by Ben Lawson

For 15 years I’ve believed in anarchy, the kind that exists in the presence of peace and equality. There have been moments when my heart has soared in the feeling of true anarchy. Certain times marching in the street, neo-tribal campfires in the ancient forest, planting gardens, painting community center walls. I cherish these moments because they’ve been few and far between. I’m always on the look-out for conditions in which I might taste that feeling again. I like to watch it in anthropology videos of hunter/gatherer peoples; freedom in every direction, inside and out.

I believe that we can share more of these moments, but we have to work to create them. We have to sacrifice the self for the whole, the ego for the spirit. That can mean compromise, forgiveness, compassion, humility, patience, love, respect. The world of dominance hierarchy actively suppresses these virtues. Small wonder why we’re all so fucked up in the head and heart. We’re not trained from birth by an anarchic culture how to live in anarchy. So when we try to synthesize anarchy, the ingredients are too contaminated to make a substance that holds together. We don’t really have the social skills and internal psychological discipline that it takes.

It requires enormous self-esteem, self-awareness, and self-control to resist the urge to dominate and the impulse to submit.

It wasn’t until I started seriously studying the self-help and human potential movements that I began to understand the social psychological pathologies that make anarchist projects, collectives, households, etc. constantly fail. It wasn’t until I began to study the nature of ego that it all made sense.

I used to walk into anarchist conferences, shows, gatherings, marches, etc. blindly trusting that everyone was pure of heart, committed, interested in healing, peace, harmony, autonomy, and respect. I was wrong; and most sorely wrong in assuming that I was at all pure and virtuous myself.

After learning about “control dramas” described in James Redfield’s enlightened novel The Celestine Prophecy, I realized that my whole life I’d used my sharp mind to lacerate everyone around me with an endless barrage of condescending, sarcastic, and hurtful behaviors. Why this unconscious brutality? Where does this desire come from? It’s quite simple, it’s energetic economics. Low self-esteem can be thought energetically to be a spirit deficiency. When we’re not happy, joyful, blissful, loving, caring, and being surrounded by people and environments overflowing with love, connection, and compassion we’re not channeling spirit into and through our bodies. We’re bankrupt in the currency of kindness. Chi, life-force, energy, love, light, whatever you want to call it, that is the blood of mental health.

What happens when you get depressed? Your body drops, becomes heavy, posture twists and collapses. What happens when you’re happy, when you feel unstoppable, on top of the world? You’re light, you stand tall, shoulders back, deep breaths, chest out. Everything is beautiful, worthy of patience and understanding. You’re inspired, (spirit means breath). You’re at peace, love flows easily into and through you. Negative thoughts melt into bliss.

Unfortunately we haven’t habituated the physiology of feeling good. Most of us have been abused, neglected and raised in a world devoid of true happiness and love. We live in energetic impoverishment. Thus we feel empty, unfulfilled, and our poor egos wonder why. Searching desperately for spirit, but finding only candy, TV, toys, commodities, shallow lust, commercialized sexuality, and the little kicks you get from being right, from being better, from knowing more, or being prettier, etc. our egos become insane.

Carlos Castaneda described the ego as the three thousand headed monster. Buddhists call it the monkey mind. Toltecs knew it to become like a parasite. It’s generally known in western psychology to be the cognitive mechanism by which we separate ourselves from all else in existence. It’s the ‘I’, “me’, ‘mine’. It is the “self” program running on the cerebral cortex computer, something unique to homo sapiens. When it’s healthy it seeks to share and connect peacefully and lovingly to the ‘we’. When it’s sick it wallows in self-pity and self-importance and isolates itself in pain.

Ego once served a healthy and vital role in hunter/gather existence: judge danger, build a self and community concept, assign meaning to experience, hold together a personality that can access past experiences to dynamically respond to the flow of reality with reflective thought in addition to pure instinct.

