Anarchism is a single-player game
Starting a political party, becoming a social media influencer, and running a business are multiplayer games. None of these ventures are successful if you are the only one impacted by them: You have to learn to influence others, win them over, and become a leader in one way or another.
Now consider meditation: If you’re an excellent meditator, maybe you can close your eyes for ten minutes and reopen them feeling fully rested. No one in the world will know about it and no one needs to know about it. It’s a single-player game.
Anarchism is as deeply personal as meditation. You can become a better anarchist if you internally question all forms of authority (even your authority over yourself). As a law-abiding citizen who never talks out of line, you can be an anarchist by silently rejecting the authority of the law while following it out of pure convenience. Like sleeper cells, we can be willing to break it at any moment if what the law demands clashes with our moral compasses, or even if it inconveniences us and we don’t see its societal merit.
Someone into meditation will often feel compelled to tell the world about it and to lead others in their path into this practice. An anarchist, being just as human, might feel a similar instinct to win others over. In my case, I think I should be careful about following this instinct. If others were willing to follow my version of anarchy, it would give me an implicit leadership that I should try to discard: There is a thick, yet slippery line between people thinking for themselves and questioning the rules around them, to just absorbing someone else’s ideas and joining a weird cult with no real alternatives to the intricate structures of today’s society.
If you’re an anarchist you’re alone on that path. Let your friends be corporate drones, your parents religious fanatics, and your children socialists. These societal structures are just part of the jungle we were born into and if we manage to travel by using vines and swinging from tree to tree or by felling some trees and opening up a road, that’s up to each of us. We need to decide this for ourselves.
Am I breaking with my advice in this post by publishing Numinous Notions and sharing my views on anarchism? Yes. But I prefer to channel this need for self-expression here and therewith be a more agreeable, more “below the radar”-anarchist in my personal life. In the last few years, I’d become too grumpy and loudly critical of our system in front of people who didn’t need to hear it. My friend’s mom, a judge in her sixties, doesn’t need to hear about my disregard for the government at our Christmas dinner. But if you are reading this, maybe you derive some enjoyment from my path in this single-player game.