Revolutionary Silliness!

Intro

For the most important time in our lives, when we’re growing up and learning to navigate the world, we’re corralled into bland and sterile cells where we are forced to sit down, shut up, face forward, and listen to the adults in power ramble about various subjects and make sure that we memorize it all. Not learn about it, memorize it. We’re not expected to analyze, interact, or ponder the information, just regurgitate it. At the same time, these lectures and drills impose expectations of what is “normal.” How things are, why they are this way, the “normal” ways to navigate the system and change it by participating in it and following its rules. If we were really learning and therefore able to critically look at these lessons, we’d realize how fucking dumb it really is. How doing things “normally” isn’t going to improve our situation or fundamentally alter the systems that keep us down.

Later on as we apply for jobs so that we can survive the capitalist system, we must prostrate ourselves before hiring managers with formal ritual and procedure as if to justify why we should be allowed to exist. You must submit a resume, you must write a cover letter where you suck the company’s dick in proper formal language, you must have former coworkers that you still talk to who can vouch for you, oh but friends and family shouldn’t be used for that because it looks unprofessional! And if (IF) you get an interview instead of being outright ignored, you must walk in wearing your sunday best with a fake-ass smile and continue to suck that corpo-cock, bullshitting so much you could start a fertilizer company. All because “it’s professional” and “it’s normal.” That fucking sucks! And the moment you call it out for being dumb, you get spurned and they get to decide that you shouldn’t be permitted to pay the bills!

All of this and more are forced upon us under the pretext of being “normal,” “appropriate,” “professional,” etc. but who decided that? Normalcy is not only a manufactured concept to enforce western capitalism, it’s also a malignant specter used in marginalization and to delegitimize radical thought and actions! The manufactured monsters of formality, professionalism, and normalcy must be countered if we truly want to make radical changes to society and adopt a revolutionary silliness!

Normalcy tells us that intrinsic parts of our personalities, psyches, or cultures are wrong and a sickness. That we must medicate or educate ourselves back to conformity. Professionalism tells us that the boss knows best and that we must kneel before capital or else we deserve to starve and suffer. Formality teaches us that some people are just better than us because of their station. That we must respect the judge, the senator, the lawyer, the bishop, all because they sit above us on the hierarchy and wear special clothes. fuck that!

A revolution with the goal of abolishing hierarchy, class, etc. would do well to, in the same stroke, abolish these codes by embracing silliness, comedy, casualness, and flagrantly defying others’ attempts to subjugate us through systemic machinations. Silliness as a personal trait and way of living is revolutionary as a means of embracing our humanity, our liveliness, and rejecting the old world while exploring how to build the new one!

Formality and normalcy

What exactly is “normal?” Normalcy is a multifaceted problem and so it has many genres — cisnormativity, heteronormativity, whiteness, patriarchy, etc. Normalcy in western society, especially the united states, can be typified with this example: The normal man is white (germanic heritage), aged 25–35, grew up in a protestant faith and may or may not still practice, works in finance or business, named something like Hunter or Declan (bonus points for weird Anglo spellings) lives in a shithole r/liminalspaces suburb, and commutes half an hour to the nearest metro center in a massive SUV or pickup truck that gets 10 miles per gas tank. Hunter buries himself in his 9-to-5 and is completely overjoyed by work related shit like company newsletters and earnings calls. Overall, he isn’t driven mad or depressed by how much he works or anything systemic cos he doesn’t care about anyone but himself and his career or his income stream. Hunter isn’t bothered by a mind-numbing daily routine that rarely deviates and he buys into capitalist bootstrap propaganda with gusto. Hunter isn’t a political guy necessarily, he’s too busy and uninterested. So he won’t be much of a fan of Alex Jones or Matt Walsh, but he might go to bat for right wing pundits or talking points because he believes that “we should listen to both sides” and that bipartisanship will solve every problem. On a more subconscious level, the left-wing detractors look kinda scary to his worldview and privilege, ultimately rendering him centrist or slightly right-leaning. Hunter is exactly who you imagine when you think of someone who actively posts or even scrolls on linkedin.

