However, as Cornel West so eloquently put it — ‘Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.’ Indeed, never forget. Because we are a forgetful society and often end up valuing symbols we think represent love more than Love itself or the Justice which is its public face.

So, perhaps we are cynical about love, having been disappointed multiple times in our own personal lives and deceived in its name by those who have used the word to manipulate us. We are embarrassed by displays of love and affection and pride ourselves on our ‘objective’, ‘non-sentimental’ view of life.

But what if it is the case that our human systems will not produce results that work for everyone unless love is consciously placed at the core? Unless love is baked in to the code from day one, as it were? If justice is what love looks like in public, then our public systems of governance must be based on justice. Another aspect of love must be mercy — we see precious little justice or mercy in the systems we have created, do we? Refugees are left to drown because it’s judged too costly or inconvenient to save them. Abstract numbers on spreadsheets are valued higher than human lives, which are themselves reduced to mere statistics. Our systems of organisation and governance are rotten to the core, as I’m sure the reader is aware. Love has left the building, ladies and gentlemen. We are left in a barren wasteland where everyone fights for themselves until there is literally nothing left to fight for. It’s every man for himself and the weakest will just be crushed under foot. When there is no love, no justice and no mercy, then what we see is the world we have today, and the worse one we will have tomorrow.

I am not a doom-monger however, at least I don’t think so. Some people are all too aware of this situation, and are fighting to create new systems which attempt not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Many technological solutions are proposed, and as we see with the internet, technological solutions can do a great deal. We have never been so connected to each other — in the sense of the speed at which information moves — in human history. The banking system is seen to be corrupt and on its last legs, so a genius or group of geniuses, creates Bitcoin. It has become apparent that Bitcoin has its own serious problems of course, but it is a mould-breaking solution from which others are now growing. We are attempting to build a new system ‘in the shell of the old’, despite the massive odds apparently stacked against us.

We must remember though that, as per Lawrence Lessig, ‘code is law’, and digital tech allows us to see this very clearly. In the old analogue model, people took actions and hoped for results. They were not able to model systems with the precision with which we are able to today in the digital world. Now we make rules and get results based on those rules, then are able to analyse the results in great detail in order to refine and update the rules. The fruit will reflect the seed much more clearly now. However, one mistake or omission can have terrible consequences, and the hyper-accelerated nature of digital means that the error will be replicated rapidly throughout the system.

If the current capitalist model had been designed by a programmer as a proposal for a system on which to run the world, we could take a look at the code and see that injustice is part of its very fabric. A system based on perpetual growth, as is the case with capitalism, obviously needs endless territory to conquer, otherwise, like a shark which stops swimming, it will sink to the bottom. Now we are running out of easily territory which can be colonised we can see this happening. There was a vague thought that we would leave this planet and conquer the stars and other worlds, but that project seems to have been put on hold for now, at least until we discover oil on one of the moons of Jupiter and it suddenly becomes profitable. Instead, we see the system cannibalising itself and the resultant disappearance of the middle class. The rules set up at the outset, albeit mostly unconsciously, determined that one day this would happen. There are indeed ‘limits to growth’ and these are being reached.

So in this way we can see how we need to be very clear from the outset when designing systems, that all rules are code, and all code is by default law. Given this great responsibility, how do we proceed? By baking in love, justice and mercy into the very structures of the systems we create. Just reading back that sentence makes a part of me cringe. But I realise it is that part which has been inculcated into me by the very capitalist paradigm in which I have grown up, where such ‘idealism’ is dismissed as ‘pie in the sky’, or some such. For me now ‘compassionate capitalism’ is the very definition of an oxymoron. There can of course be no such thing. The fundamental rules of capitalism preclude that just as the evolution of a Great White shark precludes it suddenly ‘pivoting’ into eating plankton.

