Nihilist/Anarchist...i.e., Hypocrite

I thought of myself as a “rebel” but nothing could have been further from the truth. I railed against the hypocrisy of our institutions and saw myself as outside of the machine… I called it the “meat grinder”. I thought I was acting so very revolutionary because I chose to do what I wanted to do when and where I wanted to do it. I was "Outside of society" (thank you Patti Smith). I got incredible juice from adopting an anarchism that decried the excesses of both capitalism and socialism.

Once I looked out the window of my rented apartment at my used car, in my second hand clothes that, at another time, I would have taken pride in, and I realized: The metals, the plastics and the engineering that put them together; the property bought and house that was maintained by my landlord; the carpenters, roofers, electricians and plumbers that built the house; the fabrics, designers and manufacturers of my clothing and shoes (used or not) had to be purchased by someone at one time or another… someone with a job; the food I ate had to be grown, harvested, butchered and presented in the market; all these and more depended on a system of some sort: capitalist or otherwise, because it was not going to be done by my destructive and self-centered philosophy of life.

Could it be that my so-called anarchistic way of living was a worse hypocrisy than that of the society in which I opposed so ardently? What was I contributing to the well-being of others outside of a very narrow circle of revolutionary friends like myself? Was there a set of principles I could live by that would be more creative than destructive? To love where there is hatred; to forgive than to be forgiven; to understand than to be understood; to choose harmony over discord… these seem now to be truly revolutionary ideals. This took a degree of acceptance I could not understand before. Could I find a society that extols these principles?

 Yes, I could.


 geo 4,862