Remarks On Anarchism: Volume Two

By Jack R Ernest

This is the second edition of the second volume of these notes on anarchism. I discuss more about the society, the state and gratitude. This is the final version.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781471777653

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Remarks On Anarchism: Volume Two

Jack R Ernest

Copyright

Copyright © December 2021 by Jack R Ernest

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: December 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4717-7765-3

Introduction

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. - Henry David Thoreau

I would strongly recommend the reader first reads my other book: The Labelling Phenomenon: Volume Two, before they read this work. If you read that book first, you will better understand my theory in this book. I would also recommend you read my other book: Remarks On Existential Nihilism: Labelling, Narcissism and Existential Maturity, to better understand my theory on society.

This collection of remarks is random and thus may be difficult to read and understand. I also must confess that I repeat myself often in different ways. I do this on purpose to try to make it easier for the reader to understand what I am attempting to suggest.

This is the final edition of these notes.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. - Ralph Ellison

Society

If you meet someone new, the first three questions they ask you are 1) Where do you work? 2) Are you married? 3) Do you have children? Thus, we become petrified of answering no to those three questions. Thus, to avoid the embarrassment, we work, we get married and we have children. But here is another trick: stop meeting people and you won't be asked these questions that you are pressurized to answer.

I know it is cliched, but if the whole town thinks you are the nicest person around, you are doing something wrong.

Even god would fail at making society perfect.

None is more despairingly regulated than he or she who is a pillar of the community.

The opiate addict when they don't get their drug becomes dopesick. The dreamer whose dreams don't come to fruition become dreamsick.

Women are allowed to an extent to make mistakes. Men are not. That is a huge difference between how stigma is applied to each of them.

Mature people are interested in things. Immature people are obsessed with social standing. Society comes before our own inner convictions, that is if we are extremely agreeable. When you finally start standing up for yourself, you will discover that you lose friends.

There exists an uneasy solidarity between us.

Being a criminal is not good. I am not saying otherwise. But being an extremely people pleasing law abiding individual is equally not good.

Bitter resentful individuals are attracted to positions of power and wealth. The narcissistic boss on Wall Street is more than likely a bitter resentful person.

Don't just look at who struggles, but also who or what profits from that struggle.

Validation of yourself, always; validation of others, if they have earned it.

You get ostracized for trying not to be ostracized. By living alone away from everyone, you get shunned.

You don't get given freedom. You have to earn it through the way you think. We associate taking our freedom through violent uprising against the system. No, to become free, all you have to do is alter the way you comprehend the world.

To borrow from Winston Churchill: if you have no enemies in life, you are too nice of a person.

Marriage is the most mind blown result of social conditioning.

The mature of society dislike something. The immature of society want that same something banned.

We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that 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. - Terence McKenna

Quite ironic, in that in democratic countries, people are exercising their right to use their voice to silence someone else. In a healthy society, everyone has a voice, and that includes the person you despise.

The pressure for the male to have sex is immense, such that some men would rather be called a rapist than a virgin.

Perpetual motion exists; it is called society.

Being nice is not freedom. Being nice is a symptom of economic subjugation. It is a product of restrictions imposed on you by your community. Those that are insanely rich and those on welfare, tend not to be nice. But they can afford to not be nice. The middle class is not afforded such a luxury. Why? They are not because they are all dependent on each other for each other's individual gain. Thus, the most imprisoned people of society are without question the middle class and the symptom of this punishment is they are all courteous and gracious to each other.

The first thing any mature and wise person realizes is how easily they were initially deceived when young. Self-knowledge is only useful when you are cognizant of how ignorant and clueless you once were.

The media sides with the system because the media is part of the system.

The dream life you endeavour to live is the result of the herd. Specifically, it stems from your fear of being disliked.

You have to fear the man who has no fear of being imprisoned. Such a man is capable of anything.

The state's power over you rests in the group. Avoid the group and you can minimize the states hold over you.

