"... probably not the well-armed, high-tech, drug-taking, survivalist, martial-arts, black-marketeering, tax-dodging, life-extensionist, freethinking, paper-tripping Discordian master criminals that a composite of archive cullings would suggest. I think they are mostly spiritually restless materialists: macho contemplatives locked into day jobs. They dream of escape -- of "vonu" (invulnerability to coercion by withdrawal from society); of the High Frontier (space colonization); of life extension to tide them over till a better day. They long for the big score. They take hope from the cyphernomicon that parade's their contempt for normal life as they portray fantastic possibilities always presented according to a patented formula of tough-minded realism. The typical C/punks reader is, I conjecture, a surrealist trapped in the body of an engineer." Still...probably most crypto-anarchists would offer a similar reply to the charge that they are utopians. Namely: what is truly utopian is to imagine that somehow the government can hold massive power without turning it to monstrous ends. As Rothbard succinctly puts it: "the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, 'Limit yourself'; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian." Is not the whole hirstory of the 20th century an endless list of examples of governments easily breaking the weak bonds placed upon their ability to oppress and even murder as they see fit?
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mattd