I didn’t get a circle A tattoo, but I might as well have.
One of the most influential things I discovered in books was anarchism: the idea that we could live without rulers. That it is our responsibility to resist the concentration of power in any single entity, be it corporate, governmental, or religious.
It’s a worldview that’s helped me understand the world and make decisions ever since I was seventeen. I was in the market for a new moral framework since Christianity was no longer working for me. My Catholic all-boys highschool was a stifling environment that I had been immersed in for years, but I remember the precise moment of my disenchantment: a grade twelve religion class taught by a gym teacher who didn’t even try to answer the questions I had.
In a way it was similar to why I set down fantasy novels in favour of science fiction — the hand-waving magical explanations weren’t as satisfying as complex rational ones. So I yanked out the RELIGION cartridge in my brain and chunked in the POLITICS one.
And there it remained for 30 years. Until now.