Anarchism and Truth

A treatise of the spiritual aspects of anarchism by Peter Ostrowski, available now from any public library or bookshop.

Alternatively, the book may be ordered directly from the address below.

In my dream I was alone. The sky was held up by the tallest trees, hundreds, everywhere. There were places upon the green and black high overhead where brilliant light tore through, illuminating or silhouetting the trunks and tangled branches, and where the masses of leaves burned white. This was the world. There was nothing beyond the forest, for what was infinite could have no edge; the universe was unbounded and stretched forever.

And I was not human. My being was fear. Fear and hunger, without respite, without ceasing. I had no one in the world, yet a thousand hidden eyes watched me, waiting, silent. For every invisible being in the world was but as I - isolated fear and hunger.

They were enshrouded in the darkness on the ground below me, where the light from the sky barely reached the dead leaves and cold earth or the icy streams of black water cutting through them. The unseen jungle stared in patient sentinel up at the trees, the branches of which I clung to fearing my death, fearing the darkness, fearing not seeing, not knowing.

And as night started to fall it was as if the growing dusk began to consume all that there was, revealing only the hidden, faceless, murderous other. I had fallen in my dreaming through to the depths of the oldest, most primitive, unthinking mind, yet somehow retained sentience. I saw dragons and giants emerging from the vanishing ground. Insects were crawling on me and spiders swarmed over the branches above. Then giant bats closed in, screaming and beating the tree that was falling onto me. I tried to run, but rats and panthers were there, and filthy flies were settling on my eyes and face. Everywhere were the cavernous mouths of savage, gleaming teeth, and the stench, and the snarling and howling.

For the last time, I looked up to where the sky had been, to see, almost upon me, the descending serpent.

This is how it was; this is where we have come from, what we were. And we live with the memory still buried within us, at our core of being, like something blind and white in the mud of the deepest ocean's floor. What have we today to deliver us from blindness and fear? Graced by evolution with unprecedented wisdom, what tools have we fashioned, what revelation have we witnessed, what forces have we mastered which would free us from our insentient animal past in the primeval forests and oceans? We have but a jungle of words.

Who will endow our words with meaning if not we? We speak of work, of god, of society, yet have no common understanding of their meaning, nor even acceptance of their existence. Our words are chosen for us and inhuman forces decide on what they are to mean. So when these shells of language are finally passed down for us to use we find them to be but empty sounds. In fear of losing language and returning to darkness and not knowing, we look to the word-maker to lead us to their meanings.

From upon our tower, high over Babel, we see a land imbued with confusion. Some of us manipulate the chaos to create meaning for those who wish to believe; for for them to refuse to believe in that which is not true would be to believe in nothing. But what is truth? Can the absolute and the subjective both be truths? Cannot the allegorical and metaphysical be truth?

When meaning is taken away from our words, they will become the tools of the word-manipulators. Words with which we cannot communicate are not needed; they will become intersynonymous and then be lost. We must reclaim their meaning, for only then can we use language to speak of building mankind's future. New words will be needed and created as our understanding grows and new questions about our universe are asked.

We speak of jobs and professions as pertaining to purpose in existence. What are these things? Are they what we do to obtain money which we need to stay alive? If so, then we claim that survival is the purpose of our survival. In thinking of professionalism we vaguely acknowledge a tenuous divide somewhere between unskilled labour for money only and jobs which require skills or qualifications; something somehow higher yet still paid. So in a world with no money, will people cease to have professions? We face a plethora of ambiguity and non-definition and a paucity of words themselves. But to define the profession as vocational work towards revolution and, moreover, towards the realisation of humankind's highest potential, is to envision a money-less world in which all have professions; a world in which work becomes that which is chosen by the individual, and choice is truly choice, not submission to necessity, not the coercion of poverty and death, as all the paths of option will be leading away from the heart and mind and will of the individual.

I believe that there can be no political mechanism to act against famine, war, material and spiritual poverty and the daily murder of millions which is perpetrated by nationalism and capitalism. The revolution, when it comes, will be a spiritual one, for change can only be born of a new way of seeing the world, a new consciousness. A profession is, immediately, work towards such an end. It is work which is internationally illegal, for all governments actively stifle or legislate against its facilitation. But it also has a greater purpose. There will come a time when we no longer need to fight against our self-imposed oppression, and professional work will then become pure art and science, pushing us towards achievements we cannot even contemplate today. We will no longer be burdened by mere survival, but be free to explore Creation in any way we can, elevating ourselves ever onwards towards ultimate truth.

It is a lie that more than a very few of the labouring and administrative tasks set for us are necessary, for it is a lie that money exists, and without imagining money all but one in many thousands of the jobs that are being done today would be inconceivable. We tell ourselves that employment should be exploitative to have value, that to labour out of the greed of others is to have a job. Let us not belittle the worth of our lives so. Even accepting capitalism's compromises, that to work pragmatically and selflessly we need funding for food, shelter and materials, let us believe that one can only be said to be employed, to have a job, if one is financially able to live and work professionally, alone if need be. Self-funding through unrelated labour is unemployment if the work suffers, as it inevitably must, through the time that is thus wasted. We must reclaim all that which has been stolen from us by exploitative labour.

Even for those who want for nothing other than survival, labour, day after day, year after year, which merely supplements another's income, must be named, for surely then it does not provide a 'living wage'. Furthermore, if the supplemented income is insufficient, then it also cannot be funding for a job. Thus we must question how many 'jobs' (in the lower sense of the word) actually exist. How small a minority of people do this thing which is ostensibly compulsory?

To speak of 'earning' a living is surely mankind's greatest self-deprecation. It is as if we are stating that some people, through their own sloth or fecklessness, do not deserve to live. In this way we belittle art and science, which exist to benefit all mankind, not merely to provide the artist or scientist with money for survival. Yet we perpetuate massed fear and resistance of these highest of human activities, our only tools for realising our future, our common destiny.

We follow those who ensure that we believe we need to follow by reducing all human endeavour and aspiration to a simple choice between right and wrong. But is it right to deny one's own self and follow blindly? Is it right to lead? Is it wrong to believe that human worth lies beyond the making of money or mere survival? No one declares what the difference between right and wrong actually is.

So is it then 'right' that in our schools there exists such an extraordinary and profound dichotomy in what is taught as the basic truths of Creation? For science and religion are both presented as such truths. The purpose of compulsory state education was, ostensibly, to educate all our people, so that the fetters of superstition and ignorance would be removed and truth, that is, knowledge and understanding, would prevail, and thus free-thinking and our spiritual awareness of the world and our place in it would grow in all of us. But our chosen minister for education, responsible for the teaching and popularisation of science, declares that schools should be institutions where these undefined terms, right and wrong, are taught and explained. He tells us this can only be achieved through the teaching of religion to our children. Thus they will believe it right that the world was created in six days. That supernatural creating entities spoke to men, before murdering them all in divine deluge. That decaying corpses can rise and live again, that there is a world just above the sky to which they then levitate and enter. That it is right and preordained that we will destroy ourselves in a final battle and be judged good or evil, right or wrong, holy or irredeemably damned. Thus we are taught that the responsibility for our survival and progress and for our Armageddon does not lie in our collective hands, for if the blame for total and final genocide were held by all mankind, then who would be holy, who would be good, who would be right?

The lessons for life which are taught and learned in schools are inculcated through lies, intimidation and hostility; the last people in the world who should be teachers are teachers. We learn that respect is something to be demanded, and that it may be commanded through violence. We learn that, if our strength is sufficient, assault is to be used for coercion, that others will obey our orders if we kick and punch them. And then we take our lessons with us, scars proudly borne, into our solitary, final journeys. This is how we are building our future.

Hence we despise, fear or ignore true science and the highest art - our only means of progress and, indeed, survival. This is why we speak of employment and work as we do; they are to us the infrastructure of our conservative, stagnant world, and we are but epiphenomenal to it - sentience is seen as being no more than machinery. Those whom we regard as working are said to be employed, that is, the labouring are used - we regard labour as exploitation, something with which to be graced by others, and then regard it as our personal strength. But what of the unemployed? Do they not live? If so, why must we labour? Would we too not live without employment? It is possible that we would, but we must realise that those whom we term unemployed live only through a trick of language, because the unemployed are not the dead. In any case, we must conclude that we keep people alive who do not keep us alive. For the criterion for accusing those who do not earn money of irresponsibility and non-contribution to society is whether or not they need more money to stay alive than they already own. Inactivity, sloth and greed by the financially independent is at best envied, at worst lauded, while the unfunded professional is seen as a parasite in the world he loves and whose future he is fighting to work for, for such work is adjudged meritorious solely by the practitioner's financial solvency, and not its intrinsic value. The activities which people who have professions (in this sense of the word) demand to do are not just for their enjoyment or to alleviate boredom - theirs is anarchist work, which mankind must do because capitalism is murdering millions daily and for that reason alone has to be eradicated. Capitalists claim that we should let the unemployed die, for mankind has no future anyway and that there can be no social progress.

The Babel brought upon us by this inhuman force, the creator and annihilator of words, is its life blood. If the intangible remains nameless then it will not exist within our confounded language, and so will be unspoken, invisible, untouchable and perfectly armoured. Hence to name it would be to speak of it and to begin to understand that which cannot survive in our sight. We name it Mammon and expose it.

