Book:Everyday Anarchy

Everyday Anarchy is a book by Stefan Molyneux written in 2008. It was followed by Practical Anarchy in the same year.

Introduction

It’s hard to know whether a word can ever be rehabilitated – or whether the attempt should even be made.

Words are weapons, and can be used like any tools, for good or ill. We are all aware of the clichéd uses of such terms as “terrorists” versus “freedom fighters,” etcetera. An atheist can be called an “unbeliever”; a theist can be called “superstitious.” A man of conviction can be called an “extremist”; a man of moderation “cowardly.” A free spirit can be called a libertine or a hedonist; a cautious introvert can be labelled a stodgy prude.

Words are also weapons of judgement – primarily moral judgement. We can say that a man can be “freed” of sin if he accepts Jesus; we can also say that he can be “freed” of irrationality if he does not. A patriot will say that a soldier “serves” his country; others may take him to task for his blind obedience. Acts considered “murderous” in peacetime are hailed as “noble” in war, and so on.

Some words can never be rehabilitated – and neither should they be. Nazi, evil, abuse, rape, murder – these are all words which describe the blackest impulses of the human soul, and can never be turned to a good end. Edmund may say in King Lear, “Evil, be thou my good!” but we know that he is not speaking paradoxically; he is merely saying “that which others call evil – my self-interest – is good for me.”

The word “anarchy” may be almost beyond redemption – any attempt to find goodness in it could well be utterly futile – or worse; the philosophical equivalent of the clichéd scene in hospital dramas where the surgeon blindly refuses to give up on a clearly dead patient.

Perhaps I am engaged in just such a fool's quest in this little book. Perhaps the word “anarchy” has been so abused throughout its long history, so thrown into the pit of incontestable human iniquity that it can never be untangled from the evils that supposedly surround it.

What images spring to mind when you hear the word “anarchy”? Surely it evokes mad riots of violence and lawlessness – a post-apocalyptic Darwinian free-for-all where the strong and evil dominate the meek and reasonable. Or perhaps you view it as a mad political agenda, a thin ideological cover for murderous desires and cravings for assassinations, where wild-eyed, moustachioed men with thick hair and thicker accents roll cartoon bombs under the ornate carriages of slowly-waving monarchs. Or perhaps you view “anarchy” as more of a philosophical spectre; the haunted and angry mutterings of over-caffeinated and seemingly-eternal graduate students; a nihilistic surrender to all that is seductive and evil in human nature, a hurling off the cliff of self-restraint, and a savage plunge into the mad magic of the moment, without rules, without plans, without a future…

If your teenage son were to come home to you one sunny afternoon and tell you that he had become an anarchist, you would likely feel a strong urge to check his bag for black hair dye, fresh nose rings, clumpy mascara, and dirty needles. His announcement would very likely cause a certain trapdoor to open under your heart, where you may fear that it might fall forever. The heavy syllables of words like “intervention,” “medication,” “boot camp,” and “intensive therapy” would probably accompany the thudding of your quickened pulse.

All this may well be true, of course – I may be thumping the chest of a broken patient long since destined for the morgue, but certain… insights, you could say, or perhaps correlations, continue to trouble me immensely, and I cannot shake the fear that it is not anarchy that lies on the table, clinging to life – but rather, the truth.

I will take a paragraph or two to try and communicate what troubles me so much about the possible injustice of throwing the word “anarchy” into the pit of evil – if I have not convinced you by the end of the next page that something very unjust may be afoot, then I will have to continue my task of resurrection with others, because I do not for a moment imagine that I would ever convince you to call something good that is in fact evil.

And neither would I want to.

Now the actual meaning of the word “anarchy” is (from the OED):

1. Absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder.
2. A theoretical social state in which there is no governing person or body of persons, but each individual has absolute liberty (without implication of disorder).

Thus we can see that the word “anarchy” represents two central meanings: an absence of both government and social order, and an absence of government with no implication of social disorder.

Without a government…

What does that mean in practice?

Well, clearly there are two kinds of leaders in this world – those who lead by incentive, and those who lead by force. Those who lead by incentive will offer you a salary to come and work for them; those who lead by force will throw you in jail if you do not pick up a gun and fight for them.

Those who lead by incentive will try to get you to voluntarily send your children to their schools by keeping their prices reasonable, their classes stimulating, and demonstrating proven and objective success.

Those who lead by force will simply tell you that if you do not pay the property taxes to fund their schools, you will be thrown in jail.

Clearly, this is the difference between voluntarism and violence.

The word “anarchy” does not mean “no rules.” It does not mean “kill others for fun.” It does not mean “no organisation.”

It simply means: “without a political leader.”

The difference, of course, between politics, and every other area of life is that in politics, if you do not obey the government, you are thrown in jail. If you try to defend yourself against the people who come to throw you in jail, they will shoot you.

So – what does the word “anarchy” really mean?

It simply means a way of interacting with others without threatening them with violence if they do not obey.

It simply means “without political violence.”

The difference between this word and words like “murder” and “rape” is that we do not mix murder and rape with the exact opposite actions in our life, and consider the results normal, moral, and healthy. We do not strangle a man in the morning, then help a woman across the street in the afternoon, and call ourselves “good.”

The true evils that we all accept – rape, assault, murder, theft – are never considered a core and necessary part of the life of a good person. An accused murderer does not get to walk free by pointing out that he spent all but five seconds of his life not killing someone.

With those acknowledged evils, one single transgression changes the moral character of an entire life. You would never be able to think of a friend who is convicted of rape in the same way again. However – this is not the case with “anarchy” – it does not fit into that category of “evil” at all.

When we think of a society without political violence – without governments – these spectres of chaos and brutality always arise for us, immediately and, it would seem, irrevocably.

However, it only takes a moment of thought to realise that we live the vast majority of our actual lives in complete and total anarchy – and call such anarchy “morally good.”

Everyday Anarchy

For instance, take dating, marriage, and family.

In any reasonably free society, these activities do not fall in the realm of political coercion. No government agency chooses who you are to marry and have children with, and punishes you with jail for disobeying their rulings. Voluntarism, incentive, mutual advantage – dare we say “advertising”? – all run the free market of love, sex, and marriage.

What about your career? Did a government official call you up at the end of high school and inform you that you were to become a doctor, a lawyer, a factory worker, a waiter, an actor, a programmer – or a philosopher? Of course not. You were free to choose the career that best matched your interests, abilities, and initiative.

What about your major financial decisions? Each month, does a government agent come to your house and tell you exactly how much you should save, how much you should spend, whether you can afford that new couch or old painting? Did you have to apply to the government to buy a new car, a new house, a plasma television, or a toothbrush?

No, in all the areas mentioned above – love, marriage, family, career, finances – we all make our major decisions in the complete absence of direct political coercion.

Thus – if anarchy is such an all-consuming, universal evil, why is it the default – and virtuous – freedom that we demand in order to achieve just liberty in our daily lives?

If the government told you tomorrow that it was going to choose for you where to live, how to earn your keep, and who to marry – would you fall to your knees and thank the heavens that you have been saved from such terrible anarchy – the anarchy of making your own decisions in the absence of direct political coercion?

Of course not – quite the opposite – you would be horrified, and would oppose such an encroaching dictatorship with all your might.

This is what I mean when I say that we consider anarchy to be an irreducible evil – and also an irreducible good. It is both feared and despised – and considered necessary and virtuous.

If you were told that tomorrow you would wake up and there would be no government, you would doubtless fear the spectre of “anarchy.”

If you were told tomorrow that you would have to apply for a government permit to have children, you would doubtless fear the spectre of “dictatorship,” and long for the days of “anarchy,” when you could decide such things without the intervention of political coercion.

Thus we can see that we human beings are deeply, almost ferociously ambivalent about “anarchy.” We desperately desire it in our personal lives, and just as desperately fear it politically. Another way of putting this is that we love the anarchy we live, and yet fear the anarchy we imagine.

One more point, and then you can decide whether my patient is beyond hope or not.

It has been pointed out that a totalitarian dictatorship is characterised by the almost complete absence of rules. When Solzhenitsyn was arrested, he had no idea what he was really being charged with, and when he was given his ten-year sentence, there was no court of appeal, or any legal proceedings whatsoever. He had displeased someone in power, and so it was off to the gulags with him!

When we examine countries where government power is at its greatest, we see situations of extreme instability, and a marked absence of objective rules or standards. The tin-pot dictatorships of third world countries are regions arbitrarily and violently ruled by gangs of sociopathic thugs.

Closer to home, for most of us, is the example of inner-city government-run schools, ringed by metal detectors, and saturated with brutality, violence, sexual harassment, and bullying. The surrounding neighbourhoods are also under the tight control of the state, which runs welfare programs, public housing, the roads, the police, the buses, the hospitals, the sewers, the water, the electricity, and just about everything else in sight. These sorts of neighbourhoods have moved beyond democratic socialism, and actually lie closer to dictatorial communism.

Similarly, when we think of these inner cities as a whole, we can also understand that the majority of the endemic violence results from the drug trade, which directly resulted from government bans on the manufacture and sale of certain kinds of drugs. Treating drug addiction rather than arresting addicts would, it is estimated, reduce criminal activity by up to eighty percent.

Here, again, where there is a concentration of political power, we see violence, mayhem, shootings, stabbings, rapes, and all the attendant despair and nihilism – everything that “anarchism” is endlessly accused of!

What about prisons, where political power is surely at its greatest? Prisons seethe with rapes, murders, stabbings, and assaults – not to mention drug addiction. Sadistic guards beat on sadistic prisoners, to the point where the only difference at times seems to be the costumes. Here we have a “society” that seems like a parody of “anarchy” – a nihilistic and ugly universe usually described by the word “anarchy” which actually results from a maximisation of political power, or the exact opposite of “anarchy.”

Now, we certainly could argue that yes, it may be true that an excess of political power breeds anarchy – but that a deficiency of political power breeds anarchy as well! Perhaps “order” is a sort of Aristotelian mean, which lies somewhere between the chaos of a complete absence of political coercion, and the chaos of an excess of political coercion.

However, we utterly reject that approach in the other areas mentioned above – love, marriage, finances, career, etcetera. We understand that any intrusion of political coercion into these realms would be a complete disaster for our freedoms. We do not say, with regards to marriage, “Well, we wouldn’t want the government choosing everyone’s spouse – but neither do we want the government having no involvement in choosing people spouses! The correct amount of government coercion lies somewhere in the middle.”

No, we specifically and unequivocally reject the intrusion of political coercion into such personal aspects of our lives.

Thus once more we must at least recognise the basic paradox that we desperately need and desire the reality of anarchy in our personal lives – and yet desperately hate and fear the idea of anarchy in our political environment.

We love the anarchy we live. We fear the anarchy we imagine – the anarchy we are taught to fear. Until we can discuss the realities of our ambivalence towards this kind of voluntarism, we shall remain fundamentally stuck as a species – like any individual who wallpapers over his ambivalence, we shall spend our lives in distracted and oscillating avoidance, to the detriment of our own present, and our children’s future.

This is why I cannot just let this patient die. I still feel a heartbeat – and a strong one too!

Ambivalence and Bigotry

It is a truism – and I for one think a valid one – that the simple mind sees everything in black or white. Wisdom, on the other hand, involves being willing to suffer the doubts and complexities of ambivalence.

The dark-minded bigot says that all blacks are perfidious; the light-minded bigot says that all blacks are victims. The misogynist says that all women are corrupt; the feminist often says that all women are saints.

Exploring the complexities and contradictions of life with an open-minded fairness – neither with the imposition of premature judgement, nor the withholding of judgement once the evidence is in – is the mark of the scientist, the philosopher – of a rational mind.

The fundamentalists among us ascribe all mysteries to the “will of God” – which answers nothing at all, since when examined, the “will of God” turns out to be just another mystery; it is like saying that the location of my lost keys is “the place where my keys are not lost” – it adds nothing to the equation other than a teeth-gritting tautology. Mystery equals mystery. Anyone with more than half a brain can do little more than roll their eyes.

The immaturity of jumping to premature and useless conclusions is matched on the other hand only by the shallow and frightened fogs of modern – or perhaps I should say post-modern – relativism, where no conclusions are ever valid, no absolute statements are ever just – except that one of course – and everything is exploration, typically blindfolded, and without a compass. There is no destination, no guidepost, no sense of progress, no building to a greater goal – it is the endless dissection of cultural cadavers without even a definition of health or purpose, which thus comes perilously close to looking like fetishistic sadism.

The simple truth is that some black men are good, and some black men are bad, and most black men are a mixture, just as we all are. Some women are treacherous; some women are saints. “Blackness” or “gender” is an utterly useless metric when it comes to evaluating a person morally; it is about as helpful as trying to use an iPod to determine which way is north. The phrase “sexual penetration” does not tell us whether the act is consensual or not – saying that sexual penetration is always evil is as useless as saying that it is always good.

In the same way, some anarchism is good (notably that which we treasure so much in our personal lives) and some anarchism is bad (notably our fears of violent chaos, bomb-throwing, and large moustaches). As a word, however, “anarchism” does nothing to help us evaluate these situations. Applying foolish black-and-white thinking to complex and ambiguous situations is just another species of bigotry.

Claiming that “anarchism” is both rank political evil and the greatest treasure in our personal lives is a contradiction well worth examining, if we wish to gain some measure of mature wisdom about the essential questions of truth, virtue, and the moral challenges of social organisation.

Anarchy and History

Our clichéd vision of the typical anarchist tends to see him emerging shortly before World War One, which is very interesting when you think about it. The stereotypical anarchist is portrayed as a feverish failure, who uses his political ideology as a self-righteous cover for his lust for violence. He claims he wishes to free the world from tyranny, when in fact all he wants to do is to break bones and take lives.

We typically view this anarchist as a form of terrorist, which is generally defined as someone committed to the use of violence to achieve political ends, and place both in the same category as those who attempt a military coup against an existing government.

However, when you break it down logically, it seems almost impossible to provide a definition of terrorism which does not also include political leaders, or at least the political process itself. The act of war is itself an attempt to achieve political ends through the use of violence – the annexation of property, the capturing of a new tax base, or the overthrow of a foreign government – and it always requires a government that is willing and able to increase the use of violence against its own citizens, through tax increases and/or the military draft. Even defending a country against invasion inevitably requires an escalation of the use of force against domestic citizens.

Thus how can we easily divide those outside the political process who use violence to achieve their goals from those within the political process who use violence to achieve their goals? It remains a daunting task, to say the least.

What is fascinating about the mythology of the “evil anarchists” – and mythology it is – is that even if we accept the stereotype, the disparity in body counts between the anarchists and their enemies remains staggeringly misrepresented, to say the least.

Anarchists in the period before the First World War killed perhaps a dozen or a score of people, almost all of them state heads or their representatives.

On the other hand, state heads or their representatives caused the deaths of over ten million people through the First World War.

If we value human life – as any reasonable and moral person must – then fearing anarchists rather than political leaders is like fearing spontaneous combustion rather than heart disease. In the category of “causing deaths,” a single government leader outranks all anarchists tens of thousands of times.

Does this seem like a surprising perspective to you? Ah, well that is what happens when you look at the facts of the world rather than the stories of the victors.

Another example would be an objective examination of murder and violence in nineteenth century America. The typical story about the “Wild West” is that it was a land populated by thieves, brigands, and murderers, where only the “thin blue line” of the lone local sheriffs stood between the helpless townspeople and the endless predations of swarthy and unshaven villains.

If we look at the simple facts, though, and contrast the declining nineteenth century US murder rates with the six hundred thousand murders committed in the span of a few years by the government-run Civil War, we can see that the sheriffs were not particularly dedicated to protecting the helpless townspeople, but rather delivering their money, their lives, and their children to the state through the brutal enforcement of taxation and military enslavement.

When we look at an institution such as slavery, we can see that it survived, fundamentally, on two central pillars – patronising and fear-mongering mythologies, and the shifting of the costs of enforcement to others.

What justifications were put forward, for instance, for the enslavement of blacks? Well, the “white man’s burden,” or the need to “Christianise” and civilise these savage heathens – this was the condescension – and also because if the slaves were turned free, plantations would be burned to the ground, pale-throated women would be savagely violated, and all the endless torments of violence and destruction would be wreaked upon society – this was the fear-mongering mythology!

Slavery as an institution could not conceivably survive economically if the slave owners had to pay for the actual expense of slavery themselves. Shifting the costs of the capture, imprisonment, and return of slaves to the general taxpayer was the only way that slavery could remain profitable. The use of the political coercion required to make slavery profitable, of course, generates a great demand for mythological “cover-ups,” or ideological distractions from the violence at the core of the institution. Thus violence always requires intellectualisation, which is why governments always want to fund higher education and subsidise intellectuals. We shall get to more of this later.

Even outside war, in the twentieth century alone, more than two hundred seventy million people were murdered by their governments. Compared to the few dozen murders committed by anarchists, it is hard to see how the fantasy of the “evil anarchist” could possibly be sustained when we compare the tiny pile of anarchist bodies to the virtual Everest of the dead heaped by governments in one century alone.

Surely if we are concerned about violence, murder, theft, and rape, we should focus on those who commit the most evils – political leaders – rather than those who oppose them, even misguidedly. If we accept that political leaders murder mankind by the hundreds of millions, then we may even be tempted to have a shred of sympathy for these “evil anarchists,” just as we would for a man who shoots down a rampaging mass murderer.

Anarchy and Ambivalence

The truth of the matter is that, as I stated above, it is clear that we have a love/hate relationship with anarchy. We yearn for it, and we fear it, in almost equal measure. We love personal anarchy, and fear political anarchy. We desperately resist any encroachment or limitation upon our personal anarchy – and fear, mock, and attack any suggestion that political anarchy could be of value.

But – how can it be possible that anarchy is both the greatest good and the greatest evil simultaneously? Surely that would make a mockery of reason, virtue, and basic common sense.

Now we shall turn to a possible way of unravelling this contradiction.

Politics and Self-interest

Truth is so often the first casualty of self-interest. In the realm of advertising, we can see this very clearly – the company that sells an anti-aging cream uses fear and insecurity to drive demand for its product. “Your beauty is measured by the elasticity of your skin, not the virtue of your soul,” they say, “and no one will find you attractive if you do not look young!”

This is a rather shallow exploitation of insecurity; clearly what is really being sold is a definition of “beauty” that does not require the challenging task of achieving and maintaining virtue. In the short run, it is far easier, after all, to rub overpriced cream on your face than it is to start down the path of genuine wisdom and integrity.

In this way, we can see that the self-interest of the advertiser and the consumer are both being served in the exchange, at the expense of the truth. We all know that we shall become old and ugly – and also that this fate need not rob us of love, but rather that we can receive and give more love in our dotage than we did in our youth, if we live with virtue, compassion, and generosity.

However, there is far less money to be made in philosophy than there is in vanity – which is another way of saying that people will pay good money to avoid the demands of virtue – and so the mutual exploitation of shallow avoidance is a cornerstone of any modern economy.

In the same way, being told that “anarchism” is just bad, bad, bad helps us avoid the anxiety and ambivalence we in fact feel about that which we both fear and love at the same time. Our educational and political leaders “sell” us relief from ambivalence and uncomfortable exploration – inevitably, at the expense of truth – and so far, we have been relatively eager consumers.

Self-interest and Exploitation

The CEOs of large companies receive enormous salaries for their services. Let us imagine a scenario wherein a small number of new companies grow despite having no senior managers – and appear to be making above-average profits to boot!

In this scenario, when business leadership is revealed as potentially counter-productive to profitability – or at least, unrelated to profitability – it is easy to see that the self-interest of business leaders is immediately and perhaps permanently threatened.

In addition, picture all the other groups and people whose interests would be harmed in such a scenario. Business schools would see their enrolment numbers drop precipitously; the lawyers, accountants, and decorators who served these business leaders would see the demand for their services dropping; the private schools that catered to the families of the rich would be hard hit, at least for a time. Elite magazines, business shows, conventions, life coaches, haberdashers, tailors, and all other sorts of other people would feel the sting of the transition, to put it mildly.

We can easily imagine that the first few companies to see increased profitability as a result of ditching their senior managers would be roundly condemned and mocked by the entrenched managers in similar companies. These companies would be accused of “cooking the books,” of exploiting a mere statistical anomaly or fluke, of having secret managers, of producing shoddy goods, of “stuffing the pipe” with premature sales, of actually running at a loss, and so on.

Their imminent demise would be gleefully predicted by most if not all self-interested onlookers. The CEOs of existing companies would avoid doing business with them, and would doubtless combine a patronising “benevolence” (“Yes, you do see these trends emerge once every few years – they bubble up, falter, and die out, and investors end up poorer but wiser”) with fairly-open fear-mongering (“I’m not sure that it is a good career move to work at these sort of companies; I would consider it a rather black mark on the resume of any job-seeker…”), and so on.

Should these new companies continue to grow, doubtless the existing business executives would get in touch with their political friends, seeking for a political “solution” on behalf of the “consumers” they wished to “protect.”

Entrenched groups will always move to protect their own self-interest – this is not a bad thing, it is simply a fact of human nature. It is thus important to understand that what is called unproductive, negative, “extreme,” or dangerous may indeed be so, but it is always worth looking at the motives of those who invest the time and energy to create and propagate such labels. Why are they so interested?

The Robber Barons

We can also find examples of this in the phenomenon of the “Robber Barons” in late nineteenth century America. The story goes that these amoral predatory monopolists were fleecing a helpless public, and so had to be restrained through the force of government anti-monopoly legislation.

If this story were really true, the first thing that we would expect is a one-two punch of evidence showing how prices were rising where these “monopolies” flourished – and also that it was these helpless and enraged consumers who thumped the ears of their legislators and demanded protection from the monopolists.

Of course, it would be purely absurd to imagine that this was the case, and it turns out to be a complete falsehood.

If an unjust price increase of ten to twenty percent was imposed upon ground beef, the net loss to the average consumer would be no more than a few pennies a week. It is incomprehensible to imagine any consumer – or group of consumers – combining their time and effort to pursue complex and lengthy legislation for the sake of opposing a tiny price increase. The cost-benefit ratio would be absurdly out of balance, since it would doubtless cost most of these consumers far more in time and money to pursue such action than they could conceivably save by reducing such an unjust price increase.

Are you pursuing legal action against Exxon for higher petrol prices?

Of course not.

Thus to find the real culprits, we must first look at any group which can justify the pursuit of such complex and uncertain legislation; the purchasing of legislators, the writing of articles, and other efforts spent to influence the media, the desperate pursuit of a highly risky venture – who could possibly justify such a mad investment?

The answer is obvious, and contains all the information we need to know to disprove the claims put forward.

The groups most harmed by these supposed-monopolists were, of course, their direct competitors. Thus we would expect that the primary – if not sole – sponsors of this legislation would not be the outraged consumers, but rather the companies competing with these “Robber Barons.”

Clearly, if these monopolists were unjustly increasing prices, this would be an endless invitation for these competitors – or even outside entrepreneurs – to undercut their prices.

Ah, but perhaps these Robber Barons were achieving their monopolies through preferential political favours such as forcibly keeping competitors from entering the market.

Well, we know for certain that this could not be the case. If these Robber Barons actually did own the legislature, then their competitors would be highly unlikely to take the step of attempting to influence the legislature, because they would know it was a fight they could not win. If these “monopolists” were gaining massive and unjust profits through political favours, then their competitors who were shut out of such a lucrative system would be completely unable to funnel as much money to the legislators. Furthermore, those making the laws would be exposed to blackmail for past deals if they “switched sides” so to speak.

Thus without examining a single historical fact, we can very easily determine what actually happened, which was that:

1. the monopolists were not actually raising prices, but were lowering them, which we know because their competitors did not take the economic route of undercutting on price, but rather the political route of using the force of the state to cripple these “monopolists”;
2. the monopolists were not gaining market share or unjust profits through political means, because the legislatures were still available for sale; and
3. the consumers were entirely happy with the existing arrangement, which we know because the competitors had nothing to offer that the consumers would prefer to the existing state of things.

This hypothesis is amply borne out by the accurate historical evidence. Where these “Robber Barons” dominated the market, the prices of the goods they produced went down, sometimes considerably – in the case of using refrigerated rail-cars to store meat, a price drop of thirty percent was achieved in the span of a few months.

Clearly, this did not harm the interests of the consumer – but it did harm the self-interest of those attempting to compete with these highly-efficient businesses. Sadly – though, with the temptation of the government ever-present, inevitably it seems – these competitors preferred to take the political route of attacking their successful rivals through the power of the state rather than attempting to innovate themselves in turn and compete more successfully in the free market.

What about the argument that the Robber Barons used violence to create their monopolies, by threatening or killing competing workers? Well, even if we accept this argument as true, it serves the anarchistic argument far more than the statist position.

If you hired a security guard who continually fell asleep on the job, and permitted the facility he guarded to be robbed over and over again, year after year, what would your reaction be? Would you wake him up and promote him to the rank of global manager of a highly complex security company? Would his rank incompetence at a simple task make him your ideal candidate for an enormously complex job?

Of course not.

If a government is so amoral and incompetent that it permits the murder of innocent citizens by the Robber Barons, then clearly it cannot conceivably be competent and moral enough to protect citizens from the complex economic predations of the same Robber Barons. A group that cannot perform a simple function cannot conceivably perform a far more complex function.

Over one hundred years later, we can still see how effective this propaganda really is. The spectres of these “Robber Barons” still inhabit the imaginary haunted houses of our history. The role of government in controlling exploitive monopolies remains unquestioned – and how many people know the basic facts of the situation, principally that it was not the consumers who opposed these companies, but their competitors?

When we look at political “solutions” to pressing “problems,” we see the same pattern over and over again. Government-run education was not instituted because parents were dissatisfied with private schools, or because children were not educated, or anything like that – but rather because the teachers wanted the job security, and cultural and religious busybodies wanted to get their hands on the tender minds of children. The “New Deal” in the 1930s was not instituted because the free market made people poor, but rather because government mismanagement of the money supply destroyed almost a quarter of the wealth of the United States.

Time and time again, we see that it is not freedom that leads to political control and an increase in state violence, but rather prior increases in political control and state violence. The government does not expand its control because freedom does not work; freedom does not work because the government expands its control.

Thus we can see that freedom – or voluntarism, or anarchy – does not create problems that governments are required to “solve.” Rather, propagandists lie about what the government is up to (“protecting consumers” really means “using violence to protect the profits of inefficient businesses”) and the resulting expansions of political coercion and control breeds more problems, which are always ascribed to freedom.

Anarchy and Political Leaders

Clearly, there exists an entire class of people who gain immense profit, prestige, and power from the existence of the government. It is equally true that, as a collective, these people have enormous control and influence over the minds of children, since it is that same government that educates virtually every child for six or more hours a day, five days a week, for almost a decade and a half of their formative years.

To analogise this situation, can we imagine that we would be at all surprised that children who came out of fourteen years of religious indoctrination would in general believe in the existence and virtue of God? Would we be at all surprised if the strong arguments for atheism were left off a curriculum expressly designed by the priests, who directly profit from the maintenance of religious belief? In fact, we would fully expect such children to be actively trained in the rejection of arguments for atheism – inoculated against it, so to speak, so that they would react with scorn or hostility to such arguments. We may as well hold our breath waiting for the next commercial from General Motors talking about the shortcomings of their own cars, and the virtues of their competitors’ vehicles. Or perhaps we should wait for a full-colour spread from McDonald’s depicting detailed pictures of clogged arteries?

If so, we will wait in vain.

Similarly, when the government trains the children, how do we expect the government to portray itself? Would we expect government-paid teachers to talk openly about the root of state power, which is the initiation of the use of force against legally-disarmed citizens? Would we expect them to openly and honestly talk about the source of their income, which is the property taxes that are forcibly extracted from their students’ parents?

Would we expect these same teachers to talk about how government power grows through the endless pressure and greed of special interest groups, who wish to offload the costs of the violent enforcement of their greed on the taxpayers that they in fact prey upon?

Of course not.

This is not because these teachers are evil, but rather because people respond to incentives. If the basic truths of history, logic, ethics, and reality are inconvenient to those in power – as they inevitably are – those paid by those in power will almost never talk about them. We would not expect a Stalinist-era teacher to speak of the glories of capitalism; we would not expect an Antebellum teacher to teach the children of slave-owners about the evils of slavery; we would not expect an instructor at West Point to talk about the evils and corruption of the military-industrial complex, any more than we would expect the Vatican to voluntarily initiate a discussion of child abuse by Catholic priests.

We can view these basic facts without bottomless rancour, but with a gentle, almost kindly sympathy towards the inevitable trickle-down and corrupting effects of violent power.

It is no doubt a dizzying perspective to begin to examine the dark, dank, and foggy jungle of propaganda with the simple light of truth, but that is what an anarchist is really all about.

An anarchist accepts the simple and basic reality that every single human being fundamentally values free choice in his or her own personal life.

An anarchist accepts the simple and basic reality that he who pays the piper always calls the tune – and that arguments against the virtue and efficacy of political power will never be disseminated in an educational system paid for by political power.

An anarchist accepts the simple and basic reality that human beings at best have an ambivalent relationship with voluntarism – and that human beings habitually avoid the discomfort of ambivalence, and so don’t want to talk about anarchism any more then they want to bring up their doubts about religion during a Christian wedding ceremony.

The barriers to a reasonable understanding of the anarchistic perspective are emotionally volatile, socially isolating, and almost endless. The reasonable anarchist accepts these basic facts – since facts are what anarchy is all about – and if one is truly wise, falls at least a little in love with the difficulties of their task.

We should love the difficulties we face, because if it were easy to free the world, the fact that the world is so far from being free would be completely incomprehensible…

External links

• Digital version
• Audio version
• Print version