#i just think its worth discussing how patriarchy as a social system impacts every part of everyones life including young men

[nearlyhuman]

Long Post: An explanation about what anarchism is, why i’m an anarchist, and why it’s such a big part of my life all of a sudden

[[Since I don’t have much time before I need to get back to my homework, I am not going to edit this post super carefully to make sure I don’t sound like a dork or a narcissist. This post isn’t really meant for random followers, but people who know me irl. And I hope the people who know me irl don’t think i’m a narcissist and forgive me for being a dork. ]]

Beginning two years ago but not really taking root until a year-ish ago, anarchism became an idea in my mind with increasing pull and importance. As it has become a bigger inspiration and influence in my life/brain, I’ve brought it up in countless conversations and for the most part get blank stares, confusion, misconception, or the impression that the person i’m talking to wants to leave immediately because i’m scaring them or weirding them out or coming on too strong or w/e. I accepted, several months ago, that I can’t keep bringing it up if people aren’t interested. But recent weeks have made me realize that I should at least explain myself somewhere, once, in an impersonal setting, just to avoid constantly feeling like i’m weirding people out or confusing them. 

A foundational value in my life, spanning all kinds of religious metamorphoses, is the concept/verse “to those who have been given much. much will be expected.” In left-speak, I’m a Person of Privilege. I have been given access to a lot of things and have not faced hurdles many others have faced. I do not believe it is fine for me to simply enjoy my life however is easiest or happiest for myself -- I believe I had a god-given responsibility, a sacred duty to the world -- to give back, not just tithe-percentages but wholeheartedly.

That core value has driven me, again, from a young age, to self-educate about how the world works, and to be keenly invested in caring about the welfare of others, especially those who are extra vulnerable, disadvantaged, exploited, and oppressed. As I’ve slowly learned bit by bit, my attention has changed -- instead of focusing, for example, on the problem of suicide itself, I now invest more energy in the systems which create and allow for suicides to occur in epidemic proportions. While searching for the roots of the problems and the places where impact can be greatest and change is needed most urgently, I’ve been compelled to learn more and more about government, legislation, and those in power. Politics. That word everyone hates and removes from their own lives, but is really encompassing everything we do/think/are, every day, all the time. 

For a long time, the world of politics seemed like this enormous, hopeless, endless tangle of corruption and arbitrary interpretations of morality and justice and who has a right to what. It felt like there were good guys and bad guys on every side, that things were always convoluted, that no movement ever made sense for that long. None of it ever felt right, reliable, honest, trustworthy, or transparent.

And then, I learned about anarchism. 

When most people that I know discuss politics, there are roughly two sides. Sometimes people are vaguely aware of a third of fourth, but still, it’s largely a dichotomy. But what makes a Republican a Republican? What is the Republican platform, philosophically and policy-wise? What is a democrat? if you were to sit down and try to write a paper on what democrat ideology is, or what republican ideology is, could you do it? Do you know where the economics come from? Where the sense of authority comes from? Where the morality comes from? I think most of us just have these really vague notions about them, like “Republicans like small government and democrats like big government,” or “Republicans are christians and democrats are atheist.” But even these vague notions are usually pretty wrong -- for example, Republicans LOVE a large government regarding social justice issues, and there are MANY Christian denominations that are more populated by Democrats than Republicans. So what are these parties and how did they get so much power in our nation that they’re the only two platforms that Really Matter? Why do we accept the power they hold? Why do so many of us register as one or the other, and then vote down the ticket pretty much all one or all the other? When we don’t even know what they are and can only pick or choose a couple issues here and there that we feel like we maybe have kind of gotten a grasp of, like gay rights or abortion or gun control. 

So to explain anarchism and avoid that enormous mess about parties and what we think we accept even when we don’t understand it, let’s start at the beginning, and leave all preconceived notions behind. 

