Retiring An Old Anarchist Slogan

One should not have to be a religious anarchist to understand why the adage “No Gods No Masters” is antiquated and ought be retired. This would certainly not be to defend the existence of any deity, pantheon or religious practice pertaining to anarchy (which has no mind for any faith whatsoever,) but to recognize redundancies that, intentionally or not, marginalize those who seek complete emancipation through the lens of their own spiritual modus.

Without any material master, there remains both no god for those not wanting one in all senses, as well as a bountiful space for all seeking to practice their hearts’ calling freely. For those who recognize a divine how they do with a mind for total liberation, their struggle bearing fruit is the realization of their faith. A blossoming promise for what their faith guides them towards.

A balance of anarchists possessing their own personal guidance and practicing it in their unified intention is to be the anarchist movement of the coming years, and for that is required a common frame to work out of. One can be opposed to all oppression, including theocracy and religious oppression, without instigating a special persecution onto those who are both faithful and opposed to the state and capital.

We know that the phrase in question originates in the mid 19th century French anarchists (sometimes attributed to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) who proclaimed Ni Dieu Ni Maître among their labor unions in opposition to both the dominant Christian god and the capitalists who dictated the wages of their lives with protection from the institutions of the former. We know that the phrase became most adopted by western anarchists in punk subcultures seeking to shake off the yolk of their often Christian upbringings in tandem with their defiance against the capitalist landscape. (There are instances in the global south of anarchists using the phrase in defiance of their given religions per their regions.) These are all valid historical and material necessities to be rebellious against certain institutional religious demands that stifle the potential for all that is required to overcome the dominant forces that have claimed the Earth for themselves and cast us all into their servitude. They were right to say “no” to the decree of a god or an institution claiming that god for allowing and enabling slavery, poverty, division, desperation and decay. They were right to pick up the tools themselves and make the change real and now. Part of that was rejecting the internalized behavior that the dominant religion of their culture made innate in their upbringing, that rationalized their suffering into a lifelong dedication to sustaining oneself inside misery, and in some instances this manifested as a rejection of god’s existence entirely in order to overcome that imposed misery.

Whether it truly made a statement for atheism or acted as a provocative call for secularism, it was enticing enough to become one of the main staples of anarchist “wisdom” and in conservative circles made anarchists out to be inextricably linked to a malice toward any divinity. There are certainly those anarchists who view their personal projects as spiteful conspiracies against “god’s sacred order” in hostility towards everything that, truth be told, deserves such hostility. There is no criticism for them, because they are correct to be so impassioned by their freeness from all deities that they refuse to bow to. That is their own course. They would be incorrect to expect everyone else to be on this exact same path. They would be incorrect to view all anarchist practice as perfectly resembling theirs.

Such timely contextual necessities as “killing god for everyone’s sake” do not apply in a pluralistic ethos that is multifaceted, multi-generational and tolerant of both irreligion and religion/faith equally, so long as neither influence the conditions of anyone’s life. The very fabric of striving for complete liberation is stitched with a history of fleeing persecution, both because of specific faith or lack of faith. There are some minor contenders who claim that all people need “freeing” from all faith in order for anarchy to be sustainable. These are authoritarians. These individuals atheistically deify a toxic western frame of thought that views only scientific rationalism to be the valid ethos of so-called “civilized” peoples. Their conception of liberation is enveloped in a wrongly extended categorization to include religious traditions as violations of freedom, rather than free participatory choices that reflect who one is, that are completely acceptable within the core anarchist principles of free association and free dissociation.

It is willful small-mindedness prevailing even in circles of those who profess to be aware of larger and deeper contexts and meanings that dooms the effective practice of freedom. It is the culture of “debate” and team sports of opinion that has corrupted all sense of being on the same page. At the end of all these ridiculous tensions, we find only a violent drive to control others. Whether it is the theocrat or the militant antitheist tugging at the line, they each want to constrict the lives of those who deviate from their sense of normalcy and acceptability. It is only by embracing the basic nuances of each of us as the people we are that we can realize genuine freedom. All the metrics of personal qualifiers must be washed away to invite the full potential of every person regardless of their background. One is not an anarchist if they cannot embrace, or at a minimum tolerate, the wondrous variations in all humankind. One is merely another bigot if they either disregard a person’s humanity because of their affiliation, or venture to jump through intellectual hoops in order to “prove” the inherent unworthiness of a constructed “other”. Their priorities are laid bare, and their extrapolations are invalid.

