I've been trying to get some thoughts together that have been haunting me for a long time. I don't have a ton of time to write and edit, so I'm just kind of banging this out and trying to figure out how to get something usable and consumable in to the world. I'd love to get critical feedback ("ideas too dense", "information seems to be missing", "oh hey, this is almost just like ", " is distracting and can be dropped" etc.). Still trying to figure out where to even post it or what to do with it, and am open to any suggestions. Thanks to anyone who takes the time to trudge through all of it. :)
Edit: added a codeberg link for anyone wanting to propose edits under revision control. I'll be adding a bit more context there as well. Link in URL.
Towards a Fractal Anarchism: a Psychedelic Anarchist Manifesto
We have long since passed the crisis point, and we can all feel it if
not see it. Liberalism has failed and fascism is feeding on its
corpse. We can all feel the creeping doom. We see the water rising and
know the ship is sinking. Some of us are frozen in fear. Some of us
are pretending it's not happening. But we all know, at least at some
level, that something is deeply wrong.
The world is on fire. Governments around the world are
inadequate. They are at risk of being (or have already been) captured
by forces of wealth extraction. They operate for the few at the
expense of collective prosperity, social cohesion, and, ultimately,
the survival of the species.
We can't keep going the way we're going, and alternatives are hard to
imagine. But this is exactly where the key to our escape lies. But if
we can revive our collective imagination, we can stop struggling
against the suffocating mire of apocalypse and begin to build our
utopia. Take a second to imagine how it would feel to no longer be
afraid. Now imagine the void left by your fear being filled with hope
and joy.
It is by no coincidence that authoritarian systems have the same
properties as interpersonal abuse dynamics. It is not a coincidence
that the trauma authoritarians inflict on us all decreases our
compassion and creativity. Their violence makes it harder for everyone
to figure out how to oppose them, and imagine a world without their
domination. Their abuse conditions us to give up hope.
It is by no coincidence that the dictators who dominate authoritarian
nations exhibit egotistical behavior. The fear and
anxiety you are feeling mirrors the fear and anxiety within the
authoritarians who dominate and threaten our world. Our interaction
with them consumes us. We become an externalization of their own
neuroses.
This is not imaginary. This is not an illusion. The mind of the
society reflects the mind of the individual; consciousness is a
fractal. Within your own mind there are competing interests, competing
thoughts. Do you silence opposition to your paradigm, or do you accept
inconsistency as an inescapable fact of all complex systems?
When we see the shape and structure of the world we participate
within, we begin to understand how to manipulate it at all levels. As
we free parts of our minds to question assumptions we had not realized
we accept or explore ideas we had suppressed, as we accept our own
flaws and inconsistencies, as we forgive parts of ourselves, we find
that we as individuals are more free and able to more completely
engage with the world. As we become more kind to ourselves, we find it
easier to accept criticism and to address our own internalized
oppression. The more we address these issues within ourselves, the
more we are able to predict the actions that authoritarian systems will
take against us.
A fractal approach to anarchism should feel natural to many
anarchists. How can we expect to address oppression in our communities
if we can't address it in our own lives? How can we hold others
accountable if we can't hold parts of ourselves accountable? How can
we dismantle hierarchy in the world if we can't even see it in our own
organizations, or in ourselves?
If we already operate within this framework sometimes, what would it
look like to embrace it fully? What could a fractal anarchism look
like?
An anarchism that lacks compassion is an authoritarianism in
disguise. Without compassion, what do we do with those who don't
agree? Do we help those who don't understand, who are not ready to be
anarchists? We must have some compassion in order to meet people where
they're at, help them even if we don't completely align. If our
compassion doesn't guide us, then we are not building the world we
want to see we are only struggling to destroy the one we hate. If we
center destruction, are we doing anything but justifying the police
and helping them get overtime?
If a compassion drives our external actions, do we apply that
compassion to ourselves? Are your actions driven by love, by joy, by
hope, or the guilt of knowing how much you didn't do before you knew
how bad things really were? When, comrade, was the last time you let
yourself stop and cry?
When we are compassionate to ourselves, we recognize that our work
must be sustainable. We understand our limits, and we understand that
we need help. We recognize when we are destroying ourselves, and we
recognize the burden we on our comrades when we get arrested, injured,
or killed. None of this stops us from taking appropriate risks, but
rather it forces us to consider what is appropriate and sustainable.
When we are good to ourselves, we are also more welcoming. Our
compassion makes it easier to accept new people, recognize their
flaws, and help them build their own compassion towards others and
themselves.
A fractal anarchism would tell us to heal ourselves and our
communities, so that we can heal others. It tells us to heal and
build.
A fractal anarchism notices what our internal anarchism looks like and
offers it to the world. It sees a self-awareness and an introspection
that is impossible for states to achieve. It recognizes that the world
we are trying to build is a fractal reflection of ourselves, a
conscious global organism. A fractal anarchism would have to see
itself as a part of Gaia, a global being, becoming self-aware and
self-compassionate. A fractal anarchism is necessarily one informed by
ecofeminism as we must treat ourselves with respect at all levels: the
self, the collective, the planetary being.
A fractal anarchism is a neurodiverse anarchism. We are ourselves the
sum of the parts of our minds. Within ourselves we are better if we
accept and adapt to how our minds work, if we accept each component
and treat them all compassionately. In nature, a population of
organisms may develop multiple strategies, each one that is more or
less tuned to different situations.
