I acknowledge that the kind of relationship that I have had with anarchism has been more intense and all-encompassing than the ways that other people who identify with the philosophy tend to relate with it. So I have been wondering: What is it about me that has led to my having the kind of relationship with anarchism that I have had? How did the black star of anarchism come to be the personal north star of my life? This meandering verbal exposition here is my attempt to answer these questions.
I want to elaborate a bit on what I mean when I say "anarchism". This is a loaded term and a lot of different people use the word in different ways. I also acknowledge that the word "anarchist" can have quite an emotional charge associated with it as well. So I want to be careful in spelling out exactly what I am referring to when I use that word here. It is important to make sure that we are thinking about the same thing before I go charging down the path with this word.
When I say "anarchism", I am referring to the radical political and social philosophy that emerged out of 19th Century Europe which holds that all forms of top-down hierarchy, authority and domination are fundamentally detrimental to human beings. Anarchism advocates for new forms of social organization to be implemented instead of coercive hierarchical structures. The forms of organization that anarchism advocates for are characterized by voluntary cooperation, mutual aid, free association, and individual autonomy, together with horizontal and participatory decision-making in collective groups. The various institutions that shape our everyday lives today, such as capitalism, the state, patriarchy, compulsory education, carceral justice and white supremacy, are all seen by anarchism as being at their root based upon hierarchy and domination, and therefore should be completely abolished. Anarchism encourages resistance to these institutions from movements that are based on direct action, and the building of new alternative social structures that meet people's collective needs through decentralized bottom-up grassroots community organizing. It has been said that at its core, the positive values motivating anarchism are the same three which inspired the French Revolution at the end of the 17th Century: Liberty, Equality, Solidarity. At its best, anarchist ethics says that coercion corrupts truth, hierarchy distorts relationships, and that mutual aid arises naturally when people's autonomy is respected and trusted.
To express what anarchism is using different words, I would say that anarchism is the belief that forcing and threatening people should not be the basis from which people are motivated to do things in a society. Anarchism views the society that we live in as being based upon underlying threats of different kinds: threats of homelessness and starvation, threats of being murdered by people wearing a uniform or being locked up in a cage by them, threats of social exclusion and ostracism from society, threats of being sent to some kind of “hell” after one dies (or while one is still alive, for that matter). None of these threats are necessary and inevitable, they are all things that people collectively decided to do at some point. Anarchism contains the belief that everybody’s needs should be seen and valued, and that any society where some people’s needs are given a lot of visibility and importance, while other people’s needs are dismissed or disregarded, is not how a society should be organized. Anarchism says that everybody who is directly affected by a decision should be involved in making that decision. Anarchism is about being actively involved in shaping one’s own life, whether it be one’s personal life or the life of the community that one resides within. Anarchism is about free choice, and gaining the ability to choose. Anarchism is about participation, working together and sharing resources. Anarchism is about people looking out for one another to make sure that everyone is having their needs attended to. Anarchist revolutionary change is about people acting to move in the direction of living these values together, regardless of what those who are considered to be “in charge” declare.
Anarchism emerged as a distinct political/social philosophy and movement out of the mid-19th century socialist movement in Europe. Three of the people who are considered to be founding figures of anarchism, namely Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Max Stirner and Mikhail Bakunin, all personally knew Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. However, these three guys each diverged sharply from Marx and Engels in the kind of socialism that they advocated. These anarchist thinkers advocated for a stateless form of socialism, a libertarian socialism, instead of the state-based socialism that Marxism is associated with. From that initial split onwards anarchism has changed and evolved over time. Anarchism has found many different forms of expression and experimentation around the world based on the particular people involved and the circumstances that they were in. Despite the many different kinds of anarchism that have emerged over time, they all have shared these same characteristics of being anti-state, anti-capitalism, anti-domination, and pro-freedom, pro-equality, and pro-solidarity in nature.
Likewise, when I use the word "anarchist" here I am referring to someone who personally holds beliefs in some form of anarchism. When I use the word "anarchy" I am referring to a society that exists without a state or any other organizing force of domination, and that instead operates based on people freely associating and cooperating to meet their needs together voluntarily as equals. Succinctly put, anarchists believe in anarchism and seek to bring about anarchy.
A disclaimer that I feel called to give before continuing on with this screed is that what I am writing here is the story of my life, or at least the first 20 years of it. This is a very personal account, so be warned. This is not a philosophical treatise, although the philosophy of anarchism permeates everything. I am writing my account of what I remember from what I experienced personally. I am writing my perceptions, my interpretations of what happened and how they affected me. Different people may have different memories, perceptions and interpretations, and these experiences may have affected other people in different ways. I acknowledge this.
I am also not saying that my childhood and younger years were the worst experiences ever. I know that many people have faced much worse experiences of hardship and loss than mine. I also know that I come from a background of a lot of relative privilege in society, being an able-bodied cisgender heterosexual white male from a middle-class family in the United States with parents who both loved and cared for him. Viewed from the perspective of all of the relative privilege that I was born into, I really lucked out as far as upbringings go. I acknowledge all of that. Nevertheless, events still unfolded as they did. Systems, forces and pressures were still placed upon me, and as a result my psyche and worldview emerged as it did.
This is the story of the early years of my life and how the various things that I experienced during the waning years of the 20th Century created the foundation for me to become a life-long anarchist.
I was born in October of 1978 in Lawton, Oklahoma. Lawton is a city which is overshadowed by the U.S. Army, which has the Fort Sill base adjacent to the city, and the Comanche Nation, which has its tribal headquarters in the city. Lawton was a place that played an important role in the historical subjugation of the native American peoples, particularly the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache tribes. My parents were both transplants to Lawton from the greater Detroit, Michigan area, having moved there as young 20-somethings purely for employment purposes.
I was a very shy quiet kid throughout my childhood, being very much interested in the world of books, comic books, video games, movies, TV shows, music and spending time alone outdoors. The world of sports and games that preoccupied most of my peers never really interested me. I distinctly remember learning how to read when I was in the second grade, and the excitement and empowerment that I felt at being able to access the world of written material because of that.
Aside from media and solitary experience, meaningful conversation between people has also always interested me as well. I remember starting at a very young age having meaningful conversations with others, primarily adults, be it my parents, relatives, teachers or caregivers. I was lucky to have encountered a variety of different adults during my early childhood who were willing and able to engage in meaningful conversation with me. I was particularly lucky to have the parents that I had, in that both of them welcomed conversation and questions about a wide range of different subjects. No topic was considered off limits by them. All of this impressed upon me at a young age that free inquiry and open discourse between people is both possible and desirable.
I started paying attention to the news at a very young age, most likely because both of my parents regularly paid attention to the news. Various things stand out in my memory related to that, for example, I remember being unsettled by the 1986 U.S. military bombing of Libya and the reports of one of Muammar Gaddafi's children being killed as a result. I was a child of the later stages of the Cold War, and I was quite disturbed by the possibility of mutually assured destruction from the combined nuclear weapons arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union. I was also aware of the global ecological crisis and I was disturbed at the thought of the ongoing extinctions of various species of animals around the world. The cumulative effect of my awareness of the news of U.S. military action abroad, the visible presence of the U.S. military in my hometown, the looming threat of mutually assured destruction from global nuclear war, and the global ecological crisis with its results in species extinction worldwide all came together to create a sort of background inner "Sword of Damocles" environment that I grew up in.
My parents were of the Baby Boomer generation, and that had a number of different effects on me too. That generation was shaped by the Vietnam War era, and because of that many different stories and cultural depictions of the Vietnam War filtered down to me. Hearing about the military draft, and resistance to it from people within the Baby Boomer generation, touched me deeply. As much as I loved hearing stories about war, both fictional and real-life, I also knew in my heart of hearts that if I were to ever be drafted that I would resist serving in the military. I enjoyed stories and entertainment depicting violence, but I did not enjoy the thought of killing and being killed in the real world. If it came down to it, I was ready to be a conscientious objector rather than be a part of that.
Another effect of my being raised by parents of that generation was that my mother was deeply inspired by the second-wave feminism movement of the 1960's - early 1980's. Because of this I was taught by her that both boys and girls could be whoever they wanted to be and do whatever they wanted to do, regardless of society telling us that we each need to strictly abide by normative gender expectations. This meant that the expectation that boys have to be interested in sports, for example, was not an obligatory thing that I had to be bound to. This also meant that expressions and exploration of emotions, and inquiry into interpersonal relationship dynamics by boys and men, were not considered to be off-limits when I was growing up. (Subsequently, my mother's second-wave feminism influence also led to her condemning the James Bond character as a "male chauvinist pig" and the franchise of which he was a part of as "objectifying women". This was personally confusing to me, since my father was a fan of that franchise and I enjoyed watching James Bond movies together with him.)
Another important factor of my growing up was that I was born and raised in a family that was a part of the Baha'i Faith, which is a monotheistic Abrahamic religion. My parents converted to the Baha'i Faith when they were in their 20's. They were a part of the wave of young American baby boomers who converted to that religion in the late 1960's - early 1970's, the poster children of which being the soft rock duo Seals & Crofts. As a result, I grew up in an environment where various Baha'i people and activities were a part of my everyday life. The Baha'i Faith is a religion that originated from the nation of Iran, where the state and religious authorities there consider it to be heretical. From the beginnings of the Baha'i Faith up to the current day the Baha'is in Iran have been persecuted by the authorities there. Because of this, the presence of Baha'i Iranian refugees was always there in my early life, regardless of which Baha'i community I visited. From these refugees I heard stories of persecution and government repression, and I met people who endured various forms of hardship and suffering due to state repression.
It was during my early childhood that the Iranian Baha'i teacher Mona Mahmudnizhad was arrested, tortured and executed by the state for the crime of being a Baha'i. Talking with people about this, together with watching Doug Cameron's music video Mona with the Children, really seared into my mind's eye the arbitrary and brutal nature of the state. I had the distinct sense that governments could inflict immense pain and suffering on people like me and other people in my community, whenever they so desired.
