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Title: No Masters Author: CrimethInc. Date: September 11, 2000 Language: en Topics: anti-authoritarianism Source: Retrieved on 7th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/no-masters
If you liked school, you’ll love work. The cruel, absurd abuses of
power, the self-satisfied authority that the teachers and principals
lorded over you, the intimidation and ridicule of your classmates don’t
end at graduation. Those things are all present in the adult world, only
more so. If you thought you lacked freedom before, wait until you have
to answer to shift leaders, managers, owners, landlords, creditors, tax
collectors, city councils, draft boards, law courts, and police. When
you get out of school you may escape the jurisdiction of some
authorities, but you enter the control of even more domineering ones. Do
you enjoy being controlled by others who don’t understand or care about
your wants and needs? Do you get anything out of obeying the
instructions of employers, the restrictions of landlords, the laws of
magistrates, people who have powers over you that you would never have
given them willingly?
How is it that they get all this power? The answer is hierarchy.
Hierarchy is a value system in which your worth measured by the number
of people and things you control, and how well you obey those above you.
Weight is exerted downward through the power structure: everyone is
forced to accept and conform to this system by everyone else. You’re
afraid to disobey those above you because they can bring to bear against
you the power of everyone and everything under them. You’re afraid to
abdicate your power over those below you because they might end up above
you. In our hierarchical system, we’re all so busy trying to protect
ourselves from each other that we never have a chance to stop and think
if this is really the best way our society could be organized. If we
could think about it, we’d probably agree that it isn’t; for we all know
happiness comes from control over our own lives, not other people’s
lives. And as long as we’re busy competing for control over others,
we’re bound to be the victims of control ourselves. Even the ones at the
very top of the ladder are controlled by their position: they have to
work around the clock to maintain it. One false move, and they could end
up at the bottom.
It is our hierarchical system that teaches us from childhood to accept
the power of any authority figure, regardless of whether it is in our
best interest or not. We learn to bow instinctively before anyone who
claims to be more important than we are. It is hierarchy that makes
homophobia common among poor people in the U.S.A. — they’re desperate to
feel more valuable, more significant than somebody. It is hierarchy at
work when two hundred hardcore kids go to a rock club (already a
mistake, but that’s a subject for another article) to see a band, and
for some stupid reason the club owner won’t let them perform: there are
two hundred and six people at the club, two hundred and five of whom
want the band to play, but they all accept the decision of the club
owner just because he is older and owns the place (i.e. has more
financial clout, and thus more legal clout). It is hierarchical values
that are responsible for racism (“white people are better than black
people”), classism (“rich people are better than poor people”), sexism
(“men are better than women”), and a thousand other prejudices that are
deeply ingrained in our society. It is hierarchy that makes rich people
look at poor people as if they aren’t even human, and vice versa. It
pits employer against employee, manager against worker, teacher against
student, making people struggle against each other rather than work
together to help each other; separated this way, they can’t benefit from
each other’s skills and ideas and abilities, but must live in jealousy
and fear of them. It is hierarchy at work when your boss insults you or
makes sexual advances at you and you can’t do anything about it, just as
it is when police flaunt their power over you. For power does make
people cruel and heartless, and submission does make people cowardly and
stupid: and most people in a hierarchical system partake in both.
Hierarchical values are responsible for our destruction of the natural
environment and the exploitation of animals: led by the capitalist West,
our species seeks control over anything we can get our claws on, at any
cost to ourselves or others. And it is hierarchical values that send us
to war, fighting for power over each other, inventing more and more
powerful weapons until finally the whole world teeters on the edge of
nuclear annihilation.
But what can we do about hierarchy? Isn’t that just the way the world
works? Or are there other ways that people could interact, other values
we could live by?
approach to life.
Stop thinking of anarchism as just another “world order,” just another
social system. From where we all stand, in this very dominated, very
controlled world, it is impossible to imagine living without any
authorities, without laws or governments. No wonder anarchism isn’t
usually taken seriously as a large-scale political or social program: no
one can imagine what it would really be like, let alone how to achieve
it — not even the anarchists themselves.
