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…

Anarchy and the "Problem of the Commons"

Ask almost any professional economist what the role of government is, and they will generally reply that it is to regulate or solve the “problem of the commons,” and to make up for “market failures,” or the provision of public goods such as roads and water delivery that the free market cannot achieve on its own.

To anyone who works from historical evidence and even a basic smattering of first principles, this answer is, to be frank, outlandishly unfounded.

The “problem of the commons” is the idea that if farmers share common ground for grazing their sheep, that each farmer has a personal incentive for overgrazing, which will harm everyone in general. Thus the immediate self-interest of each individual leads to a collective stripping of the land.

It only takes a moment’s thought to realise that the government is the worst possible solution for this problem – if indeed it is a problem.

The problem of the commons recognises that where collective ownership exists, individual exploitation will inevitably result, since there is no incentive for the long-term maintenance of the productivity of whatever is collectively owned. A farmer takes good care of their own fields, because they want to profit from their utilisation in the future. In fact, ownership tends to accrue to those individuals who can make the most productive future use of an asset, since they are the ones able to bid the most when it comes up for sale. If I can make ten thousand dollars a year more out of a patch of land than you can, then I will be willing to bid more for it, and thus will end up owning it.

Thus where there is no stake in future profitability – as in the case of publicly-owned resources – those resources inevitably tend to be pillaged and destroyed.

This is the situation that highly intelligent, well-educated people – with perfectly straight faces – say should be solved through the creation of a government.

Why is this such a bizarre solution?

Well, a government – and particularly the public treasury – is the ultimate publicly-owned good. If publicly-owned goods are always pillaged and exploited, then how is the creation of the largest and most violent publicly-owned good supposed to solve that problem? It’s like saying that exposure to sunlight can be dangerous for a person’s health, and so the solution to that problem is to throw people into the sun.

The fact that people can repeat these absurdities with perfectly straight faces is testament to the power of propaganda and self-interest.

In the same way, we are told that free-market monopolies are dangerous and exploitive. Companies that wish to voluntarily do business with us, and must appeal to our self-interest, to mutual advantage, are considered grave threats to our personal freedoms.

And – the solution that is proposed by almost everyone to the “problem” of voluntary economic interaction?

Well, since voluntary and peaceful “monopolies” are so terribly evil, the solution that is always proposed is to create an involuntary, coercive, and violent monopoly in the form of a government. Thus voluntary and peaceful “monopolies” are a great evil – but the involuntary and violent monopoly of the state is the greatest good!?

Can you see why I began this book talking about our complicated and ambivalent relationship to voluntarism, or anarchy?

We see this same pattern repeating itself in the realm of education. Whenever an anarchist talks about a stateless society, he is inevitably informed that in a free society, poor children will not get educated.

Where does this opinion come from? Does it come from a steadfast dedication to reason and evidence, an adherence to well-documented facts? Do those who hold this opinion have certain evidence that, prior to public education, the children of the poor were not being educated? Do they genuinely believe that the children of the poor are being well-educated now? Do they seriously believe that anarchists do not care about the education of the poor?

Do they believe that they are the only people who care about the education of the poor? Of course not. This is a mere knee-jerk propagandistic reaction, like hearing a Soviet-era Red Guard boy mumbling about the necessity of the workers controlling the means of production. It is not based upon evidence, but upon prejudice.

If the “problem of the commons” and the predations of monopolies are such dire threats, then surely institutionalising these problems and surrounding them with the endless violence of police, military, and prisons would be the exact opposite of a rational solution!

Of course, the problem of the commons is only a problem because the land is collectively owned; move it to private ownership, and all is well. Thus the solution to the problem of public ownership is clearly more private ownership, not more public ownership.

Ah, say the statists, but that is just a metaphor – what about fish in the ocean, pollution in the rivers, roads in the city, and the defence of the realm?

Well the simple answer to that – from an anarchist perspective at least – is that if people are not intelligent and reasonable enough to negotiate solutions to these problems in a productive and sustainable manner, then surely they are also not intelligent or reasonable enough to vote for political leaders, or participate in any government whatsoever.

Of course, there are endless historical examples of private roads and railways, private fisheries, social and economic ostracism as an effective punishment for over-use or pollution of shared resources – the endless inventiveness of our species should surely by now never fail to amaze!

The statist looks at a problem and always sees a gun as the only solution – the force of the state, the brutality of law, violence, and punishment. The anarchist – the endless entrepreneur of social organisation – always looks at a problem and sees an opportunity for peaceful, innovative, charitable, or profitable problem-solving.

