Growing up as a libertarian, when I heard others saying they are libertarian I’d hear someone who was fed up with the state of politics and separating themselves from the fucked up status quo, but now I just hear someone who hasn’t done any deep reading or have talked to many black and brown folks about how the world works. It is something that pushed me to abandon this portion of my identity between 2010 and 2015.
Libertarianism has some really comforting features when you really don’t want to do the work to understand the messy and beautiful world we live in. It really speaks to your selfish state of mind as a young person, and particularly a young person who lives in rural areas. When you don’t really understand how the world works, Libertarianism provides you with a simple framework that works with your heuristic approach to navigating your limited slice of a very complex and diverse world.
I switch to being an anarchist in 2024 after my mother died. This is after spending over a decade not knowing who the fuck I was, once I realized I was a complete ignorant fuck for calling myself a Libertarian since my youth. Once you actually work within government, see how large enterprise work, understand more about how markets and the world works (or don’t), you realize things are much more complicated and complex than your shit simple little rural mind could handle in early years, and you began to look for more meaning and depth.
This post isn’t about your Libertarianism, it is about mine. If you take offense, I recommend doing some more work. Libertarianism is really a self-centered view of things. Once you realize that it is mostly a bunch of white guys celebrating Libertarianism, you begin to hang out more in cities, and get to know people who work in government, you realize it isn’t a very robust toolbox for approaching life. Ultimately, once I read more, wrote more, and expanded who I hung out with, I realized I needed more than this ideology can offer.
