From the White-PillBox: Part 33
As a kid you wanted nothing more than to be an adult. Under anarchism, you actually do get your wish.
One of statism’s pernicious effects is making us think like children. We grow up highly influenced by the mindset that there is an authority in charge. When faced with social problems, we are trained to switch our minds off rather than ponder solutions.
If a crime or tragedy happens, we are expected to react by summoning an authority (generally a government authority1). The training is effective; we hardly imagine (because we don’t have to imagine) how we would personally handle such situations 2.
But is it really a problem?
The answer to that question should be obvious, considering the destructive outcomes of statism. The State exists precisely because the general population suspends their critical thinking regarding government; they blindly defer to the imagined authority of the State. They fail to employ the very attribute that most distinguishes an adult from a child: thoughtful reason.
And yet, as children we hungered to be adults: to have freedom of opinion and action; to make decisions that were final…answerable to no one else.
Somehow as children we knew what it meant to be an adult; then we promptly forgot it, as adults.
Fortunately adult decision making is well within our skill sets.
Seeing what adults can do
We do not have to imagine how we might handle a specific situation that is currently handled by State agents.
Instead it helps to observe adults in other times or places, where the State intruded into social matters to a different degree.
Colonial America
In the American colonies, adults were fiercely independent. Without a helicopter State (indeed, almost absent a State), they made decisions and engaged in social cooperation that truly does make modern adults look like children.
They did not ask who should solve their problems. They knew it was their job, as adults.
Post-Soviet society
Conversely, at the fall of the Soviet Union, the population worried how they would eat or obtain clothing. After all, the Soviet State had always been the provider of these and other resources; absent this, surely poverty and death would follow.
They were trained to think as children in almost every facet of their lives. Their new-found freedom terrified them.
The White Pill
There is no mysterious or genetic difference between ourselves, the Colonists, and the post-Soviet people. We are all adults, capable of acting like adults even if we may not imagine we can.
So rather than see it as a human flaw, we should recognize the White Pill:
We have it in us to think like adults.
After all, we already do exactly that, in many areas of our lives. And, in examples like the American colonists, we see for ourselves that others have managed to live their adult lives with greater freedom. It should be welcome news that without the State, we get to be adults, through and through.
It’s not often that a childhood dream has the chance to be fulfilled.
This is not to say that in the world we live in today, anarchists should refrain from utilizing government police, fire, etc. if they judge circumstances call for it. The State has enormously reduced our practical choices, and made it difficult or impossible for alternatives to emerge.
Sadly, parents tend to adopt the mindset of authority with their children. “What I say goes”; “obey your (parents / teachers / etc.)”.