Arthur's World
Subject: Misc. Thoughts
Date:
From: bh505@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Arthur Sankey)
Organization: The National Capital FreeNet
Newsgroups: alt.anarchism, alt.society.anarchy
What are anarchists? Those who oppose the old lie - that people are stupid and need to be controlled for their own good. Dictators think it, managers and executives think it, and often the people, considered conservative by default, are either convinced of this, or fail to make fruit of their dissent.
Laissez-fare. It sounds intelligent because it's in a foreign language. What's its translation? "Lemme lone you cottinpikkin [representative of the people, at least in theory]" Yet business doesn't leave the government alone, and it sure doesn't leave the people alone. Business propagandists call us at dinner, send us literally tons of mail, and control every source of information we have. Television, newspapers, radio - it all depends for survival upon advertising. It all depends for survival on the successful brainwashing of the people.
Anarchists don't talk about "after the revolution", they talk about "after the evolution". As the word "revolution" suggests, it always ends up right back where it started. It is not a situation of a decisive battle between power and the people, in which power would win no matter who loses. It should be a contstant war, a series of campains that hit at weak spots, isolate strong points, using judo tactics instead of suicidal head-on attacks; to gradually wear down the power of authority, while preparing humanity for the anarcist life.
The same old lie is being repeated everywhere: "we'll all be rich if we eat the poor". We're told how much cheaper our cars and radios and handcuffs are, our golden calves and human-hair shirts. They say it's because of the rich and their heroism. "It's good for the rich man to watch Lezarius starve" they say. There's a word for this, it's called "evil". Whenever you see someone trying to defend "those poor rich people" just translate it to what they really mean - "evil is good".
President Reagan told a joke, which I'll shorten:
<"e;>I'm at a farm (eating pork) and I notice a three legged pig with
three medals, so I ask about it. The farmer says that it saved
his life once, then it saved his wife's life, then his son's
life. "And a pig like that, well, you don't eat all at once!"
He claimed it was about "how collectivists treat those poor rich people". In fact he'd plagerized it from a socialist joke, with the pig being a worker and the farmer's family being management. Notice how suddenly the joke actually makes sense?
What can be reformed can be deformed.
Car chases begin when a police car tries to pull over a driver for something minor. When the driver tries to get away, the police pursue, because "if they run, they've got something to hide". This may be true, but what does it say about the masses of confidential, top secret, and above top secret government (and corporate) documents?
It seems that whenever the word "anarchy" is said, the knee-jerk response is "Lord of the Flies". "Woodstock" (and I mean the first one) doesn't come to mind - and yet, in the midst of bad acid trips and "devil music" there was peace in the anarchy. Antamont (Sp?) was not anarchy - it had the Hell's Angels to govern - and ended up as authority rule always ends up.
Is the purpose of a company to satisfy consumers? Of course not - if consumers were satisfied, they wouldn't need to buy anything. When business types talk about satisfied consumers, they don't mean permanently satisfied, they mean satisfaction in the way of a junkie who's just got a fix - Crack is a good consumer product, Utopia is not. If the goal of business was about actually doing its job, instead of making money, the world's products and lifestyles would be greater than anything we can imagine - but the only way to get business to do its job is to get rid of capitalism.
Don't be fooled. Every vote is a vote for the party.
Direct action tactic to fight telemarketing: instead of hanging up, which only sends the problem somewhere else, sit down, get a good book, and make the sales-slave think that you're interested. Keep asking them to repeat, clarify, or rephrase things, or to go into more detail, or to speak louder because you didn't hear something they said a few sentences ago. In short, keep them busy. Keep this up until they figure out what's going on, or you run out of time. While you've got them tied up, you're saving someone else from being called, perhaps someone who might buy. The results of this would be:
- They slowly clue in and you stop getting telemarketed
- Telemarketing becomes unprofitable and the company goes out of business
- People who actually are interested will be mistaken for subversives pretending to be interested, and will be rudely hung up on.
The main problem with this tactic is that it requires time - to de-productify away 100 hours of company time takes 100 hours of anarchist time. This is why I suggest doing something else at the same time, like reading, net surfing, watching TV, helmet polishing, or eating (they call mainly around dinner). If saying "uh-huh" is too boring for you, you can always try to convince them to be anarchists, or ask them if they've been saved, etc. You can also try selling something back to them, but that's kind of mean after all, these are just poor saps trying to get their pay.
Tell retired folks to chat with them (remember Grampa Simpson?) and get the bonus of them getting free entertainment and catharsis.
This is all nice as a defensive tactic, but would it work offensively as well? Whenever you're bored, or are doing something that occupies the body but not the mind, try calling up tobacco or agribusiness companies etc. asking for information. Try to get someone as high up executively as possible, or just keep them switching over to different people this way nobody will notice that the entire conversation is non-productive - and you'll interrupt people in the middle of tasks.
It doesn't sound like something that could make much of a difference, but if lots of people made this a normal daily habit...
Well, that's it. Resist $atan. Fight the power. Pepper spray the greeters at Wal-Mart and die high! (Well, maybe not the last two...)
- Arthur Sankey
