TOTW: Gotta Have Faith

This is the second in a series of topics on religion - in this case, anarchism as faith and the similarities it can share with religious experience.

"Even if He had been silent, my life up to this point has spoken of Him"
- Father Sebastiao Rodrigues

"Gotta have faith"
- Fred Durst

In the novel Silence by Endou Shuusaku, a notorious magistrate tasked with hunting down hidden Christians and missionaries in Japan during the inquisition there explains he's not putting much effort into the task because, despite many Christians remaining in Japan, the faith of these Christians is being contorted and weakened by their isolation. Unable to practice publicly, cut off from the world outside of Japan and forced to make regular public denials of their faith, he claims their faith is being twisted and distorted into something unrecognizable. While some refuse to yield and suffer horrific tortures and deaths, most ultimately compromise with the oppression they're facing and choose survival.

Ultimately Endou doesn't side with the magistrate - his protagonist comes to understand that, despite living in a world hostile to his beliefs where his ideals fail and he can't bring himself to become a martyr and so ultimately apostatizes, the experience of weakness or oppression is not the death of faith.

How can we apply all this to faith in the beautiful idea? Ultimately we're not a community of heroic martyrs but compromising survivors. How do you keep faith in a hostile world that turns us into hypocrites and liars with every job interview and rent payment? Do these compromises shape your politics? How much does the experience of suffering and loss inform your politics? How do anarchists understand weakness?

How do you keep the faith?

There are 28 Comments

I reach for my Max S, it doesn't matter how much compromise I do, I know I am my own master and noone, not even a boss, landlord or dictator is going to take that away from me.

Everyday from the work-less ascetic solitude of my ivory van, every morning and late night during my periods of moral frailty, the struggle is against the murmurs and whispers of normie social values and their institutions pushing on my Superego for repressive self-shame and indebtment to its myriads of vain obligations and representations. I resist the temptations of the normal!!!

Anarchy is the best and most beautiful idea of how the world can be. I head towards that. As an antitheist I don't like to compare anarchism with religion. But the egoist texts I've read have made me much happier and helped me. So I find in anarchism both a personal relief and a goal to head towards. What makes it different from religion, as I see it, is that I don't have any superstitious ideas as basis for what i believe in. Quite the opposite. Anarchism deals with the biggest questions and the real problems of the world. The goal of anarchism is freedom.

What happens when freedom means the freedom to do things that suck?

Like having slaves, for example.

You apparently still don't have the mental capacity to understand what anarchy means. For starters how could you have slaves if there are no masters? I thought this one's a no-brainer...

“How could you have slaves if there are no masters?”

There could be no human masters, as such. But we could very well all be slaves to inhuman abstractions, or lovecraftian entities like how workers at a worker-run cooperative are still bossed around by market forces, government regulations, advances in technology, etc.

But anyways, so does your anarchy hinge on there being a completely equalitarian distribution of power everywherr, at all times and under all circumstances? What happens when one group flexes their newfound freedom in a stateless situation and takes liberty to push their interests at the expense of others who are too weak to argue otherwise?

If you are a master of yourself, you will unwittingly enslave all those who enter into a relationship with you.

Then that authority will be fought, just like authority is fought now.

Q1- What happens when one group flexes their newfound freedom in a stateless situation and takes liberty to push their interests at the expense of others who are too weak to argue otherwise?
A1-One group's flexing force is met by an equal and opposite force and the wonderful freedom is maintained.

"enslavement" and "slave" are literally two conditions. Slave is a static contractual condition of being owned by some other party. Enslavement is the dynamic of being slave-like, without having a slave status.

Consumer-workers are enslaved (sorry workerists!), but that doesn't mean they can't possibly work around this condition. Working around this condition is what anarchists do, therefore abolishing the enslavement for themselves, and maybe others too.

I have anarchy-mom. I can tell you a story:
"There was a new woman on the edge of the village, and although she was slightly obese, dirty and didn't walk very well, she could always be seen cheerfully going about her business. The villagers thought she was a freak and talked about it: "I heard that she had many animals and children in her house from nowhere." "How suspicious... a sow?" "Nervous." But the women live only in their own little world and never care about these villagers' gossip. If she does have something strange about her, it's probably her flood of motherhood - an overabundance of energy to nurture and reproduce. She loved to collect seeds, whether they were from men, animals or plants, a thing that to her was akin to a Goblin greedily collecting treasure, and when she darted home with a smile on her face, she would try to impregnate herself with them. You could say she was a total conception freak. A terrible woman, but she was also a bit cute when she was crazy. She doted on each of her children to the extreme, and despite the fact that some of them looked a bit peculiar, the child with one horn, the child with one eye, the child with physical deformities, and the child with poisoned needles ...... , she loved her children. Until one day when her children were playing outside, those terrified villagers finally recognized the seriousness of the problem. They decided to burn down the woman's strange and eccentric "nest". Some of the children were burned to death, while others were carried or pulled by the woman, who was covered in fire and emitting strange screams, and fled to the forest. Later, the villagers said that since that night, their village has never been peaceful again. "