Who do you trust to be an authority over the world? who do you trust to be an authority over your life? Why? The people in power are not a special breed of person -- they don’t obtain power because they are more intelligent, more discerning, stronger of character, or more stable. For the most part, they obtain power because a) they want it and b) they’ve decided to spend their lives figuring out how to get it. And so now we’ve found ourselves in a society with myriad arbitrary laws dictating whether or not we can buy raw milk, who is permitted to marry who, that we can’t smoke weed but we can drink all the alcohol we want, that it’s okay to prescribe opiates regardless of alternatives/risks, that mass incarceration happens, police brutality happens, occupying other people’s countries and homes happens, patriarchy happens, white supremacy happens, that healthcare and justice can be bought only by those with wealth, and that wealth dictates everything. Seriously, from the nutrients we eat to the ratio of time we spend caring for ourselves to the lawyers we can afford to the healthcare we can afford to the education we can obtain to the amount of safety we can purchase etc etc. The more you know, the more evidence you see that having people calling the shots about how your personal world/life should go either don’t have your best interest in mind at all or don’t have the information and position they need to be in in order to make good decisions for you. Any direction that you look in -- economically, socially, geographically, culturally, you name it -- the people in power have really screwed us all over, majorly. And those of us w/ a decent amount of privilege can get by okay, most of the time. But it’s a sharp ledge to fall off when your luck runs out, when you quit winning the life-lottery that put you in a position of relative safety. Everyone hits that patch at some point. They get sexually assaulted. they can’t pay a debt. they find themselves with a chronic illness or a disease. will the system have your back when it happens to you? Look around and see that it absolutely will not. 

Okay, so, I’ve made a broad, quick case for why having a small subset of people in power over the rest of the world sucks. In anarchist lingo, we refer to that problem as being a problem of hierarchy. The idea of anarchism is to create a world without hierarchy. Again, PLEASE, keep leaving your preconceived notions at the door. Don’t bring up but what about X republican idea or X democrat idea and don’t bring up black masks and molotov cocktails, just hang back so we can keep working this out from scratch. 

So what does anarchism suggest? It suggests that we should be able to directly make our own choices in our lives. It suggests that we, the people, know what’s best for ourselves and can solve our own problems and make our own decisions and call our own shots. In effect, that means, instead of having a CEO or board make decisions about what millions of employees do, employees make decisions for themselves. Instead of having a department of education deciding what curriculum is being taught to our kids/us, we get to choose what we want to learn. Instead of having a department of state deciding when to draft us and send us into combat, we decide how to protect ourselves and make ourselves safe. We get to decide where to live, who we want to live with, who we want to work with, what we want to belong to, and how we make our communities work. Anarchism hinges upon the idea that, despite the fact that hierarchies have hit our culture hard (intelligence/information/mental health/opportunity-wise,) people WANT GOOD THINGS and can make decisions for themselves. People are a social species. By nature, we love to work together. We have families, we have friends, we seek community and partnership. We succeed when we cooperate and not when someone else makes our decisions for us and we are forced to comply. By giving power back to people, to be self-determining, we will be able to make progress together. And that governments and economic hierarchies that pose as being for our benefit/motivation/safety are actually ultimately getting in the way, and need to be dismantled and replaced with more cooperative, collaborative, empowered systems in order for civilization to avoid its descent into a melted planet where a tiny group has everything and the rest of us/our ancestors either die or get effectively enslaved. 

Honestly, the anarchist platform is kind of easier to understand than the Republican one or the Democrat one or the Libertarian one. It’s pretty simple. And we teach it to ourselves in all kinds of other situations. You know, all of that language about believing in ourselves and being empowered and being independent and knowing our worth and knowing what’s best for us and making or own decisions and respecting each other’s decisions and goals and dreams? We all talk about that all of the time! It’s just expected that if you’re a decent friend, you talk to your friends like that and you treat them like that. So anarchism really just takes what people sort of already understand on an internal/personal level and then expands that to encompass everything else, too. It’s not a big leap. Once you make it, it seems incredibly obvious. 

And that’s why it’s become so important in my life. I mean, for one, it’s beautiful and optimistic. Two, it’s really not a change at ALL from how I already lived and thought, it’s just putting how I lived and thought into a larger context. Three, it has helped the world make so much more sense to me -- it’s like Occam’s razor. If you apply an anarchist perspective to almost any problem, it’s solved pretty easily and neatly. Respect autonomy. Mind your business. Help your neighbor. Work together. Don’t oppress anyone. Don’t push anyone around. Be independent. Build what you want and what you love. 

So anyway. I’ll probably keep editing this post and improving it as time goes by because this is a rough draft on an important topic that will probably influence all kinds of things forever, unless I one day change my mind.