I had another experience during my early childhood that reinforced my understanding that the forces of the state can come for you at any time. This happened during Christmastime in Michigan when my family was visiting my relatives. My parents, grandparents, uncles and myself were all gathered together in the living room of my grandparents' house in Eastpointe, Michigan enjoying the Christmas festivities together. Suddenly there was a knock on the front door. It was the police and they had come for my uncle. Right in front of me I saw him get arrested, put in handcuffs and taken away.
I also had a visceral understanding of the horror of the state because I had experienced corporal punishment at the hands of my parents. I knew what it was like to be powerless, begging for the punishment to not happen, to be physically overpowered and to have no ability to change the outcome. I knew that on a root level, that this is what police, prisons and militaries are, and that this is what corporal punishment is as well. Claims of "for your own good" or "for the good of society” may be given, but the result is still the same: subjugation and intentionally inflicting pain on others.
During my early childhood, I also had an experience that introduced me to the concept of private property. In the neighborhood where we lived in Lawton there was a boy who was about my age who lived down the street named Bobby. He would occasionally invite me over to his house to play with him, which I would take him up on. Bobby's mother for some reason did not like this, and on multiple occasions she would see me there and scream at me "get off my property!" and I would then run away in fear. This happened one too many times for her, and eventually she followed up her "get off my property!" demand with a declaration that she was going to go tell my parents what a bad kid I was. I remember being really shaken up by this, riding my little plastic Big Wheel bike back home to warn my parents of the imminent arrival of this angry screaming neighbor lady. Soon thereafter there she was, standing in front of our front door. I remember her yelling at my father about how I was repeatedly disrespecting her property rights. My father silently listened to her tirade for a bit and then he bellowed: "listen, bitch, you get the fuck off of my property!" Bobby's mother then immediately left and I never played with Bobby again.
My early childhood also coincided with the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia. Through the news I was aware that people were starving to death out there, lots of people. In 1985 the supergroup USA for Africa released the song We Are the World and my elementary school at the time made a big deal about that. I remember appreciating the cultural spectacle surrounding all of it, while also thinking that this was an absurd and unsustainable way to address the problem of millions of people starving to death on the other side of the planet.
Somehow through the news and various conversations I had somewhat of an awareness of the political-economic systems of capitalism and socialism when I was a young child. I did not like capitalism as a child, because I did not like how homelessness and starvation were the underlying threats that made it all function. I also did not like state socialism either, commonly referred to as “Communism”, because American Cold War propaganda successfully made sure that I was well-aware of all of the various indignities, brutalities and atrocities that it inflicts upon its populations. So I wanted socialism, but not “Communism”. I was a little Okie socialist. I remember once spontaneously asking my parents why the United States is not a socialist country while watching Saturday-morning cartoons. I don’t remember the answer that was given to me, but I remember not being satisfied by it.
I remember once discussing capitalism and communism with someone who worked at a day-care center that I was at while my parents were at work. I remember us talking about how capitalism has two classes, the rich who control society and the poorer folks who have to follow their commands. I remember coming to the realization during that conversation that state socialism is really no different from capitalism in that regard, since those people who control the state in those societies are in effect the new ruling class there. The governing elite in state socialist societies control the money and they make all the rules, while everyone else needs to obey them or else suffer the consequences. So it doesn't matter if the society is called "capitalism" or "socialism", the same underlying dynamic is still happening either way. I don’t remember the details of this conversation, nor do I remember any of the exact words spoken, but I do remember that this was the takeaway message that I was left with. I wish that I knew who that day-care worker was, or how that conversation even came about in the first place, since that was indeed one of the most pivotal conversations that I have ever had in my entire life!
I remember talking with another day-care worker on another occasion about the nature of fascism and Nazism. I was aware of these things, not just because of all of the cultural narratives that were floating around out there related to World War Two, but in particular because of the TV show Highway to Heaven that I regularly watched together with my mother, which in one episode featured some Neo-Nazi characters. I was struck by the sheer heartlessness and aggressiveness that permeates the fascist mentality. That same TV show also had a big impact on me with another episode as well, which introduced me to the reality that people with developmental and intellectual disabilities exist. I was really struck by the marginalization and exclusion that such people are faced with in our society. That set the stage for me to later on, as an adult, pursue work as a caregiver supporting such individuals.
Through my experience of being sent to various day-care centers, and then later on to public schools, as well as spending time with various babysitters (all due to my parents having to work jobs in order to make money in a capitalist society), I grew to understand the visceral difference between the larger institutional forms of warehousing and managing people in contrast to the smaller more personalized forms of spending time together with people. Day-care centers and schools always felt impersonal, overwhelming and controlling to me. Being with babysitters, by contrast, while not ideal, always had the quality of being more flexible, intimate and offered the possibility to really get to know the person who was tasked with the job. This gave me an inchoate and intuitive understanding of the differences between larger centralized forms of social organization versus smaller more decentralized structures.
When I came to be of age for kindergarten and public schools, I remember the sense of prevailing doom and dread at my realization during my first day of kindergarten that this large institutional experience was mandatory, that I had no choice but to be there and endure it. These large institutions that are warehousing children, with all of their different rules, regulations and requirements handed down arbitrarily by a wide variety of different authority figures, was something that I was going to have to endure for many years to come. For me as a little boy it felt like I had been given a long prison sentence and that I had just started serving my time.
For a brief period of time my family actually had two pet dogs. There was Candy, who was there for many of my formative years, and then there was a stray dog whom we adopted after we got Candy that I named “Cane”. The idea was that Candy and Cane would be a pair: “candy cane”. Cane, however, had different aspirations for their life. Unlike Candy, Cane had presumably never lived with humans as a “pet” before, and he wasn’t about to start living such a lifestyle on my behalf. Multiple times Cane would escape from our home and my parents would go search for him and bring him back. Eventually one of those escape attempts resulted in him running out into busy traffic and being killed by a car. He lived fast and died young. Despite not living that long, however, Cane taught me that it is possible to reject the normative scripts that society gives us for how we are supposed to live our lives, and to opt instead for a life of pure unconstrained freedom. He taught me that for some beings, living a life of true autonomy is so important that they are willing to risk death in order to achieve it.
When I was six, almost seven, my younger brother was born. I remember that event, as I was hastily dropped off at the house of friends of my parents in the middle of the night before they sped away to the hospital. With my brother as the new baby in the family, my mother then joined the local chapter of the La Leche League, a mutual aid group to support mothers with breastfeeding. I remember being taken to those meetings together with my mom and little brother and listening to the mothers there talk about their lives, their families and their problems, and offering empathy, advice and encouragement to each other, all while openly breastfeeding their babies. In retrospect, those impressions formed at the La Leche League meetings, such open tenderness, care and attunement all in a mutual support social setting, probably influenced my later receptivity to the ideas of Miki Kashtan and her thoughts on the “maternal gift economy”.
Throughout all of my memories of my parents' marriage they never had a happy relationship. At best there was always a thick uncomfortable unspoken tension in the air whenever they were both together. At worst, they would be screaming and fighting with each other, with it sometimes even turning physical. I loved both of my parents and I had many nourishing conversations with each of them. But I never enjoyed being with both of them together at the same time. With this in mind, it would come as no surprise that they divorced when I was eight years old. I still remember the exact moment when me, my mother, younger brother and family pets drove away from the family home with my father standing outside on the curb alone watching as we drove away. This would be the first big trauma in my life and the foundational fracture in my conception of "family".
In 1987 my mother moved with my brother and I to Palm Coast, Florida, which at the time was akin to a company town developed by the ITT Corporation. My mother's brother was living with us initially, as he had just been released from prison and needed a place to stay. My mother felt like she herself had also just been released from prison, as she was very unhappy being in a relationship with my father, and subsequently experienced the process of leaving my father as being one of personal empowerment and discovering her own sense of agency.
For myself during this period of my post-divorce childhood, I was introduced to the concept of dueling narratives, that is, different people having different stories and interpretations of the same event that they both experienced together. My mother had one interpretation of what the relationship with my father was like, and my father had a very different interpretation of what that same relationship was like. Both of them would put a great deal of time and energy into recounting and explaining to me what that relationship was really about, and I never knew how to make sense of it all, or who or what to believe. All I knew is that I loved both of them, I could see how they were both hurting from that relationship, and I did not like my memories of how they were together when they were married living in Oklahoma.
Florida was a different environment from Oklahoma, in many ways. The beaches and swamplands of Florida are very different from the prairies and hills of Oklahoma. In both places, I have fond memories of spending time by myself outside in nature. In Oklahoma I marveled at the prairie dogs, buffalo and tarantulas. In Florida I marveled at the snakes, scorpions and armadillos. (yes, alligators were around too, but they weren't as big a presence in my life there as all the hype surrounding them would lead one to believe.)
I also became a serious history nerd while living in Florida and I dove into all of the intricate historical details of that area. I marveled at how that area where I lived, northeast Florida, had five different nation-states that at different points in history claimed sovereignty over that same area: Spain, Great Britain, France, the Confederacy and the United States. This history taught me that no nation-state's rule is eternal, regardless of whatever claims to divine sovereignty they made. The history of Florida also introduced me to the story of the native Seminole people that had also lived in that same land who were forcibly sent along on the Trail of Tears to, ironically enough, Oklahoma.
Despite the relational fracture and relocation that set the stage for moving to Florida, I would say that this time living there with my mother as a single parent was the happiest time for me in my childhood. My mother noticeably calmed down and seemed to settle into her own sense of empowerment in herself. My family life had much less of an undertone of relational tension permeating everything, and I had more physical space and freedom at our new home to explore the swamps and pine forests that surrounded us. During this time I also feel like I learned a great deal about psychology and interpersonal relationships as well, due to the many long discussions that I had with my mother about such topics.
It was a couple of years after moving to Florida that I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons one morning when suddenly the show was interrupted by the TV news. It was news of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, and images of the mass protests and government tanks in the streets of Beijing were being shown to children all across America. A little more than five months after that, the Berlin wall came down in Germany. That year I learned that governments can massacre their own citizens in the streets, and I learned that governments can also quickly unexpectedly collapse.