I just want to say that monsters have unique fun.
“ un monstre gai vaut mieux
qu'un sentimental ennuyeux. ”
That's how the world works. The more you know the more you come to a desert where there are only the condemned and the exiled. Wait for death, or save yourself? You're a piece of junk, no one will care about you. The decision is yours, whether to hum a song out of tune with a tattered voice or to go to annihilation in silence? In this broken endgame, even the spirits of hatred can do nothing, only darkness rises from all around. Sing, your lonely song, write, draw, paint your cruel story. That is your joy, no matter how morbid it is, it is your waltz.
D&G had written a wonderful chapter on iterations as a way for children to masturbate in the dark. There is always a lot of room for imagination in the childhood of the becoming world.

On the other hand, if anarchists are atheistic, what can constitute faith? If the continuity of the self does not exist, then would not people be in a crisis of faith? Or for the anarchist movement, as Shawn P. Wilbur once referred to Theseus' ship, is there a unity between the new and the old?
So this whole thing is like the Hollow Knight. Maybe one is destined to die out, but there will be a Hollow Knight in motion there. I think that's what Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and Stirner is trying to say. The anarchist movement presents itself as a happy monster if it doesn't have a continuity of self. Even though the story is tragic, it is joyful.
Life and its will constitute a whole new kind of faith: Overman.

Theseus was a monarch that founded the bourgeois Republic of Athens after his trip back from Crete. I wonder why Shawn and you are still clinging to these old Eurocentric imperialist myths of the State...

Theseus' ship is only a philosophical allusion, which has little to do with Theseus himself. Just for the convenience of describing the problem.

I think it starts afresh, though it appears to be the same thing, it has a will of its own making. Damn the villagers for wanting everything to be the same.

There are people, a great many people, on this planet who acquired things they don't deserve, due to not possessing the intellectual and moral qualities to use them with wisdom and purpose. This will always be the divergence between learning and comprehending, or just reading books around and memorizing, vs understanding the meaning of the ideas being communicated and integrating them to your life.

Such are the pseudo-intellectuals like the commenter you're defending (who may be you, or Shawn, or all the same person, lol), who use their astute knowledge to decorate what really is an empty egg shell... as the comment here was rather pointless rambling about some random concepts hardly related to this TOTW. Given how they lack grasp of the essence of anarchy, they'll just fizzle and wiggle around the black hole without jumping into the void, staying in the deceitful comfort zone of the surface.

What is more fun to smash, the un-tainted eggshell, or the one made into a Spectacle by some sophistic "artiste"?

“acquire things they don’t deserve”

Damn, son. Way to show your whole ass. Who determines who deserves what? Tell us.

It's very simple and speaks by itself, unless you haven't got the self-awareness to read through it. What are you doing with your gifts... trolling to flatter your ego on an anarchist site just coz it's the remaining one allowing you to comment, or doing something in the real world, outside of your basement, with that "knowledge" of yours? But of course I don't mean jobs... it's not a great time to find work when you got a background in humanities, classical studies or literature. ;-)

But maybe, who knows... you can become a pope of US anarchy with these awesome iterations of yours?

“What are you doing with your gifts... trolling to flatter your ego on an anarchist site just coz it's the remaining one allowing you to comment”

Did you just… own yourself??? I submit. You’re on a whole different level of anon into us anarchist news website troll life. Troll on, king.

I'm the "It starts afresh" anon who innocently replied to the King of Trolls without being aware of their sophist background. Yes, I can see the futility of philosophical discussion on an anarchist site when anarchy is more about one's personal actions and commitments in real everyday life, and I suppose that in itself is where faith comes into life's world view, the faith in yourself to be genuinely true to ones own emotionality.

Not if one lives in the Now with a faith in one's own powers and emotional wisdom.

,,,,and this gives rise to an inner strength, a possession of autonomous personal power, which alludes to Nietzsche's overman and Stirner's individual sovereignty. A faith to replace the super-fiction of gods.

Cool!
Hero of life, enjoying the welfare of developed countries, talking nonsense on the Internet.

Come on. There are many ways to express yourself, and traditional academics and intellectuals kill too much of the fun. They may be knowledgeable, but most importantly, they lack an "experience of the heart". Sometimes people are too inclined to realize actualization and forget the meaning of eggs and fantasy. In other words, there is always a reality in the state before the "realized desire". You are right, it is false, but at the same time it is also real: a false reality. This is the false power of art. ;-D

Serendipitous that this Totw is happening while churches across Klanada are being burned down. Maybe anarchists could get in on the action.

Really, how many people from younger generations go to Church these days, especially in Klanada? I see the relevant of these attacks as comparable to vandalizing statues, but the real churches are cell phone masts & other mass media antennas.

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