Anybody read this? Want to read it?

I'm backing into it from Simone Weil, who I love but whose squaring of anarchism and nearly-Catholic mysticism is kind of hard to track. Nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy has always been tough for me because I haven't done the background work with respect to historical context and now I'm thirty-nine and I'm too old and lazy to start. Which I guess is just another way to say that I didn't really care until now, but I'm trying to catch up by cheating and simply... reading the actual texts.

Anyhow, Bakunin seems like a fine place to start and "God and the State" is available free and online in a bunch of places. If anybody's up for reading it along with me, nice and slow, jump in and comment.

Early goings look pretty fun. The one thing that makes me regret not caring more about modernity is the 19th century era of big, fat ideas. And not just ideas, but IDEAS that their purveyors really, really thought were going to actively turn the entire world on its head.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/index.htm

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

Because I play KRS-1's my philosophy all the time.

I said something about philosophers are people who think about deep questions like "who are we", "why are we here", "what's the purpose of life".

My son asked, "well how do they make money?"

I chuckled.

The older I get the more I want to do deeper dives into all the stuff I skimmed in highschool and college to combat the dumber I feel the older I get.

I might check this out. I'd have to start with a secondary text though to see if I am interested in checking out the primary text.


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

He's a really evocative writer and, honestly, not so rigorous that there's a really high bar to entry if you haven't spent a lot of time reading philosophy. It's not like trying to chunk through Spinoza.

I don't want to disqualify what he's doing here, but given the choice between really digging deep on a problem and throwing a rhetorical bomb at his opponents, Bakunin seems (this is my first go-round too) to choose the latter.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

when I saw that I was like I can do 89 pages.

I guess this is why Bakunin (and other anarchists, maybe - we'll see if this gets some traction maybe we can move onto some other thinkers - but I don't know enough yet about the field to say how he's representative here) need to wrestle with religion in some way. It seems like you have to walk a pretty fine line to find state institutions necessarily antagonistic to human freedom and to say that there's something so sufficiently good that we can find actual freedom ourselves without creating coercive institutions.

If you want to retain meaningful parts of Christian thought, this question becomes:

What is sin?

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

>It seems like you have to walk a
>pretty fine line to find state institutions necessarily
>antagonistic to human freedom and to say that there's
>something so sufficiently good that we can find actual freedom
>ourselves without creating coercive institutions.

This is that idealism inherent in a lot of socialist thinkers that we have come to scoff at. And who's to say that freedom is the ultimate goal of humans as individual beings and as a collective?

When you consider the baser pursuits of fame, fortune, power, that seem to be pretty intrinsic to human nature... freedom sounds kind of watered-down

This diagram I saw today is kind of on-topic:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BiVH-gcgcyh/?hl=en&taken-by=ugojesse


>If you want to retain meaningful parts of Christian thought,
>this question becomes:
>
>What is sin?

>This is that idealism inherent in a lot of socialist thinkers
>that we have come to scoff at. And who's to say that freedom
>is the ultimate goal of humans as individual beings and as a
>collective?

This question is where faith maybe can add something to the conversation. Though the direct answer is going to sound really smug: The Church. In my view, a political ideology will, whether explicitly or implicitly, have a beginning (expressed as anthropology), middle (expressed as process), and an end (expressed as some kind of ideal outcome) where the beginning and the end are particularly open to theological description.

If I were to put on my Augustine hat, I'd say that you're leaning on a pretty limited (though more than reasonable if you don't want to be reading along with the church) definition of "freedom" as something like the absence of coercion. It's a "freedom from" external constraints. A Christian analysis would say that internal constraints, namely sin, are even more burdensome and so what "freedom" is, properly speaking, is a "freedom to" - the ability to do actual, meaningful GOOD that sin otherwise obstructs.

This is literally the first time I've dipped my toe into anarchism, and the first few pages of Bakunin so far definitely indicate this is NOT where he's going - but I guess that could be one outlet for Christian anarchism: that the mechanism of the state as a crucial means of social control can protect us and offer a surface-level "freedom from" but that it ultimately binds us in its low ceiling.

