Self-Reliance and Mutual Aid

Self-reliance and mutual aid.

Thoreau was a transcendentalist born in 1817. Transcendentalism is a belief in a soul, an infinite link to the universe that is based on intuition. A gut feeling is the best guide to living happily and wholesomely. Thoreau is most famous for two of his long essays: Civil Disobedience and Walden. These works is one of the key philosophical building blocks of the free thinking society we enjoy today in America and indeed around the world. He encouraged peaceful means of protest by refusing to obey the laws that are contrary to proper morals. He entertained that there are evil laws which are meant only to fleece the public and restrict freedom. Thoreau is also attributed to conceiving many of the core ideas surrounding the anarchist movement lasting from after the Civil War and becoming democratically impotent by the end of World War I. Famous figures from this time included Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman.
Anarchism is a belief that the best government is none at all. Each person is left to their own devices to fend for themselves. Anarchists believe in an innate goodness of humans, that we are all born in our most perfect state. Civilization is oppressive and creates a class system. The theory postulates that utter repulsion of a government will create a utopia of free expression. I believe that civilization necessarily implies government.
To this end Kropotkin wrote a treatise on evolution entitled, "Mutual Aid". He elucidates a recurring theme throughout the essay. It begins with the colonies of ants and sequentially introduces more highly complex organisms, finally concluding with human cities. He contends that animals which band together increase the success of rearing young by sharing responsibility. In other essays he then contends that laws are unnecessary, because they serve no purpose. They serve no purpose because it is the nature of humans by their evolution to be kind and sharing to one another. The class system would dismantle itself if humans were kinder to eachother. Laws maintain the class system and so they must be abolished.

I do not agree with the Nihilist contention that a property of an object should in all cases be elevated to consideration as being object of itself. Instead, I offer that there are objects, which are separate from actions. There are objects which perform actions and it is the 'how' of the relationship between objects and the respective actions which the idea of these properties relate. When X does Y it is by the property Z of object X that action Y is possible from X. It is by the degree of Z, positive, nil, or negative that we know the quality and quantity of Y-effect produced by X.
A primary theme in Thoreau's work is responsibility. Responsibility is reaction to duties. To some degree a person is responsible to others through duty to react to challenges of belonging to a community. In a community, respect depends to a great extent upon responsibility. Without community, as when a man lives far from civilization, responsibility is to survival of the one man himself. It is in the spirit of responsibility that Thoreau proffers the essence of civil disobedience. A responsible individual will disobey the law when it is his moral obligation to do so. The moral obligation to disobey occurs when a law is unjust.
Honor and duty are part of a legacy which extends beyond mortality. Our work can be
useful to others posthumously. A legacy is an attribute which is very different in the context of men as humans from men as animals because evolution is not concerned with honor. Thoreau's work is more relevant to the human experience because it addresses issues more specific to the human experience. Animals do not leave a legacy as do humans. There are myths and legends of animals and there are even animal celebrities. Though, even these examples are really a fiction created by some anonymous human narration.
There is very little in these essays about love and friendship so I will inject a poem I wrote in 2004 called “But to Be a Better Friend.”
But to Be a Better Friend
She said she's so sultry
Why whisper wanton wailings?
Open up Oppenheimer
No offense no confidence
My confidante
My sycophant
My reeling irrelevant

Mind spinning
Synchronistically
Two possibities
One rogue singularity
Love is love's fate
Love is love's fault
Love is love's fake
Love is due result

I wonder will I
Be deposed of will I
Hold my soul high
Holed my sole high

Well does she expect me
To stick around lovesick
With my heart broke
And breaking more fragile
Everyday she wants friendship
But to be a better friend
I would be a lover-friend

The part of me that stays behind when I fly
Feels the way I do about you
Does it knot when I'm crying I'm dying?
Dying for what I believe in, it's you and I

To protect her interests
Divested from my friend
To rend her gently to
My center of being
Freeing her from having to be
Someone she doesn't want to be
If she wants to be with me?

