Government-Free: Babies Hold the Key

I dont fully understand the anarchist. our most basic unit (a family) has some structures that tend to make it a govt. Without a set of rules to go by then what is acceptable and what is not? Without a form of govt then who enforces what is considered acceptable by the unit?
I tend to believe govt should be strongest and most powerful the closest it is to the people and should loose strength the further it moves away from the people. A community should handle the needs of the people as it is most closely associated with those people. By time you get to a body as far removed as the UN it should have little or no power. Maybe if nations where kept weak then they wouldnt be so ready to go to war.
Im hoping our elections here are a pull back of power the govt has taken from the people. The ruling class in the last 2 years took a normal market correction and turned it into a crisis and thereby not only hurt this country but the economy’s of many other countries. No govt should be that powerful.

D. Thacker

I understand your points.  I don’t think anyone can call what America was in for a “normal market correction” though.  The patsy, regardless which party line s/he towed, was going to take a big, ugly fall.  I’m not American, just married to one, so I’m not a democrat or loyal to any political bent but I do agree with those who say the fall was inevitable.  How could it not be?  America went to war… America invaded several countries this decade… that alone causes a depression, if history is anything to go by.  When thought of statistically, logically and historically, America has fared extraordinarily well considering how much money they have shelled out in military bullshit.  There is nothing normal about war, and it is devastating on all levels especially financially, including the invading country… just ask Germany.

I do agree, though, with what you say about gov’t powers, when it is thought of in terms we know community to be – based in agriculture, structure, hierarchies, etc.  Most of us have never lived in any other kind of society, so therefore cannot even create in our minds an alternative.  I’d like to run down that road for a minute, starting with a quote I found while googling this info:

Children (as Liedloff saw in the indigenous societies in the Amazon) were always touched and always treated with complete confidence, but were never pampered. They got what they needed without ever being told what to do and parents never expressed anger towards them. Every step children took was of their own will and motivation. She refers to this as instinctual parenting. That is something primal. Her realizations are rather universal… But civilized living is anti-primal. Children must be broken and must learn to obey orders from the start or they may never be of use. To become a part of the machine, we must start from birth. We must learn very early the need for efficiency. And what’s more efficient than complete standardization? Liedloff saw that a baby is taken immediately from the womb into the arms of its mother. She’s the first thing the child will see. It hears the familiar heart beat and feels the heat of bodies. She saw births in the hospital where children are taken in sterile hands, measured, weighed, and set alone to learn the most central message of civilization: infinite need. What it eventually gets is a pathetic substitute for being held: bottles of formula, mechanical love, noise, and the loneliness and boredom of the crib. It cries for distant parents who are eager to ensure their independence and gets more attention from soft fabric than warm skin. It learns the importance of compromise. Confident and fulfilled children are not efficient machines. Everything must be done to undermine them. But the psychological pain goes deeper than this. It begins at conception. It takes in the anger, hate, love and fear of its mother in a world of compromise and the misery of not being efficient enough. We are assured that children are not thinking even if the religious say that they are full beings crafted by god. They’re just lower on the social ladder. We are told not to listen to the senses. Words are more important. Science can prove it. With this divine knowledge, we can continue to inflict the original trauma without consequence. And even better, we can take no fault for children with homicidal and suicidal tendencies. Chemical imbalances, chemical solutions. We breed the killers and they are increasingly efficient. Green Anarchy – Sticks and Stones and Nursing Homes

There is a reason I bang on about instinctual, primitive, connected parenting… because the way people parent ultimately affects my world and everyone in it, because each of us as parents is the caretaker of a future adult.

If we inflict foundational harm upon our children in deep psychological ways, then we will pay a price, we have paid a price.  When we compromise our child’s emotional well being for an immediate desire (or “need” as we prefer to call it), by putting them in child care too early, not holding them frequently, isolation sleep, “crying it out” to sleep, punishing emotions (like tears or anger), shaming, slapping, yelling… well, the list is long – when we do this, it is easier for now, and we may even get compliance or a good night’s sleep depending on the immediate goal, but the long term sacrifice is a well rounded child.

Hurt people hurt people, and since we have all been hurt, we all continue to hurt others, and we hurt our kids and pass the baton down.  Have you ever considered how a person might parent if they were never damaged as a child themselves?  If they were the “ideal” balanced human being, filled with light and love?  Perhaps our birthright, if we follow our instincts instead of our ego and the latest advice?  I’m not sure if there is such a person out there, but I know that there are those who are much closer to that than the western human being, and at least one such tribe is living in the Amazon basin.

