I’m a 21-year-old law student from Johannesburg.
I’m studying for a profession which embodies the might of the state, in a country where the state is worshipped as the new messiah come down from heaven to rescue the impoverished masses from the ravages of… the state.
Anyway, at some point my mind snapped, and I became an anarchist. You can only see so many case dockets disappear forever into the bureaucratic nightmare that is “Pretoria” (I hear people actually live there…) before you start to question the legitimacy of the system. Only so many cases of police brutality and corruption that go unquestioned, only so much of your nation’s wealth taken from its rightful owners and squandered uselessly on the political hot-button issue of the day while every politician and bureaucrat who touches it takes something for themselves… Meanwhile most of the country languishes in poverty as it always has done, and that’s exactly where the government wants them. The only good things in South Africa have been brought about by the private sector.
What little democratic dialogue there is gets hijacked by extremists, clowns and moral busybodies. If you aren’t captivated by the President’s latest sexual and/or legal escapades (which he somehow always manages to escape from unscathed), then you’re caught in the crossfire between a lunatic fringe on the right who thinks we should institute facism and a lunatic fringe on the left who thinks we should institute communism or race nationalism of a sort. If these options don’t strike your fancy, then you could always get caught up in the patriotic hysteria for FIFA’s grotesque multi-billion Rand orgy which will cost the country about eight times more than it could ever possibly generate; an “investment” only made viable by stealing the money from the SA taxpayer (or borrowing it, and handing the debt over to the SA taxpayer)… [b]“ONLY 27 DAYS TO GO!!!”[/b] Even if you can get past the fact that it’s stolen, surely there are better things one could spend it on…
So that’s that. I am disillusioned. I no longer believe in the state. They’re nothing more than a mafia operation with the word “legitimacy” etched onto their cardboard crown in felt-marker. The emperor has no clothes.
The only trouble is that no one here will take my views seriously ever again. You’re allowed to suggest just about any system of control for the population of a country, but to suggest that the average person could and should be expected to take care of their own affairs while respecting the freedom of others is just about taboo. Whenever I talk with statists - i.e. just about anyone - there’s always a tacit allusion to the Great Unwashed masses who will rise up and rip society asunder if the threat of overwhelming force from the state were removed. The Great Unwashed is never in the room when you talk about them, of course, and I’ve never met anyone who said that they personally would go on the rampage if the state went away, but the allusion is always there regardless.
So that’s my story. What is there to be done? I became an atheist when I realised that religion was a con, and that it seeks to do nothing more than control the lives of others, but you’re always free to leave the Church… No one tried to stop me on the way out. The real problem, I have realised, is the state… Regardless of how it chooses to legitimise itself. 
