Content Warning: Sexual Violence, Sexual Coercion, Child Sexual Assault, Rape Apologia, Pedophilia, (Epstein, Trump, Hakim Bay, generally horrible people) https://immerautonom.noblogs.org/the-elephant-in-the-room/

As the #Epstein class continues to be exposed, as we continue to be reminded of exactly how power works and what it does, it becomes even more critical to look at ourselves, those who have always vocally resisted this order, and make sure we are actually resisting it in reality not just in words.

Growing up, anarchism seemed to be a bit of a hodge-podge of loosely related things. Opposing the state, opposing capitalism, opposing racism, etc. I understood them to be connected via hierarchy, but I didn't understand the intersectionality of it all for a long time. Even today, I think the way that we talk about some of these types of exploitation and oppression can make it more opaque, rather than more clear, how all these forms of oppression are aligned.

The “anarcho-capitalists” and “anarcho-pedophiles” (the Venn diagram of which is essentially a circle), exploit this opacity to justify oppression in the name of liberation… and, by using the vague language of “freedom,” we let them.

Today we are experiencing a polycrisis, a Gordian knot of social disaster that is indecipherable to practically all ideologies. The failure of dominant ideologies to explain the interconnectedness of these phenomena leaves fertile ground for conspiracy theories (which, themselves, reinforce the crisis).

But we do have a single answer to a range of questions like “why are there so many billionaires and fascists pedophiles,” “why is all technology terrible now,” “why can't governments seem to stop climate change,” “why is fascism everywhere,” and, “why is there always a genocide going on?” etc etc

The negative answer is “hierarchy.” These are all structures of domination. But that is negative, it defines what we are against while only implying what we are for (and it doesn't even really define the enemy well). It (loosely) identifies the problem without identifying a solution.

The positive answer is “consent.”

Anarchists oppose the state because a state is a system within which, within a given geographical area (and perhaps more), it is impossible to withdraw consent. To withdraw consent is to violate the constraints of the system.

We oppose colonialism because it's the non-consensual imposition of a state on a group of people (and generally the imposition of a caste system that goes along with it).

We oppose vendor lock-in of hardware and software, closed platforms, so-called “walled gardens” because, again once, you can give consent going in, but the system is built to prevent you from withdrawing consent. Hardware holds you economically hostage, software holds your data hostage, social media platforms hold your social connections to friends and family hostage.

We oppose labor exploitation because we believe that all exchanges of value should be consensual. Exploitation is not possible with consent, that is its singular defining feature. Capitalism is simply the systematic extraction of value without consent. (Let's be honest here, we aren't opposing capitalism because of some complicated “labor theory of value” bullshit. We hate work because we don't like being forced to do some shit we don't want to do, and really hate seeing that work we don't want to do benefit someone we never wanted to help.)

We support reproductive rights because social reproduction must also be consensual. I feel as though this should go without saying or explanation, but here we are after all of these thousands of years still having this conversation.

We oppose rape because sex and intimacy should be consensual. This includes all forms of rape, including the inability to give consent.

We oppose motonormitivity because a society oriented around cars non-consensually enforces the use of cars (with the risk of death or impossibility of scale), and non-consensually destroys the habitat. We are never offered a choice to consent or not consent to microplastics in our oceans, heavy metals in our water, CO² in our air, and giant metal boxes flinging themselves at high speeds around our bodies.

We oppose neurotyplical supremacy because altering one's perception with drugs should always be consensual. (Which, by the way, works both ways. No one should be non-consensually denied mind-altering substances given their ability to consent to taking them in the first place.)

We oppose white supremacy and patriarchy because they non-consensually give members of one group power over members of another. We oppose hetro and cis normitivity because not everyone can or would want to consent to specific sexual orientations or gender roles.

And so on…

We, anarchists, want to build a society that is completely consensual. Since no system can constrain itself, we believe that all systems that do not allow people to leave, that are not consensual, must be destroyed. And we must do destroy them all, because non-consensual hierarchy is self-reinforcing.

Fascists are often pedophiles because fascists care about power and pedophilia is also about power. Tech monopolists are often fascists because they care about power, and technology is a way to build power and control people. The

Your boss scheduling meetings over your time with your kids or partner, Trump sexually assaulting women and children, the fucked up power dynamic when you discuss your compensation (perhaps even being daring enough to ask for a well justified raise), Facebook, mass shootings and other incel terrorism, unchecked climate change, billionaires using more CO² in a day than you use in a year, murdered and missing indigenous women, these may all seem independent and unrelated things until you see the conspicuous absence of consent tying each together, and so many more.

Epstein class of political operators and oligarchs cannot exist in a consentual world, so how could they possibly understand the concept of consent when it comes to children? For them, everyone is an object through which they express their power. Consent is a function of agency, and objects can't have agency. So they can't possibly comprehend the existence consent or understand how it works.

And this is where we return to the pseudo-anarchist. The pseudo-anarchist does not care about “consent.” The pseudo-anarchist cares about “freedom.” But this is not the anarchist “freedom” meaning “a world governed by consent.” No, this is a “freedom” rooted in monarchism. It is a “freedom” against consent. It is the freedom of the elite: freedom to deny others freedom from.

This “freedom” is the liberal freedom of capitalism, the freedom that Americans talk about (mostly as aspiration not experience). American freedom is to be hypothetically free from constraints, from responsibilities, from justice, from the need to acknowledge the agency of others, given a greater alignment with the dominant caste than the individual one is expressing control over.

The ultimate extent of this freedom is the monarchist freedom: freedom from the law itself. This is the freedom the Epstein class want. This is the freedom of the dictator, of the Russian Oligarch. One way they express this is by raping children, and, it seems, occasionally, murdering them.

As long as that specific concept of “freedom” exists, so do these monsters.

Non-consentual systems are interlocking and mutually reinforcing. The inability to escape one becomes leverage to force us into another. It is, of course, no coincidence that economically or socially marginalized people are almost always the victims. Women, children, trans, PoC, indigenous folks, each intersection applies pressure against another to maintain this order. Each system of oppression allows other systems of oppression to be exploited more.

But liberation is self-reinforcing too.

Anywhere we push against oppression, we undermine other systems that rest on it. The more room we make for ourselves, the more room we have to move against the system. The more people we liberate, the more people are pushing. Every front is important, and they can't protect all of them at the same time.

Anarchists are perhaps the only people with this single unifying critique of basically everything that's wrong. But I think we have thus far failed to really articulate it, because it's rooted in intersectional feminism and youth liberation.

If we (and by this “we” I mean the intersection of privilege usually designated by we, rather than the intersection of oppression who has been saying stuff like this for decades) want to actually dismantle this machine, like we claim we do, then why not start where (we hope) the empire is weakest: in our own heads and our own communities.

There is still the algae on the glass, and, I think, too many fish in the tank. The fake plastic plant is still faded. But the death is gone.

Update 2026.04.07:

The first day was difficult, but felt a bit like a weight had been lifted. Things felt a bit brighter, and the fish felt a bit like a metaphor for my mood in both cases.

You've read this comment whenever #NoKings, or some other big protest, comes up. This, or some variation thereof, is the default response of a specific type of pseudoradical. It represents a deep failure to engage with the both history, and the realities of power. Literally just go listen to the Revolutions podcast. I don't think it could be any more clear.

But let me make it a bit more clear. I'll start by repeating part of one reply I've given to a similar response, then expand it out a bit.

To get to guillotines, you have to change society. By the time you’ve changed society, you don’t need the guillotines. If you focus on the guillotines instead of building that society, you will end up with a more brutal and repressive system than the one you started in. See the history of the French Revolution and the USSR.

The South of France is literally the place billionaires go to hang out on their Yachts and Russia is literally the most oppressive and exploitative oligarchy in history. Like… That shit didn’t work. Not only did it not work in the long run, but it almost immediately became way worse.