Mammon must defend itself. Its greatest strength is in knowing that human spirituality is the one force which would destroy it and so must be kept in perpetual twilight - capitalism ensures that anarchism and revolution do not pay and are therefore very difficult work for most people to do. Mammon's greatest weakness, and the reason why its own murder is inevitable, is in not understanding at all what the soul is, what it means to touch the numinous.

Then we must name the forces of Mammon which, like puppet strings, bind and violently repel us, keeping us as fractured tribes, strangers before our own people. This we name nationalism.

We are living in the time that history will remember as the dark ages. A time when good citizenship is taken to mean the willingness not to contribute, but to compete, to work only towards one's personal interest and gain; to show deference and obedience to the winners, the vanquishers. The ultimate winners are those who command deference even from those others who name themselves winners. But clearly, to hold such values is the antithesis of citizenship. And nowhere in these rules we dare not write down is there any reason why the thief and murderer should not serve self-interest at any cost to the other.

But what freedoms, choices and opportunities can there be for those who live within this artificial fortress we have constructed? When there is nothing to achieve or contribute, only competition and winning or losing, then the enterprise of the winner is negligible against the infrastructure within which such victory has been forged. For this game, this battlefield, has been created by the hundreds of generations before us and, of course, by the vanquished, the losers. The only achievement of the winners is to maintain this tyranny of our own making to create future winners and losers.

But our games are played and won with loaded dice. Those who do not win are bound and helpless at the start. We cannot even refuse to compete. And what is there to win but the right to throw our lives away, to beg for mindless labour? Capitalism would reduce free-will to a choice between unending toil and extermination. Those who think they have won, in so viewing their position in Creation, have nothing; Mammon feeds on such beliefs, leaving the winner with the greatest imaginable loss.

We believe that there are many different political systems in place in the world, other natures of nationalistic tyranny. We speak loosely of capitalism, socialism, communism, and think that there are fundamental differences in the ways that various countries maintain their existence. But what is capitalism if not the need to labour for money, while a ruling elite control the citizens by force? This is the only political system there has ever been in this world where no country can exist in isolation, and where each builds its armour of nationalism by creating, and maintaining or distorting, an abstracted economy.

So we will define capitalism as the building of economic fortresses, as nationalism, as inter-state economic competition. Thus to define communism will be to speak of a world without money, a world which must be all Earth, no less, for Mammon will not allow such a state to exist in isolated seclusion, surrounded by its totalitarian barbarism. It will be to recognise that there are no countries, and hence to never again speak of such arbitrary land areas nor of mindless allegiance to them. It will be our return to the allegorical Eden. Moreover, we will name this bridge we are building over genocide's canyon socialism. This will be the work and lives that are to take us to this great ending and beginning. It will be the name of our changing.

Out of all arrogance and presumptiveness, the worst is for one to demand obedience and deference from another. Communism will be lawless, for no one has the right to command others. At that time we will be united by anarchy. Each will have unreserved respect for every sentient mind, every being living, dead or unborn; human, animal or a future intelligence beyond imagining; terrestrial or other-worldly. For not only do we exploit and abuse that which is human, but also we exploit, abuse and even feed on, devour, all that is sentient, all that which knows. Never again will it be so; the revolution will facilitate the liberty of all. At such a time the anarchist will finally live by anarchy; today he must live by anarchism. Anarchy will be born of anarchism at the end of socialism's path toward our future.

Anarchism is the name of mankind's struggle against ignorance. Both science and the highest art have this ultimate aim, so they are both anarchist activities, but we also suffer in part from social ignorance, and fighting this is the third class of anarchist work. Social ignorance is ultimately blindness to our own spirituality, and it is our spirituality which fuels art and science, so clearly then our work must proceed in all three areas simultaneously if we are to achieve anarchy. But even in an anarchic Utopia, progress will not be finished, of course. We will still be living in a vast, unexplored, barely understood universe, only we will have then achieved a level of spiritual enlightenment - present in all individuals - which will allow us to finally pass the boundary between anarchism and anarchy. It will be like emerging from a global childhood.

It is preferable for anarchists to speak of the eradication of capitalism rather than its abolition. To use the word abolition would imply that mammon may be legislated against, when in reality it must be removed from our hearts, forever. When capitalism has been eradicated there will be no laws, not even those which promote freedom. (In fact, it is not even wholly correct to speak of the removal of capitalism, for capitalism's cause is not something solid and tangible, rather it is a great hole in our souls which must be filled with spiritual awareness and a sense of the numinous.)

Lastly, we must understand that which we call democracy. Through promulgated lies we believe unquestioningly that democracy, when taken to describe organised voting for government, is a man's highest freedom, that it creates a world of the people's choosing, of equality, that it is a levelling power. This is not so. Democracy must allow any action of the individual's own choosing. It is to assert and facilitate the right for each to achieve their full potential as human and spiritual beings. It is to never again vote for government, for no one has the right to govern another, even when claiming to be empowered to do so by the fiat of a majority consensus within a land area he chooses to name Country. Voting is enslaving and deference, and is not democracy. When capitalists speak of democracy and capitalism facilitating equality and freedom of opportunity for all, they speak solely of only one kind of opportunity - that to make money, and nothing else. In fact, all other freedom is denied unless, as a secondary consequence, it generates money.

We allow ourselves to believe that in Britain and other countries which we deem to be democracies, the laws we have 'chosen' to live under are equal for all individual citizens in each of those states. We consider this to be entirely just and condemn any alien state which we believe sets and upholds different laws for different groups of people within that state. But in fact we know of nowhere where this is not so, for we are all citizens of Earth and this is exactly the system nationalism necessarily creates for us all. And in any case, is it in fact just to homogeneously and oppressively attempt to regulate the behaviour and lives of so many people, all of whom are so very different from each other, having such widely varying aspirations and talents?

We are blind, silent, paralysed, numb and barely sentient. But we are here, and we look to see what this place is and what it is that we are. Is there a way to create our eyes and tongues and wings? I believe we know of a way; we must have the courage to take this path. And I believe that as I write, fewer than five hundred more years thus remain for humanity as it exists at present.

And so we point our radio telescopes toward the countless billions of stars, listening, waiting. But there is only silence, only the aching loneliness of being lost and alone in an unimaginably vast universe. It is for us to find what is beyond this darkness and to become something more than predators and prey in the primeval swamps and jungles. For, as long as there is no one here to be contacted, the sky will remain black, forever silent.

Exactly what is anarchism? Why is it important and what will we achieve through it?

The lower, most primitive parts of the mind are the cause of war, murder and capitalism. The higher regions are all we have with which to overcome these insentient urges - they comprise our only weapon against instincts which could eventually destroy us all completely. These highest echelons of our humanity are neglected in us all, and in some they lie totally unrecognised by that individual. Human culture must therefore embrace and exalt these facets of ourselves which point us to the full potential of sentience in the universe, for only such a culture can possibly ensure the survival of life on Earth. Such work - the gestalt sum of individuals' vocational professions - is called anarchism.

But all societies actively repress the use and development of these most highly evolved faculties of the mind, allowing the violent, unthinking, primitive parts to control us both as individuals and as a world society. Anarchism is the process by which we must reverse this trend if we are to have any future.

This concept of vocational professions - work towards both the spiritual revolution and the further development of Man - differing from labour for money, is very difficult to explain popularly because the great majority of us do not have such professions. Anarchists - the only people who do such work - comprise only a handful of members of the human race.

The people who are working towards the spiritual revolution are insultingly and vindictively accused of sloth and parasitism, when in fact the only true work is theirs. Such remarks and attitude come from those of no vision, aspiration or commitment to anyone other than themselves. They are the true unemployed. They are the ones who are lazy, the majority who are wholly reliant on a very few.

Facts must be demonstrable. We must find a way to articulate exactly why anarchism, art and science are important. Even if we give part of the answer - that these things are vital to our survival and progress - we must then give a reason as to why our survival should concern us, why progress has value and, indeed, define precisely what progress is. In any argument between anarchist and capitalist, the former will be able to deliver an unshakeable counter-argument against every attempt to justify the capitalist system, the ultimate such refutation being that capitalism will destroy mankind. This leaves the capitalist with one last riposte - final and desperate, yet still seemingly impossible to refute. He will ask why we should care for anyone else, why we should care what happens on Earth after our own deaths. To find a reply is truly difficult.

When anarchism is such a seemingly arcane philosophy - the remit of a small number of individuals, each isolated from the others - then can the basic tenets of anarchism be expected to be embraced by humanity as a whole? They will not be if these concepts are philosophically complex and difficult to understand on an intellectual level. But they are not! The precepts of anarchism rest on the spiritual base which I believe is present in all people. If not for the social forces - in actual fact, anti-social, pernicious forces - which blind us and bury our spirituality, the spirit of anarchism would pervade the world we live in. Capitalism, by its very nature, leads people away from the sight of their own spirituality - it actively prevents us from living spiritual lives. We are denied true education, and are forced to engage in activities (under pain of death) which are humiliating, degrading, damaging to our physical and mental health, and are a waste of the time we need in which to work. We dedicate our lives to waiting for our own ends: for five o'clock, for Friday, for retirement, for death. Under Mammon, ambition consists of but wishing our entire lives away. And the paths along which capitalism does send us could lead anywhere - to violence, war or total genocide. We have lost control over our own directions.