Being an ordinary person in the community is pretty bad. But what is infinitely worse is being famous. I would go so far as to say that it is better to be in prison than be famous.

In the present, we are submerged in worry about not being happy in the future.

One thing the right wing male incels and the radical female feminists share in common is that a lot of them were bullied when young. A lot of them were rejected by the opposite sex when in school and in the neighbourhood. This then fosters an attitude of hate within them, which leads them down their chosen path. 

We are used to thinking that happiness is monetary. That once we have enough money to buy things and pay bills, then we can declare ourselves to be content. But there is another sociological aspect to how happy we determine ourselves to be and that is how our peers label us. Do they like us or do they not like us? Look at insecure people. They all want to be famous, for these two reasons: to have money and to make people adore them.

Women more so than men tend to ostracize and for very little it must be said. This plays a crucial role in society because it regulates men. I feel that because women are such good people persons, much better than men, they then shun anyone who does not reach their standards of how to interact with them. 

One of the methods by which the economic system functions is to burden the individual with debt, to the point that they are always looking over their shoulder so to speak. The more laden by debt you are, the more you just have to yield to what the system tells you. When you have piles of loans to repay, you simply have to do what the system suggests. 

The criminal covers his face. That is the dilemma we all face: How do we do what we do and expose our identity at the same time?

Beautiful is my favourite word and you cannot recognise how beautiful it is to be alive if you are consumed by the fear of what others think of you. The economic system distracts us from treasuring the universe.

We are conditioned, and then destined to seek reassurance for our beliefs, which we get from all the other conditioned people like us.

Famous people and weak people are very popular and for the same reason.

If it came to it, most would rather lose the love of their partner than that of the community. When their relationship deteriorates, they find someone else. But when the whole community disowns them, they contemplate suicide.

Society is a contradiction because if you removed society the individual would be psychologically better but physiologically worse. A lot of our mental illness has its roots in society. But if you break your leg, it is society that fixes it. It is a question of whether you would rather physically suffer or mentally suffer. Without society it is the former; with society it is the latter.

The insecure individual is a stubborn idealist, and like all idealists, they trade reality for their dreams. A realist on the other hand lives in the present. This is the problem with these capitalistic self-help gurus, in that they exacerbate one's idealism for the dream life. And who in capitalism always profits, the followers or the followed?

The stigmatization, or at least the threat of stigmatization, is the weapon used to keep society in check in democratic countries.

All the wealthy have is their money and all the poor have is each other.

It takes turning away from society to become you, to realize your potential.

Our dreams camouflage the true reality, which is that the future only leads to a certain death.

One cannot see the consequences of being known. How it determines one's choices.

Even the most fanatical female left-wing feminist, would still rather marry the rich capitalist, than the lowly socialist.

We are so quick to condemn in society. If only we were as quick to forgive.

Society and the individual are sometimes confused as the same. They are not. What is good for society might not be good for the individual.

The only way the stigmatised can live in a society where they are not stigmatised, is to deny the normal people their rights. Ergo through brute force.

Every child is an artist and then the economic system gets to them.

The only way for the eccentric to garner rights of their own is to go after the rights of others. There is no society where everyone has equal rights. Rights to one group means lack of rights for another - the majority exists at expense of the minority. 

Lack of female genius is as much a social construct as it is evolutionary - women are groomed by the system to be wives and mothers above all else.

Don't bring politics into whether you like or dislike something. 

You see the world from the perspective of how the economic system wishes you to see it. We are only as free as the system imposed upon us.

What the radicalized fanatic lacks is a profound sense of gratitude. They are quite possibly the most ungrateful person alive, convinced that if only they could obtain their vision of the world, that their life would somehow fall into place. It won't, and instead they will, just like any materially driven person, want more. Their perfect utopia is like seawater, in that the more they drink, the thirstier they will get.

