HBO's "The Anarchists" Episode 2 Review

Something is missing.

In my review of the first episode, you might have recalled me mentioning the Non-Aggression Principle and how, left unaddressed, will not rally disbelievers to our cause.

It was left unaddressed. While the series highlighted cryptocurrency as if it were a core tenet of Voluntaryism (it isn’t), it left out the NAP which is.

What we saw in Episode 1 was the pronouncement of terms, the explanation of the philosophy. I was given the impression by friends close to the filmmakers that this foundation in teaching the philosophy and principles of Voluntaryism would be shared and championed throughout the series. If Episode 2 is any indication, it seems to have abruptly concluded, to my disappointment. With the proclamation by Todd Schramke, the documentarian himself that the summation of our philosophy is “taxation is theft” which is not even close to encapsulating what we believe, it’s all over. Pack up Voluntaryism and go home, kids. We are now in a full fledged cross between a true crime story and Chicken People. More in depth examination of anarchy did not exist in Episode 2. Those of us who hoped Episode 1 was just the beginning of the instruction on the topic of Voluntaryism were likely wrong.

Episode 2, aptly titled, “Forking Freedom” is about the conflicts of personality in the documentary which seemed to create a fissure within the movement as a whole. It didn’t, by the way, create a fissure. It was just a few people highlighted in this particular documentary not getting along with other people in an unsavory fashion, nothing more. Like I said in my last post, an absence of drama doesn’t move plot and won’t make it into the final edit of a prime-time documentary series.

While Episode 1 was missing a lot to be desired on the philosophy of Voluntaryism, Episode 2 showed us what we miss in the practical application of our own philosophy.

The entirety of Episode 2 takes us into the minds and backgrounds of cliquish characters in a niche culture of oddballs. Many of these “characters” happen to be people I have befriended over the 6 years I have been an anarchist. Important to note that people Todd Schramke, the documentarian has highlighted from this community of oddballs are those closest to the fairly expensive conference that takes place annually in Mexico and a murder that happened separate from and outside of that conference. The people while in these sorted scenarios haven’t necessarily been filmed as great, much less typical ambassadors for the practice of Voluntaryism. Even the ones I know seem like nice enough people in the series, but they are not shown in their best light in this series from my vantage. You’ve got Larken Rose on stage from one of the best speeches he’s ever given titled, “Sacred Cow Shish Kabob” yelling “FUCK THE TROOPS!” with absolutely zero context included. That’s not thought provoking. That’s not curiosity inspiring. That’s just inflammatory hyperbole when taken out of context and makes us all sound like angry lunatics when we are anything but. Todd Schramke might be your friend, but if you can’t see he hasn’t done you or I any favors in his editing, you are biased in your view of this series to a fault.

Here’s the full speech from Anarchapulco for anyone who hasn’t seen it.

In my last blog, I pointed out that the reviewers of this series are not conflating anarchy conferences with conflicts and murder. The documentary is to some degree. Never has that become more apparent than in the second episode where we can see pettiness and insider personality conflicts take center stage.

The philosophy of Voluntaryism was no where present in this episode. It was entirely about personalities and more precisely conflicts of personality. How people are alleged to deal with conflicts through anarchy is called the Non Aggression Principle. It basically states that we don’t hurt anyone and we don’t take their stuff. Physical action is not taken unless direct threat of theft of life or property has occurred. Absent a direct infringement of said principle (we call it the NAP, but it’s similar to The Golden Rule), we tend to just shrug off or ignore issues we can’t smooth over with a meeting of the minds. We live and let live.

What people do when they just don’t get along in anarchist communities varies from person to person. Freedom of association is often touted as the answer to many conflicts. If you don’t enjoy someone’s company, you just don’t hang out with them. Simple enough. We don’t get along, let’s go our separate ways.

Ideally, though, we can reach out personally and settle our disagreements in a respectful and considerate manner, finding common ground and making peace regardless of our differences. I’ll be the first to say, as a person who always strives for this outcome and also as a person who has walked away from her entire family, that this is not always possible. People have come up with other ways of dealing with situations where friendship can’t be reached.

