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Title: Everyday Anarchy Author: Stefan Molyneux Date: November 13, 2008 Language: en Topics: Anarchy, morality Source: Retrieved on April 1, 2013 from http://board.freedomainradio.com/blogs/freedomain/archive/2008/11/13/everyday-anarchy-the-book.aspx Notes: www.freedomainradio.com
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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” etc. 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 labeled a
stodgy prude.
Words are also weapons of judgment – primarily moral judgment. 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, incest, 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’m 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, mustachioed 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 specter; the
haunted and angry mutterings of over-caffeinated and seemingly-eternal
grad 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):
inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder.
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 organization.”
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 specters of chaos and brutality always arise for us,
immediately and, it would seem, irrevocably.
However, it only takes a moment of thought to realize that we live the
vast majority of our actual lives in complete and total anarchy – and
call such anarchy “morally good.”
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 left 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 specter 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 specter 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
characterized 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 10-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 tinpot 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
neighborhoods 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 neighborhoods 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 80%.
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 maximization 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 etc. 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 havingno 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 recognize 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!
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
judgment, nor the withholding of judgment 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 his 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 mustaches). 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
organization.
Our clichéd vision of the typical anarchist tends to see him emerging
shortly before World War I, 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 10 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 19^(th)-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
19^(th) century US murder rates with the 600,000 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 – patronizing 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 “Christianize”
and civilize these savage heathens – this was thecondescension – 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 intellectualization,
which is why governments always want to fund higher education and
subsidize intellectuals. We shall get to more of this later.
Even outside war, in the 20^(th) century alone, more than 270 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.
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 unraveling this contradiction.
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.
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
counterproductive 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 patronizing
“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?
We can also find examples of this in the phenomenon of the “Robber
Barons” in late 19^(th) 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 1–2 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 10%-20% 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 gas 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 favors 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 favors, 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:
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.”
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through political means, because the legislatures
were still available for sale.
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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 railcars to store meat, a price drop of 30% 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 a hundred years later, we can still see how effective this
propaganda really is. The specters 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.
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 analogize this situation, can we imagine that we would be at all
surprised that children who came out of 14 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-color 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 rancor, 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 he is truly wise, falls at
least a little in love with the difficulties of his 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…
Ask almost any professional economist what the role of government is,
and he 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 realize that the government is the
worst possible solution for this problem – if indeed it is a problem.
The problem of the commons recognizes 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 his own
fields, because he wants to profit from their utilization 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 $10,000 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 institutionalizing 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 defense 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
organization – 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 organization such
as collective self-defense, 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 organization 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 re-created in a stateless society is directly analogous to asking an
economist what the economy will look like down to the last detail 50
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
theorizing 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 20 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 maneuvered into the position of fighting a many-headed
hydra of exactly such questions: “How will the roads be provided in the
absence of a government?” “How will the poor be educated?” “How will a
stateless society defend itself?” “How can people without a government
deal with violent criminals?”
In 25 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 reallycould 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 defense 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 recognize 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 organization upon you.
Thus when the anarchist is expected to answer every possible question
regarding how society will be organized in the absence of a government,
any failure to perfectly answer even one of themcompletely validates the
anarchist’s position.
If we recognize that no individual has the capacity to run society
(“dictatorship”), and we recognize 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.”
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:
A. The majority of voters are wise and virtuous enough to judge an
incredibly wide variety of complex proposals by politicians.
B. 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.
C. 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 specters 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 etc. etc. etc.”
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 etc. etc. etc.”
This paradox cannot be unraveled 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
it 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.
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-defense.)
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 recognize
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 neutralized,
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.
Please note that I am not attempting to convince you of the anarchist
position in this (or any other) section of this book. I consider it far
too immense a task to change your mind about this in such a short work –
and besides, if you are troubled by logical contradictions, I might rob
you of the considerable intellectual thrill and excitement of exploring
these ideas for yourself.
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 recognize 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 institutionalize 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.
