A lot of people are. We have bad press, partly our fault and partly because we’re dangerous to systems of power and those who benefit from them. The cultural idea of power doesn’t mind if everyone swaps places or if things get turned upside down. The framework of thinking persists, everyone in the system understands it. It’s easy. Destroying it though, that means basically everyone has to unlearn a lot. It demands we see the beggar and the ceo as equals influenced by their situation and circumstances.

But also I think one thing to understand that a lot of people don’t is that there’s folks I’d call optimist anarchists, and folks I’d call pessimist anarchists. Optimist anarchists believe that we as people can build a better world together because people tend to want to help people and abolishing hierarchy is the best way to enable that. Pessimist anarchists believe that power tends to fuck with your head and make you a worse person. To them abolishing hierarchy may not result in a good situation, but rather that allowing hierarchy is too high risk. The optimist may say that a benevolent dictator isn’t as good for society as a benevolent society of equals. The pessimist would say that a benevolent dictator is rare at best and highly unlikely to keep happening.

See, unlike the communist tankies who would at this moment chant ‘one of us, one of us’…

I will encourage you to aim to to good in an imperfect world where circumstances are often either morally gray, or involve complex factors that are non obvious, but very relevant and important, to learn moral and ethical theories and challenge yourself to actually answer ‘What is good?’.

I will encourage you to /never/ believe you have all the answers to everything, that there is always more than can be learned, and that there are very rarely one size fits all answers to unique and specific situations, and to know that admitting a mistake or error, and reflecting on why or how you came to be in error, is not the sign of a fool, but is the sign of a genuine person striving to be consistent froma starting point of incomplete knowledge and experience.

I will encourage you to challenge your own assumptions, but to be confident when confronted with rhetoric and theories that you yourself can prove are misleading, logically invalid, or outright justify atrocities.

As can probably be reasonably expected, there is an extremely wide range of Anarchist stances on basically the minutia of theory, as well as on what are and are not defensible or moral stances on specific current events or situations, and there are many Anarchist theoreticians who come from many different cultures and backgrounds, and many who focus much more on how Anarchist theory can or should apply to more specific features of our largely capitalist world.

I have tried here to outline the most broadly agreed upon ideas that… well again probably only really Communist Tankies would find fault with, they kind of have a whole history of incorporating anarchists into initial Social Revolutions, and then murdering them all after they have control of their newly acquired state.

They really do not like that Anarchists existed and still exist, they are very convinced, ironically, that they own the ideology that evolved out of Marx, when in truth prominent Anarchists such as Kropotkin and others actually both agreed and disagreed with each other on various issues, and helped form some of both of their views both by antagonism and agreement.

Anyway, entirely unironically:

Live Long and Prosper, and, the Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few.

Haha I’ve had the same exact realization while learning about what it actually is!