Monolithic state-based systems such as the varieties of communism (more accurately totalitarian socialism) which have been tried have fared no better. We need new governance systems, this much is abundantly clear, and systems which favour cooperation over competition. They could include competition, sure, but not as a primary objective. That world view, a misinterpretation of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory has brought the planet we live on to the brink of no longer being able to support human life. I have no fear for life itself, or even for the Earth, but our race’s survival is based on a much more fragile balance than that needed by bacteria for example. No clean air or water, and we are history, and damn quickly.

It’s time to take down the corrupt systems which no longer function for the vast majority of humanity, and replace them with new ones with love at their core. Confused about what love is by all the overuse and abuse of the word by the corporate media? It’s that feeling you get when you see a boatload of refugees arriving at some foreign shore. It’s the knowledge, long buried but nevertheless still alive, that everything I do has consequences for all humanity. It’s the pain you feel when you see they’ve cut down the trees you remember from your childhood. It’s whatever stops you continuing the argument with your beloved and makes you reach out to them. It’s the smile you find yourself smiling when you see a friend you haven’t seen in ages. You can think of your own examples. Evidently it is not necessarily the same thing that it is depicted as in the television advertisements.

How do we create new systems based on love? We need less theory and more practice, less judgement and more mercy, and to see things from the perspective of those who have nothing. Then we will know how to proceed. If we ignore the warnings we will be joining those who have nothing, and will have to proceed from there. I usually think of it as a choice between the Path of Wisdom and the Path of Woe. In my opinion we are in the very last chance saloon for taking the Path of Wisdom and well on the way to the Path of Woe being our only option.

Not to tackle this problem and just leave it to chance would be a mistake — we need to face up to the problem of governance — to avoid it would lead to a rule by default of those who currently have the most power in our societies. This means those who are already rich, and those who work for them, those who literally write the code of our laws and social operating systems — the politicians, and in the corporate world, lawyers, lobbyists and programmers. The more we let corporations decide how things work, the more we will be ruled by a tech elite by default. These people are inherently specialists, and specialists are not qualified to rule as they generally have no overview of the processes at work on a large scale. Please note that I am not joining the ‘we are sick of experts’ crew; experts and specialists are certainly needed, however we also need generalists and what were traditionally known as ‘wise’ people to help us navigate our way. I notice that ‘wisdom’ has more or less been consigned to the dustbin of ‘not realistic’ along with ‘love’, ‘justice’, and ‘mercy’. However, ultimately ‘realistic’ in this context is what we decide it is.

In our organisations, at a smaller scale, to not face up to how we govern ourselves means we fall into the trap of replicating legacy hierarchical systems, or prey to the ‘tyranny of structurelessnesss’. We have to get things straight — our systems must be based on justice first then tech later, anything less will only serve to prolong the current disaster. Getting over our squeamishness about the word — and the fundamental concept of — love, whether it be in the form of justice, solidarity, or compassion, must be our priority. We need to talk about how we can structure our organisations from a seed vision of justice. Then we will create structures which not only do no harm, but actually start to regenerate our social contract and both personal and professional relationships.

‘Anarchy is not misrule but no rule’ – Floating Anarchy Manifesto, Daevid Allen

Following on from my previous post, ‘Big Brother is the Reincarnation of God‘, I have been considering how we give up our power to our god-surrogate, whether that be in the form of governments, corporations, or indeed organised religions.

Of course one of the main ways in which we surrender ourselves to the ‘Man Upstairs’ is through opting for convenience over our own long term benefit. I remember when Google first launched the GMail service, and certain troublemakers pointed out that the Big G would have to analyse all our private emails in order to supply us with targeted advertising. I considered these warnings for a few minutes, to be sure, but then remembering the Google motto of ‘Don’t Be Evil’, and their perceived track record of generally being pretty good around privacy issues, I chose, as apparently a vast majority did, to ignore the potential dangers and focus on the features of this new email service. And I have to say, that GMail is a great email service, and certainly pushed the whole notion of how to provide email up a level, introducing many innovations which have since been copied by other providers (even Microsoft eventually caught on, after a few years).

