Translator’s note

Anarchy is a methodology and a means of individuation as well as an organizational strategy. Free association, autonomy — Emile Armand knew there was, between society and the individual, a veil of mystifying ideology that had to be torn.

So many anarchists today fear interacting with the world outside their circles; but they forget how many natural anarchists there are in the world, people opposed to profit and power without labeling themselves anything at all. Reading Emile Armand today is like peering at the present through lenses of the past that clarify everything suddenly, in flashes, a past with the same alienations, the same struggles, the same hang-ups.

The concern of some modern anarchists for concepts such as ‘race’, ‘class’ and ‘gender’, concepts with no material reality except as social constructs, ‘conventions and prejudices’ which torture and distort the vision and should be destroyed in daily life, is the typical result of a sexual repression that also forbids discussing sexual issues in many modern literary anarchist circles.

The sexually repressed person categorizes themselves and other people, because s/he can’t directly experience the vast intricacies of anyone for fear of their involvement taking on a sexual dimension, and must erect walls of armoring, like clothing, but extended analogically to the character itself, protecting the individual from emotion. All authentic interaction has, implicitly, a sexual aspect, and if it is liberated, expresses not an obsession with that sexual side of things but a conscious acknowledgment and self-management of it.

When the lights are out, race, class, and gender have no more meaning; only individual feelings and sensual enjoyments are meaningful in the anarchy of truly free emotional association. Sexuality is a primary force in life, and our social relations come from that same place. The repression of that force creates an inversion in the mind and body which is fertile soil for the planting of authoritarian ideology; this is something Armand saw clearly so many years ago, as did individuals in so many other “forgotten” strains of the vast treasure trove of individualist and anarchist thought that has been expressed over the centuries.

Like other individuals, such as Wilhelm Reich, Han Ryner, or Thomas De Coster, Emile Armand knew well the insularity we see around us in radical circles as well as in society at large, and he knew the rigidity accompanying it; he saw it as an expression of a communist pollution in anarchy. Communism was always just a thin façade hiding a brutally ‘scientific’ authoritarianism, and Armand’s distaste for it was plain.

Most of Armand’s life was spent directly living it, but his writing was mostly polemical. His position was his own, and he seems to have struggled to make his voice heard in the bustling anarchist milieu of his time, as well as in society at large. He was a nudist and a polyamorist, taking to their logical conclusion, in daily life, the arguments of the anarchists, and living his own life in his own way.

A thorough rereading of Armand today is a healthy alternative to the dry ideologies — always infinitely less messy than the realities — that come in and out of fashion, and an invigorating look into the life of a man who tried his best to be himself and be happy, in the midst of all the misery and role-playing.

— J.

Prologue

Emile Armand was born in Paris in 1872. The son of a progressive bourgeois family, he received a profoundly anticlerical education, which, almost with symmetry, generated within him a great mystico-religious passion. His father fought in the Paris commune, and the family had to emigrate to London in exile. Upon his return numerous things happened to Armand — he first became a born-again Christian, then he abandoned Christianity, having begun to read anarchist books, and then he got tired of his wife.

Emile Armand’s rebellion was prolix and massive. It revealed itself in the way a photograph does, the colors appearing without warning from within a gray, virginal, bloodless life. First he rebelled against his own name, Ernest Lucien Juin — against a family institution. Then against his catholic creed, against moral obligation. Then he rebelled against his wife, against social condemnation. And then, later, against Power in general, which is a weakness common to all people and which is the seed of misery. Then he created his own name, Emile Armand, as voluptuous as was the kindness of the ideas he began to profess: amorous camaraderie, a combination of sensuality and freedom, of love and respect. And he assumed a new identity, which was paradoxically generous — anarchist individualism.

If hypocrisy is the mother of the mediocre human and avidity is its father, Armand desired instead the creation of an precocious generation of free children, happy egoists, innocent humans who would know how to detect, with their bodily feelings, the irrational meanness of Power wherever it might come close to generating in people a complicit attitude towards itself. Armand was not alone; he had the friendly companionship of Max Stirner and Han Ryder, recognized individualists who did not call themselves such either, and who had already walked a path which became an inspiration for the French thinker.

Emile Armand was a whole man — essayist, poet, journalist, editor, and translator. He steered away from novels, alexandrine verse, and the genres and spirits that claim that beauty is only to be found in strict compliance to formal rules. At moments, his writing becomes sticky, somewhat repulsive, sentimental — but this all corresponds to what is to be expected of a man who could not, nor wanted to distance himself from his passions. He had already done so too much in his past — for him it was time to narrow himself. The titles of some of his publications reflect this — The Averse, Outside the Flock, Beyond fighting, The Unique.

The current prejudice declares individualism to be a synonym for obfuscation, skepticism, melancholy and repulsion; that if individualism were an animal, it would be a pesky fox — that if it were a season, it would be winter, and if it were a habitation it would be a basement. It also declares that individualist sensibility is in reality a closing ceremony for the senses, for feelings, the egotistical enclosure of an “I” which considers itself to be the center of the world. There’s no reason to deny it: for anarchist individualists it is sure that each is the center of his or her own world. There is no One Earth, besides in a physical sense in which it is conceived as having certain cosmic coordinates. The negation of this unambiguous condition is characteristic of the individual who, predicating a merely discursive philanthropy, practices with violence a disrespectful centrality. This is what Armand observed — To be unique is not to be the only one, and to be amongst others is not simply to be just anyone. The problem is that the flock of (altruists) has curiously misinterpreted the (central question).

The Individualism of Emile Armand responds with a smile to traditional prejudices, one of which is the traditional views on sexuality. His is an individualism of happiness; and happiness is the closest sister of eroticism. Thus, it would be an exaggeration to consider Armand as a prophet of sexual freedom. Certainly, he practiced and spoke of it, but his was a call sent out only to a few, to the soul brothers and soul sisters that could understand the throbbing of freedom in all its rich forms. “The individualist is generally a very sensible person, a thinker, a meditator, an aficionado of social observation and personal analysis”, according to Georges Palante in his Individualist Sensibility.

As Sainte-Beuve once said, “if all of us put ourselves for one minute to the task of saying what we really thought, this society would crumble.” And Armand wanted to destroy the moral and sexual prejudices of his epoch to create a new era. History tells us that no destruction tends to be very widely welcomed, and his was no exception, but it is worth the time to rescue from the dustbin of history the valor of this man, who, like so many others, put his body and ideas outside of his times.

A Picture of the Situation

The Social Ambiance

A chaos of beings, acts and ideas; a disorderly struggle, rough, bitter, and without any center, a perpetual lie; a continual succession of events that occur blindly, raising some up today only to crush them pitilessly tomorrow.

An informal and anonymous mass, rich and poor, slaves of secular and hereditary prejudice — some because they draw advantage from those prejudices, and others still because they are submerged in the most crass ignorance and lack the will to escape. A money-worshipping mass, that has for its supreme ideal the rich man; a people made brutish by prejudices, by authoritarian teaching-methods, by an artificial existence, by alcohol-abuse, by adulterated and cheaply produced foods, a plague of degenerates from above and below, without any profound aspirations, with no other goal besides “making it” or living tranquilly.

That which is only provisional constantly threatens to become definitive, while the definite never stops threatening to become more than just provisional. Lives which do injustice to the convictions held by those who live them; convictions which serve as springboards for dishonest ambitions. Freethinkers that end up more clerical than the priests themselves, devotees that reveal themselves to be nothing but vulgar materialists. Superficialities that pass for profundities, profundities that don’t get taken seriously.

This is the living picture of our society, and it is still quite inferior to reality. Why? Because from each face a mask leaps forth, because no one worries about being and everyone worries about appearing. Appearances! Seeming! Yes, this is the supreme ideal of this society, and if anyone so avidly desires well-being and wealth, it is only in order to have the possibility of appearing to possess such things. Because, as we fly along with time, money is the one thing that holds us down.

Racing up the Ladder of Appearances.

This mania, this passion, this race after appearances and after what improves them devours the rich as well as the vagabond, the cultured as well as the illiterate. Workers that resent the boss, while they dream of becoming bosses themselves; businessmen who make such a fuss about their commercial “honor” but don’t stop themselves from participating in dishonorable business; whether small merchant or corporate capitalist, member of however many patriotic and nationalist committees, he goes as fast as he can to employ foreign labor because it’s cheaper and he can increase his profit; the socialist “representative”, lawful defender of the poor proletarian whose numbers pile up in the dirtiest parts of the city, himself resides in a privileged part of town, in the lordly neighborhoods where air is abundant and pure; the revolutionary, who denounces the state’s persecutions and puts forth great effort to move sensible hearts to action while the bourgeoisie — rudder of the ship of state — persecutes him without respite, puts him in jail, denies him the freedom to speak and write; once this revolutionary has acquired power, he becomes even more domineering, even more intolerant and cruel than those he replaced. The freethinker marries in the church and almost always has his children baptized. Only when the government tolerates it does the religious man dare to express his ideas, and he keeps quiet where religion is made to look as ridiculous as it really is.

Where can we find sincerity, then? On all sides and everywhere the gangrene spreads. It is in the heart of the family, where quite often father, mother, and children hate each other and deceive each other even while they say they love one another. We see it in marriage, where husband and wife, not really listening to each other, are unfaithful to one another but do not break the bond that enchains them, or, at least, lack the courage to speak frankly. Sincerity shows itself in every grouping where one graces his neighbor with the same esteem as the group’s members would generally show to the president, secretary, or treasurer of the group, when they’re trying to get some promotion, or while they’re waiting to take over their post when they reach their term limit. It is often lacking in the various acts of self-abnegation we see in the world — in illustrious acts, in private conversations, in official declarations.

