Failure of Revolution

     For those who believe merely recognizing gender roles and sexism in our society is counteracting patriarchy, please reconsider how (despite our protests) we are still products of a patriarchal society. No one would ever suggest simply recognizing the faults of a global economy is sufficient enough to oppose its oppression, then continually engage in free market capitalism (either as a consumer or a capitalist). As with both examples, which of course illustrates patriarchal globalization from the perspective of social relations enforcing pre-existing systems of sexist institutions (which of course then reinforces our personal behaviors)...there is a deep psychological manipulation used through economic and social means that condition every person based on a role we are programmed to believe we are destined to play. Meaning, experiencing and/or seeing the injustices of patriarchy (or globalization) and ethically opposing it in theory only deprogram our faith in these systems, which does not necessarily change the conditioning we've experienced up until that point. We no longer believe it's our destiny to play the games of the government but we've still been conditioned to fulfill certain roles.
    Our habits and tendencies are much harder to break than it is to simply change our beliefs, which only takes a thought. Taking action, like to actually stop biting your nails, requires will-power and many times of falling back into the same pattern before your actions match up with your thoughts, which already oppose biting your nails. Essentially, with changing our daily habits, like when we decide to dumpster or grow our own food than shop at the supermarket, or patch up our pants rather than buy a new pair, we are rerouting our brain's pathways and discovering new routes to go about the same situations (i.e. coming up with a different coping mechanism when experiencing mild anxiety rather than biting your nails).
    Our pre-existing habits and social behaviors is why anarchists, during meetings, purposely make room for women to speak. The behaviors we've accumulated allows a social dynamic of, for instance, men being more comfortable speaking and listened to when being vocal which enables women to be less inclined to speak out and opinions less respected. This is the process of eliminating hierarchy through changing our habits.
    It seems as though every time I am at a social gathering, whether anarchist related or not, not only do people talk past me to my boyfriend (as if I am not there)  but then unwittingly, he continues the cycle by leaving me no room to speak, and by no means am I a shy or quiet person! Yet, there I am staring at my feet hoping for a gap in the conversation where they may or may not hear me due to the mere rapidness and exclusion of their conversation. It makes sense that there is no need for my input considering my boyfriend uses the words "we" and "us" to sum up my experiences, as if he is my spokesperson and I feel awkward bringing up topics that are out of context, as if I can't help but be a secondary conversation partaker. Why, as well, do I fixate on gaining a couple pounds when I am aware of the crisis of eating disorders and oppose this consumer driven society that treats women as objects? The only logical conclusion would be that these are knee jerk reactions.
    Most of us aren't "good" anarchists; "good" meaning up to our ideal standards of what anarchism opposes/stands up for. The failures of our attempted revolutions, as with Occupy, is the unwillingness to reconcile our behaviors to match our beliefs. I expect liberals to bring take-out to the Occupations, but the anarchists...doing drugs, drinking PBRs (as if drugs and alcohol aren't already the reason for failed revolutions)...it's a hypocrisy we are all guilty of (to some degree) but we have the obligation to be the counter-point to these liberals. It's not radical to support large corporations or fund wars due to opiate addiction. What, in fact, is the difference between Chinese take-out and PBRs? At least with the take out you probably aren't supporting a large chain and also putting a little change in a family's pocket.
    It is understandable to feel pressured by this society of greed and oppression, especially as anarchists, but it's not understandable to play into ignorance out of pride. We should recognize our behaviors and hypocrisies as individuals and attempt to change them. Look at the sophistication of television advertisements, enticing us with bright colors, sounds and key words they know from research will peak our interest. Companies are constantly conducting experiments on willing participants (unwilling depending on your point of view) to find ways to draw us in based on our biology and psychology. They know what colors make us angry or excited, and how to make a jingle that can't get out of our heads. I can't even look away from HD, it just looks so cool, and I don't even know what I am watching half the time, because my brain's pleasure receptors are being stroked so efficiently. Pulling ourselves away becomes a constant struggle living in civilization.        
