distance ourselves from that. Yet the people we harm, or leave behind in the race of adquiring more money in turn cant fulfil our social needs, as they are dying from the damage we have done to them, or too far away behind. Maybe a solution are actually computer games and systems, paraphrasing what zizek said about pokemon go, the ideology, the narrative of the game, works so well because is something we have always needed. And the systems, like honor, report penalties on online games, the ones that try to create a healthy community (even when sometimes hardly achieving that goal). So in some sort of prefigurative politics, teaching game development and game theory, as the way to have good narrators of the game we call life, since we will undoubtely insert ourselves into them, being by virtual reality or any of the interfaces we use today. But also the game the reward and penalty system, inspired maybe by game theory, looking to build a system from the bottom up, not imposing rules (not primarily at least), but by rewarding honorable, or good behaviors that help everyone involved to satisfy some social need, creating the social narrative, like in hollywood feelgood movies, that gives us that feeling, that reward for using our abilities for others. It could be that the digital panopticom, the matrix ,we could be more physically be connected to, as of brain transparency; but a matrix we are basically already connected to, it could be our only future as we are harvested for data, and such systems, instead of being colectively designed, would just be socially imposed onto us (by socially i mean, not rules that force us, but rules that make it feel dumb not to do it, as with our phones for example), is the machine, the organization, the jeraquical system we have today already too strong and too ingrained into humanity for us to leave it behind and start anew?, making all our possible solutions, all our ideas, concepts only be for the use of the actual system?, is there an outside of the system from which to fight to it, or all our new techonolgies will only feed to it, making it reconfigurate itself to the point where we no longer see any particular problem with it? Anyway, good series man

[@maticdrempe1862]

My god what an episode. I love it when there is dialogue between two opposing views presented in your manner with jokes and smarts. Hope the anarchy series is as long as the frankfurt episodes

[@montgomeryscot6623]

I'm absolutely loving this series. Not only are you putting words to things I've thought but never been able to articulate, but also challenged me quite deeply.

[@TennesseeJed]

Thanks Steve! Always great thinking!

[@_chinmoku]

9:17 😂 Thankyou for yet another great episode!! Hope your health 100% gets better soon.

[@Joaocruz30]

Wow! I just want to say thanks for your podcast! First of all sorry for my terrible English language but I hope you understand what I have to say! Your podcast is my favorite and you go with me in the morning at the train when I'm going to work and even during work( at the Pc) you make me think about life, namely my ethical and moral grounds my principles, my emotions, my feelings and you make me wander through rough ways. Like today when I was listening to you talk about tolerance and intolerant values in the epoch of Voltaire and while travelling through Lisbon you red a Poem from Voltaire when I was passing through the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos in Belém! Wow! AMAZING! AND CONGRATULATIONS FOR YOUR AWESOME AND EXCELLENT WORK! THANK YOU SO MUCH! Greetings from Portugal! All the best!

[@NOVAde7]

your introductions have been a great source of joy and inspiration for years. this is one of my favorites. Thanks :)

[@123gillam]

"Soon you will forget everything , and soon , everything will forget you " Marcus Aurelius ,my hero

[@SlickSimulacrum]

Clearly that wasn't a truism... (You have heard of him)

[@luisschwank5550]

Thanks for the episode! Love to know about the thinking on Max Stirner the anar - individualism on anarchist thougth

[@applegoeshollywood]

Really cool to get some thought provoking content in this way, glad to have come across your podcast!

[@user-zo7qs1hz4c]

Very interesting episodes on anarchism! I absolutely love the idea of a more bottom-up humane approach of organizing society. However, a skeptical question on my side arose when hearing you talk about how in bigger challenges & hurdles, people in an anarchistic society will form bonds based on individual interest that will then try to resolve the issues at hand in their sense. Aren't we, if we take a look at history with a longer timeframe (about 1-2k years), just already living in an anarchical society that was and is always working on reaching a state where humans can interact more voluntarily and freely? In other words, that perhaps the pursuit of anarchy transcends the individual perspective of a human lifetime and therefore cannot be observed as a final yes or no state in any specific point in time; and that the current state of government is just a reflection of what historically - in the pursuit of anarchism by society - led to the structures we have today and that we can adapt to our environment just step by step in realizing the 'best' version of anarchic for future point in times?

