this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Anarchism and Social Ecology

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Anarchism

Anarchism is a social and political theory and practice that works for a free society without domination and hierarchy.

Social Ecology

Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

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~ Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom

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The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution...

~Abdullah Öcalan

Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.

~ Murray Bookchin

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Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition (www.kosmosjournal.org)
submitted 3 days ago by Jayjader@jlai.lu to c/anarchism@slrpnk.net
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[–] perestroika@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The article certainly has a point.

However, I feel like the message it tries to convey can be simplified.

  • some qualities of a society determine if it can exist without extracting, expanding or fragmenting
  • some of these could be equality, freedom, solidarity and sustainability
  • if so, we must admit that our societies fall short
  • we can observe how certain traits are counterproductive (agression, domination, egoism, greed)
  • we can observe our living environments often reward such traits

Now that a problem is visible, it has to be solved.

If the context is narrow and timescale is small, solutions are intuitive: if a person is agressive, egoist, seeks to dominate or behaves greedy, we know how to avoid dealing with them and how to warn others, and how to oppose them in a confrontation (hopefully while limiting the intensity of the confrontation).

If the context is wide and the timescale is long, we need to find solutions. If the offending subsystem is a certain type of business, or business itself, we have to dowregulate that.

If the offending subsystem is a particular type of state, or state itself, we have to downregulate certain types of state, or state itself.

To accomplish such large-scale goals, one has to create formats of action and organization that lack the offending features but can still accomplish the goal. Preferably in sufficient time for individual people to see results and analyze if the action taken went well or needs improvement.

The author seems to imply (and if they do, I would agree) that one can't create a "copy" of a megacorps or state with just the ethics fixed, as it would self-corrupt. The organisational level and building blocks that can form an environment to downregulate these organizations - preferably without coming into direct conflict, at least not conflict on their terms - is still being sought. I wish I could contribute a solution, but I only have half-solutions.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection?

If you told me that, I would tell you to fuck right off with this dehumanizing garbage. "Mind viruses" are analogies, and analogies are never perfect representations of what they're trying to convey.

Memes are to culture what genes are to biology: the base unit of evolution.

Oh, it's this fucking bullshit again. Therefore memes are a mechanism of cultural evolution? No, that's not how evolution or memes work; that's putting the cart before the horse. Ever wonder where the concept of the "woke mind virus" came from? It's this right here. The ideas in this article are the originating source.

So thanks a lot, you pseudoscientistific and pseudopsychological dimwits. Your hot garbage ideas helped prop up a bunch of fascists, whose bread and butter is lies and half-truths. I hope you're embarrassed every time you hear someone mention the phrase "mind virus," but I doubt you have the presence of mind to realize what you've done.

Gesturing at imaginary diseases is not how you enact an anarchist vision. The facts of reality are sufficient, and pseudoscience like this only hinders that effort.

[–] Jayjader@jlai.lu 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm not convinced by your reasoning. Evolution and genetics were distorted to prop up racism, chattel slavery, and colonialist missionaries, yet we don't dismiss them as pseudoscience. Bad faith actors coining the term "woke mind virus" does not necessarily invalidate characterizing fascism itself as a mind virus, for example. We talk about "killing the cop in your head", after all. From my understanding, wetiko is another way of describing the adage "hurt people hurt people", and seems core to working towards what the sidebar for this community describes as social ecology:

[...] the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

Anyways, I'm confused; when you write

So thanks a lot, you pseudoscientistific and pseudopsychological dimwits.Your hot garbage ideas helped prop up a bunch of fascists, whose bread and butter is lies and half-truths. I hope you’re embarrassed every time you hear someone mention the phrase “mind virus,” but I doubt you have the presence of mind to realize what you’ve done.

are you calling me the dimwit, the article's author, or the cultures from which the concept of wetiko comes from?

If you have specific references for "the facts of reality [that] are sufficient" I'm all ears. Most of the anarchist literature I've read so far has not provided me with hard facts that demonstrate enacting an anarchist vision can be done without some amount of faith in that vision being possible in the first place, which is not what I'd qualify as scientifically rigorous.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Evolution and genetics were distorted to prop up racism, chattel slavery, and colonialist missionaries, yet we don't dismiss them as pseudoscience.

True, and in fact, bigotry was kind of a part of the origin story, not just a distortion. As it turns out, though, they're actually useful ways to describe contemporary biology. They started as a means for racism and bigotry, but they are not that any longer (excepting where bigots try to revive the racist elements every so often).

This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

This is not a valid syllogism. The premises are not necessarily interrelated, but the authors are trying to appeal to our intuition by saying that we dominate the one and we dominate the other, therefore related. No, it does not follow that humans dominating each other is the root cause of dominating nature, and the final conclusion is therefore rendered invalid.

are you calling me the dimwit, the article's author, or the cultures from which the concept of wetiko comes from?

The article's authors. Apologies if you felt personally attacked.

If you have specific references for "the facts of reality [that] are sufficient" I'm all ears.

Happy to oblige! This is a good jumping off point, and as you'll notice, there's no need for "othering" in this system. As far as I understand it, it's actually still a work in progress (i.e. it's still a growing movement in Kurdistan), but it looks to be functional and scalable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism

But with regards to the article, the biggest issue I have is that it's founded upon the "othering" of people who disagree. "It's not our fault or something that we should fix together. It's their fault, and we should try to eradicate their disease." That's not to say that we have to "tolerate their intolerance," but they aren't diseased for having bad paradigms any more than someone is diseased for liking pineapple on pizza or believing in a different god. Ideas aren't diseases.