I went to a public school initially in Palm Coast, and while there I remember there being a D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program in my elementary school. A police officer would come to my class to facilitate this program and I remember one time he brought bags of real-life drugs to show the students. These bags of drugs were passed around among the students, presumably so that everyone would know what all of the different drugs look like, so that they would know what to look out for and avoid. When that particular session was over that day, it was discovered that one of the bags of drugs that was passed around amongst the students had gone missing, and that it was not returned. I remember the police officer and the class teacher being alarmed and embarrassed by that fact, and I remember a bunch of the students accusing the scruffy kid from the poor family of being the one who took that missing bag of drugs. I don’t remember how that situation was resolved, but I do remember that that experience made me aware of the fallibility of the police.
After public school, I then went to a small private Episcopal school in St. Augustine for the sixth grade. That was my happiest year in a formal school environment. I attribute that to it being a very small school, with very small class sizes, and with my teacher being a nice Canadian lady and the school principal being a gentle old lady who would occasionally sit down with the children to discuss the Bible. My best friend at that school had a mom who was dating the guy who owned the local comic book store that I frequented, so I felt like I had an inside connection with the comic book industry as a result. Life was good.
Seventh grade was a jarring contrast for me in that I was sent that year to a Catholic school, due to the Episcopal school that I was previously attending experiencing financial difficulties and as a result they had to reduce the number of grade levels that they offered. At that Catholic school I experienced both bullying from my peers as well as all of the harsh theocratic discipline from the school authorities that one comes to expect from Catholic schools. I was absolutely miserable there.
There was one little glimmer of light experience that occurred at that Catholic school, and that was that I was first introduced to the anarchy symbol while there. I remember one day seeing a circle-A scrawled on a school desk and I had never seen it before. I asked another kid what that symbol meant and the reply that I got was "that's the anarchy symbol, it stands for chaos". I was impressed that such a symbol existed.
Somehow I made it through seventh grade and half of eighth grade at that school. Somewhere along the way I learned that "homeschooling" was something that existed and I then embarked on a pressure campaign directed at my mother to have me do that instead of continuing on with Catholic school. After much begging and pleading to my mother, she agreed to withdraw me from the Catholic school and to have me be homeschooled instead.
The transition out of that Catholic school coincided with four other big things that also occurred around that same time. The first was my attending the Baháʼí World Congress of 1992 in New York City together with my mother. 30,000 Baháʼís from around the world attended that event, which was centered around the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan. That experience simply blew me away. I have never before or since experienced such a strong sense of community and shared spirituality with so many different people all together in one place. I had such a strong sense there of being a part of something meaningful and important, together with many other people. There were talks given, musical performances of different genres, and presentations of various kinds. All of the world's many different cultures were represented there and the global leadership of the Baha'i Faith, the Universal House of Justice, gave a speech to us all via a live video link. And there was singing, 30,000 of us singing together, it was an indescribable feeling. We had a shared purpose, a shared transcendent spiritual moment, and it deeply impressed upon me what we humans are capable of together.
The second big thing from that time period was that my mother was working at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as someone who was teaching managers there how to be better managers. Her boss there in turn hired an outside consultant to train her and her coworkers. This outside consultant, a man named Gregory May, engaged in various abusive practices with those whom he was supposedly training. He in turn had ties with the "Ramtha" cult and was a devotee of it. My mother, together with a few of her coworkers, were whistleblowers for the abuses that were taking place there and she spoke with a few mainstream media outlets about this. I had the odd experience during this time of seeing my mother speak on mainstream television programs about this, of reading her testimonies in mainstream print publications and of seeing a CNN television crew standing out in the front yard of our house. My mother ended up leaving that job, and after that I will never look at the FAA the same way again.
Because of what happened with the Gregory May / FAA situation, my mother lost a close friendship that she had with a coworker who was also a devotee of Gregory May. This friend of hers had three children, two of which were around the same age as me, who I was also friends with. We were all friends back in Lawton, Oklahoma and continued our friendship in Palm Coast, Florida as well, since we had all relocated out to Florida together. However, because my mother’s friendship with their mother ended, my friendship with these kids ended as well. One of the last surviving connections with the Oklahoma period of my life ended along with that.
The fourth big thing that occurred during that same time period was that my stepfather entered the picture. He was a man from rural West Virginia who was a Baha'i whom my mother met at a Baha'i event in South Carolina. My mother and stepfather had a short courtship period, after which they quickly got married and my mother then got pregnant with my half-brother.
I was fourteen years old when my mother and stepfather married. They were married in a small ceremony at the Baha'i center in Jacksonville, Florida. Soon afterwards my stepfather moved into the house that my mother, younger brother and I were already living in together and he quickly became "the man of the house".
The dynamics thus became such that my stepfather stayed at home doing the shopping, cooking and cleaning, I stayed at home enrolled in a homeschool program that my stepfather supervised, my brother went off to attend a regular school and my mother went off to work at her job to make the money to pay for everything. My stepfather quickly assumed the role of being the big decision-maker of the house, the guy who called all the shots. For my brother, my stepfather became the father-figure that he never had, due to him being two years old when my parents divorced. For my mother, my stepfather became the true Baha'i husband that she never had, due to my father never really being enthusiastic about the Baha'i Faith despite him officially being a member of it. For me, my stepfather was the man who suddenly showed up and became the central dominating presence of my life. My stepfather's modus operandi was that of anger, demands, and if need be, yelling. I did not like it and I increasingly grew more uncomfortable living with him as time went on.
Regarding the homeschooling educational program that I was doing, I recall once making a proposal to my mother and stepfather of a new approach for how things could be arranged to make it all more interesting and engaging for me. The idea that I proposed to them was that it would be centered around a fictional war between two fictional nation-states. The English composition part of my studies would include the written fictional narrative of this war that I would write, the mathematics part of my studies would include the mathematical calculations for the various logistical details of the war, the Spanish language part would include Spanish translations of things related to the narrative of this fictional war, the Science part would study the various scientific aspects pertaining to the various weapons and logistical systems used by the militaries engaged in this fictional war, and so on and so forth. Basically I proposed a self-directed interdisciplinary examination of a fictional war as the guiding framework for my homeschooling program. I was very excited about this new homeschooling proposal of mine, as it was a way that I saw that I could take ownership over my own studies and have it all become more relevant and of interest to me. My mother and stepfather both immediately dismissed this proposal out of hand, no questions asked. I was heartbroken and my interest in and enthusiasm for my homeschooling program subsequently plummeted.
Since our house was surrounded by a lot of pine forests and swamps, I would often during the day spend time by myself outside in nature. Sometimes I would bring books to read, sometimes I would just ride my bicycle somewhere and walk around and think. I would sometimes see my stepfather driving around in his truck looking for me, presumably to talk with me about something related to my homeschooling program. I had no interest in talking with him about this, and when I saw him driving around I would run off deeper into the forest to hide from him.
It was during this time alone in the forests and swamps that I started experimenting with nudism. I would go off in the forests and swamps, far away from all other people, and I would just take off my clothes and hang out in nature all by myself naked. It was "naturism" in every sense of the term. Sometimes that almost got me hurt, like one time in particular when I was walking around naked and I suddenly came across a startled rattlesnake.
Related to all of this, there was one incident that happened which I do not fully understand why I did what I did. In Palm Coast there were many retired people who lived there, and to service these retirees there were a number of different golf courses in the area. From the very beginning I had a personal hatred of these golf courses and the people who used them. The whole thing seemed to me like a huge waste of space and resources to serve entitled wealthy patrons. One of these golf courses was within bikeable distance from my house. So one day I rode out to the golf course which was closest to my home, I took off all my clothes and I hid them along with my bicycle in the woods. I then waited in the forest until some retirees who were out golfing hit their golf balls to an area close by to where I was hiding. When the time came and their golf balls plopped down onto the ground in an area that was relatively close to me, I then ran out onto the golf course completely naked, grabbed their golf balls from where they had landed, ran back into the woods, and hid from the golfers who were looking for me. The angry golfer men came close to me, shouting for me to come out and return their golf balls, but I remained successfully quietly hidden from them, and they never got their golf balls back. I was a shy quiet nerdy kid, I was for most of my childhood and adolescence, but for that one moment on that golf course, I was feral.
It was during this time period that my mother and stepfather decided to have me go to psychotherapy. I believe that they were concerned that I was spending a lot of time alone by myself and not socializing with any of my peers. I remember visiting my maternal grandfather in Michigan once during this time period and him taking me out to lunch to have a conversation with me. He told me that I was "stuck inside my shell, like a turtle". He told me that in order to grow as a person I needed to come out of my shell. I took that message to heart, but I didn't know what to do with it or how to practically move "outside my shell".
So then I went to therapy, and then all of a sudden I was talking with another human being on a regular basis. Over time I established comfort and trust with this person and I began to open up to that therapist. I began to share my honest thoughts, feelings and perspectives on things with this person. I began to look forward to talking with my therapist, since this was the one person whom I was really opening up to. And then one day, I found out that my therapist was talking with my mother and stepfather about me behind my back. What I had thought were confidential conversations turned out to not be, presumably because I was underage. What I said to my therapist was now being used to inform the new dictates from my stepfather. I was crushed by this revelation, and I did not want to go see my therapist any longer. Soon after that I stopped going.
My mother and stepfather eventually came to the conclusion that my continuing with homeschooling did not make sense for me. They then sent me back to another Catholic school in St. Augustine for the start of high school. A lot of the same students whom I knew from my previous Catholic school experience in the seventh and first half of eighth grade were there, so it was not entirely unfamiliar to me. The experience of being bullied by some of my peers resumed, as did the harsh Catholic discipline from the school authorities. The difference from the previous experience was that my prior Catholic school was run by strict Catholic nuns, whereas this Catholic high school had a Deacon as the strict disciplinarian for the school. Domination and public humiliation was in full force at this institution, both from my peers who informally assumed that role as bullies and from the school authorities who had the shroud of officious legitimacy to justify their actions.