Appearances, appearances, appearances! Pure, disinterested, and generous semblances — when purity, disinterest and generosity are no more than vain lies — to appear honest, moral, virtuous — when integrity, virtue and morality are the least of the professions they profess.

Where can we find someone who has escaped this contagion?

The complexity of the human problem.

It will be objected that we are treating the problem from a metaphysical point of view, that it is necessary to come down to the solid earth of reality, and that this reality is the only one: that our present society is the result of a long historical process whose beginnings are perhaps not so far in the past; that humanity or the various humanities are seeking out their path, but occasionally mistake it, find it again, go forward and take steps backwards. That certain crises shake its very foundations, that they are dragged along, thrown upon the road of destiny only in order to later give up the march, or, on the contrary, to mark the rhythm. That, scratching a little bit at the fool’s gold, the varnish, the general idea, the surface of contemporary civilizations, the babblings, infantilisms, and superstitions of prehistorical or pre-prehistorical civilizations, could be laid bare.

From a purely objective standpoint we will be told that “actual” society embraces all beings, all aspirations, all activities, and all pains and sufferings as well. That it is comprised of producers and greedy people, of the disinherited and the privileged, the healthy and the sick, the sober and the drunken, the believers and the incredulous, the worst reactionaries and the followers of the most unlikely doctrines. Society evolves; it modifies itself, transforms itself. It carries within it the seeds of dissolution and rebirth — at certain times it destroys itself and at other times it regenerates itself. Here it is chaotic, there it is ordered, and somewhere else it is ordered and chaotic at the same time. It glorifies abnegation, but it extols interest. It is in favor of peace, but it suffers war. It is against disorder, but accepts revolutions. It holds to the known facts, but acquires new knowledge without end. It hates everything that disturbs its tranquility, but it follows astutely those of its children who know to dispel their lack of confidence, or awaken its curiosity with promises of a different kind, or calm their fear with the attraction of a mirage. It declaims against the powerful, but in the end it follows their model, adopting their customs and regulating its aspirations according to those of those in power. Shaken by terrible crises and pulled towards the worst excesses, it naturally finds itself a servant and vassal as soon as the smoke from the fire dissipates. It is impulsive like a youngster, sentimental like a young girl, unsteady like an old man. It obeys its most primitive instinct, the instincts that guided the birds when no society existed, but it gives in to the most rigorous discipline, to the most severe regimentation. It demands that its leaders sacrifice themselves for it, but rebels when exploited by them. It is generous and greedily eager. The rigidity of its habits ends up unbearable for it, but it flaunts its decadence. It is a partisan of the least necessary effort, but it adapts itself to the most exhausting work. It flees from fatigue, but dances upon the volcanoes. It is majoritarian but makes concessions to the minority. It reveres dictators but erects monuments honoring the fallen. A melancholy melody makes it cry, but the drum rolls awaken something in its memory from many generations ago — the desire to massacre, to destroy, to sack. It is cruel and tender, wasteful and miserly, vile and heroic. It is an immense, enormous crucible in which the most disparate elements, the most dissimilar characters, the most contradictory energies are melted down, in an oven that consumes the intellectual and manual activities of its members only for the pleasure of their destruction, a field constantly fertilized by the conquests and experiences of past generations. It appears as a woman in a constant state of pregnancy who doesn’t seem to care who or what comes out of her womb. It is Society.

It will be conceded, then, that not everything is perfect in society, and it will be said that that is a part of every imperfect being. It is by means of authority that it maintains the bonds of solidarity that unite people — relatively weak bonds these — but it still has not been declared nor shown that human societies could exist without authority. Hypocrisy dominates in peoples’ social relations, in every ambiance and amongst every people; but still it has not been proven that it does not constitute in reality a necessity whose origin stems from the multiplicity of temperaments, that it might not be perhaps an instinctive expedient, destined to attenuate shocks and crashes and to take a little of the roughness out of the struggle for life.

The conditions of production and of the distribution of products favor the privileged and perpetuate the exploitation of those who are not privileged, but it remains for us to determine: 1) whether in the present circumstances of industrial production it would be possible to obtain, without that exploitation, the necessary production to maintain the economic functioning of human societies; 2) if every worker is not potentially privileged, that is, one who aspires to supplant that economic functioning to enjoy his own privileges.

It will be said, further, that it is insane to try to discover and establish the individual’s responsibility, that he or she is suffocated, absorbed by everyone around, that the individual’s thoughts and gestures reflect those of the others, that it cannot be any other way, and that if, in all the extensions of the social scales, the aspiration is to appear and not to be, the cause should be sought out in the present state of the general evolution of humanity, and not in the minimum component of the social ambiance, the minuscule, lost atom, squandered in a formidable aggregation.

We do not intend to speak to those who think that there is no other way besides letting the “inevitable evolution of society” proceed along its slow course. We are addressing those who are dissatisfied, those who doubt. To those who are even discontented with themselves, to those who feel the weight of hundreds and hundreds of years of convention and prejudice. To those who thirst for a real, true life, for freedom of movement, for real activity, and who find nothing but makeup, conformity, and servility around them. To those who want to know themselves more intimately. To those who are restless, tormented, to those who seek new sensations, to those who experiment with unheard of forms of individual happiness. To those who believe nothing shown them in this society. Let Society occupy itself with the rest — those who this world appreciates and speaks well of: they are the “satisfied”.

Anarchist Individualism

To live one’s own life

“Why do you abandon the open path to take this narrow and rough road? Do you really know, little girl, where you’re taking yourself? It just might end up that you’ll find yourself in some unfathomable abyss. No one, not even the smugglers, dare to venture down it. Stay on the wide, spacious road that everyone else walks down, why don’t you? Stay on the cared for and mile-marked path, with its signs and directions. It’s so comfortable and pleasant to stroll along it!”

“Because I’m sick of the suffocating dust, sick of the route the rest follow; sick of the slow drivers and the rushing walkers. I’m tired of the monotony of the main drags, the horns on the cars and the trees that line it like soldiers. I want to breathe freely, to breathe as I please, to live my own life.”

“You’ll never manage to live your own life, poor girl. It’s a chimera. The passing years will cure you soon enough of that desire. We always live in some way for other people, and they, in turn, live, to a certain extent, for us. He who plants wheat is not the same that makes bread. And the miner is not the one who drives the train. Life in society is an ensemble of very complicated human machinery, the functioning of which requires a great deal of vigilance, and demands numerous concessions and infinite attention.

“Think of the chaos which would come of it if everyone wanted to live their own life! It’d be just like hell, if everyone went down that road that no traveler visits, where bad weeds grow tangled, and which leads no one knows where.”

“Oh, old man! It’s just this complication of life in society that horrifies me. I’m shocked by the obligation to be dependent on the person next to me, an obligation that I feel weighing more heavily each day on my being, on my desire to live my own way. And I lose heart when faced with the idea of living the lives of others, of living for them; I want to be able to bite into clean mouthfuls without finding myself considered a glutton or a spoiled brat. I want to be able to lie down and stretch out on the grassy meadows, without fear of any guards or police. I love the roots, the trees, and the forest’s creatures, the brambles and blackberry bushes of this path with no exit; what do I care about the gilded bread and palaces in the company of which I feel disgust? Why should I care where I’m going? I live for today, and I’m indifferent to tomorrow.”

“Oh young girl! Others before you have spoken the same words, and they, like you, have gone towards the unknown. They never ended up coming back from that voyage. A long time after, on the now smoothed-over path, on the summits cleared of underbrush, little mountains of bones have been found, here and there — that’s all that’s left of them. Without a doubt, they lived their own lives, but at what cost? And for how long? Think about those tall towers emitting their thick clouds of smoke without end. They are the chimneys of the grandiose factories that humankind has erected — there, millions of men, on those whitewashed, spacious, and well ventilated premises, are working the marvelous machines that dispense to us humans the most necessary articles. And when night comes, these simple people, satisfied with a day’s work well done, conscious of the daily bread they win by the sweat of their brows, come home singing to their humble homes where their loved ones await them... Look over there at that rectangular building, with its large halls and its ample windows; that is the school, where selfless teachers prepare little beings like you to overcome life’s challenges; little creatures who only find advantage in schooling — can’t you hear the sweet sound of those little voices repeating the lessons that yesterday they were told to memorize?

“The ringing of those military-like bells and those measured steps, which will soon walk the twists and turns of the road before them, is there for you, to bring forth a troop of boys and girls marching with the flag held high before them, children who are kept in the schools for a certain period of time in order to teach them how to efficiently defend their fatherland, their nation, if any new menace rears its head.

“Don’t you see that that’s the way men evolve towards Progress, each of them working in their own specialization and according to their own capacities? There are, without any doubt, courtrooms and jails, but those are for the malcontents, for the few undisciplined ones who make them necessary. Regardless of its defects, the implantation of such a state of things has taken centuries. It is our civilization — imperfect, but perfectible — from whose influence you will never be able to escape unless you sink to who knows what depths.”

“In those vast factories and workshops I see no more than flocks of slaves, executing monotonously, as if they were religious rites, the same gestures in front of the same machines, slaves who have lost all initiative and whose individual energy is decreased more and more every day, and every day it seems less and less true to me that these risks are part of the necessary conditions of human existence. From top to bottom, in the administrative hierarchies, only one watchword can be heard — drown individual initiative.

