Protected: journeying into void.

My old Google Docs version of this was submitted to Reddit.com (Journeying into void).

[Note: I shall add some background that may help explain some of my starting points. I was an only child, cut off from social interactions due to a profound hearing loss, and lacking in any social skills. I continually maintained a large degree of skepticism towards cultural traditions and superstitions throughout my early childhood in India, albeit the more modernized cities. I had a fairly neutral upbringing insofar as I was never encouraged to either accept or reject any belief. The untainted rationalist in me spoke out against cultural traditionalist standards if I got any slightest hint of being expected to conform, and over the years I went from being a religion-apathetic to a weak atheist in a slow, gradual shift.]

The very beginning of my intellectual journey commenced with a declaration of my atheism at age 13. The first time I ever wrote of myself as an atheist was a few months later at age 14, and up until that point I had been raised to be a Sikh in practice. My parents weren’t very religious, and they allowed me to stay home while they went to the Sikh temple, but they insisted on keeping my hair long and uncut. I also grew up wearing the Sikh bangle, the kara.

One day in late March, I trimmed my hair, while promising myself I would never take off my kara as a reminder of my Sikh past. I later recanted the latter. My parents’ initial reaction to my cut hair was one of intense shock and disappointment, so much that for the rest of the year, they conversed with me about virtually nothing except how hurt they were. (It would take nearly two years for them to overcome that, and I would be isolated from any relative until then.)

Summer 2006 rolled around. I was fifteen, in a depression from my parents’ reactions. I locked myself in my room for the whole summer, never stepping out except to get a meal. I never experienced any fresh air at all, and my laptop was the only source of comfort.

It was at that point my atheism developed into a rabid, livid rage against religion. I ranted everyday in a private blog, while continually latching on to reading and writing to help me gain any scrap of temporary happiness. Around that time, I accepted a very altruistic type of morality that was simply about doing good for others.

I started my junior year still depressed, although classes helped me take my mind off it. One day in late November, my mom flew to India for a month, and at that point I became active in atheist communities. I debated theists, arguing religion on multiple forums everyday I got home from school, moderated an atheist forum, and kept up to date on all the atheist news for months. Also, around that point, my atheism got more and more solidified until I would fully adopt the theological non-cognitivist stance about a year later.

Up until then, I had been completely apolitical and apathetic. I just didn’t care. Politics, to the fifteen-year-old me, was all just boring rhetoric that wouldn’t affect me in any way whatsoever. I was rather opposed to controlling systems and cultural authoritarianism, though, but I viewed the current democracy to be a pretty good system.

Were it not for my atheism, I would almost certainly never have been an anarchist. Atheism gave me the tools, the logic, the reasoning processes I needed to evaluate anarchism.

On one or two atheist forums that I frequented back then, I heard the term “anarcho-capitalism” being thrown around, with a few proponents debating it using hardcore logic. I found it an extremely fascinating socio-political theory, and I felt compelled to look into it more, reading a few blogs and articles. Within perhaps a couple of weeks, the argument that government was people, and thus the same moral rules must apply to government as well, had firmly sunk in me, and I, at barely sixteen, was a philosophical anarchist by late January 2007. It was a quick and painless deconversion.

Then, over February and March, I continued to study the arguments, and around April, I was arguing for anarcho-capitalism online on forums, sparking off threads that soon grew to be several pages long, and during the process I was educating myself over this theory I had fallen in love with.

From then on, the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, ISIL, Reason Magazine, etc. were my primary references. I read as much Rothbard I could get my hands upon, I surfed the Mises website everyday during school, reading the daily articles and absorbing it all in. I continually argued and debated everyday for several months from the principles of self-ownership, the non-aggression axiom, private property, voluntaryism, natural rights, individualism, and a morality that was completely based upon the non-aggression principle, although I shortly after expanded my version of morality to a Randian moral realist system. It all fit together well for me, and I was comfortable in my relatively easy-to-understand, well-put-together worldview.

