Notes Towards a Determinist Anarchism

Introduction

This essay is an attempt to do a few things at once: to discuss certain political and ethical implications of determinism, to create the groundwork for an anarchism that is informed by determinism, and to be a thought-dump for me surrounding topics of determinism and anarchism. I’ve done my best to organize this thought-dump into more of a thought-warehouse, but I worry this essay may be a bit of a confusing slog. I’m not an academic philosopher, I’m an anarchist, sue me.

Really, this is an attempt to build a larger discourse. With any luck, much of this content will be trashed, reworked, and polished by like minded thinkers. Many of these arguments may feel ridiculously obvious or natural, and many of them may be. Much of the work of this essay is to readjust anarchist social philosophy to a determined universe. If I’ve elicited a reaction at all, I’ve been successful here.

Here’s the breakdown of what you’re about to read:

• First, a brief argument for hard determinism
• Then, a somewhat systems-oriented dissection of the power structures of our current system, with no mention of freedom
• Then, a proposed thought-tool to gauge a society’s utility that is compatible with determinism
• Then, a summary of how anarchism remedies problems in our current power system
• Then, a further discussion of determinist anarchist implications on the logic of society
• Finally, a reframing of what praxis can mean in a determined universe.
• As a postscript, I’ve written a meditation and a short vocabulary guide

A Brief Argument for Hard Determinism

Annihilating your free will over drinks

Hard Determinism is the concept that all actions are the result of previous actions, that the physical world is causal. Hard determinism is contrasted with “soft” determinism, or compatibilism, wherein a certain amount of physical determinism is accepted, but free will is also accepted.

Let’s walk through a situation. You’re at a bar, and the bartender asks what you would like to drink. Immediately, you may feel you have a choice in front of you. To come to a decision, you’ll likely do some quick mental calculus, weigh a few factors: What do you like to drink? How drunk can you get tonight? How much money do you have to spend? What does the bar have in stock? You answer these questions: I like beer, I can get decently hammered tonight (I don’t have work tomorrow, it’s a Saturday), I’m ok with dropping a cool $25, they’re out of PBR and Coors. All considered, you order a Miller High Life.

Now, that may feel like a decision. It may feel like you made a choice, like you’re in charge of the boat in this moment, but let’s take a step back and see how much you really had control over when you arrived at this apparent crossroads. For one, you can’t help what you like; there’s no way to will yourself to enjoy bourbon as a devoted beer drinker. Also, you didn’t decide on the weekday/weekend schedule our society uses, you’ve just found yourself able to be hungover consequence-free on a Saturday morning. You didn’t decide your wage, you have $25 to spend as a consequence of your particular economic conditions, which you don’t have control over. You certainly didn’t come to an executive decision that the bar would be out of PBR and Coors tonight.

So, let’s accept that there are many, many things in any given situation that you do not have control over. Things such as the economy, your tastes, our cultural attitude towards the workweek, what a bar has in stock are all out of your control. The choices you seem to have are bounded by hundreds of obvious factors outside your control. Now, let’s move deeper.

When the bartender asked “what can I get you?” you understood the question. As soon as the question is accepted by your senses and understood by your brain, a cascade of neurological activity is brought into play. Various inputs swirl and interact in the black box of your mental processes. What comes out is the product of the chemical and physical machinations of your organism. When you say “a miller high life, please,” it’s because your brain has processed inputs to formulate an output. So, you are constrained by the biological, chemical, and physical processes of your mind. You can’t control these processes because they are you, they are what gives rise to your conscious and unconscious actions.

Now, let’s zoom way back out. How did you get here? In this bar? Talking to this bartender? Beyond the economic and societal conditions we’ve accounted for, there are larger, cosmic processes at play with origins in the big bang. In that biggest and first explosion, matter and energy were created. Everything that ever has been began as unthinking stuff and interacted according to physical laws for millennia. As the cosmic soup expanded and cooled, planets formed, still reacting to previous processes like behemoth billiard balls colliding and sliding from the Biggest Ever Thwack of the Great Universal Pool Stick. One planet happened to be situated perfectly distant to its sun for liquid water to form. Complex atmospheric and geological processes produced basic organic molecules, which grew in complexity, and became, eventually, the first lifeforms. Millenia of evolution, fueled by the constant energy of our sun, eventually created humans, the first common ancestor of both you and the bartender. Further millennia of societal evolution gave us technologies such as fermentation, glass-making, hops cultivation and societal structures such as money, wage-work, and bars. One of the infinite culminations of these historical complexes is this moment: you, at a bar, being asked “what can I get you.” You now must react to this situation. You cannot change the situation, the question has been asked, your ass is in a stool, you’re here at a bar, and you can’t un-here yourself from the bar. What did you choose? What did you make happen? I argue, none of it.