By what means does an adage of such historical and cultural merit be retired? Well, I certainly do not believe in policing others, because I do not allow anyone else to represent or control me, and so I do not engage with projects that seek to do that. I have merely stated what should be obvious in saying that an anarchist must be welcoming and understanding, must possess the capacity to learn and be humble — while retaining a useful measure of critical thought — in order to be a useful participant in complete emancipation. One must make their judgments and act accordingly; there is no correcting a bigot who has assured himself and prays to a god that assures him that he is correct in his stupidity. There is only dissociation, and further action if casting that bigot out results in retaliation.

My chosen path has been to introduce and propagate alternatives. The no masters component remains too strong, relevant and necessary to abandon completely. But this is retained with the understanding that no conception of [a] god worthy of recognition should resemble a master as the earthly masters of humanity’s history. For us pagan anarchists, some like the phrase Old Gods No Masters. (There are regional variants on this.) Pagan anarchists do not see our venerated entities as “masters” or “lords”, but as worthy guides, essences, spirits or manifestations embedded within the facets of the natural world; the vital, ecological and cosmological reality around and beneath the world that has been imposed onto our Mother Earth. We know that the sources we engage with want us to be happy and free, and we know that the affairs of humankind must be resolved by human thought and action.

For those of us who sense a completeness beyond the here and now while remaining engaged in the existing world, our expression and reasoning of hope is a fleshing of what is to be. We cannot realistically aim to prevent others from raising the anti-god anti-masters flag, because for them that is their objective for themselves. We can only perpetuate for ourselves what we want to see sprouting from our conscious intentions. And in doing so, we acknowledge that it should be enough to do away with all the masters on Earth in order to free our own spirits, no matter the ways in which they are inclined to move.

In The Bedlam Of Sense

i.

Exiled from life in fanatical desperation
to maintain the hell-world — I sing
the swan song of living joy.
I watch, every waking day, the droves
who deserve better — and the drones
who deserve nothing at all.
The steps along this way are the same
as those who suffered the march
through a different paradigm
of chiseling away at the block laid atop them.
There are those born into that struggle —
and those born into imposing it.
A glance of the face of the learned one
sinking into the dismay of realization
tells me that things are not well:—
It could tell of wicked cupidity,
of the normal evils of life.
It could tell of birds nesting
beside the lynched scapegoats
and regular market functions
staged during total collapse.
It could tell of age-old ends of the world . . .
but it tells of the worst vital decline.
Of a severance between life & humanity.
As if a godless covenant had been dropped,
one that enriches the works of good hearts;
one that is sustained by a balanced nature,
and this balance finds itself under siege.
O good fight, become better soon
than we endure you now. Be narrow
enough to center our sights.
Be plain enough to tell our way.
All seek through grand certainties,
defined paths, the selfsame resolution
that lies bare, innate in life untamed.
A different line of considerations
is more than imminent to our wellness.
Grand announcements from cloaked sources
seemingly don the office that determines
what the chain of days are to be;
what the breadth of energy is to be sapped
for the sterile bases of the world economy.
Somehow they run to trust them.
They make us ashamed to be human,
running face-first into the suite of delusions.
The church, the bible, the cross.
These are tools for facilitating
the actual religion of economy at play.
Just as life untamed, life tamed
into insanity lies bare its drive.
The interwoven stations of accumulating,
tallying and monopolizing have rendered
the worst out of us; the failure of heart;
the collapse of the truly critical mind.
The fair bird that came last in spring
has flown away to rekindle in the moon.
Our statues, our castles, our holy texts
have not made up for our blood, our tears.
The wings of joy abandon us . . . and rightly so.

ii.

Now we lift a broken hearted head
to the rising stars with candle lit.
The aching wonder of being a child
bleeds into the present point in life.
All the sense we accumulated since:
The undying drive to be who we are.
The air, the sky, the openness
of space on Earth signals both calm
and determination. Let it hang there . . .
be at ease this moment.
Be in the tempered light
that warms the hands before directing
the life your vital keeper gave.
The breath we draw is the promise
gifted to us, knowingly or not,
by those who spawned and fostered us.
All you allow in you to define you
is suspended in your pallet to apply
at the whim of your being alive.
Where to with this knowledge?
How to traverse the terrible landscape?
We simply become the new age.
We are not beholden to the morals
intended to destroy our criticality;
We do not halt our lives
for the feelings and demands of morons.
This is the simple mode of doing things.
The age of apologizing to fundamentalists
dies with the words I write. The age
of denying who our hearts tell that we are
burns into ash and is blown away by a gust
made by the stampede of the free.
I seek to make good sustenance
from bitter embraces of the edge:
We cannot stand upon our mounts
without knowing the valley below.
We cannot raise a tattered flag
signaling determination from despair
without stitching the rags of our history
into the proud tapestry of vital resurrection,
of a new rise toward self-determination.
Let the hell-world be made gone once and for all,
and the wings of joy evolved back in their place.

