THERE IS A REALITY TO THE OLD SAYING THAT MISERY LOVES COMPANY. Like much commonsensical wisdom it purports to explain a pattern of human behavior that seems to occur over and over again and whose very reoccurrence gives it the ring of truth. My parents passed this saying on to me, just as their parents passed it on to them—unexamined. However, if we dig deeper and place it in a social context, what is revealed is the secret of the misery-making-matrix; namely, once people have internalized the artificial construct that their misery is inevitable, they are doomed to a life of despair. Accordingly, we surround ourselves with those who have come to the same conclusion, so as to reinforce their acceptance of the chains of consensus reality with the weight of mutual acquiescence.

What I have called mutual acquiescence is the polar opposite of the anarchist concept of mutual aid in that it paralyzes revolutionary action rather than facilitating it. Why bother trying to change things, people cynically say to each other, it’s hopeless. They fear and ridicule those rebels who refuse a life of misery, and attempt to socialize their children to accept misery as their lot in life or even as the very price of being human. Those parents who instill an unquestioning acceptance of the status quo into the next generation do so not only as a conscious means of attempting to insure their offspring’s survival in "the real world," but as an unconscious way of normalizing their own condition of resignation. At best, using this logic, they teach their kids how to individually manipulate or circumvent the system of misery that is presented to them as a given rather than how to overthrow it by taking direct action toward the creation of a new reality or a world of new realities.

The process of the accumulation and distribution of misery creates the oppressive regime of everyday reality that governs our daily lives and is mediated by a constant barrage of both homespun sayings like "misery loves company" and the spectacular messages and amusements that constitute the incessant drumming of the As Is. In essence then, what surrealists refer to as miserabilism is a system which not only creates misery, but convinces us that misery is the only possible reality. A dull Panglossian "best of all possible worlds" replaces the potential excitement of knowing that all worlds are possible.

Anarchists, like myself, who find an affinity with surrealism’s critique of misery, seek to erase the artificial dichotomy between dream and reality as a subversive act. Surrealists, in assisting the process by which the imaginary becomes real, decry the commodification of our dreams into political party branding and consumer fantasies of plasma screen televisions and eternally perfect bodies. We are outraged that our desires are carved into market niches and sold back to us in the form of lifestyles, gadgets and products. Social revolution? Why resist domination when the seductive voice of (too) late capitalism presents us with the impoverished idea that we can change the world by our consumer choices. In this regard, we are repeatedly propagandized to shop our way out of our alienation dollar by dollar literally buying into a market system that requires only "conscious" consumption to purchase a smiley-faced revolution at the cash register. Even our most revolutionary dreams are given price tags and rung up for sale.

Survival in this system of miserabilism is based on coping. Our minds have been so colonized by the unofficial dictatorship of market profitability that we are mired in the endless maze of manufactured reality. The bird’s eye view that might offer a visionary perspective on our situation is absent. We cope in the present so that we can better cope in the future. Even for those who see the need for fundamental change, the long march through the institutions of the bureaucratic capitalist state is seen as the only "realistic" strategy. Yet what if we could set a new course "as the crow flies." It’s no accident that human beings all over the earth dream of flying. The question is how to translate the aerial insights gained from those flying dreams into direct action in order to liberate ourselves from the oppressive yoke of civilization. The crow in flight laughs at the "you can’t get there from here" miserabilism that is characteristic of the fenced-in settler mentality.

In Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred’s new book, Wasáse (2005), he points to the aforementioned coping as a symptom of colonization. In seeking to get beyond coping and to develop a theory of what he calls "anarcho-indigenism," he asks the question, what prevents us from decolonizing our minds? Interestingly enough from a surrealist perspective, he points to the atrophied power of the imagination as a key impediment to decolonization. As he explains, "We have lost our ability to dream our new selves and a new world into existence. We have mistakenly accepted the resolution to our problems that is designed by people who would have us move out of our rusty old colonial cages and right back into a shiny new prison of coping defined by managed fears and deadened emotional capacities." In the process of liberating the land from the continually grasping claws of the colonial system, he calls for the creation of an "indigenous warrior ethic" based upon emancipating the occupied territory of the mind.

If we aspire to be dream warriors, we must recognize that we have all been colonized by the hegemony of civilization— both settlers and indigenous people, though not in like manner. Though this colonization is experienced differently, and is predicated on unequal access to privilege, civilization has cut deeply into all of our psyches, in effect, threatening to lobotomize our ability to dream. For surrealists, the ultimate revolutionary goal of realizing poetry in everyday life is very much about regenerating the bedrock primal connection between dream and reality that has been eroded by the same miserabilist system of civilization that has stolen the land from beneath indigenous feet. From an anarcho-surrealist perspective, moving toward a world in which we can all lead more poetic lives involves restoring the insurrectionary power of the imagination and unleashing it to create an anarchy that is not afraid to dream.