Second Contact
With a hundreds-strong force of true believers, hedonistic hangers-on, and the involuntarily liberated, the Society of Free Thought touched down with a civilization born in crisis. For mission years, the other factions waited with dread and bated breath at the thought of once again meeting the mad marauders who, alongside the arch-survivalist Spartans, had brought violence to the mission at its weakest hour, leading to its inevitable dissolution. Scout patrols would report glimpses of black flags at the horizon, smoky banners flapping eerily above pink xenofungus fields, vanishing whenever one approached. Speeder crews whispered to one another campfire ghost stories of coteries of Anarchists in technicolor environmental suits snatching unlucky explorers in their sleep, leaving behind strange calling cards: red and black knots of yarn, bits of dark fur, joints and other drug paraphernalia. While occurrences of such abductions are rarely substantiated, joining the ranks of spooky frontier legends like psi ghosts, frostmonkeys, or the Batsquatch, there do exist cases of campsites mysteriously disrupted in the dead of night. Surveillance revealed neither the culprits who had ransacked the supplies and food, nor the ones who had spraypainted graffiti over field equipment.
Despite sightings and portents, in time the other factions came to assume that the Anarchists, true to their name, had simply fallen into chaos and succumbed to in-fighting and the elements. Many scavengers and- resource specialists- hoped to stumble upon the ruins of their colony pod, taking what was remained or at least finding useful scrap. But they were both disappointed and a little alarmed when the Society calmly reappeared to the Unity diaspora, the proud self-satisfied black cat come back home after a night of yowling and fighting outside and being assumed lost. After all, Dame Snow Hart had boarded the ship with a nucleus of followers already, and then built the earliest faction this side of the Al-Falah cargo hold. Getting started on Planet was harsh, but no worse than for the others, and they had recruited or press-ganged enough experts and pilfered enough supplies and luxury sundries to keep going for some time solo. Both during, and after Planetfall, it was said.
Hart's first appearance before the Planetary Council was as full of mock pomp and circumstance as that original crisis conference held in the hydroponics bay all of those many years ago. This time she wore a simple dark turtleneck and cat-eye glasses, her uniform from her days as a psych and critic. The praetorians of the Dame's Militia who escorted her wore suits of motley- patchworks of many colors adorned their armor, looking as jester-like and foolish as they were renowned to be, until with a shimmering glow all flickered into one uniform jet-black coat. The Society, it seemed, was no slouch when it came to technological advancement, even of the military variety. This active camouflage armor had been forged in the labs of Crazy Zack himself, though word spread that the underlying principles had been purloined from a flimsily-secured University node. (The Dame's Hackermen became the scourge of the Planetary datalinks for mission years to come, matched by few other factional cyberwarfare units until the coming of the Data Angels.)
She thanked the nervous and bemused applause, said she was a person of few words, and then launched into a nearly hour-long speech. With holographic visual aids spinning around her podium, Hart explained what her people had been up to. Yes, it wasn't all rock shows, jazz fests, and smoke seshes at Landing. Survival was hard enough, but it's doubly difficult when you're aiming to run a free-range anarchic collective. While she enjoyed near-unanimous support, she neither wanted to run a cult of personality, nor- she smirked at the Peacekeeper stuffed shirts looking askance at her Dame's Militiamen emitting vapor into their precious Council chamber- a narco-state of addicts and burnouts. Consensus is easy to imagine, impossible to engineer. And that, she cocked her head, was the idealist's burden. Even a stateless society is hard to build, but it is ultimately worth building. There are immense challenges to aligning everyone's interests with each other via voluntary means alone. But it is worth trying, because when achieved, the rewards are uncountable. At that, both Morgan and Yang expressed a rare nod and smile of appreciation. Though neither saw the other do so.
The Society of Free Thought had progressed greatly, but there was always more work to be done. Creating a true Union of Egoists based on mutual consent of all participants who willingly actively renew their membership on a constant basis was not easy. But they had made headway. With a wave of hand she conjured holos of the Big Forum amphitheater at Landing, capable of seating the entire base's five thousand (for now) inhabitants, and regularly used for holding concerts, poetry recitals, factional addresses. Similar images of Anarchist 'formers clearing away xenofungus, tilling the soil, and Dame's Militia valiantly holding back mindworm boils floated around her.
Egoism, Hart quoted Max Stirner, was not opposed to love nor to thought, no enemy of the sweet life of love, nor of devotion and sacrifice, nor intimate warmth. It held no opposition to critique, socialism, or actual interest. It was against the only disinterestedness and the uninteresting, against the spooks of false sacredness. Absolute liberty had no foes but those who would seek to constrain it with false dictates and worse off, by the uninteresting.
Images of the Annual Anarchist Talent Show at Seattle Art Institute danced before the Council. A miniature Hart, accompanied by trusty adjunct "Frankie" Collins, dressed like Sonny & Cher, led a silent musical number.
