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Thu 25 Sep 2008 21:57
by Kevin McGehee
[Asides]
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Just watched another episode of “Sons of Anarchy,“ the TV program I mentioned in this entry.
Another theme being prodded from time to time on the show is anarchism. Apparently Jax’s late father was drawn to the “outlaw” lifestyle of the motorcycle gang culture by the idea of being free of society’s stifling rules and institutions. In the series we’re actually seeing a late-stage development in that kind of society as it would play out in real life, with the ruthless alpha—Clay—ruling all but unchallenged over his riders, and ruling with little real opposition over the town of Charming. Presumably by reading his father’s idealistic writings about anarchism Jax will be drawn to try to get back to those ideals and re-establish an earlier stage of anarchic society.
I don’t expect to deal with anarchism in my stories because I’m not drawn to examine fatally flawed political ideas in stories that I’m trying to keep grounded in real life. However, real life is populated by people who are, like Jax’s father, drawn to political ideas that don’t hold up well against the realities of human nature.
So, I toyed idly with the thought of whether the wildest über alpha in my story so far—Seth Scruggins—would be drawn to anarchism.
No.
For one thing, Seth isn’t a classic leader type like Clay, for whom the broad outlines of anarchist thought serve mostly as a basis for keeping his followers behind him. In a way this twist in the “Sons of Anarchy” theme actually appears to add support to the ideal, in that if an anarchic society were led by someone genuinely devoted to that ideal, that society could thrive. But this means that anarchy depends for its success on the will and charisma of a natural leader to remain truly anarchic. In between such leaders, anarchy inevitably leads to the downward slide depicted in the series, which in actual human history led inevitably to the development of larger social structures and to institutions rooted in formal law (however legitimate that might ever have been) that could outlive those who built them, and maintain sincere support from more than only those who benefited from them materially. As the failures of proto-anarchic societies became apparent, the successors of those societies addressed those failures successively over generations until the present. The first issue was almost certainly the question of how to hold the society together when its leader was greedy or weak. In “Sons of Anarchy,“ Clay’s flaw is greed. He and Jax’s mother fear that Jax’s flaw will turn out to be weakness.
Seth can sympathize with Clay’s greed, so his own motivation for leading men, if he sought to do so, would be much the same: to elevate himself to the top of the heap.
Being a practical man, Seth wouldn’t wish to overthrow the existing order and then merely hope the resulting disorder leads to something he can exploit; he wouldn’t waste his efforts on a half-revolution, but would carry out a complete one, in which the overthrow of the existing order leads irreversibly to the replacement order he desires.
But why bother with going to that much effort? There is no order available to humanity in which a true alpha like him will not thrive—within the strictures of that order, or outside them. Men who make their own rules will make their own way, as long as they’re not squeamish about crushing anyone that challenges them. That’s where Clay is vulnerable, because in order to maintain the support of his riders he has to walk a line between his will on the one hand, and the ideals on which those riders joined up on the other. As the series begins, Clay’s position not only as leader of the gang but also as sole interpreter of its ideals, is virtually unchallenged—until Jax finds his late father’s journals. The implicit ending will pit Clay against Jax, and as with Gemma as I discussed previously, the riders will judge.
Seth wouldn’t leave himself vulnerable to the opinions of others. I envision him as excelling at the part about crushing those who challenge him.
Anyway, while political ideas may find expression in my fiction, at least about the people of Clearwater, they won’t be overtly thematic. Human nature ultimately underlies—or undermines, as the case may be—all political thought, so the most substantive way to write about politics is to go to the source code.
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