>When you consider the baser pursuits of fame, fortune, power,
>that seem to be pretty intrinsic to human nature... freedom
>sounds kind of watered-down

Uh huh. And this is where we're going to need to see how Bakunin triangulates Marx, who will be skeptical of those individual pursuits for their tendency toward oppression, and the Christian faith, who will see them as an expression of sin.

Is he going to try and walk a middle path, where he rejects those pursuits as a problem for any kind of collective freedom? That would mean he shares a similar beginning and middle to Christianity and Marx, but not the end. Or is he going to reject freedom as too-limited of an objective? Which means he'll probably reject the beginning for both Marx (class struggle) and Christianity (sin) as well as the middle.

>This diagram I saw today is kind of on-topic:
>https://www.instagram.com/p/BiVH-gcgcyh/?hl=en&taken-by=ugojesse

I rather like this. THanks!

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

"Yes, our first ancestors, our Adams and our Eves, were, if not gorillas, very near relatives of gorillas, omnivorous, intelligent and ferocious beasts, endowed in a higher degree than the animals of another species with two precious faculties - the power to think and the desire to rebel.

These faculties, combining their progressive action in history, represent the essential factor, the negative power in the positive development of human animality, and create consequently all that constitutes humanity in man."

Before this, he pins a pretty plain Hegelian movement of history - in short, that we're creeping closer to a truer expression of our nature - onto progress. So, the first paragraph that I cited above has him clarifying precisely what that nature is:

reason and rebellion

The former is common to Christian thought. We're created in God's image, but not a physical image so much as an intellectual one. What distinguishes us from the animals is our ability to think and reason. The latter, though, is really not. It is our nature to rebel. That's sexy as hell, but it's also a pretty eccentric way of describing human nature.

But an eccentric political ideology needs an eccentric anthropology. And "rebellion" is a much more active trait to have unfold throughout history than "reason" so it works in that regard. Throw in that he's writing this in 19th century Europe, where you couldn't go six months without some kind of revolution, and "rebellion" is suddenly doing a ton of work here:

a)redeeming the century's violence into something worthwhile
b)letting him stay on the right side of Marx with respect to class struggle as a driver of history
c)letting him re-write the Genesis narrative of humankind's fall using its own terms
d)redeeming the devil
e)blurring the "end" of his political ideology with the "middle" - rebellion is a process, not a conclusion in itself

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

haven't gotten to it yet.. if I remember this when I do get to it I'll dig this poast up and discuss.

The section where he tries to simultaneously invert the story of original sin into one where Satan reveals to us our hidden, ideal state *and* reject it as silly myth-making seems like a weird amount of effort in 2018. If it's a myth intended for social control, repressing our instinct toward rebellion, then re-intrepreting it in a literal way to expose some hidden meaning just kind of adds a lot of noise. Except that, in his re-interpretation, he finds something that he desperately wants to keep: reading some kind of evolutionary narrative into human relationship with authority:

"Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science - that is, by rebellion and by thought.

Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental principles constitute the essential conditions of all human development, collective or individual, in history:

(1) human animality;;

(2) thought; and

(3) rebellion.;

To the first properly corresponds social and private economy; to the second, science; to the third, liberty."

Bakunin desperately wants to keep this third stage of human development, and keep it intact: reason and rebellion are fundamental to humanity and therefore to whatever sense of human freedom he's working toward. The first one has been part of our collective mythological origins since forever (as far as he's concerned) so demonstrating that rebellion is a natural outgrowth of that, rather than something novel, makes preserving the Genesis account probably worth it.

On the other hand, he seems kind of blithely ignorant of the rhetorical risk. Christians will frame the motivation behind our alienation from God in a variety of ways (fallen love for Augustine, fallen trust for Luther, etc.) but as an act of selfish rebellion is probably the most common. Redeeming that story for his own purposes, but using its own terms, is flying pretty close to the sun and I'm not sure he's really skilled enough for that. But I guess we'll see.

Then he takes a hard turn toward unpacking his materialism. He's following in some pretty well-established steps by 1871, as he clearly knows Marx and cribs a lot of Marx-via-Feuerbach in his view of faith. Throw twelve years since Origin of Species in there and he's not going to have to do as much legwork as his ideological ancestors did. But I have some other stuff to do so I'll get to that later.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

animality, humanity, and divinity, which cannot be divided, with humanity evolving unfailingly from animality towards the divine through reason and his own material works.

