culture in which I had been raised and which enabled me to view it critically, to sense that it did not correspond to what I regarded as “right”?
Here, we return to the idea of the attainment of knowledge as being an unveiling of truths already known. Why do thinkers of the left (including Lapierre, evidently) have such a problem with the idea that human beings are born with certain innate qualities, potential and expectations? We don’t find it impossible to understand that a bird is born with the innate ability to build a certain type of nest, for instance, but the idea of equivalent capacities in human beings seems to alarm people.
Obviously, human beings are not bound by their instincts in the same way that other animals are – and this is a significant difference. But this does not mean that those instincts are not still there, even if often buried by cultural requirements.
Is it not possible that there is such a thing as human nature – not a falsely universal version imposed on people by centralising colonisers, but a real, living, organic, indefinable one? Is it not possible that this authentically universal human nature includes the instinct to live co-operatively, freely, without the wage-slavery, exploitation and misery of the money prison-world?
Couldn’t this be why you “do violence to yourself” if you submit to the present system in contravention of your natural inclinations? Couldn’t this be why people like Georges Lapierre and millions of others within the mercantile world continue to reject the inhuman anti-values of industrial capitalism, of the global mercantile culture, and to insist that another world is possible? And wouldn’t it be a good thing if this was the case, rather than a reason for ideological anxiety or evasion?
* I have a new book on the way! Nature, Essence and Anarchy is currently in the Winter Oak production process and will be out fairly soon, all being well.