The Eighth of May, Twenty Twenty-Three...

The Coronation crowds have now left the environs of monarchic central London. All

that’s left behind is the filth and refuse these “lovers of their country” have unthinkingly

discarded like so many freedoms they clearly do not care about. As recently as two days

ago in the humorously titled “Great” Britain it became clear that it was illegal to even

silently have a public opinion opposed to that of the government (such as that written

on a placard or a tee shirt). In fact, it emerged that were you even a part of central

London’s “Night Safety” team, volunteers who patrol the streets at night handing out

rape alarms to vulnerable women in an effort to make sure such people get home safely,

you were liable to arrest and to being held at a police station indefinitely on the basis of

reported “security fears” that the rape alarms might be used to scare ceremonial horses.

Yet, if you actually wanted to scare ceremonial horses, aren’t there a million other ways

you could do this? Is a rape alarm the only possible means of making loud noise? (No.)

Why pick on innocent community volunteers?

The Coronation, and the monarchy (rule of one or singular rule) it celebrates, are, of

course, a farce, a democratic impossibility, things incompatible with the very notion of

personal economic and political freedom. Why? Because these people are beyond the

law, beyond taxation, and beyond accountability - unlike you and me, and necessarily so.

They are the supreme exception that shows you and me, us, what we are not: and what

we are not is free from coercion and exploitation in ways which determine the very

shape of our lives. The British Royal Family contains paedophiles, friends of paedophiles

(including the king himself, once a “best friend” – his words – of now notorious

paedophile, rapist and necrophiliac, “Sir” Jimmy Savile), the sons and daughters of

people who, on camera, gave Nazi salutes and attended Nazi occasions – yet no one
seeks to arrest any of them. No one interferes with their ability to express an opinion or

further an interest. No one even questions them. In fact, the king himself, so I read, is

legally exempt from many things which, for you and I, would be regarded as crimes.

What, then, is royalty? A life above the law, the apparatus of the state at your disposal,

protection of your plundered and hoarded wealth which was ransacked from across the

globe. Royalty is the remembrance of these historic and systematic injustices and the

rubbing of them in modern day faces as you are carted off to the police station for even

preparing to voice your own “no!” against this repellent and abominable institution.

And what of “His Majesty’s Government”? (For, in Britain, the government serves in the

name of the monarch – to whom all members of parliament of any party must swear as a

criterion of taking office – rather than to the people.) This government, Conservative

controlled now for 13 years although the major opposition party either continually

supports its broad direction of travel or abstains from opposing it, has become openly

fascist. Any tactic which even imagines inconveniencing someone (shouting, walking

slowly, standing on a bridge) for a just cause is expressly outlawed. Dissent is

criminalised. Acting on an opinion contrary to that of the government can receive a

harsher sentence than that of an actual, literal rapist. Those in this government, Tories as

they are called (the word is derived from Irish Gaelic and means “outlaw” or “robber”),

act as a vast crime family and use their power to enrich both business and personal

associates. They betray absolutely no interest in public service or, indeed, in serving the

public. They allow utilities to fleece their customers more than anywhere else in the

world and trash the environment, a thing they seemingly only regard as a money-making

resource. They are crooks, bandits, shysters and charlatans using politics to destroy the

social fabric. They are proud bigots who utilise narratives of hatred to divide people and

who prey on the gullible whom they keep deliberately uneducated.

This brings us to the British police, most notably in the form of London’s Metropolitan

Police, a police force (I use the word “force” advisedly) who have been publicly declared

“institutionally racist” and who, in the extremely recent past, have included actual Nazis,

murderers and rapists among their number (as I am sure they still continue to). A

significant number of them are also domestic abusers of their partners. Should “public

safety” be entrusted to such as these? Thanks to the British government’s recent desire

to criminalise any form of dissent or protest whatsoever the British police have now

become empowered to enter the world of Minority Report for now Britain actually,

legally, operates on the basis of “pre-crime”. In Britain now the police can arrest you

even for thinking that you are preparing to do something you haven’t yet done and

might not even do. They can arrest you for being with people identified as people of

interest to them according to your cause or belief system. They can arrest you for being

on premises identified as being used by those that are regarded as being of interest to

them. In a country where having an opinion contrary to those held by the government is

now a crime, even preparing to express such an opinion can lead to arrest and indefinite

detention. One does not need to have said or done anything. One simply needs to be

publicly identified with it. At police discretion. This is how a police state operates – on

the basis of expressible and inexpressible views, on the basis of views you are free to

express and views you will be imprisoned for even giving the public impression of

holding. The police, those who are “just doing their job, Guv”, are the Stormtroopers of

the British government. They are the racist, misogynist, violent, coercive Stormtroopers.

They are the fingermen of the fascist state where opinions are no longer tolerated.

Those opinions that are tolerated, of course, are those we find in the British media which

has been bought, wholesale, by right wing, plutocratic interests. It is said that Britain is

the most corrupt country in the world and, seeing its lying media, you can easily believe
it. In Britain, right now, for example, we have a TV channel called “GB News”. Is that a

news channel you ask? Well, yes, it is in that it reports and comments on current affairs.

