Anarchist vs Anarchist

[Josh F]

I have a friend from high school with whom I have remained in contact.  she is self defined as an anarchist and atheist, however her concept of anarchy seems to idolize riots/protests, Emma Goldman, Black Panthers, and the Occupt movement.  I'm way more in the AnCap school, I'm into Austrian economics, the NAP, etc.  I can be a bit controverial on the old Facebook, but she is the first person in the longest time to actually DELETE my comment to her post.  She was making an argument about how racist the Zimmerman trial was because some other black woman fired a warning shot at her abusive husband and was given jail time.  I looked up the woman, and apparently she literally went itno another room, came back, and fired the gun AT her HUSBAND and two children!!!  So I point this out to her, and he deleted my response. 

 

My topic is to address the vast chasm of Anarchy where this girl and her ideology literally seems like a parallel opposite of my own.  Here she is going to Occupy Oakland fighting cops and I am talking about peaceful parenting.

 

What is with this bizarro world of lame Anarchists running around breaking windows and eating old food out of dumpsters?  Knowing her as well as I do, I know her childhood inspires a lot of this behavior.  Any adivce from anyone with experience?  Please dont be general, I'm not really looking for any arm chair psychology.

[Pepin]

Why does this girl and her beliefs matter to you?

[Josh F]

She is my friend. I have a lot of empathy and sympathy towards her, as we grew up in similar situations.  She has done a lot to demonstrate the same in the past, but we haven't been living in the same country or city for the last couple years.  I removed her from my facebook, because I don't like reading something from someone who won't let me respond to it, it is sort of a personal rule, but when I see her again (which I will) we will still be old friends.  We spend hours catching up and talking about philosophy and politics and anarchy, she is intellegent and has an attractive charisma, passionate, and would make an epic cool AnCap.

 

Why should I not care?

[Gaurav251]

Well I guess the first best question to ask is how was her child hood?

[Josh F]

Not great.  A judgmental and "disciplinarian" type dad but I dont know the degree of spanking or anything else.  Upper middle class, educated.  Warm mother somewhat distant father.  We met in highschool so I cant speak in too much detail about her before that, and she has never been too specific about the past but has definitly shared her conteporary frutrations

[Gaurav251]

Well I never met a person who seems to idolize riots/protests but I wonder if you asked her why she likes riot and protests and what she expects them to accomplish? After all the NAP is to find healthy peaceful relationships with people and avoid violent ones. So I assume she expects something out of the riots that makes her happy that they happen?

 

I do however remember my self being cynical like this and hoping one day that the world burned or there were wars happening everywhere and humanity just ended up killing it self how ever I got over that after I 'got over' from the abuse of my father.

 

Now don't take what I am going to say seriously because this is just my opinion and I don't have as much contact to her then you do. The way I think about it is that since her father was a judgmental and disciplinarian type I assume that some sort of abuse happened to her since after all, most discipline I see from parents is just verbal or physical abuse from the parents cloaked in the name of good. So I think she never really understood what her father did to her and when ever she sees some sort of judgmental and disciplinarian system like the state and she sees riots happening she thinks its a way of striking back at the system, or in other words striking back at her father in an unconscious way,

 

again could all be bullshit coming from my mouth but that's my opinion. But I don't know how she thinks of her father either or even acknowledges that some things he would call discipline was just abuse from his part being done onto her, if she doesn't understand that then I can see why she would act the way she does about riots and protests.

[Josh F]

Yeah I agree, and maybe issues with her mom and brother and friends or relatives growing up as well.  I wonder how to approach her in an attractive way to encourage her to i dont know... switch from ansoc to ancap.

[Gaurav251]

I will talk about my experience first as it seems 'relative' to what I think this girl is going through. The first things that happened to me to cure me of my cynicism was that I started listening to stef and from there I started noting things that my parents called discipline but was actually abuse and I started to talk to my parents about it (my mother seems to have apologized but my highly religious father seems to think he has nothing to be sorry about),

 

I can bet on the fact that she has some lingering feelings that she never 'sorted out', just like what happened to me. There was a time when I was so embarrassed in school because of the harassment and bullying I got from students (and due to my cynicism I kept these embarrassing, depressing, and hurtful moments to my self and never told any one anything about them) that I was just hoping they would get hurt in any way possible and when some one fell down the stairs I smiled with glee at the joy of seeing 'karma' strike back at him. I also used to hit my baby cousin when ever I went to my uncles house even when she used to cry so much that if I think about it now it was monstrous crap that I was doing to a little child, she will probably be stuck with that abuse for the rest of her life. I also remember times where I hit my mom because I thought it was fair game as she used to hit me and then I would hit her for doing something wrong and she would take it for some reason (I stopped later on as I developed a better relationship with her).

 

But as I talked to my parents and even if my father seems to have ignored my complaints and what happened to me as a child I could talk to my mother freely about everything I wanted and every time I talked about something depressing, hurtful, or things that made me angry I would rarely flip back and talk about it again (unless it was a traumatic experience like being stripped naked by my school peers, that sticks) and my problem before being able to talk about any of this was nobody wanted to listen to my life stories or so I thought and I didn't expect strangers to care that much either.

 

Basically I left my feelings bottled in and sooner or later they popped by me either being violent or angry at some one. But when I found some one to be my mirror aka stef, my mother, anybody who listened to my life stories and just didnt say "oh how terrible of you, you should forget that" made me slowly sort out my feelings and made me lose my violent behaviors and made me into a better person who now follows the NAP.

 

Now back to her, so far you have told me she goes to occupy oakland and seems to fight cops, what does she attempt to achieve by doing this? It might be a need to take out bottled up feelings or maybe its something entirely else but she must have a 'rational' for liking riots and going to occupy movements so if you can figure that out you can start going from the top of the leaves to all the way to the roots of the problem. It could be as simple as she hasnt had any one to talk to about what happened in her childhood and nobody actually was a 'mirror' for her to open up to (If my guardians are the one hitting me and shouting at me as a child, its going to be damn difficult for me to find any one else to tell me what they did was right or wrong if I don't even process what they did was in any shape wrong at all).

 

Dont take my advice seriously though as I haven't met this person nor do I know what her personality is like or how she would act if you questioned her on this stuff, but thats my experience dealing with cynical tendencies that sooner or later made me lash out at some one or something.