"Anarchist"

"Bean didn't like his new name, but it was a name, and having a name meant that somebody else knew who he was and needed something to call him, and that was a good thing." -- Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card

This is kinda what the word "anarchist" means to me.

For about the first quarter century of my time as an anarchist, I had no knowledge of that word. Eventually, I think around junior high or so, I encountered a word like it, spelled and said the same, but it was more of a homonym, no more closely related to "real" anarchy than the "bow" of a ship to the "bow" I sometimes use to fire arrows at the range. It meant someone who "just wanted to watch the world burn", like in the Batman movie, or someone whose root goal was to disrupt orderly society to make it more chaotic, not as a way to achieve some other end, but as an end to itself. It in no way directly related to opposition to government, and indeed, it was even entirely possible, at least in theory, for one of the "bad" governments, in an extreme case of such, to be an "anarchist" organization, if they focused enough on indulging the violence fetishes of their leadership.

But a word that means someone who opposes the institution of government? I not only knew no such word, but I would never have thought to go looking for one, because why would anyone have coined a term for such a thing, when as far as I was able to find out, I seemed to be the only human in the entire species it would describe? Sure, I often enough encountered someone who opposed a particular action of government, or even who opposed an entire specific government, but they never wanted to get rid of government in general, only to swap out the specific elements they disliked for a "better" version of government. I couldn't even effectively describe my feelings on the matter to them: like trying to describe to someone blind from birth the way that one particular shade of blue varies from another particular shade, the entire concept of being opposed to government was so foreign to anything in their experience that they were unable to grasp the concept.

Then, in my late 20s, I saw a video in a college class that included a short clip of a speech by Tom Woods. It wasn't about anarchy, it was about reforming some aspects of the US university system, but something about Mr. Woods caught my attention. Maybe the way that he gave actual supporting arguments for his assertions (all too unusual a thing to encounter in a formal schooling context), or maybe it was just God's way of pointing me in the right direction. I remembered his name, googled it later, and that ended up eventually leading to me finding all sorts of information about a huge worldwide community of government-opposing people who weren't me, information that had apparently become abundant and available during the decade or more in which I had given up actively searching for such people.

And I found the word "anarchist". I learned that it didn't only ever have to mean cartoonish men with cast-iron bombs, trying to cause disruption for its own sake, that it could mean someone like me who saw government as a problem, not just as a fundamentally good thing that sometimes had superficial problems, but as something that was itself fundamentally a problem. I learned there were other Christians who took seriously the Bible's claim (one of the few things in the Bible that the text itself does actually claim to be the literal, direct Word of God) that to seek to have a human king rule over oneself is a rejection of God. I learned that there were other theorists and empiricists who had come up with demonstrations of fundamental problems with the institution of government. I've since even met a couple of such people in person.

Most of all, I learned I wasn't alone. I had natural allies. There were other people who believed what I believed. Not just one or two other people, either, but so many of them that society had found itself in need of a word that meant such a person. Someone cared enough about the existence of people like me to want a way to refer to us in speech and text. I had a name. "Anarchist".