It is important how we treat our babies from birth onward.  Be it circumcision, lack of skin on skin contact or the many other things we inflict on our babies, people in our culture have a traumatic entrance to life.  We are so deep in this indoctrination, most people I speak to about this have not even considered it before… we take it all for granted because we can’t remember any of it ourselves.

Something has gone terribly wrong with our society and we are out of our minds if we think we can heal it without considering how we treat our infants, and by extension, each other.

I don’t think anarchy is tenable.  Perhaps it is, depending on the definition… and I like to think anything is possible.  I am not saying I don’t believe in hierarchy, soft hierarchy.  I just don’t believe gov’t works – but then, “works” is a subjective term.  If I am a Bush relation or a fearful, compliant middle class white collar, well crap, gov’t works brilliantly!

Being governed is all our ancestors have ever known for thousands of years, and such embedding is all but impossible to reconsider.

Government relies on force and punishment.  Since you mentioned family, I should mention I do not do either of those things as a parent, and don’t believe they are necessary.  In fact, I know they are not necessary, because of families like mine and whole cultures.

People often told me my plans as a parent would not work, because children need to be led, punished, disciplined, controlled, or at the very least guided.  I call bullshit.  And I have evidence on my side… evidence for love and against tyranny.

When I hear it extrapolated into whole communities that we need to punish, force, dictate (“lead”), threaten… I can’t help but wonder if they are also wrong about that.  People are hopelessly wrong about human nature in general.  We underestimate not only our children, but ourselves, and our fellow beings.

What do we have gov’t for?  What do we have all these rules and laws for?  For safety and security?  The crime rate in countries with strong governance and tight laws, such as the USA, can be comparable to that of countries with civil unrest!  The sense of security is all but missing, fear is rampant, health is flailing, freedom is a memory and people are overworked and trapped.  But hey, they get to vote so YAY, hail government.

Ok, I know most agree with all that and think that a change in gov’t is the answer… I say: deluded much?  But I understand the attraction to being dragged into political games, and it doesn’t help that we are afraid of being the only one left standing on a soap box, that “a gov’t will be chosen, so I should at least have a say which one it is”… playing the game is the only option we’ve been given.  And that is why it is important to think outside the GIVEN information.

The fear is real that if we take back our freedoms and reject most of gov’t then we will have to fight for our lives – all of us, not just the handful that live in dodgy neighbourhoods, such it is currently.  People believe the strong will take everything and the weak will starve and so on and so forth… and secretly, most of us believe we are weak, so this picture does not appeal.  However, I suggest a look around you… who has most of everything anyway?  Is it you?  Is it even anyone you’ve met in your life?   I’d expect the next point brought up would be that yes, I guess we do have to struggle to get by, and most of our resources are controlled and used by a very tiny minority but at least we haven’t been treated like slaves, at least we aren’t tortured or have our towns burned to the ground; we’ll sacrifice some freedoms to be free of the worst potential.

At this point I’d like to take a moment on the word “slave”.  I see it defined as a person owned, deprived the right to payment and unable to quit work.

We have a sense of free will, because no one can technically force us to work, but what happens when we stop working?  We will lose everything, and unless we get charity, we will die from lack of shelter and food.  The free will idea is a total illusion.

For those lucky or privileged, we are able to choose our poison, and get weekends off.  Good’nuff.

In countries like Australia, they have more of a sense of free will.  A mother is paid over $1800 a month to stay at home with her children until they are 6 years old.  Socially, that resembles a family much more… however, hand to mouth is no way to live.  The money is barely enough for rent and food.  Plus, you have to contract yourself very heavily to the gov’t for the hand outs, they now know more about you than you do.

If the planet was still covered in food trees, then perhaps being out of work wouldn’t be so scary… feeling hungry, go out foraging.  But we’ve paved everything, so that’s out.  If the planet was still covered in greenery, we could fashion a shelter… but we’ve paved everything, so that’s out.  If it isn’t paved, it’s owned by someone else.  When we scale it right back to ABSOLUTE FREEDOM, it becomes blindingly obvious that those living in the jungles are the only ones who have any clue what that is.

The “want of something more” is our culture’s branding through childhood, the aching need to have, to be, to DO, so much so that the mere thought of simply playing like children in earth’s gardens without TV and museums scares the shit out of every single one of my friends and family.