Again, this book is not designed to be any sort of airtight argument
against the welfare state – rather, it is designed to highlight the
enormous moral contradictions in – and our fundamental ambivalence
towards – the use of violence to achieve preferred ends.
I may have been doomed to this particular perspective from a very early
age. I grew up in England in the 1970s, when the shadow cast by the
Second World War still fell long across the mental landscape. I read war
comics, saw war movies, heard details of epic battles, and sat silent
during rather uncomfortable family gatherings where the British on my
father’s side attempted to make small talk with the Germans on my
mother’s.
I could not help but think, even when I was six or seven years old, that
should my paternal uncle leap across the table and strangle my maternal
uncle, this would be viewed as an immoral horror by everyone involved,
and he would doubtless go to jail, probably for the rest of his life.
On the other hand, should they be placed in costume, and arrayed across
a battlefield according to the whims of other men in costume, such a
murder would be hailed as a noble sacrifice, and medals may be passed
out, and pensions provided, and tickertape parades possibly ensue.
Thus, even in those long-ago days of soft white tablecloths and gently
clinking cutlery, I mentally chewed on the problem that murder equals
evil, and also that murder equals good. Murder equals jail, and murder
equals medals.
When I was a little older, after “The Godfather” came out, endless slews
of gangster movies sprayed their red gore across the silver screens. In
these stories, certain tribal “virtues” such as loyalty, dedication and
obeying orders, were portrayed as relatively noble, even as these
butchers plied their bloody trade in slow motion, generally to the
strains of classical music, and came to grimly spattered ends on bare
concrete.
This paradox, too, stayed with me: “Murdering a man because another man
orders you to – and pays you to – is a vile and irredeemable evil.”
Then, of course, another war movie would come out, with the exact
opposite moral message: “Murdering a man because another man orders you
to – and pays you to – is a virtuous and courageous good.”
I do remember bringing these contradictions up from time to time with
the adults around me, only to be met with condescending irritation,
often followed by a demand as to whether I would in fact prefer to be
speaking German at present.
As I got older, and learned a little more about the world, these
contradictions did not exactly resolve themselves, but rather were added
to incessantly. We fought the Second World War to oppose National
Socialism, I was told, as I munched on awful soy burgers, shivered in
the cold and was told I could not bathe because the nationalized state
unions were crippling the British economy.
I was told that I had to be terribly afraid of the selfish impulses of
my fellow citizens – and also that I had to respect their wisdom when
they chose a leader. I was told that the purpose of my education was to
allow me to think for myself, but when I made decisions that those in
authority disagreed with, I was scorned and humiliated, and my reasoning
was never examined.
I was told that I should not use violence to solve my problems, but when
I climbed a wall that apparently I was not supposed to, I was taken to
the Headmaster’s office, where he assaulted me with a cane.
I was told that the British people were the wisest, most courageous and
most virtuous group on the planet – and also that I was not to disobey
those in authority.
When I was taught mathematics and science, I was punished for thinking
irrationally – and then, when I asked sensible questions about the
existence of God, I was punished for attempting to think rationally.
I was mocked as cowardly whenever I succumbed to peer pressure – and
also mocked for my lack of interest in cheering our local sports team.
When I proposed thoughts that those in authority disagreed with, they
demanded that I provide evidence; when I asked that they provide
evidence for their beliefs, I was punished for insubordination.
This is nothing peculiar to me – all children go through these sorts of
mental meat grinders – but I could not help but think, as I grew up,
that what passed for “thinking” in society was more or less an endless
series of manipulations designed to serve those in power.
What troubled me most emotionally was not the nonsense and
contradictions that surrounded me, but rather the indisputable fact that
they seemed completely invisible to everyone. Well, that’s not quite
true. It is more accurate to say that these contradictions were visible
exactly to the degree that they were avoided. Everyone walked through a
minefield, claiming that it was not a minefield, but unerringly avoiding
the mines nonetheless.
