The Death of Love and the Hope of Anarchy

How the system stifles love and even stops us living fully as ourselves

When I first became interested in anarchism, I saw it as an alternative system of government, a method of how we should take decisions together, a better mechanism that would provide more equitable outcomes and provide that elusive agency, the absence of which is so poisoning to our society. I still believe this.

However, over the years, I have become increasingly fascinated by the more personal implications of anarchism. It is not just a mechanistic system to make better decisions and for democracy at last to fulfil its promise as truly inclusive and representative (unlike today’s misnamed ‘representative democracies’). Anarchism is, I believe, the best perhaps even only way to permit love, the most important of human needs and emotions, and to allow the full expression of the self, the struggle we all face to be ourselves, to live our humanity to the fullest.

The current system suffocates love. Love cannot flourish where humans dominate one another in almost all realms of life. Power destroys love1. We cannot love someone who holds power over us (this is why we value friendship so much, as it is born and can only survive in equality of power). Indeed, power over other people is always present in domestic abuse, sexual violence or harassment and racism. These ills are in many ways a function of power. Whenever they occur, whether perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein or a subtly abusive boss, there is almost invariably a power relationship at work. The relationship of those with coercive power over others cannot be a loving one, almost by definition: how can you love someone when you make them do things that they would not otherwise do (Bertrand Russell’s definition of power)? Love is about supporting someone else to be free, to flourish, to express themselves and cherishing what they are, in full. None of these things is possible within an imbalance of power.

And, vice versa. The dominated person will always, to a greater or lesser extent, hate, resent or despise the person who denies them freedom. We may suppress that emotion, only to have it expressed as depression, anger or despair, but it is invariably present. It is fundamental to our humanity to want to be free. As Noam Chomsky once said, only in the family are relationships of domination - the parent over the child - permissible. Some would question even that.

The current political and economic (and thus social) system is built on hierarchy and domination to its very core. Confusingly, it pretends to be otherwise, a vehicle of liberty and free choice. In the workplace for instance, unless you are a solo entrepreneur or a genuinely cooperative company of co-ownership and equal decision-making (which requires learning and practicing a deliberate system like sociocracy), there is always domination: someone has power over others. The Boss. This ugly relationship is today camouflaged by earnest declarations of equality and ‘horizontal’ decision-making, and by the aesthetics of casual clothes and open-plan offices where it has become impossible to identify the boss by their appearance or size of their office.

Nevertheless, everyone knows who has power and who doesn’t. At its starkest, who has the power to fire someone else, thus ruining their lives (in the US, dismissal may literally destroy people’s very bodies by ending their health insurance tied to employment). At the end of the day, this is the power that matters and it suffuses all work relationships including the outwardly most benign, friendly or egalitarian. It explains a little scene I saw the other day at the office (I rent a desk in a ‘co-working’ space) where a thirty-something woman was holding forth to five colleagues. She talked and talked. They were silent and nodded occasionally, studiously noting her words in their laptops. It was only possible to determine the hierarchy at play by their silence and obedience. This is not what happens in an equal relationship where there are interruptions, questions and perhaps laughter. There was no laughter at that table except the occasional sycophantic fake titter. When I was the boss of Independent Diplomat, I learned that people laughed more at my jokes. I learned this too when I stopped being the boss.

The subordinate are not free. Indeed the more subordinate, the less free and indeed dehumanized they are. A survey of British civil servants showed that the lower someone’s rank in the hierarchy, the more stress they endured and the shorter their lives. Think about that. Hierarchy actually shortens lives. In today’s society, you cannot get much lower than a delivery bike-rider, who are often immigrants who cannot obtain other work. When interviewed, they say things like ‘I don’t feel human in this job’, ‘I feel that I am invisible’2. They are physically exhausted by the long hours demanded by the inhuman algorithms that dictate their work. They are routinely abused on the street and sometimes physically attacked, for instance by teenagers ‘for fun’ (surely a sign of the sickness of the society we dwell in). For female deliverers, sometimes men open the door to them naked, or invite them inside for sex.