If I own a restaurant and let's say a customer dines at this restaurant and is left disappointed by the service. He then talks to 40 other people and tells them that my restaurant was a bad experience for him and that you should not go to it. Those 40 people then each talk to 40 other people who are all told not to bother trying out my restaurant. So that is now one thousand, six hundred and one people who won't ever go to my restaurant, all because one person had a bad experience. This is an example of the dilemma that faces someone in the middle class daily.

Homosexual men have such freedom with regards sex partners, in that they can have so many of them and not be shunned. The only thing regulating them is a threat of contracting HIV. Heterosexual men on the other hand have nowhere near as much freedom to have multiple partners. They are expected to find one woman and devote their life to her. If they on the other hand have numerous female sexual partners, they get shunned. For example, a homosexual man could procure the services of homosexual escorts and not be shunned by the homosexual community. A heterosexual man would be thrown into the snake pit if caught visiting female escorts. That alone is indicative of the power that the female of western societies possesses.

You should never hate someone but instead hate yourself for hating them. The community despises that individual that goes against them, when that individual has the one thing the community lacks: Independence.

It is a trade-off: you either have sociological freedom or financial freedom, but it is a lucky man that has both. What I mean by sociological freedom is the freedom to be disliked. Most people, especially those in the middle class do not possess such a freedom. If they are disliked, it tends to affect their finance side of things. For example, if at work numerous colleagues don't like you, you will have to quit your job and thus your income is affected. Another example is a famous person whose wealth is tied up to their fans approving them. So, you are either disliked, in which case you won't have much money, or you have lots of money, but need to maintain approval at all costs in order to maintain your income.

The system is able, through its various institutions, to convince you that the life you endeavour to live is for your own benefit. It tells you that you have to live life a certain way in order to become happy.

Even the most ardent right-wing individual would admit that the female's obsession with beauty is sociological. Society makes them obsessed. But you can apply a similar reasoning to what careers they choose or why there are fewer geniuses in their gender. It is sociological.

Destroy the group and you destroy the economic system. Purge, annihilate, vapourize society. Then the people in power will suffer. Society is how they sustain their wealth. People just cannot see this. They are content with so little that they don't care. It is the house, the neighbourhood, the city, the country, the continent, the globe, that must be destroyed, before any change will happen. As long as you have a population, you will have an economic system that is heavily skewed in favour of the minority. No revolution changes this.

As Huxley said, condition people on what happiness is and then give them enough money to try and attain it. Society is kept obedient so long as they are lost in the quest to be happy.

Being afraid of being shunned is a result of the regulation by the system. This is how you are controlled to ultimately benefit the state. Thus once you overcome your fear of being ostracized, you can obtain maturity.

Being rude results in being shunned. Who else is shunned in society? The criminals of course. Thus being rude is a deviancy in itself.

To be accepted by the herd for who we are, that is what troubles us.

If you asked me what is the best society to live in, I would say the Native American societies prior to colonization.

The sense of contemptible irony: You make one mistake, the people shun you, you commit suicide, and then the very same people who shunned you, come to your funeral and say you were a great person.

As RD Laing suggested, simply being seen by another human being is a form of psychological violence upon you.

Where there is crime, conformity is born. It is not the crime that keeps us moral. It is the fact that we know we will be shunned if we commit the crime. This part of why people chase the family unit, for they feel they will be shunned if they don't adhere to it.

The middle class emphasizes the communal spirit. There exists a sense of malignant solidarity between people in the middle class. Solidarity, because they back each other, but malignant because they resent each other silently. Thus, man is condemned to be good and not because he is actually good.

We become melancholic obsessing about this one person who doesn't like us. We forget about the 7.8 billion other people in the world that don't even know us.

The criminal's weapon to enforce his rule is a gun or a knife. The middle class has its own weapon to regulate itself. It is called shunning and it is just as purposeful as the gun or knife.

As Rollo May once remarked, most people betray themselves in conforming. What we want to do is often at odds with who we should be.

Make the middle class know as many people as possible. Keep them in a state of meeting new people. This is how they are systematized. 

As Karl Marx suggested, we are essentially social constructs. We are not determining who we are. It is society that is determining who we are.

