Toward a New Anarchism: Anarcho-Daoism

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Thanks for reading this. I'm going to have to listen again because I missed some references.

One nitpick, Ursula K Le Guin did not do a translation of the Tao, but a rendition. She says so herself in the notes in her book. One should read what she herself says about how she did her version because I'm not here to dis Ursula, to be clear.

In the discussing chapter 60 remember the commentary of Ho-Shang Kung: "If you cook a small fish, don't remove its entrails, don't scrape off its scales, and don't stir it. If you do, it will turn to mush. Likewise, too much government makes those below rebel, and too much cultivation makes vitality wither."

My first thought is that this book is going to suck mad donkey dick because whoever was in charge of the title evidently doesn't know what they're talking about. "Anarcho-daoism", Jesus Christ that's absolute nonsense. Any scholar of East Asian philosophy worth his shit would laugh at that.

it's less farfetched than Tolstoyan anarcho-christianity, or especially the Catholic Worker nonsense. plenty of anarchists, desperate for some kind of beyond-the-insular anarchism, have reached out to create versions hybridized with their favorite hobbies. anarcho-syndicalism was probably the most successful hybrid, but it's a hybrid nonetheless.

Daoism and anarchy make perfect sense. The elective positional phrasing is not how I would go about it(anarcho-whatever) but the basic idea makes sense. You need an ancient source of thinking for good contemporary thinking going forward. Daoism as well as Hereclitus and other forms of mononism makes perfect sense in regards to anarchy. Rather that then Platonism or Perennialism.

the real sireinzige is stupid as fuck, my point was that calling it "anarcho-daoism" is a stupid term that not only sounds fucking stupid but reflects how little the author understands daoism. of course anarchism and daoism are compatible, but the idea that there is or could ever be such thing as "anarcho-daoism" is bollocks

btw Plato was literally a fucking monist

New paths in resignation and passivity. Lots of buyers in the US grease trap, I'll bet.

From my minimal understanding of Taoism, it seems full of binaries, but maybe that's a simplistic understanding?

Taoism isn’t inherently passive, just wary.
Translations of the Tao te Ching, Chuang Tzu, and other texts into European languages is what imposes binaries on Taoism. The primary Taoist meme, the yin-yang, has been explained a million different ways. But if you look at the glyph itself, you might not see a binary if you’re not an instinctive/trained binarist or a Hegelian. The best way it was explained to me is not a simpleminded version like “light/dark” but rather Mountain/Shadow. So clearly that’s not a binary, but a complementary dissimilarity.

an expression of what a binary looks like in the natural world, the Chinese application seems to be spiritualist gender attributes, kind of like "masculine" and "feminine" in the US states except the latter is only referring to people and gender politics. From my studies of this, "light" is "masculine" or "yang" because during the day the plants and animals are more likely to be moving, because yang is a symbol for activity, as in "dark" is yang sleeping. The best way i've seen the yin and yang expressed is the duality between activity and inactivity , whereas activity always becomes inactivity and the reverse is also true.

Im gonna say that I’m also okay with people being anarchists with spiritual lives that don’t perfectly match their politics. Too many people treat anarchism like a religion with its own strict set of doctrines.

Dear Gweilo,

Please stop.

Instead, look to the shiny, super cool anarch-ego-hermeneutics-thelema-anarchy. It's so cool. Forget this Dao stuff.

Thank you.

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