Currently, I am obsessing on AC/DC. Whole Lotta Rosie blows me away (oo-er missus!) almost constantly. I never thought I would be the kind of person who plays a song on a loop, but I find myself increasingly doing so as I get older. Whether it's on my iPod, on my phone, on iTunes at home, or on YouTube, it's pretty much always on. And it rawks, man!
Anyway, an interesting discussion in the pub recently (with something of a lunatic, as it happens, but that's by the bye) about anarchy. Somebody asked, without faux naivete, what anarchy meant. The nutter said that we were already living in anarchy, and although he had been pissing me off, I had to agree with him.
"But doesn't that mean that everyone would be running around stealing things, shooting each other?" asked the questioner.
"I have to agree," I said, "That we are already living in anarchy. Blair and Bush were able to ignore international law and go steamrollering into Iraq, and yet we're all under the microscopic scrutiny of the state for the slightest misdemeanour." I nodded my head towards the pub door and said: "No-one dares go in there with a lit cigarette." The madman was on a different tack to me, however, which I suppose is a relief in a way, and wanted to make his point that true anarchy lay in the very fabric of human existence. We - meaning everyone except him - didn't get the point. For a while I tried to establish an argument for distinguishing anarchy in political history from anarchy in the wider sense of the word, but he wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways.
"You've just experienced anarchy," he said at last.
But, I would simply ask, what is the opposite of anarchy?
2 comments:
I think that Anarchy is the opposite of Fascism, and it's creeping Fascism that continues to be the problem. The Fascist system we have needs to dis-courage communication skills in order to ensure that a frightened populace will go along with any old crap.
Of course, you'd have to keep the people happy with new and improved circuses where the latest and best entertainers are brought in at great expense from far-off lands.
Way back in the time of Cromwell, they were saying that despotism was the opposite of anarchy. Neither road was attractive, so a road of controlled freedom was chosen.
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