Wherever you will turn you will find that our entire life is built on violence or the fear of it. The right to compel you is called authority. Fear of punishment has been made into duty and is called obedience. In this atmosphere of force and violence, of authority and obedience, of duty, fear and punishment we all grow up; we breath it throughout our lives. We are so steeped in the spirit of violence that we never stop to ask whether violence is right or wrong [or what it is]. We only ask if it is legal, whether the law permits it.
This lawful violence and the fear of it dominate our whole existence, individual and collective. Authority controls our lives from the cradle to the grave- authority parental, priestly and divine, political, economic, social and moral. But whatever the character of that authority, it is always the same executioner wielding power over you through your fear of punishment in one form or another.
All your life is along chain of fears- fears which bruise your body and lacerate your soul. On those fears is based the authority of God, of the church, of parents, of capitalist and ruler. You submit to the domination of boss, judge, and government because of their power to deprive you of work, to ruin your business, to put you in prison- a power, by the way, that you yourself have given into their hands.
Authority rules your whole life, the authority of the past and the present, of the dead and the living, and your existence is a continuous invasion and violation of yourself, a constant subjection to the thoughts and the will of some one else.
Alexander Berkman, Is Anarchism Violent?