Virtue, Vehicle, and Status Quo

Posted on December 19, 2025 - December 19, 2025 by rabbitrunriot

Mutualism is the natural mode of being for people: our natural social philosophy, more or less. We can look at the natural dynamics of hunter-gatherer societies, past and present, to confirm this[1]. When the competition, fabricated scarcity, and synthetic social divisions that collectively plague modern life under liberal capitalism are eliminated, what remains — mutualism — is our natural social dynamic. Capitalism and liberalism have stolen that from us but there are plenty of intellectual exposés and angry rants that address this topic so we’re not going to waste more time on that[2].

Instead, we’re going to get meta.

There are virtues we are naturally born valuing — liberty, loyalty, compassion, reason, and truth — and then there are the vehicles society tells us are available to express those virtues — social honors, traditions, contracts, etc. Somewhere along the line, mainstream society lost sight of the distinction between these virtues and the vehicles through which they are expressed.

As an example, modern society tends to laud soldiers. Veterans of World War 2 allied armies might be respected for holding antifascist values — values which united them in their cause. The honor of being a soldier, in that era, was earned by demonstrating those virtues on the battlefield. In contrast, today, soldiers expect respect for being members of the military, regardless of the virtues and values they hold and the struggles they’ve faced. The essence of “soldier” has lost its substance of “virtue.”

For those who can see the distinction, either inherently or after some effort, between the values and their vehicles, and who dare to question the validity of those vehicles as continuing to effectively express the values they allegedly represent, there is a choice to be made. Do you accept the lie, or go against the grain?

Choosing to go against the grain — to be a genuine expression of those values which mainstream society has lost sight of in favor of vainglorious pursuits — will always be the more difficult path path. At certain points in your life, it may be necessary to tread the middle-way between them. But don’t get trapped there.

Whatever your virtues and core values are, if you participate in a society that caricatures those values in vehicles whose essence has become devoid of substance, you are submitting to living a lie at a fundamental level. Every day, when you wake up, you will more or less be lying to yourself when you tell yourself you are satisfied and happy with your life — somewhere, deep down, you will know that’s bullshit.

You’ll try therapy, drugs, alcohol, sports, sex… and everything will make you feel good… for a brief period. But nothing can sustain satisfaction and contentment because you’re living contrary to the principles you prize most. If you value truth, as most people naturally do, and your fundamental modus operandi is effectively a lie you try to sell yourself on every day, how do you think that’s going to work out psychologically?

The “powers that be” (which are not a monolith, mind you; they are not always coordinating and cooperating, but they draw from the same well of power and influence) have long since discovered the benefit of attaching the virtues to social constructs so that the latter can be weaponized for the purpose of controlling the masses. To that end, everything from armies to churches have been used to manipulate the will of the masses and direct it towards agendas they may otherwise oppose were their values, virtues, and ideals laid out plainly.

This illusion of simile — that the essence of some social construct is synonymous with and inseparable from its virtuous substance — is part and parcel of the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt would have seen it[3]. It is our responsibility, as revolutionaries, to take note of where these false equivalencies have been institutionalized, and separate the virtue from the vehicle once again so that such atrocities do not repeat themselves. This can be a difficult process and we often find that we are doing a bit more than just separating the wheat from the chaff, proverbially speaking.

In some cases, in fact, the intertwining of virtue and vehicle is so convoluted that separating the two for effective critique and evolution cannot be done without creating conflicts. These conflicts can all be boiled down to whether or not a virtue will be expressed in the context of the social lie[4] …or in spite of it. In the case of the latter, there is an implicit challenge in facing the resistance and derision of the people and institutions that will look down on the individual who questions the status quo. Those with the courage to persist will find that they are often “outcasts” and “pariahs,” and may find that their convictions cost them family, friends, and success in the world. However, the alternative — accepting the lie — creates an internal disharmony rooted in a sense (however subconscious it may be) that one is “living a lie” and the struggle becomes an internal tempest of depression, anxiety, and unfulfilled dreams of self-actualization.