I do think restoring the 'magic' of creation to man and matter rather than giving all the credit to a supreme being both emphasizes the sanctity, in the secular sense, of human endeavors and stifles the tendency to mystify turns of fortune in the course of history. There is a ton of value in refusing to see human, worldly pursuits as base, provided they be in the spirit of man reaching the divine, which he later characterizes as a kind of scientific awakening, I guess?

But this stretch is where he goes overboard

"The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice."

What does he make then of revolutions and uprisings that have found their moral foundations in holy scripture?

So far only through page 27 of 82. I read the preface and the first part in the park yesterday and continued on my commute.

>animality, humanity, and divinity, which cannot be divided,
>with humanity evolving unfailingly from animality towards the
>divine through reason and his own material works.

Nice catch. He's walking such a weird line here, where he's really flogging at Christian analogies to make his point but then discards them just as quickly. That evolution angle is a real obstacle to a 1:1 analogy with Trinitarian theology, but it feels like you're right that he's working it intentionally.

>I do think restoring the 'magic' of creation to man and matter
>rather than giving all the credit to a supreme being both
>emphasizes the sanctity, in the secular sense, of human
>endeavors and stifles the tendency to mystify turns of fortune
>in the course of history. There is a ton of value in refusing
>to see human, worldly pursuits as base, provided they be in
>the spirit of man reaching the divine, which he later
>characterizes as a kind of scientific awakening, I guess?

I think you're giving him a lot of credit here, but at this point in the reading it seems fair. I've come up against a couple similar problems (the retelling of the Genesis story is the most glaring one) and sometimes I think the simple answer - that he isn't much of a theologian but feels like he's got to work at least a little bit in that oeuvre - might be the right one.

But you're definitely right that, even if his line of reasoning doesn't quite click, he does manage to smuggle in some really important moves. Like, he's not a great Hegelian but he's good enough to give us a real telos of history. He's not much of a Christian, but he's good enough to subvert Christian thought for a solid metaphor now and then.

He's gonna drop the idea of "the divine" soon enough though, and it's right where you see it:

>But this stretch is where he goes overboard
>
>"The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and
>justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty,
>and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in
>theory and practice."

My 19th century philosophy is too rough for more subtle thinkers, but Bakunin ... isn't subtle. And recognizing Feuerbach's (maybe through Marx) fingerprints here is within my skillset. Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" made God into a mere (if powerful) projection of mankind's inward values - and it seems like Bakunin is borrowing that here. We abdicate those values by assigning them to God instead of valorizing them in ourselves. If you dispense with original sin, as he's done already, then that means those capabilities he names (reason, justice, liberty, etc.) are present and intact in us, if only we'd recognize them and not source them in some exterior force.

>What does he make then of revolutions and uprisings that have
>found their moral foundations in holy scripture?

Right? The abolition movement in the US is at least one huge data point (with literal negation of human liberty at stake) against him. My guess is that he's not going to make anything of them, since he's justified by geography at least in seeing 19th century revolution as revolts *against* scripture - but even just in the European context that's pretty myopic.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

>Right? The abolition movement in the US is at least one huge
>data point (with literal negation of human liberty at stake)
>against him. My guess is that he's not going to make anything
>of them, since he's justified by geography at least in seeing
>19th century revolution as revolts *against* scripture - but
>even just in the European context that's pretty myopic.

and lumping in Protestantism with Catholicism for their mutual oppression of humankind while never mentioning their differences, even in passing, while taking time to pit the nations of Italy and Germany against each other to support his dialectic of materialism vs. idealism seems myopic too (and disingenuous)

This isn't the dialectic he's describing. It's evolution of the human intellect.

