Of Love and Power and Anarchy

Over at Check Your Premises, Francois Tremblay has finally completed his two-part essay on love. For convenience, here’s part one; and here’s part two.

In the first part, he quotes Tolstoy and then offers some crucial insights:

What Tolstoy is saying is that you cannot accept love as virtuous but support institutions and systems that are its opposite- practicing, as he puts it, “the restraining of evil by violence.” In short, coercion, forcible domination, or in a word, control. The opposite of love is control. ....

All our popular political ideologies are based on control, of which “might makes right” is merely a pragmatic rationalization. Whether it is democracy, oligarchism, capitalism, socialism, fascism, or communism, all of these ideologies are based on the implicit premise that one should seek to control one’s fellow man in order to bring about a given outcome, that there exists a primacy of outcomes over free will. Most people don’t even think about free will at all, preferring to simply see others as extensions of themselves.

This is of course sociopathic, sociopathy being diagnosed by the APA as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others,” this definition fitting statism very well ...

And in part two, he continues in very fine form [all emphasis mine]:

All concentrations of power within a system of exploitation, whatever its specific nature or supported beliefs, twist people’s incentives. And I am also including its victims: it’s very easy for the victims of power to preach love and peace, but when they themselves take power, they follow the incentives like everyone else. This is proven by pretty much all revolutions in the history of the world. Once the victims wrestle power away from the former ruling class, they become even more cruel and oppressive than their predecessors. So any such pretense of seeking peace must be seen as the political manipulation that it is.

To come back to the subject of love, we can point out certain specific properties of love that are radical in nature, apart from being anti-coercion. For instance, love is egalitarian. When you love something, you draw it on the same level as you. Inequalities don’t factor in the desire because love is the recognition of value, and value exists regardless of inequality (it [inequality] can however pose a barrier to it [love], such as social pressure). ... Love, by inducing the desire to be close to the object of love, makes us seek to breaks [sic] down barriers. This means that love is necessarily a force opposite to anything that seeks to put barriers between people (whether they be religious, political, class, age, etc). These are features of a radical ideology.

There is also the fact that not only love cannot entail force, but it itself cannot be enforced. You can indoctrinate people into feeling belonging, you can use force to kidnap them if they refuse to express a feeling, but you cannot force anyone to love anyone or anything else. Love can only be brought about by the recognition of values.

As a consequence of all this, we can say that Anarchy is the only alternative based on the law of love.

There is too much here for my little reptilian mind to grok at present, so I will simply make a few observations and hope to flesh them out at some future time.

I wonder how much of the difficulty Americans have with this conception of love stems from an overemphasis on romantic/sexual/sensual elements and parent-child dynamics when considering love in the context of relationships. So many Americans talk easily of loving cars, computers, foods, and such; but outside of loving one’s romantic partner, parent, or child, the idea of loving others is largely cast as shallow sloganeering or incredible naïveté. It seems to me a very damning indictment that we so often seem unable to recognize value in another qua human without cynicism or suspicion. But love is really that simple, can be that easy, if one is willing to shake out the cultural cobwebs and open oneself to it.

I think Tremblay is spot on in his assertion that anarchy is based on the law of love; it is the only way to recognize the individual value each person may offer; and it is the only means of interacting such that those distinct flowers can continue to blossom. Yet my personal experiences with love suggest that it can be extremely difficult for love to flourish when the flower of another doesn’t blossom exactly the way one thinks it should. To put it more bluntly: too often, when our loved ones inevitably turn out to think, feel, or value differently than we do—or than we think they ought to—love can turn into a cudgel, or a power struggle. Or, as River Tam succintly put it, “We’re meddlesome .... and we haven’t the right.” Not even in love.

Many of us in the freedom family seem determined to “win the war” by somehow accomplishing the unaccomplishable: getting every individuals to recognize the value of the freedom philosophy and becoming anarchists. Just as people have differing shades of skin or hair, some adults prefer to let others assume some responsibility for them—a few might accurately be said to need that. I don’t know that parenting failures, etc. can account for every such instance ... and if it is true that such philosophical differences are as inherent in human beings as any other trait or characteristic, how can we claim to love those individuals if we engage in ill-fated attempts to persuade them to take up our banner? Better that we let them be, and look to our own communities ... assuming such can ever be created, surrounded and outnumbered as we are.

Last, a challenge for individuals trying to be open to this love and to spread it is that there are many people who are somehow caught between systems—trying to live freely, openly, honestly, yet also trying to deal with remnants of past coercive relationships. They can soak up all that positive energy from love and still need more ... and yet not learn how to address their problems so that they can emanate the light instead of absorbing it.

In short, I think Tremblay is on to something very important, but I don’t know how we can start turning the tide. Part of that stems from what I see as another opposite of love: fear.