Because of the proclivity of the individual to seek to define themselves — per the status quo of liberal consumerism — when individuals incorporate these socio-cultural composites of virtue-and-vehicle into their self-definition and self-actualization process, they struggle to separate challenges and critiques aimed at the vehicle from attacks on themselves, personally. Similarly, we associate certain virtues and values with people we respect, making it difficult to separate the virtue from the vehicle when a living example of their cohesion still bears heavily on our experiential worldview.

All of these things cause subjective/objective incongruence and disharmony, the reconciliation of which demands either accepting the subjective reality (“the lie” — the status quo) or rejecting it as a vehicle of virtue and value. The status quo depends on the masses’ inability to separate virtues from their social vehicles, and our psychological needs and processes complicate this process, reinforcing the very paradigms that we revolutionaries seek to challenge and overturn in service to evolution.

We can find a temporary reprieve from the stresses of evolution in certain concessions to the status quo that allow us to “cohabitate” with its proponents. Many revolutionaries, during less polarized times, end up in the punk subculture, for instance. While punk is outside mainstream and tends to be “radical and revolutionary,” it has a degree of acceptability as a subculture. However, as time progresses, evolution must continue, and eventually we are forced to confront the disharmony.

The most difficult part of this process, and of actualizing ourselves according to our own values (as opposed to within the context of “the lie”), comes when we must separate the virtue from the vehicle in a way that challenges others around us to, whether passively or directly, to at least acknowledge the discrepancy. For those “others” who have depended on the status quo for their sense of stability and security, this may create relationship conflicts.

A child raised by parents who patronize the status quo is going to meet resistance when choosing a life that disregards the status quo or actively questions and opposes it. But these virtues, and the need to express them, are not just a matter of politics and social graces; they are matters of lifestyle choices and values, expressed at every level of our being, actions, and thoughts. So, when that child, raised by parents who have followed the blueprint and believe the path to a respectable and satisfying life is by doing the same, announces that they are venturing out to be a homeless peace activist, the parents are mortified.

“We raised you better than that! Have some class and self-respect! You can’t save the world, shouldn’t you figure out how you want to contribute as a productive member of society?” This rejection of a challenge to the status quo places the burden of reconciling the conflict entirely on the child and, unfortunately, results in broken relationships and deep-seated psychological trauma.

In a group of activists, you are unlikely to not find at least one whose pursuit of justice and liberty has come at a high cost. And none will know, better, how badly western liberalism can destroy a person’s psyche than those who have lost a parent, sibling, or child to the confusion of vehicle-with-virtue. In such a case, the person who refuses to separate vehicle and virtue is effectively insisting that the world’s conception of virtue evolve to suit their needs, and that brings us full circle back to the impacts of western liberalism and consumer culture.

To be continued…

Endnotes

See a more detailed examination of hunter-gatherer society for comparison on LibCom.org.
Criticism of the social impacts of liberal capitalism and consumerism date from Thorstein Veblen’s brilliant 1899 work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, to Robert Putnam’s contemporary study, Bowling Alone.
See Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which has been published as both an article for The New Yorker and a full-length book.
The social lie (or “the lie”) just refers to the idea that vehicles are inseparable from their virtues — a misconception which helps maintain the supremacy of the status quo.

Kill the cop that sleeps inside you

Posted on December 13, 2025 - December 13, 2025 by rabbitrunriot

In order to fight authoritarianism, you must become a beacon of its antithesis: liberty. Securing personal freedom and autonomy only makes you a liberated person. To be a liberation advocate, you must actively fight to secure the liberty of others. The most difficult part of this process, which most people will not ever get past (especially since we want people to trust our vision as a form of self-validation), is killing their inner cop.

“Fuck you, I’m not a cop!”

No, that’s not what I mean. Chill out for a minute and let me explain…

Liberation is not just about securing more liberty for yourself and compatriots; it is also about reducing the proliferation of authoritarianism in whatever way we are able. When we claim liberty for ourselves, it becomes an ethical duty to secure and preserve it for others. We tend to focus this fight outward, in our opposition to oppressive social institutions. For all the good this does, though, we tend to ignore the (critical) inner dimensions of our ego and identity.