    There are similar problems with the post-left anarchists who believe we are beyond labels, yet, how can you be beyond patriarchy by just refusing to acknowledge it's existence and not using the ideas and terminology to examine your behaviors? This is why I meet men who refuse to acknowledge patriarchy exists and the same reason why even though we know oil funds war, many of us end up at the dealership ready to purchase a car... already prepared with excuses to defend your decision... because it's convenient. Ethical decisions, I assure you, are usually not convenient. This is also why so many people are against the Anti-Civ folks. It's not impossible to live sustainably with the environment, off the grid and rewild - it's just people are afraid. Bugs, storms, diseases (most which would be eliminated outside of civilization), not having all the foods they love; people are dependent on the concrete structures to protect them from their fears that have been instilled since birth. Most people would honestly,  based on their tendencies and habits, stay within capitalism, even when they hate it, based on a laundry list of excuses and quotes from dead white men who hoped technology would save humanity.
   Revolutions fail only because we prevent ourselves from succeeding. We are a society based on realism instead of idealism, which traps us into being "flywheels on the ram-shackle machinery of the awful truth" (Kurt Vonnegut). We intellectualize things to a point of falling back into our Babylonian prison cell. Sometimes we are duped into thinking we're making a difference  and then you look around you and notice your in a group of white males 20-25 talking about minority issues when who knows if any of these people personally knows one person of color. We must witness our hypocrisies and become willing to fix them with the support of our anarchist friends and not shoot down everyone who has a slightly different theory. I do think that within time, people will abandon the old anarchist syndicalist ways and become open minded to the possibilities of life not dependent on technology, which can only quicken the pace of the world's demise.
   Revolutions take place, first, within yourself. That is the main reason why Occupy countered any attempts at mass uprising, because it tamed anarchists to work within mainstream politics. Radicals failed to differentiate themselves from liberals, due to the bureaucracy of large scale consensus, although it is effective in small groups. As soon as Occupy clearly became a reformist movement about better banking and so on, anarchists should have broken up, back into our smaller groups, and took the opportunity while Occupy was still making headlines to start a counter-Occupy movement. Yet, because our theories do not sync up with our actual practice, many of us were drawn into the game of democratic process and trying to convince middle class people how to go about effective direct action (to no avail).
    There is no solidarity between anarchists which leads us into petty discussions about theoretical points instead of looking at practicality and possibility. For instance, though anarcho-primitivisim  is heavily criticized,( in my opinion for an individual's co-dependency with civilization and fear of nature) you will find a fear of feminism. Expecting the effects of patriarchal civilization to magically dissipate into a peaceful feral community, would be to expect HIStorical and archeological evidence to be accurate, which, of course, is doctored and shaped by the society in which we live. This is not to create an argument about whether or not hunter-gatherer societies held the platform for hierarchy (which it quite probably did considering here we are now) but more so to acknowledge the influences this society already conditioned us with, and to hold out the possibility that maybe the Unabomber had a point. The validity and necessity of primitivisim should not be dependent on whether or not natives were peaceful or at times violent. This is petty arguing, and the reality is, to leave rewilding (which in actuality would take generations to fully realize) the hefty task of eliminating patriarchy based on faith of someone's research instead of taking extra precaution to create a genderless society (specifically in regards to division of labor)  would be ignorant of the current attitudes of individuals and their cultural influences. If on the other hand, people applied these theories instead of debating with words we would see in practice if in fact it is necessary to make genderless equality an issue at the forefront instead of relying on what we were told worked for Tribe A or Tribe B.
    Close-mindedness, from liberals to red/green/black anarchists among themselves, is our only detriment and keeps us DE-radicalized. The very premise for anarchism is that we've been conditioned to believe we need leaders, and as we all know reading this, that is a lie, that  before  in theory leaders were believed  necessary until put into practice otherwise. Upon having the opportunity to say what we've been dying to let the mainstream media know, we cowardly watered ourselves down for the liberals and therefore played right into the hands of our big, mean government machine. Revolutions aren't futile, but with the Occupy let down, it will be difficult for another mass movement, and perhaps different tactics are in order. For now, I say unity, small collectives, and groups is, at the current time, the only counter-point to the oppression we experience in the United States, so working on ways to deviate from the capitalist system should be number one priority. Hopefully others will see the possibilities of our own creations once we stop dividing ourselves and mend our hypocrisies. The failure of revolution? Our own thoughts left over from our pre-anarchist days.