“Yes, when the night comes, I can hear your workers singing, but with bitter voices, and only after they’ve stopped in at least one of the innumerable taverns set up around the factories. The voices that come from your schools are the little voices of sad, bored children who can hardly keep down their desire to run, to leap the fences and walls, to climb the trees. Beneath the uniforms of your soldiers I only see beings who have had every sentiment of individual dignity annihilated in them. To discipline will, to kill energy, to restrain initiative — these are the imperatives of your society; these are the things people suffer so that your society might subsist. And you fear those who don’t want to adapt to this so greatly that you seclude them in the somber darkness of jail cells. Between your “civilized man” of the twentieth century, whose only preoccupation seems to be avoiding the necessary effort for sustaining his existence, and the man “dressed in animal skins”, which wins out? The latter did not fear danger; he did not know the factory or the barracks, neither the tavern nor the brothel, neither jail nor school. You have conserved, modifying them only in appearance, the superstitions and prejudices of these people you’d call “savage”. But you lack their energy, you lack their valor, and you lack their frankness.”

“Well, I agree that in the panorama of our present society there are some dark shadows. But there are generous men who have tried and still try to introduce greater equity and justice to its functioning. They are recruiting partisans, and perhaps tomorrow they will be the irresistible majority. Don’t go down these out-of-the-way paths — instead, hold to good principles, follow a method. Believe me, I’m an experienced old man; success doesn’t tend to accompany those who don’t systematically pursue it. Science teaches that it is necessary to regulate life. Hygienists, biologists, and doctors will supply you in its name with the necessary formulas for its prolongation and for your happiness. To lack authority, principles, discipline, and a plan is the worst of incoherencies.”

“I do not need, nor do I want your discipline. With regards to my experiences, I want to have them for myself. It is from them, and not from you, that I will draw my rules of conduct. I want to live my own life. Slaves and lackeys terrify me. I hate those who dominate, and those who let themselves be dominated sicken me. He who bends before the whip is worth no more than he who wields it. I love danger, and the unknown, the uncertain, seduces me. I’m filled with a desire for adventure, and I don’t give a damn for success. I hate your society of bureaucrats and administrators, millionaires and beggars. I don’t want to adapt to your hypocritical customs nor to your false courtesies. I want to live out my enthusiasms in the pure, fresh air of freedom. Your streets, drafted according to plan, torture my gaze, and your uniform buildings make the blood in my veins boil with impatience. And that’s enough for me. I’m going to follow my own path, according to my passions, changing myself ceaselessly, and I don’t want to be the same tomorrow as I am today. I stroll along and I don’t let my wings be clipped by the scissors of any one person. I share none of your moralism. I am going forth, eternally passionate and burning with the desire to give myself to the world, to the first real person that approaches me, to the ragged trousered traveler, but never to the grave and conceited wise-men who would regulate the length of my stride. Nor to the doctrinaire who would like to clutter my mind with formulas and rules. I am no intellectual; I am a human being — a woman who feels a great vibration within herself before the impulses of nature and amorous words. I hate every chain, every hindrance; I love to walk along, nude, letting my flesh be caressed by the rays of the voluptuous sun. And, oh, old man! I will care so very little when your society breaks into a thousand pieces and I can finally live my life.”

“Who are you, little girl, fascinating like a mystery and savage like instinct?”

“I am Anarchy.”

Anarchism.

The religious consider the individual to be a manifestation of divinity’s designs; the legalists consider the individual as a function of the law; the socialists consider the individual as needing proper administration, as an instrument, as a kind of machine of production and consumption; the revolutionaries consider the individual to be a soldier of the revolution. They all tend to forget the individual as him or her self, outside of all authority. They ignore the individual as an individual unity, subtracted from all domination and coercion of all kinds. This is the empty space anarchism fills.

Anarchy derives from two Greek words meaning negation or absence of government, of authority, of command. Often times it is associated with disorder, but we are not interested in this boring, oversimplified meaning. It is certain that it is a substantially negative term, but by extension it can be used to designate the philosophical conception of society that excludes the concepts of government and authority. The anarchist is whoever brings forth anarchy, the “realizer” of the ideas and acts from which anarchy springs forth. Anarchism is, seen from the speculative, practical, or descriptive standpoint, the ensemble of ideas and facts that are rich in anarchy and flow logically toward it. We consider anarchy and anarchism to be synonyms for whatever is anti-authoritarian and for anti-authoritarianism.

In practice, any individual who, because of his or her temperament or because of conscious and serious reflection, repudiates all external authority or coercion, whether of a governmental, ethical, intellectual, or economic order, can be considered an anarchist. Everyone who consciously rejects the domination of people by other people or by the social ambiance, and its economic corollaries, can be said to be an anarchist as well.

Origins of Anarchism

It is difficult to be precise about the historical origins of the anarchist movement. The first person who reacted consciously against the oppression of another individual or of a collectivity was an anarchist.

History and legends cite the names of numerous anarchists: Prometheus of mythology, Satan of the bible, Epictetus, Diogenes, and the mythical Jesus could be considered, under many aspects, old kinds of anarchists. The philosophical origins of the movement seem to go back to the Renaissance, or more precisely, to the Reformation, which, planting in spirits the ideas of free thought and individual inquiry into biblical matters, went beyond the objectives of its initiators and led to the diffusion of rational critique in all subjects. This seed of free thinking, where the development and perfection of a rational critique of institutions and conventions began, came to be planted when people started to dissect the puerile words upon which orthodox believers build their faith.

In the end, the movement finished its work of free thought and submitted to analysis all kinds of laws and rules, morals and teaching programs, economic conditions and social relations. Thus, anarchism became the manifestation of the most dangerous and fearful opposition that the tyrants of government have ever faced.

Society

Marginal, apart from all political parties, like lost youths, the living antitheses of socialism, the anarchists find themselves in fundamental disagreement with present society. They deny the law, and if they rise up against the authority of those who claim to represent them, against the acts of government, it is because they affirm that they want to create their own laws, and find in themselves the energy necessary to live.

In order to survive and perpetuate themselves, societies need to appeal to an infinite number of authorities: the authority of gods, the authority of legislators, the authority of wealth, the authority of respectability, of traditions, of ancestors, of leaders, of directors, of programs, of plans. Everyone either accepts or protests against being determined by his or her environment. The anarchist pushes, on the other hand, for free access to the material means necessary to determine his or her own life without any authority.

Anarchist Individualism

We have seen that anarchism is the philosophy of antiauthoritarianism. Anarchist individualism is, as such, a practical conception of this philosophy, and it entreats every individual to seek out and discover in practice, in everyday life, his or her own theory.

The anarchist individualists found their conception of life and of its hopes on the “individual act”. This means that in spite of and in opposition to all the abstractions created by the secular or the religious forces in society, all the traditional ideals of fraternity, the anarchist declares that the basis for all collectivities, for all societies, for all ethnic, territorial, economic, intellectual, moral, and religious entities is found in the individual. Without the individual none of the above would exist.

It will be objected, in vain, that in the absence of a social environment the individual could not exist nor develop. Not only is this absolutely false in the literal sense, since humans have not always lived in society, but it is also false when one analyzes the problem in its diverse aspects, since the following fact cannot be denied: without individuals there would be no social environment.

The human being is the origin, the foundation of humanity. It is only too clear that the individual was the precursor for the group. Society is the product of individual additions.

To be an individualist does not necessarily mean to live isolated and without associating with others. Some people find that alone they are stronger than in groups. These people say that when authority attacks, it does so more energetically when it is a question of an association then when it is a question of individuals. And that when it defends itself it is weaker and more defenseless against individuals. Some of these solitary individuals say that one can never know for certain that one’s comrade will not become a traitor, even involuntarily. Others say that association permits that better results can be obtained, that is, a more ample production in less time, and with less effort. For others, association represents a kind of instinctive necessity.

The individualist cannot be considered simply as a personal denier of authority, but as a personal negator of exploitation. The individualist does not want to be an exploiter, nor does he or she want to be exploited.

The dominion of the “I”

The individual can be considered to be a synonym for the “I” or the “self”. Now, the individualist doesn’t put limits on the development of his or her “self”, and does not restrict its personality on the social plane, but is careful not to invade, not to usurp the ground on which a comrade develops and moves. Individualism, the dominion of the “I”, demands the following conception of the relations between the “self” and the “other”, the “I” and the “not I”: An individual, no matter how insignificant or low, cannot be sacrificed to any other individual — no matter how important the other is — nor to a group of people, nor to the majority, nor to the social environment.

The individualists and the systematic revolutionaries

In the majority of cases, the individualists are not revolutionaries in the systematic and dogmatic sense of the word. They say that a revolution does not provide a real improvement in the individual’s life, any more than a war does. In times of revolution, the fanatics of rival parties and of fighting tendencies worry more than anything else about dominating each other, and to achieve that domination they avail themselves of a violence and hate that often isn’t even seen in the enemy armies. Like war, a revolution can be compared with a case of the fever: the sickness behaves in much the same way every time. After the fever has gone down the patient returns to his or her previous state. History teaches us that after revolutions, counterstrikes and repressions always take place that separate them from their original objectives. It is necessary, then, to start with the individual. This notion should be propagated from person to person — it is criminal to force someone to react in a different way than that which he or she feels to be useful, advantageous, or agreeable to his or her own life, his or her own growth, and his or her own happiness. That this crime is committed by the State, by the law, by the majority, or by a solitary individual does not make a difference in terms of the problem itself. It is the same crime. Anarchist Individualism comprises the ideas of “individuals” who react when faced with “the social”. These concepts, like I said before, should be the fruit of reflection or the consequence of a reflective temperament, and not the result of a passing overexcitement, foreign to the nature of those who demand it.

