Where upon realizing that I've reached the terminus of a delightful nihilism, I just lean over the ledge a wee bit and say it...

I feel like an anarchist.

I won't state explicitly that I am an anarchist, well, because I just cannot stand the verb form "to be." The liar's verb, that little two syllable infinitive.

Take, "It is raining."

I get, blah blah blah, that a person staking this claim in ordinary English means, "Raining outside," which is a shorthand for "water falling from the sky, of which I take note."

But the niggling little "it" which precedes the nasty fucking "is" changes everything. It really does. What "it" rains? What being behind the event of water falling from the sky actually precipitates that aero-aquatic wonder?

Obviously, no "it" orders the rain. But the sentence creates a deception, once which (if you care to see it) you can find in almost any grammatical equation hinging on the verb form "to be," even in its merely copulative arrangement.

Take, "I am Jack Crow."

Seems simple enough, right?

Nothing more slippery and deceptive than that little "am." It establishes - ex nihilo - an equation of identity between a "me-as-subject" and a "me-as-object."

It divides the naming of names into two arbitrary parts, one which does and which "is done, or done to."

It engenders the passive, the tone of the victim, and all other manner of nefarious and hateful grammatical constructions. It allows some men to state, "we are the State" and get away with the obvious fiction, since "the State" doesn't exist outside of the description of it. In all seriousness. Examine the alleged thing (a filthy being, no less), the State. Stripped of the grammatical magic of being ("the State is"), what you find never exceeds the parts.

And those parts look a whole lot like people.

And claiming that the "State is just people" still preserves the magic of grammatical being. That dastardly "is" does all the work. It transforms people working together and competing, so that they might rule others and derive considerable benefit,  into a separate entity, a thing unto itself.

A thing which does not actually exist. Like the corporation. Or the congregation.

The verb form "to be" transforms the actions of individuals into a belief about those actions, a belief that those various persons constitute a single thing.

And these beliefs in the being inherent in human choices, in the so-called organizations which people magically create by working together, bind men to them.

If Mark claimed that his breathing meditatively on Mondays, plus Julie's eating of pork on Thursdays, plus John taking a shit outside on Sundays "is the People's Living Council" and that such and such an entity could achieve things on its own, as an entity, you would rightly conclude that Mark had just tried to sell you a tall tale, probably in order to deprive you of some portion of your life and labor.

You'd rightly conclude that you could not trust Mark, and if you had your wits about you, would chase him off, preferably with wickedly hefty blunt objects brandished in poses of menacing intent.

But, if Mark, Julie, John and their friends told you that they "were the duly elected government of the Great State of Vermont," and "were entitled to obedience, a portion of your labor, in the form of promissory notes" and other claims on your time and person, you would (if you resembled most any other person on the planet) very likely believe that this thing, "government," possessed a separate and tangible being. Whether or not you thought that Mark and company had any right to order others around. Even if you'd spent the bulk of your adult years acting in opposition to them.

But why?

Because, quite simply, you believed in groups of people as "things." You believed - as do almost all of us - that people who act towards some goal, or share resources, comprise the lesser parts of a greater whole.

It starts in the family, which most of us experience as The Family, growing up. You get that belief reinforced in church, masjid, ashram or temple. Later, buttressed by guys with guns in uniforms, or guys in uniforms riding red trucks, or guys in khaki going off to kill guys in olive drab, you very likely come to believe that the world has a whole lot of these supra-personal and magical entities in it. A legion of them. Legions of legions.

Later, you join others to do some work you probably detest, or come to loathe in short order, and most of what you do gets taken from you, because the organizational entity to which you belong has an owner, with a legal title to your labor.

That fiction has some real consequences. And perhaps you learn to believe the lie because the consequences show up all around you. Others can own a fiction and take stuff from you, on account of owning it. They can control a set of beliefs, and order people to their deaths. And others to do the killing.

Powerful shit, these fixed ideas.

And yet, every single one of these imagined entities vanishes upon unbiased observation.

They just don't exist.

Because people working together don't form new beings, new entities.

People working together just work together. And then, they don't. And maybe after the earth spins on its axis once, they do again.

The labor they do actually happens. They do it. But, the doing of labor does not shape the laborers into a new entity.

That entity, in truth, resides entirely in the head. A fiction. A fixed idea. A belief resident entirely in...

...language and memory.

Which others have endeavored mightily - a project spanning generations and ages - to culture into us.

A successful one.

Until you stop believing it.

And end up feeling like a person who just doesn't believe the word magic any more.

Perhaps, upon discovering your own disbelief, you decide that you'd like to actively live without all these ghosts in your head.

Let's call that anarchism.

Or not.

I'll call it anarchism all on my lonesome, and feel happy with the result.

But it comes with some consequences, this refusal to believe in the word djinn and grammar angels.

It means that - let us take this as our leaping off point - whatever people do ends with the doing of it. The doing alone suffices. And so long as they chose to do it freely - even the stuff we don't personally enjoy - they do so on their own terms. We don't have a say. Not you. Not me. Not anyone. Even if it looks ugly and mean and low brow and full of sexual decisions you would never make.

Of course, it doesn't always play out so neatly. Food and water, shelter and lovers, resources and materials - none lasts forever, comes in an infinite supply, or shows up evenly distributed across the planet.

But, we have to start somewhere, no?

I say, let's start with killing the fucking fixed ideas...