The lower someone stands on the hierarchy, the more likely they are to be abused, the less healthy they will be, the more physically vulnerable to assault and other forms of violence, the more dehumanized they feel and indeed, the more they are treated as less than human, utterly invisible. Dehumanization is of course a precursor to eradication. These are the people - low-paid, demeaning work, immigrants, racially abused - who are being targeted for deportation in violent and intimidating ICE raids in the US. The victims disappear into a secretive gulag of ICE prisons, denied contact with their families and denied their legal rights before they are expelled: they are ‘disappeared’, erased.

This is why anarchists oppose domination and hierarchy, in all settings. It dehumanizes both the victim of power and the wielder of power, who, as I experienced myself, is turned into something they (mostly) do not wish to be: in a hierarchical society (as all capitalist societies are3), many believe that only by gaining power and getting to the top of the greasy pole will they at last be free. This, of course, is a myth. The person at the top of the hierarchy may have more power, but are they really free? They must be aware of the hatred, envy and jealousy they attract; they must suspect almost everyone they know of seeking their money; they cannot trust others; they too are constrained by the system that they inhabit, not least the behaviours demanded of them. I’ve known several billionaires. Not one of them struck me as happy, let alone free.

But what about human self-expression? Obviously, domination makes it much more difficult. But there is a related more psychic burden too. The capitalist system, indeed modern society, requires us to perform, to adopt, as Carl Jung posits, a ‘persona’, a fake self which we present to the world. It is a persona whom we judge to be acceptable, hopefully even attractive, to others. We learn to adopt the persona as children as we are exposed to social codes and normative expectations, as well as learning that we must comply with literally thousands of laws which we have played absolutely no part in deciding. We must conform.

Other chains start to enwrap the child as she transitions into adulthood, particularly money. Debt shadows the lives of all but the very wealthy, forcing us to work, often in jobs we hate, thus forcing us into relationships of domination - usually where we are dominated (the dominated of course far outnumber the dominators, per the typical ‘pyramid of hierarchy’ of the company or institution) . Meanwhile, thanks to social media and the nauseating worship of wealth in popular culture, we are never more aware than today of how most of us have ‘failed’ in the ghastly competition that is capitalism, where only the few succeed and where everyone else feels humiliated - a humiliation that drives much of contemporary ennui and social fragmentation, whether of children stabbing each other, the resurgence of racism and misogyny or the immanent violence one can sense in public places - or on the highway - just waiting to be ignited.

We all maintain a persona. I did particularly when I was a diplomat, which is a very specific type of persona, defined both by the behavioural norms of the profession itself and by the social status the job brings with it. I think in part I chose diplomacy because it allowed me to zip myself up into a defined persona with a specific place in the world, with social regard and, I stupidly thought, meaning. I was young, when we are perhaps unable to realise that’s what we’re doing.

But when you look for the fake personas, they are everywhere. I was at a funeral the other day of a very senior and accomplished judge. The congregation was numbered in the hundreds, and was predominantly male - other lawyers. They all wore well-tailored dark suits and expensive shoes. They all had that kind of brash, intelligent persona; they were highly articulate and fluent. The funeral was very moving, particularly when the dead man’s sons spoke of his love and support for them. This may well have penetrated deep into the souls of the congregation but signs of it amidst the collected personas, there was none. You can hear particular and familiar types of persona on the radio news or presenting TV. Politicians, pitifully, are forced to adopt personas that I’m sure many of them despise (and of course more and more of us despise too, partly because they are so obviously false). Sadly for them, and indeed sadly for us, they are among those most alienated from their true selves.

Jung diagnosed that the persona was very different from the true self. He claimed that this true self could only emerge once we had acknowledged our ‘shadow’, the part of ourselves that consciously we seek to suppress and deny, the parts that shame or disgust us. Jung suggests that this process of ‘individuation’ - the becoming of the true self - tends to begin in the second half of life, when our egos are less in control. Individuation is perhaps the most important, and certainly the most meaningful challenge we face - to be truly ourselves, truly human.