This “normal person” is who the rest of us are compared to. If you’re trans, you’re abnormal because Hunter is cis. If you’re not straight, you’re abnormal cos Hunter is hetero. Even Hunter, our template homunculus for normality, is abnormal because it’s nigh impossible for someone to live so trapped by routine and capitalism without developing some sort of mental health problem.

Mental health being another avenue where we’re all compared to Hunter and deemed “disordered” and diagnosed with some malady because we aren’t perfectly happy and excited to be confined to cubicles and robotic utility. This isn’t to say that there aren’t genuine mental illnesses that are independent of societal norms. Some people do have neurochemical disruptions that pop up randomly, or from some hereditary predisposition, and wreck house. A lot of mental illness, however, begins as coping/responding to our environments and developmental obstacles — including, but not limited to, being outcast for our personalities, cultures, quirks, or just our inability to keep up and perform like society demands. Some might even call them trauma disorders.

With the mental anguish and drains of capitalism on the human body and brain, mental illness is unfortunately more normal than “normal” and the fact that society refuses to solve these problems at their genesis can lead to maladaptive reactions and extremity. An example of this is the rising tide of toxic masculinity, evangelical protestantism, islamophobia, homophobia, and xenophobia. Those struggling to cope with the fact that their normalcy isn’t real and that the system is extracting so much from them respond by trying to double down on their perceived normality and in some ways to aggressively enforce a new or renewed normalcy on others through harassment and legislative capture, and support for conservatism.

Conservatism is ideologically obsessive over enforcing normality and being hostile to “abnormal” social conditions and changes. They concoct a “traditional” normal and a national myth of a time when everything was “normal.” When “men were men,” and before everything was “woke.” The funny thing is that this traditional normal is less real than the fake normal that was already imposed! When was America great, exactly? Ask a conservative and they’ll describe an advertisement from 1953 where everything is whitewashed and idealized. The truth is that none of those ads depicted the world realistically! It was propaganda all the way down!

Normality is an unobtainium! We made it up! Pure fiction! So why is normal so inflicted on us both by ourselves and by society? There is some utility to normalcy on a base primate level. We are a fundamentally social species, and therefore our groups need to maintain cohesion. So we develop unwritten rules, customs, compromises, and taboos to preserve our safety, common ties and values, and to generally prevent shit from going sideways. Along these lines we’ve evolved an intrinsic desire to be accepted and to not alienate people. This is why we have such feelings as shame, embarrassment, fomo, etc. Social groups psychologically self-regulate to maintain a status quo and at one point that was for vital safety and survival reasons. Even now that we don’t necessarily need it to maintain group cohesion against a pack of tigers or to take down a mammoth, it’s still kinda useful for creating cultures, for establishing a code of conduct and communication, and as a basic social tool. But that is all it should be — a tool! Nowadays it’s more than a simple tool or quirk of our brains, it has become a weapon that the Capitalist ruling class wields to maintain their hegemony and manufacture our consent.

As a consequence of enforcing their normal upon the masses, they create bigotry and division amongst the working class. Racism, sexism, queerphobia, ableism, and all the lovely mental health afflictions and societal blights that come along with them! The concept of normal systemically and socially creates a league of out-castes, rejects, and leads to marginalization. But the creation of bigotry isn’t merely a biproduct! It’s a feature! Dividing the masses amongst themselves, creating a narrative of “how things are supposed to be,” or a “natural order,” to the world is itself an engine of maintenance and control. A divided working class will police itself in social settings outside of the literal scenarios of law-breaking (which are still self-corrected by way of class traitors in uniform). The average person doesn’t need to maliciously believe in bigoted talking points or even care about someone’s marginalized identity (“I don’t care if you’re black, white, or purple, [insert standard of normalcy here]”). But the fact that they do care that those marginalized groups adhere to some construction of normality, ignorant of whether it’s even an option or based in material reality, is a covert expression of internalized bigotry! They aren’t outwardly or intentionally bigoted, and will often interact with actual people of those backgrounds pretty amicably, but they still cling to the inherently bigoted normality they were brought up to follow without question!

