My Path to Anarchy… and the Liars Who Usurp the Label

My father once said to me, “Son… I’ve always had a strong sense of Justice.  And I think that you have that too.”

He was right.  But when you care about Justice, you’re forced to seek after something more, something indispensable to it.  Before you can find Justice, you need to find Truth.

I’ve always believed in an Objective Reality.  That outside of oneself, things are the way they are, without regard for our beliefs or opinions.  And that the first step in achieving Grace, or Honour, or Nobility, or whatever you want to call it, is to go out there and discover how the ground lies.  To make a map that reflects the territory.  I’ve never had much tolerance for Relatavism, or Post Modernism, or Solipsism, or any other ideology that says you should believe whatever you want to believe.

And Politics, if it matters as all, is equally bound to whatever Truths are manifest by our innate social- and moral natures.  The so-called Politics of Age, Class, or Ethnicity are ugly perversions.

“You shouldn’t be so Conservative,” she said as we held each other in the post-coital afterglow. “You’re only twenty-one.  Everyone knows that you’re supposed to be Liberal when you’re young and Conservative when you’re older.  It’s more fun that way.”

“So you’re saying you’ll change your mind and agree with me when you turn thirty?”

“Not me,” she said, stroking my chest, “I’m Arab.  That’s like being Black in 1970.  I’ll always vote Liberal.”

I’d be lying if I said my politics hadn’t changed over the years – truly contemptible is the creature whose mind cannot be changed, after all.  During High School I’d spout facile arguments against Wal-Mart.  In University I became a sort of SXE-Capitalist.  Then I became vehemently pro-drug, began to see the ugly Will to Power most of our Leaders embody, and realized that all of our Great Institutions are little more than Bureaucracies, rife with all the petty, endemic problems of our old-enemy’s Politburo.

The older I get, the more Anarchist I become.

Of all the schools of political though, Anarchism is the least understood.  Imagine if you locked John Locke and Adam Smith together in a room for  three days straight.  You give them nothing to eat or drink but high-protein Kobe steaks, two or three handles whiskey, and a half-kilo of Crystal-Meth.  You leave a few copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen lying around, and play Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Doors, and Rage Against the Machine on repeat, then blend until homogenous.

At the end of it you get Anarchism.

The basic idea is that people – write this down – are perfectly fine on their own.  We don’t need no education to save us from ourselves, and we don’t need no thought control to tell us how to live.  A Free Man surrounded by a community of Free Men is going to be the most wildly productive and peaceful force on the face of the planet – they’ll be living for themselves according to their innate Human Virtue.  No rulers or tyrants to dictate who does what or who goes where – no do-gooder mobs, stealing your dollars at gun-point for some lobby group’s cause – no gangs of men with Boots and Sticks to lock you in a cage.  Just Free Men of Clean Conscience contracting with one another voluntarily, and building a better world for their children.

Oh it’s a pipe dream, more likely than not.  Day-to-day I’m more worried about what can be done, not idealized futurist fantasies.  Even if some group of Founding Fathers built the perfect Anarchist society – Sea Steaders perhaps, or maybe the Scientist-Explorers who colonize Mars – it wouldn’t last two generations before the Evil Mutants and Human Viruses appeared and began slithering through the loopholes.  And even if that didn’t happen, Freedom, sadly, places demands on the individual which few of us can bear; far too many people enjoy slavery for us to ever eliminate it.

But it’s a beautiful concept, isn’t it?

It’s a much cleaner life, living by Anarchist principles.  If you’re willing to trust the government with your moral culpability – if you trust them to murder, steal, and imprison on your behalf – that’s your business.  As for me, I go to bed with a clean conscience and wake up to a face that I can look at in the mirror.  And even if the goal is an unattainable Utopia, I can still go out there every day and try and make the world a little bit more Free, and a little bit happier.

So with all that said, I hope you understand the absolute revulsion I feel when I read something like Lino D’s excellent piece about the so-called Anarcho-Communists protesting the G20.  Now I don’t want to get too involved with the Conference itself – it’s a complex issue, and besides, Lino’s in the right part of the country to actually get his foot on the ground and cover it properly.  But as for the character of these protesters, I can sum it up in two words: Freeloading Scum.

You see, these people buy into the image, they wear the logo tees, and they frame their arguments in the context of moral outrage – but their root motivation is nothing but vicious envy.  They claim that:

Anarchism will be created by the class struggle between the vast majority of society and the tiny minority that currently rule… The methods of struggle that we promote are a preparation for the running of society along anarchist and communist lines after the revolution.

And never the twain shall meet…

Folks, Communism is the fundamental opposite of Anarchism, pure and simple.  While Anarchism holds up the Free Man as its ideal, Communism teaches that the community comes first – that each individual is owned by the majority; their land, their money, their very lives.  It is precisely this ugly totalitarianism that true Anarchists are appalled by.

For them to protest the “ruling minority’ while advocating Community Ownership of the individual speaks to their motives.  If Dagny Taggart herself walked before them, they’d tear her down with spades and clawed hands.  They’d tear down Henry Roarke’s buildings for disrespecting Women, or Africa, or Something.  Their anger is targeted at the individuals holding the wealth – not the means by which the wealth was acquired.  In their vision of the world, all preordained enemies would be toppled and a new elite – themselves – would take their place, handing down ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ as befits their emotionally-derived ideological commitments.

The label of Anarchist is a sham – nowhere do they acknowledge the stark, terrifying levels of responsibility that Freedom places on a Man.  Instead, when they say Anarchy, they mean Licence – the ‘freedom’ to do as they wish, without consequence or responsibility, not even those imposed upon them by cold and cruel Nature.  A welfare state, then – steal the wealth and redistribute it, so that all might become Trust Fund Babies, able to do as they wish in some meaningless, catharsis-free world in imitation of Second Life.

These Anarcho-Communists are children raised in the most opulent society which ever existed.  Spoilt and privileged, even the poorest among them owns devices as amazing as a Genie.  Magic boxes, divorced in their minds from the hands that built them.  These children were weaned in a socialized system, never realizing that the Baby Bonus was bled out of the Workers they claim to support, they take advantage of every Entitlement and Affirmative Action Initiative to give themselves an unfair advantage over those that toil.

These callow youths disgust me, and it will be cold comfort indeed should they get their way.  For when they receive their just desserts of an impoverished economy and a bankrupt government, I know that even then their response will be to blame the Capitalists who could have saved them.  And their only solution will be to steal even more, and borrow what they can never pay back.  After all, isn’t that what the last generation of rebels has done?

But I’m going to keep living the honest life of a Free Man, untroubled by the treacherous vermin who claim to be my friends.  I’ll keep fighting the good fight everyday, whether or not I live to see victory.  I’ll stand there and watch the sun set, smoke my cigarettes, and know that I lived a good life.  I’ll know I stood up for Truth, and did my best to pursue Justice.  And in the end that’s all that matters.