Nishant > Recent Status Updates

“away from home I was able to lay bare the past and keep stored within me much that was soul nourishing. And I was able to let much unnecessary suffering and pain go”

“Since my native place was indeed the site and origin of the deep dysfunction that had damaged my spirit I did not believe I could be safe there. I could see the connection between private family dysfunction, and the public dysfunction that was sanctioned by the State ”
(while reading on way back from kanpur)

“… it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination”

“even the most powerful – Roman, Han, Ming, Inca – could not prevent large-scale movements of people into and out of their spheres of control. Until around a half-millennium ago, a large proportion of the world’s population still lived either beyond the tax collector’s purview or within reach of some relatively straightforward means of escaping it.”

“Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart.”

“As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence.”

“When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship… ritual designed to produce kinship becomes a method of producing kingship”

“the case of Taosi invites us to consider the world’s earliest cities as places of self-conscious social experimentation, where very different visions of what a city could be like might clash... Increasing the number of people living in one place may vastly increase the range of social possibilities, but in no sense does it predetermine which of those possibilities will ultimately be realized.”

“How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients.. but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?”

“from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities”

“Men in authority are especially likely to be stupid because they are out of touch with concrete finite experience and instead keep interfering with other people’s initiative and making them stupid and anxious.”

“In natural ethics there is no such principle as the choice of the lesser of two evils. Such a principle is self-contradictory… The lesser evil is a sign that an interest has been allowed to develop in isolation until it now threatens even our lives. It is the isolation of the issue from its causes that restricts the choice to the lesser evil”

“most of the coercive conflicts that come to a vote are so nicely weighted with evils against each other that tossing a coin would also give a just decision”

“Nothing is more disheartening than to see an honest party or press, unwilling to lend itself to bad alternatives, that does not also continually produce a stream of good natural solutions. If a man cannot in fact invent a way out, what right has such a man to be libertarian on the issue at all? His negative criticism insults and disheartens the rest”

“Sociolatry is the concern felt by masses alienated from their deep natures for the smooth functioning of the industrial machine from which they believe they can get a higher standard of living and enjoy it in security.. it is a sociological standard energized by emulation and advertising, and cementing a sense of unanimity among the alienated”

“By “revolutionary” I here refer to the heirs of Rousseau and the French Revolution: the conviction that man is born free and is in institutional chains; that fraternity is the deepest political force and the fountain of social invention; and that socialism implies the absence of state or other coercive power.”

“Resistance — patience — firmness — duty: these are not negative nor even passive virtues; they are not the restraint of force.. The anarchist apparently seeks to create a political vacuum; but it is the fertile vacuum of Tao, where heavy masses fall of their own weight and the invisible seeds germinate. He speaks a word that heals as it violates.”

“at present it is exactly the aim of all the organs of publicity, entertainment, and education so to form the personality that a man performs by his subjective personal choice just what is objectively advantageous for the coercive corporation”

A free man, so long as he creates and goes by his clear and distinct ideas, can easily maintain in his soul many apparent contradictions; he is sure they will iron out; a loose system is the best system. But woe if at the same time he is persuaded into prejudices and coerced into conforming: then one day he will have the agony of drawing the line..We draw the line in their conditions; we proceed on our conditions.

On Drawing the line:

“In the mixed society of coercion and nature, our characteristic act is Drawing the Line, beyond which we cannot co-operate... No particular drawn line will ever be defensible logically... Yet to each person it seems to make all the difference where he draws the line! This is because just these details are the symbolic key to his repressed powers — and... guilt for the acceptance of it.”

On the seemingly conflicting ideals of autonomy and community: “It is not our social nature to go it alone. It does not follow that one must conform to Society. It is enough to find-and-make a band, two hundred, of the like-minded, to know that oneself is sane though the rest of the city is batty.”

"instead of trying to construct a strongly anarcha-centric cosmology, we could locate the Western anarchist tradition as one contextually specific manifestation among a larger-indeed global-tradition of antiauthoritarian.. praxis, of a universal human urge toward emancipation. Something else (being) the reference point for us, instead of us being the reference point for everything else is a deeply decolonising move"

It is of the nature of the idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

"Organic knowledge is mobilised insight that seeks to know nature within nature, not to abandon analysis for mysticism or dialectic for intuition. Our own thinking is itself a natural process, albeit deeply conditioned by society and richly textured by social evolution..."

"The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.
Shelter(memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives)
Yield(information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions)
Dispose(waste, trauma, poison, secrets)
Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save"

"The global justice movement has coalesced partly because it has collectively determined who and what it needs to fight. No one should join this movement who disagrees on the targets already chosen for mass mobilisations- the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organisation, the G-8 - not the only possible targets perhaps, but some of the ones identifed for now."