(This article was written while listening to Hammock’s magnificent ‘Raising Your Voice… Trying to Stop An Echo’ and ‘Chasing after Shadows… Living with the Ghosts’ albums. Bliss for my ears. )
This question has been asked of me: “First question: your paradigm sounds to me *very* similar, if not identical, to anarchism. Do you identify it as an anarchist paradigm, and do you personally identify as an anarchist? If not (and even if so), how do you distinguish yourself and your philosophy from anarchism; are there any fundamental differences and/or differences in focus? “
I really enjoyed this question because it gave me the opportunity to publically refract the sui generis in a number of ways I don’t usually go. Here’s my reply.
While it might appear in function that anarchism and Sui Generis are identical, it is at their foundation the differences emerge. Anarchism is a subjectively interpreted philosophy; debatable, contested, argued, disputed and challenged even amongst those that label themselves anarchists. This is the problem with philosophies: they’re debatable.
In the past I’ve intentionally experienced anarchist groups and perspectives, wondering if these contained the essential elements I was looking for; what I found was a group of individuals whose subjective experiences and interpretations frequently caused the group to go into intense upheavals that often resulted in fractures and splits within interpersonal and group dynamics. I observed that it was often the inability to reconcile the subjective philosophy of the individual to the external experience within the group; what I also observed was that it was the philosophical nature of anarchism itself- made fluid, shifting and interpretable by the subjective experience of the individual- that caused the problems. There was a failure on a deep level to establish the paradigm on something that removed the ability of subjectivity being an issue from the equation.
When I was looking for what would underpin a profound shift in consciousness that was scalable from individual to planetary community I intentionally rejected philosophies as a potential remedy because they rely on a specific kind of consensus in order to function even when, as is the case with anarchy, the foundational premise appears to be relatively simple- in anarchy’s case, the idea of ‘no master, no slave’. There are problems within this apparent simplicity on an experiential level, which I’ll explain as I go through my answer, but suffice to say these problems were enough for me to reject anarchy as a solution pretty quickly, along with pretty much every platform on the planet because they rely on some kind of consensus. I’ve had enough experience with individuals to recognise that consensus realities aren’t a good idea: I wanted something that Empire could not use to recreate itself.
Sui Generis isn’t a philosophy, it’s a principle, based on observable data, that backs the intuition and instinct many philosophies and alternative/counter cultures are based on. The principle of Sui Generis is elegantly simple in concept but incredibly powerful in action: sui generis removes the subjective dispute from the platform and places the responsibility for any cognitive dissonance experienced back onto the individual experiencing the dissonance, not the platform itself. It is a principle found in the natural world, in the function of law and in the intuition and instinct of many-if not most- of the self aware individuals on the planet, although for the purposes and intention of the law makers the full import of the principle was deliberately hidden away in commerce and copyright law, where it could be employed towards things while keeping the full implications for sentient individuals out of the public domain.
Sui Generis simply states clearly that unique creations are their own authority and jurisdiction. How does this become a platform for social transformation?
When this term was first gifted to me through another individual who thought I could do more with it than they could, I’d spent two years buried in the law looking for the remedy I intuitively knew was buried in there. I’d been experimenting with the ‘freeman/sovereign’ movement and had gotten into trust law as a result; in trust law I found a contortion of construement, enslavement and conversions that left me boggled. I found legal definitions that construed ‘human beings’ as cattle, that defined human beings as ‘monsters’, interlinking laws that decreed adults were always, in the eyes of the law, wards of the state. Twice I had a mini breakdown just in sheer horror at the story that was unfolding on a planetary scale all done in the name of law. I had reached a point of overload that left my intuitive ability struggling but still clear that there WAS a remedy within it all because I’d seen with my own eyes that in court there was something that those in the system were obeying, it just wasn’t information that was available to the non-lawyers, the ordinary individuals, that were going through the system.
