This page is about politics. In case it is never updated, I'll throw down some cursory ideology.
The two parties of US electoral politics adhere to liberalism, and if you were raised with liberal(as in liberalism) ideals, you have some notion of human rights. Rights can be positive and negative, either being "freedom to X" or "freedom from x". The freedom to punch random people runs up against the freedom from being punched. Because we share the same world, many of our positive rights come at the cost of negative rights, and vise-versa. Like most topics of philosophy, human rights can be a bit tricky because of this.
You can spill a lot of ink trying to define terms like "culture", "pornography", or "human rights" and still be left with unaddressed edge cases and caveates, and perhaps unresolved contradictions. This is the nature of philosophy. I assume you're reading in good faith, and that I can say that I value human rights that reinforce both consent and welfare.
We might generally agree that humans should have the right to not be punched, sacrificing the right to punch one another in the process. To add another layer to this cake, we bring up the concept of consent. In our society, there are conditions where punching and being punched are desireable. The sport of boxing as well as other combat sports. When adults consent to spar or box one another, it's generally fine. That consent can be revoked. If one boxer forfeits, it's generally not fine for the other to keep punching them. That consent can also be rendered invalid by extenuating circumstances. If one of the boxers was held at gun point and told they had to fight or else, that would be duress. If someone dying of thirst in the desert was offered water, but only under the condition that they fought, that would be duress. When someone is compelled to act or not act by threat of direct or indirect(withholding water) violence, that is coercion. Where coercion is present, consent is compromised.
There are certainly grey areas with consent depending on the means of coercion and the act compelled. For instance, if I offered some well-fed and food-secure strangers a dinner in exchange for listening to me read the back of a pack of gum for five minutes, that generally wouldn't be the end of the world. If able to listen while eating, the worst harm I can think of would be a slight loss of dignity for being forced to listen to such a boring speech. When I talk about coercion, I am not talking about these relatively inoffensive examples, nor am I entirely condemning influence through shame/punishment/violence. If someone is not respecting my right to not be punched, I believe they open themselves up to retaliation in kind, or possibly even escalation.
So this is where I start to say things that diverge from liberal values. I'll define authority as using coercion to enforce a double-standard. For instance, one person might declare themself the ruler of a household and give a list of demands that must be met. If unopposed, no one else in the household has the right to make demands in the way this self-proclaimed ruler does. People are likewise not free to ignore this ruler and their demands, or else the ruler will enact some form of direct or indirect violence against the others. This might look like harassment, withholding household resources, or even kicking a family member out. Families like this not only exist, but are very common in America. Many of us are raised to cope with this kind of environment, which is a microcosm of our larger political landscape.
When the state is involved, it is no longer an abusive parental figure making demands, and direct fatal violence is always on the table. For instance, failing to pay taxes to the US government may result in warning letters, or lawsuits. Ignoring these letters or lawsuits could result in a warrant for your arrest. Ignoring a law enforcement officer results in attempt of arrest, and resisting this arrest could result in deadly violence. It's much easier for an authority figure to rely on soft power like veiled threats than to actually employ hard power like direct violence, but the latter is required for threats to have coercive power. While some forms of authority can exist without threat of direct violence, the state cannot. For this reason, a skeletal state requires not only an authoritarian wishing to enact a double-standard, but some means of exacting violence to compel others to do it.
Here, have a bizarre quote. "I did NOT shoot him. I just aimed the gun and pulled the trigger. The gun shot the bullet out, and the bullet is the one who killed him." This silly argument might work on people in other contexts, if they don't think very hard about it. "I didn't kill that guy. I just deprived him of a cup of water when he was dying of thirst. The thirst killed him." or, a bit more on the nose: "We didn't kill that unhoused person. We merely denied him housing and repeatedly destroyed the tents he set up until he froze to death." I wish I was making this scenario up. Tracing the chain of causality from the bullet to the gun to the gunman is trivial. Tracing the chain of causality from the cold winter to the tent-destroying cop to his boss's boss's boss to the state and to the lobbyists who dictate state policy, and to the wealthy people who fund lobbyists has more steps. Each step you put in, it gets more abstract and feels less real. And yet, the 100 trip journey of raw ingredients to become a smartphone do, actually, result in a smartphone even despite being very complex and diffused. To say "Samsung does not produce Samsung phones" just because there are a whole mess of different countries, factories, and other third parties(such as software developers working on apps) would be incorrect. If the Samsung corporation didn't exist, Samsung phones would not either. All the others might still be making phones, but they absolutely would not be Samsung phones. If a Samsung executive greenlit a part they knew resulted in explosions(I was using this as a hypothetical, then remembered this actually happened), that's on them.
