I’ve been trying to get some thoughts together that have been haunting me for a long time. I don’t have a ton of time to write and edit, so I’m just kind of banging this out and trying to figure out how to get something usable and consumable in to the world. I’d love to get critical feedback (“ideas too dense”, “information seems to be missing”, “oh hey, this is almost just like <insert anarchist thinker I had not heard of>”, “<this part> is distracting and can be dropped” etc.). Still trying to figure out where to even post it or what to do with it, and am open to any suggestions. Thanks to anyone who takes the time to trudge through all of it. :)

Edit: added a codeberg link for anyone wanting to propose edits under revision control. I’ll be adding a bit more context there as well. Link in URL.

Towards a Fractal Anarchism: a Psychedelic Anarchist Manifesto

We have long since passed the crisis point, and we can all feel it if not see it. Liberalism has failed and fascism is feeding on its corpse. We can all feel the creeping doom. We see the water rising and know the ship is sinking. Some of us are frozen in fear. Some of us are pretending it’s not happening. But we all know, at least at some level, that something is deeply wrong.

The world is on fire. Governments around the world are inadequate. They are at risk of being (or have already been) captured by forces of wealth extraction. They operate for the few at the expense of collective prosperity, social cohesion, and, ultimately, the survival of the species.

We can’t keep going the way we’re going, and alternatives are hard to imagine. But this is exactly where the key to our escape lies. But if we can revive our collective imagination, we can stop struggling against the suffocating mire of apocalypse and begin to build our utopia. Take a second to imagine how it would feel to no longer be afraid. Now imagine the void left by your fear being filled with hope and joy.

It is by no coincidence that authoritarian systems have the same properties as interpersonal abuse dynamics. It is not a coincidence that the trauma authoritarians inflict on us all decreases our compassion and creativity. Their violence makes it harder for everyone to figure out how to oppose them, and imagine a world without their domination. Their abuse conditions us to give up hope.

It is by no coincidence that the dictators who dominate authoritarian nations exhibit egotistical behavior. The fear and anxiety you are feeling mirrors the fear and anxiety within the authoritarians who dominate and threaten our world. Our interaction with them consumes us. We become an externalization of their own neuroses.

This is not imaginary. This is not an illusion. The mind of the society reflects the mind of the individual; consciousness is a fractal. Within your own mind there are competing interests, competing thoughts. Do you silence opposition to your paradigm, or do you accept inconsistency as an inescapable fact of all complex systems?

When we see the shape and structure of the world we participate within, we begin to understand how to manipulate it at all levels. As we free parts of our minds to question assumptions we had not realized we accept or explore ideas we had suppressed, as we accept our own flaws and inconsistencies, as we forgive parts of ourselves, we find that we as individuals are more free and able to more completely engage with the world. As we become more kind to ourselves, we find it easier to accept criticism and to address our own internalized oppression. The more we address these issues within ourselves, the more we are able to predict the actions that authoritarian systems will take against us.

A fractal approach to anarchism should feel natural to many anarchists. How can we expect to address oppression in our communities if we can’t address it in our own lives? How can we hold others accountable if we can’t hold parts of ourselves accountable? How can we dismantle hierarchy in the world if we can’t even see it in our own organizations, or in ourselves?

If we already operate within this framework sometimes, what would it look like to embrace it fully? What could a fractal anarchism look like?

An anarchism that lacks compassion is an authoritarianism in disguise. Without compassion, what do we do with those who don’t agree? Do we help those who don’t understand, who are not ready to be anarchists? We must have some compassion in order to meet people where they’re at, help them even if we don’t completely align. If our compassion doesn’t guide us, then we are not building the world we want to see we are only struggling to destroy the one we hate. If we center destruction, are we doing anything but justifying the police and helping them get overtime?

If a compassion drives our external actions, do we apply that compassion to ourselves? Are your actions driven by love, by joy, by hope, or the guilt of knowing how much you didn’t do before you knew how bad things really were? When, comrade, was the last time you let yourself stop and cry?

When we are compassionate to ourselves, we recognize that our work must be sustainable. We understand our limits, and we understand that we need help. We recognize when we are destroying ourselves, and we recognize the burden we on our comrades when we get arrested, injured, or killed. None of this stops us from taking appropriate risks, but rather it forces us to consider what is appropriate and sustainable.

When we are good to ourselves, we are also more welcoming. Our compassion makes it easier to accept new people, recognize their flaws, and help them build their own compassion towards others and themselves.

A fractal anarchism would tell us to heal ourselves and our communities, so that we can heal others. It tells us to heal and build.

A fractal anarchism notices what our internal anarchism looks like and offers it to the world. It sees a self-awareness and an introspection that is impossible for states to achieve. It recognizes that the world we are trying to build is a fractal reflection of ourselves, a conscious global organism. A fractal anarchism would have to see itself as a part of Gaia, a global being, becoming self-aware and self-compassionate. A fractal anarchism is necessarily one informed by ecofeminism as we must treat ourselves with respect at all levels: the self, the collective, the planetary being.

A fractal anarchism is a neurodiverse anarchism. We are ourselves the sum of the parts of our minds. Within ourselves we are better if we accept and adapt to how our minds work, if we accept each component and treat them all compassionately. In nature, a population of organisms may develop multiple strategies, each one that is more or less tuned to different situations.

