Most of the world associates anarchism with lawlessness, destruction, violence, and war, which anarchists are supposed to contribute to because they love to create chaos. But that is not true anarchism. The love of destruction for its own sake is nihilism, which the world has spoken of with hatred for years without calling it by its proper name, and not anarchism, which is something very different.
Anarchism is all in the mind. It is a mental and moral state. It is the absolute and unshakable belief that you have inherent rights as a human being, that your rights are equal to those of every other human being, and that consequently no individual or group has any authority over you. More than that, even, it is a belief that must express itself in practice. Anarchism is a set of convictions acted on and lived resolutely.
Consequently, the anarchist’s objective is not to pull down the nation-state by force or to take up arms against a particular government. Such attempts would produce no results worth mentioning. Instead, the anarchist who believes in his ideal should work to spread anarchism by inducing people to examine the world around them and their own place in it. His goal should be to induce a new sense of self among his fellow men, one which is supremely confident and which does not tolerate concepts such as the state, organized society, or any set of restrictions which does not manage to be useful, optional, and susceptible to change at will. He does not instruct or dictate; he shows the way, partly by example, and lets the change in the attitudes of those around him develop from within themselves, from their own experiences and observations.
It is tempting to compare true anarchism to satyagraha. But anarchism goes beyond mere nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. You see, both those approaches take established authority into account. They confront it directly. Conversely, the anarchist aims to avoid direct engagement with the powers that be. A state or a society draws its strength from those who believe in it. If they cease to believe, to respect it, then it dies. So the anarchist must live in such a way as to ignore the force he wants to kill, and to convey those feelings of contempt for and indifference to it to others around him. When there are a sufficient number of anarchists, that force will cease to be able to compel them at all. It will then disappear rapidly, having been proven ineffective and thus not worth preserving.
What happens to a god who no longer has worshipers?
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