“Ask for work. If they won’t give you work, ask for bread. If they won’t give you bread, take bread.”
–Emma Goldman

Dear Mental Health Therapist (?),

Sorry. I’m terrible with names. We spoke this morning and thinking about something you said prompted me to consider writing an article for publication, and also wanted to respond more fully to what you said– so, two birds with one stone, as it were, I’m writing an open letter that serves both purposes. YOU get stuck with the barely legible hand-written version. Again, sorry.

We were discussing the designation of ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER that has been placed upon me despite the provable absence of a “pervasive pattern” of “violating the rights of others” via evidence of 3 or more specifically-defined behaviors that are NOT indicative of me (1). So, at one point, seemingly giving up on the idea of rationalizing the diagnosis by pointing to behaviors that would justify it, you asked me, “If you saw another inmate steal an extra tray, would you report it?”

And to be clear here, at this disjuncture, you began exploring my beliefs and thoughts rather than behavior, which is very odd when we consider that the diagnostic definition of ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER exclusively relies on BEHAVIORS as indicators of disorder rather than beliefs. But, okay. We’re inquiring into my thinking.
I responded, “Absolutely not.”

And you said that was why I am labeled ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER (2), because I demonstrate a nonconformity to social norms.

As a quick sidenote, I should also point out that disorders are diagnosed based on behaviors a subject HAS performed, not based on potential behaviors a subject might perform in a theoretical, future scenario. So, your attempt to justify a false diagnosis still fails.
But all of that aside, let’s deal with the scenario of the stolen tray. In what you presented to me, you said that it is a social norm that someone should report another stealing an extra tray of food and that my refusal to do so demonstrates a nonconformity to that norm.

Let’s deal first with your unstated assumptions, because those are really interesting:
The obvious assumption is that it is a “social norm” in all circumstances to report the theft of an extra tray. I think I would have to take issue with this. For instance, I do not believe that it is a “social norm” to report someone who is hungry and poor for stealing extra food from a wealthy system that keeps that person hungry and poor. I think that in such a scenario, the “social norm” is to cheer for the hungry and the poor, which somewhat goes to explain why characters such as Robin Hood, who exemplify such a social norm, are folk heroes and archetypes.

I look around, and I see a lot of poor and hungry people. I see poor and hungry people exploited by the Aramark Corporation that generate profit by skimming food from all of us, as demonstrated by numerous investigations into corrupt practices. So, in such a context, I can imagine that the only people who would perceive a “social norm” to report a poor, hungry person would be someone attempting to rationalize their own role in a draconian, oppressive system that causes more harm to the common good than benefit.
Someone like yourself. No offense.

The other related assumptions to your question to me are that someone, such a guard, has the right to withhold and dole out food to others in the first place, and that the “someone” who has the right to withhold and dole out food is not the poor, hungry person who is “stealing” it. Those two assumptions are central to your conclusion. Consider: If the STATE has no right to withhold or to dole out food, the prisoner has not “stolen” the food but has simply appropriated it. Likewise, if the prisoner is vested with authority to dole out food, his appropriation of a second tray is simply an exercise of his own authority. So, in order to properly answer your question regarding the morality of a prisoner taking extra food from the State, we must first determine who has valid, legitimate authority to decide where that food is supposed to go. Right?
Let’s consider this question of authority.

Authority.

For 4 million years, humans lived in tribes generally free of oppression, absent hierarchy, and maintained through consensus. Don’t take my word for it. Read cultural anthropologists and archaeologists– like Marshall Sahlins or Riane Eisler, for instance.
Somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, a militant faction forced others to plant crops as a matter of “food control,” settling in one place. We call this the Agricultural Revolution, where an armed minority subjugated a vast, unarmed majority to imposd tyranny and a new way of life.

Those founders of civilization demonstrated a “pervasive pattern” of violating “the rights of others” with their “failure to conform to social norms,” using others for “personal profit,” demonstrating “aggressiveness” and a “lack of remorse.” This means the founders of civilization had ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER.