A neurodiverse population values these attributes as important features of the collective, supporting those who need support for in situations for which they are less adapted and leveraging those adaptations when they are beneficial to the collective. An honest neurodiveristy is one that accepts that people both have the right to alter their consciousness, and the right not to. A fractal anarchism recognizes that the individual is best suited to make judgments about how their brain should operate, and that the collective should support that. None of this is to say that maladaptive behavior should be accepted. Everyone is accountable for their actions individually, and the collective is accountable for the actions of their members.

All this is not to say that a fractal anarchism would be entirely internally focused, a meditative anarchism, a psychedelic anarchism. No, it would also have a revolutionary praxis. However, it would not focus on overthrowing the global order.

The revolutionary praxis of a fractal anarchism would mean constructing the revolutionary society as a fractal, as a self-organizing creature, following, in some ways, our own evolution as conscious beings.

A fractal anarchism would structure society as recursive entities: the individual, the affinity group, federated affinity groups, federations of federations, etc. At any level, the entity would identify and take on tasks appropriate to the perpetuation of the entity. An individual may start, for example, with self-care, personal inventory management (food, supplies), and basic disaster preparedness. When the individual builds an affinity group, they may share some of these tasks, where appropriate, with the collective. Disaster preparedness scales. Community pantries can reduce the cost of food and other consumables. Community dinners can simplify meal planning and reduce preparation time, thereby freeing up time for personal or collective activities. Personal grooming doesn’t scale well, so everyone continues to brush their own teeth. With each layer of reclusion, new capabilities become available to help members internally and to influence the world externally.

With a large enough federation, the entity begins to behave as a dual power structure. It competes with the state for legitimacy and, against a state that prioritizes violence, can necessarily offer more.

This model is necessarily prefigurative. The revolutionary praxis is literally just building the post-revolutionary society. The transitionary period, rather than being a signal catastrophic event, becomes a gradient. Each revolutionary experiences the revolution personally and collectively in every success and expansion of their capability. The risks of revolutionary change are minimized, allowing those who may be critical of the concept to experience the revolution within the comfort of the state before they allow it to collapse.

The fractal structure also addresses one of the long-standing problems of anarchist organizing: internal conflict. Conflict can be isolated to interaction points. Low conflict individuals can bridge networks with high conflict individuals, allowing cooperation while reducing or avoiding drama.

Most importantly, a fractal anarchism is both invisible to the state apparatus of violence and almost impenetrable to it. By organizing naturally through social networks, states cannot easily observe unusual behavior. Infiltrators cannot gain entry to trusted social networks without first building trust.

Extralegal actions, where necessary to avoid to circumvent or confront state repression, are executed primarily at the individual or affinity group level for security reasons. Though these actions may be supported via other means at higher levels, higher levels would necessarily lack visibility in to such actions because knowledge would compromise the security of higher level entities. So even if infiltrators did gain access to any level of federation, they would have to infiltrate each small groups in order to understand which ones pose a threat.

All extralegal actions would necessarily need to follow standard security protocols, which are beyond the scope of this document. Anyone unfamiliar with said protocols, deeply familiar with security culture and practices, has no business taking such actions unless they are already themselves designated as illegal (for one reason or another).

By containing risk, it’s possible to minimize badjacketing as either a paranoia response or a viable tactic for disruption. State agent, informant, right wing infiltrator, none of these matter, only the individual’s behavior matters. Is the individual contributing or not? Is the individual causing harm, or not? Is the individual willing to be held accountable for harm they do cause, or not? Entities that are incapable of dealing with problematic individuals can be externalized until they can be dealt with, minimizing risk to the larger organization.

What does the external praxis look like, concretely, in practice?

People organize affinity groups to address collective needs based on priority. Buy food in bulk, learn to forage, dumpster dive, etc, to establish food security. Plan for disasters, including catastrophic state collapse, by stockpiling medication where possible and identifying alternatives where viable. Assign tasks to individuals or small groups initially, and create committees as groups grow.

Start with affinity groups, targeting a size of 5. Grow the group through social networks. Fragment groups, dividing like cells, in to smaller groups as they grow. Federate via appointed points of contact. Determine which tasks should be taken at the federation level and which should remain at the individual. Coordinate task management within federations via appointed representatives at regular meetings (spokes councils, for those already familiar).

Create things like local food pantries, durable good libraries (such as for books), shared digital infrastructure, and mutual aid services. Grow the scope of each of these, and add new targets as the federation expands.

At each level, each entity needs to figure out their own strategy, their own targets, their own structure, their own protocols for interacting and decision making. The more we work on this, the more we can share what works and what doesn’t, the more we can publish externally, and the lower the barrier to entry for others who come after.

Social insertion provides a way for fractal anarchists to leverage existing organizations, and a way to spread their ideas or identify other fractal entities with which to collaborate. Anarchist general assemblies also provide ways to meet other fractal entities.

Regardless of the next steps, the very first step is your realization, as a reader of this text, that the neural clusters processing these words, putting together the pieces, making meaning, and relating it to your life, are as much unique parts who’s emergent complexity manifest your individual consciousness as that you are part of a larger emergent consciousness. By reading this, by integrating this information, and awakening to this fact about your potential, you progress the awakening of a greater consciousness to itself and it’s potential.