Mikhail Bakunin, the anarchist with more rage than a jilted lover on payday, threw a gut-punch to anyone clinging to the illusion of personal freedom.

“I who want to be free cannot be because all the men around me do not yet want to be free,” he said.

Translation: you’re shackled to everyone else’s misery.

If the guy next door is stupid, scared, or broke, his problems seep under your door like secondhand smoke.

At first, it sounds melodramatic—like a philosophy grad student drunk on cheap wine.

But Bakunin wasn’t sipping Merlot in some ivory tower.

His message is brutal but simple: no matter how high you climb, the weight of everyone else’s chains will drag you down.

You may think you’re free, but you’re just a prisoner with better wallpaper.

The Chains We Forge: Bakunin’s Bleak Truth

Bakunin believed in one nasty little idea: we’re all stuck in the same burning house.

Your privilege doesn’t protect you; it isolates you.

Here’s the cheat sheet:

Their Problem	Your Problem	Why It Matters
Ignorance	Stupidity seeps into laws, media, and culture	You can’t outthink a world that rejects thinking
Poverty	Crime, desperation, instability	Their hunger becomes your fear
Submissiveness	Acceptance of oppression	What they tolerate becomes what you endure
Injustice	Corruption of systems	Even your success depends on a rigged game

It’s not just about morality; it’s survival.

Imagine being a genius surgeon in a plague-ridden town where nobody washes their hands.

Your brilliance is wasted, your tools useless, and you’ll probably die before you even save a life.

Bakunin’s point?

Individual freedom without collective freedom is like being the fastest sprinter in quicksand. You still sink.

Breaking It Down for the Kid

“Okay, kid. Picture this: we’re all on a boat. It’s sinking. Some people are bailing water, some are plugging holes, and some are poking more holes for fun.”

“But I’d just swim to shore,” you might say.

“Sure you would,” I’d reply, “if the water wasn’t full of sharks. Or if the shore wasn’t on fire. Your survival depends on everyone working together, whether you like it or not.”

Bakunin’s idea is simple: you can’t be free while others are shackled.

Even if you’re the best damn swimmer in the world, the mess around you drags you back.

A Personal Story: My Old Landlord’s Chains

I once lived in a roach-infested apartment next to a guy named Ralph.

Ralph was a good man, the kind who’d lend you jumper cables and offer you a beer at 10 a.m.

He was also broke, out of work, and drowning in debt. One night, he knocked on my door, asking to borrow $40 for gas.

I gave it to him, because I’m not a complete bastard. The next morning, I found his car stripped on cinder blocks—some tweaker had ripped it apart for parts.

Ralph came to my door again, this time asking for a ride to a job interview.

I was already late for work, but I took him. He didn’t get the job, and I almost got fired for showing up late. His bad luck became my bad luck, his chains rattling against mine.

At first, I was furious. But then I realized it wasn’t Ralph’s fault. It was the system—the roaches, the poverty, the desperation.

You can’t fix your own life when the world around you is burning down. And when Ralph finally packed up and left, I didn’t feel free. I just felt lonelier.

Bakunin was right: no matter how much you want to escape, you can’t outrun the mess around you.

The Resistance: Lone Wolves and Fatalists

Not everyone buys Bakunin’s communal doomsday prophecy. Plenty of folks, from Ayn Rand to Nietzsche, think freedom is a solo project. Here’s how they push back:

Who	What They Say	Why They’re Wrong (Maybe)
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)	“Screw the masses. Save yourself.”	Forgets that her “heroes” still depend on society
Techno-Utopians (Elon Musk)	“We’ll just invent our way out of this.”	Invention without equity creates better cages
Nihilists (Nietzsche, Rust Cohle from True Detective)	“It’s all meaningless anyway.”	Sure, but giving up guarantees nothing changes

The lone wolves romanticize self-reliance, but they’re blind to the system they profit from.

The fatalists shrug off hope, but they don’t solve anything either.

It’s easy to say “the world’s on fire” when you’re drinking whiskey in the shade.

The Stupidity That Drowns Us

Bakunin’s harshest truth is that other people’s ignorance pollutes your life. Imagine if calculus had been invented 2,000 years ago.

Where would we be now? Colonizing Mars? Curing immortality? Instead, we spent centuries burning witches and debating the shape of the Earth.

When society is stupid, progress grinds to a halt, and even the smartest among us get stuck in the sludge.

This is what Bakunin means when he says, “As a courageous man I am enslaved by their slavery.”

No matter how brave or smart you are, you’re swimming in the same murky water as everyone else.

Their chains tug on your ankles, and you drown with them.

The World’s a Crab Bucket

If you’ve ever watched crabs in a bucket, you’ll get it. One crab tries to climb out, and the others grab it and pull it back.

They don’t mean harm; they’re just desperate to escape too. But nobody gets out.

This is the human condition, according to Bakunin. We pull each other down—not always out of malice, but because we don’t know any better.

The only way out of the bucket is to lift each other, but that takes trust, cooperation, and a vision of freedom most people can’t even imagine.

The Tragic Comedy of Freedom: Kierkegaard’s Paradox of Choice

So here’s the thing: Bakunin’s idea about freedom isn’t just a lone wolf’s rant.

