Flippanarchy
Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
Post humorous takes on capitalism and the states which prop it up. Memes, shitposting, screenshots of humorous good takes, discussions making fun of some reactionary online, it all works.
This community is anarchist-flavored. Reactionary takes won't be tolerated.
Don't take yourselves too seriously. Serious posts go to !anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Rules
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If you post images with text, endeavour to provide the alt-text
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If the image is a crosspost from an OP, Provide the source.
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Absolutely no right-wing jokes. This includes "Anarcho"-Capitalist concepts.
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Absolutely no redfash jokes. This includes anything that props up the capitalist ruling classes pretending to be communists.
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No bigotry whatsoever. See instance rules.
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This is an anarchist comm. You don't have to be an anarchist to post, but you should at least understand what anarchism actually is. We're not here to educate you.
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No shaming people for being anti-electoralism. This should be obvious from the above point but apparently we need to make it obvious to the turbolibs who can't control themselves. You have the rest of lemmy to moralize.
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"evil and violence is not the natural state of humanity. this is not what humanity is like."
[picks up history textbook]
[reading] Oh no.
[flips a few pages ahead] Oh no. Oh dear.
Oh god oh golly oh jeez oh fuck [frantic flipping through book, trying to find the part of human history without lots of violence and evil]
perhaps it's some confirmation bias -- it being easier to write, both contemporarily and in hindsight, about the year a war kicked off than the years of fuckall happening before it -- but no I'm fairly confident at least half of all of us are proper assholes, possibly more than half, and always have been; personal learned experience has further reinforced this. Misanthropy is only really unhealthy for oneself when you don't know who you should be directing that anger at.
do not get me started on the field of history. you have this subset of history geeks who all they care about is wars. then you have actual historians.
Evil is uncommon, exceptional, and makes for better headlines and history book material. Good is abundant, mostly unremarkable, and easily forgotten over time.
Things that are uncommon and exceptional on a small scale can be entirely predicable and routine on a large scale.
Car crashes are rare for individuals and might fuck up your whole month/year/decade.
Talk to EMS and they might not even remember it; they're that common.
Same goes for evil.
Thing is, evil isn't inevitable, it's created by specific systems/conditions* that we can act to remove. It might require hard work and take a long time but it can be done.
*Hierarchy, coercion, individualization/lack of communality and support, competition (between countries, companies, co-workers, etc.), shame/isolation, the insecurity/stress of there being a price tag on the basic necessities of life which means most people have to find a way to consistently make money (e.g. find employment and keep it) in order to survive, etc.
"..the last 30 years or so have seen the science of psychology and studies of the human brain begin to put compassion, caring, and pro-social behaviour centre stage in the development of well-being, mental health and our capacity to foster harmonious relationships with each other and the world we live in. Shortly after the Second World War, researchers such as Harry Harlow (1905–81), who worked with monkeys, and the child psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907–90) began to study the impact of the caring relationship that infants had with their mothers. It was found that a mother’s love and affection had a huge impact on the emotional development of the infant, child and subsequent adult. In the 1950s and 1960s, John Bowlby outlined the approach to human development that he called ‘attachment theory’. This focused on the quality of the attachment relationship in terms of the accessibility and affection of the parent in soothing and regulating the infant’s emotions. Indeed, we have probably all seen how young children become distressed if they lose contact with their mothers and how, in the normal course of events, the return of the mother calms the infant down. Bowlby helped us to recognize that, from the day we’re born, our brains are biologically designed to respond to the care and kindness of others." / "I was lucky in having as PhD students the talented Steve Allen and Chris Irons, who studied the interaction between attachment experiences and those of power and subordination. [..] I was also fortunate that, during the 1980s, a group of us were able to meet every few months to share ideas about the interaction between the innate aspects of our minds and the way our early and social environments can bring out the best or worse in us." / "[in the context of therapy:] it turned out that helping people develop compassion for others and, especially, themselves is not always easy. Indeed, some people are positively frightened of it and resistant to the idea. They see self-compassion and self-kindness as a weakness or an indulgence; to them, it means that you’re going soft or letting