But it appears to be largely staffed by Tory MPs who continually editorialise extreme

conservative and capitalist dogmas whilst the public body in the UK responsible for

overseeing broadcast media and making sure it abides by the rules, Ofcom, has ruled

that “GB News” (the clue really is in the name) is NOT a news channel at all. Apparently,

according to them, its “entertainment”. And since its entertainment and not news it can

avoid all sorts of scrutiny about what it says since, now as entertainment, it is only there

to entertain and not to report the news fairly and with balance or opposing points of

view. GB News is apparently run by wealthy foreigners at a loss and is clearly little more

than a propaganda organ of rapacious private interests. It exists to preach against public

responsibility or any kind of regulation in the public interest and, in that, it has multiple

allies in newspapers, TV and radio in Britain all owned by people like Rupert Murdoch or

Lord Harmsworth who have dedicated their lives to private wealth at the expense of the

public and who have created media organisations whose only intent is to lie, smear and

editorialise in pursuit of such interests. It was in Britain, don’t forget, where dozens of

people’s phones, including dead people’s phones, were hacked to gain leverage and

information. British media is, in general, the gutter and it is populated by rats who fight

over shit to fling at any who would hold the powerful to account. It is almost entirely

client journalism and any public interest is, by now, almost entirely extinguished from it.

British media is now better regarded as the plutocrat’s ability to broadcast lies and

deception in order to exploit a purposely, and continually, miseducated public.

And yet I am here to tell you that the greatest enemies of the people of Britain in

general today are NOT the monarchy. They are NOT the government. They are NOT the

cops. They are not even the deliberately misinforming British media – and I say this
thoroughly and with my chest acknowledging that all these entities are huge and

present dangers to the British people in general. But no. The greatest enemy of the

British people today, and, in fact, of any people anywhere today, are EVERY HUMAN

BEING WHO, BY THEIR DELIBERATE CHOICE OR VOLUNTARY ACTION CHOOSES TO BE A

WILLING SERVANT AND SLAVE OF POWER, A TOOL OF OTHERS TO WHOM THEY HAVE

HANDED OVER THEIR AGENCY AND AUTONOMY, AN IMPLEMENT OF POLICING AND

AND THE INCARCERATION OF SOCIETY IN GENERAL IN STRUCTURES WHICH FATALLY

DESTROY ANY INDIVIDUAL’S FREEDOM TO THINK, SPEAK, ACT AND ASSOCIATE FOR

THEMSELVES.

What is a “police state”? Is it a state where you must obey the government, where cops

in the street determine your every thought, word and deed? Yes, but more than that, IT

IS A STATE WHERE THE ORDINARY CITIZEN IS THEMSELVES TURNED INTO THE POLICE,

IS THEMSELVES INCENTIVISED TO BE THE POLICE AND ENFORCE AN EFFECTIVE

FASCISM, WHETHER OF POLITICS, ECONOMICS OR REALLY ANYTHING ELSE. A police

state is a state where living there turns you into the police and so makes the reality of

your policing all the more universal, intimate and immediate.

In the past I developed a metaphor of society as a vast prison which I am certain is

anything but original. In some ways it is simply a development of the idea of the

panopticon made famous by Jeremy Bentham. A panopticon is a prison in which the

guards can see everywhere and nothing a prisoner does is private or out of sight. I find

such a prison a pertinent metaphor, one of my own design, of course, something useful

to have and to think about, and I would to repeat it briefly here in the context of the

recent developments in Britain. Consider that society is, in fact, in all its many

relationships, a vast prison. It exists to completely delimit what is and is not possible for
you to think, to say, to do and even to imagine. It is staffed by a warden or governor (in

this metaphor doing service for the government) and prison guards (obviously these are

the cops) but mostly populated by your fellow prisoners, people in many ways just like

you. But the problem is, in my “society is a prison” metaphor, that many of these

prisoners are also cops in the sense that I have just outlined - for they do the bidding of

the prison officials and “just want a quiet life” inside the prison and to “do their time”

thinking that, should they do such a thing, life, inside and out, might just be that little bit

better for them. So they inform on their fellow prisoners and report on any who talk of

escape. They do the dirty work and the leg work of the prison regime and ensure,

through their very actions, that the incarceration of everyone continues to take place in

the prescribed fashion. They are the eyes that are everywhere, at your work, in your

family, amongst your friends, and that enable this “panopticon” prison society.

