Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.

-David Graeber

We need each other to do things that we can’t do for ourselves. If we are intimately connected with each other, we just give things to each other; if we don’t know each other we find another way to handle it. If you think about it, each according to his or her abilities and each according to his or her needs is sort of the same thing as supply and demand.

-David Graeber

Brilliant.

I have been going down a David Graeber rabbit hole for the past few months, and I am certainly on that trajectory. It’s funny, I’ve heard anecdotally that there is a surprisingly direct pipeline from disillusioned evangelical christian to anarchist, and it makes sense. The principles of anarchy resonate with the most basic lessons we are taught and which Christianity has sort of claimed for itself as how to be godly.

Anarchy has an amazingly bad branding challenge though, especially in America. I thought socialism had a bad brand, and then I started learning what anarchy actually is. Yikes.

I would say I am totally aligned intellectually with the principles of anarchy as I understand them today, and yet I still reflexively equate the very word with “disorder” and “chaos”. I have to be very intentional to turn my intellectual agreement into an actual warm fuzzy vibe when I hear or read the word. The connotations are set deep. I don’t think I’m unique or even in the minority in that regard, and I’m certain that’s no accident. Right now my sense of things is that socialism is the most practical path to anarchy, but even reading back the words I just wrote, I think at least half of america would think I was describing some sort of leftist terror plot.

On the bright side, I do think that the open corruption and incompetence of our world leaders has begun to undercut the baked in idea that rulers create order. Hopefully the more we as a society see the man behind the proverbial curtain and parse the real fact that Nobody Knows What They Are Doing, the necessity of mutual aid begins to become more clear.