Back in June, I wrote four pieces outlining the ideological journey I have taken from my childhood up through today. That was before my Substack had really started to grow, however, so most of you would have seen it. A brief recap…
At some point in my teens, I began slowly escaping the left-wingery of my upbringing. I then went through a deconstructive phase until, at some point in my 20s, I became a more mainstream conservative. From that point forward, I began a study of first principles—slowly at first, and then intensifying as I worked on my book.
This study didn’t make me into something different, however. Rather, it pulled me ever-deeper into what I already was…but didn’t know it yet.
The more I learned about the classical liberal principles that undergird libertarianism and American-style conservatism, the more crystal clear those principles became. Slowly, political mythology was replaced by deeper truths. Cracks formed in the edifice of my reverence for democracy and republic. The classic conception of the social contract began to crumble. Even the mystique of the Constitution started to melt. A process had begun.
And yet, for most of us, government is like a little piece of flotsam after a shipwreck. We fear that if we let go, we will drown. As I wrote in July, “It’s scary to contemplate moving on from government. With rare exceptions, it’s all we’ve known as a species for 10,000 years. We’ve imbibed every form of statist quaff—from the argument that our choice is binary (government or chaos) to the mystique that ‘democracy’ solves the fundamental moral problems of government.”
I wasn’t ready to let go of that little piece of flotsam quite yet.
For years, I had listened to the arguments of libertarian anarchists. First, in total ignorance. Then, in frustration—one tends to lash out at things at challenging ideas, especially if they are well outside the Overton Window of acceptable discourse. And so I did.
But not for long.
Anarchism is a part of the rich tapestry that makes up the liberty movement. The longer I spent in that movement—working, meeting people, and learning—the more contact I had with the anarchist case. Eventually, I had to give the arguments a grudging respect. They actually seemed to be fairly consistent.
Yet I was still hearing the anarchist case rather obliquely. Once I began actually reading into the corpus of anarchist apologetics, that was that: I could deny it no longer.
All the little realizations I had had along the way—the logical conclusions that I came to, and then rationalized away—they all finally made sense. It was right there all along!
I made this #MemeMonday meme in memory of that process. And also to honor—and perhaps coax—all those who are now where I was not that long ago.
Enjoy that moment when annoyance turns to revelation!
I am sure you believe anarchism would be better than the mess we have now, where elites rule us through manipulation. My son had a season in his life, seven long years, during which he travelled across Canada on freight trains and supported himself as a busker. During the winter, he would land in a particular city and rent an apartment with some like-minded people. He recounted to me a certain winter he spent in Ontario in the company of a number of other young men, all of whom were anarchists by persuasion. Their political activities kept them quite busy, with meetings every night. My son was not interested in their political worldview, and he noted a certain flaw in it. They were so busy with their political pursuits that they NEVER! washed the dishes after supper. They all had to go to their meetings, leaving the mundane duties of living to my son.
In the ensuing years, I had the honour of meeting some of these young anarchists and the privilege of engaging them in conversations. It was interesting to me that each one had come to a conclusion about the real world that would be formed by the success of their political strivings. To a person, each one declared that, in the new world order, they would be musicians.
What are we to do with a world of musicians? How are we going to talk some into digging ditches when ditches need to be dug? Will there be a transfer of power to those needed in the necessary evil of leadership, maybe with a proper attitude of serving the greater good, to tell us what role we play? Perhaps we get all the now-elites to dig our ditches in a righteous reversal of slave and owner, unfortunately playing a zero-sum game.
Personally, I have too much respect for the enormity of selfish elevation in terms of how our human nature really works to give that much power to anyone.
It’s important to note well, in my opinion, that anarchy is an absence of rulers, not an absence of rules, ie laws. An anarchic system might be founded on judges and protecting people from false accusations.