It became very clear to me quite quickly that I lived in a kind of
negative intellectual and moral universe. The ethical questions most
worth examining were those that were the most mocked, derided and
attacked. What was virtuous was so often what was considered the most
vile – and what was the most vile was often considered the most
virtuous.
When I was 11, I went to the Ontario Science Center, which had an
interesting and challenging exhibit where you attempted to trace the
outline of a star by looking in a mirror. I have always remembered this
exhibit, and just now I realize why – because this was my direct
experience when attempting to map the ethics and virtues proclaimed by
those around me – particularly those in authority.
Nowhere were these contradictions more pronounced than in the question
of war.
It took me quite a long time to realize this, because the spectacle,
fire and blood of war is so distracting, but the true violence of war
does not occur on the battlefield, but in the homeland.
The carnage of conflict is only an effect of the core violence which
supports war, which is the military enslavement of domestic citizens
through the draft – and even more importantly, the direct theft of their
money which pays for the war.
Without the money to fund a war – and pay the soldiers, whether they are
drafted or not – war is impossible. The actual violence of the
battlefield is a mere effect of the threatened violence at home. If
citizens could not be forced to pay for the war – either in the present
in the form of taxes, or in the future through deficit financing – then
the carnage of the battlefield could never possibly occur.
I have read many books and articles on the root of war – whether it is
nationalism, economic forces, faulty philosophical premises, class
conflict and so on – none of which addressed the central issue, which is
how war is paid for. This is like advancing merely psychological
explanations as to why people play the lottery, without ever once
mentioning their interest in the prize money. Why do people become
doctors? Is it because they have a psychological need to present
themselves as godlike healers, or because they are pleasing their mother
and father, or because they are themselves secretly wounded, or because
they possess an altruistic desire to heal the sick? These may be all
interesting theories to pursue, but they are mere effects of the basic
fact that doctors are highly paid for what they do.
Certainly psychological or sociological theories may explain why a
particular person chooses to become a doctor rather than pursue some
other high-paying occupation – but surely we should at leaststart with
the fact that if doctors were not paid, almost no one would become a
doctor. For instance, if a magic pill were invented tomorrow that
ensured perfect health forever, there would be no more doctors – because
no one would pay for the unnecessary service. Thus the first cause of
doctors is – payment.
In the same way, we can endlessly theorize about the psychological,
sociological or economic causes of war, but if we never talk about the
simple fact that the first cause of war is domestic theft and military
enslavement, then everything that follows remains mere abstract and
airless intellectual quibbling, more designed to hide the truth than
reveal it.
We can only point guns at foreign enemies because we first point guns at
domestic citizens.
Without taxation, there can be no war.
Without governments, there can be no taxation.
Thus governments are the first cause of war.
The truth of the matter, I believe, is that deep down we know that if we
pull out this one single thread – that coercion against citizens is the
root of war – we know that many other threads will also come unraveled.
If we recognize the violence that is at the root of war – domestic
violence, not foreign violence – then we stare at the core and ugly
truth at the root of our society, and most of our collective moral
aspirations.
The core and ugly truth at the root of our society is that we really,
really like using violence to get things done. In fact, it is more than
a mere aesthetic or personal preference – we define the use of violence
as a moral necessity within our society.
How should we educate children? Why, we must force their parents – and
everyone else – to pay for their education at gunpoint!
How should we help the poor? Why, we must force others in society to pay
for their support at gunpoint!
How should we heal the sick? Why, we must force everyone to pay for
their medical care at gunpoint!
Now, it may be the case that we have exhausted all other possibilities
and ways of dealing with these complex and challenging problems, and
that we have been forced to fall back on coercion, punishment and
control as regretful necessities, and we are constantly looking for ways
to reduce the use of violence in our solutions for these problems.
However, that is not the case, either empirically or rationally.