There is a certain personality type which tries to get along anyway. They also tend to encourage everyone else to not fall out with one another either. I compare them to the people pleasers and peacemakers in a family who try to smooth everything over for the greater good of family cohesion. They are sometimes the ones that say things like, “it’s still your family” or “you’ll only have one mother.” They tolerate pettiness, cruelty and just about any kind of sleight shy of physical violence, and since they do, they reckon you should, too. They prefer the end result of having a family photo on the wall with all the appearance of cohesion. They overlook or deny the reality that the people in their happy family photo get along like grape jelly and a can of tuna. Some people are image people. They’d rather have the appearance of cohesion of a larger group than the actual harmony of more intimate relationships.

I have always wondered if these people just abandoned hope of true warmth and closeness in a family and found tolerable disdain as an acceptable placeholder. Or maybe they are afraid of intimacy and the potential for conflicts in intimate relationships so keeping large groups of people they get along with on a superficial level sustains them in feeling emotionally close- so long as the group stays together. I could come up with these types of mental scenarios all day long. Let’s move on.

Some people are introverts. They’d rather have one or two really close friends than a giant, semi-cohesive clan of uniform ideals and opinions. They suck at community building or finding the value in the endeavor of cohesive communities. If their lives depended on getting along, they’d probably end up dead.

Some people can’t handle disagreement. They tend to cut people off for rash and frivolous reasons at the drop of a hat. Perhaps, they are too insecure in their own opinions and identities to handle people not going along with their own cult of personal opinion. One might need the incessant agreement of others to validate and substantiate one’s own thoughts. It’s less work than taking the time, energy and possibly disassembly of the ego that comes from working through ideas that might be philosophically incongruent with one’s larger values and principles.

Then, there are people who not only personally disassociate but wrangle others on board with their disassociation schemes. “If I don’t get along with this person, here’s their profile information so you, too, can disassociate with them. I am doing you a favor. If you know me, like me and get along with me, then you won’t get along with this person I no longer associate with.”

Obviously, from my FB page, you’ll know I find that last group annoying AF and wrong headed. Plenty of the people I don’t get along with get on just fine with the people I do get along with. Pretending otherwise to inform the dull masses of who they should disassociate with based solely on my personality conflict is just vengeful… on one hand. On the other, it’s a bonus to find out who mindlessly jumps on board the bandwagon and joins gleefully in the cult of demonization of non aggressive, non conflicting persons and/or who are thankful for this type of “warning” behavior in others. Here’s a dox post. Take note. We’re about to find out who our fair-weather friends are.

With introspection, we might see a little bit of ourselves in each of these coping mechanism avatars. It’s good to look at our motivations and calculate possible losses amassed through the various modalities we have employed in the past. It helps us ascertain how to best handle conflicts in the future.

This is a long winded journey to the undeniably unique character that is Paul Propert. Watching Paul in this series gave me flashbacks to 30 years ago, staying up all night in Denny’s playing chess and other games with a bunch of outcasts, many of whom were homeless, few of whom were dangerous and occasionally some who were delusional. Back in those days, my parents assumed I was up to either drugs, alcohol or promiscuity. While, in fact, I had found a clean and sober group of social outcast friends who traveled to poetry slams and the Renaissance festival circuits. Nevertheless, I saw a lot of the kind of people with whom I once surrounded myself in Paul.

Paul claimed in videos shown throughout Episode 2 that he had PTSD, and it seems others understood or reconciled that he suffered from PTSD to excuse a host of his odd behaviors. Many may have, did or still do assume these irregularities in Paul referred to as PTSD resulted from his stint in the American government’s armed forces. However, looking at Paul, I can already tell his grandiosity ideations, obsessive attachments and abandonment issues expressed in his video content and posts demonstrate far more profound mental illnesses and emotional instability issues in Paul than merely PTSD. Certainly, the array of conditions displayed by Paul can’t all be from his time in the armed forces. Unless we are assuming Paul was put through POW torture or a Manchurian Candidate like, off-book program in the military, I’d still say that the issues he demonstrates, at least from what I can observe in this episode, started long before his time in the US military. In this case, I’d say the armed forces don’t so much create a personality like Paul Propert’s, but rather they attract those personalities, exploit and exacerbate them.

