Something i told myself when accepting anarchism, was to not allow myself to feel inadequate from not knowing so much about politics, history, terminology and definitions. I have seen this before, a need to be all knowledgeable about something, as a way of establishing some authority on a subject or experience to instil a sense of power, even if over your own anxieties.
As a kid growing up in the 80’s and 90’s there was always some new crazy thing coming out and some new way to learn about it. A new magazine, a new technology, a new hobby and subsequent rabbit hole of knowledge gaining to be the voice on it. Don’t get me wrong, sharing knowledge is great, but using knowledge for a position or status is just shitty.
Not knowing stuff can feel difficult, i think this is mainly as we are taught to feel shit at not knowing. From early childhood, particularly in school, we are tested, punished, categorised and segregated based on our knowledge, all in the aim of turning into competitive capitalists, trained up for the workplace, which continues this tradition. It’s sick and as a result we have a sick society.
I have open on my phone, multiple pages linking to various places on the internet, as a way to be absorbed i an a world of new terms and understanding. I have multiple Wikipedia pages which i read and reread: Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism, Withering away of the state, Socialism, Communism, Anarcho-syndicalism, Workers self-management, Proletariat, and these pages open other pages and they open more still.
It’s super important we educate ourselves, as this rarely happened in school, at least it didn’t when i went. I don’t have kids and for sure there are better schools out there, but the fact we still live in a capitalist, hierarchical society, one that is seeing more and more examples of this failing, for kinda obvious reasons, nobody really wants to work all day and spend that money each evening and weekends, or save that money and spend it on a house.
When i think of what schools have done for me, compared to how much they damaged me, and to understand we send our kids to these places, is kind if crazy when you think about it, especially now with so many other ways to educate ourselves.
Today i learned I understood a word wrongly. This often happens. My Dad used to pronounce words wrong and use them incorrectly so often they become his sayings. The word i learned correctly, i hope, is tradition.
I knew what tradition felt like, very similar to the feeling of nostalgia, a nausea and foggy oppression. I also knew but probably would have struggled to articulate as is often seems the case when asking what s word means, is the passing of knowledge from generation to generation. What i wrongly assumed was something i do each Christmas, like revisiting The Waltons movie and Charlie Browns Christmas, is tradition, it’s not, it’s annual reflection. This is good, as I’d hate to think i had a tradition in me that I didn’t want to question and most likely destroy.
Tradition: the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation, or the fact of being passed on in this way