So, to recap:

1. On the most immediate level, you can’t choose what constraints your supposed decision-making is under. Economic conditions, societal expectations, and what a bar has in stock are all completely out of your control. Your decision-making is, at best, bounded.
2. On the micro level, you are a mind-body that is subject to the laws of nature. Your brain is a chemical computer that reacts to stimuli to create action. There is no room for free will in its soft, wet circuitry. What feels like a decision is the output response of a mysterious biological calculus.
3. On the mega-macro level, you are the end result of billions and billions of years of universal change. Your origins as stardust are no more in your control than your being born on this planet. The chemistry and physics, as well as the millennia of societal development that create each new situation are entirely out of your control.

We’re going to take a sort of hard pause here. Hard determinism is going to come into play again after this next section. Before we can arrive somewhere in the vicinity of a determinist anarchism, I’m going to try to diagram the issues in our statist, capitalist society, then I’ll bring in anarchism as a solution to these issues.

The Power System of our State/Capitalist Society

Society is a system, and its fundamental unit is the person. A society is made of people interacting. Each person seeks to meet certain needs and desires, and works within the system to achieve these needs or desires, or otherwise seeks to change the system to meet them. This isn’t a misanthropic statement: for many people, one of their strongest desires is the well-being of others, and they will fight hard for the satisfaction of this desire.

There are an infinite number of interactions that individuals may have between themselves. Let’s concern ourselves mainly with interactions that seek to meet needs and desires. Let’s call these interactions “exercising power.” These can be acts of advocacy, influence, or coercion. Some definitions to make sure we’re all on the same page:

Exercising power: seeking to meet your needs and desires from an individual or society. (trying to get a beer at the bar)

Advocacy: making your needs and desires known to others. (“Hello, I could really go for a beer”)

Influence: convincing others to deliver your needs and desires, or disarming them from getting in the way of your needs and desires. (“I will pay you to bring me a beer”)

Coercion: Using physical force to meet your needs and desires. (“this is a stick-up, give me all your beers!”)

Needs: basic biological needs of food, water, shelter, and medical attention.

Desires: complex things that you want but can survive without. Things such as love, solidarity, justice, sex, and beer.

Each and every person is unique, often wildly so. Their standpoint within the social system is unique, and the things they want out of the system are unique. Their understanding of the system (that is, the knowledge of the lives, needs, and interactions of and between other people in society), is also unique to them. No individual or group of individuals can have omniscience of the system.

Let’s diagram our current system. Simply put, ours is a roughly pyramidal hierarchy. Oligarchs sit at the top and direct the actions of those in the lower rungs. Folks in the middle tiers are empowered to execute the directives of the uppermost ranks. Those at the bottom are the subjects, that is, they are subjected to the control of those above them. We also have a number of measures in place that limit or mediate the interactions between those at the bottom. Single family homes, social media, and competitive workplace culture are all examples of structures that limit the ability for individuals at the lower levels to interact with one another.

Let’s take a look at the ability of the people at the top and bottom to exercise power. We’ll use these silly little diagrams I made. In these diagrams, arrows represent the flow of power. Dotted arrows represent a loss of definition from something like an error in communication or a person doing a job they’re not prepared to do. An x represents a failure to transmit power, either due to a personal mistake, a lack of incentive, or a lack of power-transmitting social structures.

Why do we see a high fidelity and rate of execution of power in one way, but not the other? This has to do with incentives and roles. The people in the middle (the bureaucracy, police, upper management, etc.) are in a deal where they receive money in exchange for enacting the directives of those above. The oligarchy exercises influence, largely in the form of monetary compensation, on the middle people. The role of the folks in the middle is to transmit and amplify the power of those above them to those below them using further influence (again, mostly wages) and coercion. So, the lines that go from top to bottom represent a very specific form of power.

