Fundamentally, you can never be someone else. You can only be less of who you are.
Invading a statist society is like grabbing the cages of a large number of trapped chickens – you get all of the eggs in perpetuity. Invading a stateless society is like taking a sprint at a flock of seagulls – all they do is scatter, and you get nothing, except perhaps some crap on your forehead.
You are born into this world without choice, into a familial, social, educational, political and geographical environment that is merely accidental. And for the rest of your life, everyone will try to convince you that you are responsible for this accident.
Human beings have a deeply seated desire to correct others. We can be noble and say that this is for the cause of moral instruction and the improvement of the minds and choices of others across the globe – and on occasion this may actually be the case. But the reality is that human beings like to correct other human beings because it is a non-violent way to control them.
If you have a goal to pass a class in university, you have, at least hopefully, objective and well-defined steps by which you can achieve that goal – write an essay, go to class, pass an exam. If you don’t have a final goal, you cannot organize your activities.
If society gave everything that a poor person could possibly require in order to live comfortably, that would scarcely reduce the numbers of poor people, but would rather increase them considerably.
There is a sickly market for selling helpless people the idea that they are poor because the ambitious and wealthy people have stolen resources from them. This creates a dangerous hatred for the productive that sets society on the path to self-destruction.
Anarchists understand that the only valid and proven way to oppose human corruption is through voluntarism and competition – statists believe that the only way to oppose human corruption is to create a monopoly of violent power.
If you don’t examine your programming, your programming becomes your physics – as absolute and unchangeable as the laws of material reality.
The word “rights”, is something that governments need to provide you and protect you from but, the governments are the basic violators of all human rights.
The story of the progress of human morals is almost entirely populated by people who did not live to see the world that they loved in their minds.
In the statist paradigm, we listen only to God and obey His commandments. In the anarchist paradigm, God also listens to us, and we negotiate as equals.
It is the height of human happiness to have somebody to love. Our agony is that we have all the light and the paint but no canvas to put the art of our hearts on.
Civilization is the general agreement to refrain from resorting to violence if negotiations fail.
The world will be free of the State when we finally see that the State is inferior to all of our personal and professional relationships. When we are completely used to thinking in terms of mutual advantage, the violent exploitation of the State will finally become clear to us, and it will fall away.
Perfection is invented by evil people to paralyze you.
By placing you in age-segregated confinement among a subset of traumatized and aggressive children, schools teach you very quickly that peers are dangerous and that teachers are needed to control bullying.
We are constantly told by the government that we are in danger – not from the state, of course, which taxes and conscripts us, starts wars and buries us in national debts – but from our fellow citizens.
Without the state, we are told, we will be overrun by the insanity and evil of those around us – but the state is also somehow legitimized by the votes of the insane and evil around us.
If you lack self-knowledge – if you lack the basic understanding of how you have been turned into a machine that serves the state, into a subspecies of tax livestock that serves politicians – then how can you claim to have any real understanding of freedom, let alone free will?
If you were raised badly, then you were conditioned by your parents to serve their dysfunctional needs, rather than the truth, integrity, honesty or any of the other basic virtues in life.