Antifastan

I have lived in both a Catholic and a Buddhist monastery.  I have experienced first-hand a communal lifestyle in which one contributes according to one's abilities and talents, and receives according to one's needs.

Those communities produced products that were sold to the world at large and the revenues were put into the community treasury for use to benefit the community.  Every member had food and clothing, a cell (personal space), medical care as needed, and time off once a week for personal pursuits.

In exchange, the individual contributed labor, ideas and vigilance to the greater good of the community.  Each individual submitted to the will of the community and took an oath to follow the rules and goals of the community.

In both cases, the communal goals were loftier than the community itself, or any individual who comprised it.  The central goal in both cases was enlightenment and the entire community was committed to providing everything the individual needed to achieve that goal.  It is a deceptively simple system, but functional as proven by the fact that monasteries have existed for thousands of years.

My monastic experience taught me that communism (little 'c') is not an inherently bad system, and it can be manifested is many different flavors that are all equally beneficial to the individual.  However, I have never been able to conceive of a means to expand a system like this beyond a small, close-knit community with a single overarching goal.

It should be noted at this point that communism and socialism are not equivalent.  Communism supports the individual's journey, while socialism is focused solely on promoting the State at the individual's expense.

When we look at Antifastan, or the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) as they like to call it, we see none of the ideals or organization that are hallmarks of a successful alternative system.  Despite the rhetoric of wanting to establish a fair and equitable alternative to the greater society, they immediately set up walls to control "immigration," established a paramilitary police force, began demanding "taxes" from the local population, and issuing edicts that are effectively fiat laws.  In other words, they immediately became what they are supposedly fighting.  Their actions belie their words, which is typical of these kinds of movements.

Essentially, Antifastan is all about power - who has it, who wields it.  There is no higher ideal or goal that transcends the community.  There is no sense of justice or an equal playing field that protects access to opportunity for the community, just aggrandizement and fame for the self-appointed leaders and click-bait for their social media scoreboards.

The united States were founded on the ideals of The Enlightenment - that all people are fundamentally of equal value and deserve a System tha protects their basic bundle of congenital rights, so that they can pursue those things most important to their individual well-being.  In this sense, the US was conceived as the purest form of communism (little 'c'), much like a monastery on a grand scale.

The US was thusly founded on the concept that the community provides the infrastructure of fairness that allows the individual to achieve some higher ideal.  The primary difference between a monastery and the US system lies in the overarching ideal.  The monastery is a group of individuals seeking a common goal, while the US was supposed to allow the individual to select and pursue their own goal.  It's a subtle but significant difference.

What we witness in Antifastan is the community being forced to support one individual's or group's goals, without respect for any other member's needs and desires.  There is no declaration of common rights, just a sense that all must contribute to the leadership's selfish desires.

As someone watching from afar, I am reminded of the novel Lord of the Flies, with a generous dash of Animal Farm for flavor.  We see a group of children using force to gain and hold perceived power at all costs, while essentially declaring "some animals are more equal than others."

I would find myself supporting something like Antifastan if I saw a mature and sincere effort to demonstrate the advantages of an alternative system.  What I see, however, is the same corruption that has destroyed the original concept of the US.

In surveying history, the primary problem I see with all governments is that no one has yet devised a self-correcting system that inherently rejects corruption.  At some point, the Seven Deadly Sins find a way to derail the cogs of governance and redirect the ideals to serve one individual's or group's purposes.  Thomas Jefferson, who thought about this problem extensively, ultimately concluded that the singular ideal must be embedded in the culture, and that the culture must 'refresh the tree of liberty from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.'

Here, we reach the crux of the current situation.  The corrupting forces realize that the culture is the key to success.  They are doing everything possible to destroy and obfuscate the cultural ideal so that the urge to reform is gone, and is supplanted by the corruption itself.  In other words, it all depends on what the definition of "enlightenment" is.  If Enlightenment is defined as achieving a state of pure Love and Morality, then the culture serves to clear the path to that ideal.  If the definition of Enlightenment is to satiate the base desires of the individual, then the culture will clear the path to that ideal.  In either case, the culture is the key to success, however it is defined.

Antifastan is nothing more than an expansion of the child's "all for me" ideal.  It is the expression of the base desires for attention and power.  It is the embodiment of 'some animals being more equal than others.'

Once upon a time, Western culture held up the mature adult with balanced mind, body and spirit as the ideal.  In the last 50 years, we have seen that ideal warp and devolve into eternal childhood - the utter rejection of responsibility for one's self and the goal of elevating one's self above the inner animal.

In another time, the "leaders" of Antifastan would have had their mothers grab them by the ear and march them home, where fathers would apply judicious corporal punishment.  Now, the social institutions are glorifying this childish display, further eroding the hard-fought advances in Western philosophy.

True communism, such as we see in monasteries, seeks to combine the total effort of the community into a solid and secure foundation from which the individual can achieve higher goals without the constant distrction of daily needs.

Antifastan is the glorification of daily needs over all other concerns.  It sacrifices the individual's journey towards enlightenment on the altar of physical gratification

Is this really what we want - to be technological animals satiating our base desires at the expense of all else?  Or are we seeking to build a level foundation that removes certain key variables that stand in the way of our evolution towards the Divine?