The Sight of Starving Children

I am, among the many labels which can be slapped upon my person, an Anarchist – or at least, a supporter of Anarchism.

This is not as alarming as some people may find it – and not at all surprising to anyone who reads this blog . But the fact is, I find people's understanding of the word Anarchist to be a bit lacking, at times.  What Anarchism means, to me, is a critical view – sometimes harshly critical – of the human social systems based upon dominance hierarchies.
Which means, pretty much, all human societal systems at this time, worldwide.
The country I live in is highly patriarchal, and thus subsists on a dominance hierarchy of male-over-female in practice, although our laws are much more enlightened than our people. Perhaps where you live it's the other way around.  But all societies in this early 21st century CE on this planet depend in some measure upon control of some parts of the populace by other parts, be it the police controlling the citizenry, the males controlling the females, or, most commonly and in tandem with one or more other hierarchies,the rich controlling the poor. 

Here's a very telling piece about just that mindset. When confronted by a picture of a starving child, the woman just feels “blessed”. Whatever she means by that.
I have every sympathy with the writer yelling at the poor victim of our systems, but we have to realise that she probably believes that her answer was spiritually enlightened.
Thank God that you're not oppressed into starvation? What a dangerous way of thinking. 

The fact is, we are all enculturated into these systems of control, from the very moment of our birth. We are brought up to believe in a multitude of disguises for the global oppression of humans, animals and plants everywhere.
The religious codes of the Bible, Koran and Torah are pretty masterful pieces of  synthetic myth-making which we almost unconsciously integrate into our patterns of thought and hence behaviour, all our lives.  Yes, synthetic myths. Or counterfeit, as Joseph Campbell preferred to describe it.
The obviously phony stories of a male creator and the fall of mankind through an act of female disobedience is such a striking attempt to discredit the ancient, and more logical, worship of the female deity that I don't need to say too much more about it. Any one of us could uncover the lies, if we thought about it. 
That these counterfeit spiritualities have become mainstream is not to our credit at all. Yet still, even among those bright souls who have examined the major religions of the world and found them wanting, there is still more than a vestige of dominance hierarchy thinking running as a baseplate beneath most of our institutions, be they social, business or governmental.
I only have to remember the attitude of my family of origin – a family which considered people uneducated in the prevailing systems as somehow lacking, or of lesser standing. It could be book learning, or amounts of little green pieces of paper, or ancestry, or something else, but the defining lines are always there. You are this, we are that – and that is better than this, obviously.

It's an attachment to labelling people which is an insidious part of it all as well. I can talk -look at the description of my blog, where I slap at least a couple of defining labels on myself, as if that makes me more real...or more something, anyhow.

  Anarchism would have us lose the labels.
It doesn't mean, as many citizens seem to fear, violent looting in the streets as a matter of course. Although that may well happen as people start to wake up to their imprisonment within these toxic, highly oppressive systems.
Anarchy doesn't equate to chaos. It means,rather, an appreciation that we are not the labels we have plastered all over each other, that dominance hierarchies are not the natural order of things, whatever our encultured brains seem to be telling us, and that there are – almost certainly – other ways of Being in this great, beautiful, field of Life which we have put our Souls together to create.

Do you remember? You were certainly there, too.

Pic: Found Here