For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a disdain for what most people perceive as “authority”. I’m sure it was my environment growing up that shaped my contempt, but that is another story for another time.
I was never interested in getting involved in politics until I found out about Ron Paul in 2006 or so. Here was a guy who was talking about things that were very appealing to me: get the authoritarian government out of our lives and let people live the best way they saw fit for themselves, and to do so without hurting anyone or anyone’s property.
If you were part of the 2008 or 2012 Ron Paul campaigns, you quickly learned that the system wasn’t just corrupt from the top down, but was equally corrupt from the bottom up. This disenfranchisement led me to the philosophies of Anarchism and Voluntaryism.
I may have heard tiny blips in passing about Anarchism and Voluntaryism before, but for the most part, these subjects never crossed my path. The more I learned, the more I was shocked/not shocked that this information was just coming to me now. Shocked that something so logical, moral and based in freedom for humanity wasn’t spreading like wildfire and immediately being embraced by the masses. Not shocked because all of those things are against the best interests of government and those who benefit from the ignorance of an enslaved population who’ve been duped into believing that they are free.
In learning about Anarchism/Voluntaryism, not only did I start to increasingly apply logic and critical thinking in the realm of politics, I started to boost it in all aspects of my life. Sometimes you can become too analytical. If you’re already an Anarchist or Voluntaryist, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Something as simple as sitting down and trying to enjoy a movie can be a challenge to not scrutinize it and run it through your Statist Propaganda Filter, haha. And that’s one of the parts of it that make the road to Anarchism and Voluntaryism a hard one. Once you’ve been “woken up”, so to speak, you can’t go back to sleep. Nor would you want to. But it can be exhausting at times.
I’d say one of the other hard parts of the road, if not the hardest, is that you really unplug yourself from the mainstream way of thought, and in some instances, you unplug yourself from being able to relate with people in the same ways you used to. Conversations even remotely political can get dicey in a hurry, so you have to learn to turn it off and when to turn it on in order to have relatively normal relationships with people.
There will be bumps in the road on the way for sure, but it is far worth it. Your mind will be opened, will grow, and you’ll become a better version of yourself. Hopefully a more peaceful, critical thinking, moral, and intelligent person.
The journey down the road to Anarchism/Voluntaryism is one that is definitely less traveled. It can feel lonely at times. I think the trick might be to take as many people on the journey as you can and make it a road more traveled.
-RH
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