An Obscure Motion Through The Present

That beyond me, that within me
trail beside the course I laid.
I only notice these twin outlines
when a certain ease arises;
when an articulate wordlessness
suffices for everything I know.
Then I may abide them both,
take in their assessments
insightful to me; know their place
in a life hopelessly adrift.
I can trim away their excesses
in the spare time of my journey;
I can carve the likeness
that nullifies their noise.
I love the texts of sorrow
equal with the texts of bliss.
I will go between them
to deliver my point.

Repeat, Persist

A wordless commiseration
bleeds into thin streams of air.

“Oh, it’s nothing . . .
it’s just everything
that actually matters.”

And there it wafts, hanging
on for someone to say the word . . .

but there is no phrase for it.
It is said in the passing by,

in the going about the day
like nothing is on fire.

Like no lives are being
rounded up and attacked.

"Okay then."

I just want, seeing others want,
everything stuck on repeat

to die, so everything worth
living for can take the place

of our central hell. I am
the anti-citizen for this.

I know this. I do not care.
A soul must rise to say it.

A life must come about
to live the example.

I am the principal traitor
to the christian god's order—

And I love it. I love
to love life freely. I love

to taste the sweet illegality
of sincere joy unabated;

I love to disobey, to ruin,
to burn the order;

I love to undo the nonsense
the world trained into me.

How I do adore sin, loathing all
who call it so.

The nonsense, it can't stop
saying, doesn't want anything

"shoved down its throat —"
doing only precisely that

to all outside their fold.
We shake our heads . . .

these morons rule over everything.
They ruin nearly everything for us,

but they do not ruin the pursuit
to be every bit of happy.

Sure, they make arbitrary laws
to make our lives difficult.

They legislate where I can piss,
they try to make my dress illegal.

This difficulty is our lineage of struggle,
of flourishing audacious creativity.

I will not listen to their false law.
I will not bow to an insane order.

Because I don't live life
on repeat: I grow. I change . . .

I walk the shores of this quiet mind
suddenly engulfed with napalm,

I question the intentions, motivations
of everything peddled to me.

I engage with myself
in ways that make me,

I engage with others
in ways that change me —

And no fascist ever wants to.
They have no ambition, no happiness,

content with brutality and stupidity.
The burning of books, the burning

of valid ideas not rooted
in weeding out a humanity . . .

you are wrong, you are invalid
to be so stupid, so hateful

toward me, toward my sisters.
You don't define us. You have

zero authority to have final say
on who or what I am. That is me.

Your 'white race', your 'messiah',
your 'Führer', your binaries

will all fucking die. We are done
respecting what spits on us.

I am done working around
fantastical real-world demands

that sap the essence from every
sphere of being alive.

Go to hell. Go drown in your
coping tears. I am better

because I challenge everything
around me - and you do not.

You lick the soles of the shit heap
of ideas and sensations.

You default to the dreary basics
you never bothered to challenge.

You renounce your all
for a fragile fervor.

Your faith, your creed
limit only you, your fold.

It affects me not at all.
I scoff at it and spit

just as you scoff
and spit on me

but with actual validity.
I summon the whole self . . .

The nice girl has left.
The sweet gestures

and the kind carefulness
have all been scattered

to the sea. Therefrom arises
what is potent, true and free.

The nerve to say, to be, to fulfill
the birthright to sober bliss.

Fragments Of A Whole

The sad lute player
is my late redeemer.
No lie in the chords,
no lyric to muddle.
Her gentle tune weaves
matter inside nothing.
	*
Without sleep, nothing sates
to conclude this cycle.
Just a strewn film reel
Of places and events
With all contents shuffled.
	*
The infinity of thought & feeling
against the finite world, I caress
The pages with curious care.
Their print holds many seeds.
One, the secret of peace.
	*
Take this moment
and run with it.
I promise, it is
preferable to live there
and stay there. Make
a universe from it;
let your heart
contour to it all.
You never needed
this bygone world.
Only a will to be.

To A Friend

Just let it rest. For today, at least,
It’s over. Let it be over.
You worked your hands ‘till breaking,
Your heart feeling much the same . . .
No soul but me seems to know.

I know the closing in of surrender;
The weight of eyes under tears;
The ceaseless parade of contrary vibes.
And we both know: It isn’t going away
Anytime soon.

So I ask you to be strong, for me and you.
Summon your closest loved one’s reason
For loving to see you each time
They might be so blessed. I know
My reason for wanting you around.