Those who actually made the phone certainly have played a role(particularly those aware of it), but to intervene would be to subject themselves to the violence used to coerce them into the job in the first place. You can't pay rent with "I refuse to build exploding phones", and chances are pretty good that the alternative employers have other skeletons in their closets. Conscientiously objecting to all unethical jobs puts you in a tent, and we can come full circle back to the police tearing those tents down. At some level, you are given the choice to participate in harm or die. Even in a scenario where you start your own business and make everything you use, you are still burdened with paying taxes to a government overseeing genoicide in Gaza at the time of this writing.
Liberalism generally holds that authority is a necessary evil, and that this necessary evil is mitigated by some form of social contract. This contract is one devoid of any meaningful consent, however. It can neither be revoked, nor does anyone actually sign a piece of paper saying "I agree to pay taxes to fund aircraft carriers preventing intervention in the genocide in Gaza". You merely do as you're told, or violence is enacted against you. If you meaningfully protest, the protest can be labeled illegal and violence applied. Because the authority of the law is a double-standard to start with (the people can't decide nor interpret the laws, only the authorities can), it doesn't even matter if authority is breaking their own rules. A cop can murder you in cold blood, and it's up to the authorities to decide whether this is a punishable act.
The following is the original article, and above it is an attempt at an update. We'll see how ambitious I get. I'll leave both in place in case I don't get around to it.
Hierarchies are the ranking of categories of person, generally resulting in double-standards or unfair treatment. For instance, gender as a hierarchy might look like a woman having difficulty finding a job due to stigmas against women in the workplace.
People occupy multiple categories at once. Albert is a white trans man. Bob is a black trans man. Both may experience the oppression of their gender differently. Albert may act to dismantle the hierarchy of gender by supporting trans rights. Bob may perform the same acts, albeit face additional challenges from being black. The two hierarchies at play do not work separately, but combine. When seeking allies, Albert will have an easier time than Bob, who may face discrimination from Albert's allies. In this way, hierarchies enforce one another. It is therefor wise to resist as many hierarchies as one is aware of.
Expertise is the means by which one entity may consensually defer to another. You ask your friend who's good at construction to help you renovate your home and improve safety. He recommends tearing your entire house down and building from scratch. You thank him for his advice, and consider whether you should follow it. If you decide to follow it, you extend your consent to his decision. If you refuse, you safely revoke your consent.
Authority is the means by which one entity robs another of autonomy. A state housing inspector deems your house unfit to live in. You can decide to heed this assessment as wise advice. If you refuse it, however, the force of the law will be brought upon you. A state may give fines, and if those fines are in turn ignored, it may send a police officer to abduct you, and if you resist this abduction, deadly force may be used to subdue you. Penalties don't need to include death. Any penalty or power differential can be used to prop up authority.
"There is no anarchy, only anarchists." This will hopefully seem obvious, but anarchy is not a form of government. The notion of anarchy as some utopian state where all hierarchies are permanently dismantled is ridiculous, and not just because a state is a form of hierarchy. As long as there are people, there will be a struggle between the dismantling and preservation of hierarchies. The imagined utopia in actuality would be, like the current day, requiring anarchists to resist the hierarchies. So the apocalypse myth of great struggles leading to an eternal utopia can be discarded. Instead, we must live in the here and now. It is an anarchist's mission to identify which hierarchies are present, and in what ways they can be resisted here and now.
The ideal means of reaching goals is the one that weakens hierarchies instead of reinforcing them. This has the benefit of making the pursuit of your goals inherently revolutionary. Likewise, if you bypass existing institutions and organize directly with your comrades, you are not tied down to the rules that govern those hierarchical institutions. If you don't ask permission, you can't be pre-emptively denied. If you can solve a problem without using money, it is much harder to tax you. If your org lacks a central leadership, it is much harder to coopt or undermine. If your platform is the word of mouth, it is much harder to be deplatformed. Becoming ungovernable in your actions is half the fight. When you operate outside the bounds of state, capital, race, and gender, you undermine them.