The education of poor children, the succor of the impoverished and the
healing of the sick all occurred through private charities and voluntary
associations long before statist agencies displaced them. This is
exactly what you would expect, given the general modern support for
these state programs, because everyone is so concerned with these
genuinely needy groups.
Where violence is considered to be a regrettable but necessary solution
to a problem, those in authority do not shy away from talking openly
about it. When I was a child in England in the 1970s, I was repeatedly
told with pride by my elders about their courageous use of violence
against the Axis powers in World War II. No one tried to give me the
impression that the Nazis were defeated by cunning negotiation and
psychological tricks. The endless slaughterhouses of both the First and
Second World Wars were not kept hidden from me, but rather the violence
was praised as a regrettable but moral necessity.
American children are told about the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and
Hiroshima – the slaughter and radiation poisoning of hundreds of
thousands of Japanese civilians is not kept a secret; it is not
bypassed, ignored or repressed in the telling of the tale.
Even when the war in question was itself questionable, such as the war
in Vietnam, no one shies away from the true nature of the conflict,
which was endless genocidal murder.
I do not for a moment believe that all of these genocides and slaughters
were morally justifiable – or even practically required – but mine is
certainly a minority opinion, and since the majority believes that these
murders were both morally justified and practically required, they feel
fully comfortable openly discussing the violence that they consider
unavoidable.
However, this is not the case when we talk about statist solutions to
the problems of charity and ill health. You could spend an entire
academic career in these fields, and read endless books and articles on
the subject, and never once come across any reference to the fact that
these solutions are funded through violence. Just so you can understand
how strange this really is, imagine spending 40 years as a professional
war historian, and never once coming across the idea that war involves
violence. Would we not consider that a rather egregious evasion of a
rather basic fact?
This is a rather volatile comparison I know, but we saw the same
phenomenon occurring in Soviet Russia. Almost no reference was made to
the gulags in official state literature, particularly that literature
intended to be consumed overseas. The tens of millions of concentration
camp inmates showed up nowhere in the general or academic narrative of
the Soviet Union – when the book “One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich” finally appeared, even this relatively mild account of a day
in the life of a prison camp inmate was greeted with shock, derision,
horror and rage by those charged with defending that narrative.
It cannot really be the case that when society is genuinely proud of
something, the truth is kept mysteriously hidden from view. Can we
imagine fans of the New York Yankees actively working to repress the
fact that their team won the World Series? Can we imagine the Communist
leaders of China suppressing news that their athletes had won gold
medals in the Olympics? Can we imagine a police department feverishly
working to censor the facts about a large reduction in the crime rate?
Of course not. Where we are genuinely proud of an achievement, we do not
refrain from talking about its causes. An Olympic athlete will speak
with pride about the years of endless dawn training sessions; a
successful entrepreneur will not hide the decades of hard work it took
to succeed; a woman who has successfully struggled to lose weight is
unlikely to wear a fat suit when she goes to her high school reunion.
However, when a core reality conflicts with a mythological narrative,
academics, intellectuals and other cultural leaders are well-compensated
for their ability to completely ignore that core reality – and usually
savagely attack and mock anyone who brings it up.
One core reality that anarchists focus on – which surely is at least
worthy of discussion – is that governments claim to serve and protect
their citizens. When I was a child, and questioned the ethics of World
War II, I was asked if I would prefer to be speaking German. In other
words, the brave men and women of the Allied forces spent their lives
and blood defending me from foreign marauders who would have enslaved
me. This approach reinforces the basic story that the government was
trying to protect its citizens.
In the same way, when I question the use of violence in the supplying of
education, people always tell me that in the absence of that violence –
even if they admit to its existence – the poor would remain uneducated.
This approach reinforces the basic story that the purpose of state
violence in this realm is to educate the children.
You can see the same pattern just about everywhere else. When I talk
about the violence of the war on drugs, I am told that without such a
war, society would degenerate into nihilistic addiction and violence –
thus the purpose of the war on drugs is to keep people off drugs, and
their neighbours safe from violence. When I talk about the base and
coercive predation of Social Security, I am told that without it, the
old would starve in the streets – thus reinforcing the narrative that
the purpose of Social Security is to provide an income for the old,
without which they would starve.
