Direct Action Is, Ultimately, The Defiant Insistence

The Example Of Russia Reminds Us That Keeping Up That Enormous Dead Weight Of The Security Apparatus Required To Enforce The Ideological Conformity To Preempt Anything That Looks Like An Alternative Or A Social Movement Is Destroying Capitalism.

We Are Usually Told That Democracy Originated In Ancient Athens - Like Science, Or Philosophy, It Was A Greek Invention. It's Never Entirely Clear What This Is Supposed To Mean. Are We Supposed To Believe That Before The Athenians, It Never Really Occurred To Anyone, Anywhere, To Gather All The Members Of Their Community In Order To Make Joint Decisions In A Way That Gave Everyone Equal Say?

As It Turns Out, We Don't "all" Have To Pay Our Debts. Only Some Of Us Do.

People Don't Have An Ongoing Relation Unless It's A Form Of Debt Because Everything Is An Exchange, So Ongoing Relationships Are Incomplete Exchanges, And Therefore One Party Is Probably To Blame - More Likely Than Not, Both Are. Sociality Itself Seems To Become Like A Matter Of Sin, And Inherently Wrong.

The Question We Should Be Asking Is Not Why People Are Sometimes Cruel, Or Even Why A Few People Are Usually Cruel (all Evidence Suggests True Sadists Are An Extremely Small Proportion Of The Population Overall), But How We Have Come To Create Institutions That Encourage Such Behavior And That Suggest Cruel People Are In Some Ways Admirable-or At Least As Deserving Of Sympathy As Those They Push Around.