Anarchism

You cannot force a person to be anarchist.

Why would I want to?

That was an assertion that needed to be true for the following to work, and another way anarchism differs from "liberalism" and "marxism". Because while you cannot force anyone to become those things too you can force them to be faked. You cannot fake being an anarchist.

it is absolutely not anything that can be called "cultural"

And there is the fundamental disagreement between our "anarchy"s. For me it is a culture. and not much else. Everything else comes from this cultural root. The critique of hierarchy is just this anarchic culture applied to political science.

When I see the black flag it fills me with a sense of belonging. Seeing a Circled A on a street corner frequently makes me smile. Reading anarchist literature gives me a sense of being a part of something bigger and what word could there be for that other than culture? Shifting through the near incalculable amount of stickers in an anarchist space with all the ACABs, black cats and antifa. What is it if not culture?

Although now thinking about I imagine you could call cultural anarchism "punk". I don't think I can. punk is too different. It's backed by the music genre which has a very specific sound and perhaps because I doesn't gel with me I don't consider it the anarchist sound. It's punk. It is anarchic, but it's only one side of it.

I wonder what it is that you consider culture, that it doesn't contain the collective effort needed to build anarchic structures.

Anarchists are not "abnormalities"

The current norm in almost every country is to be a worker in an industry and vote in elections, (even if they don't matter). That's quite far from anarchy.

When I use normal I mean the current mainstream. Or to give more examples: being an artist isn't normal, being self-employed isn't normal, not voting isn't normal (or voting is normal if you remove the double negative). Not working isn't normal. I could go on but I think you get the idea. Obviously anarchy is natural and exists in society but it certainly isn't the norm. But I probably should have used "mainstream" because it seems "normal" seems to invoke concepts of "accepted", "good". not "average"

You mean... what people were doing for thousands of years before states were invented? None of those people thought of themselves as anarchists, you know.

They weren't. Anarchy is the conscious opposition to archy. If those societies didn't have any interaction with archic structures then they didn't know to oppose them therefore they weren't anarchists, but they did live anarchicly and their culture was anarchic, and through that culture you could call them anarchists, because that culture probably had their own methods of dealing with archic structures that tried to impose themselves, which could be considered opposition, but it wouldn't be conscious, or would it... And this is getting out of hand, isn't it.

But that's words. imperfect abstractions over infinitely complex ideas. Shame anarchy is one the most complex ones, since it's entire concept defies singular meaning. The only one you can safely ascribe to it is "against authority", and even that's only if you have a specific meaning of "authority".