totw: Strangers

doppelganger from "Enemy" (2013)

If it's "all about who you know," what about the people you don't know? Dealing with strangers is not unique to anarchists, but the consequences of trusting someone new can hold special weight. Common practices such as security culture and the affinity group shield us from unfamiliar people in our close circles. Pair this with a distrust of technocrats and the rejection of community and all signs point toward the fact that hell is, in fact, other people. But is it that simple?

How do you think we should treat folks we are not familiar with? Those who support the idea of a market might say that's the ideal framework, trading with one another for mutual benefit. Others might feel everyone should be treated as a friend and given what can be given. Another option is to build and rely on community and keep interactions with strangers to a minimum.

I have also seen some who are in favor of treating all strangers as enemies, stealing from them when possible. What do we do if we want to trade, and the strangers want to steal from us? Or if we don't want to deal with strangers at all but they force interaction? Controlling how strangers interact is one of the main things used to justify the state. We know that is nonsense, but can you explain why?

Throughout the pandemic, it's been more challenging to meet new anarchists face-to-face. What new / old ideas have you tried to meet new anarchist friends during the pandemic and what have been your successes / failures? Do you have a soft / hard rule about how long you know someone new before giving them the key to the anarchist free bin? How do we help strangers who are interested in anarchist ideas participate in the most beautiful idea? What does the relationship of specialists like doctors and psychologists who are intimately trusted as strangers look like for anarchists?

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TOTW guest submission by Babylon with some additions by thecollective
If you're interested in writing a guest TOTW, please email us your text: thecollective@anarchistnews.org

There are 18 Comments

as with anything, context matters a great lot when discussing this. what's the scenario? is the stranger a client at a cash register? they could be just another of the hundreds of clients that go by each day, only this time they want you to give them all the money in the register. before they even interact, they will be sized up, profiled and judged according to their appearance and behavior, filtered through many prejudices. do we tend to be kinder to old people and children we come across on the street?

is it a new coworker during working hours, or that same person in the subway back home, or later that night in a dark alley?

what's the mood of the beholder? what's their particular life story, their yearnings, their traumas?

if anarchists are tight-lipped and cold towards strangers, it could be due to how experiences inform them. everyone is a potential snitch or infiltrator. but again, context is key, if nothing anarchisty is being done or discussed, you may hold the door open for a stranger that has their hands full, help them jumpstart their car, give them a ride, give them free stuff.

affinity groups exist for a reason. you will do small talk with your neighbor, share cooking occasionally, but not snitch on yourself.

it's not a hard rule, but i've noticed it always takes me more than a year and a half to warm up to someone, at the very least. it takes a couple of years to have a friend.

and with regards to this topic's mention of markets, it reminds me of the idiom "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash". other similar mercantile idioms include "Pay to-day, trust to-morrow" and "If I trust, I bust". so i wouldn't say markets is the most trusting framework, but rather a realistic approach that hedges its bets through cost-benefit and risk-benefit analysis.

on the contrary, naive anarchists are usually far more trusting than merchant with their guilty consciences and qualms when their gut instinct tells them someone is n infiltrator, a troll or an entryst, willing to extend the benefit of the doubt past the point where it's too late and the harm is done , but it's hard to call the shots. but also, people that were once true and loyal can eventually betray and backstab, that's life.

but as to strangers, there are ways to veil a deep seated distrust with a veneer of hospitality as is common in customs of many cultures, like meeting people at the threshold of your front door, behind a fence, like having a porch, a balcony, some semi-exterior meeting space in the front, where you can throw a party, but house is off-limits, or it's a block party on the street, or like having a nice guest room, always available, but not inviting strangers to your own bedroom, which is behind a well locked door.

I think it depends on the project, no?
Actions by affinity groups require operational security. Also continuous infiltrative attacks by rightwing groups and “entryism” by tankies require vigilance.
Open projects like social centers, free stores, or feeds (comidas populares, Volkskuechen) on the other hand, depend on sociality to succeed. Anarchist warmth and conviviality is real, and it is a weapon in the struggle to overcome the alienation, despair and isolation that capitalist societies generate (yes, to sustain their markets). In these situations, a “veneer of hospitality” is really not enough. Without breaking the normative surface of stranger-to-stranger relations that sustains the capitalist world – breaking it with the soul energies of human contact – anything public or common, anything that extends the anarchist ideal into real life, seems bound to fail.
As a retired teacher, I’ve found anarchist conviviality at book fairs. Since intellectual and emotional content is on display, people are more present and available to casual conversation, and deeper engagement.
I realize I got this word from the name of this organization recently active around the Zapatista tour of Europe – the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, based in the SF Bay Area. They have tactics for conviviality which I have not studied. But, reading now a manuscript of a book on Dutch Kabouters late ‘60s-’70s, I realize that many of the techniques which can be practiced to stimulate/simulate community, to manufacture conviviality, if you will, come from theater. What were called “ludic” devices were regularly employed to generate a kind of instant contingent social intimacy, after which other things can develop. This is very much at odds with today’s high seriousness – and default paranoia.