As this new way of life spread, the population boomed and brought about global exploration. According to Bartolome de las Casas, who traveled with Columbus, the founding of the “New World” was marked by the wanton and ruthless slaughter of the indigenous people. They ripped babies from their mothers’ arms and hacked them to pieces for use as dogfood.
I refer you to the definition of ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER.

Swivelization as we know it was established by sociopaths… And the Americas were “discovered” by sociopaths. Then, George Washington and company decided to rebel against the established government of the 13 colonies and employ political violence, shooting and killing those who defended the “legitimate” government. (3)

They attacked their own government, abandoned traditional warfare for shooting others in the back, and rationalized all of this mayhem by establishing a separate nation, all to avoid the financial obligation of paying taxes to the crown.
I refer you to the definition of ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER… George Washington… Thomas Jefferson… Ben Franklin… John Adams… Thomas Paine… Patrick Henry…

To sum it up, genocidal maniacs reduced tribal people to slavery and spread their hierarchical model; then another generation exterminated people of the Americas to take their land; and then another generation betrayed their own government and resorted to political violence and rebellion to establish themselves in place of that government.

So, we get to Ohio (4), where traitors against the British crown invaded an area they did not own, using small-pox infected blankets to murder women, children, and the elderly, decimating a peaceful population. This was the first documented instance of biological warfare and Hitler later praised this expansion in his book, MEIN KAMPF.

In 1802, Thomas Worthington wrote the Ohio Constitution as a justification to exterminate the remaining owners of the land he wanted to steal. He then established the “State of Ohio” in an area set aside in 1795 by the Treaty of Greeneville as “Indian Territory.” The “State of Ohio” was established contrary to U.S. treaty and is therefore illegal by U.S. law (5).

So, again, to sum up the history, we have maniacs who committed genocide and imposed hierarchy; followed by sociopaths who obliterated the people of the Americas to steal it; followed by murderous opportunists who established their own ponzi scheme through treason; followed by mass murderers praised by Hitler for their brutal takeover of “Ohio.”

Where, in this accurate history of violence, theft, and sociopathy do we find the “legitimate” basis for the “authority” of the “State of Ohio”?

And if we cannot locate the origin of the State of Ohio’s legitimacy, by what authority does a corrections officer, an inheritor of fraudulent authority, exercise the power to withhold food from a poor, hungry human in a cage being exploited by Aramark corporate profiteering?

I would suggest to you that it is a clear pathology in your thinking and the thinking of that corrections officer that we owe allegiance to genocide, colonization, atrocities, and extermination committed by immoral butchers, or that we should assign any kind of “legitimacy” to their claims of authority.

Also, to fully appreciate the depth and scope of this mental sickness you hierarch state-worshipers suffer, I think we have to at least briefly consider the idea of “authority” itself, the idea of the “right to rule” (6). I would assert that this “right to rule” is as real as unicorns, faerie dust, and magical beans (7).

Where does the “right to rule” come from? How does one human assume the right to rule not just himself, but to rule another, while the human he rules is assumed to have lost even the right to rule himself?

We know this “right to rule” is not eternal. It only came about in the last 6,000 years or so, coinciding with domestication. That means, for 4 million years, humans lived without the myth that some humans have the right to rule other humans. That means this “right to rule” mythology has governed less than a quarter of a percent of human existence.

So, either (1) 6,000 years ago we figured out something unknown to thousands of generations who lived peacefully and happily, or (2) 6,000 years ago we fell under a delusion that served an exploitive few while subjecting the many to slavery.
You hierarchs assert we experienced “progress.”
I assert we fucked up (8).

As I pointed out when we spoke, there is only one specie of human being. Not two. There are not those “with the right to rule others” and those “without the right to even rule self.” As such, no human can ever assume the right to command another, to compel, to demand, to punish another human for not bending to the will of the first.