If you were shy I would take it on high
To save you drowning and towel to dry
Yield the pill I will adroitly poison deny
Though your beautiful lips don't try

My poem explicitly addresses the quandary of the difference between love and friendship. I eventually engaged to the subject of the poem, but I could not convince her to marry me despite years of faithfulness. To clarify the boundary between friendship and love. I apposite the title proposition of a song by gangsta rap group TRU who went on individually to sell over 25 million albums: “Would you take a bullet for your homie? I got trust up in myself 'cause most of these fools are living phoney.”
When I met Karen she was a strumpet, a young woman who ran away from her foster family to live with her biological family when she was 17. She was beautiful, confused and homeless. I was homeless, too, but I was ambitious at 25 and in a decent college, but also homeless. When we got together we were really good when it was good and really bad when it was not good. It was interesting enough to keep us together. When she had Zach's baby, (notice the spelling, my name is Zak) my grandmother kicked us out. It was my friend, Cosmo who gave us and Jonathan a place to stay.
There is a boundary between love and friendship that is certainly fuzzy in practical application. I mean, who honestly can love someone without making concessions? A melding of two realities occurs where the two parts cannot be said to be different, in feeling. When one party is in pain, someway, even distantly, the other is aware of pain. When one is wandering in search of the other, the other is somehow alert to this and wends their way to the first. There is some knowledge of eachother which seems to occur preternaturally. There is some sense of having been lovers in a past-life or having some predetermined meaning in the relationship.
Predetermination is a feeling of destiny or divine intervention or fate. Preternatural refers to sensations attributed to be outside of the time-space of one's sensational experience. There may be some existential device upon which this occurs. It could be the electron knowledge of our brains which, in expectation, derive the whereabouts of electrons in another mind through some quantum mechanical fealty of spiritual cross-linkage. It could just as well be neutrinos or tachyons, but there are properties of quantum specie which betray the willful observer and whereupon the expectation of the observer is found. There is some vehicle of which humankind has been scientifically unable to define and yet we wreck the world in order to make our material desires known by a more efficient technology.
As humans, we want other people to know directly of what we are feeling and yet the mass of men deny the form of intimacy known as a meeting of the minds, perhaps I do not use this term in the traditional sense. What I mean by a 'meeting of the minds' is an experience which is indistinguishable from internal dialogue but so closely resembles a 'sixth sense' of objective dialogue, as to be obfuscated as separate properties of a common phenomenon. The Atharva Veda relates this phenomenon as being “like hairs on the back of the Brahma bull”, so these ideas are hardly groundbreaking except to grasp at the concretion of modern physics as a possible cohesion of metaphysical theory.
What all this means in regard to the topic. Kropotkin's ideas of Darwinism can be used to defeat itself. There are numerous species which are extremely abundant which are solitary. It doesn't explain, regardless of special colonialism, the cannibalism of some species. Even in the ant which so much as becomes a foundation of his line of reasoning, will cannibalize the genetically defective members to enhance the strong. As a general rule, mutual aid among successful species is notable but also exceptional. His line of reasoning relies upon suspension of disbelief, the melodrama of special circumstances and the fallacy of emotional attribution. The fallacy of emotional attribution is like the woman who says, “Where O where did my dog get her personality?!?!” It is false attribution of human emotions to animals which is really a reflection of the observer's subconscious desires. A person cannot be a non-human, therefore a personality is an attribute of humans only.
People are intricately connected together. From an evolutionary standpoint having people dedicated to caring for children is a boon. Self-reliance takes on a different meaning once a person has young to raise. As a bachelor I only had myself to look after, now I must rear my child. My survival is contingent on protecting my child as well as protecting my capacity to have more children. My attention is divided between the relative certainty of the conceived and the yet-to-be. My strongest Malthusian strength is not raising children so I leave that to others by virtue of risk management. (If the legal hurdles of my new show “Survivor: Family Edition” were negligible the role of child supervisor would be highly sought, I presume.)
People naturally fall into social roles, some are agitators like Thoreau. There is some preternatural emotions which draw people together. There are attributed emotions in animals. Some of our social roles are analogous to colonial behavior in animals. Whether spirit or evolution have a causal relationship to society is vague, though symbolic relationship is evidently common. A “lone wolf” I therefore contend is filling a social role, a view of self in relation to others. A continuance of the boundary of the egoist self contrasting with the collectivist society.