Why I gave up on anarchy

The idea behind anarchy is the lack of non-consensual organizations and institutions. If you do not wish to follow the laws, rules or morals of an institution, an anarchist feels one has the right to ignore them. As one can imagine, this hardly makes the police, the government or the authoritarian priests of organized religion happy, since according to the idea of Deep Anarchy such beliefs challenge their very existence. This doesn't mean that no organizations should exist. Actually, most serious and intelligent anarchists work hard on building local area-based organizations as a way to decentralize social control and so allow the community to avoid interference from non-consensual institutions. Of course, the majority of anarchists are either alienated adolescents or "I'm more politically aware than you" activists with the resulting alpha male primate power struggle typical of groups that claim to be completely equal, but there's a few clued individuals out there. They're simply more idealistic than most people, who think some amount of non-consensual order is necessary.

My conclusion of that fact, incidentally, is why I gave up on anarchy and became a libertarian several years later. But I still feel the ideal in my heart, if not my head.

The word anarchy stems from greek. It means, roughly, "no ruler." Not "no order," or "no society."

I think that you are confusing anarchy as a movement (which is so very multifaceted-- eco-anarchy, anarcho-feminism, anarcho-syndicalism, and so forth ad nauseum-- that a magazine presents nothing like the whole of the idea) with anarchy as a political scene. If you get caught up in the fads and cliques of some of the "anarchists" you end up missing the meaning which is supposed to be carried through.

This is carried to the extreme when one looks at the general public's views on anarchy, which are, on the whole, completely unrelated to what anarchy actually is. On the whole, the public sees anarchy as a movement which seeks to reduce everything to chaos, which is violent, and which is largely composed of angry, violent adolescents. In reality, anarchy is a movement that, for the most part, is completely supportive of having a cultured civilization, is supportive of technology, and has a rich, varied history. And, in direct opposition to the "violent" stereotype, a large portion of the anarchist movement is composed of pacifists, seeing the use of physical violence as a form of coercion.