being an old fart drawn to street politics as i am, i've seen a few cycles of rupture, revolt and the inevitable crackdowns. comes in waves, always involves an influx of new people and a similar problem tends to occur because of a vulnerable state of altered, new consciousness.

you could think of it as "trauma bonding" but maybe that's not exactly right? anyway, something about that dramatic break from most of their old routines, discovering radical new ways of relating to the world, maybe experiencing police violence for the first time (if they're lucky) ... it makes people especially stupid about trusting folks they don't really know at all.

they mistake that sudden, intense set of shared experiences for more real, developed relationships. they get suckered in to mindless obedience of whatever snake oil peddler is adept at using identity or rhetoric to push them around. trauma bonding is a hell of a drug and there's a lot of dimestore would-be cult leaders who would just love to lead some naive kids down the garden path.

not saying don't try to meet new people, not saying don't be open to new experiences, you don't need to literally treat every stranger as enemy and if you do, perhaps you and I are enemies? but neither do your enemies always clearly identify themselves by wearing stupid looking matching outfits.

and it coincides with my experiences...a lot of times the strong energy of a face-to-face encounter creates a sense of trust that isn't really warranted. A very fertile ground for cult leaders (that was more of hippy/post-hippy thing though...) and undercover cops.

I don't want to go on a rant about "family being important" because that's just bullshit and has resemblances to some fucked up logic that people normally default to, yet long term developmental bonds bring about relationships that deserve trust...unfortunately that's pretty rare to find in a world with so much transience and so many different people. You gotta learn to appreciate those many counters with strangers and never trust anyone!

well it's not really an "assessment of street action" doc ... just a specific social dynamic that might occur during? usually correlates strongly with a lot of earnest people attempting to do something new, with most of their conceptions about what they're trying to do heavily mediated through performative liberal activist bullshit.

like, you know who this doesn't happen to? anyone who can project a reasonable amount of menace lol

and by cult leaders? i mean literally every single douchebag who tries to leverage their identity to make strangers obey them, rather than using persuasion like a real live human person with respect and social skills.

When you're going to a protest...maybe someone will point a finger and get someone's ass kicked but the pavement itself is kinda an issue IMO

looks like you don't understand much "doc" but you sure like to talk tho!

as far as anarchism is concerned, the deontology of strangers, or anyone, is reduced to not obeying, nor bossing them

which is why anarchism is usually uninteresting in most topics, as more or less remarked in this pamphlet recently read on immediatism which says that historically anarchists have been self-satisfied with reaffirming the same couple of eternal truisms https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/690-debord-ressentiment-revolut...

it mentions the critiques made to anarchists in chapter 4, sections # 91 to 94 of https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/guy-debord-the-society-of-the-sp...

- Servitude, obedience, is stupid, exploitative and I don't wanna associate with it.

From mesoamerican civilizations based on priest classes to which humans and non-animals were brutally sacrificed for nonexisting gods, to European travesties of judo-christisan religions that did about the same to punish those who didn't follow, to people massively sacrifying their whole lives and that of non-humans for the profits of nonexisting corporations (or Party), this looks all too similar to me.

- my life belongs to myself; it was given to me by a bunch of complex combinations. It isn't the most awesome thing in the universe yet it's unique. Thousands of years of bloodthirsty brutality have totally failed to erase this "truism", and male me believe otherwise.

i think a good approach to interaction with strangers is to get to know them so that they become less of a stranger

how would you decide if you want that to happen or not? That to me is very interesting, and is the foundation upon which prejudice tends to be based. I guess anarchism by itself isn't a great thing for deliberating that...but for me it has worked better than "common sense". Common sense basically says only seek out those who appear totally harmless.

my trust is earned. and trust is a continuum, not some binary on/off switch. the level to which i trust a stranger is almost always going to start near zero - which is NOT a bad thing, imo - and go (or not) from there based on experience and interaction.

protests, back when i actually attended them, were usually a good place to meet strangers with whom i might have some real affinity beyond whatever was the motivation to protest. but they still start at zero.

everyone is a potential snitch or infiltrator.

What would anyone "infiltrate" here, your dirty laundry in a pile on the floor? The entire tenor of this thread speaks to the way that this scene is a phenomena of rampant adolescent narcissism in a wealthy and wasteful consumer society, and nothing more lofty or dangerous than this.

Just remember this: all agents defect... and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth.

Homosexuality is the best all-around cover an agent ever had.

Maybe you ought to try your hand at writing pornography?

Threading replies is hard for me but I’m super smart and you should listen to me anyway. He he.

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