"Very far from pursuing the natural order from the lower to the higher, from the inferior to the superior, and from the relatively simple to the more complex; instead of wisely and rationally accompanying the progressive and real movement from the world called inorganic to the world organic, vegetables, animal, and then distinctively human - from chemical matter or chemical being to living matter or living being, and from living being to thinking being - the idealists, obsessed, blinded, and pushed on by the divine phantom which they have inherited from theology, take precisely the opposite course. They go from the higher to the lower, from the superior to the inferior, from the complex to the simple. They begin with God, either as a person or as divine substance or idea, and the first step that they take is a terrible fall from the sublime heights of the eternal ideal into the mire of the material world; from absolute perfection into absolute imperfection; from thought to being, or rather, from supreme being to nothing. When, how, and why the divine being, eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect, probably weary of himself, decided upon this desperate salto mortale is something which no idealist, no theologian, no metaphysician, no poet, has ever been able to understand himself or explain to the profane. All religions, past and present, and all the systems of transcendental philosophy hinge on this unique and iniquitous mystery."

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

“They begin by a terrible fall, from which they never recover – by the salto mortale from the sublime regions of pure and absolute idea into matter. And into what kind of matter! Not into the matter which is eternally active and mobile, full of properties and forces, of life and intelligence, as we see it in the real world; but into abstract matter, impoverished and reduced to absolute misery by the regular looting of these Prussians of thought, the theologians and metaphysicians, who have stripped it of everything to give everything to their emperor, to their God; into the matter which, deprived of all action and movement of its own, represents, in opposition to the divine idea, nothing but absolute stupidity, impenetrability, inertia and immobility”

In the theologians' re-telling of the ultimate salto mortale of the divine into the material world, they sin likewise against humanity. This is how they separate purpose and meaning from human endeavor and assign it to the spiritual, of which they act as mediums, giving them power over the masses. The salto morale is a contentious theme for him and this is how he sets up the dialectic of materialism vs. idealism.

“Materialism denies free will and ends in the establishment of liberty; idealism, in the name of human dignity, proclaims free will, and on the ruins of every liberty founds authority.”

His characterization of authority as necessarily antagonistic to humanity by its having been anointed by a divine will brings the conflict of materialism vs. idealism into the political, worldly sphere. His comparisons of both Greek and Roman cultures and the nations of Italy and Germany are also attempts at anchoring the dialectic in concrete terms.

Also, doesn't his incorporation, intentional or not, of Darwinism emphasize his vision of scientific advancement as the noblest objective of human work? Am I reading it correctly that you are saying he is mixing his models here in repeatedly making reference to evolutionary concepts instead of taking the dialectical approach?

I think you may be right in saying he has Darwinism on the brain, because he also strangely echoes a kind of evolution from molecule to man in describing the spread of the fallen divine essence on earth:

“In this way it passes through all degrees of materiality and bestiality – first, gas, simple or compound chemical substance, mineral, it then spreads over the earth as vegetable and animal organization till it concentrates itself in man. Here it would seem as if must become itself again, for it lights in every human being an angelic spark, a particle of its own divine being, the immortal soul.”

I don't know his influences but it sounds like there is a template he is fixated on that acts as an undercurrent of him talking about completely separate and conflicting themes.

>The salto morale is a contentious theme for him and this is
>how he sets up the dialectic of materialism vs. idealism.

Okay. That tracks. I was using Marx as my sole guide for that idea and it doesn't have to be that way. I guess the distinction that is (maybe) worth making is that Bakunin's is more of a second-person dialectic, wherein pointing out this tension is an exhortation for the reader to break out of it. It's addressed to YOU! in a way that Marx, even at his most rhetorically passionate, kind of avoids - the Marxist dialectic moves through history and therefore settles the reader as largely, a passive part of that history where Bakunin's wants to shake the reader into reframing his intellect.

>His characterization of authority as necessarily antagonistic
>to humanity by its having been anointed by a divine will
>brings the conflict of materialism vs. idealism into the
>political, worldly sphere. His comparisons of both Greek and
>Roman cultures and the nations of Italy and Germany are also
>attempts at anchoring the dialectic in concrete terms.

You're ahead of me here, so I've got to play catchup a little bit.

>Also, doesn't his incorporation, intentional or not, of
>Darwinism emphasize his vision of scientific advancement as
>the noblest objective of human work? Am I reading it correctly
>that you are saying he is mixing his models here in repeatedly
>making reference to evolutionary concepts instead of taking
>the dialectical approach?