Hart then reached from below the podium, causing the Spartan delegation to reach for their holsters as an alarmed Lal inwardly groaned and decided this was the last time he was hosting the in-person Council. She brought forth a tattered old comically oversized boot and slammed it upon the podium with a triumphant roar, declaring that humanity needed no longer fear, the Anarchists were here and ready to lead them to a future unbounded by the spooks of social construction. The Society was there to serve as a shining example of how an Egoist Union of Man could one day operate, formed from freely-sought relations of mutual benefit, all recognizing the uniqueness of each individual. In short- friendship. As an opening gift, she offered them this shoe.
Today
From that opening display, the Society of Free Thought has since gradually integrated into the Unity diaspora, the ominous "oddball empire" of the archipelago beyond Mount Planet. Their initial exports were in the realm of pharmaceuticals and nootropics; the faction had some of Chiron's foremost neurochemists, owing to its psychedelic practices. Some of the earliest breakthroughs in understanding the nature of xenofungus were accidentally discovered by Anarchist botanists seeking to adapt the spores into consumables.
Visitors reported that the faction seemingly had the governing structure of a jellyfish- each base was made up of dozens of quasi-socialist autonomous communities operating freely, forming and disbanding as its members wished. The vital functions of day-to-day operations were seemingly picked up by those who felt strongly enough about having breathable air, potable water, enough nutrients to feed, and not be killed by alien wildlife. In time, these coteries consolidated and more or less self-governed those responsibilities as a matter of tradition- but what the Anarchists themselves called "vested self-interest." But as with any aspect of life in the Society, members of coteries free-flowed from one to another as their often whimsical interests shifted. Scientific efforts were devoted towards mechanization and automation into a cybernetic civilization where this free movement would be seamless, liberating citizens from having to pursue hard labor as self-interest, and rather focus on self-actualization as they desired. The end goal, Hart proclaimed, was a "pick-up game society."
On the flip side, while visitors observed like a jellyfish, there was no central spine to the Society, their individualistic collectivism was held together by one major coterie: that of the Dame's Militia itself. These battle-tested, hardcore former revolutionaries of Earth and of Planetfall were a ubiquitous sight at every base, mirthfully joining along the festivities, but their presence always included their sinister motley-colored armor and lethal weapons. Tales of drone riots crushed by anarchist arms were always a common story.
More substantiated are the numerous small-scale- so far- vendettas launched by the Anarchists against other factions. As the faction grew and ran into the same familiar resource constraints as every civilization on Earth, the Society found itself engaging in war less lofty than Stirner's "war of all against all", and more for minerals, energy, and so on. These vendettas were of course couched in Stirnerist rhetoric- calling notions of property spooks of the mind, and so forth- or that of other anarchist, socialist, communistic, and revolutionary leftist traditions that existed to lesser extents within the Society. Defenders against the Dame's Militia, of course, did not feel any better receiving laser or particle impactor blasts from a force that had claimed to unite in everyone's best self-interest.
Hart upheld Stirner's concept that if an Egoist Union becomes dogmatic and controlling, especially if it becomes a fixed definition of itself, then it has degenerated into a collective of unconscious egos who only limit each other. And yet, she, like the rest of the faction leaders, opted not to talk of succession especially after the invention of the Longevity Vaccine. Despite these dark clouds, the mood in the Society was largely sunny in its disposition, as the Dame had near-unanimous acclaim, and no one was uninterested in her vision quite yet. Outside critics spoke of the immense amount of psychoactive use in the Society, and some gloomy doomers predicted an imminent future of self-willing Thought Control.
Despite the ominous and ambiguous face of the Society, its ideals did find traction in other factions. Peacekeeper decentralizers, the Gaian Green Anarchy Party, Morganite post-propertarians all incorporated aspects of Anarchist thought. There were INTEGRIN micro-chapters who upheld a Hartist-Ebnerism line, rather awkward given their latter champion's current work at Morgan Industries. At Cartel Headquarters, there even existed a small voluntary commune that owned a portion of the initial hab complex which from time to time claimed to be the Society's spiritual presence within the Chiron Cartel. It was largely known for its excellent cultivation of Chironian strains of magic mushrooms.
The call to ego flourished in the more authoritarian and dictatorial factions, likely spurred on by Anarchist probe teams of the Dame's Scamps. From the darkest corners of the Human Hive to the worst treated training camps of the Spartan Federation, the idea of Stirnerist insurrection against the conditions creating discontent. Following Hart's anti-ideological ideology, the idea of an insurrection of fed-up individuals seeking to arrange themselves without any fancy elaborate revolutionary institutions became the inspiration for dozens of aimless drone riots.
Thus stands the Society of Free Thought- a looming, ever-present unknown upon Chiron. Infamous for its actions during Planetfall, an insurrectionary flame to some and an un-serious irritant to others, a source of the planet's foremost creators and its most devious destroyers. Whether one seeks a fight against mischief-makers, or to smoke with artists, there's nowhere on Planet exactly like Home- except for Nowhere.
Notes:
The frostmonkey is one of the concept art creatures of Planet by Michael Bazzell - it can be found on the "Native Life" section on the original Firaxis SMAC site.
The name for Anarchist "coteries" was inspired by Vampire: the Masquerade.
