You May Be an Anarchist -And Not Even Know It

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For a while in my 20s, I asked visitors to take off their watches as they entered my home.

Even today children must be broken of their resistance to time. This was one of the primary reasons for the imposition of this country’s mandatory school system on a largely unwilling public. School teaches you to be at a certain place at a certain time, and prepares you for life in a factory. It calibrates you to the system. French situationist Raoul Vaneigem has a wonderful quote about this: "The child’s days escape adult time; their time is swollen by subjectivity, passion, dreams haunted by reality. Outside, the educators look on, waiting, watch in hand, till the child joins and fits the cycle of the hours."

Time is important not only sociologically and ecologically, but also personally. If I can share another quote, it would be [Austrian philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein’s "Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy."

Just last year I came across an account by the 18th-century explorer Samual Hearne, the first white man to explore northern Canada. He described Indian children playing with wolf pups. The children would paint the pups’ faces with vermilion or red ochre, and when they were done playing with them return them unhurt to the den. Neither the pups nor the pups’ parents seemed to mind at all.

Now we gun them down from airplanes. That’s progress for you.

More broadly, what has progress meant in practice?

Progress has meant the looming specter of the complete dehumanization of the individual and the catastrophe of ecological collapse. I think there are fewer people who believe in progress now than ever, but probably there are still many who perceive it as inevitable. We’re certainly conditioned on all sides to accept that, and we’re held hostage to it.

If fewer people believe in progress, what has replaced it?

Inertia. This is it. Deal with it, or else get screwed. You don’t hear so much now about the American Dream, or the glorious new tomorrow. Now it’s a global race for the bottom as transnational corporations compete to see which can most exploit workers, most degrade the environment. That competition thing works on the personal level, too. If you don’t plug into computers you won’t get a job. That’s progress.

Where does that leave us?

I’m optimistic, because never before has our whole lifestyle been revealed as much for what it is.

Now that we’ve seen it, what is there to do?

The first thing is to question it, to make certain that part of the discourse of society––if not all of it––deals with these life-and-death issues, instead of the avoidance and denial that characterizes so much of what passes for discourse. And I believe, once again, that this denial can’t hold up much longer, because there’s such a jarring contrast between reality and what is said about reality. Especially in this country, I would say.

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