your guard down. If they started to feel self-kindness or compassion, it could ignite feelings of grief because they would recognize how alone they’d been feeling for so long. John Bowlby suggested that, if you show kindness in therapy, you can activate your patient’s attachment memories. If those memories are of neglect or unkindness, the feelings that result from neglect or unkindness can reemerge. Far from experiencing the therapist or the procedure as kind, patients experience it through their emotional memories – they feel awkward, anxious and resistant to compassion." / "Children have a natural desire to want to play. However, suppose that, every time children start to play, their parents punish them and withdraw affection. Over time, the children will learn that their own desires for play result in punishment, and so they’ll inhibit these desires or become anxious if they feel such desires within themselves. We can learn to become anxious about our feelings because of how others have responded to them in the past. Let’s look at the desire for care and affection. What happens if children’s desire for care and affection results in neglect, rejection or even abuse? You can see the problem. So when the therapist behaves in a kind way, this can reactivate their patients’ (innate) desire for care and affection, but of course, these feelings are associated with great fear, and that’s what can flood through the patients – so they turn away from kindness." (from the book "The Compassionate Mind" by Paul Gilbert)
"Many people who end up in top positions of power are the product of private boarding school education, which separates children from their parents at an early age. [..] The psychologist Joy Schaverien, author of Boarding School Syndrome, argues that ‘early boarding can cause profound developmental damage.’ She notes in particular that because the institutions themselves provide ‘little time for reverie … the life of the imagination may therefore suffer.’ I spoke to the journalist George Monbiot, himself a boarder from the age of eight, about how a system that produces ‘a repressed, traumatised elite unable to connect emotionally with others is a danger to society’. ‘The effort [..] was very much to throw a tight loop around our imaginations, and confine them to a particular social and cultural arena.’ The result was that many of his fellow students appeared ‘to have had their imaginations surgically excised.… You come out of that system really not understanding how the other ninety-three percent of people live and work and struggle. This is why you have people who have been through that system arguing there’s no such thing as poverty in this country.’ " (from the book "From What Is to What If" by Rob Hopkins)
"Having spent over thirty years at the UK criminal bar, and ‘rather a lot of time in prisons’, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC speaks from experience when she writes: For most people, prison is the end of a road paved with deprivation, disadvantage, abuse, discrimination and multiple social problems. Empty lives produce crime…The same issues arise repeatedly: appalling family circumstances, histories of neglect, abuse and sexual exploitation, poor health, mental disorders, lack of support, inadequate housing or homelessness, poverty and debt, and little expectation of change…It is my idea of hell. In our society, children subjected to the harshest, most impoverished environments are increasingly being criminalised. Kennedy remarks that ‘Ninety per cent of young people in prison have mental health or substance abuse problems. Nearly a quarter have literacy and numeracy skills below those of an average seven-year-old and a significant number have suffered physical and sexual abuse.’ Economic, political and cultural arrangements shape identities, opportunities and, ultimately, behaviour." (from the book "Creating Freedom: The Lottery Of Birth, The Illusion Of Consent, And The Fight For Our Future" by Raoul Martinez)
People have been working together to survive since our conception. Humans are pack animals. Meaning we are beneficial to each other individualism and selfishness is unnatural as fuck so are the monsters on top of it all. The hope in understanding and not forgetting the history yet also striving to be better is essential to our survival as a species in my opinion.
Your argument is mostly sound, except for some key details.
The pack definition is man-made and the idea of an unnatural naturally forming phenomenon is quite the contradiction
A majority of animals fight within their own pack/species other over stupid shit all the time.
Most of the violence these days can be attributed to a "pack mentally" or "Us vs Them" the packs are smaller than you realize.
Humans are collaborative. Collaboration includes violence. Hierarchies were created for allocating resources to rulers. Rulers restrict the capacity for violence of subjects reinforcing the hierarchy.
Anarchists don't see the hierarchies as beneficial to humans. Preserving a world without rulers requires violence. Decentralize violence.
Individualism is unnatural? Am I supposed to be getting pheromone commands from a queen or something?
Would be pretty cool tbh
It would certainly be nice to not have to think about what I need to do
Yeah I mean there is probably a reason violence is historic. The millions of people who are hunting and farming are much less relevant to how society unfolds than the evil bastards who convince them to take up weapons to enrich themselves.
Evil concentrates power so it has a bigger effect even when it is less abundant. This is why a bunch of billionaires can fuck up the world.