Well, as you point out, he's got a dialectic in there - but yeah, it seems to me that the degree to which he leans on evolution makes his dialectic more confrontational. Rather than the thesis/antithesis/synthesis that moves through history progressively in a two steps forward, one step back kind of way, it seems like he's got a sort of constant confrontation of history with our tendency toward rebellion.

So, he's got the kind of inevitable "spirit of history" that he cribs from Hegel and Marx, but I think he'd characterize those guys (even Marx, maybe?) as the enemy "theologians and metaphysicians" of your citation - which means that the spirit of history gets divinized to one degree or another and isn't properly materialism. That's clear and intentional in Hegel, and I don't agree that Marx shares this but I suspect that Bakunin still reads Marx that way.

But evolution can come to the rescue because it's a material process. So it gives Bakunin a movement through history that he can identify as real progress but permits him to do so in such a way that doesn't require something that can be so clearly analogized to God. Does that make sense? Like I said, I need to catch up and I'm simultaneously trying to work some stuff out on paper. It's a weird dynamic as I rather like this text but I'm struggling with Bakunin himself because I recognize his sources but don't think he's reading them correctly or always in good faith.

>I think you may be right in saying he has Darwinism on the
>brain, because he also strangely echoes a kind of evolution
>from molecule to man in describing the spread of the fallen
>divine essence on earth:
>
>“In this way it passes through all degrees of materiality
>and bestiality – first, gas, simple or compound chemical
>substance, mineral, it then spreads over the earth as
>vegetable and animal organization till it concentrates itself
>in man. Here it would seem as if must become itself again, for
>it lights in every human being an angelic spark, a particle of
>its own divine being, the immortal soul.”

Wow. There's a whole lot going on there. Breaking things down to its smallest component and having it progress through materiality owes a ton to Darwin but then the immortal soul stuff is a tough right turn.

>I don't know his influences but it sounds like there is a
>template he is fixated on that acts as an undercurrent of him
>talking about completely separate and conflicting themes.

Yeah, I agree. I think he's gonna break out of it pretty soon though. This text is so much more aggressive (more or less what I was trying to say with the YOU! above) than his predecessors so I kind of imagine he's just trying to use them to clear himself some elbow room.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

*************************************

Fuck aliens

-Warriorpoet415




http://soundcloud.com/rayandersonjr

about the love affair Bakunin had with Science (capital S) in its role as a rational counterpart to religion, and a potential governor of human progress.

He wants no parts of the abstractions of Science mixed with the business of governing men. Because it is abstract, and is a specialized field of knowledge, it will inherently be corrupt, or can be corrupted. He puts the actions of man above Science, Science above religion. To sacrifice even the lamb of the architecture of systematized, rational human investigation into the natural world for Peter and John (or whatever names he uses as examples of the figurative ‘guys next door’), shows you what a humanist this guy is. He props up Science in the face of religions only to cut it down at length, with some qualifications.

What I do like is his proposition on HOW science can be made useful to humans collectively. It has to be democratized and spread to every individual. It has to become the object and tool of the people, not of experts or ‘doctrinaires’ as he puts it. This is where he can be applicable to modern Social Democrats and the stance that Science should remain free of superstition (religion) and that learning should be for all, with the collective progress of humans tied inextricably to every individual’s progress.

But then, out of nowhere in his rants against abstraction and symbols and idealism, he props up Art (capital A) as greater even than Science in its connection to human endeavor in the true, meaningful material world. He doesn’t go on very long in making sense of this, probably because it would be hard to justify the historical and I would say inevitable worship of art, commercialization of art, or sanctification of artists (a select few who hold a ‘special vision’ that others are to adopt as their own in popular culture), and hold to his distaste for abstraction.

I love art more than religion and science too, but this is another case where imperfection is easier spotted in black and white than in full color. Bakunin’s very absolute, two-sided framework in looking at everything works against him at times.

