Pragmatism, Perspective and Popularity
A quick blurb about HBO's "The Anarchists" series before Ep2 airs tonight.
I get it. We are Voluntaryists. We want the film series to do well and be well liked. Moreover, we want the concepts in the series to be captivating and embraced by the audience.
But, even if the series becomes extremely popular and well liked, it might not mean that Voluntaryism is popular and well liked. It might not be any fault of the director that this would be the case.
The problem is: predictive programming.
The trailer and advertisements for the series direct the viewer’s attention to an upcoming shit storm. The viewer then, is no longer watching it for the meaty philosophy but to get to the drama. It’s marketed as a thriller/true crime story. It’s always important to know your audience. They aren’t just statists or anarchists. They are here for a genre.
So, too, the marketing for “The Anarchists” is deliberately pointing people to look for and follow a certain genre’s plotline.
This is a very effective tool for manipulation.
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Here’s an example. I send you on a nature walk, and I tell you to look for bird shit. You wander around for 30 minutes on this nature trail, and at the end, you report to me what you saw. So, I ask, “what did you see?” You tell me about the 50 or so bird craps you saw, then the other animal droppings, perhaps some rabbit or squirrel pebbles, some deer feces, and some dog poo. I ask how many flowers you saw. You may have seen some, but since you were really focused on finding shit, you only remember a couple flowers.
Now, someone else goes on the same path just after but is instructed to find dandelions. So that person wanders around for 30 minutes and comes back to me to report what he saw. He describes that he saw 100’s of dandelions. Tried but lost count. Then, he saw these other clover flowers, some really pretty Indian paintbrush flowers, some bees, some birds, some tiny blue flowers but needs to look up the name when he gets home. He took a picture on his phone, though, that he shows me. I ask if he saw any bird poops. He responds, “none that I recall. Wait, I did almost step in one pile of smelly dog poop when getting a picture of this other yellow flower.” He leans over to show me another photo on his cracked phone screen.
Your attention goes where it is directed.
I have a hard time imagining any anarchist can watch this program, listening for the philosophy they are anxiously anticipating getting into the world, and end up having a pragmatic perspective on what the average HBO watcher is going to see in the same series after watching the trailer. Each week, we are going to see completely different shows than what true crime/thriller genre viewers will see.
I particularly find it amusing how many people are watching the series to see if they can find themselves in the footage, how they are represented in the films or how much airtime they are getting in each episode. I’m not saying this as a criticism. I am saying it entirely as an observation. We are not all watching the same series.
I LOVE Larken Rose. Many of you know this. I wouldn’t be who I am today without him saying the right words in the right way at the right time in my life, but he recently made a video pointing out the “lies” of the people reviewing the series. He calls them blatant lies over and over, yet in the majority of his arguments with their “lies”, he uses having been to an event, watching videos of events and knowing the people at the events as the evidence that the things reviewers are saying about the series are just lies about anarchists and the event. The problem is, he is using this insider information as the counter to these so-called “lies” about the series. I think Larken said at one point, “the murder had nothing to do with the event!”
The problem is: these people aren’t reviewing anarchy or even voluntaryism. They are reviewing the aspects they picked up from watching the series about an event and a murder. The film series is creating the correlation of the two unrelated events just by portraying them together at all. It’s not the reviewers creating this false equivalency. It’s the choice of the film maker to use these highly polarizing, dramatic events to portray anarchy and sell the film series.
True that many reviewers have a sort of statist confirmation bias they want to put out into the world. That is absolutely happening here. I have no doubts. I have seen it with my own eyes. Nevertheless, what they are describing as the plotline of the dramatic events as they unfolded in this series, may not be entirely inaccurate descriptions of the film series. It might be just another perspective of it from a completely different bias than the one we have but aren’t pragmatically acknowledging to ourselves. We, too, are looking for what we want to hear and see as we watch this series.
I keep hearing how wonderful the filmmakers are and have been. The problem is, that they weren’t the marketers.
I have heard the argument made that the marketing will “reel them in” but the message is still there to entice them. The problem I have with this is the reviews contradict this prophesized outcome. The reviews clearly demonstrate that the marketing influenced the attention of the reviewers. Then the reviewers get labeled as “statists” which- weren’t we all before we were anarchists? So, how do we know the average statist watching this series will get a better impression of the concepts of Voluntaryism than the press agent statists?
Hopefully, the average person isn’t as demented as the media. Still, I think it’s a good idea to take note of the reviews of this series, the ones we like as well as the ones we don’t like to get a balanced perspective of the series (not anarchy) before sending it out to our statist friends, sight unseen, believing it will help us convert them to rationalism. It could very well do the opposite.
I think it would be challenging as a director, film maker and editor to portray the drama surrounding an event which includes murder and not have it take away from the event’s actual purpose. Furthermore, even harder to strike a balance and still have a marketable product in the end. As such, the people selected for the series as well as the story line of the series are not to portray the principle of anarchy (no matter how much you know and like the director), but to depict a sort of drama within a niche culture with some of the philosophy dotted throughout. No matter how fairly one tries to document the anarchists, eventually the stories that don’t move plot won’t make it to the cutting room floor. I’m not sure that even the directors can be entirely pragmatic and omniscient about how the viewers, particularly statist ones outside their circle of friends will perceive their creation. That’s all even before the thriller/true crime genre marketing took hold.
So, it is with pragmatism, that I continue to wait until the end of the entire series and hear from multiple perspectives from anarchists and statists alike. I will give more weight to the statist perspectives after the series, to decide if I believe this series is an effective tool for persuading statists to come over to the dark side.
I still think the best argument is that we have better memes, t-shirts, cookies, coffee, weed, mushrooms, bath bombs, toothpowder, gardening tips, nutritional advice, knowledge of herbal remedies… Oh, and that we advocate self-ownership and voluntary transactions between all people absent a ruling class with the caveat no one hurts another or takes another’s stuff. Who wants it?
Yeah, that’s the stuff.