The self-policing and dependence-creating quality of normality as a social system gives the ruling class their very basic desire: a class of producers that are easy to employ, easy to tax, easy to control, and easy to sell to. Normality is why we’re raised to believe that the changes we want in society must be made using the existing system. Rioting isn’t normal, you must remain peaceful and march for an hour at a time. Normal, well-adjusted people provoke change by voting for the lesser evil every 2–4 years! It’s perfectly normal if that lesser evil becomes less “lesser” and more evil each time, just vote harder! Things like tone policing (Control of rhetorical emotion for the sake of “optics”), or peace policing also enter the scene this way. We’re taught that normal people do things the way Dr. King did it back in the day. What they don’t teach is that not only was he considered dangerously abnormal at the time, but he wasn’t the only show in town and wasn’t the sole catalyst of change!

Some parts of this cult of the normal find origins in feudal Europe, before the rise of capitalism, where a governable peasantry was needed to produce goods and pay rents, and where hereditary property rights and religious adherence were paramount concerns. At this stage, queer people became an out-group because marriage was a political act, intended to produce heirs as well as alliances, and because the bible was interpreted as forbidding queerness. In this period we also see distrust of neurodivergence as an occult affliction or a moral failure. Autistic kids in Ireland were thought to be doubles left behind after the real kid was taken by faeries, for example. Witchcraft as a crime and hysteria is also a perfect example of inflicting a subservient and othering normalcy upon women! Those who were more outspoken than normalcy desired of them, more intelligent or knowledgeable were threatening to the status quo and were deviant from established gender roles and more independent from men. Accusation of and persecution based on witchcraft and other spiritual crimes was weaponizing the normality of patriarchy to contain the threat of an independent woman.

Later on in the colonial period as capitalism began to emerge, we see imperial control become an aim of normalcy. Aristocrats and kings began to crack down on indigenous languages and cultures in Europe like Irish, Lothringian, Frisian, Welsh, etc. Westminster began using Ireland as a laboratory for oppression and imperialism before turning to Turtle Isle where they deployed whiteness and heathenry to turn white settlers against the natives and the African slaves. If the whites didn’t see themselves as more normal than the others, they might’ve realized how much they had in common and worked together to rebel! It’s easy to forget that the first places colonized by Europe were in Europe! Much like how people will say the nazis conquered Germany first, the imperial powers had to subjugate and force a cultural homogeneity onto European indigenous communities before expanding outward. They standardized national/prestige languages, forced them onto lower classes through bureaucracy, education, and sociopolitical pressure. And with those homogenous languages came mechanics of etiquette, formal grammar, and a more or less baked-in system of class division.

Returning to present day, we can see the effects on our situation: Autists are marginalized, abused, and neglected because they’re seen as a disciplinary issue or simply weird. This leaves us anxious as shit because we need to scrutinize every little thing we say and do, and pushes a lot of us into harmful lifestyles and ideological groups like destiny (the streamer) fans or people who think ben shapiro is logical. And that’s using kid gloves on the issue. Autists have double the unemployment rate as normies (Allistics, neurotypicals, those among us without brain things that make them spicy) do according to US labor department stats[1] and when getting a job requires elaborate and confusing pageantry like an interview, it’s not hard to see why. People of color also face hurdles of abnormality in employment with systemic racism excluding them from some positions or opportunities, and how black hair and even names are considered “unprofessional.” Yeah there are anti-discrimination laws on the books but try enforcing that as someone living paycheck to paycheck! Who’s gonna pay for the lawyer? Do you have enough evidence to prove legal standing, nevermind win the case? Good fuckin’ luck! Businesses won’t consider an applicant who doesn’t brown-nose and polish themselves correctly. The courts and legislatures won’t take constituents seriously without adhering to “proper” language and vocabulary, or following formal procedure to the fucking letter! In fact, deviating from formal processes will potentially get you punished with contempt of court charges, or thrown out of city council chambers! You MUST behave like a little porcelain doll instead of a human or we’ll decide that you just don’t deserve to have your issues heard and solved! “That’s just how things work!” In a formal world, respect is not an aspect of a relationship between two individuals. There is no rapport involved and instead of being earned by actions, respect is owed to titles and authorities as if it were a debt. A debt to be paid by the lessers even if the betters use their titles to break everything! Frankly, it’s fucking stupid!