The statist looks at a population and sees an irrational and selfish horde that needs to be endlessly herded around at gunpoint – and yet looks at those who run the government as selfless, benevolent, and saintly. Yet these same statists always look at this irrational and dangerous population and say: “You must have the right to choose your political leaders!”

It is truly an unsustainable and irrational set of positions.

An anarchist – like any good economist or scientist – is more than happy to look at a problem and say, “I do not know the solution” – and be perfectly happy not imposing a solution through force. Darwin looked at the question, “Where did life come from?” and only came up with his famous answer because he was willing to admit that he did not know – but that existing religious “answers” were invalid. Theologians, on the other hand, claim to “answer” the same question with: “God made life,” which as mentioned above, on closer examination, always turns out to be an exact synonym for: “I do not know.” To say, “God did it,” is to say that some unknowable being performed some incomprehensible action in a completely mysterious manner for some never-to-be-discovered end. In other words: “I haven’t a clue.”

In the same way, when faced with challenges of social organisation such as collective self-defence, roads, pollution, and so on, the anarchist is perfectly content to say, “I do not know how this problem will be solved.” As a corollary, however, the anarchist is also perfectly certain that the pseudo-answer of “the government will do it” is a total non-answer – in fact, it is an anti-answer, in that it provides the illusion of an answer where one does not in fact exist. To an anarchist, saying “the government will solve the problem,” has as much credibility as telling a biologist – usually with grating condescension – “God created life.” In both cases, the problem of infinite regression is blindly ignored – if that which exists must have been created by a God, the God which exists must have been created by another God, and so on. In the same way, if human beings are in general too irrational and selfish to work out the challenges of social organisation in a productive and positive manner, then they are far too irrational and selfish to be given the monopolistic violence of state power, or vote for their leaders.

Asking an anarchist how every conceivable existing public function could be recreated in a stateless society is directly analogous to asking an economist what the economy will look like down to the last detail fifty years from now. What will be invented? How will interplanetary contracts be enforced? Exactly how will time travel affect the price of a rental car? What megahertz will computers be running at? What will operating systems be able to do? And so on and so on.

This is all a kind of elaborate game designed to, fundamentally, stall and humiliate any economist who falls for it. A certain amount of theorising is always fun, of course, but the truth is not determined by accurate long-term predictions of the unknowable. Asking Albert Einstein in 1910 where the atomic bomb will be dropped in the future is not a credible question – and the fact that he is unable to answer it in no way invalidates the theory of relativity.

In the same way, we can imagine that abolitionists would have been asked exactly how society would look twenty years after the slaves were freed. How many of them would have jobs? What would the average number of kids per family be? Who would be working the plantations?

Though these questions may sound absurd to many people, when you propose even the vague possibility of a society without a government, you are almost inevitably manoeuvred into the position of fighting a many-headed hydra of exactly such questions:

1. “How will the roads be provided in the absence of a government?”
2. “How will the poor be educated?”
3. “How will a stateless society defend itself?”
4. “How can people without a government deal with violent criminals?”

In twenty-five years of talking about just these subjects, I have almost never – even after credibly answering every question that comes my way – had someone sit back, sigh and say, “Gee, I guess it really could work!”

No, inevitably, what happens is that they come up with some situation that I cannot answer immediately, or in a way that satisfies them, and then they sit back and say in triumph, “You see? Society just cannot work without a government!”

What is actually quite funny about this situation is that by taking this approach, people think that they are opposing the idea of anarchy, when in fact they are completely supporting it. One simple and basic fact of life is that no individual – or group of individuals – can ever be wise or knowledgeable enough to run society.

Our core fantasy of “government” is that in some remote and sunlit chamber, with lacquered mahogany tables, deep leather chairs, and sleepless men and women, there exists a group who are so wise, so benevolent, so omniscient, and so incorruptible that we should turn over to them the education of our children, the preservation of our elderly, the salvation of the poor, the provision of vital services, the healing of the sick, the defence of the realm and of property, the administration of justice, the punishment of criminals, and the regulation of virtually every aspect of a massive, infinitely complex, and ever-changing social and economic system. These living man-gods have such perfect knowledge and perfect wisdom that we should hand them weapons of mass destruction, and the endless power to tax, imprison, and print money – and nothing but good, plenty, and virtue will result.

And then, of course, we say that the huddled and bleating masses, who could never achieve such wisdom and virtue, not even in their wildest dreams, should all get together and vote to surrender half their income, their children, their elderly, and the future itself to these man-gods.

