What is God, to an Anarchist?
Why I believe in a higher power, but not in hierarchical power.
Someone once told me that I couldn’t be an anarchist and believe in God because “No Gods, No Masters” is a popular anarchist slogan. I guess you can’t be Jamaican and make a woman cry either, but I digress.
The idea that God is incompatible with anarchism makes sense if you don’t know what God is. If you do, it’s pretty obvious that God is the essence of anarchism (that sentence also runs in reverse, but we’ll get to that later).
Anarchism is a political philosophy centered on opposition to the state and hierarchical institutions. Anarchists believe that the most fulfilling social fabric emerges organically out of authentic interactions between free, autonomous people acting in accordance with their own and collective good, without the use of force to regulate behavior. It’s this totally secular idea that, in the absence of man-made power hierarchies, our own intrinsic virtue emerges as we let it flow, as we attune to our own nature and embody it in harmony with others and the natural world.
It’s like — bro, have you even read the Tao Te Ching? Anarchism is all about God, though I understand why most anarchists wouldn’t see that. Most people don’t recognize God. It took me a long time to know God, too.
