Re:The Life of Octavia Butler
by tomrod on Saturday November 26, 2022 @12:22PM
(#33754603)
Perhaps Musk is the necessary evil to point out it is possible to push us to the stars, despite his many flaws.
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I think it's a safer bet that Butler would assert that there is a unity between means and ends (which is to say, that the means you employ define the ends it is possible to reach, eg, an evil approach will only yield evil results) then it would be too bet that Butler was an "ends justify the means" type.
What makes you think she would assert that?
I'm fairly sure she was an anarchist, but not positive. This is a principle in anarchist thought.
If not, she would certainly sympathize with anarchism, based on her views I do know, which is why I qualified it as "more likely" rather than being certain.
Having run in anarchist circles when I was younger, it's strange to hear people talk of anarchism as a consistent set of ideas when the reason it holds such a special place in my heart is that there were so many different conceptions of it, many of them incompatible with each other. Which conception are you referring to here? Presumably not anarcho-capitalism.
It's my understanding that means-ends unity is central to the critique of state power and broadly shared by anarchists. Anarcho-capitalists reject basically everything in anarchism except anti-statism, so you can't really compare them to other flavors in a sensible way most of the time, and I regard the name anarcho-capitalists as a misnomer and I call them libertarians or anti-state capitalists or what have you (though I respect their right to label themselves as they please). I don't know that anarcho-capitalists reject means-ends unity as much as they have different ends in mind.
Anarchism may not be a single set of ideas but it's certainly a distinct lineage that descends from certain critiques of capitalism, hierarchy/state power, and Marxism (means-ends unity being essential to the critique of Marxism, eg, that a proletarian state will become oppressive for the same reason any other state becomes oppressive).
For instance, it's broadly held by anarchists that a society should be voluntary and not based on coercion. If someone called themselves an anarchist but was, say, in favor of aggressive policing, I'd wonder what the heck they meant by "anarchist".
Re:The Life of Octavia Butler
by TheCoelacanth on Saturday November 26, 2022 @07:45PM
(#33758755)
The protagonist in Parable of the Sower is more or less anarcho-communist.