There are cultures dotted around the globe that do not have gov’t, or anything like it.  They are self governing.  Alas, we can’t just take a note pad and have a round table with these people to extract their system blueprints, because it is very little to do with structure and there is no system.  Actually, it’s a little like looking for God… it ain’t “out there” in a system or a book, it is within the people and the environment, it is completely organic, and built into the way they move and think … it is the totality.  To isolate or separate parts of the whole destroys the whole.  Like God, if you can describe it, that’s not it.

We need to start in the cradle, by throwing the cradle away and then holding more, loving more, listening more while they cry in our patient arms, being more present.  The link between infancy and politics is not acknowledged, yet it is definitely cause and effect.  How can it not be?  We stopped listening to our instincts and started treating our most receptive sponges like inconveniences to run from as often as possible, confusing their biological instincts so much they become attached to comfort objects (aw, ain’t it cute?) and learn not to cry or rage, then we stick all these angry people together in a school yard… and we wonder why people are broken and bruised.  Broken and bruised people have no place in gov’t, but we have no other choice – we’re all broken and bruised.

There was a story told by Jean Leidloff in her book.  First, it is important to know that babies in this tribe rarely cried, they were compliant and happy and could play by a fire or a cliff safely.  They are extraordinary, and they turn into extraordinary adults who have no word for “work”, because there is no distinction between work and play, it’s all just life.  Women walking to the river to bathe, tossing babies to each other, laughing, playing, collecting and cooking; men running around like boys in a robin hood movie; they give and take fluidly, no one feels fearful, they have complete autonomy and no one expects apologies because no one assumes fault… it’s magnificent.

So comfortable in their naked bodies, comfortable with touch, just the way eden may have been before we tore things apart and built new things in an effort to understand… SCIENCE we called it (science means “knowledge”) and then we separated concepts and events into “good” or “bad”, right and wrong, and the duality was born.  A myth was written to capture this moment when we crossed from wild paradise to caged fear: “eating from the tree of knowledge” or the tree of “good and evil”.   It’s a story at the beginning of a very famous book I once read.

Well, in Leidloff’s story, there was a little boy who was taken from the jungle to America for a couple of years.  When he came back, he was just like a western child – snitty, seemingly uncomfortable in his own skin, whiney, cried often, had tantrums, wanted more, gave little… we know that child, we’ve met that child, we WERE that child!  He eventually healed.  No one pandered to him, but no one reigned him in.  He was given unconditional trust, and although he initially abused that trust, he healed.

People in these kinds of cultures don’t need govt because they aren’t expanding and don’t need to make a bunch of decisions.  They live simply and symbiotically with each other and earth.  They don’t ask for permission from anyone or seek a law book.  Children included.

Soon, they will all be gone.  There were millions of them, now there are thousands of them.  We are killing them for various reasons: our diseases, our pollution, our moralising attitudes, for openers.  Our fear has us wondering how they deal with the danger, what about health care??  Our progress has given us surgery and pharmaceuticals, guns and steel… what would we do without them, surely they have some small place in the world??

The state of my culture is such that we would need guided leadership for some time if we decided to work towards minimal governance.  I do think it should be a goal though, because this merry go round is headed to hell.  There is TOO much invasion from the gov’t.  They only need do 1% of what they currently do.  America has the most prisoners in the world, and the most cops.  They are over policed.  Our culture allows the gov’t into our bedrooms by legislating sex and morality, it allows it in our backyards by legislating plants… PLANTS!!  There is nowhere gov’t has not raped and plundered our rights and freedoms.  Religion and the morality brigade have been instrumental in this.  ”Taking offense” being at the top of the list… when we started applying laws to victimless acts, we fell down the slippery slope.

I’m not sure if I’m an anarchist yet, they say it doesn’t work.  Yet, gov’t doesn’t work either.  So it’s not really a good point of comparison is it.

A bird born caged will know a kind of joy.  It may have an uncomfortable sense of wrongness and want of “something more”, but it has never known freedom… and as long as it never sees a bird in the wild, it will be satisfied with “all it has ever known”.  In fact, most caged birds set free will die, and many fly back to the cage.  It is not long ago that people referred to wild humans as “savages” and we still compare that lifestyle to “living like an animal”.  But it is the only way we were meant to live, because we are animals.  We are mammals, named so because we have mammary glands to breast feed and yet even that has been all but eliminated and the breast sexualised.  We are not thriving in this caged environment.

The Zen of Childhood

I said to my daughter, who was six at the time, “Look, I know you’re upset about this change of plans, but we can work something out,” to which she replied, “I’m choosing to be angry at the moment. Now I am going to go to my room and slam the door behind me.”

This level of self-awareness blows most adults off the charts.