The Tao of Anarchy: Love, Freedom, Responsibility

Spend enough time on social media outlets and you’ll hear as much talk about awareness and spirituality as you like. I have learned long ago that it is not my job, if I were even capable – I am not – to judge anyone or their points of view as being truly aware, truly spiritual, or not. I have enough to deal with concerning my own ego to worry about what you are doing for your own awakening.

One of the most common memes among those who fashion themselves as aware is the idea of personal responsibility. Though the words are seldom used, the themes are similar. You must be the change you wish to see in the world. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything! You have to be a Light unto yourself. You have to seek and search within your own being, because it is already there at the very Core. If you dive deep you will find it. You will have to learn how to dive within yourself, not in the scriptures, but within your own existence. I could go on forever.

If you’re familiar with the teachings of Krishnamurti, you may have heard him describe two modes of understanding: intellectual and actual. I am often reminded of this when I observe the words of many who fashion themselves enlightened, awake, aware.

There is great evil in the world. Few can deny the world is a ruinous, grotesque charade laughingly called “civilization”. I would like to point out some of the glaring contradictions in what we often see as solutions to this problem. For if we understand the concept of personal responsibility, not just intellectually but actually, it becomes clear that we are barking up the wrong tree in working towards a solution.

Bureaucracy

As by now the whole country knows, there is a county clerk somewhere in Kentucky that refuses to grant marriage licenses to gay couples because it is contrary to God's law, i.e., immoral. We as individuals are free to harbor our own individual morality of course, but to me and, no doubt, most people of the anarchist/voluntarist leaning, the irony has not been lost that a woman who is standing by "morals" is in the employment of the State.

To most people, i.e. the mob, who are indoctrinated statists (and thus worthy of our sympathy), the concept that it is immoral to work for the State may seem a bit hazy. After all, our society has become such a bureaucracy-choked morass that, at best, we have become numb to the army of bureaucrats we have to deal with on a daily basis; at worst, we think they are necessary. But while many people feel contempt and loathing for the stereotypical welfare whore who lives in government housing, sits around eating Cheetos and Dr Pepper, and makes more babies to be dependent on the State, few if any realize that the bureaucrat is actually more harmful to society.

Borders: Imaginary Lines on Imaginary Maps

It seems to me that the most common and difficult obstacle a free individual will encounter in conversations with members of the mob is the collectivist mass hallucination called nationalism. There are boundaries – in this case ideological boundaries – one must not cross in respectable society. Not if one wants to be considered a respectable human being. In respectable society, one is expected to be a “patriot“, to be a member of good standing of the nation you belong to, or that belongs to you.

It is impossible for the collectivist mind to comprehend that the idea that you can draw imaginary lines on maps and call the land within those imaginary boundaries “countries” is as absurd as the belief in unicorns or leprechauns, and a compassionate mind can certainly understand why and how this has happened. Having gone through the same meatgrinder as everyone else – state indoctrination, i.e. public school, raised by parents who bought into the illusion, addicted, for a good portion of my life, to establishment media and entertainment – I do not consider myself superior for having figured it all out. It hasn't been an easy journey and there is still much to unlearn.

For those of us who hate the State, I feel it is important for this distinction to be made: there is only one State. Failing to recognize this, typically when we criticize the American – as one for instance and the one I am most familiar with – brand of the State, we are often told to pack our bags. “If you don't like it here, leave!” The “here“ which they speak of simply does not exist. The tyranny we wish to escape from is not an entity or a thing; it has no concrete reality. It is but a mental abstraction, an idea – a bad idea: that nations can be created and that the people who happen to live there, usually by “virtue” of simply having been born there, must live according to its rules.

Thanks (But No Thanks) For Your Service

It seems as though even the most fervent statist is capable of recognizing the ineptitude of government almost across the entire spectrum of its grasp. We know it is wasteful, corrupt, and intrusive. Of course, if you see these failures and remain a statist, your solution to this obvious, widely accepted problem will likely be more elections to try to fine tune government to become the machine it has never, ever shown any promise of achieving. 

To the statist, the government is like a man who shatters your kneecap with a baseball bat, hands you a pair of crutches, demands you pay him for the crutches, lest he break other bones in your body – your skull, perhaps – and then expects you to be gracious for his generosity. And “The People” are grateful. That analogy is absolutely flawless – indeed, if government is good at anything, it is good at engineering the fear, crises, and artificial scarcity it uses as justification for itself. The deception is obvious, we know it, yet we refuse to transcend it.

Exit the Matrix

The more my philosophical outlook on life evolves, the more I am coming to realize that the concept of collectivism is likely very near to the root of all evil in this world. It’s not that the Maos and the Stalins and the empires of the world murder people en masse, and ravage and pillage the environment; it’s our collective belief that the mechanism – the State – these monsters use to commit these crimes is actually necessary.

