The Essence of Anarchy

I am not a citizen.

In the same way that I was not born a laborer or a commodity or a percentage factor in a calculation, I was not born a citizen. I do not wish to be a citizen, to act as a citizen, or to harbor the dreams and aspirations of a citizen. To have citizenship of any kind one accepts certain laws and obligations in exchange for certain rights and opportunities. There are things that I value, and what I am asked to surrender is more valuable than what I am expected to accept.

I do not honor Law. This doesn’t mean I am lawless. I know it is selfish to steal from others, to take from another person what isn’t mine, and I don’t need a law to keep me from doing that. I know that what is not mine belongs to someone else—life, dignity, respect, honor, money, a home, a car, etc. Governments write laws to enforce behavior, to underline mores and morals, but I don’t need a law to tell me these things. In fact, once one begins to write laws governing behavior, they never stop. That is because once an individual, or group of individuals, is appointed to make decisions for the general population they become automatically exempt from those decisions. The creation of law demands the creation of lawgivers, which demands the creation of an elite that has the power of determination for all.  First it was priests, then it was kings, and today it is Congress.

Of course the original intent of the creation of an elite was to guide the masses. It was important, in the United States, for the law-givers to be a respected and educated class of people, the best and the brightest, and as it happened the best and the brightest were white, male landowners. So a group of white, male landowners overthrew the British crown and made a club called the Continental Congress. And the members of this core group laid laws governing the holdings of the white, male landowners. Over time they enlarged the franchise to include all white, male citizens, then all male citizens, and finally all citizens, male and female. As the franchise grew the elite became more entrenched and laws more complex. Today we have several hundred individuals from specific societal strata continuing to hand down legislation to a nation of 300 million people, and the heart of all legislation continues to favor the white, male landowner. In 200 years things have not changed very much
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There is no honor or privilege in being a “citizen”. It only means you can be taxed, drafted, imprisoned, and killed. Of course, you have the prestige that comes with being an “American”, but other than eating McDonalds and driving fast cars, what does being an American really do for you? The Constitution? It is basically the framework for the administering of a central government for a limited, democratic republic, or a “representative democracy”. The Bill of Rights? It is a loose afterthought of the original Constitution purported to outline the specific rights of the individual citizen. That these rights are so easily subverted, opined out of force, and changed reveals the ultimate value of the Bill of Rights. That is, it is only as powerful as the ability of the citizen to preserve it.
I don’t need a Bill of Rights to tell me that I can speak, to tell me that I can think, or to tell me that I don’t have to house US military persons in my home. These are rights that everyone has a human being, among any number of other rights we have as human beings. We are not born as citizens, we are born as human beings.

I have no compulsion to wave any mans flag, to sing any mans song, or take my sense of self and stick it to some supposedly hallowed tradition of nation and culture and populace. I can see clearly what is real and what is not. Land is real, guns are real, food and cars and buildings and resources and people are real. Ideologies, institutions, concepts, theories, conjectures, and beliefs are not real. To fashion a legal entity and accord it powers according to the laws fashioned by men is to worship a false god, a false creation, a false reality. Yet this creation of ours we call government has more power than we do, even the power to kill any one of us that it wishes. I don’t know of many data processors that program their computers to kill them if they violate the laws written into that computer, but I know there wouldn’t be very man computer programmers left if they did do that. So it is with government.

I am not a citizen.

I am not an employee
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I am not a cog in a machine.

I am a human being, first and foremost, and I surrender no rights to any man or man made creation that would seek to make me less than that.

That is my right, and I can take it from no one, nor can anyone take it from me.

This is the essence of Anarchy.