It was during my high school years that my family moved to a different town in northeast Florida, a tiny little place called Elkton, close by to St. Augustine. Elkton had less forests and swamps, and more human neighbors close by. The culture of this town was more "southern redneck" compared to that of Palm Coast. One neighbor whose house was across the street literally had a Confederate flag flying outside their house. We were not welcome in this neighborhood, my family was viewed as being outsiders and different. On one occasion I remember kids throwing rocks at our house. On another occasion, a kid pulled a knife on me at the local neighborhood park. And of course, people would sometimes scream epithets at me as they saw me go by. I hated being at school, I hated being at home and I hated the neighborhood that I lived in. It was an overall miserable time of my life.
One thing that happened during this time period was that my mother and stepfather befriended a Baha’i woman who was living out of her van together with her two teenage kids, a boy and a girl, who were both around my age. My mother and step-father agreed to have this family park their van in our yard, run an extension cord out to their van, and let them use the kitchen and the bathroom in the house. For a while we were all living together, and gradually I was becoming closer to these kids who were my age peers, which I appreciated. Then one day my stepfather got into a conflict with that Baha’i woman and evicted that family from the property. That was the end of my friendship with those two kids. I learned two things from that experience. One is that it is possible to live a transient vagabonding lifestyle based out of an automobile. And the other is that it is possible to lose one’s home due to a capricious landlord.
It was into this context that my half-brother was born and entered the picture. My mother and stepfather's attention shifted primarily to him, the new little baby that was the product of their relationship. This laid the groundwork for me by-and-large falling off of their radar and for them to generally become unaware of what and how I was doing.
Just because there was emotional misattunement doesn't mean that there wasn't surveillance going on however. In an effort to keep close tabs on my brother and I, my stepfather at one point decided that I was to no longer have a private bedroom of my own, and that my brother and I were to instead share the same bedroom that was directly adjacent to the living room where my stepfather spent a lot of his time. We slept on a bunkbed and the door to that room was taken off of its hinges so that my stepfather could see into that room at any time. What was previously my bedroom was then turned into a space for storage of my mother and stepfather's excess and unsorted belongings.
One particular insight stands out to me during that time attending that Catholic high school. I came to realize that there is a distinction between someone acting according to an institutional role and that person acting as an authentic human being. This insight came to me through my high school biology class. It had nothing to do with studying biology at all, but rather through observing the teacher of that class and how he behaved with the students. When the teacher was teaching, he was, to put it bluntly, an asshole. The guy would yell, scream, threaten the students, and overall he was unpleasant to be around. However, occasionally the guy would slip out of being in teacher-mode and he would instead just be a human being. During those moments he would talk about his interests, life experiences, hopes, dreams, etc., going completely off script from the whole “Biology class” thing that we were supposedly doing. He would be a very different person during those moments, and it was during those times that I actually appreciated his company. I realized that it was not him as a person whom I disliked, but rather him acting out the institutional role of "teacher" that I despised.
Another memory that stands out to me during this time was a history class that I went to where the teacher one time played videos for the class that were filmed of the Allied forces' liberation of the Nazi concentration camps of the Holocaust at the end of World War Two. The videos were graphic and intense. I remember the class being totally silent and entranced by what was being shown to us. I remember a football jock student openly crying while watching these videos. Those images from the Holocaust were then forever seared into my mind's eye.
There was one beacon of light for me during that time at that Catholic high school in Florida, and that was my friend Paul. I did not have many friends during my childhood and adolescence, but Paul stands out from them all. We were both comic book nerds and that was our initial point of connection. We talked about comic books, superheroes, sci-fi, and that became the foundation from which we then went on to talk about many other things. Unlike me, however, Paul then started exploring more alternative culture stuff. He would hang out with artsy counterculture people in downtown St. Augustine and he would then tell me about those experiences later on. He would experiment with smoking weed and taking psychedelic mushrooms, and he told me about that too. At the time I had no desire to do any of those things myself, but I was interested in hearing him talk about his experiences. Paul also introduced me to other things that I had never encountered before, such as punk rock music, the band Nine Inch Nails, the comic books of Alan Moore, the Church of the SubGenius and the Autobiography of Malcolm X.
One big contribution that Paul gave to my life was that he made me aware that the Catholic high school that we were in was designed to prepare students for going on to big name universities and to eventually have high-income professional careers. He had no interest in going down that path, since the life that he envisioned for himself was to be an artist and a writer. Paul also was the first person to tell me that it was possible for one to legally drop out of high school at the age of 16, which was something that he planned on doing. I made a mental note of that fact, as I also had the desire to do the same. I hated going to school from the very first day, in my eyes school was a prison, and if there was indeed a possibility that I could finish my sentence early, I was going to take it.
I was at that Catholic high school for two years. After that, a lot of different big changes started happening in my life in rapid succession.
During the summer after my sophomore year of high school my pet dog Candy died. This was a dog that I first got as a little boy in Oklahoma before my brother was born. My parents got this dog for me after I had been saying for a while that I wanted a pet dog. Candy previously was living in an abusive situation, which was evidenced by the fact that she did not have a full tail. Someone had cut it off and she only had a little nub of a tail remaining. Candy also had a distinctive underbite, which combined with her nub-tail resulted in a number of different people telling me how "ugly" she was. But for me, I loved Candy dearly, and she loved me in return. People telling me that she was ugly brushed right off of me, my love and appreciation for this beautiful being was unshakable. Candy was with me when my parents' marriage fell apart and they divorced. Candy was with me through the move to Florida and us getting settled there. Candy was with me when I went to Episcopal school, Catholic school, “homeschooling”, and Catholic high school. Candy was with me when my step-father entered the picture. And Candy was with me when we moved to redneck Elkton. But eventually she grew old, and in the summer of 1995 she began unexplainably coughing and passing out at random times. Then one night she went to sleep and didn't wake up. Candy was a steady presence in my life, a source of unconditional love, acceptance, and companionship, and suddenly that was gone.
Also in the summer of 1995 my friend Paul moved away. His family was originally from Philadelphia and they decided to move back there. I lost contact with Paul shortly after he moved away. Years later, as an adult, I re-established contact with him. I found out from him that after moving back to Philadelphia his mother passed away and he then became addicted to alcohol and heroin, which compounded the suffering and hardship for him. In a desperate effort to overcome his addiction and subsequent homelessness, he joined the U.S. Army and was sent overseas to fight in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was traumatized by those experiences, and upon returning to the U.S. and being discharged from the Army, he relapsed back into his old addictive patterns. The last time that I saw him he was openly and obviously struggling with cycles of addiction. Years later I found out from Facebook that Paul committed suicide.
The summer of 1995 was also the year that I officially became a member of the Baha'i Faith. An individual can officially become a member of the Bahá'í Faith at 15 years old, which is recognized as the age of spiritual maturity in that religion. However it took me until the age of 16 years old for me to feel ready to make that commitment. I took that matter very seriously, as I wanted to be totally sure that the Baha'i Faith completely aligned with me before I made a serious and public commitment to it. That summer I went to the Louis G. Gregory Bahá'í Institute in South Carolina to attend a Baha'i youth summer camp. That was the third summer in a row that I attended that youth camp, and it was that third and final year that it finally had the effect of making me decide to officially become a Baha'i. The last night of that summer camp I announced to everyone my love for Baha'u'llah, the prophet-founder of the Baha'i Faith. I publicly signed the card to become a member of the Baha'i Faith, which was significant since signing that card is the closest thing there is to an initiation ritual in this religion. I remember that last night there, sitting on my bed in the dormitory building, all blissed-out on Baha'i-ness, while the other kids in the dormitory were running around screaming, engaging in a raucous pillow fight, all psyched-up on the fact that they will be leaving the next day. Their behavior did not matter to me, because I was with God.
Maintaining my enthusiasm for and devotion to the Baha'i Faith was difficult for me upon leaving the unique environment of that Baha'i institute. For one, that institute had a strong local Baha'i community surrounding it, and in fact they even had a Baha'i radio station on site there. In addition to that, the Baha'i institute had residential retreat facilities and various programs running concurrently that resulted in a steady stream of Baha'is from all over constantly coming and going. Another notable fact about that location is that that was also the same place where my mother and stepfather first met each other, years prior, which added an additional sense of importance to the place for me.
Going back to Florida without all of that supportive infrastructure in place felt incredibly challenging and isolating for me. My mother and stepfather were Baha'is, but their approach to the Baha'i Faith did not inspire me, and my stepfather's application in particular always felt domineering and intrusive to me. I was committed to being a Baha'i, but I did not want to relate to that religion in the same way that they did. There was indeed a local Baha'i community in the Jacksonville, Florida area, but it was not the kind of community where I experienced the degree of connection, support and guidance that I needed at the time.
In addition to all of that, I then dropped out of high school.
Well, saying that I "dropped out of high school" is a bit over-simplistic, so let me explain... My mother had a deep fear of public schools. She had heard stories of all kinds of sex, drugs, violence and overall rowdiness in public schools and she wanted none of that for her boys. It is because of this that she had me go to an Episcopal school, a Catholic school, homeschooling and then a Catholic high school. These were all attempts to keep me away from the dreaded public schools and their presumed pervasive immorality, godlessness and vice. However, by the time that the summer of 1995 came around, her financial situation was such that she could no longer afford to continue sending me to a private school. So as an alternative to sending me to a public school, she found a high school completion program that was run out of the local community college for me to go to. This high school completion program was entirely self-paced, one could show up at any time to take the necessary tests in order to pass the various required “classes". I quickly realized that nobody was actually paying any attention to me or monitoring whether I was actually "going to school" or not. So I just stopped going. I had by that point reached the age of 16, the age where one can legally drop out of high school according to Florida state law. So I was then, for all intents and purposes, a high school dropout.
My first year as a high school dropout was characterized by me getting my bearings and exploring the world on my own terms. I would be dropped off at the community college campus in the morning, located in downtown Jacksonville, Florida, and I would then read things in the community college library until the time came for the main downtown public library to open and I would then walk over there and read things there. I would read whatever I was interested in reading, I would just follow my own curiosity and go from there. The encyclopedia and dictionary were good touchstones that I would use to orient me for whatever I would explore. The internet was also new and exciting at that time, the mid-'90's, and I would use it to explore and learn whatever I could that was of interest to me. I was experiencing a similar kind of self-directed freedom that I had when I was homeschooling in Palm Coast, but while that was me being alone in the forests and swamps, I now was alone in the downtown of the largest city in Florida. Plus, now I was a bit older and I had access to multiple large libraries and the internet. It was a whole different game.