I had also essentially jumped from statist to anti-political agorist, without going through much of a political or minarchist phase, and I advocated an entrepreneur revolution (as per Agorist Class Theory, I believe) where the bourgeoisie and proletarian classes would disappear under an anarchic world, and thus satisfying the left-anarchists, even though I wasn’t really interested in them.

Fall of 2007 I was a high school senior, taking an AP Government class that I informally referred to as “Democra-bot Programming”, since it was so chock-full of propaganda. Being the dissident, the dedicated Austrian anarcho-capitalist, I took advantage whenever I had an opportunity to poke back at my religious neo-conservative teacher making a snide remark about anarchism being possible only if men were angels. I also recall taking a few political tests that annoyed me because of their being one-dimensional, with liberal and conservative at the ends, and thus I was lumped in with the political moderates.

However, I did my best to promote anarcho-capitalism everywhere I could, whenever possible. I wrote my senior project paper debunking the concept of “intellectual property” interviewing Kinsella, and citing Rothbard, Hoppe, and Konkin. I also managed to get permission from my second-semester Economics teacher to deliver a presentation explaining Rothbardian market anarchist ideas to the class. After several weeks of editing, shortening, simplifying it, and my teacher continually delaying the presentation date, I delivered the talk. The audience wasn’t very responsive, although I did get a couple of interested people.

I was also into Objectivism then– I read Anthem and The Fountainhead in late 2007, and I fell in love with the message of everything Randian, except for my rejection of Rand’s minarchism. I was actually thankful I had heard of Rand only after my anarchism was hardset, so I never gave in to full Objectivism.

But that aspect of me that wished to keep evolving, moving on, and changing, was still there in me. So sometime around September 2008, at which point I had almost completely left behind atheist activism, I finally dropped the anarcho-capitalist label. I just no longer wanted to be bound to a set of beliefs. I wanted to be free to evolve and change, and open myself to some of the ideas of other anarchies, although I was quite open to the possibility of my reverting back to steadfast anarcho-capitalism. Up until then, I had also always referred to myself as a hardcore individualist, and I viewed atheism and anarchism to be the religious and political colloraries, but around this point I stopped using the term individualist altogether. I had simply started to view the individual versus society concept as a false dichotomy.

Then, over the remainder of 2008 and the entire first half of 2009, I was a post-ancap agorist and professed anarchist-without-adjectives, but still clutching on to most of my anarcho-capitalist sentiments. I didn’t identify well with any labels other than agorist anarchist. I was also incredibly bored of theory, and didn’t wish to engage in those kind of discussions, instead focusing entirely on anti-State activism with the anarcho-capitalists, and I was somewhat well-known in their circles. I was very comfortable there, as I was free to adopt my own positions on specifics, diverging from hardline anarcho-capitalism. I just didn’t find the majority of theoretical discussions interesting or relevant to my activism– I believed that as long as we smashed the State, the theoretical conflicts were irrelevant since we could never predict exactly what would happen under a stateless society, so I just didn’t bother for more than a year. But it wasn’t enough.

Mid-2009, I started to actually study and understand the other anarchies, and what I came across shocked me. The left-anarchists were right. The more I tried to understand them, the more I realized the capitalist system was shockingly similar to the State that I had valiantly thundered against. Having “good people” at the top of any hierarchy would not work. The hyphen connecting capitalism and anarchism was slowly being broken apart.

The more I realized that the State was only a branch of evil, not the root, I started to view my former “as long as we smash the State and it’s voluntary, who cares” position as incredibly naive and devoid of thinking. And as such I abandoned the label anarchist-without-adjectives– only in part, as I still remained something of an AwoA, but only in the original 19th century sense. “Anarcho-”capitalism would not be included as a valid anarchism by the original anarchists-without-adjectives.