Of course, we never do get to actually see and converse with these deities. When we do actually listen to politicians, all we hear are pious sentiments, endless evasions, pompous speeches, and all of the emotionally manipulative tricks of a bed-ridden and abusive parent.

Are these the demi-gods whose only mission is the care, nurturing, and education of our precious children’s minds?

Perhaps we can speak to the experts who advise them, the men behind the throne, the shadowy puppet-masters of pure wisdom and virtue? Can they come forward and reveal to us the magnificence of their knowledge? Why no, these men and women also will not speak to us, or if they do, they turn out to be even more disappointing than their political masters, who at least can make stirring if empty phrases ring out across a crowded hall.

And so, if we like, we can wander these halls of Justice, Truth, and Virtue forever, opening doors and asking questions, without ever once meeting this plenary council of moral superheroes. We can shuffle in ever-growing disappointment through the messy offices of these mere mortals, and recognise in them a dusty mirror of ourselves – no more, certainly, and often far less.

Anarchy is the simple recognition that no man, woman, or group thereof is ever wise enough to come up with the best possible way to run other people’s lives. Just as no one else should be able to enforce on you his choice of a marriage partner, or compel you to follow a career of his choosing, no one else should be able to enforce his preferences for social organisation upon you.

Thus when the anarchist is expected to answer every possible question regarding how society will be organised in the absence of a government, any failure to perfectly answer even one of them completely validates the anarchist’s position.

If we recognise that no individual has the capacity to run society (“dictatorship”), and we recognise that no group of elites has the capacity to run society (“aristocracy”), we are then forced to defend the moral and practical absurdity of “democracy.”

Anarchy and Democracy

It may be considered a mad enough exercise to attempt to rescue the word “anarchy” – however, to smear the word “democracy” seems almost beyond folly. Fewer words have received more reverence in the modern Western world. Democracy is in its essence the idea that we all run society. We choose individuals to represent our wishes, and the majority then gets to impose its wishes upon everyone else, subject ideally to the limitations of certain basic inalienable rights.

The irrational aspect of this is very hard to see, because of the endless amount of propaganda that supports democracy (though only in democracies, which is telling), but it is impossible to ignore once it becomes evident.

Democracy is based on the idea that the majority possesses sufficient wisdom to both know how society should be run, and to stay within the bounds of basic moral rules. The voters are considered to be generally able to judge the economic, foreign policy, educational, charitable, monetary, health care, military, et al policies proposed by politicians. These voters then wisely choose between this buffet of various policy proposals, and the majority chooses wisely enough that whatever is then enacted is in fact a wise policy – and their chosen leader then actually enacts what he or she promised in advance, and the leader’s buffet of proposals is entirely wise, and no part of it requires moral compromise. Also, the majority is virtuous enough to respect the rights of the minority, even though they dominate them politically. Few of us would support the idea of a democracy where the majority could vote to put the minority to death, say, or steal all their property.

In addition, for even the idea of a democracy to work, the minority must be considered wise and virtuous enough to accept the decisions of the majority.

In short, democracy is predicated on the premises that:

1. the majority of voters are wise and virtuous enough to judge an incredibly wide variety of complex proposals by politicians;
2. the majority of voters are wise and virtuous enough to refrain from the desire to impose their will arbitrarily upon the minority, but instead will respect certain universal moral ideals; and
3. the minority of voters who are overruled by the majority are wise and virtuous enough to accept being overruled, and will patiently await the next election in order to try to have their say once more, and will abide by the universal moral ideals of the society.

This, of course, is a complete contradiction. If society is so stuffed to the gills with wise, brilliant, virtuous, and patient souls, who all respect universal moral ideals, and are willing to put aside their own particular preferences for the sake of the common good, what on earth do we need a government for?

Whenever this question is raised, the shining image of the “noble citizenry” mysteriously vanishes, and all sorts of spectres are raised in their place. “Well, without a government, everyone would be at each other’s throats, there would be no roads, the poor would be uneducated, the old and sick would die in the streets, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”

This is a blatant and massive contradiction, and it is highly informative that it is nowhere part of anyone’s discourse in the modern world.

Democracy is valid because just about everyone is wise and moral, we are told. When we accept this, and question the need for a government, the story suddenly reverses, and we are told that we need a government because just about everyone is amoral and selfish.

Do you see how we have an ambivalent relationship not just with anarchism, but with democracy itself?

In the same way, whenever an anarchist talks about a stateless society, he is immediately expected to produce evidence that every single poor person in the future will be well taken care of by voluntary charity.

Again, this involves a rank contradiction, which involves democracy.