No matter how much we believe in and prize freedom and egalitarianism, our ego has an innate drive to enforce itself and it’s identity on the world around us due to conditioning of the environment (western liberalism) in which it has developed. In other words, the world that shaped us has taught us that self-actualization comes through objectively imprinting your “mark” on the world — domination, expansionism, imperialism — whether this is as a militant colonizer nation or a cutthroat Wall Street shark makes no difference. This is the life we’re supposed to want in the modern neoliberal west.

The ego’s strong attachment to our identity in the world means that any perceived attack on that identity — our emotions, ideas, and opinions, or our reason, logic, and wisdom; that is, our subjective and objective conception of the world — is taken as a personal attack. The perception of an attack then results in the conception of a conflict and the ego seeks to assert itself and its truth. The act of enforcing its opinion and ideas on the outside world without giving the options for “compromise,” “opting out,” or “agreeing to disagree,” becomes a de facto authoritarian dynamic… your inner cop has come out to assert how big he is.

This builds society in an intrinsically hierarchic way. Where your ego triumphs, you are “above” those people; where it submits, you are “below.” When everyone in a community is stuck in this arrogant and self-righteous cycle of trying to assert themselves as individuals, the community cannot help but tend towards vertical organization. This means that those “below” are naturally positioned to oppose those “above,” and society becomes conflict-oriented and authoritarian organically.

It is, therefore, imperative that we learn to recognize authoritarian tendencies in ourselves, and have the objectivity and humility to call ourselves out. We are responsible, first and foremost, for ourselves. If we cannot embody the behaviors of a liberator, nobody has any reason to believe liberation is possible.

And, crucially, this is not a one-time process. It’s something we must be actively engaging in — every moment of every day. Be mindful of your actions and thoughts — police them yourself (so other people don’t have to, and so you don’t get tempted to police other people). Cultivate humility. Learn to be accepting of failure and faults, and seek compromise and cooperation — always — instead of conflict, schism, and war.

Domestication and Schism

Posted on December 9, 2025 - December 10, 2025 by rabbitrunriot

When you domesticate a wild animal, you cannot just put it in a cage and expect it to stay content. No matter how much food you give it, it will try to escape and run away. And every time, it will make a greater effort not to be caught again.

To domesticate an animal, you must gain its trust first. Then, the domestication process becomes a continual dialectic. In order for it to be successful, the animal must feel satisfied more by continuing to participate in the dialectic than to run away. Over time, the animal will become a companion, and that trust becomes a bond.

But if you break the trust, you break the bond. Sometimes it can be mended, if it’s addressed quickly and prioritized accordingly. But the relationship is forever changed, and if there is no amicable solution, schism occurs. Schism can be avoided, however, if the relationship dynamic is allowed to evolve to resolve the inconsistency/incongruence (whether in one of its parties or the dynamic itself); otherwise, the issue that causes schism will become its own unresolved loop.

The idea of winners and losers is a fallacy of modern society: nobody wins in a schism — bonds are broken, enemies can be made, and conflict arises. Conflict sets other patterns in motion as the schismed parties go their separate ways and then, before the original conflict can be resolved, the fractalized conflicts and loops (“subs”) that spiral out from the schism need all to be resolved, first.

If the schismed parties are lucky, and they are able to reconnect after resolving their respective “subs,” they may have an opportunity to resolve the conflict, again. More likely than not, they will find it again in another party, and will continue to be tested by, over and over, until they are able to reach an amicable solution rather than a schism.

Thus, when the conflict is over broken trust, it’s essential that both parties see the situation from the subjective perspective of the other, in the context of the objective reality, in order for it to evolve and be preserved. This demands extreme and brutal self-honesty from both parties involved — something which contemporary society, capitalism, liberalism, and consumerism have all played a part in suppressing. And they’ve been quite successful.