Perhaps, this is how governments make use of people like Paul: canon fodder for the military industrial complex. It’s sad that any human is seen as expendable.

The unfortunate thing about Voluntaryist communities, is that we have no idea what to do with “crazy” people either beyond disassociation (also expendable, to a degree) or compensation with gifts. We might give them charity, a place to sleep, a meal, a ride (or a tow in Paul’s case) or even money, but one can’t expect people with severe mental and/or emotional issues to use anything of this nature offered to truly better themselves.

As much as Voluntaryists do not like the idea of imprisoning people, the fact of the matter is that if one is a physical danger to oneself or others, they are safer to love and care for behind bars. I’m not suggesting this was necessarily the truth of Paul Propert, at all. However, in light of the types of vulnerable individuals like Paul, it might behoove us to consider how we might begin to advocate helping wanderers in deep need of psychological evaluation and intervention, including but not limited to locked down, live in facilities (not just a prescription and a hall pass). Until such time comes that we work through this scenario, we, in our philosophy, seem to be missing something.

The other problem in Voluntaryist communities specifically is that we can’t distinguish if someone is truly crazy, extremely insightful or tripping on psychedelics. I mean, really. Someone could be any one of those three choices for a good while before a person with a live and let live philosophy would dig around into the business of another to find out what’s going on for certain.

But what we glean from Lily in this episode is that she had a sense about Paul. She said she thought bringing Paul around was a bad idea to begin with. Other people seemed to feel less than enthusiastic about him living in their driveway, but were seemingly too afraid of creating conflict in the community to ask him to move on.

So the series shows us a certain dichotomy of how various personality types within the niche group of people closest to the Anarchapulco conference and also those close to the murder handle conflicts of values, opinions or ideals. We see the Freemans in conflict with Lily and John handling things in a kind of cold standoff, attempting to excommunicate Lily and John from their club of wealthier, crypto anarchists and specifically, to distance the couple from Jeff and the conference. Yet, we see others in the community shrugging off while investing substantial resources into a guy with somewhat apparent mental and emotional issues, giving him access to their homes, kitchen, bathrooms and even, possibly, their bedrooms while they were sleeping at night.

The NAP hasn’t even been addressed yet. It’s just MIA in this whole series, but even if it had been around, I think this dichotomy of how various personality types handle conflicts is worthy of observation. I don’t think in this case, the NAP amounts to a hill of beans.

I think it’s a good series. I think it’s an extremely important series. This may be the most important episode of the series. This episode is more of a personal lesson than a societal one. Or rather, it’s an issue for individuals contemplating societies to reconcile and agree upon hopefully prior to coming together as a future society or voluntary community.

I can already say with confidence that this is not the series to share with friends on the fence you want to introduce to anarchy.

PLEASE, FOR GOD’S SAKE, DO NOT DO THAT!

THIS SERIES IS NOT THAT!

It’s entirely the wrong tool for that end. I’d hold out for The Jones Plantation if that is your aim.

The Anarchists is a great tool for us to look at ourselves in our communities. It gives us a chance to see what might be missing in our own lives, in our minds and in our hearts. It shows us ways we can better handle conflicts. It tells us that problems that we haven’t found a solution to yet might not be so swiftly swept under the rug with the common adage, “I don’t happen to have the solution to every problem that government is alleged to solve, but they will come and even no solution is better than government.” Some of those missing solutions may need to come sooner than later. More immediately, it’s showing us that conversations about how to compassionately help or handle people who are a danger to themselves and others which go beyond mere disassociation are well overdue.

The bigger question is, now that we are shown through this series what we are missing, are we up to the task of finding it?