2008 Me, Less Cringe Than 2019 Me

Ha! It's funny 'cuz it's true.

I saw this meme pop up in my feed today and had to share my response to it.

Really? Hmm...

I feel like I've been gradually inching toward who I am my whole life.

However, I would say my biggest swing away from that was from about 2017-2020, thinking everyone becoming a full blown anarchist in ideology was possible if not necessary for a positive future. I thought it would save the world.

I no longer live in that mindset, and I shudder to think of how silly I have sounded the past four to five years pushing that mindset onto others.

However, I have reconciled that it was one path to where I am today that happened to be necessary to me, on one hand, to reject the state involvement in my decision making which is important, but on the other, to realize simultaneously that to make it as a species, my biggest allies need to include and to become aligned with “statists” rather than to revile them like a petulant child.

And in that, I learned I need to reject certain anarchist idealists who refuse to see beyond their microcosm of ideology as I once did. Once you’ve seen, you can’t unsee that the majority not only want-and will only ever want- a benevolent leader, but would be better off with one (not in this current over bloated federal configuration but after it inevitably collapses).

I no longer want statelessness. The anarchy of the people who wore the masks and supported Ukraine and took the shot as their own choice and right to do so, not to mention the handful that feel virtuous in taking their kids to drag queen story hour or to embrace the mutilating trans ideologies, those people living off their own devices as pure individualists is not the world I want to live in, ever, even if they pretended to leave me alone or told themselves they were going to live and let live with me… living next door to them… with my completely opposing value system.

That's too much delusion. There's not enough therapy in the world to make that fairytale be ideal or make that kind of ideological consistency tolerable.

I know what that looks and feels like. It's all your neighbors shunning you and you shunning them. It is plain awful. Nothing in Voluntaryism can fix that.

Having had to live through that exact neighborhood with individualists who were on board with all those aforementioned values living and let-living all around our single house of health and well-being values, I can 100% assure you the reality of that island of isolation is not the dream world Voluntaryists envision nor desire when they speak of inhabiting a voluntary society. An absence of the existence of the state would have made zero difference in that situation.

But alas, this is what I told myself over and over in 2019, before I knew.

Now, I’m just glad I got here before I name called more sensible “statists” and pushed them out of my circle forever.