It’s a miserable little truth that every philosopher who’s ever looked at human suffering has put his hands on and slapped around like a dirty rag.

Enter Kierkegaard, who wasn’t exactly throwing parties, but sure as hell knew how to show you a nightmare in a tuxedo.

Søren Kierkegaard, the man with more emotional baggage than a passenger at the lost luggage counter, talked about something called the “leap of faith.”

And this leap? It’s as absurd as trying to jump over a pit of snakes while blindfolded. You make the leap, but you don’t know what’s on the other side.

In essence, Kierkegaard said you can never be truly free unless you’re willing to make choices despite the uncertainty.

But here’s the rub: the more choices you have, the more you’re paralyzed by them. The more you realize freedom means facing a void that stares right back at you.

Freedom’s a burden. Every choice is a chain that keeps you shackled to your own existence.

Kierkegaard was right about one thing: there’s no way out of this mess. Whether you’re running from the system or running towards it, you’re running from your own damn self.

And it’s exhausting.

But Bakunin would tell you: no, freedom doesn’t come from individualism or religious leaps into the void.

It comes from breaking the chains that bind us all. You’re not escaping the absurdity alone; you need the whole damn ship of fools to row together.

Foucault’s Surveillance and the ‘Freedom’ Trap

The modern world doesn’t just have chains that you can see. No, it’s got invisible chains. And those chains?

They’re called surveillance.

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who could’ve written a user’s manual for dystopias, told us all about how power works in the modern world.

Foucault wasn’t into grand revolutions. He was more into the small, creeping control that slips under your skin like a slow-moving virus.

Forget kings and emperors. Today, your boss, your government, your social media platform are the ones pulling the strings.

And guess what? You’ve volunteered for the whole thing.

In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about how the panopticon—a type of prison where every inmate is always being watched—becomes the perfect metaphor for modern society.

You may think you’re free, but you’re not. You’re always being watched. Your actions, your behavior, your thoughts are all shaped by the constant gaze of some unseen force.

You start policing yourself because you think someone’s always looking.

Bakunin’s vision of freedom didn’t just mean throwing off the chains physically—it meant getting rid of the mental prisons we’ve built for ourselves.

If everyone around you is conditioned to act within the norms of a society built on control, can you really be free?

If you’re not even free in your thoughts, how can you claim to be free in your actions?

And Foucault’s little trick? He showed us that even the “free” people aren’t free at all.

They’re just prisoners who think they can leave the yard anytime. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

And Bakunin’s anarchism isn’t just about dismantling the state; it’s about tearing down the whole damned system that makes us think we’re free when we’re not.

The Revolution of the Mind: Marx’s Call to Arms

Bakunin’s anarchism, with all its fire and brimstone, might make you think he had the market cornered on revolution.

But if you take a detour into Karl Marx’s corner, you’ll see that Bakunin didn’t quite have the full picture.

Marx had his own idea about freedom, and it wasn’t a freedom of individuals living alone on some mountaintop.

It was a collective freedom that required the whole damn class structure to be torn apart. Marx was the intellectual heavyweight who saw through the smoke and mirrors of capitalism.

The whole idea of individual freedom? Marx laughed at it. You’re not free when you’re paying rent to someone who doesn’t work.

You’re not free when your survival depends on whether your boss is in a good mood that day.

No, Marx said that true freedom could only happen when the working class threw off the chains of the capitalist system and took control of their labor.

But Marx’s dream of the working class seizing the means of production wasn’t exactly a day at the beach.

It wasn’t all workers high-fiving each other on the factory floor. It was brutal and bloody and messy, like trying to fix a car with a sledgehammer.

Bakunin took one look at Marx’s blueprint for revolution and said, “Nope, we don’t need the state at all. We burn it to the ground.”

Marx, for his part, probably wouldn’t have argued with the “burn it down” part, but he thought a little bit of state control would help bridge the gap to the glorious future.

But the question that Bakunin and Marx both wrestled with was:

How do you get to a world of freedom when everyone around you is trapped in chains?

Marx’s answer? The workers must rise together.

Bakunin’s? Burn it all down, take what you can, and get the hell out of the mess.

Both philosophers knew freedom wasn’t a free ride—it was earned through struggle, sweat, and tears. But the difference between Bakunin and Marx?

Bakunin was the anarchist who didn’t trust anybody with power, while Marx thought a little dose of power could be the cure.

In the end, Bakunin’s anarchism may sound like a pipe dream, but it’s a pipe dream that might just be a hell of a lot more honest than Marx’s revolution.

Both paths lead to the same destination: the collapse of everything we know and the birth of something new.

Conclusion: The Darkness and the Choice

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to give you hope. But Bakunin doesn’t hand out easy answers.

He just tells you the stakes: as long as one person is chained, nobody’s free.

History doesn’t help. Revolutions topple kings, but the chains stay.

Nietzsche reminds us that “man is a rope stretched over an abyss,” and most of us are just trying not to fall.

It’s bleak, but it’s honest. The system eats everyone.

Still, there’s a sliver of light. Choice. We can build better boats, or we can sink together. It’s ugly and slow, but it’s the only shot we’ve got.

The future isn’t written; it’s dragged kicking and screaming out of the mud by people who refuse to give up.

So, what’ll it be? Help cut the chains, or keep holding the bucket?