On the street will giving out my free paper I am sometimes asked, "What is an anarchist?", My usual answer is "Somebody like you" followed by "We are all anarchists at heart". A belief that I have held for many, many years. All of us want to control our own lives, all of us, resent being ordered around and told what to do, at heart, we enjoy being part of, and co-operating with, the community in which we live. However convincing people that at heart they are really anarchists, is the difficult part.
This article by David Gaeber from The Anarchist Library, explains it in more detail.
Chances are you have already heard something about who anarchists are and what they are supposed to believe. Chances are almost everything you have heard is nonsense. Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.
At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions. Odd though this may seem, in most important ways you are probably already an anarchist — you just don’t realize it.