[@user-hr7lm3pm3d]

I would think that is not that we gravitate towards anarchism, but more like a dialectical negation of the previous concepts that have emerged, and ended up ruling over us by simply limiting our subjectivity to conform to them. The pluralistic and analog nature of humans at grand scale social level, would inevitably poke holes on any single concept we pretend to use as a form of imposed rule. I believe that horizontal ways of organization are natural to us, but that could only consistently endure in circumstances where society is not constricted or materially anchored to some particular problem that defines it outwardly (such as scarcity), without being overrun by another system that subjugates and minimizes the pluralistic tendency of the horizontal system. Dont remember who defined an anarchist, paraphrasing, as a person who tries not to be hierarchically above or below someone else, and those kind of tendencies are things we see normally in people that are more altruistic. So if the anarchist mindset would be a tendency towards altruism (and i say tendency because absolute altruism is impossible since we kidnap oxygen, food, and matter in our own body), as to minimize or compensate the effects that our own existence has in others, then what we would be left with is how to organize society in a way that intrinsically encourages this mindset.

[@curtissjamesd]

Having listened to a lot of Anarchist discussion I would say that the goal of most Anarchists isn't to create anarchy but to create more Anarchists. Andrewism has a lot of great videos on the subject for those interested in a deeper dive into the ideology.

[@iloveowls8748]

The goal for anarchists is to achieve anarchy, but yes it would require to create more people who practice anarchistic ideas. Andrewism is dope!

[@TiagoLageira]

Would be interesting to hear an interview from you with someone who works in the police force about this.

[@PlatoDragon]

The book Means and Ends by philosopher Zoe Baker is a great resource for anyone hooked on this topic. It serves both as an expansive historical archive, and as a tool for understanding anarchism philosophically. Quite much the best book I read last year, I hope more people will find it informative!

[@YHWHisGracious]

As an enjoyer of Marx and of Lenin, I really enjoyed listening to this episode.

[@perion1]

Hello Stephen West. You are an absolute delight to listen to. I find your podcasts extremely helpful in understanding key concepts of philosophy. I have a REQUEST. Though I understand your podcast to a great degree, I am at times unable to grasp the scope and magnitude of these heavy words you use like epistemology, ontology,realism, metaphysics etc. I do understand the basic meaning of these terms but find myself failing miserably when I try to think deep and long on these subjects. Online resources are much scattered to form a solid understanding of these concepts. Do you think it is worthwhile making standalone episodes on these philosophical disciplines explaining chronologically the evolution of thought, its thinkers and the current frontiers of these topics? I would really enjoy such episodes as much as I do others. Thank you. Cheers to amazing 2024 ahead.

[@user-hr7lm3pm3d]

i havent seen all episodes so i may be missing something. I remember some explanations about those concepts, maybe not all, from older episodes, try watching the first episodes on kant, descartes, hume and hegel, maybe structuralism, the frankfurt school on enlightment, and foucalt, episodes before #160 i think. He usually tries explaining "what questions philosophers were trying to answer", questions that are product of their times, so those methods and subjects (epistemology, ontology) would emerge from the contradiction between different thinkers. I wouldnt personally dwell too much on those concepts, although im not that much into philosophy myself, unless you are planning on studying philosophy. If anything Steve ,kind of, brings downs the ideas to a more practical, less institutional, level, so just grab any idea you resonate with, and learn what label its usually associated with it once you feel the need to learn more in depth about it.

[@ElMarduko]

Sooooo waiting for the next episode, as I lean more towards a more individualistic approach towards anarchy. I wonder if any arguments against a rather libertarian approach by OG anarchists will match the ones I encountered during many of my online discussions.

