Government, shmovernment - Part 4

If you can't change the world...

As you can see, I'm having more and more difficulty explaining away in my mind why it is okay for one group of people (be they the majority of people or not) to decide what is right for the rest of us.  Given this fact I'm also becoming more and more uneasy about giving another group of privately owned policy-enforcement officers the authority to arrest and detain me and to use force against me in order to enforce the laws that we all have supposedly agreed to by simply not leaving this imaginary area (i.e. "country") in which we stand.  I'm feeling less and less like this was set-up in this way to help the "little guy", or the "99%" as it were.  I'm feeling more and more like this system is set-up to make the majority a lot more manageable for the minority...or at least that this is what this system has become. Our unquestioning devotion to a system that very few of us truly understand feels very much like how we humans have blindingly obeyed the various religious oligarchs, monarchs and dictators in history.  And I don't think we need to "change the system", I really think we need to un-plug for a while and start to focus individually on ourselves and immediate families and communities and to fix our own backyards first.  We also need to reevaluate the very basis of our assumptions about the type of system we need or want to live, and want the rest of the world to be able to live as well.

To me anarchy means personal responsibility.  Worry about yourself, your children and your own backyard first.  Get your own affairs in order and be truly conscientious of your personal affects on the world around you.  If everyone did that there would be a lot fewer social problems in the world.

Admittedly this type of personal responsibility attitude is very difficult when one lives in a world where much of life's necessities are provided by a third party, not to mention a world that I think is quite destructive to most humans during their most important and formative years. We live in a world today that still by and large believes that using corporal punishment in child rearing is both effective and necessary, and that schoolyard bullying is just a natural way that kids interact. I'm wondering how much our present society skews the true essence of the human spirit.  Very few children in the Western World today have the benefit of having a parent at home full time to rear them in their formative years, and fewer and fewer children have their biological parents living together.  A large proportion of our society suffers from some sort of abuse, neglect or disconnectedness as children.  A lot of us are not getting a good start in life.  Many of us have not learned how to form positive, productive and healthy relationships. Many of us have not been equipped with coping strategies.  And then many of us are also having children of our own...  This is just a recipe for societal fucked-upedness.  So, no, we couldn't just get rid of government and not expect some serious hardship. Perhaps to start some small communities could form and show others what it is possible, but for society as a whole to reach this type of world will take generations, in my opinion.

Being the misanthrope that I am, unfortunately I think this system is going to crash long before we get our shit together as a species.  I just hope we can think about this stuff now, while we have the "free time", resources and infrastructure (particularly the internet) to flesh it out and discuss it.

The way our society is run used to get me really down. Sometimes I feel like a sane person living in an insane world and that the people at large are so brainwashed by the ideas fed to us by our education systems, media and other CLOG run institutions, that they will never live up to even a fraction of their potential as humans, and yet here I sit in a house fully connected to the grid, typing away on my computer made by slave labor overseas after having eaten a meal whose ingredients certainly were not grown nor processed by me.  So instead of complaining about how fucked up the rest of the world is, I'm going to try and "be the change [I] want to see in the world". 

It truly is the least I can do.