The problem of normality is therefore a problem of both state and market spheres and brings us to the problem of formality and professionalism. Formality is merely the standard of normal in a hierarchical context. Formality is the practice of treating some people like they’re better than us or deserve certain respect because of their job or rank or shit as a facet of what’s normal! That some animals are just more equal than others! And if you don’t treat your betters with the right etiquette, you’re abnormal and a freak! ew, go away peasant! Standard normality is more cultural and panopticonal, as a standard of peer pressure and internal policing of the common people. Formality is systemic and kinda bureaucratic. Professionalism is similar but acts as the middle-ground between the cultural and everyday-ness of normality and the rigid systemizing of formality. Professionalism is what’s normal in the workplace! Professionalism is the primary goal of being compared to Hunter and how he just loves his job oh so much! Professionalism takes normalcy and mixes it with the hierarchical and productivist bullshit of formality and capitalist employment.

In this sense, formality and its liaison professionalism, are the genesis of standards for normality. Basic normality is a vulgar formality and provokes us to discriminate against each other, to divide the common crowd amongst themselves. Formality is the more direct discrimination from the Capitalists above, conveyed through professionalism and law, to inform our sense of what is normal. We want to be normal as much as we want to rise above our station and achieve the freedom we perceive in wealth and privilege. And that’s why we have boot lickers, boomers, hustle culture, and that one guy who cornered Elon at a panel and asked to be on the board of Tesla[2]. Leninists and social democrats could easily convince an audience (and essentially have over the last century) that the problem of normality is simply a product of who controls the state. That if the proletariat seized the state and gave power over to the vanguard party, a new normal could be created that is more accepting and progressive towards abolition of class and capital. This would be nice if it were true, however normal and formal as dictated by ruling classes/cadres are tools of control not of liberation. Normality is explicitly a framework for shaping the habits of the common class to suit the needs of the rulers. Whether those rulers are liberal or conservative, fascist or bolshevik, that fact remains.

Marxist-Leninist and Maoist governing classes may have sought to disrupt the established norms, but they not only maintained professionalism and formality within the parties, they strengthened the formality and created abusive and bureaucratic systems with it to be ruled by exclusive cliques. This in turn affected their relationship with the working class they claimed to represent and further separated them and their class interests. Inb4 “anarkiddie” or “read lenin” etc. Cry about it! It’s not enough to simply create a new normal by trying to wield the old normal and formal. Normal must be rejected! Formality must be abolished!

Revolutionary Silliness Enters the Chat

Enough problems! Time for solutions! Revolutionary silliness can be summarized as being ungovernable, or the negation of bourgeois normalness by living honestly, casually, and largely unapologetic for being different than society’s expectations. The first major trait of revolutionary silliness is flexibility. Most bad shit in day-to-day life is not as important as we let it become. For example, if some douche is tailgating you on your way to your wage slavery, fuck ‘em! clearly they have issues so don’t let that become your problem! You don’t need to speed up or anything to accommodate them, 99.999% of tailgaters will fuck off after a while of being stonewalled. For readers in the United States, that 0.001% is when you get tailgated by a florida man.

Flexibility ultimately rests on picking your battles and letting shit flow around you. If it’s not an immediate or existential emergency, you can afford to take a breath and deal with it over time or, if it’s petty enough, forget about it! Some people, however have deep and troublesome anger problems, or autists might have difficulty going with the flow (source: rough youth experience). And that’s ok! That’s a very real thing that can stand in the way but it’s workable so long as you keep focused on the goal of personal growth and accept help as it comes. It’s not impossible! Revolutionary silliness is a learning and growing process in this way as much as it is an act of rebellion and class struggle!

Anxiety also factors in as a hurdle that many of us face, and it’s not something to be underestimated! Breathing exercises, mantras, and many other strategies go far to help people cope with episodes of anxiety! It’s a good idea to remember that when you’re afraid that others are judging you and you’re unsure about a situation or something you’re doing, more often than not (99.9% of cases) people are facing similar worries about themselves and don’t have the time or care to scrutinize you the way you scrutinize yourself! In short: fuck it! Do you and if you are fucking up, someone will tell you! Fucking up isn’t the end of everything and it just means you know better now! Is this “fake it ‘til you make it” approach going to totally cure your anxiety diagnosis? No, it’s not a magic bullet but it will help you deal with it and overcome an episode. Power of positivity, motherfucker!