It was during this time that Ted Kaczynski (aka "the Unabomber") had his essay Industrial Society and Its Future (aka "the Unabomber Manifesto") printed by the Washington Post under a state of duress. I was not a fan of the terrorism and bombing stuff, but I was interested in reading a unique new philosophical perspective that was published under such unusual circumstances. This piece surprisingly resonated with me, particularly his thesis about how individuals and communities lose their autonomy under mass societies of industrial capitalism. I didn't know what to do with these ideas, however, particularly since he was disconnected from any kind of larger movement and his violent tactics were very much off-putting to me.
This was also a time period of musical exploration for me as well. I found myself gravitating to punk, industrial, and metal genres. The Seattle "Grunge" movement had already passed its prime at that point, but I jumped onto it then anyway and adopted the long-haired shabby "grunge" look. It was definitely a period of me trying to "find myself", for sure.
Spending my days walking around downtown Jacksonville, Florida, I also encountered and spoke with homeless people directly, something that was entirely new to me. For the first time in my life, down-on-their-luck strangers would approach me asking me for money and/or to share with me their unique idiosyncratic beliefs about God. I also had my first encounters with the police during that time. Based on how I looked, they assumed that I either was on drugs or had illegal drugs in my possession. Given that this was 1995/1996 that we are talking about, this was also a presidential election campaign season, Bob Dole vs. Bill Clinton. Politics was in the air, but I had no interest in or enthusiasm for either candidate. Jacksonville, Florida was characterized by three main things: the Baptist Church that had multiple large buildings downtown, the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL football team and the U.S. Navy base that is also there. All of these different institutions felt aggressive and alienating to me, as I spent my days wandering freely amongst them.
I did find it odd, however, that my mother and stepfather did not even seem to be aware that I had dropped out of high school. My stepfather was so overbearing and controlling that he certainly seemed to be the sort of person who would be on top of this and accordingly crack down on me for doing such a socially unacceptable thing. And yet, he didn't do that. One important thing to keep in mind during this time, however, was that this took place during the period when my half-brother was a baby and my younger brother was a little boy. My mother and stepfather seemed to be more preoccupied with the two younger kids, not to mention my mother's job and their various pressing adult responsibilities. All these different preoccupations, combined with the veil of the high school completion program that I was technically enrolled in, led to them being unaware that I had essentially stopped doing the "high school" thing altogether. This made an impression on me though, it showed me that despite all the bluster and universal proclamations that authorities may give, that they do still have their limitations and oversights. Regardless of all the airs of omnipotence, omniscience and infallibility, people can still discover their own circumstantial margins and interstices to find freedom in.
An important thing to keep in mind is that during this period of my life, I had no friends, at least not in-person. I also had no romantic relationships, as my shyness kept me from being able to talk with girls. The friends that I had at the high school that I previously went to were people whom I only saw when I was at that school itself. When I stopped going to that school, I then stopped seeing those people. The only friend whom I used to see outside of school during my high school years was Paul, and like I said, Paul had moved away. I had friends who were people whom I met online, using the primitive internet of the time. I also had some old-school pen pals, people whom I would exchange handwritten letters with. Some comic books would have a "pen pal" section in the back of each issue, showcasing different people who were open to establishing a relationship via written correspondence, and so I would be engaging in multiple relationships where I would write letters of up to 30-something pages per letter. So I had epistolary relationships, as well as various online relationships. America Online (aka "AOL") was a very important part of my life at this time and I would spend hours and hours chatting with different people on AOL each day. I suppose that this kind of disembodied way of living was the late 20th Century precursor to the kind of perpetually-online digital existence that is very common now.
In spite of all of that epistolary and online connection with other people, I was deeply, deeply lonely. I knew that this was not how human beings are meant to live. My loneliness during that time was so profound that sometimes I would feel it as a distinct physical sensation in my chest. I would feel it and I knew intuitively that that was the physical sensation of loneliness. Despite the pain, I learned to be present with it. This is why years later as an adult in my 20’s, when I discovered Focusing and the work of Eugene Gendlin, it immediately resonated with me. Because I experientially knew what the felt sense was, since I knew what loneliness was in a felt sense sort of way. I didn't know it at the time, but at that point I was developing somatic awareness without guidance, and a moral commitment to human connection, without having it yet.
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Then one evening my stepfather and mother sat me down in the living room of our house to have a talk with me. Well, my stepfather did most of the talking, my mother mainly just sat there looking uncomfortable. He said that I was socially isolated, that I needed to have contact with other people, and that I needed human touch in particular. He then gave me a long, awkward and uncomfortable hug. I absolutely hated it, I detested it. Every part of me was repulsed and was telling me that that was wrong. My stepfather then said that he will from now on be doing that to me on a regular basis, for my own good. He also said that he was going to take me to get my hair cut, because males having long hair was not appropriate according to the Baha’i Faith. I was enraged, incensed, and I stormed out of the house. While outside I thought to myself "this is wrong! This is abuse! I will not stand for this!" I then came back into the house and yelled at my stepfather. I told him that that was wrong and that I will not stand for this. I told him that I do not consent to being touched without my permission and that I will call the police on him for what he is doing. After my bout of yelling at him was over, my stepfather then started his barrage of yelling at me. He said that the police will not do anything to help me because I am underage and he is the head of the household. He said that he makes the rules, that this is all for my psychological health and well-being, and that everything that he is doing is God's will as revealed through the Baha'i holy scriptures. After his yelling at me was over, he then proceeded to carry on with one of his less-heated but still long-winded rants that he was prone to doing. On and on and on he lectured me, and mentally I then checked out. I gave up and was defeated. I submitted to his demands that night. But whatever remaining trust that I had in my relationship with my stepfather ended that night as well.
I was deeply shaken up, deeply affected by all that had happened that night, so much so that I consider that event to be the second big traumatic fracture of my life. The next day, after I was dropped off in downtown Jacksonville, I then found a payphone and I called my father (my actual father, not my stepfather). I was in tears and I told him all that had happened the night before. I begged him over the phone, pleaded with him to let me move in with him and to help me leave this horrible situation. My father spoke words of sympathy and encouragement. He told me to hang on and tough it out in my current living situation. He told me that it will get better eventually and to just give it another try. He was not, however, willing to help me leave my home environment and to have me move in with him.
After that phone conversation I then walked over to the downtown Jacksonville Greyhound bus station to buy a bus ticket. I was ready to leave and run away from home then and there. I wanted to get away and to just go somewhere, anywhere, away. I looked at all the prices for all of the available bus tickets, and I then counted all of the money that I had in my possession and I realized that I could not afford anything. I could not afford to leave Jacksonville, Florida. Plus I had nowhere to go, no one to take me in, and no plan. I then sat down on the floor of that bus station and wept. I was trapped. Devastated.
Soon after that my stepfather took me to get my long hair cut off. I remember us waiting for the hair stylist to be ready and my stepfather showing me a booklet of male models displaying the various hair styles that were available for purchase. My stepfather said that I could choose any hair style there that I wanted, and I said that I didn't care. I was defeated and I didn't want to be there in the first place. Any possible hairstyle that I could have gotten then would not have been my own.
My mother and stepfather then once again sought out professional psychological help for me. Whereas previously the strategy pursued was psychotherapy, this time around I was professionally diagnosed. I remember a whole team of people working on me, clipboards in hand, having me perform tests and asking me various questions. I did the whole psychological rigamarole. Eventually an official diagnosis was officially placed upon me: I had Asperger's Syndrome. I was told this, but I did not give a shit. As far as I was concerned, this whole process and their labels that they conferred upon me was yet another form of control. The diagnosis arrived inside a broken trust field and I did not even want to be there in the first place. I held what they said in such low regard that I even forgot that I was officially diagnosed as having "Asperger's Syndrome", it was so insignificant to me. It was not until years later as an adult when I discovered the paperwork that officially proclaimed me to be such that I remembered that I was given that diagnosis.
Years later as an adult, my father confided in me shortly before he passed away that he regretted responding to me the way that he had during that pivotal phone conversation. My father told me that he wished that he had made a different choice and that he wished that he instead had offered me to move in with him and to find a way to somehow make it work. He said that he was too preoccupied with what was going with his life at the time to be able to think about such a drastic new living situation for the both of us. He said that in retrospect he thought that helping me to leave that home environment would have been the right thing to do. I have no idea how my life would have turned out differently if my father had chosen to let me move in with him when I asked as a teenager, especially in light of what happened not long after that.
It is within this teenage context, deeply religious, socially isolated, intellectually searching, emotionally devastated and freshly diagnosed, that I discovered anarchism. I had previously heard the word before, but I always assumed that it meant things like "chaos", "disorder", "violent insanity" and so forth, and as a result I had no interest in looking further into it. However, one day I was sitting on a public computer in the basement of the main public library in downtown Jacksonville and I was searching for things on Infoseek, which was one of the main internet search engines at the time. I was doing my usual thing of following my own curiosities to see where they would take me. The thought suddenly occurred to me, "What if I did a search for 'libertarian socialism'?" I already had an affinity for libertarianism, since I loved the whole pro-freedom message that it had, but I did not like all the pro-capitalism stuff that went along with it. I also already had an affinity for socialism, since for my whole life I had wanted the well-being of everybody to be valued and looked after, but I did not like all of the heavy-handed government stuff that went along with it. The search result then revealed to me that "libertarian socialism" is a synonym for "anarchism", a pre-existing well-established radical political philosophy that goes back to the 19th Century. Anarchism said that each individual should have autonomy with their own life and that people should freely work together as equals and share the world's resources to ensure that everyone's needs are met. It said that the problem facing humanity is domination and that this shows up in many different aspects of life. From social-economic classes to family relationships to compulsory education to gender relationships, to this big thing that we call "government" itself, the through line is domination. Anarchism said that domination can and should be destroyed and replaced with a radically different way of organizing the world.
