All new starts begin by exploiting the old system

I saw this tweet the other day, but it appears to have since been blocked and/or scrubbed.

Click to enlarge.

Of course it is easy to mock utopian idealists such as the Seattle Autonomous Zone. You started your commune by seizing land not belonging to you, supplied it with goods not produced by you, established the principle that people could take what they needed, and now you need more supplies from others. A system only works if it supports itself over time. Depending on permanent subsidies of others is not a successful system. Indeed, it is a form of self-servitude.

When I saw the original tweet, something niggled at the back of my mind and it has finally worked its way to the surface.

Years ago I poked fun at Henry Thoreau for something very similar. He was asking interesting questions and exploring untested assumptions. But it is marginally ironical, after a prolonged discussion of autonomous man, living independently, that he begins his adventure with the most dependent but social human act of all, borrowing from a friend. From Walden and The The Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry Thoreau.

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise.

All utopias start by leveraging the accomplishment of the despised system that went before, proceed with naive optimism and blind self-awareness, before crashing and burning.