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Title: Mere Anarchy Author: J. Neil Schulman Date: June 23, 2010 Language: en Topics: anarchism Source: https://jneilschulman.agorist.com//2010/06/mere-anarchy/
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— from The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
The title of this essay has two meanings.
The first is the reference to the Yeats poem quoted above, The Second
Coming.
The second is a reference to C.S. Lewis’s immensely popular book of
Christian apologetics, Mere Christianity, a phrase C.S. Lewis picked up
from a Christian apologist writing three centuries earlier, Rev. Richard
Baxter.
What Yeats meant was the end result of entropy; what Lewis and Baxter
meant was core sustainable beliefs. Clearly I’m choosing to deal here
with antithetical thoughts.
In common usage the word “anarchy” is a synonym for chaos and anomie,
just as in common usage “anarchist” is a synonym for terrorist or
nihilist.
It places an immediate communications burden on anyone who believes, as
I do, that a stateless society can be not only as well-ordered and
agreeable as any society which attempts by a constitution to limit the
powers of government for the purpose of ensuring common individual
rights, but in theory could do a better job of preventing a reemergence
of tyranny.
I’m not alone in this skepticism regarding the American experiment with
Constitutional government. This caution comes from one of its original
authors.
Upon leaving the Constitutional Convention of 1787 Benjamin Franklin
answered a lady’s question whether the convention produced a republic or
a constitutional monarchy with the bitter and prescient warning, “A
republic, if you can keep it.”
If we’ve kept the Constitution at all after:
intent
House of Lords
federal agent shows up
transparency
political payoff to another
… it’s only by the skin of its teeth. In 223 years of mastication, many
of the Constitution’s teeth have fallen out, some are impacted, many
have cavities requiring root canal, and even the remaining relatively
healthy teeth are dulled, loose, and painfully difficult to chew with.
In my lifetime the Constitution is more Poligrip than Politics.
So why — when the Constitution of the United States is clearly in crisis
as to whether it can sustain its original intent to “establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the
general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and
our Posterity” — are alternatives offered to try and do the job better
looked upon with such fear and loathing?
Well, for one thing, the proposed alternatives have never worked on a
large scale before.
Various forms of anarchism have been tried out in microcosmic
experiments. The Old Testament tells us of a time before Kings when the
Israelites had only Judges.
In the ancient Irish túatha — while you had a king — at least you were
free to choose which one you wanted.
There were anarchist-based communes both in Europe and in America. None
of them expanded into the general population and few survived into a
second generation.
And — well — historically too darned many high-profile anarchists have
in fact been nihilists, trouble-makers, and terrorists.
Yes, yes, yes, I know. There is a rich and peaceful tradition of
individual anarchism, which includes Henry David Thoreau who wrote in
his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience:
I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs
least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and
systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I
believe – “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when
men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they
will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments
are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
No less than Mohandas K. Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., have
each attributed their successful uses of non-violent resistance to the
anarchist Thoreau.
Other historical anarchists — William Godwin, Lysander Spooner,
Voltairine de Cleyre, Benjamin Tucker, Emma Goldman, and Thomas Hodgskin
— as well as anarchists I’ve known personally in my lifetime — Murray
Rothbard, Robert LeFevre, L. Neil Smith, David Friedman, Victor Koman,
and Samuel Edward Konkin III — have all advocated anarchistic visions of
society that are neither chaotic nor nihilistic — and one can
convincingly argue that, despite their protests, both Ayn Rand and
Robert A. Heinlein made far better cases in their fiction for
anarchistic societies than they made for government in their nonfiction.
Plus I must note here that Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock found
it necessary to make a clear distinction between government and the
State.
But cutting to the chase, are any of these visions of a stateless
society both doable and sustainable?
I believe they are, if certain conditions are met.
The concept of a Sovereign Right means that each one of us has the
individual sovereign power to do whatever each of us wants without prior
consent of anyone else, providing that by our doing so it does not
invade the equal sovereign right of anyone else to be left unmolested.
