All That Is Meaningful Is Imaginary

Foreshadowed by my musings on adulthood, what I’m presenting here is the temporary result of my efforts pondering the core of the concept of “freedom”. I have come to the conclusion that what we call “freedom” relies on two great assumptions: 1) humans have free will; 2) free will ultimately depends on the ability of “adults” to consent.

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I recently got to read this post that attempts to speak against the concept of consensus politics which I’ve been promoting. Although I find myself agreeing with some of the criticisms made against “democracy” as we currently know it, the claim that a constitution would somehow be better than consensus politics disregards the fact that the only way a “constitution” can come into existence is through people at some point consenting to it.

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This was written as an explanation of my standpoint on this divisive issue in the wake of the recent events in San Francisco.

Circumcision has been performed on children, male and female, in many cultures throughout history. The elementary aspects of circumcision are most often that of an initiative ritual where one gender, or both, is/are “purified” through the removal of what is perceived as remnants of the other gender’s reproductive organs. This initiation also served the purpose of reinforcing social links within a tribe and identifying other members of the group.

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This is a (rough) translation – with my own minor subjectively assessed improvements – of part of an article published in French at the blog of a fellow anarchist and Quebecker, Anarcho-pragmatisme.

The debate on property is probably the most fundamental debate among anarchists, and there is no clear consensus on this issue within the anarchist movement. Worse still, I’m not even sure of my own opinion on this topic!

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An aspect often overlooked in normative theory is the intricacy of irrational feelings and personal reality. The boundary between “feelings/intuition” and “objective perception” is a murky one that most ideologues like to conveniently ignore. Politicians are unlikely to become politicians under the assumption that they’re not objectively right as to what is best for everyone. Contemporary “democracies”, where each individual and group claims to hold objective truth, and where number is the greatest vector of political power (Capital being a close second), allow for the irrational beliefs of the majority – or, more often still, of a powerful minority – to govern the lives of everyone.

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I recently finished watching Elfen Lied, which was recommended to me by a friend. It was overall an interesting exploration of themes such as “social alienation, identity, prejudice, revenge, abuse, jealousy, regret and the value of humanity”, quoth Wikipedia. This… highly joyful anime, in which there’s more ecchi and gore in close proximity than in anything else I’ve ever watched, didn’t quite bring any new ideas to my thoughts on whatever debates it attempted to re-ignite, but still rather nicely symbolically linked a few cute faces to the issues at hand. Some characters were genuinely interesting, others felt like poor caricatures. It was good, but not groundbreaking. If only the ending had been better.

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This post will explain what I believe to be one possible axiomatic that can demonstrate why panarchism  – or most other flavours of anarchism, for that matter – would be a “fair” political system. The greatest issue that is tackled by this axiomatic is that of defining “fairness” itself. To avoid the pitfalls inherent to any single definition of what is “fair” and what isn’t, I will assume that people know what is fair.

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This is a critical synthesis of my main thoughts on education of the past 2-3 years.

I find it a fertile idea to assume that schooling exists to transmit to youths a body of knowledge that cannot be transmitted by the parents, for two reasons:

1. The knowledge that must be passed on to the new generation can no longer be contained within a handful of individuals, let alone the parents.
2. Parents, in an increasingly individualistic world, choose to work full-time rather than raise their children, earlier.

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At the deepest core of politics lie what some call principles, attitudes, beliefs, values, axioms and all sorts of words that, for the purpose of this post, are conceptually identical. As none of those words even comes close to having the breadth and depth of what they are supposed to represent, this concept will hereby be symbolized by an imaginary “box”, []. Fill it with whatever is truly important to you, whatever you think “matters” in life. Read more »

The concept of “wealth” is a recurrent theme in debates between the right and left: each side believes that their system has the most ethical way of managing wealth. The perspective we will defend here is our own – that of the left. First, it is essential to define “wealth”. As core premise of our definition is the idea that wealth, as with all human realities, has meaning through being subjectively experienced. We furthermore suggest that the specific meaning of material wealth is the satisfaction it can provide to people.

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