But with the Snowden revelations, and those of other whistleblowers, we realise that our trust in Google was misplaced, or perhaps being more charitable, our trust in how the internet works was misplaced – we still don’t know how much Google or other corporations knew about, or are able to prevent, the likes of the NSA spying on everyone’s emails. We may assume that as they didn’t see it as a problem to analyse everyone’s emails themselves, that personal privacy was not exactly at the top of their list, but of course we had the clear option of rejecting the GMail model on privacy grounds, and we chose not to, which brings me to one of the main points of this article.

We are at a crossroads where we have to decide if we are always going to chose the most convenient option offered to us, or if we are going to step up and take back our power. In the Venn diagram of Convenience vs Personal Power there is apparently only a small intersection between these two forces competing for our attention – one is endlessly blared at us from the Masters of our Universe in the outer world, the other comes as a persistent whisper from within.

Now we are called on to wade into the deep waters called ‘Responsibility’ – a swampy region which has been out of bounds for most people since the 1950s as anything to be taken seriously… please let me explain…

The beatniks and hippies in the industrial West saw the concept of Responsibility for what it had become: a semantic illusion whereby the needs of the Church, Corporation or State were made out to be equal to our own inner prompting, our own personal sense of Doing The Right Thing. As the encroaching radios and televisions started to drown out our own inner voice, we were told what it was to Do The Right Thing – consume this, ‘support the troops’, reject the Other (they might be a Communist, out to destroy our ‘Freedom’!), and many people unwittingly bought into this – because it was convenient to just be told what to think rather than having to exercise their own brains.

The younger generation from the late 50s onwards started to reject this paradigm – creating the Generation Gap and the phenomenon of the Rebel Without A Cause. The beatniks wanted to just ‘take it easy’ and ‘hang loose’ – ‘Responsibility’ was a dirty word, a trick used to get kids to enrol in pointless imperial wars or dead-end wage-slave occupations. ‘Why don’t you take responsibility?’ was really just another way of saying ‘Why don’t you conform to the demands of a dying imperial culture at the expense of your own soul?’

However now it can be said that the baby did go the same way as the bathwater; and that as Adam Curtis’ excellent documentary series ‘The Century of the Self‘ demonstrated, multinational corporations soon found a way to use this desire for a ‘hang loose’ lifestyle for their own ends… illustrated in the classic line from ‘Withnail and I’: “We are at the end of an age. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is nearly over. They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man”.

Convenience became the new god, and we didn’t care who provided it, or at what cost. Responsibility was old-hat, man; ‘they’ would take care of everything and we could just stay cool. With the rise of the punk movement a new distrust arose, ‘don’t trust anyone over 30’, DIY culture, and so on, but Responsibility was still the enemy.

As we moved into the Information Age, we started to see new ‘cool’ companies, companies who ‘got’ the hippy thing, who ‘got’ the punk thing – people who had been brought up smoking weed, maybe talking about the potential of computers while on acid; people who Did It Themselves, who were definitely ‘cool’ – we had been waiting a long time for them to come through, and now here they were, they said they were not ‘Evil’ – and we believed them. They offered us Convenience without Responsibility and because we knew they were ‘cool’, we trusted them. We trusted them with our data, with our personal information, with our whole life stories, with our Privacy.

Now we discover that we were betrayed. They gave all that data to The Man. The elder sibling who was helping us do all this cool stuff (and probably having a crafty smoke in the back yard as well) had now become Big Brother, or at least Big Brother’s Little Helper, dutifully passing on all our private data to The Bad Guys, the uncool ones, the NSA, the government – in short those people we would NEVER have trusted in a million years with our most intimate data.

