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Am I An Anarchist

Today was awesome because I got to spend a couple of hours with Tyler and we waxed philosophical. I explained to him my evolving thoughts and he called me an Anarchist. I'd never been called an anarchist before and since I wasn't entirely sure what one was, I couldn't argue. So just now I read about anarchists in Wikipedia and I realize that I can't really be considered an anarchist as anarchy is a political philosophy and right now I could care less about politics. But I did find this paragraph insightful. It's speaking about the ideologies of the William Goodwin--the Father of Modern-Day Anarchism:

His aversion to the imposition of a rules-based society led him to denounce as a manifestation of the people's "mental enslavement" the foundations of law, property rights and even the institution of marriage. He considered the basic foundations of society as constraining the natural development of individuals to use their powers of reasoning to arrive at a mutually beneficial method of social organisation. In each case, government and its institutions are shown to constrain the development of our capacity to live wholly in accordance with the full and free exercise of private judgement.

That paragraph explains how I feel about organized religions. Particularly the lines about "mental enslavement." I feel governments and religious institutions do impede the development of man. Constrain, in fact, is the perfect description. I find it insulting that people think the human race would devolve into riotous, murderous living if there were no religious underpinnings.

So while I have no desire to label myself as an anarchist, I do desire to study some of their philosophical works. I really think I'm more of a libertarian--or perhaps an open-sourced, abundant communitarian.

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