From the bottom to the top, we have another kind of power. This form of power is advocacy. The trouble with advocacy is that it has nothing to offer but words. When a worker advocates for a pay raise, when a prisoner advocates for better food, when a voter advocates for a new policy, they only have their voices to exercise power upwards. As such, those above may simply not transmit the message to those at the top (represented by an x), or they may do so poorly or after some reinterpretation (the upwards dotted line), or those at the top may simply choose not to hear because there are no consequences for inaction (the upwards line terminating in an x). Even worse, advocacy is exhausting, and requires work. Many folks are made too busy by their work obligations to have time to do much other than vote once every few years (the x near the bottom individual).

The skeptical reader may not find themselves convinced by my silly little graphics. A thought experiment may aid in my argument. Think about all the ways you are able to coerce the system, think about the extent to which you can coerce those above you in the hierarchy. Is it quite easy for you to intimidate your boss, to stare down a policeman, to physically bully a politician? Can you, as an individual, employ coercion, influence, and advocacy to immediately influence others the way a wealthy landlord can? Likely not. Intimidating your boss will result in a loss of wages, staring down a cop will result in death, bullying a politician will result in jailtime and a restraining order. Your landlord, on a whim, can deprive all their tenants of a place to stay.

Now think about it the other way. To what extent can a hierarch coerce you (assuming you are, like most, at the bottom rung)? A cop, working only within the parameters they are legally empowered with, can easily bruise you, tase you, or shoot you. How many officers have you heard of that have faced severe consequences for delivering coercion on behalf of a law? How much more likely is your boss to get in trouble for harassment of a subordinate than is a subordinate for the harassment of the boss? Clearly, there seems to be a one-way tesla valve in the flow of power downwards in this system.

The siloing systems in place at the bottom-most tier creates feedback into the power of those in the middle and upper tiers. A noisy neighbor would best be dealt with by the immediate neighborhood, but the issue is often passed to the discretion of the police. A building project that threatens your immediate ecology is best dealt with as a strong bioregional community, but our system instead gives you reams of paperwork, a designated protest area, and a 2-minute slot to speak at the next city council meeting.

Not Freedom, Systemic Satisfaction

ASS!

The immediate consequence of our hierarchical society is that some have a greater ability to achieve their needs and desires from the system than others. The people at the top have their power amplified by a series of cronies and middle managers that create a one-way gate through which influence and coercion flow.

This system disadvantages those at the bottom and puts them in service to those at the top. Even in a best case scenario -one in which enlightened communist bodhisattvas have found themselves on the top of the pyramid with a desire to bring joy and high consciousness to all below them- the system still cannot service those at the bottom. Because our hypothetical buddhas cannot have omniscience over the system, they cannot accurately guess what policies and decisions will benefit those beneath them. Any attempts to create affluence and wellbeing for the subjects will necessarily be taken from a satellite’s-eye-view, with a low definition of information caused by a ridiculous game of surveillance telephone that distorts bottom-up advocacy. Not to mention that particular interpretations of “wellbeing,” “enlightenment,” “communism,” and “happiness” are ultimately derived from the unique personal standpoints of each of the hierarchs, and necessarily cannot reflect the actual needs and desires of the average political subject.

Through the amplification effect of the middle rungs, the entire system becomes a crude reflection of the power of those at the top, being a product of their needs, desires, standpoints, and very limited knowledge of the system they dominate. Innocuous -even benevolent- desires for a better world become distorted in the fun-house mirror of hierarchy: calls for communism create drab cultural uniformity centered around Great Leader cults, calls for a space age create hero-gods out of idiotic captains of industry. The best-laid plans of our hierarchical heroes devolve into destructive nonsense, again and again, revolution after revolution, election after election, coup after coup.

We do not live in the best-case scenario of bodhisattvas and good-hearted communists; our overlords are far from benevolent. As the system stands today, those at the top have inherited their position due to economic or genetic legacy and are dedicated to furthering their own economic and cultural interests. They were born into the correct stratum, so it’s no coincidence that they arrived at adulthood with a bunch of power; individuals often have a strong desire to surround themselves with family and like-minded compatriots. Even new blood is all but guaranteed to possess a degree of evil: the bright gas flame of wealth and power tends to attract some ass-ugly moths (flies to shit may be a more apt metaphor). The way that corporate-political backscratching, ivy-league buy-ins, and nepotism reinforce the ages-old character of the upper echelons has been examined endlessly elsewhere, and I think it’s about time I move into the punchline of this essay anyway, so let’s move on.