So here we are – and the solution to our predicament appears to be that most reviled and rejected word ‘Responsibility’. We have to grow up, just like those parents in the 50s demanded of their Rebel-Without-A-Cause sons and daughters. We need to Take Responsibility, Stand On Our Own Two Feet, and all those horrible slogans we have been running from for at least the last 60 years.

We have to realise that we willingly gave Big Brother all our stuff, and we have to do what we can to take it back, and make sure that this doesn’t happen again. But the solution is not a collective one, at its heart. We each, as individuals, need to accept that we are responsible for our stories, our data, our lives as they exist in the public or private domains, and take back our privacy, and with it our power. We will then be on the road to a writing a death sentence for Big Brother, just as one was written for his predecessor, God.

The beauty of this approach, as we start with our online lives and then go onto applying the principles in our lives in general, is that we do not need to wait for anyone else to do anything for us. Sure, we necessarily lead interdependent lives with those around us, and I am certainly not advocating that ‘taking personal responsibility’ is equal to buying a shotgun and going to live in a cabin in the woods, there to wait, stewing in our own paranoia, for The Man to show up and smoke us out, Waco-style.

If a lot of people start taking responsibility for their own data, and as an extension, their own lives, this may start to look like some kind of Movement. But in reality that is the last thing it needs to become. For me, Movements tend to move us to where someone else wants us to be – for example, if you join a political party, then you must consign any belief that doesn’t fit in with their ideology to a kind of mental limbo, like the ideological version of the drawer full of cables and other odds and ends we all have at home.

But before we go any further, what am I talking about when I say ‘take responsibility for our data’? I simply mean that we do not trust big corporations or governments any more, no matter their protestations of not being evil, or their bland reassurances. They have had our trust, and they have betrayed it, big time. Anyone who thinks that view is cynical, that it was just ‘a few bad apples’ getting the upper hand in any given situation needs to wake up and smell the rotting fruit – the whole barrel has clearly gone bad, and the exception now would be finding anyone with any integrity in a position of any significant power in public or corporate life. The reasons why this has happened are, I would suggest, mainly to do with the erosion of proper checks and balances on power, starting with the dismantling of any sort of truly free press in most countries, and the current war on real journalism we see unfolding at the moment – but that is really a subject for another day.

So we may have to say ‘goodbye’ to Google, ‘farewell’ to Facebook, ‘adieu’ to Apple, and ‘mind how you go’ to Microsoft. We will have to trust other, smaller companies, although if we are fairly tech-savvy we can actually replace a lot of our dependence on big corporations by taking measures such as hosting our own dropbox-style service using Owncloud, running our own web server on an old machine at home, and so on. If we are not so technically minded we can still spread the risk by hosting our email with one of the many privacy-conscious providers – growing day by day since the NSA spying revelations, do our web searches using startpage.com or duckduckgo.com, and generally build up an ecology of smaller tools to help us carry out the same tasks we do today using the monolithic services provided by big corporations. Yes, we will have to be vigilant with each of these services, to see that we can still trust them; and yes, it will be somewhat less convenient. That, however is kind of the point of this article: in today’s world, taking responsibility is going to mean sacrificing some degree of convenience.

The word ‘vigilance’ is also key here; we must constantly monitor the services we use as much as possible; choosing those which offer the greatest level of transparency and making sure they stay committed to protecting their users from those (we now know for sure) are out there trying to get their hands on our personal data for whatever reason. We know that in the current Information Age, our data is like gold, and we should not willingly hand it over to anyone we do not trust implicitly.

Of course, we will always have the choice. I do not believe that most people really care that their personal communications are being spied on;  that their data is being mined for the profit of others. This is fine, that is their choice up to the point where the last doorway out of the corporate system closes and the lobbyists realize their dearest dream of getting us to be legally required to use the services of a monolithic provider… then there will no longer be a (legal) choice – and if people say that is the present writer being paranoid, that is exactly what they would have said to someone ten years ago who claimed that in ten years’ time, completely private communications between people would be almost a thing of the past. The fact is, that ‘almost’ is notable – it is not quite a thing of the past yet – with a bit of knowledge and vigilance, and of course taking the dreaded Responsibility, we can widen those doorways leading out of the locked down, spied-on system, and help others to come out too.