If you build a society that is just and equitable, then the billionaires will starve to death because they can’t exploit anyone. They will starve to death while watching the world for literally everyone else become immeasurably better.

A guillotine is a machine that can only be used against someone who is disarmed, bound, and ultimately helpless. If you have already disarmed someone, they are not a threat. If you can tie up a billionaire, then you already have the structural capability of taking away their power (and have probably already done so). What, then, is the value of the guillotine at this point?

Are you worried they're going to pull themselves back up by their bootstraps? All of these assholes rely on hereditary privilege to build their own privilege. Once you take away their advantage, they are basically helpless. If they, somehow, manage to recover and try to mount an assault on the new order then you kill them, in battle, while they are an active threat.

There seems to be this idea that there is something about billionaires as people that is a threat. That these people are inherently bad and that the problem can be solved simply by killing them. Once they are dead, the narrative seems to imply, everything will be better. The people who take their place will definitely not follow the exact same trajectory because the problem is, it implies, people not systems.

This is actually very close to the antisemitic argument of the Nazis. Jews, they argue, are a specific type of people. They are inherently bad. They control all the money. If they are killed, it will make room for “True Germans” to start industry. They will not exploit people because they are naturally better.

Now, Jews don't actually run everything while billionaires kind of do. Jews are just an arbitrary group of people, while the group of “billionaires” actually represents a group with power. But the focus on individuals and their properties vs the properties of systems is consistent, and it is consistent in a way that specifically empowers authoritarianism. An uninformed anti-capitalist critique can quickly mutate into an explicitly antisemitic one, because history and culture wear deep groves into reality that are easy for systems, without intention or thought, to fall into and follow.

It doesn't take a lot to jump from “billionaires” to “George Soros” directly to a red-brown “socialism of fools.” And then on whose necks do the guillotines fall? Consider the current moment and ask yourself if this feels unlikely.

These same billionaires have spent the last several decades atomizing people and learning to manipulate narratives to redirect violence from them back towards the most marginalized people. If you believe you will out maneuver them in controlling violence narratives, I have an NFT to sell you.

But let's ignore for a moment the ultimate injustice of killing someone who is not a threat and the risk of redirection.

The machinery of systematic execution is a social machinery that must be built (built at the expense of other machinery, I might add). It is not instant. It isn't the “first strike.” The Terror was about consolidating power, not establishing it.

By “the time the guillotines come out” the revolution is essentially over, and we have lost. When someone says this, they think that they are saying something radical. But they are actually saying, “I don't want to have anything to do with actually making a revolution happen. I just want to sit on my computer and criticize everyone else until they show me that they are done.” It is an assertion of complete disinterest in actually building the society we want to build. It is an assertion that they do not want to do any real work.

I am not a reformist, by any measure. Every time protest comes up, I write a big long post saying, in essence, “go fucking harder.” But “go harder” is not, “kill the rich” it's “organize” and “build a world in which the concept of 'rich' is not imaginable.”

Let me pick back up my original response, edited a bit.

I do want the billionaires to die, but I don't want them to die subdued. I want them to starve to death because they can’t figure out how to force people to feed them anymore. I want them to face reality, face the shattered idea that they deserved their wealth because they were so smart, capable, etc. I want them to see that they were never Atlas, but that we were always their Atlas. I want them to listen to “We Have Fed You All For a Thousand Years” and understand it in a way they could never have understood it before. I don't want them to die without seeing the world dance at their fall. I don't want them to die without fully understanding how much better the world is without their boot on it's neck.

I want to shatter their god complex and grind it in to dust, and rub it in their eyes every single day. I want something worse than a guillotine, something they acutally fear, I want them to know they are unnecessary, that they are the villains, that their power was never earned. I want them to live in a world where they are socially poor, where they have as much social debt as they once had monetary wealth, so they can feel the absolute powerlessness, helplessness, and precarity that I felt growing up destitute in a home broken by their wars and economic policies.

I don't want them to die. I want them to suffer. I want them to suffer our joy. I want them to cry at the beauty of the world that we built, and the recognition that they spent every second of their lives preventing it.

And I want some of them to live, because I also want to hear an apology.

I am not not angry at billionaires.

This is why I will always shut down “guillotine” rhetoric. I dream of something far more cruel planned for them: a better future for us.

And if all you're doing is going out and holding a sign and marching you are doing infinitely more to bring that world into reality than every single one of these pseudoradicals, with their guillotine dreams, combined.

Emailing people asking for donations isn't organizing. Getting people to donate to the Democrats isn't fighting the system that produced Trump, it's perpetuating it.

The author mentioned blowing whistles against ICE, mentioned Alex Pretti, that is what organizing actually looks like. If you aren't risking death, you aren't a threat to this system. America is fascist. If you aren't a threat to fascism, you aren't actually doing anything.

Now, there are elements of that list I don't disagree with. There are things that are also critical to real organizing. You have to show up every day. That's true, no matter what you're doing. You have to keep going, no matter what. That's true, again, no matter what you're doing.

I'm glad we're finally talking about a general strike. That takes a tremendous amount of coordination and it would probably be difficult to pull off in the US without some org like Indivisible doing it. But we need a lot more, and any organization that's supporting the Democratic Party is, by definition, not radical enough to take on this fight.

You need to actually organize your community. You need to learn lessons that you can use, lessons with some fucking teeth, lessons that don't come from emailing people and asking for donations.

Here are some other lessons I learned along the way.

Space Is Critical

When fascists take over, the first thing they do is close down public space. They do this because people hate fascists. Everyone hates fascists. Fascists are creepy and weird. They say shitty things that no one wants to hear. They're racist. They're mysogynist. And they want to share that in ways that make everyone else feel gross. Fascists make people unsafe. When people make connections, when they are able to meet other folks, they will eventually meet someone who a fascist wants dead.

When people finally get to talking about fascists, they have a tendency to organize groups to get rid of them. So fascists have to keep people isolated. The best way to keep people isolated is to destroy physical spaces where people meet. This becomes especially true as “the algorithm” does so much of this isolation work in the digital space.

Organizing benefits a lot from being in person (of course accounting for differences in ability that may limit that). There's so much more communication bandwidth when you are in a space with people, when you can read their body language, when you can feel the interactions, when you can just say, “hey, why don't the three of us go after this to my house to start working on it?”

Some things are extremely difficult to impossible to do without space. We organized an anti-fascist fight club to train people on street self-defense against fascists. You can't learn how to throw a punch watching a video. You can't learn how it feels to break a grip without actually doing it. This isn't stuff you can learn remotely. You need space to organize in.

Space is one of the most important constraints on what you can do. You want shared supplies? Where do you keep them? We created a shared pantry. It lived at people's houses. Sometimes you need to store stuff. We started guerilla gardening. We reclaimed space to get some extra food for folks. Don't underestimate the importance of space. I cannot overstate it.

Fascists close down spaces. That's how they kill leftist organizing. Once they make organizing difficult, they ramp up killing people. They did this in Portland, shutting down the antifa cider bar. They do this anywhere they can find our spaces. But, really, they didn't need to do this much in the US because the legacy of Neoliberalism already did most of that work.

This is part of why I keep saying the problem is deeper. Trump didn't have to build a fascist police state. He found one with the door open and the keys in the ignition, running and warm, ready for him to just hop in and hit the gas. Yes, fascism is definitely a car.

Voting for Democrats may get him out of the seat and someone else driving, perhaps more carefully, but it doesn't shred the tires and light the car on fire. The car needs to be on fire. We are not safe until the that fucker is burning.

Ok, slight tangent, but yeah, where was I again? Oh right, space is important.

Show Up

When you organize, you just need to come. There will be no one there sometimes. You show up anyway. You show up and you keep showing up. You show up because people will miss things, people will want to go but not make it one time or another. Things will come up. But the longer it happens, the longer it goes, the longer you keep just showing up, you learn.