In the wild there is an abundance of love and spirit, the ego is most often pacified, nursing like a baby on the beauty and abundance of communal love and nature. In the dead neurotic scarce world of industrial civilization, our minds have become like a baby ripped from her mothers breast. Screaming and crying, why?

In this state of lack, we become masters of stealing energy from other people. We don’t learn how to cultivate it in ourselves through meditation. We’re not taught to find fulfillment, spirit and peace of mind by connecting with wild animals and nature. We don’t experience healthy love economies in dysfunctional patriarchal families. So we become spirit pirates. We become vampires of others’ energies. We fill our heart by stealing from the hearts of others. This is the game that is constantly being played behind the rational guise of business-as- usual human interaction. You don’t need Egon’s Psycho-Kinetic Energy (P.K.E.) meter to see this violent energy exchange in business, family, collective, and community life.

We’ve all heard the playground axiom that the bully who picks on you doesn’t really not like you; rather he just doesn’t like himself. We all seem to accept this as fundamentally true yet don’t quite see the more subtle applications to our own less brutish behaviors. As teenagers and adults we may no longer throw spit wads at each other or make fun of each others glasses but we do pick on and bully ourselves and others with other passive and aggressive behaviors.

We try to get pity, we suck energy and attention from others by making them wonder what’s wrong with us, we ridicule others mistakes, we punish ourselves with guilt, we intimidate others. Not to mention all the sinister games played in relationships. There are so many vicious cycles of negative thought, speech and action that tear through our minds and communities like tornados. We act out the ‘poor me, aloof, interrogator, and intimidator control dramas’.

After many black flagged relationships, friendships, bands, co-ops, and collectives failed in my life it started to dawn on me that most of us are too hurtful, destructive and insane to make the dream of anarchy come true (for ourselves in this lifetime). We can catch glimpses when our egos are quieted in moments of awe and reverence for natural beauty, song, dance, love, connection, solidarity, art, etc. But again, these peak states of blissful anarchy are seldom sustained for long before ego returns us to misery in conflict.

I realized that it’s not only foolish and ineffectual but also extremely dangerous to be building movements to do battle with the system while we’re all completely imbalanced and operating with diseased egos.

I can’t count all the infections of hellish debates, arguments, divisions, lynch mobs, character assassinations, back-biting, shit talking, and betrayals that I’ve witnessed or been on one side or the other of in the punk and anarchist scenes.

We accept and believe what American culture has taught its citizens and the world: cut throat individualism. While an anarchist collective may be creating a communal resource, event, project, etc. its members’ egos are still very often cutting throats psychologically. One time a friend summed up the dynamics within radical groups well by saying, “It’s all about who’s fucking who, and who’s king of the hill…”

So much sexual politics, so many hidden agendas, so much gossip, so many rumors, so much elitism, these are all hungers of the starving ego. These are all symptoms of inner conflict resulting in outer conflict. The sick ego never sits still, it’s never comfortable, it’s never at peace. It always judges, criticizes, and demands more. It’s never content, it’s always nagging, begging, and complaining. It doesn’t see the good in people it sees the bad. It doesn’t love the charm of peoples’ folly, it scathingly scoffs. It wants immediate gratification. It wants to be fed experiences that enforce its supremacy. It’s an ugly thing when it loses balance and becomes diseased, swollen, and inflamed.

It’s so funny how flimsy ideologically based movements are. Agent provocateurs drop one little rumor into the pit of hungry snarling egos and they tear each other limb from limb with the passion of pitbulls.