In defending itself, Mammon doesn't merely suppress the word anarchism, but understands the power of ridicule and reduces the meaning of the name to something which people will equate with no more than terrorism and rioting, and which for them will have no political meaning or ideology at all.

Thus the police seek to exculpate themselves from any responsibility for incidents of violence at public demonstrations or rallies by directing the blame for any such confrontations onto 'anarchists', immediately gaining public support through the years of the misappropriation of the word. National and global television and other media networks duly and authoritatively report and disseminate this unchallenged libel. Anarchism is thus continuously fighting such world-wide reactionary political misinformation, becoming reduced to no more than a purely pejorative and abusive term, whilst being denied virtually any media access at all in which to expound its actual aims and viewpoint.

Mankind's destiny may only be realised through anarchism, yet it is the one political creed which is completely censored and suppressed by all aspects of modern society, including the popular media and all children's state education.

Would the creation of an anarchist political party help to strike back against this misinformation and media neglect? It is difficult to see how anarchism's work could be placed in the party political arena. Anarchism transcends leftism and rightism, and if it were to be placed in the political spectrum, there could be nothing to the left of it, and to its right would only be ranged various degrees of watered down capitalism. In any case, its voice would be tiny and unheard. Perhaps the formation of an anarchist union is possible, however - a society bringing individuals together so that they do not feel so alone in their work.

We need to identify the areas in which fundamental social changes must be made. For example, the problem of unemployment may be addressed by attempting to spread work out among all citizens. But in a society so advanced that a concerted effort has been made to share out jobs in a fair way, money will have been abolished too. This would eradicate 99% of the jobs which exist at present. Conversely, many more vocational human activities will be created by this monumental advancement in our spirituality. Necessary labour would then be done as a form of voluntary national service and would not impinge to an intrusive degree on liberty and the time which people need to work at these professions. Such labour would be performed during natural breaks in a person's career, if such gaps happen to arise. Inevitably, some professions would allow for little such time, and so people would have to give as much as they were able to, even if this meant that some could only contribute very little. But under anarchy we would understand and allow for this.

The 'industrialised' countries, of which Britain is one, garner a disproportionate part of the world's wealth and possessively hold it close, prepared even to murder in order to defend it. For not only is war murder, but so is the world-wide economic competition which starves millions. Moreover, given the arbitrary nature of country boundaries, all war is therefore civil war, whether it be in the form of armed combat or interpersonal socio-economic competition; we are citizens of one planet.

It appears that this is how most of the employed want the world to be. It is how most of the unemployed want the world to be. To then have the temerity to complain of being victims of such a system, or to pity the poor they themselves have created, is hypocritical, arrogant and wholly self-centred. We speak of the concessions by which the unemployed are allowed to survive as being 'safety nets'. But why are we walking tightropes?

Countries do not exist - we have fabricated them from our bigotries. We have made them up. This is the most fundamental tenet of social organisation. Exploitative labour is maintained not by the ruling class, but by the exploited themselves. The exploited comprise the army, the one and only tool available to the rich and powerful with which to subjugate the majority, and to protect their own riches and power. The control of armed forces is ultimately the root of their power, the coercive mechanism which enables men to force their will onto others and to steal the common land. It was only because people who possessed this violent might took and divided the land long ago that exploitative labour ever came into being. People were spread so sparsely over the Earth that it was possible for anyone to find a plot of land, build their own home and grow their own food. If people had not been prevented from continuing to live so freely, trade and money could never have come into existence.

The existence of armed forces, therefore, is both a direct consequence of capitalism and a major prerequisite for its continuing survival. One cannot be without the other.

It is often said that prostitution is the world's oldest profession ('profession' is always misused in this common aphorism, of course - it is actually used here to mean exploitative labour). But this cannot be so, for military activity must be older still. Prostitution exists because of money - capitalism - which is forced upon us only by military means. Therefore there had to have been armies before there had been prostitution. The first exploited workers were soldiers.

The people of our world - the citizens of our global society, present and past - are lacking almost totally in pride, self-respect, dignity, a sense of the numinous and hope for our collective future. In place of these things fester violent hatred and nationalism, religion and superstition, and a fear of science, coupled with an inability to understand either it or the nature of its spirit. If we do not respect ourselves, then how may we ask for respect from others? We allow people to demand deference from us, and then meekly give it. This is my life - nobody has a right to tell me what to do, and I have no right to do likewise to anyone else - others' lives are their own. Only when we have first accepted this fundamental truth can we possibly accept responsibility for working towards mankind's future.

How can the exploited complain of their lot if they are not anarchists? About whom do they complain if not themselves? If they want capitalism, then they want to compete to stay alive, they want the ever present threat of redundancy, they want to be at constant risk of losing the game of Mammon. However, perhaps they do have this right of resentment if they have been enslaved and repressed, for a lifetime or for generations, and have had their intellectual and spiritual development stunted to such a degree that they don't even know what their basic human rights are. So many times I have tried to speak of rights and pride to such timid, obedient people as these, and have always found it frustratingly difficult to do when they so easily take deep offence at such frightening ideas.

Thus people who are trying to instigate anarchy are not trying to tell others what to do - they simply wish to ensure that individuals are fully capable of both making and exercising choices in their lives. A social system which allows this is by definition named Anarchy.

We allow God's land to be carved up and owned by a few and call the land - our land - property. Almost the whole world is chartered in this way, and we offer no opposition to this theft of our common heritage. Indeed, the popular use of the word heritage has been vulgarised to imply the ownership of the world by a few. Yet the ownership of the one thing which is above anything else the personal property of the individual - our very lives and minds and will - we unquestioningly throw away. We have damaged ourselves so badly that we cannot see that no one has the right to tell another what to do, to give orders, to starve, to murder, to imprison. We even surrender time. Our lives are so short, like the blinking of an eye compared to the cosmic time-scale, and still we speak of this time, this handful of years, as if it were not our own. We sell it to our masters so that we may live, and regard these contracts as just and fair. The 'theft of time' from these exploiters - shirking, impunctuality, sick leave - are condemned as anti-social, and we even speak of 'spare time', when we are not being abused and enslaved. But this time is ours! It is our lives! Must we be so helpless and obsequious? A day is such a precious thing, yet we let them all slip by, unused, one after the other until we die.

If people are not anarchists, then it is only they who must justify their reactionary stance. Yet although non-anarchists have vastly more opportunity than anarchists to expound their views, I have never heard anyone attempt to do so using a logically consistent argument. Not only do capitalists not understand anarchism, but it appears that they do not understand capitalism. Its proponents cannot justify it. There can be no subjective argument about right or wrong - if the mental handicap responsible for capitalism is responsible for the daily murder of millions, then it is wrong and must be cured or eradicated. It is not possible for there to be a logistically consistent counter-argument to this, and it is a waste of time to listen to anyone attempting to expound one. Anarchists need not justify that which is, by definition, the only way to facilitate mankind's survival and progress. Choosing and supporting capitalism entails wanting to live in poverty or under the constant threat of redundancy and poverty equally as much as wanting to live in wealth and luxury, for it is not possible for capitalism to exist without all these things. It also entails wishing such restriction and injustice on all other people. Capitalism's apologists claim that such a system facilitates the individual's freedom and choice. It does no such thing, because the free would not choose servitude. Under capitalism, social responsibility consists of being compliant, deferential and obedient, and merely deepening the age-old furrows worn by the machine of the system we live by. This social responsibility includes no form of contribution to society other than interpersonal and international economic competition - ultimately, to the death.

In places of exploitative labour (and, indeed, outside of such environments) so many people are quite prepared and willing to show deference to those who tell them what to do. No man has a right to give orders to another under such circumstances - that is, under the blackmail and violent coercion of capitalism - and conversely, for humanity's sake, no one has the right to give in to such false authority and offer such abject deference to others.

Governments aim to combat insurrection by exploiting this human weakness and seeking to create a strong and pervasive sense of hierarchy in society. In the workplace, if individuals are forced to compete within an infrastructure of fluid, meritocratic pay scales, then this will serve to destroy any sense of solidarity between those fellow workers, for everyone will then be at everyone else's throat - there will be no coherent 'mass' of employees, strong in their number. Also, by creating a culture where everyone is considered a 'consumer' or 'provider', governments ensure the fragmentation of industrial organisations, again stifling any possible spirit of solidarity.

So many accept and never question a great divide between 'manager' and 'worker'. Yet managers - secretaries and supervisors - serve no purpose other than to assist workers by organising their work for them. They have no other possible use, and if they do not perform competently then the workers must replace them with others. It is possible for entire companies - banks and suchlike, for example - to comprise no workers, in which case that whole organisation exists for no reason other than to serve and assist those who do work.

All the media perpetuate the capitalist ethos of home-owning, that is, the belief that a home is an investment and not a place to live. Anyone who regards their house as a monetary gamble and not a dwelling place must be prepared for the value of their investment to decrease as well as to increase. People who simply want a roof over their heads obviously desire low house prices, whereas capitalists speak of such a housing market as being 'depressed', and wish for prices to increase, which they then regard as being a 'recovery' of this market. People who choose to attempt to scale such a property ladder forfeit all rights of complaint against any loss or state of poverty they themselves suffer at Mammon's hand.