It should be obvious to the reader that I don’t really like this system. But by what metric am I scoring our society poorly? Historically, anarchists have used the concept of individual freedom as a degree of goodness in a society. That is, a social system which affords a high degree of individual freedom is a decent system to your average anarchist.

There’s an obvious problem here for my arguments, though. A determinist understands that freedom is an illusion, so a determinist anarchist can’t really use that as the measure of a good society. Luckily, as my above arguments have hopefully communicated, one doesn’t need to approach society in terms of individual actors and their supposed freedoms but can view society as it is: a system.

If we accept determinism, and If we accept that society is a system made of individuals seeking to meet their needs and desires, we arrive at a different measure for the goodness of a society: Average Systemic Satisfaction. I define systemic satisfaction as the degree to which a person can achieve their needs and desires in and from a social system. Average systemic satisfaction (ASS!), then, is the systemic satisfaction of some individuals plucked randomly from a social system, the ability of your average joe or jane to get their needs met.

Systemic satisfaction exists at the interface of the individual and their social systems. It is a characteristic of a society, but one which is measured at the point of the individual, the way a bridge engineer might inspect a single truss. To extend the metaphor, a decent engineer cannot judge a bridge’s sustainability on one truss alone, and so should take a survey. Average systemic satisfaction, then, is a thought-tool to gauge the integrity and usefulness of a social system.

We can discuss average systemic satisfaction in thought experiments, or we can measure it from our own point of view. If any individual is to judge the social systems they participate in, then they must necessarily judge it from their bounded reality, from their little sphere of unomniscience. The surest measure they’ll have, then, is whether they are achieving their needs and desires from the system, or whether the masters are using the system to achieve their needs and desires from them.

Let’s analyze the systemic satisfaction of the average person at the bottom of the pyramid from their perspective. J Doe works 45/hrs a week as a retail sales associate at a big-box electronics retailer. They have the same basic needs as every other human organism: food, water, shelter, and medical care. J has a chronic illness that requires a monthly doctor’s visit and prescription medications. They also have a number of complex desires. J is kind, and has a strong desire to see their friends, family, and community members taken care of. J is spiritual, and enjoys meditating and exploring their psyche through drug use. J has a foot fetish, one of the most common fetishes in the United States.

To what degree is J satisfied by the system they’ve found themselves in? With regards to their needs, J cannot achieve food, water, and shelter without devoting 45 of their weekly waking hours to retail work. Even with all that hard work, J incurs serious expenses to not die of their chronic illness, and often has to do additional work soliciting money from family and friends via gofundme. Their needs are hardly met, and can only be met on the condition that they perform alienating bullshit make-work in exchange for money.

What of J’s desires? J’s kindness cannot be satiated by the cruelty and inequality of the system, as they don’t have much surplus time and money to give to friends, family, and community. J’s spirituality and sexual fetish have legal and cultural roadblocks due to the imposition of puritanical values by the laws and social control of the hierarchs. This system -at least and especially from J’s POV- does not work for J, but makes them work for someone else.

Anarchism, then

The systemic satisfaction of the hierarchs of our system is orders of magnitude higher than the systemic satisfaction of the subjects. As we’ve already gone over, our society has essentially become a reflection of the desires of its bourgeoisie, royalty, oligarchs, and politicians. It works to amplify their power and return complete fulfillment back to them at the expense of the joy, dreams, and basic needs of those below.

What does an alternative system look like, then? Let’s start with our assumptions from earlier in the essay:

• A social system is largely composed of people interacting to meet their needs and desires.
• Each individual is unique, and so is their point-of-view over the system.
• No person or group of people can have omniscience over the system.

I argue that a decentralized, anarchist system is the only rational way to organize society from the above principles. An anarchist society is one in which no person or group of people holds absolute power over others, and where conclusion-seeking structures seek to obtain the consent of all participants. An anarchist system is moneyless, devoid of private property, and thus communistic.