I realized then that the problem that I had with my stepfather was not with him as a specific individual, but with the way that our relationship was structured: domination/submission, authority/obedience, top-of-the-hierarchy versus bottom-of-the-hierarchy. I realized that the microcosm of my family of origin was emblematic of the kinds of things that anarchism was talking about. My stepfather giving the orders and my mother doing the work to make the money for our family was emblematic of the class structure of capitalism. My stepfather being a male giving the orders and my mother being a female receiving the orders was emblematic of patriarchy. My inability to leave my family even though I dearly wanted to was emblematic of the domination of children by adults. The intuitive sense of schools being a prison for the young that I felt throughout my entire school-age life was emblematic of the domination of compulsory education. My stepfather's large stature, angry barking of orders and surveillance was emblematic of the forceful, violent and intrusive nature of the state.
Not only that, but out in the world that I saw all around me, from the homeless people on the street asking me for money, to the police stopping me and harassing me for looking weird, to the kids who were still in school jumping through all the necessary hoops to get good grades, to the various wars happening all around the world, to the bullshit election campaign that was currently taking place, to the overbearing presence of religious institutions both in my life and all over downtown, to the visible military presence in both Lawton, Oklahoma and Jacksonville, Florida, it was all connected, every bit of it, connected. It was all domination. It was domination itself that I hated. I saw how every institution of domination was interconnected, that they all reinforced each other, and I realized that I hated it all, and that I always had.
Then there was anarchism's promise of a different world. Anarchism spoke of a qualitatively different way of doing things, a way that is based upon autonomous action, voluntary cooperation, respecting the dignity of each person, and communities that cooperate based on mutual aid and care. I realized that I had experienced this too, through my own self-directed learning and exploration during both my "homeschool" period of wandering by myself through the woods and later by dropping out and learning whatever I wanted at the public library. And my experiences in Baha'i communities in various places, the more positive experiences that is, what I loved about them were the anarchist qualities present of voluntary mutual aid, community care, thoughtful collective dialogue and deliberation.
My mind was blown. I read the descriptions of what "anarchism" is and I realized that this is what I believe. It felt to me like a light had suddenly turned on in the dark room of my soul. It felt like I had finally come home.
I dove right into it and read everything that I could get my hands on about anarchism. It turned out that there was a whole anarchist section of books in the downtown Jacksonville public library, as well as a number of different anarchist websites on the internet. At that time there were anarchist "web rings", Spunk Library and anarchist email listserves, and I explored all of them. The website Liberty For The People was a main initial anarchist point of contact for me online, as was the website Anarchy for Anybody. The latter website was run by a man named "Dave Neal" and I reached out to him and established an email correspondence with him. He patiently answered all of the various questions that I had regarding anarchism and he functioned as basically my anarchist mentor. I never met him in person and I don't know whatever happened to him, but I do feel a deep sense of gratitude to him for the supportive role that he played at such a pivotal point in my life.
Discovering anarchism also led me to explore more of the musical world of punk rock. I was previously aware of punk rock through my friend Paul, as he had introduced me to the Dead Kennedys, the Sex Pistols, Fugazi and Minor Threat. In the world of more mainstream music, Green Day and Rancid were quite big at the time as well. Through anarchism I discovered the specific sub-genre of anarcho-punk, and the band Crass stood out in particular. Crass just blew me away. Here was a group that not only understood and advocated anarchist philosophy, but they were able to express it with such vitality and emotional heft. Feminism, youth liberation, animal liberation, free thought, the DIY (Do It Yourself) ethos and nonviolence were all woven together in their songs and presentation, together with the more traditional anti-capitalist anti-state messages of anarchism. The music of Crass made anarchism feel more alive to me, like it was a living breathing force to be reckoned with.
On a more personal emotional level, the song Hard As Fuck by the anarcho-punk band Against All Authority really spoke to me, particularly these lyrics:
One day I decided I would pray
I kneeled down and looked to the sky
I asked God why is life so hard
He turned his back and I started to cry
You turn your back on me
So I turn my back on you
Fuck your system and fuck you too
One of the first pieces of anarchist literature that I remember reading was T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey. I appreciated how he was able to recognize the value in small temporary experiences of freedom and autonomy, rather than waiting for some big grand revolution as the be-all and end-all. I was able to relate to that through my own experience as well, given that I was enjoying my own temporary experiences of freedom each day by myself in downtown Jacksonville. I loved imagining how this could be applied to whole groups of people. T.A.Z. then led me to the novel Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling which fleshed out that concept more, in an illustrative science fiction kind of way. Another one of the first anarchist books that I read was bolo'bolo by P.M. which laid out a possible utopian framework for how a new anarchist society could function. This piece I read early on was helpful for me in that it gave me an idea of a vision for what anarchism could strive towards.
I remember reading the book Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm by Murray Bookchin early on as well, and I remember being confused by it. I appreciated the values that Bookchin was speaking out in favor of, but the various people and subcultures that he was railing against I had no personal knowledge of or experience with at that time. Throughout his diatribes, I felt like I just had to take his word that whoever those people were, these so-called "lifestylists", were indeed bad people.
Then one day at a Barnes and Noble bookstore amongst the magazine racks I discovered an issue of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, and through that I was introduced to the literary expression of the people whom Bookchin was taking potshots at. This was the world of post-left anarchism, a vibrant, playful, leave-no-stone-unturned approach to anarchism that I immediately resonated with. Bookchin came across to me as a bitter old man trying to cast out the heretics before he died. The post-left anarchists printed in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, on the other hand, seemed to be people genuinely striving to take anarchism to new places through their examination of every facet of human life. In terms of the "left vs. post-left" debate of that era, I knew that I had found my side.
I saw that much was said about the split between individualist and egoist anarchism on the one side, and social and communist anarchism on the other. For me, I have never taken sides on this divide, and instead I have appreciated what they each have to offer. The individualist side of things views the society that we live in as being one big prison and death camp and it focuses on what we as individuals can do to free oneself and escape. The social anarchist side of things focuses instead on collective action and what we can do to change things for the liberation of humanity as a whole. I have always viewed anarchism as being a weaving together of the two strands. That is, individuals doing what they can to free themselves from the death trap of authoritarian society, and then through connecting with, working together with and supporting other individuals and groups of people who are doing the same. Hopefully in the process of doing this we are taking steps towards creating a new better society for all. I expressed this sentiment through a pithy phrase that is a play on Murray Bookchin’s famous diatribe: “Social anarchism is our lifestyle.”
My interest in and passion for anarchism also led me to research various philosophies and practices related to, yet separate from, anarchism as well. Alfie Kohn and his books "No Contest: The Case Against Competition" and "Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes" particularly stood out to me. Reading Alfie Kohn's work, together with the various anarchist writers whom I was reading at the time, had a deeply felt resonance for me. It felt like I was discovering language for what my nervous system already knew intuitively.
Alfie Kohn's books were also important to me because they established the conceptual link between anarchism and humanistic psychology. Erich Fromm and Paul Goodman's writings were also helpful for me in this regard. That connection established between these two schools of thought made it possible for me to immediately see the link between anarchism and Nonviolent Communication (aka "NVC") when I discovered that years later.
Anarchism then led me to also discover the world of youth liberation, radical parenting, deschooling, unschooling, democratic schools and other alternative forms of education. Not in practice at that time, but in writing. One important discovery for me was Taking Children Seriously (aka "TCS"), which was a radical parenting and educational philosophy that is based on the idea that children are full people, that coercion of any kind is harmful for children and that coercion inhibits real learning. A lot of the people who were actively engaged with this philosophy considered themselves to be "critical rationalists", and interacting with these folks online was quite an intellectually stimulating and rigorous experience for me which helped me to get clear on what it is that I really believed in and why.
One personal barrier that I came across immediately with regard to anarchism was my relationship with the Baha'i Faith. As I said earlier, I had just a little over a year prior to that officially joined the Baha'i Faith. However, due to my lack of social support, connection and engagement with the Baha'i community, my personal Baha'i practice and conviction was waning. Anarchism immediately spoke to me and deeply resonated with me on a personal level. The Baha'i Faith, on the other hand, was where I came from and what I officially was still a part of. I was torn between the two and I spent a lot of time wrestling with this tension. I tried to make links and conceptually build bridges between the two, out of hopes of maintaining both my connection with the Baha'i Faith and anarchism. The best that I could find was Leo Tolstoy, who in his day corresponded with and had affinities for both the Baha'i Faith and anarchism, even though he did not consider himself to be fully aligned with either. In the end, however, I could not honestly reconcile these two traditions. The Baha'i Faith believes in governments, authority and hierarchy, and anarchism seeks to abolish all of these things.
The last vestiges of my belief in "God" and monotheistic religion in general fell apart through my reading of two anarchist classics, God and the State by Mikhail Bakunin and The Unique and Its Property by Max Stirner. Bakunin's piece impressed upon me that authority of any form is detrimental to human beings, and the bigger the authority the more that it crushes people under its weight. If "God" is the biggest authority of them all, then "God" is also the biggest detriment to humanity. One quote from that piece had a profound impact on me: "If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.”
Stirner's work then took things a step further. He said that all of these social institutions which shape our lives, be it government, property, family or religion, they are all made up by people. These are all just ideas that people have that we choose to live according to. He goes further to say that even things like "good", "bad", "duty", "obligation", and "God" are all human-made concepts as well. Because all of these ideas are made up by people, we don't necessarily have to abide by them and there's no need to have these things control us. Stirner encouraged people to take charge of their own thinking, to determine their own sense of direction, to create their own sense of purpose, regardless of what others may think or say. Through Stirner’s writing I felt like I had found the instruction manual necessary to help me to get myself out of all of the conceptual entanglement that my mind was trapped in.