This self-honesty must come from walking backwards through the dialectic of influences and dynamics of the inconsistency or incongruence that created the conflict until you arrive at its root. This enables you to find and amend the root problem and break out of the loop. Sometimes we get lucky and have this clarity sort of spontaneously as an epiphany; sometimes it takes time to work out through deconstruction. Either way, identifying it allows us to confront and resolve the issue. Maybe we can’t entirely have it “our way” — but we can absolutely try to synergize with the world instead of fight against it.

Transcending Anarchism?

Posted on December 9, 2025 - December 9, 2025 by rabbitrunriot

Anarchy is not a political theory. Anarchy is the tool to heal the divisions and malignancies created by politicization and the establishment of orders and hierarchies (collectively “the state”).

Let’s break this down into a sort of logical proposition.

Politics is inherently divisive. Politicization involves establishing a structure or order for society, which mandates the classification and stratification of people, processes, and resources and ultimately results in divisions. The divisions caused by politicization are responsible for establishing false dichotomies (“good vs. bad,” “rich vs. poor,” “abundant vs. scarce,” “legal vs. illegal,” etc.) that give the illusion of “one or the other.” This is further exacerbated by capitalism, and the combination of politics and capitalism has proven to be an unholy alliance.

Eliminating political division, and the resulting social order, establishes egalitarian liberty. In order to establish an equitable, peaceful, and cooperative society, these dualities need a peaceful, cooperative resolution rather than the competitive conflict that is the result of classification. The subjective and objective realities that we all perceive — and between which we must choose on a day to day basis — demand a completely different approach, not just a new system of organizing our approach.

Anarchism as a tool can serve to eliminate the role of the state, but it must remain dynamic, flexible, and co-evolutionary; not fall into that various hypostates of political theory. Eliminating objective authority empowers the individual, but in it’s place — if society is going to continue — must be a cooperative, voluntary, and deliberate effort of individuals — working under no authority but their own will to cooperate — working together for a shared collective goal — their conceived reality. Ending social hierarchy, the state and capitalism, and the policing of individuals has taken center stage in anarchism as a political theory, but we must not neglect or forget the equally important concept of anarchism: personal responsibility and agency — and this goes well beyond the realm of politics and political discourse.

Politics Is Inherently Divisive

These divisions occur because of how classification and stratification works. An object is defined as being a member of a class based on certain characteristics, traits, accidentals, etc.; whether intended or not, this creates an implied negation — anything that is not a member of the class is separated out from it. This is where division starts: the “in group” versus the “out group.” When one class is given higher social value than another (regardless of the justifications for this), the other class is implicitly demeaned and subjugated. The entitlement of a higher-position object to subjectively manipulate and control a lower-position object creates the authoritarian dynamic of modern, state-based societies.

This is, of course, not isolated to statist politics. We find the same phenomena occurring in theocratic societies (from the Holy Roman Empire to the modern Islamic State), and it is here that we must acknowledge a dichotomy that exists persistently in social individuals: the subjective perception (identity, desire, emotion, etc.) and the objective perception (observed reality, scientific inquiry, logical reasoning, etc.). These two modes of perceiving are not siloed. They interact and coalesce in the process of conceiving our ideas about our perceptions. But when one or the other is allowed to “win” (the “this or that” / “this versus that” mentality, where one must triumph), a biased conception arises and prioritizes one above the other; how we combine them in the moment does, in fact, matter.

Politically, people who tend to lean heavy on subjective perception tend to favor liberalism and capitalism while those who lean heavy towards objective perception tend to favor socialism and communism. In both cases, the perception be suitable for the individual, but claiming that one is an objective “right” or “good” (and, incidentally, establishing the implication that the other is objectively “wrong” or “bad”) is problematic. Our social environment is a cooperative effort of conceiving our world — the coalescence and cooperation of individuals as a collective. In recent millennia, the norm when arriving at such a proverbial crossroads has been to perceive a competitive juxtaposition in which one must triumph and the other fail, but it hasn’t always been that way. For the large majority of our history, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were cooperative and mutually attentive. It has only been in the last 10,000 years — since the Agricultural Revolution — that this has shifted to a competitive dynamic… and it can be shifted back.