Consider also all the many exploited people who think nothing of calling others, whom they see as being in some sense 'above' them, Sir, Doctor or Mister, whilst they themselves accept being addressed by these people by their surnames or, more patronisingly still, their christian names. Those who demand deference must be prepared and willing to be themselves deferential to those who, under the system which they choose to embrace, are their masters. The implication is that there is yet another ladder to climb, and those at the bottom, if they take any opportunities to climb up, will treat their 'inferiors' - the very group of people of which they themselves were once members - in the same supercilious manner. Again, people who choose to play on this ladder forfeit their right of complaint against redundancy and any personality clashes in their place of exploitative labour which upset them, for the rules they choose to play by are of their own making. Ultimately all the players are on their knees throughout their lives, and their desire to demand and give deference is born of a gaping spiritual vacuum in their hearts which denies their own basic rights, indeed, suppresses knowledge of what those rights are, and veils and clouds all perception of the potential of what it means to be human. People seem determined to achieve absolutely nothing. It is a triumph of the human spirit, a magnificent achievement, that we have progressed even as far as we have, despite these seemingly insurmountable obstacles and this repression of the soul.

The second most profound act of this government's current residence in office has been the declaration that 'there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families'. The most profound political act of this period has been for the electorate to then re-elect the party at the following general election (albeit after a cosmetic change of leadership - which I believe to have been precipitated by the immediate realisation by the government that this outrageous statement was politically grossly inexpedient, and urgently needed to be disowned and expunged from the people's collective memory). And now these same overlords have the hypocrisy to tell us that it is unacceptable for there to exist a social underclass of people who do not share the same values and aspirations as everybody else.

If the people who appoint themselves as our rulers claim that society does not exist, then what do they believe it is that they have dominion over? Nationalised industries - both manufacturing and service - and administrative bodies are steadily and systematically being privatised and the people are told that it is not the job of governments to organise such work. We are to believe that transport is not the government's concern - although the railways and roads have been and are still being built solely with public money. Nor do they wish to administer the distribution of gas, electricity or water. Such a philosophy, such a complete abrogation of their administrative responsibilities, is quite consistent with the belief that there is no such thing as society. So what is it then that has made the government contrive, organise, publicise and sanction the official national dream that is The Lottery? Why do they wash their hands of all the vitally important work which a government is elected to perform, while setting up and overseeing something which they claim has no importance other than being 'a bit of fun'.

The purpose of the lottery is to create, through an insidious, Machiavellian inculcation, a culture in which capitalism is customary and unquestionable, appearing to us to be as natural as the sky and trees. For the players are taught to be concerned only with a quest for their own luxury, just as it is in the capitalist world of exploitative labour and interpersonal economic competition.

This culture the lottery is aimed at creating is also one in which charity is not questioned. We are each expected to fight each other in serving our own, individual self-interests, and any pennies we have left over may then be thrown to charities. If we were to believe the truth, that important things such as feeding, housing and educating the citizens of the world should be funded and supported as a matter of principle, and not through charities and lotteries, then this would be a monumental step towards destroying capitalism. And Mammon is aware of this.

It is in capitalism's survival interest that people believe that there is no such thing as society, and creating a handful of millionaires will help to inculcate such a belief in us. If we aspire to win the lottery above all else, then there will be no room within our hearts for anarchist, revolutionary aspirations.

Mammon is prepared to make some of us millionaires in order for us all to believe the lie of Conservatism. In order to survive, Conservatism must take away all hope and aspiration from the people, except the hope of economic victory and victories of influence, power and command over our fellow citizens, and - apparently - the aspiration to win enough money to be able to avoid the need to do exploitative labour for the rest of one's life. The instigation of the lottery has acted to erode our sense of citizenship, for it has created a culture which actively elicits an expression of desperation, disenchantment and disenfranchisement from society from the vast majority of the populace.

When it is possible to compel people to do such labour, then it is easy to demand that they believe that those who do not do so shirk their social responsibilities and are a drain and burden on our common wealth, our public funds. So many show such blind diligence to their toils and deferential loyalty to their masters, who in turn are subjugated by the master of Mammon. Yet to them winning the national lottery is something to aspire to, a dream to hold and cherish and call a reason for living, so that they may cease labour and join the shirkers (those very people whom they had previously accused of not contributing through any work or labour toward a common good), for their million pounds would be paid directly from our shared national wealth, being in fact a far greater drain on that wealth than a man's unemployment benefit, even if it were paid to him for a lifetime.

Everywhere we turn we hear people saying what they would do if they won the lottery jackpot, how they would ostentatiously resign from their place of labour in an outburst of anger and relief. Yet, while they are still compelled to be exploited, they accept their lot without complaint or any concept of anarchism, denouncing 'scroungers and idlers' and speaking of how the wheels of society must be kept in motion through exploitative labour.

Capitalism demands only one form of contribution to society from its citizens - obedience, compliance and deference. Never does it expect the individual to actually want to do his or her tasks for any reason other than financial gain. This is why workers are subjected to pay scales and supervision, threats of redundancy and financial catastrophes if the earning of money ceases for but a week. If people are constantly being taught, forcefully, that the exploitative labour they are doing serves no purpose other than to make money, then it is hypocritical to expect them to have any intrinsic interest at all in that activity. The government's every public pronouncement is carefully designed to further instil in us such ways of thinking - unemployment benefit assessment explicitly demands that labour serves no other purpose than to make money for the labourer - and even the media, controlled by capitalism, also try to force us to believe these things. We live under the yoke of an insidious despotism. Thus the individual struggles against appalling odds to search for any truth at all.

As well as using the media and the law to control people's thoughts, to mould their ethics and aspirations, the government takes much away from us through censorship. Any society which uses censorship to control what its citizens hear, see or read, claiming that depravity and corruption are the products of social forces, in so doing admits that war (the greatest mass depravity and corruption) and crime are caused by society. Yet the only measures taken to combat these things are aimed solely at civilian criminality, and are merely punitive - deterrents against individual offenders. Punishment is always nothing more than anger, loss of temper and hatred. Those who wish to rule cannot admit this, because they themselves use violent moral crime in order to maintain their own power.

Censorship is but one example of the hypocrisy of capitalism's proponents who claim that their creed is a natural, self-regulating social system by which all of its members and their activities reach their own meritocratic level. For Mammon would destroy itself if it were not tempered by censorship, or the control of drugs and arms, or the regulation of privatised industries to ensure that they do not make too much money, or the provision of state benefits to those whom it has made losers, or the regulation of monopolies and mergers, or the state funding of science and the arts. Capitalism does always fail.

Anarchy will need no such tempering.

Capitalism expects so little from people. It assumes that we will only care for anyone other than ourselves, except maybe our families or close friends, if those others are 'customers'. Anarchism, however, recognises that people have so much more than this to give and to contribute, and because they want to do so. Without spiritual desire there would be nothing driving our work, no fire, no reason, and the whole of humanity would be volatilely simmering with discontent.

Many people who demand deference from those whom they see as being ranked below them in their place of labour (or even, in a general sense, socially) hypocritically claim that people who do not labour are not contributing to society. It is only possible to make such a contribution if one regards all others as being equal citizens. Those who demand deference are in opposition to anarchism and so cannot possibly contribute to society nor believe that such a thing is even possible except through capitalism's serving of 'customers'.

If this psychological subterfuge succeeds, if we are ever truly left with nothing to hope for or aspire to other than personal, selfish, cynical escape from the mindless labour, the fight for survival which we ourselves have created, then we will be left with nothing at all. Mankind will then have no future, because hope, the strongest political force there is, will have been lost for ever.

One of the major forces sustaining capitalism is school education. In every school the content of the syllabuses of sociological subjects such as history, literature and geography is selected to reinforce the attitudes within people which enable Mammon to survive.

For example, history - the story of humanity - is taught as a series of wars and conquests, kings and queens, shifts of theocratic power and the spread and dissolution of empires. The child is presented with a picture of human progress in which social change is effected by no means other than bloodshed, nationalistic expansionism, greed, hatred and power. And these lessons are, sadly, learned. When football hooligans riot abroad, attacking the fans of the opposing team, they are simply reacting to their lifelong conditioning to believe that their country is superior to all others, and that this is to be proved by military might if necessary, as it has been throughout the centuries. Under capitalism, people are expected to compete against one another - for pride, economic gain, and even for mere survival - as individuals and as nation states. It is grossly hypocritical for capitalists to condemn racist violence when such behaviour is logistically consistent with this capitalist ethos. Such jingoistic, violent inculcation is not questioned, because these people have known nothing else. There are actually people who believe that to wipe out entire cities through bombing, if done during wartime and authorised by generals, is not murder!

But there are in history tremendous milestones in scientific and artistic achievements, great men and women have brought the wealthy and powerful to their knees with their words alone. Yet all these works - our true history - are ignored, children's knowledge of them suppressed by those who presume to teach.

The whole of education is structured as a violent, reactionary force which, instead of giving inspiration, instilling wonderment, enlightening the child, nourishing and freeing his or her spirit, serves only to teach that might and fear control us, that authority is not to be questioned. Moreover, aside from the actual content of lessons, schools operate in an atmosphere of fear, hatred and violence which inculcate obedience and deference - capitalist values - into the pupils. And if schools did serve to inspire children, in the world as it is today they would only grow up to leave and step into a world that immediately thwarts their aspirations and denies them the right to pursue their chosen professional paths. It is almost as if it is preferable - kinder - for children to leave school with nothing in their souls, and so have nothing which can be denied them.

