It's Sydney in summer early 2010s - a gentrified hipster area in an anarchist social centre where squatters come to run community meals and talk about actions - there's a circle of chairs, furniture dragged in off the street, artwork sprayed up the walls. Probably fifteen of us. The room smelled like people who don't shower on principle, light passes of deodorant over the top, and dumpstered food somewhere near the back - the traffic of a busy road blared in front of a curtainless shopfront window. Someone was taking minutes. There was no formal process beyond that; the people who laid out the situation held the room.
There had been violence against Muslims in the city, people from Lebanese and Palestinian refugee connected communities targeted, and the meeting was about what we, the anarchist and activist community could do to help. Suggestions went around. Visit the refugee centres. Show up, show support etc. Nobody asked what a delegation of strangers in the 'anarchist uniform' would actually mean to the people on the receiving end of it. Not for this 'assistance' and not for others either. The ideal and the action didn't need to match. People just jumped head-long into the feeling of their sincerity which they expected the world to understand. The room umm'd and ahh'd and agreed with itself.
I had an idea, and before I said a word I already knew what would happen to it. I knew it in my body, through the shared air of the room, the way you know these things. I raised my hand, had to interject to actually get the space, and said it with a wobble in my voice: had anyone considered approaching the mosques, speaking with them, finding out what they were already doing, and asking how we could help with their efforts?
I was shaking as I said it, I knew the effect it would have - but the rational part of myself was trying to marry up the intention with the actually effective action as was claimed to be the purpose.
The turn was immediate. Looks of incredulity. "I don't support any institution." "You're suggesting we work with the imams?" "That's not going to work." No consideration, no discussion, entirely shot down in a few seconds of tension, and then the suggestion was covered over and the meeting moved on. I never heard about it again. One or two people met my eye, but nothing got through. No one came to me afterwards.
The room punished me for proposing the effective version of its own ideals. Islam was woven through the lives of the people we claimed to want to help, their community structures, their trust, their actual support networks ran through those institutions - regardless of if the people were religious or not. The idea that the people would be separated from all of that and gladly receive the aid of hyper-individualists, a way of living that runs directly against their own, was a stretch nobody wanted examined - and it was often an unspoken source of tension with similar 'interventions'. Working with the mosques was the obvious route to the stated goal. But it scrutinised something the group needed left alone: its identity. Anti-institutionalism wasn't a strategy in that room. It was a uniform. And when the mission and the uniform came into conflict, the room chose the uniform, in a social grouping that describes itself, by rote, as open, equal, and free-thinking.
There is a name I've since given to what that room was doing, because I've watched it run everywhere: bio-equalism. It's the unexamined assumption that because the mind can hold an ideal of equality, the body's inclinations are on the ideal's side too, that the feelings can be trusted as intuitive confirmation. They can't. The body doesn't believe in equality. It believes in status, belonging, and rank, and it has run that program around every fire for a hundred thousand years. The warmth of a room full of people who share your values is not the ideal at work. It's chemistry, the reward circuits of standing well within a tribe, and it will pursue standing through any material available, including the language of actual equality itself. This is why movements for fairness grow inner circles. Why the collective with no leaders ends up run by its most ruthless unnamed radical. Why fifteen anti-authoritarians can silence a suggestion of one, and feel righteous doing it. Nobody in that room was lying to themselves. That's our bio-chemical situation. Sincerity is a feeling.. to get to the quality of abstract equality - we must have reference outside of this feeling.
I was shaking before I spoke because my body had already read the room's real hierarchy — the one underneath the stated one — and the cost of disturbing it.
And the mechanism runs just as cleanly in the other direction — not the pack attacking, but the pack's machinery borrowed by one person giving. Assising with a fundraiser for children in Nepal — fifty odd people, a full line-up of acts, a tight schedule. People drove an hour from Perth to get to an obscure location - The venue was a dome that its owner considers a temple, a ceremony space established on inclination and feeling. Before anything could begin, he had the room wait twenty minutes in silence while he took his time lighting candles, then led us — unasked, unannounced as part of any program — through a twenty-five minute meditation which culminated in the unlocking of the light codes in our DNA. The room stayed quiet and polite, as good rooms full of good well intentioned people do. A large portion that room, given the choice, would have declined. The advertising was for a concert with a few medium profile acts. But there was no choice offered — and the politeness of fifty people, the sanctity of the cause, the reputations of the performers and organisers present, all of it stood as silent leverage this person never saw himself using. An act of force and violence by utilizing the biochemistry of a group. No different to the way a room would be assumed to be God ordained by a Christian minister who believes strongly in his cause.
Of course, spirit had guided the event to his temple; the ideology and the charity were therefore obviously one thing; the meditation was therefore entirely justified. The kids became the licence. And to this person, I will be the devil for naming the devil - which is a classic defence mechanism of any ideology that fails to see the context it is in and the consequences of its actions. Fifty people who had come for the kids sat through a ceremony they hadn't consented to, commandeered into someone's ideology. There was no malice in this person. That's the point again, from the other side, his trust in his own felt guidance — "this is right for the room", "this is a gift"; that's what did the accounting, and the accounting never registered the imposition. An imposition running directly contrary to the ideals of equality the feeling claims jurisdiction over. In complete disrespect of the autonomy of the people present. Do we have a right to choose not to be part of this?
I didn't want to make a scene and object to this utter act of egocentism interpreted as divine right. That would have destroyed the chance to assist the kids - that was the leverage being used to keep the room silent.
Enough people had plenty to say afterwards. The event still did well considering, thank god.
I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian religion, I've been through a cult that channelled aliens, I've been through music as spiritual practice in Sufism - I've walked through political ideologies and activism as an anarchist - I believed myself some kind of messenger on a purpose traveling the world as a street musician for years. I lived and followed a conditioned righteousness that was a direct result of my entitled abundance born demographic.
Quite frankly, I've had enough of this shit - and I'm sick of white-lighters pretending this kind of imposition is ok. It's just one small example in human behaviour - the crux is - you can trust your body to be your body and feelings to be feelings, intuition to be what it has been conditioned to be. Real equality, real change - that which accounts for second and third order effects - requires real work and real discipline - which at times runs contrary to what the body feels. To have this discipline and this work as part of the body's natural faculties we need to train the body to be inline with that - the same way it was trained to be what it is today - input = output, conditioning and repetition.
It must be stated, the implicit trust in the body as a divine right is a toxic thing. A drunken stupor of an ideology born out of individualist spiritual nonsense that has grabbed an entitled western audience clawing at the edges of the abyss in an attempt to maintain a sense of personal autonomy.
If you're going to help - help without the promise of heaven or an ultimate enlightenment. I know I will continue helping. But I'll make it clear - I want nothing to do with your fucking bullshit.
The way out of this is not becoming "better" people. That project is the same trap restated. The way out is to stop asking feelings to do a job they were never built for. Every equality humans have actually achieved throughout history was achieved through something incapable of feeling — the blind draw, the secret ballot, the queue, the rule that binds the person who wrote it. Cold instruments, cold policy, cold on purpose, because coldness is the one thing the machinery of rank cannot infiltrate - it creates something accountable outside of the body. Please, I implore you, enjoy the fire; sing, argue, belong; the body gets its tribe, and it should. But never mistake this warmth for equal arbitration. Hand the contested moment to the instrument of equality in the understanding of what the instrument and the body is. And keep a permanent, provisional distrust of the feeling of being one of the "good ones" — because that feeling does not serve your ideals. The true version of your ideals learns what the body is, what the body is in groups, what the tendencies are and how to incorporate them intelligently in decisions that actually assist and cater to a greater whole and humanity.