Mental freedom aside, a big barrier for me leaving the Baha'i Faith was that the Baha'is were the only community that I had ever known. I had previously had these profound connecting experiences of community and togetherness at the Baha'i World Congress, the Louis G. Gregory Bahá'í Institute, and various Baha'i retreats and programs across the country, not to mention the local Baha'i communities of Lawton, Oklahoma and Jacksonville, Florida. I knew first-hand how wonderful, powerful and basically essential it is to have a solid community of people in one's life. At the same time, this community was not authentically resonant with me. I honestly did not believe in what they believed. As much as I tried to have it be otherwise, I could not bring myself to remain a Baha'i. In my heart I was an anarchist, that much I knew for sure. So in the end, for me, it was a choice between integrity and community, and I chose integrity. I was painfully socially isolated at that time in my life, and cutting out the only community that I had ever known risked even further isolation. I just had to trust that sometime somewhere somehow I would experience the kind of connection and community among free autonomy-respecting people that I knew was possible.
I decided to leave the Baha'i Faith. With the help of a friend online, I wrote a letter that I sent to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States informing them that I was leaving the Baha'i Faith and that I was now an anarchist. I then arranged to take my mother and stepfather out to eat for dinner at a restaurant that I paid for with the money that I was making at the job I had working at a grocery store. I carefully planned it out so that we were seated at a very public location in the restaurant to reduce the likelihood of them screaming at me, and then I handed them each a printed copy of the letter that I had written to the National Spiritual Assembly declaring that I am leaving the Baha'i Faith in favor of anarchism. The event went over surprisingly well, there was no screaming happening at that time. They accepted the fact that I was not a Baha'i and that I was an anarchist instead, even though they did not fully understand what that was.
After successfully completing that high school completion program at that community college, I was somehow allowed to continue on there for two more years to get an Associate’s degree, tuition-free. I was told that this was because I got good grades at that high school completion program. I found that to be odd, since I put in the bare minimum amount of attention and effort into that program. I did not know what else to do with my life, so I let inertia get the best of me and I stayed there. I then started going to regular classes again, with other students, assignments, tests, the whole rigmarole. I was now a college student.
One class that particularly stands out to me during those two years was the public speaking class. I struggled a great deal with that class, since I was so painfully shy and uncomfortable with talking with people. In fact, I even had to take that class over again, since I flunked out the first time I took it. My saving grace came when the teacher gave us the final assignment of delivering a speech about something that we are passionate about, something that we really believe in. I knew what my passion was about: anarchism. I then wrote and delivered this speech to the class with great gusto:
Society is bullshit. With each and every day, with each and every minute the absurdity of it all increases.
It becomes more obvious that the way we operate now, the way we LIVE is a sheer mockery of all life.
With each moment that passes, more species of life become extinct, more pollution is released into the world, and more wildlife habitats are being permanently destroyed.
With each moment the planet's very eco-system is being torn apart and its effects become more obvious all over the world.
With each moment that passes economic stratification increases, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer while the middle class just totally disappears all over the world.
With each moment more and more people are imprisoned, fined, taxed, executed, spied upon, bombed and murdered by government in various ways, eventually leading to the United States having the largest prison population in the world, and growing.
With each moment we become more detached from nature.
Concrete surroundings, air-conditioned rooms, automobiles and artificial lights become the norm while true nature becomes something that is seen in the background of commercials that we watch on TV after work.
With each moment we lose touch with our spirituality.
Spirituality becomes institutionalized into religion and mass-marketed back to us, while cold notions of scientific reason and progress are used as an artificial replacement.
With each moment we become more UNHEALTHY!
We are over-worked and over-stressed with very little time left for sleep, rest and relaxation.
More junk-food is invented and marketed to us while the "healthy" food becomes filled with artificial chemicals.
Sports become "spectator" sports and concern for healthy living becomes a mere "health fad" or "health craze".
With each moment our creativity and imagination are destroyed.
Pressure to obey orders, follow the rules, blend into the crowds, and bend to the whims of the bosses and the Markets leaves no room for us to follow our own natural curiosity, interests and desires.
With each moment we all become BRAIN-WASHED, lied to, tricked and deluded in various ways.
Advertising, propaganda and the conformist mind-set are inescapable in our society, anywhere you look you find some product being pushed, some government lies being given, some ideology being crammed down our throats.
With each moment that passes we are all being MURDERED!
Unhealthy lifestyles pushed on us by an over-worked, ignorant, stressed-out, fast-food consumer culture has led to massive amounts of death caused by automobiles, unhealthy diets, various forms of legal and illegal drugs, and cancers from man-made causes.
With each moment we lose our enthusiasm for LIFE!
We become used to the routines of mind-less repetitive and monotonous jobs, standardized indoctrination at schools, bureaucratic nonsense and red-tape, and bland "entertainment" that is marketed to as broad an audience as possible, that we forget and neglect the wide range of possibilities and potential that exists out there for us!
With each moment that passes we become more ALIENATED from each other!
Our society pushes us to view one another impersonally, as mere OBJECTS - objects in business, objects to be governed and controlled, objects in relation to the divine.
We no longer see one another as real human beings, we see each other according to a LABEL - you are an employee, customer, a "bad guy or a good guy", tax-payer, sex-object, criminal, parent, believer, student, you are not longer a human being.
With each moment that passes we become more alienated from OURSELVES, we let conformity to society determine who we are and obedience to authority determine what we do.
True self-reflection and self-responsibility is replaced by the opinions of others and mass-media and the dictates of the Rat Race.
With each moment hope is destroyed and replaced with defeatist ideas about "human nature" and "inevitability".
With hope gone, suicide increases drastically, among the young and old alike.
If we continue down this path, all life will die, it is as simple as that.
If we continue, we will become mere soul-less objects working blindly for our mutual destruction.
Authority is the cause of all of this, the moment that we allow ourselves to be controlled, we doom ourselves.
The moment that we view our fellow human beings as mere objects to BE controlled, we doom ourselves.
A complete worldwide revolution is needed, but this can not be accomplished through politics, political parties, violence or ideologies.
The revolution begins with YOU, not anything above you.
Destroy everything that has been programmed into you, a life-time of school, mass-media, bosses and following orders has left us totally detached from reality.
Destroy authority, destroy society - Let us discover life for OURSELVES!
Delivering this speech was a game changer. Many of the students stared at me with their eyes wide open, and a few jaws had dropped. That speech was the last speech of the day, and it left the students there shaken up at the end of class. A bunch of different students then approached me after that to talk with me. For the first time in my life, other real life human beings initiated conversations with me to talk about anarchism. I had never experienced anything like that before!
After all of that was over and I began walking out to the parking lot, I noticed that one of the students was talking to the other students about me and my speech. One thing to keep in mind is that I happened to deliver this speech on April 22nd, 1999, which was just two days after the Columbine High School massacre took place. Another thing to keep in mind is that I was mostly a silent person, always off to myself, carrying around a big clanking beaten-up military back-pack, and often dressed in all black and I was wearing all black while delivering the speech as well. I overheard the student saying: "oh my god, I am so scared, did you see him, this is going to be Colorado all over again! It is people like HIM!" Then she saw that I was walking behind the group and she freaked out and gave a little squeal of fear. She then walked away to the side of the group that was farthest from me and I heard her saying "oh my god, oh my god, oh my god" because she obviously realized I heard everything that she was saying about me.
It was a potent and mixed experience, to say the least. I had found my voice, and I was able to finally pass the public speaking class because of that. I discovered a way to speak openly about something that I believed in in such a way that other people found interesting and wanted to talk with me. And then, as with the case of that last student, I was also deeply misunderstood and written off as being something very different from what I was trying to convey.
A lot of the time people's journeys into anarchism is a very social story. Anarchism is often something that people are introduced to through friends, through punk scenes, through activist scenes and so forth. For myself, it was very much a solitary and intellectual thing. I came across the ideas of anarchism before anything else. It's not that I was opposed to the social community aspect of anarchism, I just didn't know how to find it. But I did try, and that is how I was able to find on the internet some signs that in the near-past there was actually a collective of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation (ABCF) in Jacksonville. From what I could tell, these people had gotten in trouble with the authorities for vandalism-related stuff. They were also well-known for advocating for armed self-defense. I had no interest in vandalism and I had far more affinity with anarcho-pacifism than I did with armed self-defense. But I actively sought these people out anyway, my eagerness to connect with other self-identified anarchists was so great. I made contact with one guy who had been a part of the former ABCF collective in Jacksonville, and we arranged to meet and talk at a Borders bookstore. This guy was then the first self-proclaimed anarchist who I ever met in-person. I forget this guy's name, the conversation wasn't that great, but it was something and it was a milestone for me. The conversation was enough for him to feel sufficiently comfortable to invite me over to visit the apartment that he shared with some other anarchists who had been a part of the old ABCF collective. So at a later date we then met up there and one of the first things that I noticed in the apartment was a framed picture of Che Guevara hanging up on the wall. I quickly pointed out that Che Guevara was not an anarchist but instead was a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary. They said that they admire Che Guevara regardless of that fact and that anarchists should look up to him as an example of how to be good revolutionaries for the people. At one point during the conversation, one of them suggested that we work together to make some DIY bullets at home there. I immediately replied that that was "macho strutting bullshit" and that true anarchism rejects domination in all of its forms, that coercion makes domination possible, that violence and threats of violence are all forms of coercion, and that true anarchism should therefore strive towards nonviolence. Needless to say, that conversation did not go well and I was not invited back.
They gave me some anarchist literature that they were distributing, particularly I remember some writings by Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin being among the pile given to me, and I was shown the door. As I was driving back home I was pulled over by the police for the first time in my life. The cop had me exit my vehicle, I was frisked and then I was locked in the back of his squad car while my vehicle was searched. No drugs or weapons were in my vehicle, just the pile of anarchist literature that was given to me. I do find it interesting that the first time that I visited an anarchist collective space and the first time that I was locked in the back of a police squad car both took place back-to-back during the course of the same evening. I suppose that that was also the moment when I was first introduced to the phenomenon that some people may call themselves "anarchist" but in reality are actually Marxist-Leninist, or some other adjacent revolutionary-yet-authority-based ideology.
I also looked into formal anarchist organizations that I could join as a member, even if the organizations weren't located in my local area. The best thing that I could find at the time was the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. I was thrilled that such an organization actually existed in the United States! However, the timing was such that by the time that I discovered their existence, they were well along the process of completely falling apart. I was a fresh-faced young anarchist full of hope and enthusiasm for the cause, and they were an organization mired in acrimony and controversy in their final stages of life as a coherent entity. Needless to say, I wasn't able to successfully join them before they collapsed.
