Understanding Anarchy: Empathy By: Puck Arks
Written By: Puck Arks
Understanding Anarchy: Empathy
Anarchy is what keeps our compassion from becoming a hollow shell of the real thing - it's what keeps our love for others from becoming a commodity that is sold back to us or a ploy to make us acquiescent to the dictates of authority. Anarchy is about finding and appreciating the genuine soul in human beings and keeping it free from all authority, submission, moral ism, and static roles.
This approach holds that there exist real-life processes and actions
that can be taken to create more compassion and anarchy in our lives in
the here-and-now. Compassion and anarchy are not just vague feel-good
poetic phrases or proscriptions/descriptions of a future society - they
are interactive relationships that human beings everywhere can and do
take part in.
This approach eschews lifestyle-ism and strives for far-reaching anarchist. Anarchy seeks to avoid dehumanization, polarization, and projecting enemy images onto others. The anarchist social revolution is seen as the immense application and proliferation of anarchist ways of relating.
This approach is akin to Gustav Landauer's sentiment when he said: The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently and by acting compassionately to one another.
Empathy is a key component of anarchy. Empathy is seen as a glue that helps society stay together and not degenerate into a war of all-against-all; and empathy is seen as being revolutionary tool that aids in revolutionary organizing. Beyond notions of working class solidarity, community organizing and solidarity of the oppressed lies empathy - the practice of people deeply listening to and understanding one another in a very real and fundamental way.
Without empathy, the connections between people that need to be made in order to effectively challenge the alienation and atomization inherent in capitalism and institutional authority will not happen.
This approach eschews lifestyle-ism and strives for far-reaching anarchist. Anarchy seeks to avoid dehumanization, polarization, and projecting enemy images onto others. The anarchist social revolution is seen as the immense application and proliferation of anarchist ways of relating.
This approach is akin to Gustav Landauer's sentiment when he said: The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently and by acting compassionately to one another.
Empathy is a key component of anarchy. Empathy is seen as a glue that helps society stay together and not degenerate into a war of all-against-all; and empathy is seen as being revolutionary tool that aids in revolutionary organizing. Beyond notions of working class solidarity, community organizing and solidarity of the oppressed lies empathy - the practice of people deeply listening to and understanding one another in a very real and fundamental way.
Without empathy, the connections between people that need to be made in order to effectively challenge the alienation and atomization inherent in capitalism and institutional authority will not happen.
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