The welfare state, old-age pensions, and “free” education for the poor are all considered in a democracy to be valid reflections of the virtuous will of the people – these government programs were offered up by politicians, and voluntarily accepted by the majority who voted for them, and also voluntarily accepted by the minority who have agreed to obey the will of the majority!

In other words, the majority of society is perfectly willing to give up an enormous chunk of its income in order to help the sick, the old, and the poor – and we know this because those programs were voted for and created by democratic governments!

Ah, says the anarchist, then we already know that the majority of people will be perfectly willing to help the sick, the old, and the poor in a stateless society – democracy provides empirical and incontrovertible evidence of this simple fact!

Again, when this basic argument is put forward, the myth of the noble citizenry evaporates once more!

“Oh no, without the government forcing people to be charitable, no one would lift a finger to help the poor, people are so selfish, they don’t care, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”

This paradox cannot be unravelled this side of insanity. If a democratic government must force a selfish and unwilling populace to help the poor, then government programs do not reflect the will of the people, and democracy is a lie, and we must get rid of it – or at least stop pretending to vote.

If democracy is not a lie, then existing government programs accurately represent the will of the majority, and thus the poor, the sick, and the old will have nothing to fear from a stateless society – and will, for many reasons, be far better taken care of by private charity than government programs.

Now it is certainly easy to just shrug off the contradictions above and to say that somewhere, somehow, there just must be a good answer to these objections.

Although this can be a pleasant thing to do in the short run, it is not something I have ever had much luck doing in the long term. These contradictions come back and nag at me – and I am actually very glad that they have done so, since I think that the progress of human thought utterly depends upon us taking nothing for granted.

The first virtue is always honesty, and we should be honest enough to admit when we do not have reasonable answers to these reasonable objections. This does not mean that we must immediately come up with new “answers,” but rather just sit with the questions for a while, ponder them, look for weaknesses or contradictions in our objections – and only when we are satisfied that the objections are valid should we begin looking for rational and empirical answers to even some of the oldest and most commonly-accepted “solutions.”

This process of ceasing to believe in non-answers is fundamental to science, to philosophy – and is the first step towards anarchism, or the acceptance that violence is never a valid solution to non-violent problems.

Anarchy and Violence

One of the truly tragic misunderstandings about anarchism is the degree to which anarchism is associated with violence.

Violence, as commonly defined, is the initiation of the use of force (the word “initiation” is required to differentiate the category of self-defence).

Since the word “ambivalent” seems to be the theme for this book, it is important to understand that those who advocate or support the existence of a government have themselves a highly ambivalent relationship to violence.

To understand what I mean by this, it is first essential to recognise that taxation – the foundation of any statist system – falls entirely under the category of “the initiation of the use of force.”

Governments claim the right to tax citizens – which is, when you look at it empirically, one group of individuals claiming the moral right to initiate the use of force against other individuals.

Now, you may believe for all the reasons in the world that this is justified, moral, essential, practical, and so on – but all this really means is that you have an ambivalent relationship to the use of force. On the one hand, you doubtless condemn as vile the initiation of the use of force in terms of common theft, assault, murder, rape, and so on.

Indeed, it is the addition of violence that makes specific acts evil rather than neutral, or good. Sex plus violence equals rape. Property transfer plus violence equals theft. Remove violence from property transfer, and you have trade, or charity, or borrowing, or inheritance.

However, when it comes to the use of violence to transfer property from “citizens” to “government,” these moral rules are not just neutralised, but actively reversed.

We view it as a moral good to resist a crime if possible – not an absolute necessity, but certainly a forgivable, if not laudable action. However, to resist the forcible extraction of your property by the government is considered ignoble, and wrong.

Thus in a democracy, we have a highly ambivalent relationship to violence itself. We both fear and hate violence when it is enacted by private citizens in pursuit of personal – and generally considered negative – goals. However, we praise violence when it is enacted by public citizens in pursuit of collective – and generally considered positive – goals.

For instance, if a poor man robs a richer man at gunpoint, we may feel a certain sympathy for the desperation of the act, but still we will pursue legal sanctions against the mugger. We recognise that relative poverty is no excuse for robbery, both due to the intrinsic immorality of theft, and also because if we allow the poor to rob the less poor, we generally feel that social breakdown would be the inevitable result. The work ethic of the poor would be diminished – as would that of the less poor, and society would in general dissolve into warring factions, to the economic and social detriment of all.

However, when we institutionalise this very same principle in the form of the welfare state, it is considered to be a noble and virtuous good to use force to take money from the more wealthy, and hand it over to the less wealthy.

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