ryanpatgray:I hope no one minds, but I would like to conduct a survey. I have a theory but am willing to admit I am wrong if I am. I myself was a non-anarchist libertarian before becoming an ancap as were most of the people I know of who have mentioned their conversion. If you do not mind my asking, I would like to survey the board. Immediately before becoming an anarcho-capitalist how did you describe yourself politically?
Thank you,
ryanpatgray
For about a year prior to finding Freedomain, I would have described myself openly as a small-L libertarian, but in truth, I had become completely politically agnostic.
I was a Big-L for many years leading up to this, but was never quite satisfied with it. I could never reconcile "The Pledge" with open support for certain kinds of taxation, and mandatory public schooling. After a few really bad experiences (state conventions), I abandoned party politics altogether as totally hopeless. I started paying close attention to moral and political philosophy at that point, and eventually found that I could not justify any political system whatsoever. That panicked me at first. The thought of being an "anarchist" hadn't even crossed my mind, but the implications of what I'd learned lead right to it. So, I backed away from it for a while.
Finally, I worked up the courage to start asking around on several Atheist boards, whether and how one might be able to justify a moral framework sufficient enough to make organized society even possible. I got the usual nihilistic pseudo-science: morality is a social fiction, there are no moral atoms, it's all a culture thing, survival of the fittest, and so on (as well as, "you're an idiot", "stop bothering us", "get lost you moron", and such).
Stef found my email address from one of those boards, and invited me over to have a listen. I ignored the email at first, thinking it was spam. But, on a lark, I went back to my waste basket the next day and decided to read it. He talked about his own articles on atheistic morality, and I was hooked. I had to know what he had figured out.
Coming to the boards, my first instinct was to fall back on my Libertarianism - I was breathless about the need for national defense, the sanctity of family, and a few other small things - but in truth, those dominoes were all ready starting to fall, by the time I'd read his articles. My blindness toward my family was really the only thing I was clinging to with any real effort. For the rest, though, I didn't need much convincing, even though I did put a lot of effort into believing I did. He was just right. And I just knew it.
So, Freedomain didn't *really* change my whole life. I was already doing that for myself. What Freedomain did, though, was to accelerate the change by orders of magnitude, make absolutely essential course corrections, and give me a place where I could feel like I was doing something good. A safe harbor. A place where I no longer felt like what I was trying to do for myself was some crazy fool thing; that I was being irresponsible or reckless or ridiculous. Freedomain was the well-placed gravitational field I needed to slingshot myself out of the solar system I was stuck in, and I no longer had to feel like a bad person for wanting out of that solar system...