Then in March of 1999 I flew out to San Francisco, California to go attend the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair in Golden Gate Park. That experience was a real turning-point for me, as it was then that I was introduced to a wide variety of different kinds of anarchists, anarchist groups, anarchist activities, all in person. Hundreds of anarchists were there, from all over the world. I met different people there at that event whose works I had previously only read or corresponded with online. I also spent a lot of time hanging out with an anarchist friend whom I knew from the internet, a guy from North Dakota who also flew out to attend the anarchist bookfair. It was that experience there in San Francisco where I first encountered anarchism as a real-life embodied thing.
Through my relentless online searching for other radical people in my area, I was eventually able to find and meet up with some Marxist-Leninists in my area. One happened to be a professor at the same community college that I was going to, and we met up and talked a few times. He was a firm believer in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and he unsuccessfully tried to convince me to join his cause. I also met and befriended a young woman who was also a member of the CPUSA. She had a boyfriend who was a post-Situationist anarchist who had also once been a part of the old Jacksonville ABCF collective. As much as I appreciated having a local person with whom I could talk about anarchism with, his cynical condescending attitude did not mesh well with my hopeful enthusiasm.
In 1998 I discovered the existence of communes and other forms of intentional communities that exist in the world. This happened through me discovering the propaganda of a commune/cult called Zendik Farm which advocated for a global revolution through people radically changing their lives by living and sharing their resources together in communes. That immediately spoke to me and what I was longing for with my anarchist convictions. Whereas previously I thought of an anarchist revolution and an anarchist society as being things that can only happen in some far off distant future, this showed me that living according to anarchist ideals is something that people can do right now, that there are actual physical addresses that one can go to where people are doing that and where newcomers are welcome. Upon discovering the existence of Zendik Farm, my longstanding state of semi-depression that I was mired in for years immediately lifted. Suddenly action for anarchist social change seemed both practical and accessible to me - there were now clear things that I could plug into in the real world with my own life.
A problem with this, however, was that Zendik Farm was a cult, in addition to being an intentional community. Luckily, in spite of all of the hope and enthusiasm that was stirred up in me through learning of their existence, I was still able to pick up on the fact that they had two people who sat on top of the hierarchical social structure that they established for themselves. Since I was now aware that intentional communities were a thing that actually exist in the world, I then started to search out other intentional communities in the United States that I could go visit.
One intentional community that I kept on coming across repeatedly that seemed to closely align with my anarchist beliefs and values was Twin Oaks Community located in central Virginia. I arranged to be a part of an official Twin Oaks visitor period that was to begin in May of 1999. I then did my first cross-country intentional communities tour, driving alone in a silver Ford Escort LX, meeting various people in-person whom I previously only knew on the internet and visiting real-life intentional communities. I was accepted as a member into Twin Oaks Community and in September of 1999 I moved in. Two months after that, the Seattle WTO protests happened. I knew that those protests were going to be big, but I didn’t care, since I had found my niche in the world of intentional communities.
Upon joining Twin Oaks Community in 1999 and for about ten years afterwards I adopted the name (I)An-ok, which was pronounced “yan-ock”. This was a name that I created myself by splicing together “Ian” with the British punk slang term “anok”, which stands for “anarchy” or “anarchist”. Adopting that name, for me, was a signifier that my previous life in Florida living with my family of origin was behind me. It was a way to show the world that I was my own self-directed person. By joining an income-sharing commune I viewed myself as having stepped outside of the old capitalist system, and as the new millennium came into being, I saw myself as being a new person, with a new identity, living a new life.
Since that time I have been engaging with anarchism in countless different ways. I have made friends with anarchists of all persuasions from all around the world, I have been involved with innumerable anarchist projects and collectives, gone to countless anarchist events and spaces in multiple countries, had multiple lovers whom I met in anarchist circles, I have written anarchist writings and been published in multiple different anarchist publications, I've given multiple different public talks at anarchist events, and gotten multiple different anarchist tattoos. Anarchism has literally shaped my life, in every which way, ever since I first discovered it.
On a deeper psychological level, I would say that my relationship with anarchism had essentially transformed who I was as a person. By having this set of beliefs that I was passionate about and fully committed to, I had found confidence in myself and who I was. Through having a commitment to anarchist revolutionary change, I had found my life purpose, which then helped me to discover my voice. Through that, I then gained the ability to come out of my shell of shyness and insecurity that I had suffered inside of for so long. Through having a distinct sense of purpose for what I was doing in the world, I was able to confidently interact with other people and to meet them where they’re at. As a result of that, through talking with different people, interacting with them, gradually getting to know them, I was able to make friends, form romantic relationships and find community once again. That was the way that I was able to start meeting my needs for social connection. Needs that had gone unmet for so long, which had caused so much pain and suffering for me, were finally being met.
Looking back on all of this, I think that the process of becoming an anarchist was a gradual one, with one particular catalyzing moment. It started with a gradual accumulation of awareness of the various horrors and injustices of war, state persecution, the genocide of the Holocaust, the threat of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War, starvation, homelessness and global ecological devastation. This visceral understanding of domination and subjugation became more personal to me through my experiences with corporal punishment and compulsory education. All of these things I hated, and all of them seemed unnecessary.
Simultaneously, I also grew up with experiences of caring supportive community through the Baha'i Faith. Likewise, I grew up having meaningful, thoughtful conversations with my parents and other caregivers. Through these experiences, I knew that true community, dialogue and free inquiry are things that human beings are capable of. The Baha’i Faith also pretty strongly rejects racism and nationalism, in favor of a multiracial, multicultural, global society. This also likely predisposed me towards anarchist beliefs.
My later experience of Catholic school and bullying from my peers then gave me an experience of and distaste for both theocratic tyranny and informal social hierarchies. My experience of "home schooling" after Catholic school showed me first-hand that such structures are not permanent and inevitable, and that they all can be left behind. The time spent alone in the woods when I was "home schooling" then deepened my appreciation for the greater nonverbal community of non-human life that surrounds us all and strengthened my sense of connection to it. I also learned during this time period of the horrific potential of abuse in employment situations through my mother's experience of working with the FAA and subsequently publicly exposing what happened there.
My life entered a pressure cooker phase of adolescence with the authoritarian presence of my stepfather being introduced, the magnificent experience of communal togetherness and communion at the Baha'i World Congress, the deep experience of connection and being understood by my friend Paul, my spiritual awakening by becoming a Baha'i, and then having most of my social support structure fall away in rapid succession. This resulted in my effectively dropping out of high school, seeing the facade of normativity for what it is, and learning how to direct my own learning on my own terms. This whole process was my gradual evolution towards becoming an anarchist.
My first explicit introduction to anarchism, sitting in front of a public computer in the basement of a public library, came in the aftermath of my second traumatic fracture. It was in a life context in which I felt as if my inherent sense of dignity and personhood was broken by authority that I came across a philosophy that said that this should not be the case. Discovering anarchism was the way that I discovered myself. Anarchism told me that even though I was overlooked and crushed by the various authorities of the world, that I still exist and I matter. It told me that I still have a voice and that it can be heard. That relationships can still be created where people acknowledge you and respect your autonomy, and that communities can still be formed where people work together and support each other. That a whole new world can be built in this way, in spite of all of the attempts by the authorities and would-be authorities of the world to destroy us and convince us otherwise. Anarchism gave me permission to exist, and it told me that in the end, permission is not even necessary. Discovering anarchism was my revolutionary moment.
Looking at my whole developmental arc, I had certain qualities and attributes that played a critical role in everything that I experienced. Through my questioning, through my empathy for others, through my independent thinking, through my sensitivity to power differences, through my engaging in good faith dialogue with others, through my connection with non-human life, through my awareness of the systemic suffering of people all around the world, through my participation in community, and through my abiding faith that human beings are capable of building something much greater and more beautiful than the world that currently exists, these qualities that I've had for as long as I can remember are the qualities that made anarchism an intuitive fit for me. The philosophy of anarchism gave me a way to connect the dots that I was already seeing and it gave me the words to express the image that I saw. Discovering anarchism revealed to me that I was an anarchist all along.
Yet another way of looking at how I became an anarchist is through the lens of communitarianism and communal care. I had a taste of the possibilities of belonging and mutual support through my family's involvement with the local Baha'i communities of Oklahoma and Florida. I experienced great pain and devastation from the lack of communal care during my first traumatic fracture, and again during the profound social isolation of my teenage years when I needed that kind of care and support the most. What those situations reveal to me is not that any particular person is to blame, but rather that the nuclear family model is not sufficiently capable of meeting people's needs. The needs of both children and adults alike are left under-served through the atomization and isolation of the nuclear family structure in modern capitalist society. Greater community involvement is necessary to support people through difficult times. What is needed instead are consciously created and intentionally maintained expansive kinship networks of mutual care and support. I took my first steps towards that by exploring the world of intentional communities, starting with Twin Oaks Community in Virginia. Viewed through this lens, that was the start of me becoming an anarchist.
And even with the context of community in place, I have come to find that certain skills and capacities are needed for effective care and support to sustainably be in place for everyone involved. Namely, the capacities for presence, for empathy, for acceptance of differences, for speaking honestly despite one's fears, for collaborating together with others as peers, for equanimity in difficult times, for holding complexity, for emotional attunement. The lack of such skills and capacities contributed to much of the suffering and hardship that I personally experienced during my early life. The lack of these skills and capacities has also contributed to much suffering and hardship within the various anarchist projects that I have seen and been involved with in my adult life since that time as well. I have come to view the learning and growing proficiency with these skills and capacities, within the context of community, as being something that is essential for a sustainable and practical anarchist life. This is definitely a learning edge, an area where myself and all of us often fall short. In this sense, becoming an anarchist is something that I aspire to.
So how did I become an anarchist? It was a gradual process of evolution. It was a sudden moment of revolution. I was an anarchist all along. And it is something that, in community with others, I strive to become.