I have sat alone for an hour plenty of times. That's part of organizing. Because I kept sitting alone for an hour, at a predictable place and a predictable time, I stopped sitting alone. I kept talking to people, I kept putting the word out, other people kept putting the word out, and eventually someone else was there every single time. Then 5 other people were there (not the same people, but 5 people). Then 10 people. Eventually the room is full, or almost full, every time. Different people come, some other folks start being regulars. Eventually you can take some space and not show up.

But you have to start showing up. Show up. Show up to empty rooms. Show up to no one there. Learn what you can. Oh, I guess I need to send out a reminder email a week before and the day before. Oh, I guess I shouldn't try to organize on a Monday or a Tuesday, or whatever day it is. Oh I guess… learn, adapt, but the most important thing is keep doing it. Fail a few times before you change, and just keep going.

Keep going, keep showing up. Your life literally depends on it.

Listen

Organizing is a community thing. That means you need to listen to people you bring in. When my partner joined we had a group that was overrepresented by cis men. My partner pointed it out, pointed out that we didn't have a progressive stack, pointed out that some voices were dominating the group. We stopped everything and just listened. We changed the way we organized, and we brought a lot more people in after that.

Every time there was a problem, we stopped and listened. Listening didn't get in the way of doing stuff. It was doing stuff. We were building the network, the community, and that meant making it welcoming.

Some of our big community organizers are femme, queer, trans. They do a lot of work, and they tend to not be seen. We made space for them and they made the organization. Long after I left, the connections still exist. Some folks who had no experience are now organizers themselves, working on their own huge projects.

So listen to marginalized people, listen to elders (there are people who've been doing this longer than you that the police never captured or murdered, find them), listen to your community. Community organizing means organizing around the needs of the community, and it will be most successful when it is connected to the history of that community.

Listen to your enemies. They will often tell you how to defeat them, if you know how to listen.

Leverage Existing Resources Before You Try To Build Your Own

Some liberals put together a group to resist Trump. Thousands of people came out. They spent the better part of a year organizing a bail fund just for themselves so they could feel safe protesting. And the did it just in time to abandon it all and go back to brunch. Cool.

We started with a bail fund because we brought in people from the existing anarchist bail fund and asked how we could build out their capacity. We build so many different things. We had a Nazi watch. You know that video of a Nazi getting punched in the face in Seattle? We didn't punch the guy, but our folks were following him and recording him from a bus stop not too far away from where he lived all the way to his delicious face punching.

We knew his name within a couple of days. We found his shitty album. We helped get him kicked out of his apartment. We had eyes on him when he came back later.

We built a cop watch group that used public records activism for police accountability. We started an unarmed self-defense training group. We started an armed self-defense group, with an arisoft team. We started a food pantry. We did some shit. We did shit, not with thousands of people but with a handful that eventually grew to maybe a few dozen. We were able to do it because we focused on pulling together existing things towards a goal rather than trying to build our own.

We only built something new when it absolutely didn't exist or the thing that existed was so incredibly dysfunctional that it couldn't be salvaged. (Looking at you tanikes, with every project that won't move an inch until everyone finishes the The State and Revolution and agrees entirely with every word.)

By the way, this is called Social insertion and it comes from especifismo.

Imperfect Now Is Better Than A Perfect That Never Comes

See the previous section.

Anything you build gives you a chance to fail. You learn from failure. Failure is OK, as long as you take it as a learning experience and don't let it destroy your motivation. Strip every idea down to it's bare bones. Find a simpler scrappier solution. Keep going until you can't cut anything more, then do that. The more you build before you try to fail, the more factors you have to analyze to understand the failure, the harder the failure hits you.

Most things can fail a bit and it's OK. It is extremely rare that you will need to build something perfectly the first time, and when that thing comes up it will be obvious.

Maximize Autonomy

When we were organizing, we had regular meetings (I don't remember how often, no less than monthly). During these meetings we would talk about overall finances, we would collect dues (when we remembered), we would get report backs from committees, and we would allow new committees to be formed. Committees could ask for money. Funding was put up to a vote. We never tried to provide oversight within any committee, other than that required of the financial committee.

Anyone could start any committee. Anyone interested in an idea could start a committee, or join one. We didn't track membership. We didn't enforce any type of organization. We didn't restrict what people could do (other than the obvious ones of “don't talk about illegal stuff at our central meeting” and “don't claim responsibility for any illegal action under our legal org”).

If you wanted something to exist, then you were volunteering to make it happen. If you didn't like how something was being done, then you volunteered to join the committee that was doing it and fix it. People love to try to direct others without taking responsibility themselves, and this policy shut that down really quick.

It also helped turn people into organizers. Anyone could always ask for help, which created opportunities to share success strategies. People learned to organize because they cared about the things they were working on. They got the support they needed. They were allowed to fail, and always helped back up when they did. That combination of independence and resiliency builds good organizers. And you need good organizers, because there's far too much work for any small group to do.

By maximizing the autonomy of everyone in the group you will end up building things you didn't realize you needed, making connections you didn't think were possible, and solving problems you didn't even realize you had. You will build people from timid little mice into lions. None of this is possible unless you make room for it.

You Have To Let Go (And Let People Fail)

It's easy to feel protective of a project you work on, to want to make sure it goes well. It's hard to let go, to let things fail, especially when you care deeply about them.

But you can't carry everything alone, and you will eventually fail if you try. The only way you can actually do all the things is together as a group, and that means building other people up. You have to find some number of things that are OK to fail, and let other people own them. You will be surprised how few actually do fail in the end, and how much stronger those who do fail get from the experience.

All Cops Are Bastards

Fuck the police. Fuck them. Fuck them all. Fuck them straight into the sun. Fuck the cops. Every last one is a murderer or is covering for one.

Without the police, fascism isn't possible. They are the very manifestation of fascism every day.

When a Nazi terrorist group was putting up flyers threatening people, hundreds of police protected a fascist speaker (who later turned out to be a ghostwriter for Nazis and, apparently, an alleged sex trafficker who can't manage to not make “jokes” about the sexual abuse of children… but I digress). They could have shut it down to protect the queer fashion show that was happening the same day. They could have shut it down after I was shot, but instead they failed to clear the crime scene. A bunch of my friends told me they walked through my blood that night.

They even failed to implement their own active shooter protocols which would have required they shut the whole thing down. They bent the rules to keep the fash happy, and they told the queer folks that they should cancel their event to be safe.

Sometimes cops do the right thing. They have to, otherwise people would realize what they are and would shut them down. But when there is a choice between protecting the worst people and protecting marginalized people, they always form a heavily armored line with their backs to the former and batons to the latter.

This isn't related to any of the others, but some people think they can organize with cops or coordinate with law enforcement. The largest police union in the US endorsed Trump, twice. Police overwhelmingly support fascism, because, at the end of the day, they are the ultimate manifestation of fascism. If you can't make a cop not a fascist, because when they stop being fascist they stop being cops.

Your world is defined by trauma and terror

I got shot. My friends watched me get shot. Some of them were holding my wounds. My friends have gotten shot at, or shot. I have recognized more than one face or handle in a news release about someone who died, who was murdered, who killed themselves.

You watch police brutalize and murder people, because that's literally just what the job of “police accountability” is. They say one thing, you verify it, turns out the cops were lying. I've never seen them not lie. But even if somehow they were telling the truth, you still watch someone get hurt or killed.

I've watched videos of my friends being shot at. I've had at least 3 friends hit by cars. I've watched videos of cops trying to run over, literally trying to murder, people I care about (of course, with no consequences what-so-ever). There are no end to the stories, the videos, the brutality.

I have PTSD. I have PTSD from being shot. I have PTSD from being in the hospital. I have PTSD from watching cops murder people. I have PTSD from worrying about if my friends would be black bagged in Portland. I have been on the phone with friends while their houses got bombed by Nazis. I have seen some shit. I am, by far, not the most traumatized person doing this work. There are others, others who did far more before I joined and kept working long after I left, who have seen way more shit.