Even in the case of higher education, its recent dilution was planned to suppress aspiration in people by reducing education to the level of a commodity, and therefore making it appear valueless. In this way it is possible to ingrain in society the concept of education as being of no purpose other than to facilitate for consumers of education greater financial earning ability. If the uneducated, who do not know what uneducated means, are given degrees, they will think they are then educated and so will never express any resentment of their lot. In a sense, it is true to say that higher education has been abolished, having been seen as being politically dangerous.

Ultimately, education under capitalism serves to erase freedom in the individual, both the freedom of wanting - of knowledge of oneself and of the potential of humanity - and freedom of opportunity, that is, being able to do the things one wishes. True education allows one not only to choose from a range of possibilities presented to one, but also to know what that range of possibilities really is. If one does not have these two types of freedom then what is the point in being alive? What is the point of amassing life experience if one does not use it?

For those of us living in Britain, the culture of these islands is the only one we are daily able to experience directly. Our social viewpoints tend to centre around life in our immediate community The difficulty in speaking of poverty, exploitation and the suppression of rights lies in the fact that nationalism dictates that different groups of people are subject to different laws, degree and range of opportunity, and geographical circumstances. The citizens of Western Europe have a voice which is less fettered by cultural, that is, militaristic and educational, forces than almost anywhere else in the world. We must speak out for anarchism - question everything, everyday - for we are the ones most able to. We have been graced with this tremendous responsibility.

Human progress is hampered by a very serious and unrecognised misuse of words. Due to a pervasive popular ignorance of the purpose, even the existence, of many spheres of human activity, it is difficult for us to unambiguously name many of the important things we must do, or the aspects of our society which we must try to excise or change.

There are not enough words for us to use, and therefore many of those which we have are often misused or inadequately delineated. Consequently, and perniciously, these words are used by the popular media, thereby culturally ingraining them, perhaps irrevocably. Our language is becoming impotent.

I have therefore defined the words which it is most important we do not misuse, so that we may be enabled to speak of, write of and contemplate the whole range of human endeavour.

Because so many have used language for so long whilst ignorant of faculties of our humanity which need to be named, it may appear that some of the words that have been assigned to meanings have been almost arbitrarily chosen. Others are synonymous with each other. However, up to now these words have had no meanings at all, and so this creates no semantic problems.

1. Amateur
To help facilitate freedom, some essential labour needs to be done on a basis similar to a form of voluntary national service (eg the provision of fuel, food and transport etc). Traditionally, human activity has been termed either professional or amateur to specify whether or not it provides the worker with sufficient income to live on (although professional is also sometimes used only to describe work which is supposedly of a 'higher' status than that of those who are deemed to comprise the proletariat). But it is a false criterion for payment and funding to define the value of a person's work, so I shall name such auxiliary, supporting artisan activity amateur labour.

2. Anarchy/Anarchism
Anarchy is the first social system mankind will achieve through progress - through people's citizenship and professional work - which will be free of money, deference, armed compulsion, nationalism, material and spiritual poverty and which will exist to guarantee the freedom of every individual.

Anarchism is the name of the work we must do to reach this goal.

The meaning of anarchism has been twisted by all the mass media, and likewise the word has been misappropriated too by many who actually call themselves anarchists, but are in fact anything but. Such people do not feel the fundamental human spiritual need in their hearts for science, and, indeed, actively rally against it, envisioning instead a Utopia where technology (which they perceive as being science) barely exists, and only through superstition do we attempt to understand the natural world - a world where we are totally helpless to shine light into the feared, unknown darkness. They would have humanity raze at once thousands upon thousands of years of progress, and thus live through everything - all the millennia of pain and sorrow - again.

3. Capitalism
Any social system which forces economic competition for survival between individuals or nation states. Therefore, every social system there has ever been on Earth has been a capitalist one.

4. Career
The period of professional work in an individual's life.

5. Citizenship
Having an understanding of and a commitment to professional work. This involves having a sense of responsibility for the well-being of all present members of society, and of all people as yet unborn, who will exist in the future which the citizen is working towards, the society which we are building today.

Citizenship also entails a great sense of responsibility to those who have lived before us. For it was only the belief that their work would be continued or built upon after their deaths which gave their lives meaning. Similarly, our own collective future is all which gives our own individual lives meaning.

6. Communism/Socialism
I will define communism and socialism as being synonymous with anarchy and anarchism respectively.

7. Democracy
A social system which facilitates complete individual autonomy and freedom. Under democracy, provision is made for a full education for each person in accordance with their innate abilities and special needs. Essentially, anarchy.

8. Earn
To procure money by doing exploitative labour. That is, to 'earn a living'. The word is used by capitalists only, for it implies that if life is to be earned, then some people do not deserve to live.

9. Education
The passing on of inspiration from one person to another. This is done through nurture, academe or other interaction with another's work, or through normal social contact with people. Such inspiration serves to facilitate the individual's ability to choose a profession, to realise as fully as possible their own innate potential, as do the teaching and learning processes - the assimilation of skills and knowledge - involved in the four forms of education outlined above.

10. Employment
Employment is having funding for one's work. Those who finance their work through doing exploitative labour are unemployed, as are those exploited labourers with no desire for a profession.

Rarely is there ever any attempt to discuss or define employment or the nature of the intrinsic value of work, beyond that of the financial income it provides the worker with.

We may only have truly full employment if the concept of a profession, that is, vocational work which is of benefit to mankind, is accepted and the right of each individual to do such work, if he or she has found it, is guaranteed. Exploitative employment of an arbitrary nature, for no reason other than to make money, is a form of unemployment if it prevents people having the time to make a philanthropic contribution to society, causing them only to suffer psychological problems and damage to their mental and physical health. True employment may only exist if it is work of the individual's exact choosing - it may not be assigned, for it would then be merely servitude.

It should be stressed, also, that the sense in which an anarchist may be unemployed differs fundamentally from that of a non-anarchist's unemployment, for the latter has nothing in his or her heart to be prevented from doing in the first place.

11. Freedom
Freedom is not only the full and unlimited opportunity to perform professional work, but having the nurture and education to facilitate a true understanding of the concept of a profession, and having a passion for doing such work.

12. Hobby
The playing of games or pursuit of leisure activities by the oppressed who, because they do not understand the concept of a profession, do not know they are not free.

13. Job
A job is professional endeavour under capitalism, that is, funded by a government or other organisation (eg. an audience), ostensibly because that body appreciates the cultural importance of such work. Professionals who are not able to obtain funding are forced to partake of exploitative labour in order to finance their work. A job need not allow the anarchist more than a materially ascetic existence, as long as he or she is able to work full time. That is, one needs to receive sufficient funding to live on and to fully cover the cost of the materials needed for one's work. This funding is not paid in exchange for work, but simply to allow that work to be done.

14. Labour and Exploitative Labour
Labour is artisan activity, either physical or mental, which may or may not be of practical use to society. Labour is creative - exploitative labour need not be - and is done of the individual's own volition (eg. mowing the lawn, building a garden shed etc). Exploitative labour can exist only under capitalism and serves no purpose other than to procure money needed for survival.

Exploitative labour may be subdivided into two classes by level of income. Firstly, there is exploitative labour which allows one person and his or her immediate family to live. The second class is that which provides only enough money to supplement another family member's income. In this case, all members of that group who do exploitative labour belong to this second class, because any one of their individual incomes alone does not support the family, and so they may all be said to be unemployed. A single individual cannot survive by doing the second class of exploitative labour which I will name supplementary exploitative labour.

15. Leisure
A term which can exist only under capitalism, and is used only by those who cannot understand the concept of a profession, referring to those periods of an individual's life which are not spent performing exploitative labour. The free cannot be said to have leisure time because they devote the whole of their lives to their work, that is, they do not have set hours in which to work, because they are always free to at least think and plan their activities whenever they choose to do so, and those activities which are regarded as leisure activities - travel, the playing of games, social interaction etc - are an intrinsic part of that life and work.

16. Profession
A profession is anarchist activity. Such work need not only be within the spheres of art and science, but may involve the promulgation and popularisation of art, science and anarchism.

Those who claim that unpaid work cannot be a profession are logically implying that all human activity is arbitrary and valueless, for any paid work would then completely lose its intrinsic value if it suddenly ceased to provide money for the person doing it.

17. Progress
As well as being simply mankind's continued survival, progress is our development on three levels - scientific/technological, social and spiritual. These three are inextricably bound together - we cannot progress in fewer then all these areas simultaneously.

18. Service
Service is the benefit gained by society's members from their own or other's amateur labour.

19. Slavery
Slavery is the coercion of man to perform exploitative labour. Compulsion is effected by the threat of punishment - either imprisonment or murder (as in the case of 'bought' and 'owned' men and women, receiving no wages, or people living in states where exploitative labour is explicitly compulsory) - or the threat of unemployment and homelessness (as under free market capitalism).

Some slaves are anarchists - people who have unfunded professional work, and who know that they are oppressed. Others, having no such work, have nothing to live for nor, therefore, to lose, and so are unaware of their own unjust servitude.

20. Society
A collective of free individuals, co-operating to effect both their immediate well-being and to build and safeguard the future of that group. Ultimately, there is but one universal society, fractured in time and interstellar space. Before understanding, there is always not understanding, and so not all individuals are aware of their positions and responsibilities. That is, they are unable to have citizenship, but still are, of course, equal and valued members of society.