Society on a microscopic level is essentially the same in its functionality as a one man dictatorship. But within society we are all dictators and we are all peasants. We are all oppressors and we are all oppressed. How is this so? How are we at once both the oppressor and the oppressed? We are because we all must validate and be validated by those we interact with. In the neighbourhood, at the schools, at work, on the Saturday night out etc. If we don't validate those we know, they shun us and we in turn shun them. In the Soviet Union Stalin sent you to a gulag if you went against the party's line. In free societies, being shunned by those you once were cordial with, is the equivalent of the gulag. So society is essentially a dictatorship.

Reputation is possibly the middle classes most valued asset and the potential loss of it is what dictates their sociological orbit.

He who fears being shunned is at a disadvantage as much as he who is actually shunned.

We are cognizant of how degraded the sex offender is and this frightens us. To counter this we try to create strong bonds within the community. We seek approval from people to know we are good person. When they validate us we feel good. Thus, one could argue that it takes the most heinous of crimes to lead to a sense of solidarity within the law-abiding of society. That is the role crime plays within society.

The man that is worth millions but rejected by the community, will at the bare minimum become melancholic, if not suicidal. But the man with an average income, who is accepted by the community, considers himself happy. Take what you want from that.

Acceptance, that is what we are after. That is what we are condemned to be consumed by. If you interact with others, acceptance will dominate your thoughts.

It is the subtle threat of being ostracized, not by the production owner, but by your colleagues, that forces your hand. That is why everyone is so courteous. That is why you get married and have children. The person that is not courteous gets frozen out. The person that chooses to remain single, is also in ways shunned. And don't for one minute think that the 1% don't know this. They are fully aware or cognizant of it. Keep society at war with itself, that is how they reap the rewards.

The textbook schizoid, who keeps within the law and keeps to himself, gets shunned. Socialization is not an option but a requirement.

One hears commentators remark that we must end war or disease or famine or poverty, and then society will be perfect. This is incorrect. It is because even in times of utopian bliss and peace, a psychological war is taking place in society. Even in a society that lacked those four things I just mentioned, people are still falling out with each other. Perhaps they don't get along with someone they work with or perhaps they did not go to someone's wedding and so on. You just cannot create a perfect society.

Why do we see more male geniuses than female geniuses? The answer is sociological. Specifically, the answer lies in labelling and what either sex has to do to be liked. With men, they have to be successful to be liked by the opposite sex. But in order for women to be liked by men, they have to be physically attractive. But it is sociological because where do women learn such a thing? They learn it in the schools or the neighbourhoods or the workplaces.

Sex has been industrialised to the point that people dont do it for enjoyment, but to produce children for the economic system, much like a vehicle is constructed on a factory line.

The driving force is not sex but rather being liked. This obsession with being validated consumes us.

Children are slaves to money, but also slaves to interpretation. Their success in life is as equally dependent on interpretation as it is money.

Out of our fear of being mislabeled, society is born.

Imagine a small town of maybe 10,000 people. If you are mentally ill, you get gossiped about. If you are homosexual, you get gossiped about. If you visit escorts, you get gossiped about. Thus people learn to try and avoid being gossiped about. You achieve this by behaving in a very finely engineered way. This small town thus sustains itself through the psychological violence of being gossiped about. It can only function from the psychological threat of stigma, because everyone as a result of this threat gets married, works, has children, does not break the law and so on.

I keep going back to it and I apologize for being redundant, but psychological violence is unique to humans. No animal worries about what other animals think of him. They may fear an animal physically but not psychologically. A Lion is not afraid of being ridiculed by a Hyena. Whereas a man or woman is petrified of being humiliated by another man or woman. This psychological violence plays a huge role in forging human societies.

The outstanding irony is that we are fully convinced we are making society better by cancelling others for petty reasons.

Laws are only as good as their enforcement.

Luxury hurts society - women because of their achievements demand this perfect partner, and men because of their achievements feel entitled to have sex with lots of women. Luxury in society damages society. 

