No Masters: An Introduction to the Idea of Thinking for Yourself

From Days of War, Nights of Love

If you liked school, you'll love work. The cruel, absurd abuses of power, the self-satisfied authority that teachers and principals lorded over you, the intimidation and ridicule of your classmates don't end at graduation. Those things are all present in the adult world, only more so. If you thought you lacked freedom, wait until you have to answer to shift leaders, managers, owners, landlords, creditors, tax collectors, city councils, draft boards, law courts, and police. When you get out of school you may escape the jurisdiction of some authorities, but you enter the control of even more domineering ones. Do you enjoy being controlled by others who don't understand or care about your wants and needs? Do you get anything out of obeying the instructions of employers, the restrictions of landlords, the laws of magistrates, people who have powers over you that you would never have given them willingly?

How is it that they get all this power, anyway? The answer is hierarchy.

Hierarchy is a value system in which your worth is measured by the number of people and things which you control, and how dutifully you obey those above you. Weight is exerted downward through the power structure: everyone is forced to accept and conform to this system by everyone else. You're afraid to disobey those above you because they can bring to bear the power of everyone and everything under them. You're afraid to abdicate the power of those below you because they might end up above you. In our hierarchical system, we're all so busy trying to protect ourselves from each other that we never have a chance to stop and ask if this is really the best way our society could be organized. If we could think about it, we'd probably agree that it isn't; for we all know happiness comes from control over our own lives, not other people's lives. And as long as we're busy competing for control over others, we're bound to be the victims of control ourselves.

It is our hierarchical system that teaches us from childhood to accept the power of any authority figure, regardless of whether it is in our best interest or not. We learn to bow down instinctively before anyone who claims to be more important than we are. It is hierarchy that makes homophobia common among poor people in the U.S.A. - they're desperate to feel more valuable, more significant than somebody. It is hierarchy at work when two hundred punk rockers go to a rock club (already a mistake, of course!) to see a band, and for some stupid reason the clubowner won't let them perform: there are two hundred and six people at the club, two hundred and five of whom want the band to play, but they all accept the decision of the clubowner just because he is older and owns the place (ie. has more financial power, and thus more legal power). It is hierarchical values that are responsible for racism, classism, sexism, and a thousand other prejudices that are deeply ingrained in our society. It is hierarchy that makes rich people look at poor people as if they aren't human, and vice versa. It pits employer against employee, manager against worker, teacher against student, making people struggle against each other rather than work together in mutual aid; separated this way, they can't even benefit from each other's skills and ideas and abilities, but must live in jealousy and fear of them. It is hierarchy at work when your boss insults you or makes sexual advances at you and you can't do anything about it, just as it is when the police flaunt their power over you. For power does make people cruel and heartless, and submission does make people cowardly and stupid: and most people in a hierarchical system partake in both. Hierarchical values are responsible for our destruction of the natural environment and the exploitation of animals: led by the capitalist West, our species seeks control over anything we can get our claws on, at any cost to ourselves or others. And it is hierarchical values that send us to war, fighting for power over each other, inventing more and more powerful weapons until finally the whole world teeters on the edge of nuclear annihilation.

But what can we do about hierarchy? Isn't that just the way the world works? Or are there other ways people could interact, other values we could live by?

Resurrecting anarchism as a personal approach to life.

Stop thinking of anarchism as just another "world order," just another social system. From where we all stand, in this very dominated, very controlled world, it is impossible to imagine living without any authorities, without laws or governments. No wonder anarchism isn't taken seriously as a large-scale political or social program: no one can imagine what it would really be like, let alone how to achieve it - not even the anarchists themselves.

Instead, think of anarchism as an individual orientation to yourself and others, as a personal approach to life. That's not impossible to imagine. Conceived in these terms, what would anarchism be? It would be a decision to think for yourself rather than following blindly. It would be a rejection of hierarchy, a refusal to accept the "god given" authority of any nation, law, or other force as being more significant than your own authority over yourself. It would be an instinctive distrust of those who claim to have some sort of rank or status above those around them, and an unwillingness to claim such status over others for yourself. Most of all, it would be a refusal to place responsibility for yourself in the hands of others: it would be the demand that each of us not only be able to choose our own destiny, but also do so.

According to this definition, there are a great deal more anarchists than it seemed, though most wouldn't refer to themselves as such. For most people, when they think about it, want to have the right to live their own lives, to think and act as they see fit. Most people trust themselves to figure out what they should do more than they trust any authority to dictate it to them. Almost everyone is frustrated when they find themselves pushing against faceless, impersonal power.

You don't want to be at the mercy of governments, bureaucracies, police, or other outside forces, do you? Surely you don't let them dictate your entire life. Don't you do what you want to, what you believe in, at least whenever you can get away with it? In our everyday lives, we are all anarchists. Whenever we make decisions for ourselves, whenever we take responsibility for our own actions rather than deferring to some higher power, we are putting anarchism into practice.

So if we are all anarchists by nature, why do we always end up accepting the domination of others, even creating forces to rule over us? Wouldn't you rather figure out how to coexist with your fellow human beings by working it out directly between yourselves, rather than depending on an external set of rules? The system they accept is the one you must live under: if you want freedom, you can't afford to not be concerned about whether those around you demand control of their own lives or not.