21. Vocation
An individual's choice of profession. A vocation may be embraced by a person even before he or she actually begins the work. One's vocation may be investigated and, if it turns out that such work cannot be done for whatever reason, changed if it is so wished.

22. Work
The results of professional endeavour. Such work, then, can only be produced sporadically, although a free person may spend the whole of his or her life working.

From these definitions we must conclude that a non-anarchist cannot have a profession, career, job or vocation, do work or be an artist, a scientist, a citizen, educated, employed or free.

When, through anarchism's work, we accomplish four specific tasks, then we will have reached anarchy.

No human will ever see the end of art and science; if there is any such thing as ultimate knowledge - if such a concept even has meaning - humanity cannot witness it. So these four monumental projects must be undertaken concurrently with art and science, and are intended to be of finite duration. Only when all four of these tasks have been completed can we believe that we have crossed the bridge of the spiritual revolution.

Firstly, we must eradicate nationalism. There are no countries - all such boundaries drawn on the land or across the oceans are arbitrary and imagined. Their notional existence acts to prevent people from considering the consequences of capitalism on mankind as a whole. The people who are most able to do anarchist work are those living in wealthy countries. Yet they are made to see only the effects of capitalism on their own countrymen; they witness no one actually starving to death, and so do not acknowledge the full horror of Mammon. They are made to regard the plight of people in other, poorer countries as not being their problem. When we see that national allegiances are futile and meaningless we will cease to need - or desire a need for - money and religion, both of course being inherently nationalistic, with religion especially existing to perpetuate fervent devotion and loyalty to one's nation state. Exploitative labour will be seen as being not only unpleasant, but also a waste of the time we need in which to work. However, there would be no paradox in then viewing necessary labour as a pleasure and privilege. Such tasks would be performed as a form of voluntary national service. Only a small part of people's lives need be set aside for these duties, for the amount of such activity would be but a small fraction of exploitative labour being performed today.

Moreover, our new spiritual strength - which we first need in order to create such a world - would reduce religion to the original stories, allegories and metaphors from which it has grown. In fact, it would be more appropriate to consider religion as being raised to such a level, free from the distortions and apocrypha of millennia of theocratic abuse.

Our second task concerns human attitudes to the sentience of animals, that is, species other than ourselves. We do not have the right to abuse, hunt, murder and eat any other conscious being, any entity which is aware of existing, anyone who may know fear. All such beings are people and are a part of the evolution of mind on our planet.

Moreover, as the leading technological and cultural intelligence of this world, Man has a duty to safeguard the lives and rights of these individual people. Of course, to defend ourselves and our activities, we must, to a degree, restrict the land access of animals. We must find them homes where they may live free and natural lives, thereby defending them and their activities.

The traditional human disrespect of non-human people has been born of and maintained by the belief that non-humans are not sentient beings, that they do not have 'souls'. For so long we have never questioned the view that 'animals' cannot know, that there can only have been but one sentient race created on God's Earth.

Thirdly, we must find a way to articulate the reason why art and science are important. At present we can only talk of this metaphysically, but we also need to find a popularly tangible expression of this purpose if true science and the highest art are not to be forever seen as arcane and irrelevant. Clearly, this has to be an immediate aim, but we must be aware that it may be that no dialectic solution to this problem is possible at this present time. Science and art are ultimately no less than the search for truth, an attempt to understand Creation, to 'progress' both intellectually and spiritually. But in stating this premise, we are immediately led to other, more fundamental questions - what is the importance of truth, understanding and progress? If the reason for our human passion for reaching ever upwards, forever growing, knowing and simply being is no more than a feeling, then what is the point of feeling? What is this thing we call the 'heart'? We are looking to language to articulate the answers we seek, never imagining that the language we need may be beyond human conception or understanding.

Lastly, we must accept the inescapable truth that our scientific knowledge is forever growing and that in time we will have the capacity to genetically engineer, that is, choose, the mental characteristics of the next generation. This is inevitable and we must not hide from the fact that soon, perhaps within two hundred years, there will be people making such choices for their children. It would be futile to argue about whether we should allow such genetic engineering - as soon as we have the necessary scientific knowledge, it will be used. All we can hope to do, and we must begin to prepare ourselves for this now, is to ensure that this new power is used in the wisest possible way. There are many different categories and aspects of innate mental character, intelligence and ability. We must, for the sake of our very survival, ensure that the best choices for our future people are made, that we take the right road.

Why should we presume that humanity is the ultimate state that life on Earth can reach? Evolution has brought us this far, but it is only a mechanism by which matter attains consciousness - there is no reason why evolution through thousands and millions of years of natural selection should be the only way in which we may change ourselves. Now that we have science, other avenues are open to us, other ways of drawing the future ever closer to us. We are not ultimate beings, but warlike, paranoid, superstitious, barely intelligent creatures, still blinking in wonder and shock in the first light of sentience's dawn. We can be more than that.

Mankind's Grail is the spirituality gene - the rudimentary nature of which is the reason why so many are not genetically capable of understanding anarchism. When we find this Holy Word, amplify it and instil it in all, then we will be in anarchy. This is how we are to change the mind.

Spirituality is of the mind - let us consider that it is not a function of mind, but rather that the mind is the physical catalyst through which spirituality pours. For indeed, anarchism is spiritual work, beautifully, breathtakingly illustrated by the fact that anarchists today have no hope of ever seeing what it is that they are building, what they are trying to achieve. It is work towards our future, a future which I believe is nevertheless very nearly upon us.

We could deviate from this road; we could take a wrong turning and find ourselves unable to retrace our steps. For example, it is quite possible that the rich - almost exclusively those with high capitalist acumen - will be the first to choose hardwired personality traits for their offspring if the understanding of the new discoveries is not disclosed to all mankind, but maintained as a confidential, esoteric trade secret, licensed and therefore available only as a commodity to those who can afford to pay for it. They will create them as single-minded business people and within only a few generations the balance of individuals will move towards soulless money-makers (even more so than now). The artist and scientist will become both even more in the minority and even more repressed in their work.

It is therefore important that the knowledge of how it is possible to change the mind is made public at its very inception, for otherwise Mammon will use it for its own ends and perhaps become totally invincible.

In fact, as the number of hysterically committed capitalists grows, with an ever increasing number therefore finding themselves unable to fulfil their lives' hardwired purpose, they will turn upon one another in their hatred and frustration, destroying themselves and Mammon from within, but taking the whole Earth with them also.

So, of these four imperative tasks which I have identified above, the last would seem to be the most vital, the most fundamental. For a genetically facilitated spiritual revolution would in itself resolve the other three problems - all individuals would 'see' that which at present we can only try to promulgate.

Yet without anarchist work in the first three areas we may never recognise the problems that the discovery of the spirituality gene would bring.

And we would ride blindly headlong into our Armageddon.

Science is one facet of mankind's struggle against ignorance. It is the name we give to our examination of the nature of the universe through observational, experimental or theoretical research, the results of which are then used to amend, expand or refute existing theories and to postulate original ones. Research must also inevitably invite and foster speculation and create many more new questions than answers, for otherwise science will end. Such work is to be published and it must reach all the people, for science belongs to all mankind, not only to those who do the work. So often science is spoken of as something other people do, an arcane and esoteric pursuit divorced from real life. Popular science publications should not speak of the work as being done by 'scientists', reinforcing the apparent gulf between science and most people's lives, but by 'us' - mankind. It is important to educate people - reaching through to the heart of our closeted spirituality, which we all possess, however deeply hidden or damaged - not to value science only in terms of its occasional practical, everyday benefits, that is, not to confuse science and technology without truly understanding either. One who does science also has further responsibilities. He or she must speak out for all Truth, making their voice heard in popularising and increasing the public understanding of science, both in the knowledge of the physical world which science has given us, and in its spirit. The term scientist is only applicable to those who recognise and take upon themselves these responsibilities and duties.

A scientist must speak out against all manifestations of ignorance, namely religion and superstition, money, nationalism, the suppression of the freedom of the individual and the suppression of knowledge and truth. But as well as having the duty to publicly refute and condemn those things, a scientist must also speak of the numinous fire that drives science. The purpose of science is simply to keep this fire burning - its reason is not pragmatic but metaphysical. One of the highest problems we face is to articulate this seemingly intangible meaning and purpose in our wanting to know what and where we are, have been and will be.

Truth is also the goal of the highest art. Science and art have much common ground, as if the two were convergent on the same point from opposite directions. Scientists and artists are colleagues and their respective work must, to a great extent, mutually draw on and be inspired by the other. Someone who is not an anarchist cannot be an artist or a scientist. At best, a non-anarchist who does science can only be a scientific artisan.

Human progress is dependent on a culture of freedom in science and the arts. Under capitalism - the need for money to pay for one's own life - this necessitates adequate funding as well as freedom from censorship, which exists today in both disciplines. The scientist and artist have a responsibility, an imperative moral duty, to help facilitate this freedom both by speaking of their work and its geist - its place in human spirituality - and directly, through the work itself. Again, we face the impasse of requiring Mammon to provide funding for that which would destroy it.

It is the acceptance of all these responsibilities which makes a person a scientist - not just the undertaking of scientific research, or the receipt of a living wage for performing such work, or employment by a university (the number of lecturing posts is finite, so not all scientists could do this anyway).

Neither is science simply the solving of problems in engineering, or work undertaken to accomplish a specific goal. Science's only goal is to understand how the universe works.

