Quotes

Yes, I still consider myself to be an anarchist. Or libertarian socialist like Chomsky calls it. For me it’s first and most a job. I am not an anarchist because it’s the perfect political theory. I am an anarchist because there is no such thing as the perfect political theory. What has affected my anarchistic ideas most is the internet. And maybe there will rise a new idea of neo anarchism and I think and I hope that some sort of anarconomy will be the economic system of the future.

The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.

Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see

We are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get this, get that.’ And then you’re a player, but you don’t want to play in the game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

Here of course one has to deal with the inevitable objection: that utopianism has lead to unmitigated horror, as Stalinists, Maoists, and other idealists tried to carve society into impossible shapes, killing millions in the process.
This argument belies a fundamental misconception: that imagining better worlds was itself the problem. Stalinists and their ilk did not kill because they dreamed great dreams – actually, Stalinists were famous for being rather short on imagination – but because they mistook their dreams for scientific certainties. Thie led them to feel they had a right to impose their visions through a machinery of violence. Anarchists are proposing nothing of the sort, on either count. They presume no inevitable course of history and one can never further the course of freedom by creating new forms of coercion. In fact all forms of systemic violence are (among other things) assaults on the role of the imagination as a political principle, and the only way to begin to think about eliminating systematic violence is by recognizing this.
And of course one could write very long books about the atrocities throughout history carried out by cynics and other pessimists…

Initiation is learning never to stop. The universe is peeled like an onion, and an onion is all peel. Let us imagine an infinite onion, which has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Initiation travels an endless Möbius strip.

Just look at us. Everything is backwards. Everything is upside-down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality.

When our children and grandchildren look back to assess our performance during this era, they will bitterly note that during a time when we should have been aggressively expanding public investment to employ all of our many unemployed people, launch bold projects for national renewal and progressive development, save our planet and light a rocket under our massively underutilized productive capacity to build a prosperous future for our progeny, we instead chose to get bogged down in ridiculous and priggish bean-counting and budgetary hand-wringing. Right now, it looks like we will be known as the generation that chose stagnation, blinkered bookkeeping and fiscal tunnel vision over dynamic national progress – a weak, cowardly and unimaginative people – the Lamest Generation.

‎We say that ‘seeing is believing,’ but actually, as Santayana pointed out, we are all much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe nearly all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can’t believe.

My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.