The next major trait of revolutionary silliness is humor! Part of embracing the silliness and abnormality of life is being able to laugh at yourself, and the dumb shit around you! Living your life in pursuit of a chuckle will give you endless means of entertainment, and contributing to dumb shit (real life example: a guy licking his debit card after the chip reader failed) will give you stories to tell and deserved breaks from capitalist monotony! Humor not only makes our own experiences interesting, it helps bring people together and foster connections that were otherwise impossible or totally unexpected! The amount of friendly and random conversations I’ve had with perfect strangers by combining flexibility and comedy has made my life a wild ride and has been an absolute boon for my organizing! Humor also serves to deflate the egos and gravitas of problematic characters. Officials and self-important idiots deserve to be made fun of when they insert themselves into spaces or try to enforce authority and formality! When you get called out by a liberal for wearing a hat indoors or a party stooge comes in to coopt your organizing, roast the shit out of them! They’re not entitled to your respect or your compliance! When you show them that by refusing to take them seriously, you help others muster the confidence to do the same and to assert their own agency against the system.

Major trait number three is honesty! While some amount of non-verbal communication is kind of innate to you non-autistic freaks (kidding I love y’all), and it’s definitely learnable for us on the spectrum, there’s a point in our society where it can become pathological. Normal society teaches (and demands) us to be coy, deceptive, shy about our feelings and to treat conversations more or less like a chess board. Readers with very catholic upbringings definitely know the brunt of this, but the rest can take examples such as formal/business language that we use in the office and emails, or aspects of toxic masculinity. To maintain status quos and adhere to normality, we’re supposed to withhold our deepest thoughts, feelings, and concerns from others, forcing them to play detective roles to decipher ambiguities and implications. Being forced to assume so much and having so much be assumed about us is frankly poisonous to our relations when exacerbated by formality and hierarchy. This isn’t to say that some amount of privacy isn’t unwarranted or anything. There are definitely situations where tactful drip-feeding of info is a good idea. But driving ourselves to chronic anxiety and pharmaceutical recourse is fucking stupid. It creates generations that are insular, divided, misunderstood, lonely, scared, and easily corrupted into fascistic or otherwise poisonous ideologies! Dishonesty and mind games not only harm our neighbors, our organizing, and ourselves, they also build up and maintain the myth of normalcy! Social dishonesty prompts us to compare ourselves to Hunter — our template model of the “normal” white man — and drives us to despair when we don’t stack up!

A solid concern to have about revolutionary silliness is the practicality of it in serious and sensitive contexts. We surely can’t be completely silly in every second of every day, can we? Professionalism must have some utility! The simple answer is both yes and no. In a revolutionary society and prefigurative silliness, it’s still important to read the room, and figure out how to best coexist in a given scenario. Flexibility as a tenet of silliness comes into play here where we recognize that a topic needs care or the audience might not appreciate a certain joke. Someone who lost a parent on 9/11 probably won’t like jet fuel quips! So, to be flexible, we dial back on the humor aspect of silliness. Revolutionary silliness isn’t necessarily about living with social abandon and doing whatever the fuck. We as humans still require a sense of solidarity, community, and social compatibility. Humor doesn’t need to be dialed back completely either! Dad jokes are great for tense situations to brighten moods!

Humor as a tenet of revolutionary silliness is more individual than honesty or flexibility. Honesty and flexibility are crucial to the negation of formality and the regime of normal, while humor is a finishing touch in a way. Honesty is a hammer that looks hierarchy in the face and says “I don’t care that you’re on the board, your idea sucks and here’s why.” Flexibility is an extension of solidarity with other working class folk, going with the flow of what people can do to take a little bit of karen-stress off their shoulders. Humor is a different tool in both contexts. Humor with other plebs is an adhesive. We bond over dumb shit and laughing together is fucking great! When comedy is done right, it punches up and nudges across! We take more care to not insult or overstep with people we care about and people getting screwed over. With our “betters,” they can gargle our collective nuts. Humor against The Man is a weapon. It tells them “I don’t care that you have a big office or a fancy title. You’re no better than me and I’m gonna shit on your ego if you try to act otherwise!”