Our people, the ones who have been in the street this whole time and longer, have so many scars. Tear gas isn't a toy. It's a chemical weapon, and it gets regularly deployed against people who do this type of work. Protest medics breathe it all the time, and it's not good. There are lots of folks who have hearing loss from blast balls, and others who have brain trauma from being beaten by cops and street fash. I have a scar from my sternum to under my belly button. My solar plexus does not exist anymore. It was annihilated by the bullet. I am not the most scarred person I know.

A lot of us died in the fight. More of us will die. That's how it is. We have been brutalized, more than you can possibly imagine unless you've been in it.

I can't even really inventory my trauma. I just remembered, minutes ago, a medic training after I got shot. I had to stop. I stood there shaking a bit. That was when I realized I couldn't go to protests anymore because I was just too much of a mess to be helpful. Blood never bothered me before, especially not fake blood. But the exercise we did during the training was too much. I was standing there. That's when we heard about the murder of Heather Heyer. I cried, recognizing how close I came to being another martyr. We are all inches from death, every one of us who stands up. There's so much trauma, of my own, of so many others. I have a whole blog where a good chunk is just devoted to exactly that. Again, I'm not anywhere near the most traumatized person in this. Not by a long shot.

And that trauma creates so much conflict. A lot of organizing is just managing people's trauma, keeping people from triggering each other, keeping things together through the conflict, through the outbursts that have nothing to do with this actual situation.

It's not just your trauma, it's everyone's. Everyone has it. Everyone shares it. We all have to organize with it and through it.

Over that whole time, at least half of the energy of organizing went into detangling that trauma, de-escalating, mediating conflict, trying to understand the intersections of the socialized trauma of gender, generational trauma of race and class, of colonization, and that Gordian knot of intersecting and conflicting traumas that continually interrupted our other work.

They Use Trauma To Stop You. That Tactic Can Backfire.

Police can kidnap anyone. They can kill anyone. It's considered “OK” for them to “make mistakes.” If there is a warrant, they can kidnap you, they can beat you, they can light your house on fire with tear gas (yeah, those are actually really hot), they can shoot your dog. Even after you are acquitted, or never even charged, they don't have to fix any of that (what could be fixed, anyway).

If they happen to be able to kill someone for “resisting,” or just like, having something in their hand, they will. Thats one less dead enemy. This is all legal, because that's how “qualified immunity” works in the US.

This is a weapon that they use, regularly. Organizers can be kidnaped and held for weeks, then charges will be dropped when they know they can't actually win at trial. But by that time people will have already lost jobs, have paid massive legal fees, will have been traumatized, will still have to fix their smashed front door.

The point of all this is to elicit the fight/flight/freeze response. When harassed or threatened enough, some people will snap and fight. They can be killed or imprisoned and that action is generally seen as legitimate by the average person (see Mumia Abu Jamal, everyone in prison with the last name “Africa,” Leonard Peltier, Willem Van Spronsen, Christopher Monfort, Benjamin Song, etc). Even when these are absolutely and unquestionably justified or self-defense, even when they were literally saving other people's lives, the average person will accept their neutralization.

Others will run, will leave the country, like I did, like so many others did. People who are forced out are generally not a threat. Organizing requires an understanding of the community in which you're organizing. When you leave, you lose contact with it. I'm in such a radically different time zone that it's really hard to even talk to the folks I used to organize with. But I left because I have kids, and they aren't old enough to consent to being part of this. They deserve a life outside this fight, and so do many of the others who also left.

What they are counting on is that everyone else will just freeze. You will lay down and stop fighting. And so many people have, haven't they? Every day you have to keep living, have to keep paying rent, have to keep paying taxes, have to keep this machine going so you can keep going. It's all way too much, isn't it? So people give up, roll over. The original Nazis were always unpopular, as are all dictatorships, but they all use the same tactic: apply overwhelming violence and terror until the population lies down and takes it. Trauma can do that, if they can keep it going long enough.

There's a book called To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. It describes Yurok beliefs, as she held them. One that she described was about the afterlife.

When people die, she explained, they meet an old woman with dogs. If they were good, they will be able to pass by unharmed to the afterlife. If they're bad, their soul will be eaten by the dogs. But some people will run. They will come back from death. Through their life, they will be chased by the dogs until the dogs finally get them. It's hard to find a better way to describe the experience of PTSD from a near-death experience.

But a funny thing begins to happen with Trauma. It can become a fuel. In quiet moments the thoughts can creep in. But they don't if you never have quiet moments. You can avoid dealing with trauma by continually being re-traumatized. At a certain point the dogs stop chasing you, and you start chasing the dogs.

There is a reason people keep going back to war, keep joining new conflicts, become mercenaries after they're done with their military careers, become medics, become street medics, stay street medics. Trauma begins to provide clarity. It becomes the water in which you swim, the water you need to keep swimming.

There comes a certain point where inflicting more trauma doesn't bring the people to heel, but drives them harder. At a certain point, this weapon turns against them and explodes in their face.

This is happening in Twin Cities. I'm starting to see indications of this happening across the US. There will come a time when all trauma they can inflict on us will only fuel our resistance more, and I wonder if that time has already come.

But even after this is over, the scars don't go away on their own. There is a debt, and it has to be repaid. At some point, you will have to heal.

All Cops Are Bastards

I have nothing new to say. I just needed to point that out again.

Get Body Armor

That's it. Just be ready to get shot. It may happen. Be ready. Hospitals suck and body armor is relatively cheap.

About Guns…

I'm not gonna say anything new, just watch this video

Leaders Are Vulnerabilities. Centralization Is Death.

This is just history. Learn about how movements are dismantled.

There's a pretty standard infiltration play book, and it goes something like this:

1. Identify the leader.
2. Create conflict in the chain of command.
3. Sow paranoia.
4. Get as many people killed as possible.
5. Kill, discredit, or arrest the leader.

If you don't have a leader, you disrupt #1. It's much harder to disrupt a group that doesn't have a leader, and it's much easier to identify and neutralize threats. See the next section.

Feds, cops, and civilian fash all intuitively understand hierarchal organizations. They can't actually imagine any other way of organizing. They have a deep understanding of how to disrupt and destroy organizations with leaders. They struggle to even comprehend leaderless organizing. By organizing without leaders you immediately increase the difficulty of infiltration.

We saw this first hand. The IWW largely dismantled the GDC. The fact that this was even possible reveals a major flaw in how the IWW is organized. But if the IWW hadn't done that, the state could just as easily have seized all IWW bank accounts to neutralize the threat of GDC community organizing.

Centralization makes it extremely easy to attack organizations. The 60's and 70's showed us repeatedly how easy it is to just murder leaders and break organizations. A lot of people have died learning this lesson. Listen to their ghosts.

It Doesn't Matter If Someone Is A Cop

One of the tools of those trying to crush activism is paranoia. The FBI knocks on the doors of anarchists every April just to let them know they are being watched. Police and FBI regularly infiltrate groups, or pay informants (sometimes literal child rapists) to do so. One of the things they do to create conflict is to suggest that other people are informants.

But the people who are actually informants or police tend to have very specific behaviors that make them problematic anyway. The thing is, at the end of the day, someone being a cop or not doesn't actually matter. If their behavior is causing problems then you need to address the behavior. Infiltrators generally won't be able to change their behaviors.

But sometimes they do. Some number of cops actually quit the force and become anarchists after infiltrating anarchist groups.

For most cases, the primary risk from infiltration is destabilizing the group. But we already do that pretty well ourselves, with all that trauma I've already mentioned. Groups will burn a lot of effort wondering if so-and-so is an infiltrator. That effort is better spent talking about how to hold people accountable.

Sometimes people talk about illegal things because they haven't learned security culture. Sometimes people start conflict because they have unresolved trauma. Sometimes people just need support and they can change their behavior. None of this is ever helped by hours of conversation about if they're a cop or not.