Now, to be fair, hierarchs often raise arguments to support the idea of “implied consent” to be ruled, and for the legitimacy of “elected” rulers assuming the right to rule. To avoid repetition of things I already wrote, I’ll simply refer you to OHIO, PART II, free at seanswain.org, and to the excellent arguments of jurist Lysander Spooner, who wrote CONSTITUTION OF NO AUTHORITY, and makes a profound argument based upon the principles of contract law.

But, to sum it up succinctly, just because YOU might vote for John Kasich, that does not create a contractual obligation for ME to obey him or to recognize any authority over myself, that I may otherwise have, as being transferred to HIM. YOU can no more waive my right to self rule than you can sign my name to a contract.

So, apart from the undeniable historical fact that so-called human authority has been passed down through bewildering and irremediable acts of genocide, oppression, and butchery that are inexcusable and illegitimate, from one generation of the worst sociopaths to the next, the very institution of human authority itself is provably based upon a myth, a falsity, a premise as unreal as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. No human has the “right to rule” another human. (9)

Back to the Question of the Food Tray.

No human being has the right to rule and thus no right to withhold food from another human being locked in a cage and exploited for the profits of the privileged few. No human being can reference the “legitimacy” of their authority inherited from murderers, rapists, sociopaths and war criminals.

Objectively, that corrections employee doling out the food is contributing to the continuation of a vast lie of “authority,” perpetuating an atrocity, against real freedom and against life, that began 6,000 years ago at sword-point. It’s a vast lie and crime against humanity that you also perpetuate.
Never forget, the Nazis had shrinks at their concentration camps too.
And the butchers who founded Ohio were Hitler’s personal heroes. Keep that in mind also. (10)

So, in this context, we now return to the question of whether a human being held in a cage by other humans with no legitimate authority, inheriting their false mythology of legitimacy from sociopathic criminals,should be reported when he takes extra food from those who do not have the authority to withhold it in the first place. To me, the question is not whether we should side with the poor, hungry human locked in a cage, but whether or not our solidarity and empathy and dedication to the cause of true freedom demands an even more active commitment.

Against the Hierarch Pathology.

Consider what the hierarch pathology and its myth of the “right to rule” has brought us: overpopulation, depletion of the ozone, school shootings, rape culture, racism, hate crimes, terrorism, war, weapons of mass destruction, famine, poverty, road rage, suicide, toxification of the water, toxification of the soil, toxification of the air, species extinction at a rate of 124 species per day, depletion of the rain forests, recourse to torture, riots, pandemic diseases, alcoholism, drug abuse, unemployment, economic instability, political instability, and on and on.
Tecumseh didn’t experience that.
Crazy Horse didn’t experience that.
Geronimo didn’t experience that.
Humans who lived for 4 million years as hunter-gatherers in consensus-based social settings didn’t experience that.

In 6,000 years, the hierarch pathology with its myth of the “right to rule” has taken us to the brink of OMNICIDE. So, the question is not whether we should look the other way while a hungry victim of this pathology manages to eke out a few extra calories (11), the question is whether we have an obligation to work actively to take down this murder machine once and for all before it makes the planet a lifeless rock, using our forced cooperation to do it. The question is whether we’re going to stop being veritable “good Germans,” the system’s “little Eichmans” marching in lockstep to our collective doom for the myopic benefits of the delusional hierarchs who turn our world into a concentration camp; the question is whether we are going to drag stones up the side of the pyramid or actively oppose this vast crime. (12)

I’m not proposing you merely have a moral responsibility to quit your job (13), and to convince your co-workers to quit their jobs, but larger duty to commit yourself to a meaningful struggle for the liberation of all of us, to include recourse to the strategies and tactics of political violence.
As Emma Goldman said it emphatically: “TAKE BREAD.”