The individualist’s conditions of existence

Anarchist individualism presents no project, and instead proposes an ambiance in which the individual has precedence over the human mass. It is a new orientation of thought and sensibility more than the fictitious future construction of a new social order.

When it is asked of the individualist to extend his point of view, the individualist recognizes frankly that he or she would only be incapable of existing and developing his or herself in a humanity in which an infinite number of self-governing groups and of self-governing, isolated individuals function simultaneously, practicing all kinds of economic, political, scientific, affective, literary, and recreational postulates. Definitively, a forest of individual and collective realization. Here and there everything happening — here everyone receiving what they need, there each one getting whatever is needed according to their own capacity. Here, gift and barter — one product for another; there, exchange — product for representative value. Here, the producer is the owner of the product, there, the product is put to the possession of the collectivity. Here omnivorousness, there vegetarianism, or any other hygienic or culinary tendency ending in “ism”. Here sexual union and family, there freedom or promiscuity. Here, the materialists, there the spiritualists. Here the progenitor mother, there the children brought up by the group. Here the search for artistic or literary emotions, there scientific investigation and experimentation. Here the schools of voluptuousness, there those of austerity.... And meanwhile it is understood that any individual has the chance to, at any time, migrate from one group to another or to withdraw from the whole. And this without the possibility existing that the more powerful groups would feel themselves capable and/or tempted to absorb the weaker groupings, or that any group would want to violently integrate isolated individuals.

Our kind of Individualist.

The individualist, in our conception, loves life and fortitude. Proclaims and exalts the happiness of being alive. Recognizes sincerely that one’s own happiness is the objective. The individualist is not an ascetic, and the mortification of the flesh is repugnant to him or her. The individualist is a passionate person. Going forth without tinsel and glitter, chin up, the individualist sings with gusto, accompanied by the flutes of Pan. Communicating with nature by means of his energy, that energy stimulates instinct and thought in the individualist. He is neither young nor old. Only whatever age he feels. And while there is a drop of blood left in his veins, he struggles to conquer a place in the sun. The individualist does not impose, nor does he want others to impose on him. Repudiates bosses and gods. Knows how to love and knows how to repent and change. Gushes forth with love for his own, those of his world, but he is horrified by “false comrades”. He is brave, and conscious of his own personal dignity. He gives himself shape, sculpts himself, and reacts towards the outside. He withdraws from society here and lavishes himself upon it there. He is not worried by prejudices and laughs at those who concern themselves with “what others might think”. He likes art, sciences, and letters. Loves books, study, meditation, and creativity. An artisan, not a day laborer. A generous, sensible, and sensual person. Thirsts for new experiences and fresh sensations. But if he advances through life like a fast-speeding car, he does it on the condition that it’s him driving, animated by the will to determine for himself which role wisdom, and which part pleasure, will play in his life.

Authority and Domination

The law of continual progress

We are not ignorant of the theses of those who uphold the law of “continual progress.” This idea is not new. There are seeds of it in Greece and Rome, and later in the mystics of the middle ages. They announced that in the same way as the reign of the Son follows the reign of the Father, after that will come the reign of the holy spirit, in which there will be no more errors nor sins. Leaving mysticism aside, this conception was affirmed and clarified first by Bacon and Pascal, and became general later with Herder, Kant, Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Comte, and their successors, the utopian and scientific socialist schools, and definitively by the evolutionists and fatalists of all kinds.

We are not ignorant of the fact that the idea of the law of constant and uninterrupted progress was accepted, exalted, and vulgarized by the poets, the literati, the philosophers, and by many scientists. It played amongst men the role of consoler, which in previous centuries, when faith ruled them, was played by religion. But with careful examination we can see quickly that there is nothing less founded, scientifically speaking, than this supposed law.

Above all, it is impossible to prove experimentally that the acts of every human being, of every people, of all peoples, are immutable and incontestable effects of primordial circumstance. In reality we care as little for the origin, the beginnings of humanity, as we do for the end or the goals towards which it proceeds. But even knowing exactly what this origin was, we have no scientific criterion that permits us to distinguish what is progress and what is not. We can say that there is movement, a flow — and nothing else. Men, according to their aspirations or to the party they belong to, define this movement as “progress” or “regression”. And that’s all.

Behind this conception of continuous and unavoidable progress, behind its scientific appearance, a secret mystical and determinist thinking rings. Here we see it mix itself in with the idea that the individual is “nature becoming conscious of itself”. There we see it accompanied by the idea that all animal evolution announces and moves towards the rise of the biped of erect stature and which speaks words, that is, the human being. It is pure anthropocentrism, and it forgets the simplest reality — that on the lowliest forms of life that the universe bears, below the atmosphere that surrounds it like a diaphanous veil, a whole multitude of parasites scratch and vegetate. Some accident has overexcited, apparently, the intelligence of one of the many parasitic species living on this body — the earth — and caused it to believe it was permitted to dominate over all the other species. Was this good luck or bad luck for the inhabitants of the planet? We do not know. We have no idea what the result would have been had some other species of vertebrate prevailed, for instance the elephant or the horse, or other varieties of creatures. Nothing proves that nature could not have “become conscious of itself” in a better way through those creatures. Nothing proves that a new geological, biological, or other kind of accident would not take away from man his throne, his power, and his arrogance.

But facts are facts. As things stand, man seems to be, from the intellectual point of view, the most gifted of the terrestrial parasites. Let us return to and study the law of continual progress, the thesis of progressive and necessary evolution. Now, this is a law that cannot be accepted without admitting, at the same time, that not only are the things that happen and have happened necessary, but that they serve and have served, necessarily, the happiness of the human race. To this conclusion arrived August Comte and Taine etched it into stone with the phrase “what exists has a right to exist.” Everything happens, then, for the good of the best of evolutions. In the past as well as in the present. The violence applied to bodies and the violence exercised over opinions; the inquisition; the war councils; the wars and epidemics; the strangulation of undomesticated consciousnesses and the fires wherein the heretics were burned; the death squads; the burning liquids; the asphyxiating gases; the bombardments; the “cleaning out” of the trenches by blows of the bayonet; the use of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima; the concentration camps; the ovens — Everything is for the best according to this view. The prisoners of war massacred in spite of having been promised their freedom, the Christians of imperial Rome thrown to the lions for food, the extermination of the Albigenses and the Anabaptists, the pardons handed down from the governors, reasons of state, perverse laws. Slavery, pariahs, the homeless, the jails. The feudal lords that played with their subjects’ lives more easily than with a dog’s life. The monopolists and the exploited, the privileged and those marginalized by the laws. Everything is for the best, everything worked, everything was concurrent in the march towards progress, all these things facilitated and prepared for the coming of ineluctable and universal happiness.

It is impossible! Our reason rebels against this idea!

We look down into this bottomless whirlpool in which the greatest civilizations and most famous ages have sunk, into the depths where the most resonant and grandiose historical periods have been washed away, and from these unfathomable abysses we hear no songs of happiness and pleasure, but instead we hear an unharmonious, horrendous cacophony of protests, cries, and lamentations; feelings, aspirations and necessities ignored, mutilated, offended, repressed. The ferocious and a bit contrived clamorings of the accommodated try to cover and suffocate the screams of rage and hatred from those who had no chance to feel satisfied. But they never succeed.

Rhetorical figures? Sentimental arguments? I concede it. But they are proven by facts, and documented by historical experience. At every moment in the development of a civilization — whatever the influences that preceded their growth — the discontented, the oppressed, the marginalized of one class or another have risen up, alone or in groups; certain people stood up and proclaimed that their happiness was denied by and in the margin of what the dogmas, the conventions, the laws, the decrees, the dictatorships or mandates of mediocre minds, the elite or the social environment imposed. The flame of resistance and nonconformity has never been entirely put out, even in the most sinister days of humanity’s evolution. It is certain that the fire of hope, hope for a happiness different from the official happiness, from the happiness of those around, hasn’t always burned with the same light. But because of this it has never lit any less brilliantly the road of rebellion and individual autonomy, the road on which the majority of humanity has always walked. If it was necessary to attribute to a law the improvements and betterments that some believe they find in people’s social relations, that law might be that of the “continuous persistence” of the spirit of non-conformism, and not at all the so-called law of “continual progress.”

The origin and evolution of domination

Domination was exercised at first by one person upon another. The most physically strong, the best armed, dominated the weakest, the one with the least defenses, and forced the latter to comply with the former’s will. The man who only had a piece of wood to defend himself with had to cede, eventually, to the man who persecuted him with a steel pointed spear or with a bow and arrow. Later, or perhaps contemporaneously, another factor determined the exercise of domination — cunning. Men came forth who began to succeed in convincing their fellows that they possessed certain secret magical powers capable of doing them great harm, of causing many inconveniences to their persons — and to their goods — if they were to resist the authority of the former. It is possible that these “magicians” were convinced of the reality of their power. Either way, domination has, everywhere and always, two founts — trickery and violence.