The World We've Inherited: Brave New World & Anti-Civ

"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't."

    -William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, II.

"Am I sorry you killed the Kennedys'
And Huxley too?


But I'm sorry Shakespeare was your scapegoat
And your apple sticking into my throat
Sorry your Sunday smiles are rusty nails,
And your crucifixion commercials failed."
   
    -Marilyn Manson, Target Audience, album Holy Wood.



   It's 11:59pm, 1983, you're waiting for the ball to drop and the boot to come down on the face of humanity. As soon as it hits midnight there's going to be a sudden outbreak of totalitarianism...1984 has come to pass literally, and figuratively, being that the anticipated image of riots in the streets, currently popularized by the Occupy movement, is the un-evolved fascism of pre-democratic, give a dog-a-bone consumerism; now, post-1984, is a future that operates more like the dystopian vision of Huxley's Brave New World. We cannot distinguish democracy from fascism, we willingly participate in our sedation in fear of the littlest inconvenience or displeasure at the cost of freedom within the illusion of free-market capitalism. As an anarchist, I do not distinguish the myth of voting from a literal boot in the face, but two party democracy and intellectual elitism gives people their apples and oranges, or rather GMO and organic options, not realizing Monsanto can fall far from the tree, and we've allowed this - outrage and all. 
    It's remarkable that in 1932 Aldous Huxley was able to foresee the infiltration of technology and how it would alter and control the masses.  Even more remarkable would be the fact that his critique on technology goes as far to say it's not the incorrect use of technology that troubles our future, but civilization itself that is doomed because it is dependent on manipulation of nature, now exaggerated by the aid of modern technology. 

Population Control
      Population control is the backdrop for Brave New World, keeping the population consistently at 2 billion, which is sustained artificially through "decanting bottles" for the Alpha intelligentsia and for the other lower ranks in a single fertilized egg; breeding intelligence and passivity for the government's preordained tasks at various levels and continues on past nature into nurture. This keeps the different groups, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon separated not only through superficial differences but through their analytical capabilities, which also manifest in privileges and jobs they uphold. Sex is seen as a commodity and pastime, encouraged so the population is satiated with pleasure, beyond the point of love so no real bonding can occur.  

    Population has steadily increased since the Industrial Revolution, which began in 18th century Britain, and came into full actualization during the early 19th century, although it wouldn't be until about 100 years later the world would truly experience the impact of modern medicine, food modification, and fossil fueled methods of mass import and export.

    "In only 100 years after the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the world population would grow 100 percent to two billion people in 1927 (about 1.6 billion by 1900)......Since the 250 years from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to today, the world human population has increased by six billion people!"  

-Eric Lamb, The Ecological Impact of the Industrial Revolution, Global Ecology Network       

     Technological development and scientific gains in medicine supports population increase not only in the sense diseases are cured (i.e. when smallpox was eradicated through extensive vaccination, once a serious cause of death), or because life expectancy has drastically increased due to medical research, less child-bearing deaths, etc., but when the general world population has food, shelter and are not fighting to survive, the rate of child births also increases, therefore resources will be depleted rapidly. In Brave New World, once a person hit 60 years of age, they were euthanized to prevent overpopulation. This is not unlike China's forced abortions and one child policy, or China, India, Pakistan, Taiwan and Singapore's (just to name a few) gendercide of small baby girls, because (a) there are too many mouths to feed, (b) boys are seen as more profitable since they are used for physical labor, (c) the parents wouldn't have to pay dowry and, (d) men cannot become pregnant.  Uneven distribution of resources leaves the poorer nations fighting to control population, while the wealthier countries keep using up the resources to sustain their own populations with more advanced technologies.