If we hope to have a socially and ecologically responsible society, it can't be founded upon othering, because that's the very division the authors are supposedly trying to reject.

[–] Jayjader@jlai.lu 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

First of all, thanks for the constructive response.

bigotry was kind of a part of the origin story [of evolution and genetics], not just a distortion [...] They started as a means for racism and bigotry

Good catch! I was under the impression that they were impossibly entwined at the start and almost immediately co-opted, rather than directly conceived to be a means for racism, bigotry, and colonialism - but that's not what I wrote in my previous comment either, so thanks for the clarification/pushback.

No, it does not follow that humans dominating each other is the root cause of dominating nature, and the final conclusion is therefore rendered invalid.

For the record, that quote isn't in the article but in this community's sidebar. Apologies if you're clearly aware of this already; it's not clear to me when reading your comment and so I'm not super confident that I'm engaging with this remark on the proper grounds.

I have not yet seen a justification for the domination of nature that doesn't invoke the separation of humans from nature at some point. I tend to agree that it is not accurate to claim that humans dominating each other is the root cause of humans dominating nature (if there is a cause-and-effect relationship here, I tend to think it goes the other way around). I do think it is accurate to view othering of people and othering of nature as two peas in a pod; either can lead to the other, both seem profoundly unscientific and both must be dismantled (ideally in tandem, at the very least in quick succession) to prevent one "sneaking back in" under cover of the other. Under this lens, the final conclusion seems quite valid to me - though I understand criticizing the reasoning this quote uses to arrive at said conclusion.

Apologies if you felt personally attacked.

Mostly confused, but thanks for clearing that up. I certainly don't feel attacked now, on the contrary!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism
Öcalan reformulated the political objectives of the Kurdish liberation movement, abandoning the old statist and centralizing socialist project for a radical and renewed proposal for a form of libertarian socialism that no longer aims at building an independent state separate from Turkey, but at establishing an autonomous, democratic and decentralized entity based on the ideas of democratic confederalism.

Very interesting, thanks for that link! I had read https://raddle.me/f/Anarchism/154271/why-rojava-is-neither-anarchist-nor-communalist a year or two ago which cited sources that, among other things, there was a cult of personality developing there. Not only did I mix up Rojava with the PKK but that link now gives a 404. That'll teach me to not regularly inform myself.

But with regards to the article, the biggest issue I have is that it’s founded upon the “othering” of people who disagree. “It’s not our fault or something that we should fix together. It’s their fault, and we should try to eradicate their disease.” That’s not to say that we have to “tolerate their intolerance,” but they aren’t diseased for having bad paradigms any more than someone is diseased for liking pineapple on pizza or believing in a different god. Ideas aren’t diseases.

I'm not convinced that the article necessarily others people, nor that your summary is exactly accurate, especially when the latter 2/3 of the article are about the work needed to "free ourselves" (not others) of these paradigms of domination and (over)consumption. From my reading, it qualifies our culture as diseased, which then seeds these bad ideas in us in a self-perpetuating cycle. The wikipedia page on disease states:

A disease may be caused by external factors such as pathogens or by internal dysfunctions. [...] In humans, disease is often used more broadly to refer to any condition that causes pain, dysfunction, distress, social problems, or death to the person affected, or similar problems for those in contact with the person. [...] In developed countries, the diseases that cause the most sickness overall are neuropsychiatric conditions, such as depression and anxiety.

This seems to me to be very compatible with the anarchist critiques of domination and the very notion of alienation. I think I understand your criticism in regards to the language used; "disease" is unfortunate given how it has been used to justify various flavors of ableism, eugenics, and general othering over the past few centuries. Is the way the article uses that word enough for you to pass on the entire text, are you merely focusing on the text's flaws in your critique (without necessarily a wholesale rejection of said text), or have I maybe just misunderstood you here completely?

To quote the article a final time:

Thus, one of the starting points for healing is the simple act of seeing wetiko in ourselves, in others, and in our cultural infrastructure. And once we see, we can name, which is critical because words and language are a central battleground.

I see clear parallels to (my understanding of) how racism, colonialism, imperialism, misogyny, patriarchy, speciesism must be dismantled in our minds to truly make progress in dismantling them "outside of ourselves" (i.e. in society as a whole). I find there is a sad irony in how the article seems to ultimately fail because of it's choice of words and language when that seems to be one of it's key takeaways.

Perhaps I should have included this as the initial, top-level post body: I was asked a few years back by a family member to read a blog post criticizing the state of the 5th edition of the tabletop role playing game Werewolf The Apocalypse, written by a First Nations member. The blog post took great offense to the game's use of "Wendigo" as name for a native tribe of werewolves but mostly explained other issues with the game. At the time I didn't know of the actual background for this concept. The article I shared here [that we're discussing] was the first source I found since that fully brought home the gravity of the cultural appropriation being done by western media commercializing a piece of folklore that specifically is about the type of antisocial, cannabilistic mindset that so deeply characterizes the worst of "western civilization". It also does a decent job of citing sources (though I haven't read any of them (yet)). It seemed à propos to share it in the communities on this instance that are ostensibly about repairing/bettering our collective relationship with others and the "natural" world.

Oof, apologies for the long post. In case you don't feel up to continuing this exchange, thanks for reminding me to at least be more careful with how I share things (and what I share) on the fediverse.