The Broken Teapot
We present to you a reading of The Broken Teapot, 2nd Edition, put out by Sprout Distro.
From the Sprout Distro site:
The Broken Teapot (2nd Edition) is a collection of five essays that explore the limitations of current anarchist models of “accountability” in situations of rape and abuse. The zine raises a number of important questions regarding the “accountability processes” that have been developed over the past ten or so years to deal with these issues within the anarchist space. It’s an important piece to consider when thinking about how “broken” we all are.
“Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry?” asks Peter Wessel Zapffe in his 1933 essay, “The Last Messiah.” For him, the cosmic panic he saw endemic to the capacity for meaning-making burdened his species with a perpetual psychic scramble to avoid absorption into the infinite regression which under girds that capacity. For anarchists, the whole of the world as it is faces them with similarly unthinkable problems whose sheer magnitude, complexity, or both render them as in fact meaningless by dint of scopes in excess of the capacity for a given brain to cognize them, terminating thought into impermeably blank anagnorisis. Having achieved a state of no mind, only those with suitable religious inclinations bother remaining here for long.
“So much as I have been able to put together the pieces of the universe in my small head, there is no absolute right or wrong; there is only a relativity, depending on the consciously though very slowly altering condition of a social race in respect to the rest of the world. Right and wrong are social conceptions: mind, I do not say human conceptions. The names “right” and “wrong,” truly, are of human invention only; but the conception “right” and “wrong,” dimly or clearly, has been wrought out with more or less effectiveness by all intelligent social beings. And the definition of Right, as sealed and approved by the successful conduct of social beings, is: That mode of behavior which best serves the growing need of that society.”
“In these regions, you may observe Man in his constitutionally vicious, instinctively evil and studiously ferocious form – in a word, in the closest possible harmony with the natural world.” — The King