A Sure Divagation

Now is the minute of our chord,
Of our somber lyric. I impose
On you and this leaf
An admission of waning desire —
Of parting faith. A departure from
Dependence on awe, reliance
On new desolations. A sickening
Blankness toward malice . . . no more.
Tonight I flee from this orthodoxy
Into the dawn of perfect horizons.
I will find glory in the everyday.
I will sing the promise of breath,
Praise the pagan countenance of the sky
Mirroring the most avoided realities.
And in those bright verses, those
Eloquent revelations, I will adorn
Our new sensibility with the greenery
Of long life and immortal youth.

Hope For The Real

Down they lie with tremors to know
The sense does not outlive the bright.
But subtle and constructive is youth
When steered by all with that light.
Tear apart the bindings of the old
Book ― our spirits soar beyond.
Lay wretched tyrant’s head to stone ―
Be done, once now, evermore,
And reap all of day, all the bright.

Anniversary Poem

Such beauty happens out
	without theatrics —
how hearts draw together.
No tune can match
	the sense —
	the tinge from eyes
gracing with coy, polite grin;
no lyric is the answer
	but kind touch
	within honest gravitation.
I remember when your word
gently, with welcome, captured me;
	when your sweet
	kiss . . . did everything to
			me.
	It is just
as you told it to me, love,
that life leaves no room
for do-overs. Regrets,
	too biting to bear,
		go out the window
		of our seventy mph
	journey through sapphic
joy. O, my dearest K—, I love you.

The Homebrew Thinker

Such a figure is the liberator of consideration, the sower of raw knowledge and the beacon of self-direction. They are the constant source of proof that we are the makers of our own thought ― that all action derived from personal consideration is completely distinct from any theoretical body.

The figure who can stand upon their own mount and declare perfect independence from any -ism is the figure that lives and roars inside all of us, waiting to be tapped into. This figure is the renegade scholar of useful information: the one who thinks for themself and shares their insights in the manner that reflects their disposition and perspective. They are seizing their moment to define themself, and in the process demonstrate something immeasurably crucial.

We recognize one exercising their own thoughts by their expression of what has compelled them towards a conscious modeling of their own self-constitution. (This is a phrase I like to use to denote the unique configurations of being that rest deep within us, animating what feels right for our times and places.) We find in their acts and statements a sense that previous philosophies exist to be looted from, not adhered to.

We ought to recognize the basic difference between a grifter and a character meeting the criteria mentioned. One tends toward monetary gain, the accumulation of social capital, a hoard of mindless followers and the sowing of duped bullshit. The other tends toward honesty, genuine suggestions for sensible resolve, a nerve to say things without mincing words, a drive to tackle what others avoid. Their work is shared to provide tools for an outlook. To inform as best they can on things that they have weighed deeply and to prove that we are all capable of everything we set our faculties to.

In the context of actually getting free, we owe recognition to they who think for themselves and act accordingly. We have so much more to learn from them in our present circumstances than we do from Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, or Stirner. We have so much more to gain from knowing ourselves and our intentions than we do from reciting chapters and verses from tomes that claim to direct us in the “proper” direction.

We find a necessity to “grow up”, or grow out of, the conservative thinking that pervades many of our peers. Our search for guidance from old books has lead us astray from what was so imminent to us all along. The figure described is the classmate who shares and exploits the weaknesses of the institution, of the tyrannical administration; they devise questions for the authoritarian teacher that totally subvert his very existence. They steal the test answers and covertly give them out to their peers to advance through the nonsense. They break into the school at night and replace all the coffee in the staff lounge with decaf ― or worse, if you can imagine. These manners of strategy applied in their respective broader contexts are the mode of becoming ungovernable in both conceptual and physical force.

In recognizing the homebrew thinker, taking in their contents and judging them how one will ― as not every person is given perfect exemption from being an idiot on the merit of them thinking for themself ― we have to understand every individual as their own scholar, their own critical processor of information and events in the world. To resist this is to resist the very obvious nature of human interaction. We have to bring ourselves, as those conscious of the need for wide-scale change, down onto the same terrain as everyone else ― not elevate ourselves as possessors of secret knowledge that must be given special treatment in order to join the Holy Association of Knowers.

We must make our findings critical of present conditions available to those who would process them on their own terms as I and others have. We must make their language digestible and their subjects relevant to our myriad struggles.

When we begin to learn not simply from each other’s ideas, but from how one came to reach that idea, we begin to see how we can resolve everything that the government or private entities are expected to fill in forever. We see how we as individuals are the true directors of how the world is. We lose sense of “Mass” or “Society” in the simple recognition of agency and potential between persons. We need no unified body if every body is respected as a universe of its own. We need no government if individuals, among those individuals who share their locality, take the initiative to directly shape their conditions.

We need to rise and free ourselves on every level. In the empty chambers of our essential freeness of thought, we can craft something truly emancipatory if we apply the skills we absorb. No misery is inescapable if the mind is honed and executed well.