If we accept that a social system is largely composed of people interacting to meet their needs and desires, then an anarchist society can ensure that no person is put in the absolute service of any other person’s pursuit of satisfaction. With a horizontal organization that does not allow recourse to coercion, I cannot be made to work 45/hrs a week at a bullshit sales rep job just so some silicon valley exec can buy a Tesla. If said exec really wants a Tesla, they have to convince the people around them that a luxury electric car which kills every 2,000th passenger in a fiery explosion is worth the time, resources, and energy of the average person in their community (or at least in their regional Maker’s Syndicate). They’d have to show up to the community assembly and plead pathetically for lithium strip-mining and long factory shifts. Without the power to remove the means of life from those below them, our hypothetical tech bro could not put the social system in the service of their desires.

If we accept that each person is unique, then we should desire an anarchist system in which each person is allowed to live out their uniqueness. Our current social system amplifies each puritanical hangup and personal preference of the rulers, squishing all attempts at genuine queerness, creativity, and diversity. Because of its inherent rejection of cultural conformity, an anarchist system can allow for the creation of huge amounts of culture, and the unbottling of innovative and idiosyncratic ideas.

A social system which affords similar power to all participants in the system is strengthened by the diversity of viewpoints which it can funnel into stronger, more robust arrangements. When a neighborhood is creating a mural on a bare wall, the art will be richer for the participation of each neighbor. When a municipality is picking a spot for a new permaculture project, it can employ the thoughts and eyes of the entire community to maximize the efficiency with which the food is cultivated, distributed, and stored. “If we put the garden there, then I will be unable to access it because I use a wheelchair” “If we put the garden here, we’ll disrupt this rare pollinator species that I found” “I believe the project ought to go here, because I’ve seen the way the water flows over the land when it rains.” When each unique perspective in a community is given a chance to voice their thoughts on a community project, the emergent wisdom inherent in groups of fulfilled and confident people can shine through.

If we accept that no person or group of people can have omniscience over the system, then it is idiotic to suggest that someone be in charge. The most any hierarch can be is a blind leader to the blind. Anarchism cuts out middlemen in the pursuit of one’s desires. In an anarchist system, an individual doesn’t have to go through mediating powers to achieve a good life, and can interface directly with their immediate communities and production systems to advocate for change. The lack of individual omniscience bounds political units to sensible, human sizes. Some psychologists and anthropologists posit that the psychological limit to human interaction lies anywhere between 20 and 500 people, so perhaps a functional anarchist community will find it conducts most of its political business at an organic, neighborhood scale.

Anarchism is the only way to approach a peak average systemic satisfaction, one in which all individuals in a social system are satisfied in as many of their needs and desires as possible. The tight-knit communities, consensus based organizational models, and human-scale systems that necessarily comprise an anarchist society are inherently person-centric.

Through emergent processes, the anarchist community can become the reflection of the needs and desires of the community members, and not the crude distortion of the whims of an aloof elite. An anarchist society has the potential to achieve great enduring strength in diversity when individuals are empowered to live themselves fully and forge a system that works for them.

Anti-Fault, Anti-Blame, Anti-Pride, Anti-Shame

A determinist anarchist perspective can annihilate certain irrational aspects that we hold as cultural common-sense. It is a perspective that is entirely opposite along all political axes to conservatism in its rejection of individual responsibility and cultural normativity, but also in its annihilation of inner feelings of pride and shame (the main driving psycho-social forces of the conservative urge). Because it speaks to the logic of our inner world, determinist anarchism can be more than just a basis for social organization: it can be a personal compass for navigating one’s absurd path in life.

The concepts of fault, blame, pride, and shame are harmful fallacies that our society holds as both common-sense personal truths and as moralistic political principles. In truth, each are equally incoherent concepts to the determinist anarchist. Fault and blame don’t exist in a determined universe, or rather, they exist to such an accelerated extent that they don’t matter much. Everything is everything’s fault, each new moment is born out of an infinitely fine causal network of actions and reactions. A murder, a social feaux-pas, a harsh word, each are the result of the nonrandom movements of particles and energies. We cannot blame an individual for their actions any more than we can blame an expertly thrown bowling ball for landing a strike.

Similarly, pride and shame are incoherent. Pride for what? pride for having been born? pride for having been launched on a rollercoaster with a pre-destined terminus? A determinist anarchist understands that pride in our actions or in our identities is as ridiculous as pride in our very birth. Shame comes against similar roadblocks. Why ought I experience shame in what I was always going to do?