In present societies, domination is only rarely exercised — in normal times — with such brutality as it has been. When it is practiced in such a way, it happens thanks to custom, moral or legal sanction, or thanks to an irregular state of things. It is certain that there are still mothers who hit their kids because they disobey, husbands that hit their wives because they reject the legally accepted obedience, and police that fire upon escaping prisoners or vice-versa. But this is tolerated by habit or is exceptional. When domination is exercised over a human collective for the benefit of an autocrat, it happens because that autocrat has the support of a sufficient number of complicit parties or satellites that have a vested interest in seeing that authority survive, and these complicit parties help that domination by forming mercenary armed troops, sufficiently powerful to make all resistance futile.

Domination is rarely exercised for the profit of an autocrat, at least not directly. It is always practiced for the benefit of a class, of a caste, a political clientele, a plutocracy, a social elite, or of the majority of a collective. It supports itself on a regimentation of a political, economic, civil, military, legal, moral or religious kind. And it is made holy by institutions regulated by leaders.

Concerning “good” and “evil”

To understand the evolution of the morality of fraternal society, it is indispensable to remember that “good” is a synonym for “permitted” and “evil” a synonym for “prohibited.” Someone — the bible says — “did what was wrong in the eyes of the eternal being”, a phrase repeated in various passages of the Hebrew holy books, as well as those of the Christians. But it is necessary to express that more clearly — someone did something that was prohibited by the moral and religious law established by the theocracy... In all times and in all the big groupings of people, what is “evil” is always the ensemble of acts condemned by convention, written or not — which varies according to epochs and societies.

So it is that it is “evil” to expropriate the property of he who possesses more than what he needs to live well, “evil” to mock the idea of God or of priests, “evil” to negate the “fatherland”, “evil” to have sexual relations with close relatives. And since prohibition is not enough, oral convention becomes crystallized in the law, whose function is to repress.

I recognize that the appearance of a difference between “good” and “evil” — the permitted and the prohibited — marks a new stage in the development of the intelligence of collectivities. At first this difference was social; the individual lacked sufficient hereditary possessions and sufficient mental experience to avoid being submitted to sales and purchases and to the mob mentality.

It is understandable that “good” and “evil” are soaked with religious connotations. Over the course of the whole pre-scientific period, religion was for our ancestors what science is for us. The wisest men from those times on could only ever conceive of a supernatural explanation for the phenomena that they didn’t understand. Religious habits preceded civil habits.

However surprising it might be a posteriori to live in ignorance of conventional good and evil, it is an indication of intelligence. This is not because he who ignores the permitted and prohibited is more like nature — and much less because he is a person without morals — but simply because he doesn’t try to reason with the world and what happens.

On the other hand, the contemporary person who places him or herself individually outside and at the margin of good and evil reaches a superior stage in the evolution of human personality. He or she has studied the essence of the concept of social “good and evil”, and has asked what is left of the permitted and prohibited beyond appearances. If one prefers instinct to reason as a guide, it happens after careful comparison and reflection. If one gives way to reasoning in its confrontation with feelings, or gives way to feelings over reasoning, it is a deliberate act, after having felt one’s way along through one’s temperament. One then secedes from the traditional flock, because one considers that tradition and conventionalism are obstacles to one’s expansion. In other words, whoever rejects these concepts is a-moral, after having asked him or herself what “morals” are worth for humanity. There is a good distance between this person who gives up morality and the “primitive” person, who flees animality at great cost, whose brain is still obtuse, who is still incapable of opposing his or her personal determinism to the crushing determinism of the surrounding society.

To Live at Will

It’s worth it to live.

Life can only be beautiful for those who take upon themselves the desire to live their own lives.

Life is only beautiful when considered individually, in its uniqueness. It is good to breathe the air, filled with the scent of the meadows, to climb on the slopes of wooded mountainsides, to sit tranquilly at the edge of a creek murmuring its unworried song, to dream on the beach; but on the condition that these are things experienced personally, on one’s own account and not because it was written in some tourist guide.

But only what can be grasped fully can be enjoyed fully, since wherever the ability to appreciate and the feeling of good measure disappears, so too does freedom. The true enjoyment of life is a question of capacity, of attitude, of one’s personal conception of it.

The “I” and the happiness of living.

Hindu philosophies, and those that come from them, believe — and there are those that do so more and less — that health comes from the suppression of individual life, that is, from the union of the subject and the object, the fusion of the self with the other, the “I” with the “not I”. Now, all of nature shows us that it is precisely in the differentiation between the “I” and the “not I” where the vital phenomenon resides. And in the same way as nature does, scientific experience also shows that as minor as this difference is — that is, as minor as is the consciousness that the subject possesses of being separated from the object — it is as minor as the sensation and the manifestation of will. There is one phenomenon that unites the I and the not-I perfectly: the particular state called “death.” Here too, nature and experience teach that simple and pure instinct pushes living organisms, from the lowest to the most elevated forms of life, to avoid death. For this reason these philosophies and its adepts seem to me to be plagued by morbidity.

I do not deny that people are nothing but an appearance, an aspect or a momentary state of matter, a passage, a bridge, a relativity. I do not ignore that the I is nothing, in the end, but the sum of the flesh, bones, muscles, and diverse organs contained in a kind of sack called “skin”. In other words, that it is in this form that life for the individual being manifests itself. I admit all this. But as long as this bridge, this passage, this stage, this moment lasts, as long as this particular relativity gifted with consciousness lasts, my reason, upheld by scientific experience, and my feelings, guided by instinct, find it to be natural that this particular composite of aggregates would try to get the best out of all the faculties it possesses.

To limit the passions! To restrict the horizons of the happiness of living? Christianity tried to do so, and it failed. Socialism is trying to reduce humanity to a sole common denominator of necessity, and it will fail as well. Fourier saw it clearly when he launched his truly majestic expression of “the utilization of the passions”. A reasonable being utilizes; only the senseless suppress and mutilate. “Utilize one’s own passions” yes, but for whose benefit? For one’s own benefit, to make one’s self someone “more alive”, that is, more open to the multiple sensations that life offers.

The happiness of living! Life is beautiful for whoever goes beyond the borders of conventional existence, whoever evades the hell of industrialism and commercialism, whoever rejects the stink of the alleys and taverns. Life is beautiful for whoever constructs it without care for the restrictions of respectability, of the fear of “what they’ll say” or of the gossips.

To live for living’s sake.

“To live for life’s sake”, to perform the proper function of bipeds of erect stature, gifted with consciousness and feeling, capable of analyzing emotions and cataloguing sensations. “To live for living’s sake”, and nothing else. To live for the voyage between places, to appreciate intellectual, moral, and physical experiences, scattered along each person’s path, to enjoy them, to provoke them when existence is too monotonous, to put an end to an experience, to renew one. “To live by living”, to satisfy the needs of the brain or the demands of the senses. To live to acquire knowledge, to struggle and form an autonomous individuality; to live for love, for embraces, for flower-gathering in the fields, for eating fruits from the trees. To live to produce and consume, to plant and reap, to sing harmonies with the birds, to stretch out in the sun on the beach by the oceanside and at the riverbank.

To live for living’s sake, to enjoy sharply, deeply, everything that offers life, to taste every drop from the cup of delights and surprises that life places before the lips of everyone who becomes conscious of their own being. Doesn’t all this perhaps incite noisy complaints from the secular and religious metaphysicists?

The individualists want “to live for living’s sake”. But they want to live in freedom, without any exterior morality imposed by tradition or by the majority establishing borders between what is illicit and what isn’t, between the prohibited and permitted.

To live for living’s sake, no longer racking one’s brains to ask one’s self if this life is consonant or not with a general criteria of virtue and vice, but putting all care in not doing anything that might diminish one’s respect for one’s self in one’s own eyes, nor anything that might damage one’s individual dignity.

To live for living’s sake, without oppressing others, without stepping on the aspirations or feelings of others, without dominating. Free beings, who resist with all their forces the tyranny of One Sovereign as much as they resist the suction of the multitudes.

To live, not for Propaganda nor for the Cause, nor for the Future Society, since all these things are contained within Life, but only for everyone to live, in freedom, their own life. Neither bosses, nor equals, nor servants — these are the conditions in which we want to “live for the sake of living”.

Not to suffer

We have no instinctive desire within us to suffer. We flee by nature from physical suffering. And in this repugnance we feel in perfect communion with all living organisms: with those who are of the highest and lowest forms of animal life. We can, at many times, feel different from the rest of our fellows, different from the perspective of aspirations and desires, dissimilar in relation to doctrines and conceptions of life, but we have in common with all living beings who are healthy in body and mind that we do not want to suffer physically.

Every time we suffer, we suffer in our hearts. And we do everything we can — everyone in their own way — to eliminate, or at least to diminish that suffering, to cure ourselves of it. We follow diets, we ingest remedies, and we take precautions to put a quick end to pain and physical trials. None of us willingly accept physical suffering to any great degree.

Well, then, we don’t want to suffer morally either. None of us has become a better person thanks to pain, regardless of the part of us it has devastated. We never find any path to perfection in pain. Every time we suffer “morally”, our health changes, and when that suffering reaches an acute degree, “moralizing” phenomena do not follow: we lose our dreams, or our appetites, or our tastes. We also, sometimes, do things we would never have thought to do; our whole organism offers less and less resistance to epidemics because of our suffering.