Then someone I knew sent me just those two words- sui generis- and said “I think this will interest you.” And the entire remedy unfolded out before me, hidden deep within commercial and copyright law: unique creations are THEIR OWN AUTHORITY. In copyright and commercial law, the sui generis of a particular creation is used in part to determine its commercial ‘worth’; it is the degree of sui generis expressed within that particular creation that is used to determine copyright infringement cases, or plagiarism, or the degree upon one creation has inspired another.
Sui Generis is the principle upon which the right of a creator- artist, writer, designer, architect, choreographer or any individual that produces original works- is established: the principle of sui generis, unique, of its own kind, is the foundation upon which intellectual and physical copyright is built. Nobody disputes the rights of an author to exercise copyright over their material unless it can be established that their work is not, in fact, original: that which is not original becomes generic and the worth of that thing is immediately reduced to a copy. This changes the way the law views this thing, regardless of what it is: knockoff Rolex’s will never be worth as much as the original, for instance, no matter how good a copy they are; knockoff Rembrandt’s are the same.
As I was contemplating these operations of law based on a foundation principle of ‘unique’ I had an explosion of awareness go off in my head, based on the myriads of other functions of law I’d researched as being in operation towards human beings: individual human beings were having their sui generis stripped from them by the full knowing of the functions of law: what I mean by this is that the ‘law’ and those enforcing it on a court level were fully aware of what wasn’t being afforded the individual and there were very, very specific reasons for that which revealed themselves in the commercial trading that goes on around human beings and their activities.
In the public domain law, human beings are not sui generis individuals, they are generic, a group, a classification, a designation: in the deep law, they are also construed variously as cattle, as resource, as tradeable item. The issue of individual sui generis is used against an individual or to establish a matter, such as in the use of an individual’s unique DNA, fingerprints or other biological markers to convict them of criminal charges, or to establish paternity, or to protect a particular copyright: the court knows that the individual is unique because it’s fully aware of the principle of sui generis in the physical realm, which is that no two living organisms are the same. They can be similar, but not identical- and this creates all kinds of legal function requirements.
It is from this knowing that patenting of life sprang: the majority of individuals believe that the patenting of life is possible because the principle of sui generis isn’t in public operation, which is exactly the way those in control wish it to remain: the actual issue with DNA and other life based patenting is that no two living organisms are identical and hence the complexities of actually making those patents stick if disputes arise between different corporations.
This is also why the US Govt went for the ‘70% similar’ spread with its patents on Ebola: it was going for the greatest spread against the individual differences between organisms that it could without taking it into the sui generis territory. This 70% spread has really big implications and expression when it comes to the human being domain and explains in part what the obsession with social engineering is about: individuals are not individuals if they behave, think and operate as a hive mind. In law, there are specific formulas and applications that are used to determine if a work is original or not, if it meets the definition of ‘plagiarism’ or not, and these formulas have to do with the degree of originality within the work or item itself. In writing this is often the 10% rule, when it comes to actual content- in works of art or design there are other formulas but the ones regarding living organisms are much more complex. If the US Govt has gone for the 70% spread then we can be assured that it’s a good ballpark figure to consider the courts are willing to accede to.
It is important also to consider that in copyright and commerce it’s not simply the equation of a strict number of words or phrases, or how a thing looks, it’s the non-tangibles that are also taken into consideration; in the case of written works, for example, the themes, tones and intention of the writing is taken into account. This is intellectual copyright, the understanding that ideas, concepts, platforms can themselves be copyright: the products of an individual’s thinking is unique and can have copyright applied to it. This is why nobody disputes Einstein’s work and why his thinking about that work is uniquely his as well: nobody serious would help themselves to his notes and try to pass off his thinking as their own.
Why is this so important? What does this implicate for human beings?