This is the role of anarchism: to remove all worldly authorities and hierarchies and make all people equal by proposing a dialectical tool to resolve these dichotomies into a unity, rather than giving fealty to their identity or society at the expense of the other.

Anarchism, re-imagined…

Lately, I’ve been waxing philosophical a lot and getting into some deep ontological and metaphysical questions. This has gotten me thinking about how we, as anarchists, may have been short-sighting ourselves all along. Perhaps we’ve been too narrow in our perspective — not going far enough in recognizing the real degree of change that an anarchic world demands of contemporary humanity.

The social structure of the modern world is largely built on political and economic hierarchies, with social and cultural hierarchies still playing a fairly formative role. At the same time, new hierarchies, like sustainability, are attempting to develop while old ones, like religion, are beginning to crumble. Traditionally, anarchists have competed against the state in the domain of politics and economy, and that is where our efforts remain. Politics is the contemporary language of social organization (just like religion and tribalism in eras past) but anarchism must go beyond politics if it is to be successful.

It is easy to say that liberalism and Marxism have failed, but we must also learn to acknowledge the subtle (but critical) ways they have changed humanity and human society since the 19th century. In order to acknowledge those faults, we must identify where politics ends and other “domains of life” begin… and take appropriate responsibility for them. This is in service to the greater goal of liberating the individual — by liberating the elements of their life from the authoritarians of society.

Perhaps this will make more sense if we work back.

Let’s take the impact of liberalism. Of course, we all know about the direct harm that liberal capitalism has enabled — everything from wage slavery to fabricated scarcity. But most of us don’t think about what the individual impacts of liberalism are. Things that we wouldn’t even consider:

Neoliberalism allows the individual to abdicate their responsibility for active moral/ethical reasoning by insisting that the state’s judgments based on codified laws are superior to this capacity
The “superior” nature of the law is so “effective” that it enables individuals to act against socially and ethically responsible reasoning (usually in the interest of a personal agenda) by virtue of “not breaking any laws”
This emphasizes (superficially) an implication that individuals are incapable of moral reasoning and need an intercessor — whether state or priest — to do so on their behalf.

None of this stuff is “political” in the grand scheme of things. And the average person — you and I, your neighbor up the street, and 95% of the people you meet in the world — is perfectly capable of following some basic moral guidelines. It doesn’t really take any more than that. There is plenty more to give, surely, but it can stop there and still be effective.

This isn’t a politics problem. It is, however, the basic justification for politics and government, and clearly it is an absurd justification. “People cannot reason well enough to solve their problems. So let a few people reason poorly on behalf of everyone so the problems get worse?” Yeah, basically. Because if people were confident (as they should be) in their ability to solve their problems without “leaders” (construction worker teams do it every day; hackers and open source developers have been doing it for decades; the Wobbly shop model has proven effective; etc., etc., blah, blah, blah…), there would be no justification for the “elites” and the power we willingly give up to them. So they keep us scared and desperate, and preoccupied with “entertainment” and “work,” lest we start to actually talk to each other and realized how much we’re being boned by those very “elites” who so desperately claim we need them.

Contemporary leftist movements have a similar problem, but inverse. Leftism assumes society is far more structured and predictable — objective — than it is. They rely on theory to resolve conflicts, but tend to favor the theory over pragmatism (presumably because admitting your theory cannot account for something and needs modification is a blow to the ego of the individuals who adhere to the theory). This results from placing the theory, itself, in the same role that liberalism places the “elites” — the authoritative position. The theory becomes a sort of “god” to the community following it. When discrepancies arise, such a community will work to preserve the theory from challenges rather than admit that cooperation and society cannot be definitively stable or planned.

This all being the case, we must consider Anarchism not as a political ideology but as an holistic way of life for humanity. We would do well to stop reducing it to political banter. Not everyone cares about politics, and in many (perhaps all?) ways, politicization is counterintuitive to social progress and human nature.