Thread by @rechelon

Core to my analysis of power has been -- since about 1998 -- that power is rooted in a cognitive strategy of disengagement (walls, borders, static systems, tradition, etc), whereas freedom is about engagement (networking, vigilance, reflection, empathy, etc).

I discuss this briefly in my piece Two Definitions Of Power (which got reposted in 2009 during a website change, but was first posted in the early 00s) while addressing and rejecting attempts to use "power" with positive valences or other definitions.

humaniterations.net/2009/11/13/two…

This core analytic dichotomy between engagement and disengagement cuts through all my work. It was initially a troubling tension with my involvement in the counter-globalization movement. Eventually it won out in the consent v agency framework debate and became positive freedom.

(Basically I got hung up on "how do we ever get consent to the act of communication of consent," worried all language was immoral and put myself in solitary for a long while before coming to the agency consequentialist framework and extensively checking that it worked.)

Broadly speaking in this dichotomy there's entropy (entangling of disparate systems) and attempts to resist it.

The former involves rationality, self-reflection, model building, etc but also empathy, dissolution of individual identity to wider circle of care, etc.

The latter tendency in contrast fights against entanglement by trying to create and preserve simplistic isolated or static patterns. This is necessary to hold up the arbitrariness of a strong apriori individual self (rather than just a reflective awareness of contingent self).

The construction of nations, borders, identities, groups, formalized systems, etc often all try to violently strip away and impede emergent complex entanglements. It's a reactionary fight against the future, against time, to (establish and) preserve.

The "reactionary" politics that emerged in fear of radical social change with the french revolution is named doubly well because in its war against the uncontrollable complexity of entanglement, of future development, it has to retreat to *reactive* impulse and instinct.

It has to stop the feedback loop of *engagement* because engagement drives radicalism, so it has to segfault one's cognitive processes into habits, traditions, instincts, unexamined happenstance desire, etc.

The reflective -- *integrative* -- process has to be stopped.

In this way those who see "freedom" or the "wild" in returning to instinct and unexamined default desire are not in fact embracing anything like freedom, they're embracing the cold death of dis-integration, killing the integrative spiral that is reflective consciousness.

The anarchist approach must be to emphasize -- to accelerate -- the weaving together of the world. True freedom is not isolation and stasis -- causal remove -- but the blossoming possibility, complexity, *options* enabled by choosing engagement and integration.