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Anarchism and left wing politics in general has religious roots, in the "West" Christian and Islamic roots. I hope to look at this stuff, and have a lot on this page about the English Revolution , about the great radical Christians of that era like Winstanely and Lilburne
I also hope to look at the Milgram experiment (which showed that your average citizen will torture another human being to death if someone in a white coat tells them to do so) and
its relationship to spiritual practice and in particular the ideas of George Gurdjieff.
The Milgram experiment was described in detail in Milgram's book "Obedience to Authority". If you've ever gone near a sociology course you will have heard of it, it is also known as the "Teacher Test". People were paid to become involved in a phoney experiment in which they were told to shock bound and helpless victims to obviously dangerous and agonising levels. If the victim did not correctly answer certian banal questions (the experiment was supposed to test the effect of pain on learning) a shock was given, higher for each incorrect answer. Of course the "victim" (actually a stooge working for the experimenter) always answered wrong. In the initial experiments everyone was prepared to shock the victim to a clearly dangerous level, and 65% were prepared to shock the victim to apparent death.
I have often explained anarchism in terms of the Milgram experiment, an Anarchist society is one where the Milgram expreriment would fail. I've also used this experiment to explain the link, as I see it, between Anarchism and what is called spiritual practice. One of the things that you could say about a spiritually developed person is that such a person would pass the Milgram test. This implies a rather down to earth idea of what spiritual practice is about.
Gurdjieff's ideas form the basis for an Anarchist spiritual practice according to me. I like his insistence on overcoming mechanicalness, on the uselessness of empty mysticism and emotional benevolence. Although on the surface extremely heretical, one interesting aspect of Gurdjieff is the light his ideas shed on the issues at the heart of Christianity. (According to Gurdjieff the Last Supper was a magical ceremony. The flesh the disciples ate and the blood they drank was entirely literal, the purpose was to maintain contact with jesus after his imminent execution Gurdjieff's magnum opus was the book Beelzebub's Tale's To His Grandson in which Beelzebub (who we find to be a grumpy but fundamentally good-hearted old Tory gentleman) tells the story of human history from his own point of view. Among other things Beelzebub tells of the invention, in Sumeria, of the class system and of the terrible effect that this had on the human psyche.
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