[@Joaocruz30]

I shouldn't respond to this episode as I'm only going to #44, but the police are very volatile when it comes to who they have to contact. I'm Portuguese and I live in an upper middle class neighborhood, close to Lisbon and we were stopped in a stop operation and I was going with a Brazilian friend of mine. As soon as they asked us for identification and as soon as they saw my address, they lost interest and were back to my friend, wondering if he was legal, if he had work, and what he was doing with me... bahh...

[@addammadd]

Han’s got a pretty hilarious track record with respect to predictive utility. Do we, in fact, live in a post-immunology age? Has “fear of the other” actually ceased to drive international politics? I wonder to what degree the (long) list of truisms he offers qua analysis actually count as W’s against the egregious L’s they tend to come tethered with. At some point we must ask ourselves, is Han more accurate in his analysis than we might expect from a chatgpt primed with Nietzsche and the last 20 years’ worth of cable news?

[@abbasishehryar8297]

make a podcast on Slovak Zizek.

[@Dez-E]

As an anarchist I can explain(without violence) why anarchism is antithetical to capitalism if anyone is interested. It'll only take a moment. All that being said, this is in my to 10 channels on YT. Stephen West is amazing

[@EWOKakaDOOM]

Do one on John Zerzan please

[@sheepwshotguns42]

omg, nooooo. why do you have to end with advice like that!? you're going to kill me

[@OHamil-pl8wu]

Great video. I don't believe anarchism and basic capitalism are at odds. Capitalism, without government to control the system (i.e., no corporations, barriers to entry, or regulation), is just the free exchange of goods and services, which iis frankly the best type of economic system for the anarchism you describe in this video. Capatilism IS the economy of community.

[@Dreddwinner]

🏴

[@marksplendidtv]

Seattle population in 1920 - 315,312, population in 2020 - 738,172

[@darksoul479]

What if my neighbors not my friend and he tells me to go to hell when I ask him to turn his music down? Then what?

[@user-hr7lm3pm3d]

Well many things, which usually involve community cooperation, i know i know, it sucks right?, but like, maybe that one neighbor isnt your friend, but the others are right?, i mean why would you unnecessarily hate or be mean to your neighbors to the point they dont like you enough to help you or listen to any of your requests anyway. So you could go to other of your friendly neighbor's house and ask him if he is also annoyed by the music (also really boring, why not just call the police and have the first guy beat up to the point where he is clinically deaf), so he, who is not an enemy of the first loud guy, can ask him nicely to turn the music down. You could ask some nice neighbor if he lets you sleep in his house, since you cant sleep in yours with the loud music. You could also throw a party next day and passively-aggressively annoy the fck out of him, as retaliation, or, better yet, invite him to your party, try to get along better with him so he is more prone to listening to your requests because being an ashole to you would mean no longer going to your parties, and, also as he already had fun in your party, he has no need to make one of his own and annoy you later on. The important point is not any of those things, as they may not work well in the end, but to realize how much the systems by which we regulate stuff end up creating all sort of problems that we can only minimize but never solve. Like we all feel systematically alone cus we are mentally exhausted from work and have no time to form meaningful relationships with others because we dont even feel like talking to our neighbors.

[@faheemabid9646]

19:44

[@AT-AT-AT-AT]

luxury belief

[@darksoul479]

If there's no police why just not drink a bottle of tequila while I'm driving down the road? There's no one to stop me.

[@user-pr3in1wd2m]

For the artist communication with nature remains rhe most natural condition. The artist is human; him/her/there self is nature. A part of nature within a natural space. Sibly Moholy Nagy.

[@darksoul479]

I'm sorry but this is silly. There's a quote in The Federalist Papers that goes something like this. And I paraphrase... if men were angels we would not need government.

[@orangecream3340]

I don't think the end of southern slavery is a good example for people changing their perspective of how society could function, considering that it took a military occupation for it to end and the oppression of black people continued through other means.

[@darksoul479]

A self-governing community still has government. A self-governing community will still have laws and penalties just like any other community. It has to be that way or there would be no peace.