Do we really need masters to command and control us?

In the West, for thousands of years, we have been sold centralized power and hierarchy in general on the premise that we do. We've all been taught that without police, we would all kill each other; that without bosses, no work would ever get done; that without governments, civilization itself would fall to pieces. Is all this true?

Certainly it's true today that little work gets done when the boss isn't working, chaos ensues when governments fall, and violence sometimes occurs when the police aren't around. But are these really indications that there is no other way to organize society? Isn't it possible that workers don't get anything done unless they are under observation because they are not used to doing anything without being prodded - more than that, because they resent being inspected, instructed, condescended to by their managers, and don't want to do anything for them that they don't have to? Perhaps if they were working together for a common goal, rather than being paid to take orders, working towards orders that they have no say in and don't interest them much, they would be more proactive. Not to say that everyone is ready or able to do such a thing today; but our laziness is conditional rather than natural, and in a different environment, we might find we don't need bosses to get things done.

And as for police being necessary to maintain peace: we won't discuss the ways in which the role of the "law enforcer" brings out the most brutal aspects of human beings, and how police brutality doesn't exactly contribute to peace. How about the effect on civilians living in a police-"protected" state? Once the police are no longer a direct manifestation of they community they serve (and that happens quickly, whenever a police force is established: they become a power external to the rest of society, an outside authority), they are a force acting coercively on the people of that society. Violence isn't just limited to physical harm: any relationship that is established by force, such as the one between police and civilians, is a violent relationship. When you are acted upon violently, you learn to act violently back. Isn't it possible, then, that the implicit threat of the police on every street corner - of the near omnipresence of uniformed, impersonal representatives of state power - contributes to tension and violence, rather than dispelling it? If that doesn't seem likely to you, and you are middle class and/or white, ask a poor black or Hispanic man how the presence of police makes him feel.

When the standard forms of human interaction revolve around hierarchical power, when human intercourse so often comes down to giving and receiving orders (at work, at school, in the family, in the courts), how can we expect to have no violence in our society? People are so used to using force against each other in their daily lives, that violence cannot be far behind in such a system. Perhaps if we were more used to treating each other as equals, to creating relationships based upon equal concern for each other's needs, we wouldn't see so many people resort to physical violence against each other.

And what about government control? Without it, would our society fall to pieces, and our lives with it?

Certainly, things would be a great deal different without governments than they are now - but is that necessarily a bad thing? Is our modern society really the best of all possible worlds? Is it worth it to grant masters and rulers so much control over our own lives, out of fear of trying anything different?

Besides, we can't claim that we need government to prevent mass bloodshed, because it is governments that have carried out the greatest slaughters of all: in wars, in holocausts, in the centrally organized enslavement and obliteration of entire peoples and cultures. And it may be that when governments break down, many people lose their lives in the resulting chaos and infighting. But this fighting is almost always between other power-hungry hierarchical groups, other would-be governors and rulers. If we were to reject hierarchy absolutely, and refuse to serve any force above ourselves, there would no longer be any large-scale wars or holocausts. That would be the responsibility each of us would have to take on equally, to collectively refuse to recognize any power as worth serving, to swear allegiance to nothing but ourselves and our fellow human beings. If we all do that, we would never see another world war again.

Of course, even if a world entirely without hierarchy is possible, we should not have any illusions that any of us will live to see it realized. That should not even be our concern: for it is foolish to arrange our life so that it revolves around something that you will never be able to experience. We should, rather, recognize patterns of submission and domination in our own lives, and, to the best of our ability, break free of them. We should put the anarchist ideal - no masters, no slaves - into effect in our daily lives however we can. Every time one of us remembers not to accept at face value the authority of the powers that be, each time one of us is able to escape the system of domination for a moment (whether it be getting away with something forbidden by a teacher or boss, relating to a member of a different social stratum as an equal, etc.), that is a victory for the individual and a blow against hierarchy.

Do you still believe that a hierarchy-free society is impossible? There are plenty of examples throughout human history: the bushmen of the Kalahari desert still live without authorities, never trying to force or command each other to do things but working together and granting each other freedom and autonomy. Sure, their society is being destroyed by our more warlike one - but that isn't to say that an egalitarian society could not exist that was extremely hostile to, and well-defended against, the encroachments of external power! In Cities of the Red Night, William Burroughs writes about an anarchist pirates' stronghold a few hundred years ago that was just like that.

If you need an example closer to your daily life, remember the last time you gathered with your friends to relax on a Friday night. Some of you brought food, some of you brought entertainment, some provided other things, but nobody kept track of who owed what to whom. You did things as a group and enjoyed yourselves; things actually got done, but nobody was forced to do anything, and nobody assumed the position of master. We have these moments of non-capitalist, non-hierarchical interaction in our lives constantly, and these are the times when we most enjoy the company of others, when we get the most out of people; but somehow it doesn't occur to us to demand that society should work this way, as well as our friendships and love affairs. Sure, it's a lofty goal to ask that it does - but let's dare to reach for high goals, let's not settle for anything less than the best in our lives!