A mind full of fire; A fistful of steel

Wake up. Feel the bleak, gray dawn break upon your face as you drag yourself out of a bed made with the blood, sweat, and flesh of slaves working for pennies on the dollar. It's 7:00. Far too early for any sane human, you think, but yet you must rise, and for some drab reason that has been lost in the cranny behind the backseat of your id...ah, yes, that one. Eat your cereal, plastered with the faces of anthropomorphic animals and smiling children, showing no care or genuine emotion in the world as their eyes look blankly into your mind and tell you to participate in sweepstakes you won't win. You look back at them as you slurp the soggy mixture of processed grains, high-fructose corn syrup, and factory-farmed milk. You walk out the door and into the Suburban Wasteland®, and as the bright yellow MS St. Louis roars and sputters its way into the maw of institutionalized ignorance herself, for just a fleeting moment, a thought streaks across your half-awake mind: Why the fuck do I even try? But that small spark is put out as quickly as it came as you occupy yourself with thoughts of busywork and senseless “projects” done in the name of the hellhounds keeping watch at the Hades you have spent the most precious years of your life confined in; told what to do, what to think, what is right, and what is wrong.
And you think that once you get out of this goddamn place; once you “break free” from the confines of public indoctrination, you'll be at liberty to pursue your conceited (or so they tell you) passions and live life “on your own”. But you wind up stuck behind a desk anyway; you have to work at a job, shuffling paperwork and answering the call of nameless, faceless bosses in the upper echelons of ACME inc., encapsulated in boredom and monotony for until the clock stares at you with the same face as it greeted you when you came in. Or else, in a run-down apartment or on the street because you chose the “wrong major” in college, longing for work because you think it will prevent you from starving. You get vacations in the name of more work. Life is work. Work makes free. Work, work, work, work, work, and more fucking work.
And again that same thought dashes across your mind and precipitates in the craters of your subconscious. It gathers just a bit more each day you trudge your way to your job (or your desperation to find one). But now you have “adult issues” to worry about, and you try to bury these dissenting thoughts under a mountain of commodified relationships and a stream of spectacles masquerading as reality. That thought will follow you for the rest of your life, and even as you desperately try to assimilate yourself into the nameless, faceless mass of consumer-worker drones of society, it will come back to haunt you. Were you born to serve your “betters”; to live and toil on bended knee?
The natural, and correct, response to this question is a resounding “Hell no!”, no matter how many mental gymnastics or false convictions others have forced upon your mind, at no fault of your own. They, those anonymous bureaucrats and suit-touting people behind the curtain controlling society and at the same time convincing people at a subconscious level that they're not, that it's the way that it's supposed to be and get back to your (home)work and/or buying that latest iThing 200XT Plus HD, want to eradicate that instinct, that natural aversion to coercion. And they've done it, because even though you know the answer to that essential question, you don't want to do anything about it. You want to keep yourself distracted with other “more important” things so as to run away from the truth. And that means they've won; they've defeated a truth so integral to humans, to life itself, that it is a factor of evolution.
And the name which we assign to that all-encompassing fact is Anarchy.
“Anarchy!?”, you exclaim, as you (undoubtedly) roll your eyes and images of hoodlums and paper-white teenagers donning mohawks and body piercings flash across your mind. Yes. Anarchy. Not the “anarchy” espoused by punk bands and their multimillion dollar record labels, nor the “anarchy” marketed by Hot Topic and printed on a child-labor-produced T-shirt in an attempt to lure young minds into thinking buying is rebelling. Nor is it the mindless rampage and discord that the DHS and the FBI and any person of authority will try and scare you with. It's not even a political position; it can't be classified as something so contrived or, indeed, classified at all. The best reduction of Anarchy portrays it as a deeply-ingrained state of being; and instinct; the call of Nature; or else, the Nirvana that Buddhists strive to reach but fail miserably at finding. It's the utopia we all dismiss as impossible and yet fail to realize that it's always been with us; within us, trying to escape from the prison of manufactured society.
Nor is an Anarchist someone you have to adopt some high-minded ideal and throw away “human nature” to become, looking down on people with a moralistic high ground. That would be joining a religion. Whenever you chat with a group of friends, you're an Anarchist. Whenever you do something good for the sake of feeling good, whether it concerns yourself or someone else, you're an Anarchist. When nobody's staring you down and “supervising”, you're an Anarchist. Whenever you come to your own conclusions, you're an Anarchist. Whenever our sense of Anarchy, or what remains of it that we can comprehend, is threatened, we react. Why else do you think people riot and smash windows demonstrate when some ridiculous law is passed? You are an Anarchist; you just don't know it.
It means not just demanding everything, but taking direct action to obtain everything as well. Because being selfish is the highest form of altruism. The shadow puppeteers want you to think that we are all “selfish” in that we only care for our immediate and private concerns; that we are utility-maximizing Homo Economicus concerned only about what happens to us in the short run. What they're trying to conceal is that we are all far more self-centered and greedy than they make us out to be; that being so selfish as to demand freedom and well-being for all is a far more satisfying want than getting that dope pair of Nikes. Human nature, or nature itself, isn't the “war of One against All” that Thomas Hobbes used to justify rulers and “better men” to “improve the human condition”. Human nature is enlightened self-interest; the realization that we are all interdependent and that an attack on one person is an attack on you and everyone else. Forget the “collective” and the “individual”. Human nature is the best argument for Anarchy because it is Anarchy. One is all, and all is one.
But what is freedom? What is well-being? Freedom is the idea that nobody is more qualified to determine what your life will be than you are. Having a job isn't freedom. Buying things isn't freedom. All of those things imply that you are forced by a human-made social construct into doing so. You can't express your individuality when you're working; you'll be fired and left to starve. You can't say otherwise when you're buying something; they'll call you a free-riding thief. Which brings us to well-being, which means that you are entitled to all things except which others have to offer their consent. You are entitled to food, water, clothing, shelter, and material goods because they don't belong to anybody not making use of them. You aren't entitled to another person's opinion of you, their consent to sex, what they make use of directly, or anything violating their individuality. But you must have known all this at one time or another; I am simply repeating what any child or toddler knows by nature, before they are taught anything else.  It is suppressed as they “grow up” because it's not useful to the people in charge.
By now, you're probably wondering “well, that's nice and all, but how will it work? Will it work?”. That , honestly, depends on you. Yes, it works; it will work and it has worked for the entire length of human history. The fact that you are able to live and interact and do things and share things on your own without supervision is proof enough, never mind the fact that the idea of the State and of having a job and making money has only taken the center stage in our minds in the past half-century. But it's precisely because of that shift, consciously and unconsciously, away from the self and towards self-sacrifice for the sake of self-sacrifice that jeopardizes the success of Anarchy. Human nature isn't the stumbling block for Anarchy, it is the reason for Anarchy. The artificial ideals you have to force yourself to follow, like unquestioning obedience to the boss, the teacher, or the politician, is what you have to worry about.
So drop out. Quit your job. Hit the road and find spaces with other self-realized Anarchists and live and play together. Share things, because sharing is caring. And urge people to do the same, but never force people to do so because Anarchy is all about self-determination. And pretty soon others will realize the meaning of Anarchy and do similar things, but there won't be a sweeping revolution like days of yore because that isn't genuine change; genuine change comes step by step and comes from the roots up. Fight the State, fight Capital, fight coercion, and pursue a freer, more joyous world, whatever that may be. And be yourself, because you are you.






From a prison of pretty lawns and identical houses;
with a mind full of fire and a fistful of steel,

--Der Landstreicher
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