The State is collectivism, writ large. It is the monster that is created by the concept of “we”: “We the People”. “One nation, indivisible”. “E pluribus unum.” This idea that we are all in this together, that we all have collective responsibilities. It sounds noble on paper, because fundamentally we all have the same wishes – to be happy, to be free from sickness and suffering – but we are, each of us, one of 7.3 billion people, with our own ego identities, our own experiences, our own distinct levels of consciousness, ripping each other’s eyes out over the best way to make the world a better place. It is this, it seems to me, that makes the world such an increasingly appalling place as it continues to be.

Empowerment and Entitlement

It is both an alarming and sobering fact that most people are indoctrinated with an indomitable and terminal sense of entitlement. Even those who fashion themselves as aware, who identify many of the problems of the world, often still cling to the establishment paradigm, cling to "democracy", groupthink, and collectivism to solve their problems, unable to comprehend that their solutions are actually the source of the problems.

The fundamental reason democracy (and whatever child of democracy we've tried - "republicanism", whatever) has failed is, aside from proxying out our own personal responsibility to our own lives to people no sane person could ever believe would have our best interests at heart, is that slowly, incrementally, over many generations, money powers have bought off nearly every aspect of society. This became inevitable with the birth of central banks, most notably the United States Federal Reserve system - a private banking cartel with a monopoly on fiat currency creation. Sane people can imagine the power one would have if he could create as much money as he wanted, and dole out that money without oversight, scrutiny; with impunity. Our entire government is bought and paid for, so that there is virtually no distinction between corporation and State.

Most "activists" can see this disease, but their cure is to continue to petition the government. In every issue imaginable, they can see that corporate interests not only own the vast majority of our politicians, but worse, own the fascist alphabet bureaucracies, the unelected bodies that make most of our "laws". And yet, rather than call to opt out of this fake system, time after time, as politicians and bureaucrats move to guard corporate profits and suffocate the free market, the call is to contact your "representatives", or the relevant government regulatory bureaucracy (the FDA, USDA, etc). It's a sickness, an insanity, that is painful to watch.

The Stateless Society: A Philosophical Approach

Man seems to have one fundamental trait: he loves to make things complicated. Perhaps it is a side effect of his advanced intellectual capabilities, to become disillusioned into thinking nothing worth having can ever be simple. He thinks that just because he is capable of solving complex problems, of reason, logic, etc, that the most complicated and convoluted solution for any given problem must therefore be the best. Another trait humans have that makes us unique is introspection: we have the ability to “look into the mirror,” see the error of our ways, and make whatever changes are necessary. Introspection is the purpose of this essay.

The collective egoic malaise most of mankind is trapped in, it seems to me, is the fundamental root cause of the State. We have taken all of the supposed problems and issues of daily life, tossed them into one basket, and created Leviathan, giving it the power to fix and maintain our lives for us so that we may lead what most of us erroneously believe to be the “simple life”.

Talk to almost anyone about the virtues of a stateless society and you'll receive one or more of a handful of stock answers based on the belief that, because the State allegedly handles specific issues for “the People,” this is somehow axiomatic and cannot possibly be changed. The State supposedly builds the roads, therefore the State must build the roads, otherwise roads won't be built. This is just one of many misconceptions about the State, which will all be addressed before I've finished.

Gravitating Back...

Strange the directions life takes you. For whatever reasons, what was once a growing and seemingly prospering website has lost its vitality. Not sure if it's because less people find my content interesting, or Google and/or Facebook are phasing out "unauthorized" sources of information, or what. It could be that I haven't written as much of my own material, which aside from some freak occurrences where random posts have gone viral, have always gotten the most views. This blog is free and I've decided it's not worth paying money for anymore.

Not to mention, I have less to write about these days. Gone are the days when I felt like I had to share every discovery with the world. It's not that I don't care, I just don't have the time anymore, time to read, to take notes, to compile and write a coherent presentation on life, the universe, and everything. I have a home now, and I am trying to be as productive and self-sufficient here as I can, and there is little time for blogging.

I swore off politics in my previous post here almost four years ago. Some of my ideas here will be viewed as political, but as I have become "anarchist" in the most radical sense you can probably imagine, my views are a-political. In fact my anarchist tendencies are driven more from a spiritual foundation - that you are your own person, you own yourself, and you are fully empowered and responsible for your life, your life alone, and no one else's. So any arguments against the State, for anarchy, voluntarism, liberty, etc, arise from there. There are many articles I've written to this effect on my Conscious Resonance (god I hate that name) website, which I will gradually move here before killing the site altogether.

Thanks for reading, please give your thoughts in the comment sections, and may you be happy and free. Namaste.