Anarchist calisthenics

Anarchist calisthenics The term anarchist calisthenics is both wordy and off-putting to some, but if you understand this concept, it's going to empower both you and your community and change how you read the news in everyday life. I want to break this down, giving you two completely made up scenarios, one of them surreal, one of them realistic, and see how you react to each of them differently. I first learned about this term from my friend, Jonathan, who died a couple of years back from colon cancer. He was a professor at SMU and the mark he left on my life was indelible. And as a result, it shaped my community as well. The scenarios you'll be the hero Let's start with the surreal scenario. Imagine you wake up and you're on the stage of Woodstock in 1969. You look down, you look different, you look in the mirror and you see Jimi Hendrix. And you're like, wait a second, I'm trapped in Jimi Hendrix's body. People push you out to the center of the stage and say, do what you do. And you say, wait a second, you don't understand, I'm not Jimi Hendrix. And they said, it doesn't matter, just do what Jimi Hendrix would do. In that moment, No matter how much you tried to will it, you couldn't do what Jimi Hendrix would do because you hadn't done what Jimi Hendrix had done up until that point. It's impossible to come up with the skill and the talent of Jimi Hendrix if you didn't have the fostered talent of Jimi Hendrix. Being able to be in the illegality Now hold that in your mind. Let's go to the more realistic but still fake scenario. Imagine ambulance times in your rural community are 15 to 20 minutes and there's a senior living facility in which people regularly die from easily preventable things because of that delayed experience. You and your friends got together, learned some basic first aid glucose administration for people who are diabetic. And you started listening to police scanners, responding to those calls and saving lives on a regular basis. Ambulance company that had a contract with the county threatened to sue the city. And so the city clamped down on you and said, if you go on more calls like this, we are going to arrest you. Now the scanner comes out, you know, it's an easily preventable thing. You could go save someone's life, but you also know you're gonna get arrested when it happens. What would you do in that scenario? In that first one, we have this understanding that an innate skill when it comes to a physical talent is something you could be both born with, but requires practice and something you build up over time. But for some reason, we see this moral skill as completely different. That's something you can just will to power like, playing Jimi Hendrix songs without any background or practice of being like Jimi Hendrix. This is where we get to the part of anarchist calisthenics. James C. Scott is a professor who at the fall of the Berlin wall was in East Germany and realized something that there were absurd rules that he wouldn't follow if no one was watching, but his behavior would change if people are watching. And he thought, if this rule is stupid and worthy of being broken, then I should have the moral fortitude to break this rule even if I'm being judged by other people. So he posits that morality is like a muscle that you have to build and you have to exercise or it'll atrophy like your real muscles. And so he says, you should break stupid rules of little consequence in order to prepare you for when there is a big rule of big consequence that needs to be broken. And this is where the name anarchist calisthenics comes from. Participate in the Tiananmen Square → practice resisting If you're sitting here wondering how would you react as a tank came to you in Tiananmen Square, you need to ask yourself, what little things are you doing now? And don't let that term scare you away. Anarchist calisthenics isn't the way that we've been conditioned to think of anarchy as some sort of desire for chaos or the collapse of organized society. That's not what anarchy is. Purely, it's just anti-authoritarian. Something that focuses more on mutual aid and how community can help each other rather than needing help to be prescribed top down. Practicing anarchist calisthenics is looking around at your community and say, what can I do now? Or better yet, what's something small and stupid that I could resist now to help me practice resisting when it really matters? And this is where my friend Jonathan comes in. The last time we met I was talking about how frustrating it was to show up to city council and to the city and feel so patronized and powerless and wanting to be able to do something. At this time the city had just removed nine benches from downtown in part because homeless people loitered and used those benches. When you remove benches, even for people you might deem undesirable or unworthy, you also remove those public benches from everyone. He taught me this concept of anarchist calisthenics and me and an artist got together. I built a bench, the artist made it stand out, and this was the bench. It went in place of one of the ones the city removed. And I said, this bench is illegal, but it shouldn't be. As a result, a video about that bench got 3 million views and a TikTok account exploded overnight for this group called the Chattanooga Urbanist Society. Since then, 200 benches have been placed across town from different individuals and organizations. And all of this stems back to my friend Jonathan teaching this term of anarchist calisthenics. One of the first benches placed was a Martin Luther King bench placed on Martin Luther King Boulevard on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. That bench is still there, although it probably has some maintenance needs, and it stands as a reminder that both individual actions and mutual aid are one of the strongest forms of resistance against authoritarianism. It requires both the strength of a local community and individuals who have practiced small acts of resistance, making decisions to break small rules of little consequence, so that they have the moral muscle to break significant rules of major consequence when it matters most. --- See also - Code calisthenics