Larken Rose is one of the most prominent contemporary anarchists around. Maybe I should stop using that all too emotionally loaded word and better call him a voluntarist. It describes the same, but avoids the widespread misunderstanding of what anarchism really is.

A voluntarist is somebody with the philosophy and conviction that a free society must be built on the voluntary interaction of individuals instead of the initiation of force through a government apparatus.

When I learned about Mr. Rose and his ideas, they were fundamentally different than they are today, as, during that time, he actually took the government seriously and actually challenged them to show him where his interpretation of the law was wrong. He was certainly right about the law but very wrong in his assessment that somebody of the challenged cared. He got a time-out for a year, which he used, while fed and berthed by the federal government, to write. One of the results of that writing was a novel with the title The Iron Web. I report about this book in another article.

This book subjects the reader to the question “who owns you” and tries to give some hints on how this could be answered, and establishes a real-world iron web that is comprised of those people who fully consciously answered it with a resounding ‘I’ and act upon it. If you do own yourself, you do not owe allegiance to anybody, and certainly not to any government and its laws.

To signal this state of the mind, Larken Rose suggested the symbol at the top of this article, and I was immediately busy adding this symbol to a commercial website selling tie-dye that I run then, and that still operates today.

But if you have somebody in your space who has not had this change of mind, you have somebody who does not want to upset the powers, and the fear of breaking any of their ‘laws’ can be overwhelming and intimidating.

So, I actually received pressure for removing this symbol, not from the adversary but from my ally. I hate to call them adversaries, as that gives them power they don’t have intrinsically, but I am lacking a better word.

This is the system how it has been built, it uses indoctrination to make loved-ones the enforcers – that stinks but is a matter that has be be dealt with.