Like most people, I was a very confused teenager. I spent my childhood being indoctrinated into authority by a government internment camp that is funded via extortion. I vividly recall the day everything changed for me, it was a deep change in my understanding of reality brought on by an act incredibly simple yet socially forbidden.
Up until this specific point in my life, nearly everything I thought I knew was was nothing more than forced dogma. Now don't get me wrong, I owe my ability to read, write, and solve simple math equations to well meaning teachers in the public education system. No matter how inefficient it was that is how many of us are introduced to these skills. What I am referring to here is a concept that we are force fed from the days before we can even speak. An idea so profoundly illogical that it's amazing how frightened individuals are of questioning.
The belief, the dogma, the faith, is human authority. It is so powerful that it often trumps the faith of even the most devout religious. People will obey it, no matter the absurdity of it's demands. You dare not question it, because there is no need for authority to give you an answer. It's only answer is the resounding "because I said so."
There is a program within the public indoctrination institution known as D.A.R.E. Although everything I was taught about drugs growing up contained the same messages this one happens to be the most blatant. A law enforcement officer was the designated preacher for the state's war on drugs. He would host classes in which he informed us of all of the evils of the nasty and terrible drugs, and how they would completely destroy our lives. Just one time, and your life is over. We must vanquish this plague on society. I fell for it.
About six months after my sixteenth birthday I did the unthinkable. I smoked marijuana. I attribute this decision partly to curiosity and partly to the power of peer pressure on a high school teen. Although I no longer have a desire for marijuana to be a part of my life, that decision changed everything. It was the day that I realized I had been lied to by the one thing that was supposed to have my best interest in mind, authority. This had such a profound effect on me that I began to question everything, literally everything. It sent me down a spiral of intense paranoia and radicalism following zeitgeist, then info wars, and later Ron Paul once I started to chill out a little. I fought tooth and nail every demand of any authority in my life no matter how arbitrary the demand was.
Luckily after several years of absolute stubbornness and a short stay at the Department of Corrections I grew up a little. I started to take more logical stances and really evaluate my beliefs. I found that there were people in the world that understood these things, very intelligent people. Economists, podcasters, authors, and ironically even a politician or two. I decided that if someone points a loaded weapon in my face and demands my money I best give it to them. That doesn't mean I've given up, or that i'm OK with it. Just that it's usually best to look out for my own interests, lest I end up back in a cell. I can still speak out against it and do my best to avoid those situations altogether. I can accomplish much more outside of a cell.
Today I am more outspoken on anarchism, voluntaryism, and agorism on the web than anywhere else. In my physical life I tend to try and live my principles more than preach them. Introducing others to them softly and intimately without throwing the words in their face. I am part owner in a business that designs and creates functional homesteads, both urban and rural. We teach classes on the subject of self resiliency. I've found that encouraging others to be more proactive towards the basic needs in life opens them up to being much less dependent and far more skeptical of authoritarian systems. Most people are already mostly anarchist anyway, they just don't realize it. After all any decision made outside of pure obedience to an authoritarian order is an anarchist decision.
I remember learning about World War 2 in history class and being dumbfounded at the possibility of of humans being capable of something as atrocious as the holocaust. Today i know that the answer to that pondering is "obedience to authority". It actually isn't surprising at all anymore, we are raised by the state being taught obedience, for many people it's all they know. The way to avoid being one of those people is simple. Be your own authority, you are an individual, own yourself.
“I'm not scared of the Maos and the Stalins and the Hitlers.
I'm scared of the thousands of millions of people that hallucinate them to be "authority", and so do their bidding, and pay for their empires, and carry out their orders.
I don't care if there's one looney with a stupid moustache. He's not a threat if the people do not believe in "authority".”
― Larken Rose
links to resources that have been influential to me:
https://www.youtube.com/user/LarkenRose
http://www.theseedsofliberty.com/
http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/
https://mises.org