No one, however, is going to do it for you. You, and I, will have to judge how we are best going to protect ourselves from being spied on. There will be no-one to blame if it goes wrong, and in all probability, no-one will praise us if things go well, as they will probably not know much about our escape from Big Brother – this is not going to be a thing you will want to publicise very much, online or off.

Having achieved some measure of freedom regarding our data and our online lives, we may wish to broaden that into the wider, offline world. As I mentioned in the previous article, this may involve ‘being the change we want to see in the world’, (and I apologise here, as I did there, for using this by now rather worn out rallying cry), and taking back our power online was the first step in an ongoing process which eventually encompasses all of our life.

I am reminded of an anecdote told by the British comedian Robert Newman who was, via his interest in the environmental movement, starting to do some research into anarchism, and had indeed met a few people who claimed to be anarchists. They were talking and someone came up with what to Newman appeared to be a good idea in the field of direct action. ‘Someone should do that’, he offered. ‘No mate, it doesn’t work like that’ – and he realised that the ‘someone’ who should do that would have to be himself. This was his moment of illumination as to what anarchism means – everybody takes Responsibility for themselves. A true anarchist sees waiting for someone else to do something for them as an intolerably weak position to be in – hence the distrust of governments and hierarchical structures.

Just to digress a moment: when I speak of people taking Responsibility for themselves, I don’t mean it in the fundamentalist Republican, Tea Party style: ‘people are poor because they are lazy, and to help them would condone their laziness and make them dependent’. Thus that little child must be allowed to starve or die of a curable disease to teach her parents a lesson. This is borderline insane in my opinion, amply illustrated by the current shutdown of the entire US Government apparently just so these Ayn Rand worshippers don’t have to lose an argument.

Of course taking responsibility includes helping others, even those who might be classified as lazy or undeserving. I am currently reading Dr. Gabor Maté’s excellent book ‘In The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts’, about his work with hardcore drug addicts in Vancouver’s downtown East Side – he explains how he is often forced to deal with political conservatives reducing or removing funding from harm reduction programmes such as a local safe needle exchange project, simply on the ideological grounds that if drug users do not suffer sufficiently, it might encourage other people to start making the ‘bad life choices’ that would lead to them becoming heroin, meth or crack addicts. He makes the very good point that if that were true we should also refuse hospital treatment to alcohol or nicotine addicts, or even to stressed businessmen who have heart attacks, because they could, in theory, have made other choices with their lives and not put themselves in the position of being ‘a burden on society’.

The truly free person surely looks on those suffering under the yoke of addiction with compassion, whether it be addiction to heroin, nicotine, religious dogma, or the crap they churn out on Fox News. Everyone is surely doing the best they can, even if that ‘best’ does not match up to how other people chose to define it.

So what would a society look like where each individual took Responsibility for themselves? A vision I like is ‘Floating Anarchy’, originally propagated by the original hippy punk band, Planet Gong, ‘led’ (in a non-hierarchical sense of course) by Daevid Allen. As I understand it, this means everyone taking Responsibility for their own actions, precluding the need for governments, laws or police. The ‘Floating’ part would be underlining the non-violent and spiritual slant on Anarchy, as opposed to the version commonly presented in mainstream culture where Anarchy is assumed to be synonymous with chaos and violence. Of course, the media have an agenda to promote and any kind of realistic examination of what ‘anarchy’ means might jeopardise that.

‘Here and Now Is Floating Anarchy
NOW you know the only way to be
Turn your head up to the morning Sun yeah
And your life will just have begun
You know that violence is caused by governments
Armies, police force….’

