To Loiter: To delay an activity with aimless idle stop and pauses; Dawdle, to remain in an area for no obvious reason: hang around, to lag behind. Loiterer…
Loitering is a crime, prosecutable and enforceable in many cases. It is most associated with private property rights along with soliciting and trespassing, but often, it is just a handy tool to get rid of “undesirables”. It is often used by police to harass and intimidate sex workers and homeless indigents, and anyone else they dislike. It is not used for everyone who is idle. Whoever heard of the idle rich being busted for loitering?
There is no such thing as freedom if loitering is a crime. There was a time before the appropriation of all land as property when people could roam and claim the natural resources of the land and loiter at will. There were no boarders encircling territories or a State therein. There were no rulers or Kings—no authoritarian dominators telling you what to do.
There is a preponderance of new evidence showing that people lived as equals in communities where private property was virtually unheard of—where women had equal standing with men. Yes, that sounds improbable, but, evidently, that it was the norm for hundreds of thousands of years of human existence.
When most people look back at human history, they see only the most visible tiny anomaly in our history. They see ancient Greece, Pharaonic Egypt, Imperial Rome, Mesopotamia, Mayans, Aztecs, Inca Peru, Han China, etc. These are usually regarded as the greatest achievements of early human civilizations. People learn in schools that there was a linier progression from hunter-gatherers to farmers to Kingdoms and then States. In fact, it was not linear. People moved from hunter-gatherer foragers to village living seasonally. They were farmers for a time and switched to foraging at other times. They had many different living arrangements and frequently invented new and interesting ones. The so-called “Classic Civilizations” were rare and brief in the history of humans.
What did these “classic” anomalies have in common? They were all authoritarian domains ruled by males—Kings, Priests, and Emperors. All these rulers had colossal monuments built to themselves and to other living and dead rulers. They held territories and resources that were controlled by violence through conscripted armies, exercised dominating control of women, and practiced slavery.
The three ways that these rulers exercised their power and control was through the control of violence, control of knowledge, and/or through charismatic politics that crystallized into an institutional form of sovereignty administration.
These ancient oppressive societies with their harsh ruling classes offered no technology worthy of their cost. They gave back nothing and took everything. While men were building monuments to the dead, playing sports, capturing slaves, policing, and administering, women were inventing agricultural techniques and food supply, developing mathematics, weaving fine fabrics, basketry, cooking new recipes, rearing and educating children, making and decorating pottery and art, discovering medicines, and chemicals, domesticating animals, arranging festivals, and more. What these women received in return was to be the last at the table, lowest in respect, repressed socially, sexually, and politically and NO LOITERING WAS ALLOWED!
Modern inventors that we hold in such high esteem pale when compared to the body of knowledge we have received from women over the centuries—starting from the clothes we put on when we get up, the cereal and leaven bread we eat for breakfast to the daily economic and cultural purpose of our work, and to the beer we drink after work. It was the cereals and agricultural produce that created the excess wealth that made it possible to support the rulers and the labor they directed. What did those monuments to the dead ruler contribute to the benefit of the people under its control? These monuments and sculptures are more historical curiosities than significant cultural accomplishments or development. In the end, we must admit that these authoritarian experiments were a colossal failure. They did nothing to benefit the people, and they created harm and misery for most. Charisma is tenuous after death of the ruler; violence doesn’t work at a distance and obedience is hard to hold on to if it has no benefit.
Most of these proto states collapsed on their own when, after finding no benefit and being too repressive, people simply moved away; most probably initiated by women. Before there were territorial States with prescribed imaginary boarders like today, there was little stopping people from moving away. If they got tired of obeying and the burden and taxes were too high, what or who could stop them? Once they were not under the thumb of the ruler, who could oppose them from forming new relationships with their neighbors They could now explore new ways of living that were fair and equal? That is what they did. It’s not to say it was easy to pick up and go. But it was possible because there was still some place to go. Private property was not yet endemic. There were places to move that were habitable and free.
At some point however, places to go ceased to exist. When states turned into countries with borders, border guards, papers, razor wire, private property, there is no walking away. If one could walk away, what’s the chance one would be welcome on the other side? Freedom to move and disobey became remote and no longer a means to bring down an oppressive regime. Now, seemingly the only way to bring down an oppressive ruler is armed revolt, and the outcome of that is bleak.
Today, hundreds or thousands of years after the collapse of these ancient states, great profits are made from tourism by airlines, international hotels, and tour companies to view these monuments, but typically, the local population is left with selling trinkets for small return. Yet again deprived of benefit, in most cases it is a downright burden imposed on them again by tourists that increase living costs. It also taxes their environment with infrastructure costs.
If these proto states were beneficial to their subjects, they may have survived until today. These failed monuments are the precursor of no loitering, soliciting, trespassing enforced by prosecution and private property domination. They are the model for the State solidified by nationalism, patriotism, and loyalty oaths. They fortunately did not survive, and it gives us hope that the present state will not survive either.
To review and bring this discussion to date: Now there is a new class that is building monuments to themselves, and they are destroying the entire world in the process. They are a clique of multi-billionaires who, with their wealth, control world governments and saturate the world with overproduction that is consuming all resources and leave a polluted, overpopulated world. They will exploit our labor to concentrate their wealth to a point of no return. There will be nowhere to move, disobey or reinvent life. The world will be their exclusive domain and they are destroying the planet. Their products are as worthless as the colossal monuments of the past. They are no more than “historical curiosities”.
As I pointed out earlier, the way authoritarian states and extreme wealth-power exert sovereignty and dominance is by the control of violence (police, army), control of knowledge (propaganda, news, education, consumerism), and charismatic politics (patriotism, nationalism, racism, loyalty oaths). To exercise the right of freedom, one must have 1) Freedom to move (move away from the oppressor), 2) Freedom to disobey (refusal to cooperate with oppressor), and 3) Freedom to establish new social arrangements and relationships.
If we wish to oppose and depose the enemies of freedom, we don’t stand a chance against their “control of violence”. We are outgunned. We do however have leverage to combat control of knowledge, and charismatic politics. We have the tools of SOLICITING, TRESPASSING AND LOITERING.
With the internet, social media, and mobile technology, we can interfere with their control of knowledge. Trespassing and loitering can disrupt commerce and labor. We can disrupt patriotic holidays to counter charismatic politics and its monuments to war. We must counter nationalism to take back the freedom to move, disobey authority whenever possible, ignore boarders, rip up and burn the flag, depose patriarchy and patriarchal religion, trespass private property, reject capitalism in word and deed, fight racism and its economic and political cause, work to rule, slow down and loiter. Use their tools against them.
We need monuments to women to counter the monuments to rulers and wars. Instead of usual towers and edifices of monuments, one might envision giant middens filled with the rubbish of patriarchy- the burned-out weapons of war, consumerism and the ejaculated remanence of private property and the State. We must delist ourselves from their world and build a new tomorrow.
Please Solicit, Trespass, and Loiter!
Robert Green