    In more affluent countries, the manipulation of the birth process has been actualized through fertilization drugs, which is why there has been an increase in twins, triplets, quadruplets, etc., and through artificial insemination, but recently countries have been experimenting with cloning and stem cell research to grow organs in laboratories. These so called "advances" only enhance existing problems such as wars over oil, outsourcing factories for cheap labor which only make countries dependent on the presence of rich corporations, and mass destruction of ecosystems (i.e. the rainforests for some commercial food commodity). The development of genetic mutations, and forced genetic mutations of food, and people to cure diseases, actually creates new, more sufficient illnesses, like cancer, for example, that had not existed before recent times and as of yet, cannot be cured. Civilization cannot exist without manipulation of nature, and nature cannot allow humans to destroy the planet. No matter what measures we take to protect ourselves from the inevitability of death, illness and scarcity, we will experience backlash.

    Countries such as the United States are answering these problems by creating new ones, and out necessity to fill the wallets of corporations without looking at long term effects, we experience, just as in Brave New World, a breeding of levels of intellect according to privilege and class. Separatism is already enforced through capitalism - where minorities are kept poor and unable to receive higher education, unable to verbalize concerns in the preferred jargon of pseudo-intellectuals who run our schools, hospitals, and, who are at the mercy of the corporate hierarchy. Then those who are born into money/privilege are held captive by positions of business executives and lawyers afraid to lose a paycheck. Capitalism keeps neighbor fighting against neighbor, thanks to private ownership, and the poor always dependent - therefore abused by the rich. To further the correlation between Brave New World and modern society, is the superficial way we treat having children, with artificial insemination (which is not dependent on pair bounding or family; family considered "pornographic" in the novel), the lack of natural childbirth, c-sections being treated like an assembly line, and the lack bounding between mother and child (i.e. using cow's milk over breast milk) leaves us to treat sex as a commodity, just a fun past time, that has no real correlation with love or human bonding. 
    The careful calibration to desensitize and rob us of love, family, loyalty, etc. has been made possible through private ownership, consumerism, and technology and is the platform for the blindfolded allowance of social and environmental injustice. Huxley, an academic from the prestigious Eton, had seen the development of modern technology, and its effects so much that he, himself was in awe at the accuracy of his predictions, which inspired Brave New World Revisited.

Soma

           "There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." 

    -Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961 

    Soma is a fictional drug (although there is a pharmaceutical drug that shares its name) that is used many times a day whenever one of the characters are unhappy or needs an extra boost; the drug is also given in rations. Soma resembles not only our own drug epidemic, but our addictions to sex and consumerism that is used at our will to sedate ourselves, not unlike a self-serve IV pump. With the constant pressures to maintain 40+ hour work weeks, or on the other hand, the stress of making sure you have basic necessities, it becomes mandatory to "groom" civilians with treats (as do pedophiles with young children) for a trust to develop. "Grooming" prevents the questioning of blatant injustices, letting people assume the government has our best interest in mind, while we die with a belly bloated with fast food, as our country kills animals, ecosystems, creates wars, just to have more businesses to kill more people in the name of democracy which is a mockery run by the banks.
    Sex is treated as commonplace, to a point where sexual exploitation of all walks of life, but primarily women, is treated as a game. Degrading each other is treated as humor, when in actuality it desensitizes our scope of empathy, and we continue to look at each other as demographics or an object of sorts. How could we understand the starvation that millions of people go through, when we are more concerned with smart phones or having our gas prices decrease? Sex is not a problem, just the commercialization of sexuality and everything else including music that funds our sedation, to give an illusion of choice or freedom.
    Occupy is a great example of this illusion, most of the people I've met within this movement just want bank loans and would rather have a frappicino than actually understand that convenience comes at a price. More so, it illustrates how even when people sort-of see there's something not right, here comes Ben & Jerry's to make an ice cream flavor called Occu-Pie. 
    Symbolically, consumerism, democracy and sex are soma, but what about the true-to-life drugs like alcohol or prescription pain medication? Alcohol causes liver disease, is linked heavily with cancer, it's a contributor for brain shrinkage, stroke, dementia, causes accidents (31% of all traffic fatalities in 2010) and is associated (obviously) with poor decision making. Although most people know this, almost all social functions center around drinking, for the mere fact that it feels good. Now, alcohol has been around since ancient times, the only reason that makes a fair amount of sense as to why now it's an epidemic, would be modern advances in civilization which creates a need to feel sedated despite its consequences and half-assed attempts with advertisements to warn everyone.  
    More shocking, is the sudden uprising of pain clinics all around the country where almost anyone can have a prescription. There has been a 24 percent rise in prescriptions to opiates, and the abuse among teens has been steadily increasing. Our government has an on-going war against drugs, yet at the same time we feed children adderall, give adults anti-depressants which have been actually linked to increased feelings of suicidal thoughts and behavior, because of certain drugs being pushed by major corporations, this includes opiates. Opiates have increased in distribution to keep heroin off the streets, which most certainly would not profit the Rx companies, yet sedate the masses. This keeps poor folks struggling for a moment of peace, which unfortunately is bought because they are unable to earn it.
   
Savage       
     Brave New World is a sterilized society away from nature, afraid of actual child birth and appalled at the "ancient" religion Christianity. Ways of the outsider "savage" Christians are seen as immoral and disgusting. This is a direct correlation to our current attitudes about native rituals and our (dare I say it?) hatred of nature. Modern society is obsessed with anti-bacterial soap to a point where we actually get sick from having 99.9% of bacteria gone, making us much more vulnerable to foreign organisms that otherwise would naturally live on our skin. People are terrified from eating a fruit off a tree because of chemicals, yet we eat food that's been doused chemicals on it all the time...people can't even tolerate a speck of dirt or a harmless insect on them or inside their homes...It's to a point where if I even politely voice my views about green anarchism to a fellow anarchist they assume a necessity in concrete, cars and supermarkets. I assume people are too comfortable in air conditioning to want to even think about living a place made out of sustainable materials or to just farm or something which requires effort.
    These views are ingrained in our behavior because the very fact civilization exists is because of the violence we've put the so-called savages through and their so-called savage land. Just being within a tax bracket is upholding the values of violence. We have not only committed mass genocide but stripped natives of their culture which before Spanish and European settlers, was in accordance with nature. The so-called civilized ways of Christianity pushed out the need for nature, and ever since industrial society has been trying to make everything plastic.
        Not only does Brave New World articulate our blind and willing obedience as the evolution of totalitarianism, but it makes the argument that the entire concept of civilization is doomed due to its defiance of nature. Nature is the first casualty of war and mass agriculture. Earth cannot support endless development of cities and constant multiplying of any creature. It is not beneficial to us either, because if there are not enough resources people will become extinct. Capitalism, or any other form of developing government cannot exist without manipulation and depletion of the land which goes hand in hand with the exploitation of people, their rights and the extinction of their culture (look at China and Tibet).  If Aldous Huxley, who by no means is an anarchist can make that analysis, then why stand around starry eyed wondering why our protests are barely making a dent? 
    At the end of the book the main character decides to live like a "savage". He didn't try to change society; no the soma was too strong, the fear of the people too great...and it was their decision. My only suggestion is for those of us who can see the destruction and how it renders us almost completely powerless, is to resist by living outside the "safety" of industrial civilization as  much as possible. This is not to criminalize the participants of civilization or to suggest that being totally outside civilization is feasible, but to take an action that is more feasible than hoping for 1984.