Feel free to come talk to me again next week. Who knows? If you truly commit yourself, we may be able to get you past your pathological delusions so you can experience a healthy, rewarding, productive, and well-adjusted future.
And, perhaps, burn down the statehouse.
We can hope anyway.

The truth is dangerous…
Get dangerous.

Freedom,

Sean Swain (14)
PS: In light of this comprehensive deconstruction, please stop using this false “stolen tray” scenario to convince people to think of themselves as somehow maladjusted because they don’t share YOUR delusion.

END NOTES
(1) ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER, as defined in the DSM V:
A) There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and the violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three or more of the following: failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest; deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases or conning others for personal profit or pleasure; impulsivity or failure to plan ahead; irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations; lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another;
B) The individual is at least 18 years of age;
C) There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years;
D) The occurence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or a manic episode.

(2) You will recall that you told me that ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER is on Axis II and is therefore nothing serious to worry about. This is not true. In the DSM V, ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER still falls under the dramatic/erratic cluster of personality disorders but is no longer on a separate axis from the other mental disorders. Please do not hesitate to ask me if you need me to help you with any other matters related to your field of expertise.

(3) I have quotations around “legitimate” because the government was legitimate by your way of thinking.

(4) For a more exhaustive treatment of this, read my 3-part series, OHIO, Parts I-III, available for free at seanswain.org.

(5) As I point out in OHIO Part I, this point was conceded by U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle during the Indian Claims Commission.

(6) This is more thoroughly treated in OHIO Part III.

(7) I have also addressed this topic in a radio podcast, “The Right to Rule,” available in archive at ashevillefm.org/the-final-straw.

(8) So do all the people who know what they’re talking about– Eisler, Sahlins, Daniel Quinn, John Zerzan and the dozens of writers who contributed to AGAINST CIVILIZATION, as well as traditional anarchist critics of the State such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Goldman, Berkman, Fabri, Malatesta, Kropotkin, Rayson, Shef, DeCleyre, Parsons, etc. We’re not re-inventing the wheel here. This is only news to hierarch state-worshipers who don’t know anything.

(9) Just for fun, consider the implications of this for most major religions– as, in most, the “God” they present is too dumb to know that human authority is a fallacy. You would think the Creator of the Universe WOULD know that.

(10) In all this context… A delusion at the base of your worldview and deference to sociopaths and maniacs praised by Hitler… What’s YOUR diagnosis???

(11) Ironic that the initial act of the sociopaths who constructed this social disorder was to LOCK UP THE FOOD in order to control other humans. Also ironic, your assessment as to whether I suffer ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER hinges on whether or not I defer to those sociopaths and their legitimacy.
I think that says more about YOUR pathology than it does about mine.

(12) Elsewhere, I have written that any relevant mental health model must recognize that someone oppressed has an inherent right and intrinsic drive to defend self and self-worth, via recourse to resistance. One of those articles I named from a quote by Algerian psychiatrist and guerrilla fighter Franz Fanon, who wrote in Wretched of the Earth that the liberation of the colonized springs forth “from the corpse of the colonizer.” Check out my work, “The Colonizer’s Corpse,” available free at seanswain.org.

(13) Henry David Thoreau, who demonstrated nonconformity to societal norms by refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the Mexican American War and in protest of slavery, obviously demonstrating ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER, also persuaded the tax collector to quit his job… And succeeded.

(14) Please note that, according to your file, which says I have ANTI-SOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER, I have a 107 I.Q. That means I’m 3 points below adjusted average. Fifty-one and a half percent of the human population are smarter than me, which translates to roughly 3,650,000,000 people who should be better able to perceive the reality that I have presented and should be better able to articulate it.
I’m in the back half of the brains bell-curve, according to your file. So, given that there are billions of you vastly smarter than me, why is it that THE WORLD IS SO FUCKED UP?
Either I’m a dimwit exceeding expectations with this level of articulation or else, perhaps, we should suspect the I.Q. designation to be somewhat erroneous.
Your call. You’re the expert.