An Anarchist Manifesto: The Reaction

A co-worker of mine had me listen to a libertarian podcast yesterday about an anarchist's view of work. It was manifesto of sorts that espoused that we all as working people are little more than slaves of tyranny, and would all be better off playing and left to our own devices. Clearly this is insanity. I listened with a passing interest, but his words might as well have fallen on deaf ears. My mind couldn't even grasp, couldn't even branch out far enough to explain the many faults in his pseudo-Utopian view of the modern world. At the end of the discussion I wasn't left with any inkling of desire to walk out on my job and tell my wife that I was just going to have fun from now on and use this ideology as comfort. It's just ludicrous.

The article clearly did not reach me on a political level as it was designed, but it did leave me with many introspective, philosophical level questions. The root of all of the questions being: What is it all really for? I've talked about it awhile ago, about who you are. Are you your memories and experiences, or is there a soul that resides and drives your life? I've talked about heaven. Is there a heaven, what is it, what could it be like? These are all topical when thinking of the over-arcing question, what is it all for? If there is a soul, and heaven accepts those souls upon physical death, and if heaven truly, truly is Utopia, why "waste" 80-90 physical years "living"?

It is almost too complicated and overwhelming for me to think about. Because to really get to bottom of it (which I'm sure I won't do today) you have to have an understanding of time, and how the universe works and how the two are ultimately interrelated or, correct me if I'm wrong, the same thing all together. I'll start by saying that time is NOT seconds, minutes, and hours as many would answer. Nor is it the aforementioned 80-90 years. Those are man-made terms used to measure change. Man has found a way to quantify earth's relationship to itself and to the sun, and we have all accepted those quantities as "time", but it would indeed be inaccurate to define time as seconds, minutes, hours, etc.

Can you see how different the world would be if long, long ago, the people that made these decisions on quantifying time had decided that every rotation the earth made was to be 1 hour
instead of 1 day? Very good, that was a trick question. The world would in fact NOT be any different at all. That's the point. All that would be different would be the semantics of how we discuss the measurement of change. Instead of talking about being 80-90 years old when you die, I would be talking about being 3-4 years old. Time would still exist unchanged, as it always has and always will. This moment that is a permanent fixture of the universe would still exist whether you call it a second or a millennium. It doesn't matter what I call it, it's your mind in each moment that makes it real and organizes them into past, present and future moments. Time just is, and you can see how talking about it in terms of measurement can be irrelevant to this discussion.

So where does that leave us then? If you have a soul that has rented a physical body on earth for a finite amount of moments that add up to less than a spec on the timeline of eternity...then why? Why would your soul gamble those, relatively speaking, minuscule moments away on an earth that has pain and suffering. What does "living" have to do with anything in relation to your soul? And beyond that, what does anything we do on a daily basis have to do with "living"? These are very open ended questions here. And as usual, I don't have any of the answers, just more questions.

So the anarchist failed to convert me politically. That much is no surprise. What it did do, however, was open up a lot of old introspective questions that have been plaguing me for some
time now. Will I ever have the answers to these questions? Probably not. Then why worry about them? I suppose it's the old-fashioned fear of the unknown. A fear that this all might not mean anything in the end, and that we didn't take advantage of the moments we had when we had them. Maybe knowing that is enough, and maybe it's not. Maybe it is in the not knowing the end that we gain a clearer understanding of what we do know now, and will hopefully learn to cherish our "time" that much more.

Stupid Libertarian podcast...