We're Holarchists, not Anarchists

Anyone likely to read this will no doubt agree with me when I say that most of the established hierarchies by which we order our civilization are not just superfluous but actively detrimental to the health of our species and the planet. I speak of the hierarchies we know as corporations, governments, religions, and yes, even the mafia. The sad truth arising from the study of human nature is that whenever a hierarchy manifests, whenever power begins to orbit about a single center, the human predator known as the psychopath is ineluctably drawn to the sweet allure of that power, like a pederast to a smooth young boy. Should the hierarchy persist, it will inevitably be infiltrated by a growing number of primary and ultimately secondary psychopaths; the process of ponerization will proceed apace, the hierarchy will inevitably be turned to destructive purposes and ultimately destroyed.

It would seem that if one wanted to design a society optimized for the neutralization of psychopathic behaviour, the issue of hierarchy cannot be avoided. The only certain long term defense would be to do without hierarchies to whatever degree is practical, for if there is no hierarchy to infiltrate the individual psychopath's range of influence will be greatly frustrated. When hierarchies cannot be avoided, they would have to be fluid, temporary, and task-specific, 'adhocracies' as Alvin Toffler called them.

A lot of people would call what I'm talking about here anarchism, a word that thrills a few and scares many with its associative imagery of imagery of black bloc street fighters tossing rocks and molotovs at riot police and dreadlocked hippies with bloodshot eyes passing a joint around a drum circle. Okay, I'll admit it: both of those images bring a smile to my face. Anarchist is certainly a label that's been applied to me in the past on numerous occasions, but while it's a label I've often accepted it's not one I've ever felt really comfortable with.

The problem - beyond the massive number of mostly negative associations that have attached themselves to the word - is that anarchy implies a state of violent disorder. No matter how much one might point out the benefits and attractions of everyone just staying home, growing their own food, harvesting their own power, and doing their own thing more or less as they will, people will always point out that while that's all very well and nice, what's to stop some band of raiders coming by with some AK-47s and shotguns and taking all your stuff, raping your daughter and feeding you to pigs? You can be damn sure you wouldn't hold off those hellhounds on your own, and with no government there to save you with its police and its army you're taking your life in your hands.

Of course, no one ever stops to think how often this happens even though we do have police departments and armed forces, and how often those very establishments create the very conditions that then require their presence (most especially they've been good and ponerized.)

So, I don't like to call it anarchism. Anarchy's what you get when you're dealing with man in his current state: weak, ignorant, and afraid, a domesticated slave indoctrinated from birth into a self-defeating meta-context he barely comprehends. Take off the leash and he's liable to be so unnerved he'll kill the guy next to him for a sandwich. It's not entirely the modern human's fault that she finds herself in this state: the metacontext she inhabits has been designed specifically to keep her in this victim state. The strategy is simple, even if the tactics are complex beyond possibility of human undertaking: our cultures are set up so as to obscure as totally as possible certain fundamental truths governing the nature of the universe. I'm not simply talking about physics here; this is deeper, something from which physical law as we understand it emanates.

When those laws are understood - and they are undoubtedly few and very, very simple - when those laws are held deep in the hearts of a majority and form the context by which they live their lives, what sort of a society do you think will grow from that? It certainly isn't anything you could call a mere anarchy, for such a society would be ruled, not by any merely human agency but by the fundamental and eternal laws of the cosmos. And yet it would be so unlike the hierarchical civilizations we have built up to now, for no hierarchy would be justified or even needed when all are conscious of the place they occupy within the vastness of creation. I thus propose that the term holarchy be adopted to describe such a society, for reasons that willl become clear, I hope, shortly.

Now, I'm not going to say I know what all those laws are. I have some idea, and I'm willing to bet a lot of you are on the same page as me on this: free will and personal responsibility are high on the list of fundamental concepts, here, as is karma. Anyone who's read the Handbook for the New Paradigm knows the acronym AIAB (Attraction, Intent, Allowance, Balance), a handy shorthand for what it maintains are the only four laws you have to know. Maybe that's the full list and maybe it isn't; at this point that's not important. All that we need to know is that those laws exist; they are relatively simple; and that when they are followed, they produce Results.

A society following such universal laws would govern itself through maintaining a natural harmony with the way of the universe. It could not be otherwise. There would be no need for legislatures: their sole function is to make laws, and the laws of creation have always been, will always be, and can never be modified. No need for courts: when natural law is violated, its judgement is instantaneous. And none for police: after all, nature corrects violations of its own accord. Armies would similarly fall out of use: what use war, when all is in balance? Likewise there would be no place for a mafia, for the conditions that create crime in the first place would cease to exist: no man who understood free will or balance would try to harm his brother, and no woman who took to heart allowance and attraction could fail to help a sister in need.

Imagine, for a moment, that such a society might be created, in microcosm, not just in one place on the earth but in dozens, hundreds, thousands. Small communes, villages, associations, networks: loosely connected or tightknit, localized or distributed, but consisting always of people who know the laws, understand them, seek to live by them.

Indeed, you don't have to imagine it because for all the talk of impending armageddon that clouds the modern mental landscape, those microcosms of what I'm talking about already exist, dotted around the globe, like seeds that have been planted just in time within the cracked interstices of the crumbling Machine. I have a feeling a lot of you have glimpsed this even in your own personal associations, and more rather than less in recent times: a growing reliance on friendship and gifts and less on commerece and money. I assure you it is a trend that will intensify. As the ponerized hierarchies rage in their death throws, they shall prepare the earth for the growth of those seeds that survive into the next phase of human civilization, if in truth civilization is even the right term. Once the hierarchies die, as they will and of their own accord, the new society will blossom: unified in understanding, galactic in its orientation, a holarchy that reflects the whole of the cosmos at every level within itself down to the minds of the humans who compose it.