Instead, think of anarchism as an individual orientation to yourself and
others, as a personal approach to life. That isn’t impossible to
imagine. Conceived in these terms, what would anarchism be? It would be
a decision to think for yourself rather than following blindly. It would
be a rejection of hierarchy, a refusal to accept the “god given”
authority of any nation, law, or other force as being more significant
than your own authority over yourself. It would be an instinctive
distrust of those who claim to have some sort of rank or status above
the others around them, and an unwillingness to claim such status over
others for yourself. Most of all, it would be a refusal to place
responsibility for yourself in the hands of others: it would be the
demand that each of us be able to choose our own destiny.
According to this definition, there are a great deal more anarchists
than it seemed, though most wouldn’t refer to themselves as such. For
most people, when they think about it, want to have the right to live
their own lives, to think and act as they see fit. Most people trust
themselves to figure out what they should do more than they trust any
authority to dictate it to them. Almost everyone is frustrated when they
find themselves pushing against faceless, impersonal power.
You don’t want to be at the mercy of governments, bureaucracies, police,
or other outside forces, do you? Surely you don’t let them dictate your
entire life. Don’t you do what you want to, what you believe in, at
least whenever you can get away with it? In our everyday lives, we all
are anarchists. Whenever we make decisions for ourselves, whenever we
take responsibility for our own actions rather than deferring to some
higher power, we are putting anarchism into practice. So if we are all
anarchists by nature, why do we always end up accepting the domination
of others, even creating forces to rule over us? Wouldn’t you rather
figure out how to coexist with your fellow human beings by working it
out directly between yourselves, rather than depending on some external
set of rules? Remember, the system they accept is the one you must live
under: if you want your freedom, you can’t afford to not be concerned
about whether those around you demand control of their lives or not.
Do we really need masters to command and control us? In the West, for
thousands of years, we have been sold centralized state power and
hierarchy in general on the premise that we do. We’ve all been taught
that without police, we would all kill each other; that without bosses,
no work would ever get done; that without governments, civilization
itself would fall to pieces. Is all this true? Certainly, it’s true that
today little work gets done when the boss isn’t watching, chaos ensues
when governments fall, and violence sometimes occurs when the police
aren’t around. But are these really indications that there is no other
way we could organize society? Isn’t it possible that workers won’t get
anything done unless they are under observation because they are used to
not doing anything without being prodded — more than that, because they
resent being inspected, instructed, condescended to by their managers,
and don’t want to do anything for them that they don’t have to? Perhaps
if they were working together for a common goal, rather than being paid
to take orders, working towards objectives that they have no say in and
that don’t interest them much, they would be more proactive. Not to say
that everyone is ready or able to do such a thing today; but our
laziness is conditioned rather than natural, and in a different
environment, we might find that people don’t need bosses to get things
done. And as for police being necessary to maintain the peace: we won’t
discuss the ways in which the role of “law enforcer” brings out the most
brutal aspects of human beings, and how police brutality doesn’t exactly
contribute to peace. How about the effects on civilians living in a
police-protected state? Once the police are no longer a direct
manifestation of the desires of the community they serve (and that
happens quickly, whenever a police force is established: they become a
force external to the rest of society, an outside authority), they are a
force acting coercively on the people of that society. Violence isn’t
just limited to physical harm: any relationship that is established by
force, such as the one between police and civilians, is a violent
relationship. When you are acted upon violently, you learn to act
violently back. Isn’t it possible, then, that the implicit threat of
police on every street corner — of the near omnipresence of uniformed,
impersonal representatives of state power — contributes to tension and
violence, rather than dispelling them? If that doesn’t seem likely to
you, and you are middle class and/or white, ask a poor black or Hispanic
man how the presence of police makes him feel. When the standard forms
of human interaction all revolve around hierarchical power, when human
intercourse so often comes down to giving and receiving orders (at work,
at school, in the family, in legal courts), how can we expect to have no
violence in our system? People are used to using force against each
other in their daily lives, the force of authoritarian power; of course
using physical force cannot be far behind in such a system. Perhaps if
we were more used to treating each other as equals, to creating
relationships based upon equal concern for each other’s needs, we
wouldn’t see so many people resort to physical violence against each
other. And what about government control? Without it, would our society
fall into pieces, and our lives with it? Certainly, things would be a
great deal different without governments than they are now — but is that
necessarily a bad thing? Is our modern society really the best of all
possible worlds? Is it worth it to grant masters and rulers so much
control over our lives, out of fear of trying anything different?
