Outsourcing Humanity

Government or Community: pick one.

The human species is around a quarter million years old.  We survived thus far by being an aggressively social species and living in community, both local and global.  The idea of the modern state is a recent innovation of the last few centuries, and it upended the way we relate to other humans.  City-States are much older, but still only represent perhaps 2% of our species existence. 

Government acts as an intermediate between people, so that people and communities can no longer effectively resolve problems among themselves, they must appeal to a higher power (government) which is thought of as “representative”, but always serves the ruling class and not the people.  Once this intermediary exists, it actually imperils attempts to operate without.  For instance: group A has a conflict with group B in a community, and attempts to informally meet and work out resolutions to problems.  But one person in one of the groups is unwilling so they call the cops.  The cops show up to ensure ruling class interests are maintained, which may include violently taking the side of the party in the wrong, or possibly doing violence against all sides for having the audacity to try to work things out on their own.

There’s no such thing as “representative democracy”.  Direct democracy is the only democracy, and it’s messy and organic.  It requires knowing neighbors and communities, being informed, exercising critical thought and collective processes.    It connects you to other humans.

Appealing to government to save people, to deliver justice, to deliver humanity, is an exercise in futility.  It’s outsourcing your humanity to an outside contractor who doesn’t care about you.  The Whiteness construct heavily relies on this externalizing of humanity, IE erosion of it.  It is a means by which not to take responsibility for acting in human social ways as individuals and communities, to instead appeal to abstracts.  Anything but material solutions to material problems.

The first task of liberation from statism is to learn to live in community, and listen to those who have never forgotten how to be in community, indeed have been forced to.  Those of us with colonizer backgrounds are students and it is time to take a seat and learn.