An educated young man likes to think; he likes ideas for their own sake and likes to deal with them disinterestedly and objectively. He will find this taste an expensive one, much beyond his means, because the society around him is thoroughly indisposed towards anything of the kind. It is preeminently a society, as John Stuart Mill said, in which the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds. In any department of American life this is indeed the only final test; and this fact is in turn a fair measure of the extent to which our society is inimical to thought. The president of Columbia University is reported in the press as having said the other day that “thinking is one of the most unpopular amusements of the human race. Men hate it largely because they can not do it. They hate it because if they enter upon it as a vocation or avocation it is likely to interfere with what they are doing.” This is an interesting admission for the president of Columbia to make - interesting and striking. Circumstances have enabled our society to get along rather prosperously, though by no means creditably, without thought and without regard for thought, proceeding merely by a series of improvisations; hence it has always instinctively resented thought, as likely to interfere with what it was doing. Therefore, the young person who has cultivated the ability to think and the taste for thinking is at a decided disadvantage, for this resentment is now stronger and more heavily concentrated than it ever was.
—Albert J. Nock
— Albert Jay Nock (via marketorder)
Becoming An Anarchist
Philosophical Arguments:
- Why I Am An Anarchist by Benjamin Tucker
- Against The State by Crispin Sartwell
- Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard (PDF)
- Our Enemy, The State by Albert J. Nock (PDF)
- Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
These are just a few off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many other very influential writings to read. I just haven’t gotten to reading them yet. Also, I haven’t read much by the traditional anarchists. But I’m more focused these days on learning more about the practicability of anarchism than the philosophical or ethical arguments for it.
On Doing the Right Thing
When there used to be more restrictions on my actions, however voluntary it was that my actions were restricted by associations (family, girlfriend), I tended to study harder, work harder, get homework and essays written earlier. Then I split from my family and my girlfriend (I was 19. I started at Boise State early. I lived at home for the first couple years, getting good grades, being influenced and driven forward by my mother and ex). Shortly after that I ran. I moved away. Eventually, I returned. But since my return, I’d become somewhat jaded by school, at least so I thought.
As I read Nock last night it dawned on me that I didn’t develop the same self-control in schooling as freshmen in college who weren’t subjected to the influence of trying to get a degree for the future of themselves and their perceived life-mate or freshmen who were less inhibited from going out and spending time with their friends. And, they weren’t typically subjected to the daily verbal battering of a Puerto Rican mother from New York, reminding them that college is the most important aspect of their life, if not even more important than life itself. When those shackles were removed my actions and self-discipline changed.
Beyond the shackles being removed there was a new questioning of prevailing views of the world and her institutions. I didn’t understand the importance of school. For, what seemed to me, no rationalized reason I had been studying, getting good grades and learning things that I was not sure how they would be affecting my career path, or even whether or not they’d benefit it. I’d been racking up the debt for an education I felt I could learn on my own, with slightly more difficulty, granted. Then, with that mentality, I continued with school, carefree.
Our Enemy, The State
Albert J. Nock presents an important comparison between the State and historically, the Church in his essay (PDF).
There appears to be a curious difficulty about exercising reflective thought upon the actual nature of an institution into which one was born and one’s ancestors were born. One accepts it as one does the atmosphere; one’s practical adjustments to it are made by a kind of reflex. One seldom thinks about the air until one notices some change, favourable or unfavourable, and then one’s thought about it is special; one thinks about purer air, lighter air, heavier air, not about air. So it is with certain human institutions. We know that they exist, that they affect us in various ways, but we do not ask how they came to exist, or what their original intention was, or what primary function it is that they are actually fulfilling; and when they affect us so unfavourably that we rebel against them, we contemplate substituting nothing beyond some modification or variant of the same institution. Thus colonial America, oppressed by the monarchical State, brings in the republican State; Germany gives up the republican State for the Hitlerian State; Russia exchanges the monocratic State for the collectivist State; Italy exchanges the constitutionalist State for the “totalitarian” State.
