I will speak in terms of beliefs, because at the core there is a point where the choice of our political system becomes a matter of philosophy rather than fact.

I believe that hierarchies are inherently destructive. Human beings should not organise themselves in top-down orders, but rather operate in a manner that is cooperative and consensus based.

I believe that the only true form of high leadership is self-governance. We must be sovereign individuals. Each person able to stand physically and mentally independent in their own power, rather than a supplicant to the power of others.

That being said, collective power is greater than individual power, so our individual powers should be pooled and shared to create a creature stronger than any of us are able to be alone, something akin to the traditional village.

I perceive humans to be like the cells in an organ, villages to be the organs, and the global society to be the body of our humanity. In that sense, it seems obvious that though we may be individuals, and though we may be unique, we are also the same as everything around us. This idea of self sameness resonates with me.

The mathematical patterns that govern all life on earth are scattered like clues throughout the cosmos in the fractal patterns that trees use to choose their leaf positions, or the recurring strength and beauty of spirals in shells, or the complex geometries of protein folding and DNA.

These recurring patterns speak to the common constraints that govern our universe and set us up in a particular configuration unique to our place in time and space. These patterns are also present in the behaviour of computational systems like AI systems that mimic the neural pathways of the human brain, and show the way that these basic physical constraints of the universe have set us up to evolve particular forms.

These forms have, repeatedly over more than four and a half billion years, evolved mutuality and interdependence as a survival strategy. Who am I to judge the universe on their evolutionary design skills? They have had more time than I have to field test the notion.

If it’s good enough for trees and fungusses, or bees and flowers, or gut bacteria and humans to work together, I think I can manage to figure out how to collaborate a little with people who are totally unlike myself. We just have to work out how it works, but I know there’s a way.

I have faith in collectivism, because I have the evidence of my eyes that is has served this planet for millenia.

My eyes tell me a different story about unconstrained growth. Things that grow indefinitely look to me like the infections that fell ash woods, or the collapse of waterway ecosystems when certain invasive plant species become dominant and change the oxygen levels in the water, or when farms grow monocrops that decemate the insect ecosystems and even impact on surrounding wilderness, or cancers that destroy a body.

These to me seem to be the same shape as the philosophy of capitalism which posits that there is always room to grow more profit and more wealth and a bigger market.

The earth is a closed-loop ecosystem. What goes up must come down. We are star dust to be sure…but we are also the ashes off our ancestors both human and non human, both animate and non-animate life.

All things must die and return to the earth to provide the substrate upon which a new generation will grow. In that sense, a corporation which will never die and will only ever grow seems an abomination to me.

Capitalism was birthed out of the heat of the death of the rule of kings and the collapse of empires…and it resonates still with that energy. There are ideas that still hearken back to a time when men owned other men, and the earth was thought of as food to be consumed, not a mother and a home.

The beliefs of those who shaped the philosophies of capitalist governance were archaic. Many held only room for a unitary theistic religion in their reckoning of things and took the eradication of other religious faiths as a given. All these considerations and many more to boot mean that the minds who contemplated Capitalism did not contemplate of an earth or a human race as we do. What they valued is not what we value.

And your style of governance absolutely MUST proceed to take shape out of your values and beliefs. To proceed from the bottom up, from the everyday outcomes and lived conveniences, will only leave us rudderless and lost in a way of being that is in no way going to serve our core needs and resonate with our most precious values.

And so for me, while the current observable evil effects of capitalism are heinous and only serve to firm my resolve against it, it is at this high abstract philosophical level that I find my most powerful arguments against capitalism, and where my conviction that anarchism (which is not chaos but self-sovereignty) and some form of mutuality (syndicalism, collectivism, etc.) are the only acceptable forms of governance.

Only mutuality could plausibly resonate with the things I see painted on the face of our earth in such vivid colour in everyday illustrations of what survival will look like, but also with the beating heart of my deepest, most cherished values– that are not ideas I can put into words, but which are written in the poetry of trees sharing resources via the pathways of fungusses, or bacteria sharing their genetic information horizontally, or wild animals nursing the abandoned young of other species, or the fact that every language on earth has a word for loving someone, or the truth that pupae must dissolve themselves entirely into mush to become butterflies, and seeds are destroyed growing into the mature plants they are destined to become.