We have never gained any benefits or advantages for our suffering. On the contrary, we come out of it diminished, devalued, mutilated by these painful periods that we pass through because of circumstances, people, events, or other elements. The idea of becoming complacent faced with one’s own suffering is a concept with a Judeo-Christian origin which manifests two things — that suffering is the result of disobedience to the law, and that by means of suffering one can be forgiven for one’s sins or for those of others. It is thus the product of self-hypnosis. Some may find, through morbidity, that suffering “contains something good”. But we are not weak, nor are we mystics.

We hate, we detest suffering, because we want to live, because we love living, because we want to enjoy like Dionysus the fruits which life offers healthy organisms, that do not ask themselves — at the moment these fruits present themselves according to the seasons — whether they are good or bad, whether it is good or bad to take them.

On the other hand, physical suffering is not different from moral suffering. Suffering is indivisible.

If we want to physically enjoy life, our life, we do not desire it as “patrons”, as dilettantes, but rather, with passion, with intensity, furor, with perseverance and refinement, with more and more intensity as our existence becomes fuller. Putting into play all our gifts of exterior perception and interior comprehension, all of our aptitudes, we gather — wherever we can discover and/or provoke them into existence — the pleasures, the happiness, and the chances we get by means of our own determination. And we do so by making use of all the deepest reserves of our sensibility.

The individualism of happiness

Our individualism is not an individualism of the graveyard, an individualism of sadness and of shadow, an individualism of pain and suffering. Our individualism is a creator of happiness, in us and outside of us. We want to find happiness wherever it is possible, thanks to our potential as seekers, discoverers, realizers.

Our interior health is measured thusly: we are still not nauseated by the experiences of life, we are still disposed to trying new experiences, to begin again what was not finished or what did not bring us all the happiness and pleasure we were promised; there is in us a love, an infinite love, for happiness. When it is not springtime that sings inside us, when in the depths, deep in the depths of our beings, there are neither flowers nor fruits, nor voluptuous aspirations, that means that something important has been thrown away and lost, and, I’m afraid, that it is time to think about going down that dark road from whence no one returns.

There are youths that call themselves individualists, but their individualism does not attract us. It is stingy, arid, timorous, incapable of conceiving of experience for experience’s sake, pessimistic, pompous, furiously documenting everything or documented in everything, mystified, confused, neurotic, colorless and without inner heat; an individualism that has not even the necessary force, once it sets out on the path of aloneness and freedom, to sink itself into it fully. Oh, what a disgusting individualism! They can keep it; we don’t envy them.

There is the individualism of those who want to create their own happiness dominating, administrating, exploiting their peers, making use of their social influence, whether it be governmental, monetary, or monopolist. It is the individualism of the bourgeoisie. And it has nothing in common with ours.

It is the individualism of those who think themselves to be superior, who want to crush the rest under the weight of their morality, of their intellectual culture; the individualism of the “hardcore” (read, those who are hard with others), of the insensitive; of the conceited who won’t bend over to pick up a gold coin, of those who don’t cry and who exist in that seventh heaven beyond human reality. I fear that this is only the individualism of the fatuous and presumptuous, of the angels that one day sooner or later end up thrashing about in the ocean of uniform mediocrity, the individualism of human turkeys who in the end are content with a little shell to live in to calm their ambition. This individualism does not interest us either.

We want an individualism that radiates happiness and benevolence, like a hearth radiates warmth. We want an individualism that shines even in the wintriest of hearts. An individualism of bacchantes, deliriously free, which extends itself, expands, and overflows, without owners, borders, or limits. Whoever doesn’t want to suffer nor carry heavy loads, but doesn’t want to make anyone else suffer or carry the weight for them. An individualism that doesn’t feel humiliated when called to apologize or to make up for damage caused by carelessness. Oh, what a rich, magnificent individualism!

Cunning as a defensive weapon

Anarchist individualists who use trickery as a defensive weapon are to be reproached. However, without cunning and trickery, either authority would have humiliated them or the environment would have absorbed them long ago. To subsist, that is, to conserve, prolong, intensify, and exteriorize his life, the individualist, the outsider, cannot, under pain of suicide, refuse any method of struggle, including cunning. He cannot reject any means, except the imposition of authority. And this is so because he finds himself to be in a state of inferiority in relation to his social environment, which always seeks to extend its usurpation over what he is and what he has.

Who doesn’t play the games of deceit? Perhaps the worker, who is careful not to reveal his ideas to the boss, the boss who steals from the worker a part of the fruits of his labor, the “paster” of seditious manifestos who puts them on the walls of public buildings at night; the distributor of subversive works who works cautiously so he will not be surprised? No, certainly not them. And why should the use of cunning be disdained in others? Why should we let our adversaries know all our thoughts? Why open ourselves and our drives to the first one who comes along? The individualist does not live as a “friend” in the ambiance that surrounds him. He concedes to society the least possible of himself, and tries to snatch what is in his reach, since he didn’t ask to be born, and, once he was submerged in the world, an irreparable act of authority was exercised over him, which excludes all possibilities of any bilateral contract being made.

Passive Resistance

Anarchist individualists deny any pedagogical value to violence. They do not recognize any practical utility for it in the solution of people’s and collectives’ problems. The use of violence solves nothing. It is only an affirmation of brute superiority, a fundamentally anti-individualist way of doing things because it requires the use of physical authority. The only form of revolutionary action recognized by anti-authoritarian individualists is the special tactic commonly called “passive resistance.”

Passive resistance is an act of rebellion or an ensemble of insurrectionary actions different from the manifestations, the uprisings, and the armed struggles of the world. This kind of resistance never upholds itself by way of the passing and superficial excitation of the masses. Passive resistance, which can be used to achieve all kinds of objectives, supposes the preliminary education and initiation of those that use it.

For instance, one can, without raising barricades, abstain from all activity, from all work, from all functions that imply the maintenance or consolidation of a certain regime; refuse to pay the taxes destined to further the functioning of institutions and services one considers to be useless and unnecessary, and even totally irrational; from tariffs on consumption to the war tax, one can refuse to pay it. One can refuse to send one’s children to State schools, whose teaching one may judge to be tangential, unilateral, and pernicious for the education and development of one’s progeny.

Professors and doctors who are such thanks to an official diploma can be rejected. One may deny any response to commissaries, judges, magistrates, tribunals, civil, criminal, or correctional courts of justice, One can refuse to obey, to adapt to the wording of a decree, of a law, of an order that one considers to be contrary to one’s own conception of life. One can refuse to work for a wage that he deems to be too low or for a number of hours that he considers too high. One can stand up against all kinds of social, administrative, or juridical pretensions and usurpations that one considers to be capable of dealing a decisive blow to one’s autonomy.

Let us suppose the existence of a movement based on “passive resistance” that develops on a grand scale, and is not directed by any “capo”, but which would be studied, premeditated, and decided on individually by each of its participants. Let us suppose a movement of partial or general passive resistance — what could a state, a government, or any dictatorship do, the individualists ask, against this great, silent, decisive stoppage, against this total abstention?

The individualists say that the total absence any chaos, of any activity, would make it impossible for any government to intervene, because that would disturb the public peace. Because each passive resistor or abstentionist would be individually conscious of his or her own refusal, there would be no leaders to arrest. What could the most despotic of governments do against the “crossed-arm general strike”, against a movement of passive resistance comprising of hundreds of thousands of people, from which one would only find defectors very rarely because only those who were driven by their own will would participate in it? They could massacre, gun down those hundreds of thousands, those millions of adherents, but that would not resolve the conflict, and moreover, it would go against the interests of those same directors of people.

Who isn’t conscious that abstention, prepared, matured, and consciously practiced, would have a different value, a different reach than does that noisy, tumultuous and irreflexive agitation that drags in its flocks — whether they wish it or not — a number of followers ready to flee at the sight of the first serious obstacle, some because they had only let themselves be dragged in by the current, and others because they had never thought about the possible consequences a prolonged general strike entails? It is natural, given these considerations, that the tactic of passive resistance will have been the focus of attention for theorists of anarchist individualism, and that these consider it the most appropriate instrument to express their demands.

Risks.

Whoever speaks of an independent life supposes “risks”. A life free of rocky roads, full of victories, never running any eventual risks even in thought, is inconceivable. It can occur that in a society based on an egalitarian organization of production and consumption, economic risk becomes reduced to an insignificant minimum, but an expansive realm would still remain — the realm of psychological relativities — where risk would persist in being a factor in individual evolution.

On the other hand, it is not one of the individualists’ intentions to refuse risks in their own lives. A smaller risk corresponds to a smaller individual initiative. To a smaller personal initiative corresponds a decreasing individual autonomy. The theory of the least effort doesn’t pertain to any individualist concept; it is the doctrine of those without energy who let themselves be dragged around blandly by the knockout-pill current of conventions, of prejudices and social comforts. Life conceived of outside of social “arrangements” requires an effort. And there is no effective effort without initiative. The withdrawal of individual initiative means the death of will, of effort, of force, that is, the disappearance of the impulse towards a distinct orientation.

Life is only so as much as it is experienced directly. Life freed of authoritarian morality, life unconditioned by any previous gesture, that ignores the changing circumstances in order to better reveal new forms and new aspects. This kind of Life cannot completely avoid risks.

The individual must conquer a full enjoyment of life by means of his own will and action. There, where the adventure has died, only what is regulated remains; there, where there are no more furtive hunters, remain the guards of the hunt. There, where risk is nonexistent, there is nothing more than people carved according to a mold, people cut out of patterns. Robots, functionaries, managers. There, where the bohemian lifestyle disappears, there are only people whose lives are well organized and who are viciously cunning.

Now, to refuse to take risks in one’s individual life is equivalent to making one’s self a robot. Without risks, life would end up reduced to a monotonous chain of known and precedented acts, whose repercussions would resemble hopeless litanies. That those who don’t see anything but a perfect producer and a perfect consumer in human beings, that the “hierarchizers” continue with their annihilation of all risks, that’s OK. They’ve got character. The communists and the collectivists don’t know how to realize their ideal society without people who behave like robots. But to say that the anarchist individualists only “mention” risks? Well! Free life, real, true life, the individualist life, is a constant risk, a constant effort, an experience that doesn’t end except with death.

The day when risk — under any form — is abolished from the face of our poor, small earth, it will drag away in its ruins the last of the individualists.

Getting old: The complicated life

To know that one is aging; to become conscious that one’s own hair is going white, and one’s face becoming marked with the lines of years; to feel one’s self to be in the bloom of youth — What does it matter, after all, that grey or whitened hairs appear on one’s head? What is important is that I don’t feel old, nor that I am growing old. One has only the age one feels — he who feels old is old. It is certain, considering the social ridicule and societal conventions that exist, but he who cannot confront them is condemned to the age he is given, or that which is shown to him.

To live a complex life is not an easy thing, after all. One can count on the fingers the people who are really apt enough right now for a really complex life, that is, for a life that would involve living contemporaneously various existences without these becoming confused or impeding each other. What a flowering of capacities that would be for those who would be capable of manifesting themselves, expanding themselves into multiple activities that accompany each other without conflicting with each other! What a wealth, what a beauty this accumulation of experiences! It is infinitely probable that the man of tomorrow will not be the specialized man, the man of one purpose, but the man of multiple possibilities, multiple reasonings, sufficiently potent and energetic to have various existences simultaneously and in a parallel fashion. I like to think that this would be aided along by innumerable voluntary associations that would have it as their objective — each in their own sphere — to leave unexplored no realm of those things that the investigation and experiencing of which are enjoyed by people.

Faith.

Doubtless the fanatics, the enthusiasts of the centuries when belief ruled over people, had faith. Faith, as the “substance of the things hoped for”, as the “proof of what cannot be seen”. And through faith “they did great things”. They persevered in spite of the torments. They were whipped, stricken, tortured, burnt, without denying their beliefs, without a single cloud obfuscating their vision. At the beginning, they were a small handful of men. The more they died, the more numerous they became. And these were not only the disciples of a Cakya-Mouni, or a Jesus of Nazareth, nor the worshippers of Jehovah, or the followers of Mohammed. During the great periods of crisis, in times of intellectual repression, of revolutions, of wars, there are always people who rise up, who “have faith” in a better future society, or in the final triumph of their fatherland. People who sacrifice themselves for the free expression of their thought. For their concept of the future society. For an ideal that will never come within their reach. To conquer, keep, or lose a freedom that death prevents them from enjoying.

Perhaps some of you will tell me that you have lost faith in the invisible, or that you never had it. Or also that “we live on food, not words”, or further, that “every happiness that your hand cannot grasp is a dream”. That you don’t want to sacrifice themselves for an ideal. Or to make the least possible effort towards the ignoble “future”. That you want to live right away, without worrying about chasing phantoms.

And it’s good; but if one has no energy nor initiative, one never reaches any horizons, the sky is low, and the air unbreathable. There is no objective.

Contemplate the herb that waves amongst the grassy hillsides, or the creek that sinks and gurgles from rock to rock, or the little bird that flaps its wings in flight, or the spider just starting to weave her new web. Come, observe, listen. Everything, everyone, will show you it has faith in itself. Faith that they will fulfill their reason for existence for themselves, until they live like beings instead of like things. Faith in one’s own creation. Your present fatigue, since nothing seems important or everything seems as insignificant as can be. Your faith in the result of your present effort, even when the last one failed. A faith so powerful and practical that it produced the miracle of the continuous existence of life in spite of all the geological, meteorological alterations and agitations; in spite of the destruction and depredations that that destroyer without scruples, man, commits.

To have faith in one’s self. Faith in anyone who undertakes their own will and effort. In the work we dedicate ourselves to. Today, right now. For today, for the past which is nothing but the recurring present, and for the future into which we penetrate at every moment. For everything there is to be, since we continually become. For everything we’re about to do, because our feet are always in the stirrups. What is the invisible, the indefinite, the Ideal any good for? Arenít you a part of Reality? Isn’t the work your hands do a proof that you are more than just a shadow? Get moving, then! The rest — enthusiasm, ardor, perseverance, tenacity, the quest for new risks and a disdain for danger — will come naturally.

And this is what you call living?

Wake with the dawn. Moving quickly, taking cars and trains, hurry to work. That is, enclose yourself in a more or less spacious spot, more or less deprived of clean air. Sitting in front of a machine, transcribe memos the half of which wouldn’t even be compiled if they were written by hand. Or, fabricate, working some mechanical instrument, objects that come out the same every time. Or, never moving away from a motor, watch vigilantly over its functioning. Or, otherwise, mechanically and automatically, sitting rigidly in front of a loom, repeat the same gestures continually, the same movements. And do so for hours and hours, without any variation, without distraction, without any change in atmosphere — every day! Is this what you call “living”?

Produce! Produce more! Always produce! Like yesterday, like the day before yesterday. Like tomorrow, unless sickness or death surprises us — produce? Things that seem useless but whose superficiality is hardly ever discussed. Complicated objects which are mostly of a terribly low quality but which can be used unsatisfactorily for some purpose or another. Objects, the process of producing which is rarely understood in its entirety by any of the workers that share their fabrication — Produce? Without knowing what is to become of one’s own product. Without being able to refuse to produce for those who we dislike and oppress us, without being permitted to take the smallest autonomous, individual initiative; Produce: now, hurry! Become an instrument of production that gets itself going in the morning, that drives itself on, that takes on too much, that stretches its capacity until the point of complete exhaustion — This is what you call living?

Leave in the morning on the hunt for a juicy clientele. Cajole the “good client”; doggedly. Run from home, to your car, from your car to work, from work back to the commute. Make fifty sales pitches a day. Spill sweat and blood so your commodity becomes preferred, and the commodity of the next salesman becomes devalued. Come home late, overexcited, fed up, agitated, make those around us unhappy, deprive yourself of all interior life, of all the feelings that pull you to seek out a more beautiful, full humanity — And this is what you call “living”?

Dry yourself up between the four walls of a prison-cell. Feel the unknown of a future that separates us from what is ours, what we feel to be ours at least, because of solidarity or because of having shared risks together. Feeling, if condemned to death or prison, the sensation that our lives are fleeing from us, that there is nothing more we can do to determine our own lives. And do so for months, for whole years. Incapable of struggling anymore. Nothing but a number, a toy, a rag, a thing — caught up, watched over, spied on, exploited. Everything punished with sentences totally out of proportion to the crime. And this is what you call living?

Put on a uniform. For one, two, three years, repeat incessantly the act of killing men. In the exuberance of youth, in your fullest virility, become a recluse in immense buildings where people enter and leave at fixed times. Consume, parade, awaken, sleep, and do everything and nothing according to an established schedule. Train yourself to die, or to produce deaths. Become a tool, a robot, in the hands of the privileged, the powerful, the monopolists, the hoarders, only because you yourself don’t happen to be one of the privileged, nor one of the powerful, nor an owner of men — is this what you call living?

Incapable of learning, loving, being satisfied alone, of spending time according to your liking — having to be shut up inside while the sun shines and the flowers invigorate and intoxicate the air with their scent. Not able to go to the tropics when the snow covers the windows, or to the north when the heat becomes terrible and the grass dries in the fields. To find, erected before you always and at every turn, laws, borders, morals, conventions, rules, judges, offices, jails, and men in uniform who maintain this mortifying order of things.

And this is what you call living? You, who are in love with the intensity of life, you, who adore “progress”, all of you, you who push forth the wheels of this blood-guzzling machine of a “civilization” — I don’t call it living — I call it vegetating. I call it dying.

The individualist city.

The individualists have always shown a particular interest in the so-called colonies: free environments, vital activity, work in common.

The reason for this sympathetic interest is in an admiration for the effort that a more or less numerous group of people can put forth in order to create, in the heart of this society ruled by laws and by a general conformity, islands or oases where one can put forth an effort and materialize their own ideals. It is still not possible for these ‘autonomous zones’ to escape the impositions of the society surrounding them, except in exceptional cases. The individualists have always observed that the founders of these colonies, the initiators, and the participants in them always had about them a certain determination to liberate themselves from the old world’s impositions, or, at least, to reduce them to the minimum possible, with a will to last in spite of all the obstacles and problems. That these attempts have had a favorable result or not, whether they founded themselves in religious principles or a-religious ones, makes little difference. What interests us is not whether they remained standing, but their resistance to all the internal and external factors that collaborated or allied together to corrupt them, to dissolve them, and to make them disappear.

The problem is that, sacrificing all to the common denominator, these “communitarians” find themselves estranged before the concept of a union based on the sovereignty of the individual. Is it impossible to imagine a formation that would have the independence of the individual as its object, and not the common preoccupation about the equilibrium between production and consumption?

If the major worry of certain “unique beings” on “our” earth consists in living together without sacrificing any of their own individual autonomy, how can that problem be resolved?

