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Individuality is inseparable from community

Updated Mar 22 2025

It shouldn’t surprise me anymore that I keep running across taoism when reading about anarchism or indigenous animism, or running across anarchism/animism when reading about the tao. (But it still does, bc I wanna stay childlike like that ☺️)

The principle is that if everything is allowed to go its own way the harmony of the universe will be established, since every process in the world can “do its own thing” only in relation to all others. The political analogy is Kropotkin’s anarchism—the theory that if people are left alone to do as they please, to follow their nature and discover what truly pleases them, a social order will emerge of itself. Individuality is inseparable from community. In other words, the order of nature is not a forced order; it is not the result of laws and commandments which beings are compelled to obey by external violence, for in the Taoist view there really is no obdurately external world. My inside arises mutually with my outside, and though the two may differ they cannot be separated. —Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way