Science has no need to seek self-justification within a religious idiom. It is born of Man's spirituality and is an attempt to face the questions being alive raises. Conversely, it is religion which is constantly having to adapt the interpretations of its ambiguities, absurdities and contradictions to fit scientific knowledge. Religion's answers have no meaning for they obliterate their own questions - without definitions, words, such as God, are no more than sounds. If we say that God is omnipresent, that is, everything, then clearly we are God.

This is the most basic precept of all art, science and theology - that we are each God in human incarnation; our consciousness that of God itself, though fettered by the constraints imposed by human neural limitation. God is everything - how could our sentience be anything else?

The consciousness of individuals is the glimmer which can be seen through barely substantial holes in a vast shroud covering a whole, great light. If the holes expand, growing and merging, eventually there will be no shroud, only light.

Imagine an institution founded for and dedicated to the accumulation of our knowledge of the natural world. In this place, people with a passionate involvement in science come together in order to learn of and explore Creation. Within this academic community there exists the opportunity for the unlimited and free exchange of ideas and opinions and for the unrestricted publication of the results of one's work. Here people are able to meet and collaborate in such study and research. Across the world, there exists a profusion of such places of learning, and they are all in constant discourse with each other, pooling the individual work and resources, collaborating on this greater, corporative level.

These communities comprise, in part, young people studying one or more disciplines which they have chosen out of a passionate interest in those fields. Such a studentship is a professional commitment, because membership of these academic communities serves partly to allow the student to choose the work he or she is to do in later life, and so is an intrinsic part of that person's professional life.

Society recognises the vital importance of education and scientific research and ensures the provision of adequate funding (if money exists in that society) and facilitates the entry of all people who choose to pursue and can demonstrate an aptitude for these courses into these institutions.

There are a myriad disciplines from which we can learn about the universe, our place in it, and our own humanity. All of these are incorporated into these seats of learning and research - a universal amalgam of sources of knowledge. Such establishments may be named universities.

Imagine such places.

But we are living in the Dark Ages, in times when the university system has been established ecclesiastically, as a collection of centres of theological learning, evolving over the centuries to have the sole purpose of increasing exports and bolstering national economies. Higher education - indeed, education at all levels - is intended to serve industry. There are so few voices to speak out against such an attitude, for most - nearly all - students themselves regard their own attendance at university as serving no purpose other than to empower them to receive higher salaries in employment. Attendance at university is seen as a 'prize'. The spirit of scientific enquiry, its beauty and romance, is not present in this world's citizens, for all of whose benefit universities should exist.

There is a great resentment among many people who are not able to attend university, born of their inability to understand what universities' purpose is. They see them as places of privilege where people spend three or four leisurely years, leaving with the promise of easily obtainable, highly paid jobs. And all this unjust privilege is funded by those who are excluded from it. Who can blame people for regarding higher education in this way when so many students and graduates themselves do, except that, in place of resentment, they have only bigoted attempts at justification of their studentships? Society is bedevilled by a pervasive misapprehension of education's true purpose.

So many students are doing nothing more than preparing themselves for perusal and selection by prospective employers. There are no goals in their hearts other than the making of money. And in nearly all of these 'jobs' - I would suggest as much as 99% - which are traditionally regarded as being of degree-level entry, the graduate is severely underemployed against the criteria which ought to be met by professional work. I believe that we must regard the underemployment of any individual as unemployment.

The highest reason why universities exist is because art and science are important. Certainly, the highest human activity involves exploring and understanding the natural and metaphysical world - and this is exactly the domain of art and science. Universities are places where such work is done, places where human truth is gleaned.

Within what disciplines should university work, that is, teaching and research, lie? Plainly, our understanding of the structure of the universe will be drawn directly from the natural sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology, which embrace numerous subsidiary subjects. All other mathematical sciences - not only pure mathematics, but engineering and computing science - are also important. And I believe that the university compass should include flourishing faculties of art and the humanities. Indeed, this is what the word university implies - a bringing together of many diverse disciplines within art and science to establish an academic community in which people may be enriched by subjects other than those which they are actually studying. A university creates an academic atmosphere in which the importance and interdependence of all subjects is apparent. So an institute specialising only in science and technology or only in arts cannot be a university. Moreover, I see no reason why students should be limited to taking just one degree in their lifetime. If people have the academic ability and aptitude to study both science and art, then it is grossly restrictive of their intellectual and spiritual development to deny them the opportunity to study subjects within both domains. An educational establishment should not claim to be a university unless it actively encourages students to pursue courses in both art and science.

Moreover, there is no reason why, on graduating, people should only choose work which is directly related to their university courses. Ultimately, education is, after all, inspiration, and not training for a trade.

Historically, science and theology have long formed an uneasy and disparate dichotomy in universities. And today, with universities fast becoming mere training camps for industry and commerce, a profusion of other subjects has been introduced into higher education which bears no relevance at all to the ideal of the university being a confluence of all enquiry and learning about Creation. Subjects such as theology, nursing, fashion design, law, business studies, P.E. and so on are not degree disciplines and have no place within the sphere of higher education. Religionistic theology, especially, is the antithesis of all university work.

Higher education is not something which has to be intrinsically elitist, but universities have to ensure that prospective undergraduates do meet the defined academic standard for becoming university members. Today, this unfortunately means that selection is inevitable.

But how are these standards set? What social forces sway the universities' hand in selecting their own members?

Higher education in Britain has been subjected to a massive 'expansion' in recent years, one reason for this being an attempt by the government to allay the resentment of the uneducated by trying to convince them that they are, in fact, educated, having attended a full- or part-time course - in any subject - which has been arbitrarily called a degree. Yet all this can mean is that overall entrance requirements have fallen dramatically over these recent years. A-levels - university entrance exams - are now taken by far more people and so the standard of the respective grades must be correspondingly lower, unless there is evidence of there being very large numbers of academically able people who five or ten years ago would not have elected to study A-levels. Only in the most demanding subjects - physics and mathematics - has the standard not been undermined, for the numbers taking these courses have fallen. It is reasonable to suppose that the most able students are still electing to study these subjects, and only the least able are being lost to other, newer A-level and other courses which are now available. So although the proportion of candidates obtaining top grades has risen, there is no reason to believe that this is due to a drop in standards in these subjects. In any case, there are many establishments today offering degrees which require no A-level entrance qualifications at all.

Of course, in reality, true universities such as of which I have spoken are but idealised, imagined places. There has never been an institutionalised dedication to the pursuit of knowledge for its own or humanity's sake in any university. Many people go to university for no reason other than to obtain a degree, hoping only that in this way they may increase their money-making capacity. This is the view of education's purpose which governments are trying to instill in people; this is the fundamental purpose behind increasing the accessibility of further and higher education. Even the proposals to create a graduate tax or to introduce student loans in place of grants are intended to make us believe that higher education serves no purpose other than to make more money for us and 'our' countries. Accepting the concept of paying for education as if it were a consumer commodity will aid the insidious inculcation of capitalism within our hearts. But in reality, university education must be free of charge, for it exists for the benefit of everyone, even those who are not able to go to university themselves. Anyone who leaves university and is not a committed anarchist has in fact wasted those years both for themselves and for mankind. They cannot be educated people for they are ineducable. So, although overall academic passion may be in decline, can we really say that this is heralding education's demise? People of such commitment have always been few and isolated in all universities, IQ and spirituality being two distinct and only vaguely related human faculties.

But the world facing people after school and university is very much non-ideal anyway - after all, this is why we need anarchism. So any inspiration received by people from their education is wasted when there is no funding available for their subsequent work. We must strive to ensure that education today does not give people only the pain of aspirations they cannot fulfil.

In assessing the extent to which universities are being damaged, we must ask whether there was anything which they achieved when only 2% of the population had access to higher education which cannot be achieved now that this figure has been increased to over 30%? Funding per university for pure research is falling, but there are now more bodies doing such work. Academically able students can still pursue courses just as stimulating, fulfilling and demanding as before, albeit with a more careful selection of university. Perhaps then, in fact, we ought to adopt a pragmatic viewpoint and accept that universities today will certainly comprise mostly non-anarchist students and staff, and so cease trying to create in them the atmosphere of an academic community, hoping instead that by allowing access to university to anyone who wishes it, a few of those people will achieve something important. There would, of course, cease to be any real purpose in interviewing prospective students, for what criteria could be appraised at such meetings? All educational establishments would then call themselves universities, and a very small number of them would be forced to maintain high academic reputations in order to ensure that as many genuinely academically able members as possible were appointed. In fact, if universities are only to accept committed anarchists, then, because such people are so very few, universities cannot exist today at all. We must accept all who are academically capable of following the courses, however wide the range of rigour. This will mean of course that such graduates, being predominantly non-anarchist, cannot claim a right to receive funding for whatever work they choose to undertake.

It is unrealistic to suppose that many non-anarchists entering university will leave as anarchists, but if they attend university then they may at least absorb some understanding of anarchist principles and values. Anarchists must not be isolated from society, but live within it for as long as possible. Universities also give young anarchists the opportunity to articulate their metaphysically experienced convictions, to know that they are anarchists.

In order for university members' work to be able to inform and inspire their colleagues, it is clearly necessary for all university courses to be full-time, with students resident at or in the vicinity of the university, for people attending part-time courses will not be in a position to be affected by or contribute to the cultural life of that academic community.

And so, with academic entry requirements becoming ever more arbitrary, science's temples are becoming no more than young people's playgrounds. Manufactured, frivolous courses are being offered to the academically unmotivated, needing no intellectual or time-consuming effort, and presenting none of the extremely difficult concepts which are required to be grasped in, for example, the mathematical sciences. Hence, as standards are diluted in this way, and as the number of universities increases, the number of students at each university in subjects such as physics will fall. Being required to compete with each other for students (who will be regarded then as customers and consumers of education) in order to survive, they will therefore look upon physics as a 'problem subject', not cost-effective to run, and in time may even begin to close their physics departments. But one of the fundamental reasons for universities' existence is to teach and research pure science - they are not businesses, but one of the most vital investments we can make in increasing our understanding of Creation. The ties between universities and industry - which in Britain have increased substantially during the vulgar political climate of recent years - are obscene. University science parks - nothing more than industrial estates - are now being established. Such direct links to manufacturing and consumerism demean the status of the faculties involved and of the entire university. Funding is directed at aspects of education which support the growth of personal and national economies, when clearly universities will exist (with even greater social import in people's eyes), and our citizens will still seek to perform true professional work, when we have eventually reorganised society without money. It is sometimes argued, fallaciously, that scientific and, especially, technological progress needs capitalism to drive it, to give scientists and engineers - 'inventors' - a goal, a financial reward to aim for. Is there really any evidence to suggest that, for example, the telephone or television would never have been invented if people had not thought that they could make a lot of money out of such devices? Admittedly, people who thought they could greatly profit financially provided funding for their invention and development, but I believe that there are always enough people to do pure science for its own sake. In fact, under anarchy, far more people would do science, because everyone would have full freedom of choice and opportunity in life, both in being able to carry out their choices and in knowing what those choices were. The achievement of such a world - the destruction of capitalism - is one important and immediate aim of the education of the survivors of a people blinded by the active and systematic propagation of ignorance. Many people seem offended by science which has no apparent industrial applications. Although they would list education as being one of the basic human needs on which money should be spent, they would omit science, not being able to understand its limitless value to the human spirit. Yet the funding of pure research in universities is a vital part of state education spending, whether or not all people are able to understand the work done.

With there now being such a wide distribution of university standards, how can artists and scientists assess and choose a course? What criteria do they apply for gauging a university's integrity? Generally, the entrance requirements for Cambridge University have always been more stringent than elsewhere. This, in turn, has ensured that the intellectual standard - the raw academic ability to follow and pass the courses - of prospective candidates, and therefore students, has been high (although there have, of course, been incidents when ill-educated people have gained entry to Cambridge on the strength of their socio-political standing, which has inevitably demeaned the university and embarrassed the majority of its members). But again, in the present world, the spiritual fires in individuals are too few and isolated for there to be any reason to believe that the passion for science and art among Cambridge students is greater than at any other university.

Furthermore, there is a limit on undergraduate numbers. Also, people may choose to study elsewhere for a variety of reasons. Certain universities, faculties and departments may have developed reputations over the years, but such hearsay cannot be considered to be acceptable criteria for choosing one's higher education. Universities are understandably loathe to publish their average A-level entry grades for the very reason that these would indeed be such a good guide for sixth-formers. There are far fewer A-level examination boards than there are universities, so the standard of A-levels is much more uniform across the country than that of individual universities' exams. Many departments are accepting undergraduates with A-level grades so low that formal publication of these entry requirements would be embarrassing and detrimental to the institute's reputation. Thus other indicators need to be considered. Does the institute run sub-degree courses? Are lectures compulsory, with students being required to sign in each morning? Affirmation of both these questions would indicate a probably poor choice for the prospective student. Or is it one of the traditional universities, that is, did it exist at the time of the polytechnics and so, hopefully, has managed to retain its standard? Although useful as rough indicators, these and other criteria are clearly unsatisfactory for they are only used to elicit reticently held information.

These problems of academic dilution arise because under capitalism there is insufficient provision for the independent funding of the sub-degree courses which everyone has the right to study if they so wish. Education should be inspiring and spiritually fulfilling at all academic levels and for all age groups. It is one of the most fundamental rights of every citizen. Quite obviously, the higher its academic level, the greater the degree of difficulty a subject presents to the student. A-levels are intended for candidates who excelled at GCSE, and similarly only the very highest echelons of A-level students are academically suited for university. If people are being accepted into university with just one A-level at grade E, then they will only obtain a degree if that course is designed to be significantly easier than A-level. But such a sub-A-level course is then clearly sub-degree level as well. As I have said, people have the same right of entry to such courses as have other, more academically able people to education suitable for them - but these courses are not degrees and have no place at a university. If the government truly envisions fifty per cent of young people entering higher education, then it must concede that, overall, the degrees they will be taking will be much easier than the old O-levels, which were originally intended for just twenty per cent of school students.

It is possible, of course, that the A-level grades held by many undergraduates are so low because of the variable quality of A-level teaching. These are competitive exams, and whatever the innate ability of the student, he or she will be disadvantaged in receiving inadequate tuition. Universities have always recognised and allowed for this, for comprehensive school sixth-forms cannot compete with sixth-form colleges or grammar schools for recruiting talented teaching staff. This is because the latter two staff groups know that they will only be teaching motivated, academically able students, while comprehensive schoolteachers spend most of their working time in remedial, disheartening, unfulfilling teaching.

Finally, I wish to reaffirm a point which I hope I have already made implicit anyway. There exist many and various faculties of mind which humans possess, in a range of degrees of development. I believe that all these are innate in everyone, and that all are subject to the nurture they receive in the lifetime of the individual. That which is often called intelligence is related at most very subtly to spiritual development. For this reason I believe that the study of science is open to all, and should be made freely available by society at all possible academic levels.

Many students drop out for non-academic reasons before completing their courses. Other people find cause to turn down the chance of attending university. But in the very least, in this dark age of ignorance, we must ensure that the opportunity of higher education is there, afforded to all. Opportunity is defined as the right for us all, as individuals, to achieve our full potential as human and spiritual beings.

The question of what mankind 'wants' cannot be fully answered at this time. We will not know these things, we will not wholly understand our individual or collective aspirations until our very end, if ever. Right now we can but guess at what it is we desire. The purpose of progress is to facilitate the growth of our knowledge of what we want. Just as a man must learn about his own self in order to live his life to its full potential, so we - mankind - must find out what we are, through art and science, the only tools we have to do this. These two quests then, the artistic and the scientific, are but one and the same.

Thus if, through anarchism, we are trying to protect the rights of every individual person, or even if we are merely embracing the principle of majoritative democracy, by which all people serve the will of either the majority or the modal group, then we must understand that mankind consists not just of those people alive at the present time, but also those as yet unborn. The people who will inhabit Earth in the future are the vast majority of mankind, and so it is the consequences of all our actions today on their lives which we must constantly consider. Similarly, we have a duty to the dead; we must ensure that all their lives and work were not in vain. If we can look into the future and consider and worry about our children's lives, then surely we can declare a responsibility for all our future citizens.

Representatives of other races do not walk among us, not even in disguise as spies. We really are quite alone.

We don't receive messages or visitations from the people of alien worlds simply because we haven't invited them. They would see any interference, any surreptitious surveillance of our lives as being downright rude. Even a message sent through interstellar space, which we were capable of receiving and understanding, would be deemed unacceptable social interference, influencing mankind's development. If we were to be given a 'helping hand' by older, wiser races, we would only be weakened and impoverished by it, for the achievements that would follow would not be truly our own.

It's up to us to send an invitation. Of course, if we are able to understand that societies at around our own level of development may be adversely affected by receiving a message from an alien civilisation, then we must be careful in sending such messages ourselves. However, in all the billions of years of Earth's existence, we have only had radio astronomy for about the last fifty. And if we believe that the anarchist spiritual revolution will take place within the next millennium, then we can infer that there is a 'window' of no more than a thousand years in any civilisation's development, during which the reception of alien messages could possibly be pernicious (races which have not yet developed radio astronomy cannot, of course, receive such messages). So, statistically, the possibility that any of the nearby stars at which we are aiming our radio signals is home to a people at a similar stage of development to our own is almost infinitesimal.

Moreover, aliens whom we do manage to contact would have to be convinced that such an invitation to visit us has been sent by all individuals, and not just by a few people on behalf of everyone else. Perhaps, in fact, we ought to warn other beings off, sending a message explaining that we have nuclear weapons, pollution and religion, that we are destroying the Earth, that we murder and devour people of species other than our own. The only extraterrestrial contact we can possibly hope for at the present time is to be placed in quarantine by the whole universe.

And how will they know when we are to be released? They won't intrude on our privacy and monitor us. Perhaps space is thick with interstellar messages of a form we are not yet technologically capable of receiving, let alone understanding. What if spiritual unity will itself be a lens, a receiver for these messages? Then a message cannot possibly be received until after we have left our childhood behind us.

Further work by Peter Ostrowski

WHY THE SKY IS SILENT - Anarchism and Truth
by Peter Ostrowski
48 pp
Published by The Ring of Stones
ISBN 0 9516273 5 X
£3 (cheque payable to P.Ostrowski)

The Ring of Stones
c/o Peter Ostrowski
105 Long Meadow Drive
Wickford
Essex
SS11 8AZ
U.K.

e-mail: POstrow909@aol.com

Last altered: 30th April 1997