For our orientation week at Truman University, we freshmen were asked to write "This I Believe" essays. I had never heard of this project before. I started reading and listening to some of the essays, both the recent ones and the ones broadcast on the radio in the 50's, and realized I could probably listen to them all day--it's a bit like "This American Life," fast-food style. Most of the essays are about 500 words and take only about three minutes to read or listen to, but the writers accomplish a lot in that brief time, telling beautiful, painful, or just amusing stories and synthesizing life lessons from them. It's also a bit like the format of my old column for my high school newspaper, which was around 600-700 words and had many of the same goals. I've posted my essay below; I read it to about 100 classmates in a lecture hall. About two dozen others chose to read their essays. It may have been a bit out there for my first essay at Truman, but that's the energy of starting so many things over in a new place, I guess.
I believe in anarchy. Let me explain.
This is not a plug for a stateless society. Maybe I should rephrase and call it small-scale anarchy, because that is all that is usually possible in this world. The kind of anarchy I am interested in occurs in the smallest imaginable moments, usually when we are most alone—when we encounter a panhandler on the street without a mother or father with us to brush him or her off, when we see a wrapper on the floor in a deserted hallway, when we are alone with another person on a date, when we find ourselves holding the answers to a quiz we have to take next period, when we are faced with a choice and have no one to stop us from making the wrong decision. Situations with no rules, with no authorities, when we are accountable no one and nothing but our own conscience—these are times when we are most free to choose, and therefore have the most potential to do good or evil, to do something truly horrible or beautiful.
Anarchy of this kind is not always small-scale. But it is the only scale I have experience with. And just because these moments seem small does not mean they are not important—extremely important, sometimes the best evidence as to what kind of person we are and often profoundly influential on other people.
I don’t believe in anarchy just because I believe in humanity and our ability to choose the right thing when given the chance. I believe the human spirit is fallen, and that people, including and especially me, face many barriers to choosing good when there is no authority to tell them to do so. Indeed, these moments of anarchy are also the times when the influence of God, and an omnipresent, interventionist God at that, is clearest—a God that somehow pulls humans over high mental barriers and deeply rutted prejudices in order to be able to be merely free to chose the right thing. But these moments are also when the human spirit is at its strongest, because we so often do choose to do good, against all odds.
I have only spent five days at college, but I have already noticed that there is a huge amount of anarchy here. The absence of parents, the ease of access to all sorts of things we know we shouldn’t want, and the sheer number of people and situations makes this a place where students are forced to make many more decisions on their own than they ever have before. My fifth-grade teacher once said that you really only find out what a person is like in college. I think I understand what he meant now. Only when we choose entirely for ourselves do we begin to determine what kind of person we are and will become.