A neurodiverse population values these attributes as important
features of the collective, supporting those who need support for in
situations for which they are less adapted and leveraging those
adaptations when they are beneficial to the collective. An honest
neurodiveristy is one that accepts that people both have the right to
alter their consciousness, and the right not to. A fractal anarchism
recognizes that the individual is best suited to make judgments about
how their brain should operate, and that the collective should support
that. None of this is to say that maladaptive behavior should be
accepted. Everyone is accountable for their actions individually, and
the collective is accountable for the actions of their members.
All this is not to say that a fractal anarchism would be entirely
internally focused, a meditative anarchism, a psychedelic
anarchism. No, it would also have a revolutionary praxis. However, it
would not focus on overthrowing the global order.
The revolutionary praxis of a fractal anarchism would mean
constructing the revolutionary society as a fractal, as a
self-organizing creature, following, in some ways, our own evolution
as conscious beings.
A fractal anarchism would structure society as recursive entities: the
individual, the affinity group, federated affinity groups, federations
of federations, etc. At any level, the entity would identify and take
on tasks appropriate to the perpetuation of the entity. An individual
may start, for example, with self-care, personal inventory management
(food, supplies), and basic disaster preparedness. When the individual
builds an affinity group, they may share some of these tasks, where
appropriate, with the collective. Disaster preparedness
scales. Community pantries can reduce the cost of food and other
consumables. Community dinners can simplify meal planning and reduce
preparation time, thereby freeing up time for personal or collective
activities. Personal grooming doesn't scale well, so everyone
continues to brush their own teeth. With each layer of reclusion, new
capabilities become available to help members internally and to
influence the world externally.
With a large enough federation, the entity begins to behave as a dual
power structure. It competes with the state for legitimacy and,
against a state that prioritizes violence, can necessarily offer more.
This model is necessarily prefigurative. The revolutionary praxis is
literally just building the post-revolutionary society. The
transitionary period, rather than being a signal catastrophic event,
becomes a gradient. Each revolutionary experiences the revolution
personally and collectively in every success and expansion of their
capability. The risks of revolutionary change are minimized, allowing
those who may be critical of the concept to experience the revolution
within the comfort of the state before they allow it to collapse.
The fractal structure also addresses one of the long-standing problems
of anarchist organizing: internal conflict. Conflict can be isolated
to interaction points. Low conflict individuals can bridge networks
with high conflict individuals, allowing cooperation while reducing or
avoiding drama.
Most importantly, a fractal anarchism is both invisible to the state
apparatus of violence and almost impenetrable to it. By organizing
naturally through social networks, states cannot easily observe
unusual behavior. Infiltrators cannot gain entry to trusted social
networks without first building trust.
Extralegal actions, where necessary to avoid to circumvent or confront
state repression, are executed primarily at the individual or affinity
group level for security reasons. Though these actions may be
supported via other means at higher levels, higher levels would
necessarily lack visibility in to such actions because knowledge would
compromise the security of higher level entities. So even if
infiltrators did gain access to any level of federation, they would
have to infiltrate each small groups in order to understand which ones
pose a threat.
All extralegal actions would necessarily need to follow standard
security protocols, which are beyond the scope of this
document. Anyone unfamiliar with said protocols, deeply familiar with
security culture and practices, has no business taking such actions
unless they are already themselves designated as illegal (for one
reason or another).
By containing risk, it's possible to minimize badjacketing as either a
paranoia response or a viable tactic for disruption. State agent,
informant, right wing infiltrator, none of these matter, only the
individual's behavior matters. Is the individual contributing or not?
Is the individual causing harm, or not? Is the individual willing to
be held accountable for harm they do cause, or not? Entities that are
incapable of dealing with problematic individuals can be externalized
until they can be dealt with, minimizing risk to the larger
organization.
What does the external praxis look like, concretely, in practice?
People organize affinity groups to address collective needs based on
priority. Buy food in bulk, learn to forage, dumpster dive, etc, to
establish food security. Plan for disasters, including catastrophic
state collapse, by stockpiling medication where possible and
identifying alternatives where viable. Assign tasks to individuals or
small groups initially, and create committees as groups grow.
Start with affinity groups, targeting a size of 5. Grow the group
through social networks. Fragment groups, dividing like cells, in to
smaller groups as they grow. Federate via appointed points of
contact. Determine which tasks should be taken at the federation level
and which should remain at the individual. Coordinate task management
within federations via appointed representatives at regular meetings
(spokes councils, for those already familiar).
Create things like local food pantries, durable good libraries (such
as for books), shared digital infrastructure, and mutual aid
services. Grow the scope of each of these, and add new targets as the
federation expands.
At each level, each entity needs to figure out their own strategy,
their own targets, their own structure, their own protocols for
interacting and decision making. The more we work on this, the more we
can share what works and what doesn't, the more we can publish
externally, and the lower the barrier to entry for others who come
after.
Social insertion provides a way for fractal anarchists to leverage
existing organizations, and a way to spread their ideas or identify
other fractal entities with which to collaborate. Anarchist general
assemblies also provide ways to meet other fractal entities.
Regardless of the next steps, the very first step is your realization,
as a reader of this text, that the neural clusters processing these
words, putting together the pieces, making meaning, and relating it to
your life, are as much unique parts who's emergent complexity manifest
your individual consciousness as that you are part of a larger
emergent consciousness. By reading this, by integrating this
information, and awakening to this fact about your potential, you
progress the awakening of a greater consciousness to itself and it's
potential.
