Hey all, I’m hoping this is the right comm for this kind of post. I’m really interested what brought my fellow lemmings to anarchism (or just radical politics in general). Was is a youtube video? A book? A conversation IRL or on the internet? For me personally it was a friend IRL who introduced me to an local anarchist collective.
A lot of reasons, from childhood abuse being justified as “they have the right to do it to a child” to police neglecting issues around me and my family, to just being autistic makes me question things everyone takes at face value.
But the key principle of my ideal world is that as long as everyone involved (small scale to environmental scale) is consenting to the actions being done, you should be able to live a happy life. If they don’t consent, don’t involve them. If everyone involved can’t consent, probably don’t do that.
You shouldn’t have to choose between rent and food. Or healthcare. Or seeing your friends or paying your bills. Or just having a happy life our ape brains enjoy compared to the alienating mundanity of most politics.
Working labor your entire life so you don’t die from hunger in the cold, to retire at 65 and not be able to take any of your material possessions with you to any form of afterlife or lack thereof, seems cruel. Especially when no one was asked to be born into this system, they have to work to survive.
Star Trek also helped influence me, it made me a better person. I was more jaded and capitalist libertarian in my views as a teenager. Now I’m just a hopeful pessimist.
I don’t pretend to have the answers of every single question or edge case of anarchism, I also don’t pretend it’s best for everyone. But it’s a system that doesn’t reward or enable the power hungry and greedy, when most systems do.
People will gladly tell you the issues of Proudhon, or call out some anarchists wearing the label as an excuse to do whatever they want with no consequences.
I’ve seen people whitewash and idolize and bootlick for other systems of power, people, and philosophies. Sometimes it’s because they think they’ll get a turn of being in that position in life, when they’ll be struck by lightning first.
Maybe I’m just rambling because it’s almost 4:30 am and I’m killing time on my graveyard shift. God I hope somehow this makes some form of sense.