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.

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.

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.

Away With Voting, Away With Rule

Why do people enforce on each other the smiley-faced participation in the present slavery to politics?

Why do they champion “having our voice heard” and “getting the vote out” as the highest priorities in having agency over our lives and habitats?

Why is it so difficult for the peasants of the world to secure their futures by force?

It’s because the social masses as social masses are willfully toothless sheep, clinging by a broken limb to the singular pitiful excuse for a life raft, the one avenue of apparent non-resolution they have, which simply ushers in and swiftly ties off the long line of campaign finance schemes, grifting for the special political interest of the billionaires who command everything in society and the petty displays of political allegiance that proudly wave the banner “I am a thoughtless moron who needs a fascist, a socialist or a liberal to lead me!”

This infectious stupidity, this easy-mode of trying to change lived conditions is exactly what is responsible for all the angles of the horrible state of the Earth and the life on it. There is no debating with the latest forms of tyranny, especially with one in which even the peasants are vying for office in their local districts, their state houses, their local sheriff and so on.

There is no kindness to be owed to the system of gang bullying others into being led by “democracy” or whatever high-sounding word they use to justify governance at all.

Decisions made for the society are decisions consented to from below (by the “mass,” the “majority,”) and imposed from the top; whatever “say” in the matter any subject might have is closely filtered and monitored through the mechanisms of imposing the outcome that most suits exploitation and the business as usual of the combined state and private domination. The dominant mode of politics, and furthermore the existence of politics at all, are slavery.

Let us entertain the idea that voting has changed things and does affect our lives/habitats. Do you suppose this is truly an argument in favor of it? Why should everyone be subjected to what a malleable “majority” has to say about anything in their lives? Why is this considered the most “civilized” and “fair” system of reaching an agreement? (An agreement for what absurd rules and dictates are levied onto individuals simply trying to survive and be content in themselves.)

Surely the system of democracy has changed things! All for the very worst! All the conditions we suffer now were democratically allowed by good members of society, in their abstinence from direct confrontation and in favor of casting a ballot, who precisely keep nation states alive while simultaneously possessing the power to bring them all down.

We are slaves to the outcomes whatever morons in power decide are “best” for the people who have to carry their burdens. And our fellow peasants often idolize and defend their masters. These morons have no right to decide the mobility of our lives and the available breadth of our ambitions. We each ought to determine the playing field for our own lived realities.

All the decisions that truly matter in life can be decided and acted on directly, either alone as an individual or autonomously and with agency in a group of conscious rebels. If a decision needs to be made in which there is conflict, the ideal resolution lies in whichever allows every person to act out what they choose, rather than attempting to conform individuals to the group and its abstract purpose.

There can be no “better” form of doing politics, as all politics is the managing and dictating of lives and voices. It is the practice of rule, the enemy of freedom and wellness for all. Rule is quite simply the opposite of freedom. Rule carries with it a guarantee, which is why most flock to certain rulers who wear the shade of rule they prefer. With freedom, there is zero guarantee. But there is also unlimited reward.

What good voters enforce is civility, they enforce toothlessness, they enforce a common disempowerment and they enforce a delusion that anything will change by a ballot. They are offended by critical thought, and demand people only use the gracious rights afforded to us by the benevolent liberal state as the only reference point for where our freedom is to go.

Our time cannot be wasted with them. They choose their disempowerment, and we choose our power.

When the social masses are decomposed into armed individuals who find each other and define their goals, tools and terms, they will be much closer to the vibrancy of their future, the well-being of themselves and their loved ones.

That should be the priority. Not getting some moron of whatever party in power.

Set In These Ways: On Heathen Anarchy

“The Dises,” Dorothy Hardy (1909)

(Note: For the sake of context and a sense of progression, it may be helpful to have read The She-Wolf And Her Own before delving into this essay.)

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Introduction

With strange tongues, careful rituals were begun. An overcast morning welcomed the purifying candlelight. The mist of the valley and the smoke of the incense billowing gently from the altar teemed round where highways and factory farms eclipse today.

Elements in wayfaring patterns juxtaposed one another above, below and among the doings of the world-gazers: the common human head among several or many residing in the heaths that dotted pastures, coasts and roadsides. Many spots where these people broke from their work, giving thanks for all they had, are still marked with letters of a jagged, interlaced composition. A story of a wise wanderer who sacrificed self to self by hanging from the World Tree to know the nature of these unique runes encourages all who gaze at the world and its tree to seek insight, to challenge themselves. Stones were hallowed, erected where heath-dwellers felt the strongest gifts bestowed by ageless guardians, stalwart ancestors, loving friends, congenial wights. “From the gods, to the earth, to us . . .” They gave gifts in return, in thanks to these friends: “From us, to the earth, to the gods . . .” And so a cycle, biding the spheres and lasting through the tides, came to be the praxis of these world-gazing people.

This, in their modest tasks of self-sustenance — even during the first strange changes, served them very well before the aqueducts, before Christ, before cities, before miles of agriculture and every fucking thing wrapped in plastic begot the gradual end of this world with which we were blessed.

This is one among the ways of the pagans, the people spread across all regions whose waking and lived individual constitutions had ceded from this life long before the current epoch began making the Earth unlivable. In their times, the wages of mortality or deprivation rested on disease and natural disaster before man-made climate change, regional dictates by the brawn of a King or an Earl. These predate the imagination that we would someday possess the capability to skew the storms, bring drought and floods, to erode the skies, poison the oceans, the soil and the soul. And still, with immanent threats that encompassed no world yet known but the heath or the mountainside, hearts would still rise to the task of betraying or slaying tyrants when it became clear that the life blessed by the goddesses and gods was being hampered by an all-power, welcome-worn buffoon.

There is no going back to these times before everything became this horrible. There is only an onward course for those still alive which is continually, minutely revised in the passing hours that yield more information. But with more information in these channels, there seems to be only more disengaged possibility that recognizes itself in its halting at fear. Collective paralysis, set on by so many gruesome factors, has made the decision for all: to be an upstanding subject, to be parsed, seen, chewed and shat back out by the Roman Empire in 2021 [or, insert current year,] the common era.

History’s many, many points are well behind a twenty years’ chronicle of gnashing of teeth, repetitive images and video. It flares like a collection of myths concerning the most malignant level of the upright (human) wealth of happenings. So very much and somehow only a grumble of what to learn from, of what to expound on and make a practical lesson. A grappling with the world has cemented over the gazing heights. Their peaks were given luxurious balconies made from the suffering of thousands. The height stands to evoke in the viewer the feeling of might and command rather than a vantage into the world’s contents, what to derive in the heart from them.

The Roman, the world-grappler, sees only in the Earth the material with which to make more, make more. The Romans venerate their gods through expansion, eternal building and wringing out the land and waters for resources to do so. The world-gazing pagans know that if we are to have the goddesses’ and gods’ fullest reciprocity, they want us to manifest and sustain a real equilibrium in life between our heaths and the earth without saturation into death as we do every day now in this global Empire.

The world teeters on an uncertainty borne from the desperation to always be certain in the worst ways about the worst affairs, with so few having the shelter to be sad about it all.

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