Tough times create tough people; good times create fussy people.

Is technological advancement the killer of intelligent beings?

The Native Americans had a really good life or system, up until the Europeans colonized the continent. Since then they have been suffering. It makes you think.

If you don't expose your identity to people, you don't have to worry about what they think of you. Thus you can take from that, if you do expose your identity to people, you then have to worry about what they think of you.

It is so difficult to look after yourself, to basically choose you over others, because the price you will always pay is you will be shunned. So, if you want to be happy, you have to be content with being abhorred.

True freedom is the freedom to be disliked whilst simultaneously being happy. 

Imitation they say is the sincerest form of flattery. It is also the most obvious example of immaturity. If you are just mimicking what your idol says or does, you are no better than a circus monkey.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. - Albert Camus.

The dilemma for the individual in the group, be it the classroom, the neighbourhood or the workplace, is basically who they should swear allegiance to. This I call The Pirates Dilemma. Imagine a pirate ship back in the 18th century and there is a mutiny in the ship. Such a crew member has two choices: back the captain or back the mutineers. But each choice is not without risk. If he backs the captain and mutineers prevail, then he will be killed; but if he backs the mutineers and the captain retains power, then he will also pay with his dear life. If you are in the workplace and there are unhappy employees who want to stage a protest, do you back the company or join the employees in the protest? This is a problem people have to deal with daily.

It is our ego that makes us think we are the centre of the universe. When we buy a lotto ticket we cannot see the millions of others purchasing the same ticket with the same fruitless dreams. Then when we struggle in life, we cannot see the billions of others faced with the same misfortunes and predicaments.

Look at the result of the herd mentality through education. It produces so many bitter, resentful, self-pity and narcissistic individuals. It does so because of the group. 

Conformity is great for society, but not necessarily good for the individual.

Bakunin’s quote about the people's stick best sums up my philosophy. Any stress in life is not just coming from those in charge but also from those you consider your allies.

That humans are fundamentally flawed, means society will always be flawed also.

The middle-class individual must worry about job security, the individual on welfare has no money and lives in poverty, and the retired multi-millionaire is worst of all of them bored. You are not meant to be happy in life and you must impregnate that into your delusional mind.

The only person that truly cares for you and your welfare is yourself. You must remember that everyone you meet will look out for themselves first and foremost. Their lives are built out of the fabric of indifference. 

The right to commit a crime is the most important of one's civil liberties.

Your body is really your peers body, the systems body, the states body etc, because they determine it through labelling.

The excessively nice people within society are deviant in their own way. But this deviancy is normalized.

You cannot have freedom without freedom for the criminal. The freedom the criminal has to commit his crime is the same freedom that the law-abiding individual thrives in. For example, let's say one tries to create the perfect society by rounding up all the criminals and sending them off to concentration camps to be worked, if not tortured. Obviously, such a world is bad for the criminal. But it is also bad for the law-abiding individual. This society is basically the Soviet Union under Stalin. Thus, a healthy society that is good to live in, contains a certain level of crime. 

We shame the criminal, but one can learn so much from him also. The criminal is able to be shamed and shunned and not care. It is not caring that law abiding people could use. The criminals need to be less criminal, but the law abiding need to be less virtuous.

Men sacrifice social standing for themselves. Women do the opposite.

The neighbourhood is no different to that of the school or company office or even prison.

Men don't understand stigma and women don't need to understand it. The male suicide rate is five times higher in men than women for precisely what I have just said. So many men don't understand the power of being potentially shunned. Thus, they err and become shunned and take their life. And women on the other hand don't have to worry about it because they are not subject to the same rules.

Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free. - Edward Snowden

We are all sinners. Every single human is not without error and regret. Every single person alive or that has ever existed, has had others that do not like them. This truth consumes some and to counter or compensate for it they try to be polite to everyone. They try to avoid suffering and consequently are subjected to a unique suffering in itself because of this avoidance.

Once you are married with two children, you have essentially wandered past the sociological singularity, if