Why I Have Chosen Anarchy

If, among the wide range of ideas that have presented themselves to me, I have finally chosen the libertarian ideal, it is because, like every person on the planet, I am fundamentally egoistic.

As I hate being forced to adopt principles, lines of conduct that do not correspond to my views and am even ready to sabotage a society that means to direct my actions, I have thought that any oppressed individual would have the same feelings and that therefore the best way for me to have peace is never to subject anyone to a state of affairs that they do not accept. Now the libertarian ideal is the only one that does not claim to oblige beings who are resistant to accept its fundamentals. It is the only one that does not aim, in order to achieve any goal, to subsume, by force if necessary, individuals within it.

None of the political factions — Communists, Socialists, Fascists, etc. — bases its conception of society on a free grouping of Communists, Socialists, etc.; as soon as they possess the might, and thus, in practice, the right, they impose their point of view on those who are not partisans of the regime, forcing them to collaborate and to model their actions solely on authorized ideals. Is it any wonder that there are uprisings and unrest? We, libertarians, do not want to convert anyone to our ideas by force, nor to compel them to imitate us, if this is not their explicit will. What we want, and that with all our strength, is to have the ability to live our lives as we have chosen, to express and exchange our opinions in complete freedom. We do not accept the imposition on us of a way of acting, a way of thinking. We will not be sacrificed to absurd entities, to improbable futures or to shameful interests.

“Man was born to live and not to prepare to live,” said Pasternak. We do not want the incomparable paradises that everyone would like to compel us to inhabit, and we wholeheartedly agree with Rostand when he writes: “I would not want a heaven where I did not have the right to prefer hell.”

This is, I believe, regardless of the various existing conceptions about the structures of a libertarian society, what unites at base all anarchists, and this is why I have chosen anarchy.

In the same way that I do not like being forced to integrate myself into an environment that is not mine, to make myself live in a way that does not conform to my aspirations, just so I would not want for anything in the world to force others to embrace my ideas and oblige them to live according to my ideal, even if I think that their happiness lies in this way.

Having no standard against which to measure Truth and Values, the so-called libertarian who would try, for the sake of efficiency, to impose their ideas on the masses, would ipso facto fall back into the category of those they fight, because they too, often in good faith, claim to bring us Truth, Salvation and to save us in spite of ourselves. There is no reason to say that they are wrong and we are right. This is why I find it hard to believe that anyone can think of carrying out a violent social revolution with the aim of bringing an anarchist remedy to the ills that human beings suffer. The only way that seems to me full of promise and fruit is to fight everywhere, always, against authority and, if the state of our forces allows it, to accomplish a revolution, violent or not, having as its goal, not to propagate a libertarian communism, but to shatter the tangible reality of the authority that crushes us, so that everyone can, without constraints, choose their path, be Marxist, libertarian, etc., and live, with their own comrades in ideas, their own life in their own way.