>What I do like is his proposition on HOW science can be made
>useful to humans collectively. It has to be democratized and
>spread to every individual. It has to become the object and
>tool of the people, not of experts or ‘doctrinaires’ as he
>puts it. This is where he can be applicable to modern Social
>Democrats and the stance that Science should remain free of
>superstition (religion) and that learning should be for all,
>with the collective progress of humans tied inextricably to
>every individual’s progress.

He's not just opposed to the arbitrary authority of religion and its privileged forms of statehood, but to the more passive-seeming authority of an expert, technocratic class. There was actually an article in the New York Times today that looked at surveys of attitudes toward democratic values and it found that people who define themselves as centrists were most antagonistic to these values in Europe and America. This seems to be Bakunin's brand.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

So, his antagonists make a too-fluid move from discussion of liberty to discussion of authority. It's fluidity is presumably because they don't actually understand either notion, evidenced by their insistence on the connection between an invented God and coercive state power.

But then he draws an alternate, meaningful connection - between natural law (that has no necessary connection to coercive state power in his view) and true liberty, which is man's recognition of the harmony that exists between these natural laws and his ideal state.

"The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual."

This is an extremely Augustinian understanding of freedom, but without God. His view of the role of science here is weirdly difficult to track, as he seems to have a favorable view of the process insofar as it relates observation of the natural world to our God-less human development, but a dimmer view of scientists as such that fits right into his problems with technocracy.

The arc of this text isn't just not bending toward an answer to the tension between the anthropological optimism that says "we can make the world function in a freer way without the coercion that's necessarily bundled with state authority" and the moral rigidity that insists anybody in charge of anything is just going to fuck everybody's life up with greed and selfishness - it's actually reminding me of that tension at every possible opportunity. Which I guess means I gotta keep reading.

The part about the authority of the savant is a point well-taken, but I already assumed that wouldn't be a substitute for state authority so it's actually more of a distraction here.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

"It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart of men. The privileged man, whether politically or economically, is a man depraved in mind and heart."

Easy enough. Corruption is freighted with privilege but in the sort of seductive way wherein you don't actually know that you're corrupt. It's an interior bondage to the framework that validates your expertise. Because, duh.

But what does this corruption look like, specifically?

"A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case of all established powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its government and direction."

Fucking brutal. It's not even the sexy, fun corruption where dictators poop caviar into gold toilets. It's the dull, crushing corruption of eternally self-validating bureaucracy: you need us today because you needed us yesterday.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

>"A scientific body to which had been confided the government
>of society would soon end by devoting itself no longer to
>science at all, but to quite another affair; and that affair,
>as in the case of all established powers, would be its own
>eternal perpetuation by rendering the society confided to its
>care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its
>government and direction."
>
>Fucking brutal. It's not even the sexy, fun corruption where
>dictators poop caviar into gold toilets. It's the dull,
>crushing corruption of eternally self-validating bureaucracy:
>you need us today because you needed us yesterday.

This quote can be the new "don't tread on me" flag for people bitching and moaning about 'THE BUREAUCRACY' and voting libertarian today

Libertarians have never really had a firm grasp on the notion of irony. So maybe it's not a surprise that an area whose primary industry is think tanks with bland names like Global Policy Associates pumping out legal justification for drone strikes on Pakistani kindergartens would have so many self-identified libertarians.

I will say that though I'm not the biggest fan of where I think Bakunin is going to end up, at least anarchism acknowledges a "we" as it rejects the weight of bureaucracy. Whatever else happens here, I do expect him to navigate the tension between resisting government oppression and retaining some collective responsibility to each other in a skillful way that most Libertarians can't really be bothered to try.

I don't think I'm going to end up buying on anarchism, at least Bakunin's exposition of it. But I'm positive that being a Libertarian is like being a white nineteen year old forever.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

He huffs and puffs with the best of them, but he ends up contradicting himself consistently, and that detracts from his more valid points.

>I don't think I'm going to end up buying on anarchism, at
>least Bakunin's exposition of it. But I'm positive that being
>a Libertarian is like being a white nineteen year old forever.

I Lol'd at this

Because Gary Johnson is the fucking embodiment of exactly that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkYWnHaI770

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/23/31/8a/23318a3256b03ee796395eb310baacf0.jpg