In the case of any being or even any thing which is regarded as having
such sovereign rights, the test is whether such an entity can be held
accountable for the consequences of its actions. If the answer is “no”
then some other individual with Sovereign rights whom Nature has
appointed or who has otherwise agreed to be held answerable for that
irresponsible entity — whether fetus, child, mental incompetent, animal,
tree, or Frankenstein’s Monster — is the guardian, overseer, in loco
parentis, and steward of that entity until such a time as the entity can
answer for the consequences of its own acts.
initiated where one or more Sovereign Individuals file a complaint. So,
for example, possession of a substance with the intent to use it could
not be a crime because possession of a thing, nor an intent to do
something with it, is not Action; and unless you Act against Someone
Else no Sovereign Rights Violation has yet occurred. Making a threat
against someone is an action; and could be adjudicated. Possessing
something which by its nature is a danger to others would have to prove
that the danger is real and present, not theoretical, statistical, or
only under unlikely conditions.
between competing claimants for needed places and things, and peaceful
non-neighbor-impacting individual use of them must not not be overly
burdened by entailments, covenants, contracts, and restrictions.
their own property within their own circles is none of my business so
long as they don’t throw their garbage on my lawn and interrupt my sleep
with blaring music — must dominate social interaction.
you pay for it. You want me to support it in mutual aid, charity, or
common cause, you ask me instead of telling me. The most you can do to
punish me for refusing to sign on to your holy crusade is to have
nothing further to do with me.
a commercial product or a product of non-profit organizations just like
any other useful thing. Judges can offer their own law books in private
arbitrations, and even cut the court costs by offering their trials as
public entertainment — such as all the TV Judge Shows, which are already
private arbitrations held in public. A General Submission to Arbitration
is the necessity and hallmark of a responsible neighbor and a free
society. The absence of a General Prior-to-Conflict Submission to
Arbitration is the primary reason that no anarchist society has worked
in an Industrial or Post-Industrial Mega-Population Society. If this is
a new drug to fix the ills of society, I say let’s start the Clinical
Trials now.
and to be held accountable for it by a standard of reasonable men in a
court with a judge to which the accused has consented, with a
presumption of innocence, all the accused’s procedural rights protected,
and with no civil or criminal penalties imposed without a conviction by
a jury of the accused’s peers. The Bill of Rights got almost all of this
correct.
present, and the weapons and techniques enabling effective and efficient
self-defense are always legal in a free society. I won’t argue that
there is no place for professionals in the fields of defense, security,
and protection — and I won’t even argue about the necessity for standing
military or posse comitatus to be prepared for threats — but no society
can remain free or stable in the long run if the individual is not the
first and last line in defense of his own rights and the rights of his
loved ones, family, friends, neighbors, and nation.
Assuming for a moment that such a society is practical, is there a way
to get there?
I believe that answer is also yes.
Even a society under the thumb of a totalitarian government– some would
say especially societies under the thumb of totalitarian governments —
have black markets.
Historically black markets are populated by criminals with few ethics
and less self-control. Without any “honor among thieves” crime and
violence are endemic.
But what if black-markets were operated by people more lawful, rational,
and ethical than in the legal-edict society rather than less lawful,
rational, and ethical?
What if the black markets had less crime than the above-ground markets
because property-rights were better recognized and enforced by private
arbitrations?
What if the bare minimum of business structure was cheaper to operate in
— and fostered more productivity — than trying to start a business under
layers of burdensome bureaucratic regulations, taxes and payoffs to
politicians and their appointees?
What if — even with the extra costs of maintaining secret communication,
transportation, and protection operations — it was still far cheaper to
operate your business in these underground networks than in a
debt-ridden, inflation destabilized, highly taxed and regulated, and
hostile business environment as we now see in our current
Constitution-impaired society?
Would not capital naturally flow into such better-operated markets and
act to enrich them, empowering better use of technology and more
efficient allocation of scarce resources for the purposes of expansion
and growth?
What if the next tax haven wasn’t offshore but a well-concealed and
protected network of markets right under the government’s stuffed nose?
That was the strategy of countereconomics — the philosophy of Agorism —
proposed by myself and Samuel Edward Konkin III, presented first by Sam
at the two CounterCon conferences I organized in 1974 and 1975,
presented first in fiction (as Ayn Rand did with her philosophy in Atlas
Shrugged) in my 1979 novel Alongside Night, and first presented in a
work of nonfiction a year later in Samuel Edward Konkin III’s New
Libertarian Manifesto.
Now, some may say what I’ve proposed above is not anarchy at all, but
limited Constitutional Government.
I won’t argue the semantic point.
Call it what pleases you. Sam Konkin and I called it Agorism. This is
the Thoreau-inspired vision of a free society I’ve been working towards
in the past four decades of my life.