There is no disputing-within either law or actual science- that individual humans are absolutely unique (ScienceForHireTM isn’t science at all, it’s the Cult of Scientific Propaganda so I never consider that as actual science). Everything about an individual human being is unique, but this doesn’t serve the interests of commerce, which relies on the ability to classify various groups into classes in order to assign value to them, yet commerce in action is silently testifying all the time that it’s totally aware individual human beings are unique: what else do eye scanners, fingerprint scanners and voice recognition systems operate on? Commerce and the function of law around us is continually telling us what actually IS, which is that every single living human being is not a category or part of some other whole, but is a unique, one of a kind, Sui Generis Being, without peer, of their own jurisdiction, their own authority, their own designation.
Here’s the thing: the statute law (which makes up the body of ‘law’ that operates in corporations, of which every govt in the world is one) has no authority over living, sui generis individuals: the law that applies to these individuals is the principle of sui generis itself, that each Being is authority over their own Self only; any act of domination and control over another constitutes harm and immediately takes an individual out of their own sui generis and brings them under external authority law: the law that applies to things, categories and property. If an individual demonstrates an inability to function as a sui generis Being then they must be treated as immature, a child, a ward, in need of management: what has happened within our culture is those in power have construed and tortiously converted the trusts in such a way that nobody outside their system is seen as an adult because they’re not told about their sui generis, not shown how to be truly mature, responsible Beings. This suits the agendas of those in control on any number of levels but creates a system in which the overbearing hand of the ‘guardian’ is becoming the greatest danger: the psychopaths are in control because control is the opposite of sui generis.
The stifling of the sui generis in living Sentient Beings has an even greater function: the stifling of the evolution of consciousness within the planetary community. This leads into a different discussion of the deep nature of contracts, which I won’t get into here, but the purpose and intention is the same: preventing the evolution of the individual and the planetary community. There’s enough information out in the ether that points to the incompatibility of a community of free thinking, self aware and personally responsible individuals and a culture of domination and control; those in power are addicted to their own perceptions and propagandas in this regard.
(This is why the models of ‘universe at war with itself over scarce resources’ and the ‘dominator/dominated, predator/prey’ models of evolution served the controller’s purpose so well; it’s much much harder to achieve one’s aims of absolute control over a sentient population when that population believes evolution to be inspired by co-operation and symbiotic connection. )
Returning to the question, though, this is why I do not experience sui generis to be identical to anarchy, because sui generis is the anchoring platform anarchy has been looking for: sui generis is the principles, observable, demonstrable and indisputable, upon which the right of an individual to their own autonomy, self determinism and personal authority is founded. We are self determining because we are unique: there is no individual that can determine for us our best course because no other individual IS us; no other individual has our uniquely subjective process, the combination of elements that result in the entirely one of a kind Being that we are. Just as no other individual can dominate, control or classify us, we are not free to dominate, control or classify another living Being regardless of form: sui generis applies to ALL organisms, from microbes to galaxies- we are authorities over our own Being, nothing more: everything else is co-operation, co-creation, respectful dialogue, the awareness of one another’s right to self determination.
This is what anarchy was pointing towards intuitively but couldn’t substantiate. I wanted a platform that individuals couldn’t argue over; I was intuitively aware that there was a principle in operation on the planet that would dissolve Empire’s ability to function and in the principles of sui generis I have found it. No matter how I’ve hacked this platform, no matter how many ways I’ve moved the pieces around and challenged it, it remains intact and impervious to the machinations of individuals who conflate legal argument for actual exploration (legal argument is a function of law, designed not to establish the heart of a matter but to demonstrate linguistic and conceptual skill at the expense of clarity).
I’m looking forward to more explorations.
This is a beautiful piece of text and I would like say that as an ethical individualist this will help speed up the cognitive evolution of any Entity that perceives the context and relevance to our current fucked up power structure .
Thank you- I’ve recently been immersed in more system testing of the sui generis platform and have continued to find it immune to Empire in absolutely every way. This is the only thing that interests me now- the dissolving of Empire *without* using Empire’s tools…