Jungian psychology is rarely put together with political and economic systems. But it is clear that the current form of capitalist society encourages suppression of the self and the adoption of an artificial and inauthentic persona. Moreover, Byung Chul-Han, the Korean-German philosopher, argues that the inherent inauthenticity of capitalist relationships denies the possibility of love. Today, at the advanced age of fifty-nine, I feel myself finally becoming, well, myself. I have left behind the persona of the diplomat but also the somewhat egoistic and self-serving persona of the chippy rebel against the diplomatic machine, the whistleblower who told the truth, the entrepreneurial creator of a unique NGO (though, as you can tell, traces still remain!). I feel greatly relieved that I no longer have to act out these roles. Sadly, I see many of those who joined the diplomatic service at the same time as me, over 35 years ago (god help us!), still trapped in that professional persona. Indeed it has become them. This is partly because it is cognitively and psychologically impossible, as I came to realise during my own time as a diplomat, to maintain a hidden self of conscience and honesty and a professional self of the unquestioning, loyal (and thus effective) diplomat: this is the very definition of unsustainable ‘cognitive dissonance’. And it is of course the private self who must die in this contest. It is tragic.

I’ve known only a few people who I sensed were truly ‘themselves’, who lived life without artifice and said what they really thought. All three, perhaps no coincidence, were writers, all of them successful and famous to different degrees. Two of them, notably, called themselves anarchists and indeed it was through our shared commitment to anarchy that we met. The other was an anarchist in all but name: he hated politicians with a deep passion, and his writing speaks clearly of his contempt for the cruelty and inhumanity of the state. Notably, all three had difficult upbringings, perhaps a factor that required them very deliberately to define themselves. I’m lucky enough to live with three others who exhibit not a smidge of artifice as they confront the world, my wife and children. Why, is their story to tell.

Only recently have I begun to realise what it means to live as truly oneself, partly because of the examples I’ve known in my life and partly because of the necessity of coming to terms with the various demons who inhabit my own shadow, a process, both liberatory and painful, that began in a deep crisis when I stopped running Independent Diplomat and with that departure finally threw off a persona that had defined me for decades; this crisis of depression and lassitude lasted several years.

More philosophically, it has become clear to me that this process of Jungian ‘individuation’ is only possible in conditions of freedom, when we are not forced into a persona, whether professional or social. The writers I knew who were truly themselves - and thus ‘individuated’ - had through their own pens become unshackled from the pressures, including financial, that constrain the rest of us. They were subordinate to no one - and indeed no one was subordinate to them. As Jung might have predicted, they were also all three well into the second half of their lives. All three have sadly died in the last couple of years, though the lesson of their lives and, happily, their writing, remain.

There is a risk of seeing every political problem and social ill as a nail awaiting my anarchist hammer. Life is not simple, its troubles susceptible to easy remedy (though the practice of anarchism is not easy). But it seems to me that we can barely begin the battle to be truly ourselves unless we are free to speak and act, and form relationships as we choose, without coercion and in equality, conditioned always of course by respect for the needs and sensibilities of others (an obligation best fulfilled by negotiation face-to-face as equals rather than indifferently arbitrated by distant and unaccountable bureaucracy). Without such freedom, we cannot begin to explore what it is to live as ourselves, and as fully human.

This is why my forthcoming book is called ‘There we are human again: a diplomat’s journey to anarchism’, a title that I and my ever-patient and thoughtful publisher Jonathan Rowson (whose excellent substack I recommend) have finally agreed upon after literally months of dialectical discussion on WhatsApp. This substack post is not a summary of the book, but it does reiterate its central argument: that only in anarchy is love, that most essential of human needs, at last protected; only in anarchy, can we at least start to be fully human. The book is dedicated to my dead anarchist writer friends4, who remain a great inspiration to me, and whose books lie on my desk as I write.