I was also growing more and more in line with original social anarchism, but I still maintained a fair deal of respect for “anarcho-”capitalist theory, even though it was slowly falling apart. The voluntary nature of a situation was not enough for me to declare it just and valid, and my former worldview seemed extremely oversimplified, based on a small number of basic principles. Many self-professed “anarcho-”capitalists and voluntaryists were badly stuck in the mentality of “If you oppose any voluntary relation, you advocate using coercion to stop it.” This line of reasoning seemed, at best, a non sequitur, and at worst, an insight into the implicit belief that the only way to oppose something was to use coercion to stop it. These were the same people who were vehemently opposed to paper money, yet they would never advocate using coercion to stop a voluntary system of paper money under an anarchic society.

The proponents of “anarcho-”capitalism had also redefined some important terms to mean what they wanted it to mean. To most “anarcho-”capitalists, “anarchist” meant anti-state, not anti-hierarchy or anti-authority. “Initiation of force” had been redefined to mean “initiation of force against my favored property system.”

One of the last blows to my “anarcho-”capitalist ways was struck when I became familiar with many of Proudhon’s anti-propertarian arguments. The concept of possession kept the good aspects of property while throwing out the bad. I was extremely reluctant to give up my propertarianism– I struggled with a long and hard intellectual battle for several weeks, until one night.

Near the end, I had to choose between capitalism and anarchism. I chose anarchism.

The final powerful blow took place overnight. August 28, 2009, a year after I had ceased to use the anarcho-capitalist label.

I was commenting on a blog post discussion section on Fr33 Agents, a site that I had helped found during my post-ancap days, while reading a few other debates and reading an ongoing Skype discussion with ex- and post-”anarcho-”capitalists over several flaws within “anarcho-”capitalism. It hit me as I realized how weak the entire theoretical structure appeared now. By the end of that I was convinced it was all a fraud, and I was in mild shock.

Later during the night, I was commenting on one thread, along with a few smaller ones on Facebook, and I was repeatedly asking for arguments that I had not already heard before, and throughout the night I barely got any, and when I did the flaw was instantly recognizable.

As the night progressed on, I was growing to realize how vacuous it all was. Reality hit in on me, and I remembered that I would once have been on the other side.

That gripping fact shook me so bad that I was in utter shock and a raging influx of emotions were going through me– so much that my hands were shaking slightly. Within one night, I started to despise my own former self for ever having accepted, let alone valiantly defended, the absolute fraud of “anarcho-”capitalism.

As the faint glow of dawn emerged, I was left with nothing. “Anarcho-”capitalism, the same ideology I had once fallen in love with, was destroyed forever.

It also hit upon me that all this time, I had never been an anarchist. Anarchism’s rich history had always been anti-capitalist, and just now I was understanding why.

I would eventually recover, but I lost several friends and acquaintances. I had to resign my support for several projects I had previously been absolutely enthused about, including the Free State Project. I had to alter my future plans.

Over the course of the next couple of months, my ideological evolution went through a phase of rapid acceleration, with me realizing the importance of mutual aid and cooperation over market competition. I started to appreciate some of the ideas of anarchist communism, so although I never renounced my support of a market, I moved beyond the common interpretation of market anarchism, at least in part, and as a consequence I gave up agorism as well.

Renouncing “anarcho-”capitalism, however, was the biggest step. When I reflect back on my past, I do somewhat appreciate what I learned. “Anarcho-”capitalism led me to discovering an enormous passion for studying socio-political theory, possibly the greatest passion I have ever had in my life. It taught me about legitimacy and justice, the real flaws in the theory and worldview, and I’ve been bringing in what I learned with me as I view the world in a new light.

I have every so often wondered where I am headed now, and as of now I cannot say for sure, but I can say that will depend on the major flaws I find in my current mutualist and libertarian socialist position. Or more likely, I may end up leaving my journey through anarchism as a part of my past, just like I once wandered through atheism for years until abandoning that journey (though not the atheism in itself), and moved on.

Or most likely, I may retire from all activism while I keep evolving and exploring and discovering. I have fallen in love with the journey it’s taken me on, and I could never imagine ceasing even for a glimpse.

- Noor