It still is curious, that difference in value....
Now isn’t it?
Rather?
Art and Anarchism
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
When “they” ask you what anarchism is, and you scuffle around for the most convincing definition, why don’t you merely ask instead: “What is art?” Because anarchism and art are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason.
An anarchist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between government and life; an artist is a person who realizes the gulf that lies between life and love. The former knows that he can never get from the government what he really needs for life; the latter knows that he can never get from life the love he really dreams of.
Now there is only one class of people—among the very rich or the very poor or the very middling—that doesn’t know about these things. It is the uneducated class. It is composed of housewives, business men, church-goers, family egoists, club women, politicians, detectives, debutantes, drummers, Christian Scientists, policemen, demagogues, social climbers, ministers who recommend plays like Experience, etc., etc. It even includes some who may be educated—journalists, professors, philanthropists, patriots, “artistic” people, sentimentalists, cowards, and the insane. It is the great middle-class mind of America. It is the kind of mind that either doesn’t think at all or that thinks like this: “Without the violence and the plotting there would be nothing left of anarchism but a dead theory. Without the romance of it anarchism would be nothing but a theory which will not work and never can until nature has evolved something very different out of man. It is cops and robbers, hare and hounds, Ivanhoe and E. Phillips Oppenheim all acted out in life. It is not really dangerous to society, but only to some members of it, because unless every one is against it there is no fun in it.”
There is no fun talking about anarchism to people who understand it. But it would be great fun to make the middle-class mind understand it. This is the way I should go about it: