"When did you ever feel like you would be happy to see children burning books?" asks a gleeful Nathan Freeman over images of his kids tearing up tomes and throwing them into a beach bonfire at the beginning of Blumhouse Television's The Anarchists. For most, the answer will likely be: never! Even those embracing an anti-establishment lifestyle, however, achieve little lasting joy in director Todd Schramke's six-part HBO docuseries (July 10), which focuses on an annual event known as Anarchapulco—held, as its title implies, in Acapulco, Mexico—that brings together men and women who object to governments and their corrupt, authoritarian rules and social norms. It's a fascinating portrait of against-the-grain dissenters and their pipe dreams of true freedom, commencing with promise and concluding with the age-old lesson that you should be careful what you wish for.

Launched in 2015 by entrepreneur Jeff Berwick, Anarchapulco started as a makeshift conference attended by a few hundred people and orchestrated without a real structure—a tack befitting a get-together founded on ideals of autonomy and decentralization. Berwick differentiates his ideology from the more traditional view of anarchy (i.e. violent insurgence) by explaining that he and his Ron Paul-venerating compatriots share a core conviction about the unjustness of taxation and the villainy of central banking. To them, anyone buying into the global paradigm of "statism" is a sheeple, and the sole way out is to band together to form a new community predicated on unfettered thought and action. Thus, in more than one archival clip, Nathan makes it a point to performatively laugh at the word "allowed," since it runs counter to this movement's guiding ethos.