[@Herr_Vorragender]

How would universl basic healthcare work in an anarchist society? After all if anything at all unites anarchists, it is their diverse opinions, beliefs, norms and ideas. If every anarchist thinks differently about universal basic healthcare, then there is no unity at all. But without any unity, any health care could be a case of life and death all decided by money and/or power. We all need to collectively accept that basic health care is something we all want. And we all need to align on common grounds to achieve it. These common grounds will be constantly tested. Best if not every single mood of any individual can actually test the common grounds simply because - well, he or she wants to save the money for health care in order to buy him self a new xbox right now.

[@zuz-ve4ro]

anarchists arent particuraly diverse on universal healthcare. everyone thinks that people who know medicine or can organise it should contribute to community with that function. those who diverge are mostly "anarcho"capitalists who dont really do anything, all activism is done by anarchosocialists. when everything is decised and authorised in some sort of a council - from what xboxs we get to who collects trash - there isnt really need for money, and most of anarchists reject it internally, only as a means of trade with the outside world.

[@Herr_Vorragender]

​@@zuz-ve4ro I believe it was just the previous episode of Philosophize this where we have learned that it is the "trademark" of anarchists that their opinions actually are extremely diverse. Wouldn't it be a better idea to find arguments that convinces every human on earth that universal basic health care is something we really do want? Because there are a lot of people who beg to differ. A philosopher may ask him self who would convine who. Obviously it would be the most clever of people convincing the simple minded. Even that would go against the grain of anarchism. Because every anarchists oppinion is equally valued. Just like it should be in any democracy.

[@zuz-ve4ro]

@Herr_Vorragender what can there be if not universal healthcare in anarchist society? non universal healthcare is always a tiresome bureaucracy, and people who provide healthcare generally don't like when people are functionally put to death because they don't have enough money, Good Community Member Points™ or something. the way private dictatorship over healthcare workers and treatment is excused economically is by saying that there are some kind of evil or unworthy inherently lazy people who will game the system all the time. that thing isn't really possible when these potential people are in your council (and are accountable to you in some way)

[@darksoul479]

Having militias is the same as having police, you're just calling them a different name.

[@darksoul479]

If you have a strong military you don't have to worry about people occupying your country do you?

[@standowner6979]

The ignorant fellow character from this episode was deeply entrenched into the hegemony. Btw, when is Gramsci coming up?

[@darksoul479]

What if my neighbor breaks into my house and steals all my property then what? Do I start a war and get my gun and go get my property back from my neighbor, or do I just let my neighbor keep all my property? This is not fantasyland. This is what's going to happen in the real world.

[@darksoul479]

You can't honestly call me naive. I live in the real world. Anyone that believes the things in this video could ever be possible are the ones that are naive.

[@Pablito2466]

you woke up with fever what co**id!!!

[@darksoul479]

This is not a fun exercise. It's a ridiculous waste of time.

[@darksoul479]

Just because you have answers to the questions I'm asking does not mean your answers are correct. This whole thing is ridiculous from beginning to end.

[@darksoul479]

Ask Ukraine what happens when a country doesn't have a strong military.

[@darksoul479]

Just because you would not rob your neighbor if there was no police does not mean that your neighbor would not rob you.

[@jimicunningable]

Living wages and nothing else, control crime. Look it up, sir.

[@darasadiq00]

Anarchism is a joke nowadays let’s be honest

[@charlesfisher83]

Anarchy is not a humanist Utopia Anarchy is the absence of order not the regulation of power

[@gitarrojoe]

the world either has order or it does not... either everything is random or it isnt. anarchy cant stop there being an order to things

[@zuz-ve4ro]

there never was an order

[@zuz-ve4ro]

destruction of state authority never leads to bottom up chaos, chaos always results from established hierarchies fighting for the power vacuum. never documented idea of a "thin veil" applied to governance has even a name, "elite panic" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_panic. common reaction to things like collapse of administration due to natural disasters is mutual aid like field kitchens, rescue organising ect, because people are empathetic creatures.