Another example is in technical documents and correspondence. Engineers and mechanics working out the parts they need for a project, the assembly of a machine, etc. need to be honest and flexible with each other to make sure they stay on the same page. Clarity and completeness of information expression is key, and humor can come in on top to accent the conversation. Medical charts and diagnosis also require care of information. You wouldn’t want some Peter-Griffin-ass doctor to come and tell you through a joke that you have cancer! Honesty and flexibility to bend with the gravity of the news are part of a good bedside manner. Comedy is medicinal, and as long as the room is read and the audience receptive, bad news could sometimes be punctuated with a harmless one-liner!

Flexibility too has it’s moments to be curtailed. Flexibility prevents needless and petty conflicts between peers, and maintains comradery. But when a fellow pleb says or does some problematic shit, flexibility starts to pipe down. People must be held accountable and when someone fucks up they need to know it and they need to know that it’s not ok. You can try to be casual at first (“Hey that was really not cool can you please don’t?”) and escalate if they persist in being a dick. Part of revolution and even solidarity is not backing down from fights that need to happen because you’re afraid of public disruption or you don’t see anyone else objecting. Even with people we might respect or who’s peerage we value, if they fuck up then they need to be accountable! Honesty takes the wheel here, and humor leans out the window with a bat if needed. “Hey you did x,y, and z, and that’s not ok because a, b, and c.” “Yeah I understand you didn’t mean it that way, but that’s not how it made people feel or the only way it can be interpreted.” Yadda yadda.

Here’s the bottom line

Our western-whiteness-centric concepts of normality and the social conventions it binds us to are anathema to a truly liberated world and anarchists must work towards its negation as part of our efforts against capitalism and domination. A revolutionary movement that seeks only limited abolition of capitalism, oppressive structures, and indeed limited abolition of “normality” has only so much capacity to build a new way of being and a new society before becoming a farcical recreation of the very machine it claims to oppose (Lookin at y’all, Leninists, you elitist fucks). Even among anarchists, this cult of seriousness and normality endures. An innocuous group photo or worded post with a dash of silliness from a single person is derided by people who leave comments calling that person ableist and uncreative insults, or saying things like “Don’t pose like an idiot it makes us look ridiculous.” Fuck you, live a little! If you let your inner child die, the nazis and the bourgeois have beaten you. Yes, there are aspects of revolutionary action and organizing that demand a curtailment on silliness, but those are often seldom. Even then, the traits of revolutionary silliness can still peak through and remind us of our humanity and what we fight for.

Abolition of normality requires that we cause persistent problems when they become necessary to excise bad actors and practices from our spaces. Maintaining “normal” social dynamics in such scenarios does a gargantuan disservice to the vulnerable and turns solidarity into a useless little word instead of a crucial action and value that we must live by. If you see an abuser, bully them!

Some among us are also neurologically unable to adhere to common social conventions and achieve “normality,” or at least are unable to do so without serious frustrations and effort to overcome the pathologizing of their identity by power structures and the disciplines of psychology/psychiatry. Abolition of normality is therefore also an act of accepting our divergent brethren, their limitations, their quirks of speech and habit, and creating a world more inclusive/accessible to them.

In terms of technique for negating social normalness, such spicy-brained friends can also contribute quite nicely to our playbooks. Their perspectives can allow us to reduce the overcomplexities of social interactions and organizing, and inject some oft-needed humor into boring-ass situations! Non-western cultures will also benefit from revolutionary silliness as broader acceptance of unique and marginalized perspectives can inspire us to think differently about how we reorganize society to better fit our needs as communities and a species.

Long has the idea of “normal” been a cudgel for othering and oppressing those who don’t fit the mold of white, western society. It’s high time we tear that bitch down!

In conclusion: Boohoo cracker lmao

[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/research-evaluation/statistics

[2] https://youtu.be/QFMHaRMlUX8?si=dnE_yuUZOqX6UmM6