So everyone acts in harmony with The Moment, with their own deepest motivation, which is assumed to be in accord with the Will of the Universe, which is of course nothing other than our own deepest Will. It is really a question of living in a frequency of consciousness above that of Reason; in the state of Reason, rules have to be made, recorded and written down. These rules assume the future will be like the past, or they would not work. Of course they do work for a while, in most cases, although never in all cases, gradually becoming obsolete, unjust and tyrannical, then are replaced by new rules. There is a kind of entropy to this though, as laws are made much more easily than they are repealed and eventually we find ourselves tied up in the detritus of old laws, bound by our past good intentions into a State of total inertia. This entropy is reaching an endgame in several areas of life, I believe, especially where taxation and copyright are concerned.

With Floating Anarchy, the moment to moment understanding of what is right sustains all, is understood by all, and is lived by all. How do we know we are living in this state? We are free from unhappiness. If we become emotional or unhappy then we know we have left this state, have left the moment and have gone into a slower world of cause and effect, blame and gain. Barry Long has spoken about this state at length, especially in his ‘Only Fear Dies: A Book of Liberation‘ – what it means to take responsibility for our actions as individuals, and as how one acts while knowing oneself as not separate from the Whole:

AT THE BEGINNING
At the beginning of time the individual man or woman was the ruling authority on earth. There was no emotion in this authority: no past, no likes and dislikes, no unhappiness, no self-interest. Each individual was responsible for himself or herself in a way that is unimaginable today.
There was no concept of the masses. There was no notion of what would be good or not good for others, society and the world or even for oneself. There was only one good.

No good is seen in the future.

The good, the only good, was seen, realised or known now, in the individual. And it was known by the absence of unhappiness in himself or herself. So it was not ‘a good’ as we think of good today. It could not be given to another or shared with someone who did not have it. That would have been to create another or secondary ‘good’, a notional (not-existent-now) good.
Everyone was responsible for their own good. It was an utterly individual and just authority. One simply took responsibility now for the good – the absence of unhappiness in oneself. And all that followed was naturally right or good.
As anyone or everyone could do it, and did it, no excuse existed for not doing it. Consequently, notions of mass good, social or family good, or even of social equality, had no meaning. If all are equal in the timeless good within, all are equal in the unfoldment in time of the good without. What happens is then right, and known to be right, leaving no place for doubt or unhappiness.

I believe this is as good a definition of Floating Anarchy as we are going to get.

Is this an impossibly utopian state of affairs to wish for? In one sense yes, as it is clearly not going to happen any time soon for any great number of people – however this way of seeing things inherently invalidates itself. If I want Floating Anarchy to come to Earth, I simply have to live it right now. I don’t wait for anyone else to join me; that would imply time and unhappiness. By my example, that might encourage people to do likewise but that is ultimately none of my concern.

Another facet of the question ‘Is this an impossibly utopian state of affairs to wish for?’, is that, as I have examined here, proposed utopias always rely on the future for their creation, and more often than not an overarching philosophy of ‘the end justifies the means’. In other words, they need the promise of the future to exist; they are chimeras, mirages which always recede away into the horizon the closer one comes to them. All politicians can, and do, promise ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ – it is the hope that this time things will work out, that this time we have chosen the Man Upstairs who will fix all our problems. Change is easy to promise because that is all there is in this world. It’s like promising there will be salt water in the oceans tomorrow. I’m sure I am not alone in hoping we ‘Don’t Get Fooled Again’, but we are such Hope fiends I wouldn’t bet on it. The promise of tomorrow’s utopia always allows us to think that someone else is going to take care of it and we can just sit back and avoid that terrible, awful thing: Responsibility.

What happens though if we don’t avoid it? What happens if we grasp Responsibility with both hands – and in doing so realise that what seemed to be its persistent, nagging whisper is but the first sparks crackling of a fire which will eventually become a furnace burning our old  lives away, compromised and enslaved as they were – and creating the space we need to grow into, as truly free beings.