Many people often have a half-way understanding of the ways that blame, pride, and shame don’t quite add up, the same way many people believe that free will is enacted within a bounded reality of limited decisions. Most people know that we can’t blame a small child for putting a rock in their mouth, or a schizophrenic for exposing themselves on the street. We roll our eyes when someone expresses pride in being a member of the dominant race, and we rebel when told that we should be ashamed of our innate sexual preferences. A determinist anarchist says “yes, and…” because they take the logic to its natural conclusion: If we ought not to blame a child, we ought not to blame an adult. If we ought not to feel pride in our birth, we ought not to feel pride in anything. If we ought not to feel shame in our desires, we ought to feel shame in any aspect of ourselves.

This isn’t to say that we should become hardened stoics devoid of life and emotion in order to live more in tune with the logic of nature. I’m not arguing we shouldn’t have a dip in our inner selves when we’ve hurt someone we didn’t mean to, or that we shouldn’t glow at an accomplishment. What I’m suggesting is a simple change in attribution. Don’t be proud of the house you’ve built, be glad that you’ve found yourself at the completion of a project. Don’t feel pride in your race, feel interest in your cultural lifeways, feel connection to your community. Don’t feel gutting shame at every flubbed interaction, find a desire to do better. Extend this logic to those around you, and you may find yourself leaping over the emotional roadblocks that arise when fallacious human intuition butts up against a universe of causality.

The implications of an anti-blame outlook on political life are huge. The extended logic of determinism leads to an extreme abolitionism towards all punitive forms of justice, and even casts a critique against the concept of justice itself. Punitive justice is fueled by irrational impulses, and so isn’t sustainable in a rational society. Punitive justice is the application of vengeance to redress harm as if it were a natural law, as if there were some causal relationship between murdering someone and finding yourself in a concrete box for a life sentence. In reality, punitive action is always irrational and reactionary.

Restorative and rehabilitative approaches are generally more in line with a determined universe, but they aren’t the end-all. Beyond the application of post-facto justice -which only seeks to alleviate harm and find conclusions after a bad act-, a rational application of justice, informed by determinism, seeks to build a science around the causes of behaving badly. What’s more, a determinist anarchist position requires us to reckon with what we can usefully call “bad behavior” and then from there find social fixes that create less of it.

We can look back to our concept of systemic satisfaction to inform a revised definition for bad behavior. In a social system, where the system’s goodness is judged on its ability to achieve a high ASS, bad behavior is actions by individuals that seek to put others (or the entire system) purely in the service of their systemic satisfaction to the detriment of the systemic satisfaction of others. This is generally in line with our intuition about good and bad. For example, a murder is a systemic bad because it satiates one’s bloodlust at the cost of another’s life.

Often, the prevalence of certain bad behaviors indicates a systemic issue, not some kind of epidemic of personal moral failings. Gendered violence is rooted in patriarchal cultural attitudes and gendered economies, theft is rooted in material scarcity, oppression is rooted in hierarchical systemic structures. A determinist understanding of justice is almost entirely systemic.

The engineering of community safety systems and the abolition of harmful constructs is of paramount priority in creating anything that can be called justice. We should approach every incidence of bad behavior as our social system showing its flaws, and incorporate it as data towards a science of the causes of bad behavior. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t work to do after an incidence of harm or abuse, but we should approach each attempt at restoration, remediation, and rehabilitation with the understanding that time only moves in one direction, and that nothing can un-change. The nature of causality (and, indeed, the nature of abuse), is that all things change moment to moment, forever.

What Will You Do?

So, a determinist anarchist is a rationalist, and seeks to organize society rationally. They have no use for personal and social constructs that assume free will, and seek to do away with punitive justice, as well as the hierarchical power systems that perpetuate an illogical social construction. But how does a determinist anarchist affect change?

The notion that a person is an agent that affects change isn’t acceptable in a determined reality. So here’s the hard truth: you either will be a revolutionary, or you will not. You either will attempt to employ effective praxis towards the creation of a more just social system, or you will pathetically accept the boot as it lands on your face.

Having read this, you are challenged (as you are with any new meme that lands in your mind). You must react, because the determined universe has presented you with a novel stimulus. I wrote this as an argumentative essay, but also as a gauntlet thrown down to each reader who accepts at a majority of its points. What happens next is up to the universe and the absurd and mysterious rube goldberg neuronal processes of conscious and unconscious creative thought that these words have instigated in your brain.