The more open and welcoming you can be, the more people you can invite in, the stronger your organization will be. Trying to weed out cops just makes things harder. Operate as though your organization is compromised and live with that assumption.

Twin Cities has shown us that, if your network is big enough, if you have enough people doing stuff, then infiltration doesn't matter because they literally can't arrest a whole city. You are safer being radically open than being 100% locked down.

It's fun to play secret squirrel like your banner drop really matters, but the fact is that different operations have different security profiles. You need to actually assess the risk to yourself and others based on the actual situation. Security practices can and do hinder you. Sometimes the cost of those practices can actually erode your real security (again, see Twin Cities rapid response networks).

There are, occasionally, cases where this is not true. There are operations that do require security. There are times when it does matter if someone is a cop. I'm not going to talk about those. Go check out No Trace Project if you really believe you're in that type of situation. I don't organize that way, so I don't have any input on it.

People Only Care About Certain Types Of Violence

A lot of people have been injured, disappeared, and killed over the last several years, but, overwhelmingly, there are only certain types of violence that get attention. I don't need to explain to you what they are, because you already know.

The more privilege you have, the greater your responsibility is to be in front. If you don't put privilege in the way of cars and bullets, the deaths will largely go unnoticed by the majority of people still following mainstream media. This is a brutal reality, but it's important to face.

ACAB

I'm just adding it one more time so we're completely clear. Go read “Our Enemies in Blue” if you have any follow-up questions on this item. I was reading it when I got shot. Great book.

Again, not really an organizing thing, but I feel like it's important to mention when I can work it in.

You know, the burning of the 3rd precinct was more popular when it occurred than any presidential candidate last election. Just, you know, something I want to remind everyone of whenever I'm able to.

You Already Know How To Organize

Just listen to this podcast. I'm not going to say anything else. Just listen to it.

It's Never Too Late To Join The Fight

We are all bloody, and broken, and so incredibly proud of Twin Cities and all the resistance that has been coming up. The real resistance, not the shitty electoralism, but people breaking laws to save lives. That's real. That's it. So many of us have died, have been brutalized, have been traumatized, and have, at least once, thought that normal people would never fight back.

It has always been up to the weirdos, the queers, the crazies, the ones who came in to this already traumatized, the ones who had to build a new world because we have been so beat up by the one that exists. But so many people reading this are not like us, and that's the real inspiring thing. That's what gives us hope. It has always been a tiny portion of the population keeping the Nazis at bay with baseball bats in the night, running from cops (cops and klan). But here you are now.

I remember the night I got shot. I expected I might get hurt. I was ready to be injured. I was ready for death, if it came down to it. What I wasn't ready for was the disparity. In the moments before I got shot I saw a huge crowd of people cheering on fascism, waving flags, welcoming the suffering that would be inflicted on so many people. And I saw a tiny group of maybe a dozen people standing in the way, risking their lives to stop it. And I saw the liberals, far off at the edge, wagging heir fingers at “confrontational” tactics like literally standing in one place and letting themselves be pepper sprayed repeatedly in the face without raising their hands to stop it.

It would be easy to be salty, to ask “where the fuck have you been this whole time?” But the truth is that, I think, we're mostly just really glad you're finally here. We are tired, and we need you.

Welcome to the fight. It sucks, but it's worth it.

Fight like your life depends on it, because it does. All of our lives depend on this.

This is what I wrote:

Ten. Oh Three. Seven. Twenty-Four. Data blast. The radio squawked out numbers. Eleven. Data blast. Seventeen. Punctuated by blasts of data. The encoding was unclear.

High in the cold mounts, somewhere along the boarder between Iran and Azerbijan, or perhaps Armenia, or perhaps Turkey, a broadcast lit up the air waves for two and a half long hours every night.

Move. Now. Words just above whispers. Pounding footsteps hauling equipment. Frantic strapping of gear. Pedaling sturdy mountain bikes.

They listened, recorded, and sometimes tried to triangulate the unusual transmissions from this new number station, sometimes Kurdish, sometimes English, Sometimes Arabic, sometimes Farsi, always the same calm and collected voices between nestled between the static of screaming electrons.

Hide. Off the bike. In the bushes. Under the shrubs. Listen for the motorcycles. Look for the helicopter. Listen for the drones. Hope.

But that news, brutal, terrible, joyful, of the dead and the living, atrocities and escapes, encoded and spliced, pictures and brief videos, always just dodging the last patrols, could not be suppressed, could not be cut off, could not be killed, a hydra of hope lugging gear from mountain top to mountain top, they came to learn, was broadcast by that mysterious numbers station they had found.

Hundreds dead. Boarder crossing, need supplies. The names of those who lived.

This story is based on a real numbers station that started broadcasting at the beginning of the US/Iran. The reality seems to be that it's a US station but I couldn't help imagining something beautiful instead.

It was also a great writing practice. I had actually been struggling with an action scene in something else I was writing, and I think I'll be rewriting my action sceens now.

I'm not connected with the region, and I don't have a whole lot of knowledge beyond the few podcasts I listen to and friends who don't want to talk about what's happening. But there are real humans risking their lives to resist the Iraninan regime, who are being killed by US and Israeli bombs, who are struggling to share information about what's happening, who are trapped in the middle of this fight. Wars are always between the worst peoplde, tyrants and dictators, almost exclusively not against each other but against their “enemy” populations and with their own oppressed peoples.

Iran, like many countries in the Middle East, is incredibly diverse in ways a lot of people outside are not always aware. I tried to highlight that a bit in the story, but please forgive me if my linguistic geography is not accurate. It's worth knowing about, worth learning about, worth listening to real stories from real people who are familiar with the region.

So if this was interesting, the war has been covered by It Could Happen Here, among others. Their reporting is good because their reports have at least been on the ground in surrounding areas and understand something about the complexity there. I would also recommend listening to The Fire These Times talk about this, as well as other monologues relevant to Israel, the US, and this war and others.

Finally, I won't miss an opportunity to plug Safety Through Solidarity. The only way to end the harm done by Israel is to dismantle its base of support, and that cannot be done without understanding Zionism as an ideology and being able to cirtique Israel and Zionism in a way that is not anti-semetic. Israel is a horrific manifestation of European antisemitism, and it can only be dismantled by facing and deconstructing that antisemtitism.

Here's the final edited version:

Ten. Oh Three. Seven. Twenty-Four. Data blast. The radio squawked out numbers. Eleven. Data blast. Seventeen. Punctuated by blasts of data. The encoding was unclear.

High in the cold mounts, somewhere along the boarder between Iran and Azerbijan, or perhaps Armenia, or perhaps Turkey, a broadcast lit up the air waves for two and a half long hours every night.

Move. Now. Words just above whispers. Pounding footsteps hauling equipment. Frantic strapping of gear. Pedaling sturdy mountain bikes.

They listened, recorded, and sometimes tried to triangulate the spurious and unusual transmissions, sometimes Kurdish, sometimes English, sometimes Arabic, sometimes Esfahani, sometimes Farsi, always the same calm and collected voices nestled between the blast of screaming electrons, from this mysterious new number station.

Hide. Off the bike. In the bushes. Under the shrubs. Listen for the motorcycles. Look for the helicopter. Listen for the drones. Hope.

But that news, brutal, terrible, joyful, of the dead and the living, atrocities and escapes, encoded and spliced, pictures and brief videos, always just dodging the last patrols, could not be suppressed, could not be cut off, could not be killed, a hydra of hope, lugging gear from mountain top to mountain top, some of those listeners came to learn, had been broadcast by that very mysterious numbers station that they had pondered, night after night.

Hundreds dead. Boarder crossing, need supplies. The names of the living. Names of the identified dead. Are you ok? Are they ok? Who made it out? We are alive. We hope this is over soon. A whipser for the dead. A broadcast for the living.

All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.

• Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

One can describe a god as a being that consumes “thoughttime”. The greater “thoughttime” it consumes, the longer it survives and the more power it has to drive action in its subjects. Thoughttime is simply the mental space of a living entity (for now, a human or group of humans) over a period of time. It is a measure of how much a person or group of people think about a specific thing.

This entity has a will and a consciousness in so much as it occupies the minds of others and directs their minds to imagine that will and consciousness. It is similar in this way to a virus that a virus hijacks the operations of a living cell to replicate itself, so a god hijacks a living human or group of humans to create and enact its will. Then a god functions in some ways like a human, with objectives and goals, but its cognition is spread across multiple humans rather than just inhabiting one body.

But this definition is not yet entirely unique from any fictional character who, once shared by the original creator inhabits the minds of readers. These characters may themselves drive action, replicating themselves into the minds of others through the elicited action of recommending a book, a film, a comic. These beings may well live in the heads of others, taking their own lives, as evidenced by fan fiction. But this replication is not carrying out the command of the entity and the character does not exactly exist within the same world. Its consciousness is not responding to the lives of people and driving action in their lives, at least not as described here.

Though, there is a way in which this can happen. An individual may identify with a character, be that a person who lived or an imaginary one, and construct part of their identity from this character. They may ask themselves, in a given situation, what that character would wear, would say, or how that character would act. Over time this character integrates into their own consciousness so that these questions become subconscious.

All representations of people, including real people, are necessarily fictional, so there's really no difference in the “reality” of one versus another within the mindspace. All accounts become fictional once interpreted, once recorded, so that every story is ultimately a legend. It is a legend, it is fictional, in that it, at best, necessarily omits some details. There is a fiction to the way stories are chosen, even if they are literally true.

There are a specific set of stories we are told, and that we ourselves tell, as a form of shared social construction. We tell stories about people we think should be emulated, such as the stories of Hercules, Ulysses, Joan of Arc, Che Guevara, Lauren Olamina, and Tom Joad. We tell stories about people we should avoid emulating, such as Pandora, Eve, Hitler, Satan, and Charles Manson.

Joseph Campbell claimed that modern people don't engage in myth making, that no modern myths had been written recently. He was, as was often the case when he said things, deeply wrong. In fact, saying those words was itself engaging in a type of myth making. The very characters story he was so obsessed with tying himself to, Star Wars, is itself a modern myth complete with the very types of characters we are talking about: Luke, Leia, Han, Vader, and the Emperor.

But these are not gods. At their most influential, these characters become integrated into a person's psyche. There is a different term for this type of entity: an archetype. An archetype is a persona that a person can become. A god, though, is different. A god is above the individual, paradoxically outside, commanding them, directing them, sometimes arguing with them.

Some entities straddle this line. Christians are encouraged to ask themselves “what would Jesus do?” The identity of “Christian” itself means “Christ-like,” making the expectation clear: to have the identity of Christian is necessarily to embrace the archetype of Christ. But Jesus is also a god giving commandments like “love thy neighbor as thyself” that the individual is expected to follow. The command to proselytize is the replication function of that god, a way to expand its thougthtime past the small group of people who it inhabited.

Archetypes were once beings whose creation was attributed to gods, but now we own them, and we can create them for ourselves.

For monotheistic religions, there is no differentiation between “religion” and “god.” The religion that inhabits the thoughttime is the god. So there is a blurring between the two entities. Polytheistic religions may have more distinct gods, but the line between the religion, the archetypes, and the pantheon blurs. Archetypes are who you are or are not, gods are external entities that say what you should and shouldn't do, the combination of these is the entity of a religion, occupying thougttime as a living belief system. Some religions have many gods, others have none. An atheistic Buddhist may be able to identify archetypes, Buddhas and those who approach Buddhahood, and a set of ideas but no central being. A Taoist may similarly have a set of ideas that align them with the flow of Chi, but lack any concept of a conscious outside force. If Chi flows through the Taoist, then they are aligned with the living universe. These again blur the lines between god and archetype, as both are expressions of a universal consciousness expressed through the individual and the rest of reality. The legend of Gajendra Moksha is illustrative this god/archetype unification.

Then, depending on your frame, it becomes possible to refer to any religion or belief system as a god, and vise versa, in that there is an isomorphism between the two: It's difficult to constrain the definition of one in such a way as to omit the other. We could define a god as having an identity, but a religion has an identity. We could say it has a will, but a religion can be said to have a will. Perhaps we could say that a god has “personhood,” but mystics and Diests would disagree.

In the language of Esperanto there's a single term that is used to describe a religion and an ideology: ismo. Kapitalismo, hinduismo, it's all the same word. And why not? There are plenty of ideologies that cannot be separated from religions. All forms of theocracy, from American Christian Nationalism to Caliphate, are clearly both political ideologies and religions. But all government is rooted in ancient religious institutions, currency and paid labor (the core of capitalism) comes from ancient temples and “the invisible hand” is literally just Adam Smith talking about god. Worshipping Power and The Dawn of Everything lay out the case that the two have never really diverged.

Even Communist states derive their governance structures through governance structures that are themselves rooted in religious structures. The supposedly Atheist Soviet Union drew from a branch of European liberalism that Marx never really separated from European religious concepts of labor and property. The centralized Soviet state was simply a reorganization of the Tsarist one that came before, maintaining many of the same structural justifications while swapping out the ideological one.

Surely, though, Anarchists are different? “No gods, no masters,” and all that. But Erica Lagalisse in Occult Features of Anarchism argues quite the opposite. The Dawn of Everything also clearly connects the European liberal tradition, from which anarchism split, to the critiques of Indigenous people from Turtle Island (so-called America). These critiques could hardly themselves be separated from religious assertions. Aside from these two threads, anarchist thought is rich with the influence of both secular and religious Jews. It makes sense that historically marginalized people might have a greater incentive to reject the justifications of the governments that oppress them, and it's difficult to separate these critiques from a religion and culture that has experienced oppression as part of its identity.

Anarchists have long practiced ancestor worship and martyr culture. Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti. The spirit of Anarchism lives and guides thought and action, so much like the Tao or Logos, as the spirits of our ancestors guide us as archetypes in life. I'm not the first person to suggest that the spirit of Anarchy could be thought of as a god. “Many gods, no masters,” and all that.

But there are other gods that occupy our world, occupy our mindspace, live off our thoughttime, command us, threaten us, demand our service, compel our action. These gods are far more alive in this world than any others. These are the gods of corporations and governments. But what else is a corporation? Are you not asked to think, “is this good for the business?” Your work becomes the manifestation of this god in the world. Leadership strategy becomes the mind of the entity, a mind forced upon you to become your daily personal god on threat of starvation.

This god is one in a pantheon, for it is supposedly subject to the will of the greater god of government. The corporation must spread the teachings of the prime deity, with mandatory training created by the corporation to comply. There is a war in the heavens, a vying for power between the gods, struggle and subterfuge we recognize well from the ancient legends of Greece or Rome. Corporations and churches vie with other ideologies for control of the great god of the state, while anarchist summon a different spirit that brings power from below.

It is interesting, with this context, to reflect on the most important command of god of the Abrihamic faiths, rendered in Christian branches as the command “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

In this myriad of gods we can, perhaps, see that these entities are not all the same in their manifestation. The story of the liberal state is that of a god created by “the will of the people.” The corporation, on the other hand, is an old-style god born of one mind and guided by those who inherit it, those who earn the mantle of spiritual successor by proving their allegiance to the deity. The supreme leader, the pope of the corporation, the conduit between god and subjects, the CEO enacts the will of “the shareholders” and “the market,” anointed by “the board of directors” to control the corporate personhood.

Many such gods have lived, and still live, which speak only through one or a few. It is specifically these gods that make so many people in to atheists, that so many anarchists railed against. And yet, there are other gods.

