Month: February 2022

Not too long ago I was listening to an hour-long presentation on Zoom about the importance of relationships on campus—relationships with colleagues, relationships with students. And when it got to the part about how this information should be applied in the classroom, what specific things I should be doing, my levels of irritation became almost unbearable.

Relationship, or what is meant by that term in this context, is a basic, primary, fundamental, and fundamentally human thing. Relationships are things that develop and grow and change organically. Educational institutions are machines. They are inhuman, mechanical, artificial things. There is no humanity lurking inside the procedural structure of an educational program. There is nothing human in a bureaucracy. There are no relationships in an institutional system, only connections, contacts, and conduits.

And so what the folks (institutional servomechanisms) running the presentation were doing, what they were trying to say, was something along the lines of: “OK, people are suffering a little bit because the relationship thing is missing because we are dealing with contrived connections and mechanical activities and there is nothing human in any of that (only they weren’t saying it that way), so what we need to do is we need to add ‘human’ back, and here are the techniques for doing that, here are the mechanical changes you can make to how you act within the system so that people can feel (experience the illusion) that there is some sort of actual relationship there; here’s how you can make relationship happen—how you can manufacture relationships.”

The absurdity of this should be glaringly obvious to everyone, and the fact that it’s not is more than just a little frightening to me.

I’m sure you have seen those political compass memes that attempt to display political ideology in terms of a two-dimensional grid, with economic left and right on the x axis and level of individual freedom, from authoritarian down to liberal, on the y axis. What results is four quadrants that can be labeled “authoritarian left,” “authoritarian right,” “liberal left,” and “liberal right.”

Although this seems on the surface like a reasonable way to sort out mainstream political affiliation, I can’t seem to find a place for me in this simplified political landscape. Most of my friends, and many of my casual acquaintances as well, identify as “progressive,” and fall somewhere in the left-most regions of the “liberal left” quadrant. But I don’t fit in this quadrant. Nor do I seem to fit in any of the others. As a result, participation in friendly political discussions has proven to be somewhat difficult at times.

Although I am somewhat sympathetic with the radical left, I am not progressive. Neither do I consider myself politically liberal in even a general sense. I am extremely anti-authoritarian, and no one would ever place me amongst the fascists occupying the authoritarian right, but I have occasionally been confused for libertarian, an occupant of the lower right quadrant, ideological territory that I find particularly repulsive.

It recently occurred to me that the reason I don’t seem to fit in (on the compass and in most mainstream political discussions) is that I don’t accept the underlying premises that the two dimensions in question are based upon.

Economically, I don’t think that the system should be collectivized. Neither do I think that it should be based on free market competition. As a primitivist, I don’t think there should even be a system to begin with. And when it comes to the question of how much freedom the individual should be allowed, as an anarchist, I consider “legitimate authority” to be an oxymoron, and that no one (either individual or collective) should have the power to impose restrictions on anyone else.

Further, the presence of each of these things, authority and a complex economic system, depends on the presence of the other in a way that makes thinking of them as separate dimensions problematic in the first place: without authority, there can be no sustained economic system; remove the system, and you eliminate the substrate through which authority operates.

Not really a great insight, I suppose. And none of this really matters, of course. It’s just a silly meme, after all. And its two-dimensionality is just a reflection of the simplistic flat-screen-friendly ways that social media has conditioned people think about themselves.