Besides, we can’t claim that we need government control to prevent mass
bloodshed, because it is governments that have perpetrated the greatest
slaughters of all: in wars, in holocausts, in the centrally organized
enslaving and obliteration of entire peoples and cultures. And it may be
that when governments break down, many people lose their lives in the
resulting chaos and infighting. But this fighting is almost always
between other power-hungry hierarchical groups, other would-be governors
and rulers. If we were to reject hierarchy absolutely, and refuse to
serve any force above ourselves, there would no longer be any large
scale wars or holocausts. That would be a responsibility each of us
would have to take on equally, to collectively refuse to recognize any
power as worth serving, to swear allegiance to nothing but ourselves and
our fellow human beings. But if we all were to do it, we would never see
another world war again.
Of course, even if a world entirely without hierarchy is possible, we
should not have any illusions that any of us will live to see it
realized. That should not even be our concern: for it is foolish to
arrange your life so that it revolves around something that you will
never be able to experience. We should, rather, recognize the patterns
of submission and domination in our own lives, and, to the best of our
ability, break free of them. We should put the anarchist ideal (no
masters, no slaves) into effect in our daily lives however we can. Every
time one of us remembers not to accept the authority of the powers that
be at face value, each time one of us is able to escape the system of
domination for a moment (whether it is by getting away with something
forbidden by a teacher or boss, relating to a member of a different
social stratum as an equal, etc.), that is a victory for the individual
and a blow against hierarchy.
Do you still believe that a hierarchy-free society is impossible? There
are plenty of examples throughout human history: the bushmen of the
Kalahari desert still live together without authorities, never trying to
force or command each other to do things, but working together and
granting each other freedom and autonomy. Sure, their society is being
destroyed by our more warlike one — but that isn’t to say that an
egalitarian society could not exist that was extremely hostile to, and
well-defended against, the encroachments of external power! William
Burroughs writes about an anarchist pirates’ stronghold a hundred years
ago that was just that.
If you need an example closer to your daily life, remember the last time
you gathered with your friends to relax on a Friday night. Some of you
brought food, some of you brought entertainment, some provided other
things, but nobody kept track of who owed what to whom. You did things
as a group and enjoyed yourselves; things actually got done, but nobody
was forced to do anything, and nobody assumed the position of chief. We
have these moments of non-capitalist, non-coercive, non-hierarchical
interaction in our lives constantly, and these are the times when we
most enjoy the company of others, when we get the most out of other
people; but somehow it doesn’t occur to us to demand that our society
work this way, as well as our friendships and love affairs. Sure, it’s a
lofty goal to ask that it does — but let’s dare to reach for high goals,
let’s not fucking settle for anything less than the best in our lives!
Each of us only gets a few years on this planet to enjoy life; let’s try
to work together to do it, rather than fighting amongst each other for
miserable prizes like status and power.
“Anarchism” is the revolutionary idea that no one is more qualified than
you are to decide what your life will be.
— It means trying to figure out how to work together to meet our
individual needs, how to work with each other rather than “for” or
against each other. And when this is impossible, it means preferring
strife to submission and domination.
— It means not valuing any system or ideology above the people it
purports to serve, not valuing anything theoretical above the real
things in this world. It means being faithful to real human beings (and
animals, etc.), fighting for ourselves and for each other, not out of
“responsibility,” not for “causes” or other intangible concepts.
— It means not forcing your desires into a hierarchical order, either,
but accepting and embracing all of them, accepting yourself. It means
not trying to force the self to abide by any external laws, not trying
to restrict your emotions to the predictable or the practical, not
pushing your instincts and desires into boxes: for there is no cage
large enough to accommodate the human soul in all its flights, all its
heights and depths.
— It means refusing to put the responsibility for your happiness in
anyone else’s hands, whether that be parents, lovers, employers, or
society itself. It means taking the pursuit of meaning and joy in your
life upon your own shoulders.
For what else should we pursue, if not happiness? If something isn’t
valuable because we find meaning and joy in it, then what could possibly
make it important? How could abstractions like “responsibility,”
“order,” or “propriety” possibly be more important than the real needs
of the people who invented them? Should we serve employers, parents, the
State, God, capitalism, moral law before ourselves? Who was it that
taught you we should, anyway?