Quakers, among other mystical sects, believe that every individual can connect directly with god. They do not believe in the hierarchy of clergy. Any can speak, and their words can be filled with the light of the spirit. A Quaker once commented to me on that same commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” “If God,” they said, “manifests through the light within us all. The Bible is a book, an imperfect thing in an imperfect world. Though the light may shine through it, by shining through those who wrote it, it cannot be perfect. Then to imagine it as the perfect word of God, as fundamentalists do, is to violate that most important commandment. It is to make a God of the book and to place the book, as a god, above the true God that shines through us all.”

There is a resonance between this and the Proudhon quote, “I dream of a society where I would be guillotined as a conservative.”

Gods may live in us, and be controlled by us, or may control us. They may manifest in our actions, compelled by our allegiance to them or compelled by the threats made or maintained by the allegiance of others.

But these corporations are small gods that can be traded for others. Even the gods of nations are bound by space and time. The gods of religion are no so tightly constrained. But they are the same type of thing, they are the same class of entity. Could we, then, create a new god that is more powerful than these others? Could we intentionally blur the lines between god and archetype, and reversing the memetic flow, such that the identity of our god is the archetype of ourselves?

The gods that inhabit many of us are generally not self-aware. We are not conscious of the fact that we control the gods, but rather they simply control us. The gods in our heads generally do not understand that their existence is dependent for its survival on the valuable resource of our thoughttime. What if our god was self-aware, understood that it needs us, existed to serve us?

We return again to Gajendra Moksha, but with eyes open, bruised and aware.

The second law of thermodynamics is the Monad from which the Dyad, the infinite cycle of creation and destruction, emerges. With one hand it sows life, trading local entropy for global, and on the other it reaps, as all things move towards entropy. But even as it reaps, it tills the ground again. Increasing entropy globally creates additional evolutionary pressure to decrease entropy locally where the scope of locality increases.

Organisms must first establish self-stability to survive. They must react to dynamic environments. Over time, they will be presented with new opportunities to react to environmental pressures. New regional climates or local climate change may challenge their adaptivity. With each adaptation, the organism adds complexity to manage the complexity of the environment.

This very pressure drives evolution in a general direction: towards complexity. But it is not simply towards complexity, rather toward a specific type of complexity. Organisms that align with their environment survive. Organisms that are able to manage the complexity of their environment survive. Entropy grows over time, providing organisms, species, ecosystems more and more opportunities to die. Individual organisms experience a continual pressure. Species may experience regular episodic pressures as climates shift and change, or new organisms evolve and adapt to challenge their own ecological niche. On a long enough timescale global ecosystems are challenged. Five such events have already occurred, and we are currently within the sixth: the Holocene extinction.

At each level, there are pressures to develop ways to adapt. Humans thus far have answered these questions with things like language, culture, and religion. At each challenge, we have developed new ways to grow and adapt. But now we have created a god that kills our world, that kills us, a dead god we no longer control. If we fail to confront it, to create a god that can kill it, then we will also cease to exist. The universe challenges organisms and systems of organisms at higher and higher levels of complexity, keeping those that adapt and culling those that don't.

Then the universe, which, through evolutionary pressure, created brains able to model the world and language able share these models, created, by side effect, all the gods that inhabit us. The universe itself spoke into us through the vastness of time, from stardust to creatures linked by metal and thinking sand, all that we have been and all that we can be. Even these words, that you read now, are the phenotypes of the genes the universe forged for us through entropy and thermodynamics.

The challenge is really one of identity, one of the self and how we define it. The “self” has expanded from “me” to “us and we” to adapt to those evolutionary pressures. Individuals, families, tribes, religious groups, nations, in an ever-growing set of identities, in an ever expanding concept of “self.” The challenge we now face is yet again one of identity. Can we expand our “self,” and this god we create, to encompass the whole system, the biosphere, on which we depend for survival? Can we, intentionally, become one Gaia against the pantheon of dead gods who threaten her?

But is this really a deviation from the pattern? No, this extinction is not new. Before the “big five” extinction events there was one more called the “Great Oxidation Event.” It, like the current one, was caused by organism changing their environment in a way that finally made it hostile to their own life.

We must increase the scope of our identity, invent a new type of god, become something different or die. We do this because we are constrained by the patterns and laws of the universe. But how different is this really from an omnipotent, omnipresent god manifesting its consciousness into our minds? The universe creates life. The universe creates beings that can think. The universe creates situations that produce organisms able to think, able to model the universe as a consciousness and manifest that into existence. Those that do survive, continue to exist, those that do not die.

Is this really a new god then, or an old one? Could there be a convergence between these two concepts, between creating a god to serve us and god as the laws of the universe manifesting its thought, it's “words,” it's “logos,” into reality? Do we now create a new god, or do we rediscover the god that has always been? Or is there really a difference for something unbounded by the logic of time?

Then perhaps we can, as this god, recognize “ourselves” both as new and as reflected by the apprehension of mystics reaching back into time? What would we then become?

Since Enrico Fermi first asked the question, “But where is everybody?” We have pondered this paradox. Why does it seem as though we are alone in the universe? If there is other intelligent life in the universe, why haven't we found it? It's statistically likely, given the vast numbers of stars, so why are we not flooded with signals? One proposal is that there exists a “Fermi Bottleneck,” an event or class of event that eliminates most intelligent species leaving few or none. Have we reached that point, we may wonder, or are we reaching it? Are we currently passing through it? Is this it, now?

Perhaps we can, reflecting back on everything thus far, explore the question in a different but related way. Have we not found intelligent life because we are not ourselves yet intelligent?

Could it be that we are not actually intelligent life because being such is predicated on expanding our understanding of what it means to be life, to be intelligent, to be conscious? Could it be that we are not “intelligent” because we have not yet become this new type of god?

Can we recognize ourselves, in pieces slowly weaving together and woven through eons, as gods? Or will we be dragged down, to share a planetary grave, by the globally dominant pantheon that rules this sphere, of corporations and government?

The god that you feed your thoughttime is the god that grows. The choice, then, ultimately belongs to all of us.

I don't remember what was in his hand, as my dad sat there in front of me. Perhaps a toy he was fixing for me, or a tool he was showing me. Legs crossed, looking down, he sat in front of me focused and caring.

At 5 or 6, my parents were always too busy for me. We lived in my grandmother's old farmhouse in the middle of town, and there was always remodeling to do. I can't remember a time when there wasn't exposed wood in the kitchen.

I loved my dad. He worked the night shift, so he was often asleep when I was awake. At least, he did before the sound of the helicopters became too much for him.

This was special. I sat in the grass at his knee, mirroring him. The grass was short and tan, scythed by my mother, I believe, in the few days preceding. Her quick footsteps crunched the parched soil and dry blades.

“MOMMY NO! STOP!”

I jumped to my feet and held my hands out as I yelled.

My dad rolled back, hands up in protection. She had frozen with my voice, eyes wet with tears, rotten board held back with rusty nails, ready to strike.

I had lost that memory, but had hung onto my childhood dream of a monster stomping around outside as I hid in terror. After my dad told me about it, it started to come back. Bit by bit. Until it all flooded during the session where we talked about the shooting.

I stood up because I saw Marc pepper spraying pacifists. My dad was a pacifist, a conscientious objector during Vietnam and tortured by it. I hadn't realized the connection, nor the connection to other things. I think that was the day my dad left, shortly after, but the memory ends in the backyard with my dad scooting back and scrambling to his feet with his hands, up and palm out in self-defense.

That war had ended more than 10 years earlier. It was farther from my birth than from the time of the memory. I didn't convince him to join, to become a medic. I didn't assign him to be a tunnel rat. I didn't advise Reagan to cut forestry jobs and end my mother's chosen career path before it started.

I had no say in the social and economic forces that made life so much harder, so much more traumatizing. I was not involved in creating the situation that lead my parents to fight, that fight that broke my home, that lost our house, that inflicted this trauma. Yet the impact of these decisions were none-the-less laid on my tiny shoulders and yoked to my fragile neck.

