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Title: The Gulf Author: Émile Armand Date: 1910 Language: en Topics: individualism, individualist, egoist Source: http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com/2010/08/e-armand-gulf.html Notes: This short piece by Émile Armand appeared in Horace Traubel’s The Conservator in 1910. It’s an interesting piece to have appeared in a magazine dominated by the shadow of Walt Whitman — and an interesting example of Armand’s thought. — Shawn Wilbur
All the societies of the vanguard — Social Democrats, revolutionaries of
all shades, various communists — say that the individual is a “product
of his environment.” It would be more exact to say that individuals are
products of their environment, adding that the individual person, more
especially, is the end of an ancestral line, which traces its origin
back into animal darkness, holding this fact accountable for certain
individuals in whom essentially predominate the characteristics of
temperament and disposition of a particular ancestry. All societies —
religious, lay, collectivist revolutionaries or not — say that the
individual is a composite, therefore a dependent upon his environment.
The anarchist individualists wish to make the individual person an
independent, therefore a decomposite of his environment. The societies
see in the individual a stone of the structure, a member of the body.
The anarchists aim to make each individual person a distinct organism, a
unified freeman. Whence two conceptions of education and propaganda:
1^(st). The social conception, which regards the individual as a
wheelwork of society, and in its most audacious dreams does not go
beyond the idea of the tremendous final transformation or revolution of
the environment. It regards evolution as a quantitative result, a
question of numbers. It takes the child or the adult, and, a priori,
fills him with the concept of binding solidarity, of necessary harmony,
of a communal organization inevitable and universal. It proceeds by
shaping the brain after a pattern arranged in advance. It prescribes a
special education.
2^(nd). The anarchistic conception, which regards the individual as
detached — as the cause or reason of all association — who opposes it to
society, and who would daringly like to make each personal life a
ferment destructive to the prescribed or submissive life of the
environment. It considers that all emancipation is due to quality, to
individual effort. It seeks to make the child or the adult more
competent for resistance, better endowed, a being deciding for himself
as much as he can his own needs, and supplying them as much as possible;
a union now or to come of others more capable or better endowed in one
way or another. Outside of all intervention, of all guardianship, of all
protection of the state or the community. Anarchistic education does not
proceed by force, but by free examination, by approved elimination. It
suggests, it selects.
And these two points of view are irreconcilable.
E. Armand.