Peace in the chaos of the outer world is harder than inner peace. It’s the hardest thing to create and maintain. It’s not a plateau like the one inside, not a hammock, it’s a never-ending steep jagged rock face. It requires self discipline, total attention and extreme care. I don’t see this type of attitude often. I’ve seen myself and other people conducting their minds and behaviors the way corporate businessmen do: no mercy, no shame, total defense of their interests above all else.
And when we come to an impasse, we can all say fuck you and hit the road, because we don’t actually NEED each other tribally to survive. The system has plenty of artificial food, water, and ‘medicine’ sources for us to access as individuals. We don’t HAVE to love ourselves, each other, and nature to survive in every moment as a group. That’s the great ironic gift of industrial capitalism: false independence that destroys true interdependence. This will be a future column, back to the ego…

So called “primitive” peoples develop elaborate social systems involving stories, ceremonies, rituals, and mythologies to keep the ego in check. To keep the self rooted in the tribe; to keep ALL the deadly sins in balance. Not to fear, repress, or hate the negative impulses we humans have, but to learn from them, understand them, and be vigilant against their destructive power. And even to enjoy the folly, and be entertained by the human circus of imperfection. That’s the texture of this life, don’t wish it away, you’ll come back as a stone and crave the madness of human society…

Anarchy doesn’t require sainthood, or Buddha-hood. It does require discipline and humility and self-love in abundance that can be shared with the external world. If we try to create new anarchic associations without a conscious strategy to heal and rebalance our egos, we’ll continue to do the system’s work for it. We’ll keep re-infecting each other with pain, abuse, neglect, denial, fear, distrust, self-hatred, embarrassment, anxiety, etc.

There are infinite pathways that we can all explore to gain more of an internal sense of peace and harmony that we can then genuinely project into our relations. There is hope, we’re not simply ruined or cursed. We just have a tough job of self-discovery and self-love. It would have been nice if we’d have been raised knowing how to conduct ourselves better, or had been given a few hints earlier in life. But the more we practice these things now the healthier our bodies, minds, and communities will be and under such conditions spirit and magic can return and circulate. In our cold, toxic, negative mind and group states, spirit vanishes and anarchy cannot be achieved.

Now I know that on a metavisible level, it’s not really the content of the problems that plague anarchist groupings, it’s the form. It doesn’t mater what we’re debating when we do so with the conscious and unconscious intent to harm, to belittle, to insult, to win, to be right, we’re really just abusing the anarchist discourse as a tool to make ourselves and others ultimately feel bad. If the hippie drugged out drop outs don’t contribute much to the anarchist revolution, they certainly contribute a lot to the health of the planetary mind by promoting peace and love. On a vibrational level, a hyper-intellectual anarchist mind is like a chain saw being used to massage a deep painful injury. I was the ultimate chain saw, I just wanted to be in conflict and struggle for ego power, battling for psycho-spiritual energy, take, take, take, feed, feed, feed. And there were plenty of other vulchers to join in the frenzy. I know the sickness of ego quite well, I consider myself and all civilized humans chronically mentally diseased. There is no cure, only remission.

It’s a personal journey to find healthy, lasting fulfillment that doesn’t come at the cost of the health and wellness of others. There is no universal prescription, just an optimistic and experimental attitude will do. And there’s no end, every day is a struggle to defend oneself from the world and defend one’s spirit from one’s self.

Here’s a small list of things to try:

Say I love you in the mirror. Give yourself a daily massage. Discipline your body with an active art form and get fit having fun. Take an aspect of yourself that you don’t like and apply yourself in small daily increments to change it. Go into memories of hurt, shame, or embarrassment and redesign the experience, see yourself empowered and replay the script with new lines. Treat yourself how you want others to treat you. Watch a sunrise. Imagine that your mouth is literally full of shit as you talk shit about others. Keep a journal of your emotions. Breathe deeply. View your emotions as waves following through you, stand tall don’t get washed away. Criticize yourself in the sexiest voice you can imagine. Proact, don’t just react. Make new agreements with yourself and with reality, like those suggested by Don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements: Be impeccable with your word. Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make assumptions. Always do your best.

As transformations begin to occur you may notice some of the ’signs and symptoms of inner peace’ outlined by Saskia Davis:

“A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than on fears based ..xperiences; an unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment; a loss of interest in judging other people; a loss of interest in judging self; a loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others; A loss of interest in conflict; a loss of the ability to worry; frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation; contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature; frequent attacks of smiling; an increasing tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen; an increased susceptibility to the love extended by others as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it.”