But what, you might be thinking, if you want to be free? What if you have not made any

sort of “peace” with the idea of spending your entire life imprisoned? What if you can

imagine another, different sort of life beyond prison walls and its coercive exploitation

of (y)our existence and you don’t accept the story, constantly peddled, that life has to be

the prison way and that anything else is terrible and much worse and bound to fail? What

if you think, regardless, that your freedom and your life is your business and that you

want to live in a world where you can be left alone to take your chances? Obviously then

both the prison officials and the prisoners become deputised police will have you in their

sights. You will be the enemy of ALL of these people. They will regard your desire for

freedom as a threat, something that might spread, something that might educate others

to the ideas that there can be alternatives to how people live and that there is a thing

called “thinking for yourself” to begin with. The prison system of relationships would

then swing into effect to negate and neutralise any people who thought like that.
Dissent would not be allowed. Making people aware of alternatives would be an activity

that was crushed. Prisoner police would be rewarded for handing over their fellow

prisoners in a “me or them” dynamic. All the prisoners together, if they acted as one,

might have been able to make that prison inoperable, might have been able to break

through the walls but, alas, all too many fell in with what they were told and assumed

their assigned roles as willing prisoners and slaves. And it was not to their ultimate

benefit. For they were, and were always going to continue to be, prisoners.

It is my view that in capitalist-authoritarian societies like Britain this is largely the case.

We live in fascistic prison societies and people are groomed to police their neighbours.

Any concept of personal autonomy or agency is carefully cultivated by such societies at

large so as to become wholly domesticated and benign, a comforting ideal rather than a

conflictual practice. The universal fascist unity, the whole that may not be in any

unprescribed way diverse, is what matters in such a place. Thought police and culture

police are an absolute necessity here - and the more the merrier. Such a place could

never develop actual people who had actual agency or autonomy for that would then

mean people were free to dissent, to be different, to pursue diversity, to freely

associate, to create communities uncontrolled by, and dissociated from, centralising

power. Freedom is ultimately the enemy of control and so any who want to control will

ultimately do things to limit freedom and to centralise power. Power, in fact, is little else

but forced centralised power in the end. In our day and age it is greatly assisted by

technology’s increasing ability to facilitate it. But I, on the contrary, do not want to

control and I see freedom, personal agency and autonomy, as the ultimate way to limit it.

I have a vision and it is a very present and biological vision. It is a vision of a world

without overarching control that organises itself to its own benefit in whatever ways it
can. This, I posit, is the way of nature as it operates right now according to life’s mode of

operation. Life, so biologists tell us, is self-organising. If you think about it for a moment,

it has to be. Life that did not come with its own processes and mechanisms of survival

would just blink out of existence again the moment after it blinked into existence. It is

fundamentally to life’s benefit that it organises itself. This radical agency and self-

sufficiency of function is the basis of life itself. I propose that it is the basis of political,

economic and ethical life too. It is the basis of human community. It is the basis of any

and all cooperation by which life, in now communal and relational senses, propagates

successfully.

So this biological self-organisation, necessarily individualised, is not thereby contrary to

either relationship or cooperation. Indeed, such self-organisatory processes and

mechanisms can facilitate great symbiotic relations of things from forest networks of

plants and trees to colonies of bees or ants. Everywhere there is life it cooperates in

some self-organising way or other, often surprising but true, in tandem with this self-

organising function of life itself. Politically, economically and ethically understood, this

does not inevitably pit a mentality of every man for himself against its only alternative, a

mandatory communism; rather, it means, instead, that having your own beliefs, will and

desire is not inimical to cooperative relationships and useful community. All you actually

need – and all humans often do their utmost to actually avoid – is genuine autonomy and

agency at the personal level and a practice of preserving it for the whole entirely. It is

this practice of self-organising freedom, agency and autonomy which creates and

propagates life on this earth in all its massive diversity. It is that which, applied

politically, economically and ethically, would preserve and prosper that human freedom

from which everything else, in my vision, follows (things like cooperation, mutuality,

sharing and relationship which build cultures and communities at all).

Now, of course, this would necessitate a huge change in human thinking and practice and

you can be sure that all the habituated police in our prison society (yes, including those

in your workplace, family, circle of friends and associates) would be activated against it.

We would be told it was impossible (when life already all around us prospers to the best

of its ability in exactly this way every day, making it very far from “impossible”). We

would be told it would make us poorer (as if wealth is what really matters on a planet

being polluted and killed on purpose). We would be told it was madness (as if rampant

uncontrolled capitalism, political authoritarianism and the needs of companies over the

claims of simple human life are not, in themselves, insane). Human beings would

certainly need to get their shit together and change their values from ones of lazy

comfort at the expense of mass exploitation and relative wealth for some with dire

poverty for the rest. People would have to stop living at the cost of someone else’s

misery and become active, cooperative and self-sufficient.

But people can do that. They have, in fact, done it before for most of human existence –

which was as hunter-gatherers that existed in strongly bonded affinity groups (one can

read about this in the books Sex At Dawn by Ryan and Jetha or The Dawn of Everything

by Graeber and Wengrow). It is not the case that this model could simply be replicated

now in a world containing billions of people as opposed to hundreds of thousands but

the principles it involved could be employed to drastically alternative effect. On a long

enough timeline there simply is no world future in constant exploitation and oppression

as the pursuit of privatised “economic growth”. And, anyway, we do not need economic

growth (and certainly not money): we need economic stability on a global scale in which

“profit” becomes an inconceivable concept and “sharing” and “cooperation” become the

norm. That, as Peter Kropotkin once showed in a famous study called Mutual Aid, is how

all kinds of life have done it for ages. We could too if we woke up before it was too late.