Liberty of solitude and liberty of company! Absolute respect for one’s person, for what belongs to someone and what depends on him or her, and the faithful respect of freely arrived-at conventions. These are some of the foundations on which the function and development of a city of this kind could base themselves, a city which would not have the pretense of being an example for anyone nor of prefiguring a future society, and less of resolving the social question. The objective would be simply to celebrate a permanent gathering in an established place, a place for friends, for individualist comrades, of “unique beings” linked together by merit of similar thoughts, by a shared disdain for hypocrisy, two-facedness, social, moral, or intellectual prejudice, or anything else that makes the social environment a residence for dementia and an asylum of incoherence.

The above lines have no other end than to “launch” an idea that will probably end up having a practical result in the future, or which perhaps will meet with complete indifference.

The danger of mediocrity-rule.

There is a danger graver than that of conservatism, clericalism, and communism — it is the danger of mediocrity-rule. What do we mean by mediocre? Mediocre man is a half-person, indifferent, apathetic, less than is usual. He is the man who fears combative originality, who fears energetic initiative, who is horrified by absorbing passions, by efforts which consume one, by the spontaneity that exalts, the adventure that forges character, he unforeseen quickness of intuition and perception. Mediocre is the man who is not moved neither by the forces that rise him up nor by those that degrade him; who accepts in good faith being a face in the crowd or an agitator, in such a way that his mentality does not rise above that of the others, accepting as a brother or sister anyone who doesn’t scare him with ardor of temperament or originality of understandings. Mediocre man is always ready to enlist, to enroll, to jump on the bandwagon, as long as no overcomplicated measures are necessary. He is ready to participate in every effort destined to improve his lot, but only if those don’t require him to reflect or cooperate ostensibly. He is not very virtuous, and he is modestly vicious. He is mediocre in everything and of everything mediocre.

Critical activity

Don’t be misled — anarchist individualists are negators, destroyers, demolishers.

They are those who believe in nothing, and respect nothing — nothing, really, is safe from their all-encompassing critique. Nothing is sacred for them.

When should one criticize?

At every moment. There is not a single historical event that didn’t arouse critique — there is not a single suffering, no pain, and no torment that hasn’t given rise to criticism. Every human drama offers material for critique.

Where should one criticize? Everywhere.

How should one criticize? Enthusiastically. Courageously, vigorously. With sincerity. The individualist criticizes as if the possibility that at that instant everyone around him were to become an anarchist individualist depended on his action or inaction. Without worrying about the failures of those who preceded him, of their errors, of their inanity. With the hope and conviction that the result he will obtain will be worth more tomorrow than today.

With what means?

With thousands of means. By all means. With words, writings, action. With newspapers, pamphlets, books. With discussion, conferences, confrontations. With a life lived refracting. With a marginal existence lived as an example.

Why criticize?

Not because of dilettantism or arrogance. Not to gain followers and disciples. Not to make one’s self a number or others into numbers. To make a clean slate. And once they are released, once they are freed, once they are placed in the mind, reason and feeling vibrate at will and it remains to each of us to build our own conception of life, complete it, and fabricate one’s own interior City.

To enjoy physically.

I want to live. To live means to appreciate life. Individually. That’s the only reason I feel myself to live by means of my senses. Through them: through my brain, my eyes, my hands, I conceive of the exterior world. I only feel myself to live physically, materially. The grey matter that fills my skull is material. My muscles, my nerves, my veins, my flesh are material. Joy and pain, emotions, sensual, olfactory, tasted, mental pleasures, either augment or restrict the functioning of my essential organs. There is nothing in all of this that is not actual, natural, tangible, even measurable.

I have no other ideal besides the full physical and material enjoyment of life. I do not classify pleasures as superior or inferior, good or bad, useful or harmful, favorable or inconvenient. The ones hat make me love life more are useful. The ones that make me hate it or depreciate it are harmful. Favorable are the enjoyments that make me feel like I’m living more fully, unfavorable those that contribute to the shrinking of my feeling of being alive.

I feel myself to be a slave as long as I consent to others judging my passions. Not because I’m not really passionate, but because I want to flesh out my passions and impassion my flesh.

Sensual life. Amorous Camaraderie.

Why do the bees fatten up their queens in such a way that we only do for our opera singers? This is a question that deserves to be contemplated. Bernard Shaw. Man And Superman, 1946.

Considerations on the idea of freedom

Before putting forth the anarchist individualist perspective on the sexual question, it is necessary for us to clarify what we mean by the expression, “freedom”. It is known that freedom cannot be an end, since there is no absolute freedom, like there is no general truth, practically speaking. Only individual, particular freedoms exist. It is impossible to escape certain contingencies. One cannot be free, for instance, from breathing, from taking things in, from being unique. Freedom, like truth, purity, goodness, equality, is nothing but an abstraction. And an abstraction cannot be a goal.

Considering, on the contrary, that from a particular point of view, freedom is understandable when it is not an abstraction, when there are means of achieving it, when one takes the road towards it. In this sense that the freedom to think, to be able to conceive of and do things without exterior obstacles in the way, to express through words or writing one’s thoughts as they take form before the spirit, makes sense.

This is precisely why only particular freedoms exist in possibility; leaving the domain of the abstract, placing ourselves on solid ground, we can affirm that “our needs and our desires” — more than our “rights”, an abstract and arbitrary expression — have been refused us, mutilated or covered up by authorities of various kinds.

Intellectual life, artistic life, economic life, sexual life — the individualists demand the freedom for these things to manifest themselves fully, according to individuals, to the tune of their freedom, outside of he legalist conceptions, and of the religious or civil prejudices. They demand, considering them to be like great rivers from which human activity floods, that they be free to flow in their own direction without being dammed up by moralism or traditionalism. Even further, that they not be hindered by impetuous error, by over tensed nerves, by backwards impulses. Between life in the free air, and the life in the shop front, we choose life in freedom.

What is love?

Love is one of the aspects of life, and the most difficult to define, because the perspectives from which it can be considered are very diverse. Sometimes the satisfaction of sexual necessity, an emotion, a sensation that escapes one’s comprehension is called “love”, and other times a feeling that comes from the spiritual necessity for intimate and affectionate camaraderie, from a profound and persistent friendship is called “love”. Other times, beyond all this, it is even a reflexive act of will whose consequences have presumably been pondered. Love is also an experience of personal life: here and there we find impulsive experiences, pure caprices, and experiences that can last for many years or for the entirety of life.

Although love does not escape analysis any more than the other domains of human activity, its analysis presents more difficulties. Love is found “beyond good and evil”. Some paint it as the “child of Bohemianism”, others attribute “reasons that reason ignores” to it, many consider it “stronger than death”. It is, essentially, of an individual nature. If it is feeling, it is also passion. Whenever a person lives his or her life in an affectively intense manner — whether this intensity comes from feeling or passion — it influences his or her character, awakens spirit, is conducive to “heroism”, but also brings along in the same way feelings of dismay, sadness, and gloomy anxiety. If reasoning and will can, in certain cases, channel the development of these feelings, they do not take away love’s characteristic sentiment and passion.

The way things are, humanity is made up of beings of different sexes whose coming together is indispensable for the perpetuation of the human race.

Until sexless people (they would hope) can be created in biological labs, this indispensability will continue, and since that dawn of that day will take a long time to come, it will be necessary to speak of human differences of this sort.

But not only is the continuation of the human species linked to the attraction of people of both sexes, nature has it that the two sexes are attracted mutually, and that the sexual act be the fount of a voluptuous happiness that depraved asceticism and farcical Puritanism would like to dishonor or stain with infamy. They will never come, however, to considering it an unhealthy act, since it forms a part of human nature.

The fact itself that procreating can be voluntary and that its exercise can be the consequence of the woman’s free choice does not suppress sexual attraction in any way.

The sexes are attracted to each other, seek each other out, naturally, normally — this is the original, primordial fact, the fundamental basis of the relations between the two halves of the human race.

On the other hand, it is insane to try to reduce love to an equation or to limit it to one form of expression. Those who attempt this will find right away that they’ve been walking the wrong road. The amorous experience knows no borders, no limits. It varies from individual to individual.

The social environment and sexual relations.

Sensual, sentimental, or affective, a great duplicity is imposed on sexual relations. The legal kind of love is for many people the only they know; that is, the lifelong union of two beings who usually didn’t know each other so well before their “marriage”, who in their flirting and relationship before the marriage and into it usually hide their true character, and, in spite of the possibility of divorce, tend to have a hard time separating without grave social or economic inconvenience.

Free union itself is only very slightly different from marriage when it accommodates itself to custom. As regards convenience, a great number of people who are naturally ‘changeable’ or ‘unstable’ have to appear to be ‘constant’ or ‘stable’. From thence results that people live together and end up suffering real tortures and the awkward ‘comfort’ of domestic hypocrisy. It ends up that the two refine their superficialities together, trying to hide from each other their real temperament, and bringing up intrigues that require a permanent lie. This all results in the reduction of people’s character, and generally of personality.

Is there anything less normal than the practical consequences, in the life of some women, of such conceptions as chastity and sexual purity? The infamy, accepted by all, that tolerates two sexual moralities, one for women and other for men? Is there anywhere women are more enslaved, where she is made more ignorant and placed more brutally beneath a yoke?

All legal and obligatorily constituted societies can only be hostile to irregular loves. To consider the normal expression of love, natural sexual attraction, it is necessary that the preoccupation for individual anatomy predominate over all other things.

To slave-love, the only kind of love that authoritarian societies can tolerate, the anarchist in