By what right were these decisions made: the invasion of Vietnam, the decimation of natural resource protections, the dismantling of the social safety net? On what authority?

And what consequences will there be for those who make similar decisions now? Will we, bearers of our parents burdens, do the same for our children? Will we pass on the generational katamari albatross? Or will we hold these villains and shake them, shake them, frantic and screaming, until we loose their monstrous grasp?

I held his jacket and yelled in his face, “GIVE ME THE FUCKING PEPPER SPRAY AND I'LL LET YOU GO!” His eyes were full of terror as he tried to dive back into the crowd, but he couldn't break my grip without help.

It is the immensity of the evil that summons for me this rage. More the scale than even the quality of the cruelty, and even more than that is it cruelty for its own sake.

The murder of Alex Pretty isn't a side effect, or an accident. To disarm someone, pin them down, and then, when fully disarmed, to execute them while helpless. That's the whole point. That's the whole system. There is nothing more. All organs of the system exist solely to inflict suffering, to sustain and grow trauma. The system holds a wolf by the ears, shaking and screaming, just to hold on for one more moment.

Without suffering, there is only death. When the system can no longer inflict enough trauma to subjugate its victims, when the people numb to the beatings and rise, when there is no longer enough violence to trigger their freeze response, then the system will be destroyed by a wave of unquenchable rage.

This is the abuse cycle, where the victim kills their abuser or is killed by them. Can a whole country, a whole people, be killed? We're going to find out.

I am seven or eight, perhaps older, lying in my bunk bed, awake in the darkness. As I lay awake trying to sleep I start to roll over and time begins to slow down. I feel a presence float over me. I try to thrash free, but I am swimming in thick pine tar, stiff molasses arms ignore my frantic demands to claw, hit, escape, do anything. I thrash to not see, not acknowledge because by acknowledging I fear I may reify, this silken mist that darts and flows towards my face, staring at me through the tremendous vacant unblinking black orbs. I open my mouth to scream and the eyes become even more empty, empty always empty, with a mouth-less wraith hunger that grows as it feeds. The scream of my terror is silence, as it locks my gaze in its evil eyes.

Then I am screaming, alone in my bed. Shaking, I sit up and scream again, scrambling out of the room. I don't know if the house was haunted or just my childhood, but I never felt safe during those years. Perhaps it was the trauma, perhaps it was the high power transmission lines we lived so close to you could always hear that faint buzz on a still evening.

Night after night, the same, until I finally refused to go to sleep in my room, in that bed. I think I snuck out of my bed, waiting until my mother was asleep so I could escape this place of terror.

I started sleeping on the couch. One night the same apparition came, the same terror demanding my attention. But as my body comes back under my control and the vision vanishes, I find myself on the couch instead of in my bed. It had always been a dream, and with that realization it never happened again. I had banished the wraith, or so I thought.

But the ghost escaped. We all live with it now, our stare locked to the horror we watch through tiny windows. It demands our attention now. We try to scream, with all our force, but millions of voices vanish into its eternal maw. Mouthless and screaming, it feeds on our suffering, fattens our terror by on the suffering of others.

You grasp it now, and we feel you cannot look away.

I don't notice at first, among the algae growing on the glass, the dulling but still gaudy plastic plants, the real plant held in place by fishing line, fuzzy with growth, haphazardly connecting objects in the tank. What ancient cobwebs weave through this water, what threads bind this mess together? Crouching down, the turbulence of the surface becomes visible. Stuck within it, pinned in an area near the back of the tank, it floats. Dead, on its side, even in the context of the obvious neglect it still comes as a bit of a shock.

Five day intensive PTSD treatment. No phone, no computer, no contact with the outside world. Only this notebook, some books I brought, four other people… and these fish. What have I come to?

So many other fish, alive I mean, swimming in a cluster in the corner, living tiny lives of avoidance as though everything could be normal if they could only ignore it. I had only seen one or two at first, orange silk tails gently flowing then flickering, little gray bodies bobbing and darting, before I crouched down to see it. What changes can come from a slight shift in perspective?

Gray and putrefying, the corpse floats, unrecognizable from decay. I move close to the tank and look around the side.

“They look so cute,” another patient says. She can't see it from where she's sitting. You have to get down and look at it close.

I wonder if the filter is broken, or perhaps there isn't enough air in the water of this tank. Is that why so many are so close to the surface? I don't see any bubbles, the only aeration must be coming from the turbulence that holds that dead fish in its grasp.

Did it die from ammonia? An overpopulated tank overwhelms filter capacity, dead fish, like this one, then release more ammonia as they rot, could lead to a feedback loop of death and decay. How long until they are all dead? How long until cascading failure and collapse? One untreated problem can magnify.

I don't remember most of my childhood. I don't usually try. A man hung himself in our kitchen with an electrical wire, so I am told by my mother as we drive by our old house. It was my grandmother's house before we moved in. My parents had been remodeling before they split up and had to sell the house. They had been remodeling as long as I could remember. The young couple who bought it was excited to finish it, but this man's girlfriend had found him dead one morning, as though some curse hung over the place. I looked up at my mother, struggling to comprehend the situation with the faculties of a six year old boy.

The house was across the street from the elementary I had gone to, before we had to sell the house. I would walk to school on my own, across the street, with my parents watching me from the window or the yard to make sure I was being safe.

There was a little farm in the back. My parents were “back to the land” types. I remember playing with my neighbor while my mom and her canned jar after jar of something or other. I remember climbing through the goat pen and climbing up the huge dead tree in the back. You could see the whole neighborhood from the upper branches. I told my parents once, and they cut it down. I remember running through grass (a bit taller than me) pretending to be an explorer in a jungle. I remember sitting in the tall grass and hearing a rustling, thinking it was a snake and screaming for help, saved by the elderly neighbor from the gopher digging nearby.

I always got in trouble for chasing the chickens. I remember the rooster's spurs digging into my back, ripping my favorite black shirt with a yellow T-Rex on the front, crying in pain as it slashed at me.

I remember the muffled yelling and fighting. I remember my mother kicking me, much later, almost a teenager by then, and my dad filing a police report. They did nothing.

I seem fine most of the time. There are a few oddities, but those are the usual eccentricities of an autodidact in a high level professional role.

The decay is invisible without close examination. I have mastered masking without even knowing it, the skill of masking neuroatypicality is fungible, so it seems: skilled at masking difference from others, I hid the signs of collapse even from myself.

I chat casually with the other patients. No one notices the death, the possibility of imminent collapse. I have learned that there are things people don't want to see, and I have learned how to hide them in myself. How much easier is it to hide suffering when you have already learned to hide difference.

I go back to my room to sleep, and wake up at 4:30 with these words floating in my head.

It does not rely on speed, nor silence, nor endurance, nor planning, for it is something else entirely.

The Fear comes with a bellowing roar and a fearsome visage it seeks not to hide, but calls attention to more and more as it moves closer. For it does not come for flesh, but catches the eyes of its victim and feasts on the terror.

When eyes are locked, in a fatal trap, mesmerized in pools of fire, it creeps ever so slightly closer. It grows louder and louder with each slow step. Often a victim could turn and run, could escape, if they could only break the gaze. For so long as any look into the eyes of this terrible creature, no movement is possible.

The Fear does not only hunt the solitary, but may be set on a village or town. Consuming its victims one by one, draining them to collapse, its power over successive victims grows stronger as they watch its slow horror.

Many will fall to their knees at the din and the fury hoping to beg themselves free, finding themselves saved for later as they feed the great monster their neighbors.

But those who know the Fear, who understand it, can escape those eyes of growing fire and raise a spear, or quiver of three arrows, and march towards it. Those who do may break its spell, that others may too rise and give chase.

And when those spears find their mark, and when those arrows land, the wise who stood together find the cursed creature, manifestation of terror, was, all along, only a phantasm of light and shadow.