Rational Idealism

My Road to Anarchism October 16, 2009

By my late teens, I had become a nihilist.  There was, as far as I could see, no point to life, no morality, no reason for continuing on.  I became a sensation-seeking drone, deciding to simply accumulate as many extreme experiences as possible, and hold out to see if the Meaning of Life would present itself to me.  This is why I decided to join the Marine Corps.  My friends and family were uniformly shocked and saddened at this decision, but to me it was the obvious choice.

My experiences in the Marine Corps were as instructive as I anticipated.  At first, it was sheer glee, kind of like playing a particularly good video game.  As time went on, however, boredom set in.  I began to realize that most other members of the Marine Corps, particularly those who were senior to me, had interests diametrically opposed to my own.  They were not there to be badasses, or to see the world, or to challenge themselves, or even to serve their country.  They were there for security.  My disgust grew as began to see men twice my age acting almost entirely out of cowardice.  To watch them, one would conclude that their job description was “cover your ass”.  There was universal disdain for taking on extra duties, refining techniques, or going on deployment to exotic locations.  The negativity around me was astounding.  Marines my age were concerned only with the arrival of their next paycheck so they could go out clubbing, and those who were older were inevitably married with children and just wanted to go home.  I saw young Marines like myself start out incredibly motivated, only to be slowly crushed under the weight of bureaucracy, apathy, and organizational inertia.

So I started tuning out.  I began reading in my free time, which was considerable.  I had always been interested in world affairs, and I soon progressed from the news to op-eds, and began discovering the many intense political opinions available in the marketplace of ideas.  Before long, I was progressively staggered by discoveries of how wrong so many people are about so many things.  I read the book Atlas Shrugged, which, in its depictions of statist hell, perfectly conformed to my daily experiences as a government employee.  It also provided me with a new moral impetus and framework around which my life is still structured.  Before long, I discovered and joined the Libertarian Party, a romance which lasted the next six years.

A formative experience during this time was my decision to marry a Japanese woman I was dating.  Her student visa had expired, and the only way she could stay in the USA with me was for us to get married.  This involved an endless amount of paperwork, fees, bureaucratic snafus, and several years.  Part of the process involves proving to the feds that your marriage is “real”, and to this day people still accuse me of a “fraudulent” marriage.  I was face-to-face with a nexus of political and cultural tyranny that I simply cannot describe with any word other than “evil”.  Governments dictating to people where they can go, and who they can associate with, and under what terms, is so incredible an injustice that I’m still amazed that anyone can find it within themselves to defend such a system.

By the time I left the Marine Corps and entered the UW, my first-hand experiences with the government, and my studies of political theory, had turned me into a radical, pissed-off libertarian.  I immediately found some other like-minded students and formed a group, “Libertarians at the UW”.  LUW was extremely active, fed off the political momentum of the 2004 presidential election, and quickly became an affiliate of the Washington State Libertarian Party.  Before long, I was asked to run for office as a Libertarian candidate, for the office of King County Council.  I made it on the ballot, and ran a serious campaign, putting up signs, building a website, filing out questionnaires, making appearances, giving speeches, and even debating my incumbent opponent on NPR.  I won 4% of the vote, to the Republican challenger’s 16%.  Immediately after the election, I organized a large, fairly successful event on campus on the Patriot Act, featuring Norm Stamper as the keynote speaker.

When that all ended, I realized that I was broke, my grades in school were hosed, and I had accomplished nothing.  It was a bit like driving a car off a cliff at top speed — it’s spectacular for a second, and then you plunge.  I became very depressed, for most of the next year.  A major part of this depression, I now realize, was the way that I had divided up my political and social life as I had become increasingly radical.  Most of the people who I called my “friends” were apathetic or hostile to my brand of politics.  Even while I was pouring huge amounts of time and energy into changing the world, I was still acting cordially toward people who, in some cases, were acting against me.  I was trapped in a hellish limbo of being slave to the opinions of those around me while attempting to do what I saw as right.

For a while I swore off politics.  It became a game of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, where I would pour energy into relationships, only to discover, inevitably, they supported the use of state force against me.  This progression lead to me associating only with people too apathetic, uninformed, or just plain unintelligent to have strong political opinions.  I could only avoid thinking about politics by submerging myself in mindless, distracting activities.  Intellectually, this period is mostly lost time for me.

But no more.  I finally came back to politics with a vengeance earlier this year, and began re-educating myself.  I sat back down at the drawing board of ideas and quickly discovered Stefan Molyneux’s freedomainradio.org, a site devoted to rational morality and anarchism.  Listening to Stefan’s podcasts, I realized that I had let my intellectual development end when I became heavily involved in Libertarian politics.  I had always paid service to the Non-Aggression Principle — the idea that it is morally wrong to initiate force against another human being.  When people challenged me on the incompatibility of this principle with libertarian minarchism, I typically referred them to Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”.  This book, while excellent, essentially amounts to a rationalization of state power that is both unnecessary and immoral.  My reluctance to move past the label “libertarian”, I must admit, had more to do with my fears of social consequence than my own intellectual integrity.

I am now a proud anarchist, and will defend anarchist principles to anyone who attacks them.  The status quo is such that most people feel comfortable disparaging freedom with impunity, and cannot tolerate challenges to their statist beliefs.  These people are not my friends.  They are my sworn enemies.  I will not steer clear of politics in order to maintain social harmony — this is exactly what statists want.  The status quo always benefits from lack of critical engagement, therefore I see it as my solemn right and duty to fight against the state and its supporters whenever the opportunity presents itself.  I will still choose my battles, but I will not be complicit in this system of oppression, and will not tolerate people in my life who have so little respect for me that they wish to use the power of the state against me.