Progressive Folly
Why We Must Become Anarchists
“Anarchism stands for social order based on the free grouping of individuals”
Emma Goldman
There is a creeping stupidity that pervades the ranks of those who call themselves “progressive.” It is the stupidity of those who wish to appear virtuous but are incapable of thinking beyond the confines of their shallow moral posturing. Progressives, with their boundless enthusiasm for collective projects, have come to resemble the very tyrants they claim to oppose. The state, which they once claimed to resist, now becomes their beloved idol, the false god before which they kneel—not in the name of a higher ideal, but in the name of conformity, of civic-mindedness, of a collective mind that destroys the individual.
The war machine, once the province of despots and imperialists, is now glorified by these self-appointed champions of “justice.” They have come to love the map, the abstraction of power, the ability to move men like pieces on a board, like a game of Risk. Their love of planning and organizing borders, nations, and peoples reveals the true imperialist undercurrent of their thought. These are not individuals who care for freedom or dignity; they are the very same sociopaths who, throughout history, have thirsted for power over others. They delight in deciding where borders should be drawn, who should live where, and under what conditions. The irony is sharp: while pretending to despise the imperialists of old, they have become the very same, clothed in the garments of virtue, but their hearts are as black as any Caesar’s.
It is not by accident that these people rise to power. Power does not corrupt; power attracts the corruptible. The progressive, with their endless schemes and plans for “improvement,” cannot resist the lure of governance. For they believe they know better. They believe in the grand design, in their capacity to remake society, to build utopias on the backs of individuals who, in their eyes, are nothing but raw material. The sociopaths, the power-hungry, are not born but made. And they are made by the very structure of power itself, which demands submission, conformity, and the death of individual will.
Individualism was murdered in World War One. The war, which should have been a lesson in the dangers of collectivist thinking, was instead the proving ground for the death of personal autonomy. The draft, that most heinous of impositions, was the weapon used to slaughter the individual spirit. It was the first collective project, the first grand experiment in turning human beings into tools of the state, and the progressives—like all power-hungry fools—loved it. They loved how the war molded people, turned them into docile sheep willing to kill and die for a cause they did not understand, for borders that meant nothing, for leaders who despised them.
And yet, few question this. Few rise to resist the madness. Why? Because the sociopaths have created a world in which it is seen as virtuous to serve, to obey, to conform. And the progressive loves this. The progressive, with their love of systems and their obsession with collective projects, is the perfect tool of the state. They delight in the draft, for it makes everyone “civically minded.” It turns the individual into a cog in the machine, into a servant of the state, into a mindless follower of authority. It is no wonder, then, that these people love war. War is the ultimate expression of their collective mindset, the final obliteration of individualism in the name of the “greater good.”
This is why we must become anarchists. Not the weak, sentimental anarchism of those who wish for peace and harmony, but the anarchism born of a hatred of power itself. The anarchism that recognizes the state for what it is: a machine designed to crush the individual and elevate the sociopath. Anyone who seeks power, who desires to govern others, is already corrupted by that desire. They are already lost to the abyss, for power attracts only those who are willing to sacrifice their humanity for control over others. The state is the breeding ground of sociopaths, and to enter into its service is to submit to the most degrading form of slavery imaginable: the slavery of the soul.
The only logical conclusion is to reject the state altogether. To reject the systems of power that breed sociopathy. The only way to preserve our humanity is to live outside the reach of the state, to refuse to participate in its grand projects, to deny its claim over our lives. Anarchism is not the rejection of order; it is the rejection of false order, of the tyranny that masquerades as justice. It is the recognition that true freedom can only come from within, from the individual will to power, from the refusal to submit to the sociopaths who seek to rule us.
The progressives have become the enemies of freedom. They delight in the machinery of the state, in the ability to impose their will on others, in the death of the individual. They are no different from the imperialists of old, no different from the despots they claim to oppose. They are the architects of our collective downfall, the builders of a new empire in which the individual is nothing, and the state is everything. We must resist them. We must reject their vision of a world in which we are nothing but pawns on a map, where our lives are determined by those who seek only power. We must become anarchists, for the alternative is sociopathology, the slow, inevitable death of the individual at the hands of the collective.
To be free is to be an anarchist. Anything less is to be a slave.