My guess is that you’ll find yourself doing one of three things as we near the end of this essay:

• you’ll be genuinely unconvinced of much of my arguments and return to your life of wage slavery and institutionalized trauma.
• you’ll understand and accept many (or all) of my arguments, but the emotional hurdle of aligning yourself and society with a determined universe and a systemic understanding of society will be too great. You’ll likely tell yourself some compatibilist lie that “we may as well have free will because of the great complexity of the universe” or a depressive nihilistic line “I was always going to accept my lot in life, that will not change now.” You will return to your life of wage slavery and institutionalized trauma.
• You’ll understand and accept many (or all) of my arguments, and find yourself acting to realize a better world.

I hope that many of the readers find themselves in the last category. As I’ve developed the thoughts that have become these notes, I have found myself committed more viscously to combat against the present order of things. I have found myself pleased to be one of the fortunate few who the universe has placed in a fight for a better world, and I have found myself with genuine hope that it may be possible to see true progress in my lifetime. I have found myself, at times, with little investment in the outcome in this fight, with only joy to be among those that struggle for happiness, against hate. I find myself feeling little pride in my position, only gratitude for being here. I find myself feeling little shame over my failures and limits, only determination to find myself trying again.

What I Hope You Do

Rewriting the Logic of Society

To those of you who find themselves in my third category, here’s what I hope you do: 1) organize and 2) live in accordance with natural reality.

To my first hope: an anarchism that is informed by determinism is necessarily organizational. This is because a determinist anarchist understands society as a system. We cannot hope to create a more satisfactory social system when we act as though each individual is a free agent endowed supernaturally with a limitless insurrectionary potential. Society will always be social, it will always be a system, so it cannot be changed solely on the wild, romantic, angry acts of a lone revolutionary. Neither poetic terrorism nor surly dropoutism will make the evils go away. The work must be prefigurative, and it must be social.

The Novatorean bomber may find catharsis and a glorious death (should they avoid imprisonment), but they will only ever be a wet ball of mud tossed against a tight-knit brick wall of economic, cultural, and social relations that create the modern statist-capitalist workhouse. The dropout will find themselves a secluded squat or un-exploited patch of woods, and might live there happily until the agents of the mega-machine come to evict them, kill them, imprison them, or otherwise subjugate them. Your ability to actualize yourself as a woodwose or a hermit is safeguarded by the unsexy, unromantic strength of good social organization. Unless our coercive system is annihilated and replaced, the bombers and squatters will always lose.

Only active prefiguration can build a more logical society. It must start with organization. Find your people, start doing anarchy. Unknit and re-weave the stained social fabric.

To my second hope: a determinist anarchist should seek changes in their lives as they do in society. This requires practiced attention to the ways that the illogic of our society has colonized our minds. I hope you find yourself assigning less blame, taking less shame, quashing your pride. I hope you find yourself living in accordance with the Way Things Really Are. I’ve found that much of my life’s suffering has come from my inability to accept natural truths around people and nature: things change, nothing is anyone’s fault, we may never win, success is fleeting, only entropy seems eternal.

When we live as though we can claw time to a halt, as though we can keep things the same, as though we can blame conscious meat sacks for the harm they cause, we often find suffering. The universe has its own logic, and a society that is built against that logic will eventually have to reckon with the greatest forces that ever were. Presently, we live in such a society: a society built on the conception of Free Will will never find success in a determined universe.

A Meditation

I am what I always would have been

I will be what I will be

I am nothing, an intersection of everything

The 4 known dimensions have converged on myself and everything I know

And all the things that will forever be unknown to me may as well be an aspect of my mind

I am a passenger on an absurd path

I hope to find myself extending grace and goodwill to my fellow passengers

Determinist Vocabulary Guide

Some words and phrases assume Free Will, but don’t necessarily signal a truth that is against the logic of a determined universe. A potential avenue for determinist anarchist praxis is bringing determinism into the logic of everyday life. Here’s a list of phrases and terms we may be tempted to use, and alternative phrases that align with determinism, anarchism, and their implications.

Non-Determinist Phrase :: Determinist Realigned Phrase

Decision-making :: Conclusion Seeking

I chose to do x :: I found myself doing x

You should do x :: I hope you do x

I’m oud I did x :: I’m happy I did x

I’m sorry I did x :: I hope to not do x again

choice/decision :: conclusion, turning point, transition, next step