When we examine the narrative that the state exists to protect its
citizens, we can clearly see that if we unearth the basic reality of the
violence of taxation, a malevolent contradiction emerges.
It is very hard for me to tell you that I am only interested in
protecting you, if I attack you first. If I roll up to you in a black
van, jam a hood over your head, throw you in the back of my van, tie you
up and toss you in my basement, would you reasonably accept as my
explanation for this savagery that I only wished to keep you from harm?
Surely you would reply that if I was really interested in keeping you
from harm, why on earth would I kidnap you and lock you up in a little
room? Surely, if I initiate the use of force against you, it is somewhat
irrational (to say the least) for me to tell you that I am only acting
to protect you from the use of force.
This is a central reason why the aggression that governments initiate
against their own citizens in order to extract the cash and cannon
fodder for war is never talked about. It is hard to sustain the thesis
that governments exist to protect their citizens if the first threat to
citizens is always their own government.
If I have to rob you in order to pay for “protecting” your property from
theft, at the very least I have created an insurmountable logical
contradiction, if not a highly ambivalent moral situation.
In general, where coercion is a regrettable but necessary means of
achieving a moral good, that coercion is not hidden from general view.
In police dramas, the violence of the cops is not hidden. In war movies,
shells, bullets and limbs fly across the screen with wanton abandon.
However, the coercion at the root of war and state social programs
remains forever unspoken, unacknowledged, repressed, hidden from view;
it is mad, shameful and imprudent to speak of it.
A hunter who proudly displays a dead deer on the hood of his car, and
puts the antlers up in his basement, and barbecues the venison for his
friends, can be considered somewhat proud – or at least not ashamed – of
his hobby.
A hunter who uses a silencer, shoots a deer in the middle of the night,
and carefully buries the body, leaving no trace, cannot be considered at
all proud – and is in fact utterly ashamed – of his hobby.
Thus, when an anarchist looks at society, he sees a desperate shame
regarding the use of violence to achieve social ends such as the
military, health care, and education. Any anarchist who has even a
passing interest in psychology – and I certainly put myself in this
category – understands that this kind of unspoken shame is utterly
toxic, both to an individual and to a society.
Thus it inevitably falls to anarchists to perform the unpleasant task of
digging up the “body in the backyard,” or pointing out the widespread,
prevalent and ever-increasing use of violence to achieve moral goals
within society. “Is this right?” asks the anarchist – fully aware of the
hostile and resentful glances he receives from those around him. “How
can violence be both the greatest evil and the greatest good?” “If the
violence that we use to achieve our supposedly moral ends is in fact
justified and good, why is it that we are so ashamed to speak of it?”
To be an anarchist, to say the very least, requires a strong hide when
it comes to social hostility and disapproval.
When people have genuinely exhausted all other possibilities, they tend
not to be ashamed of their eventual solution. Even if we take the
surface narrative of the Second World War at face value, the victors
were able to express just pride because the narrative included the
significant caveat that there was no other possible response to the
aggression of the German, Italian and Japanese fascists.
Parents tend to be pretty open about hitting their children if they
genuinely believe that no rational or moral alternatives exist to the
use of violence. If hitting a child is the only way to teach her to be a
good, productive and rational adult, then not hitting her is obviously a
form of lax parenting, if not outright abuse. Hitting your daughter thus
becomes a form of moral responsibility, and thus a positive good, much
like yanking her back from running into traffic and ensuring that she
eats her vegetables.
Such a parent, of course, reacts with outrage and indignation if you
suggest to him that there are more productive alternatives to violence
when it comes to raising children – for the obvious reason that if those
alternatives exist, his violence turns from a positive good to a moral
evil.
This is the situation that an anarchist faces when he talks about
nonviolent alternatives to existing coercive “solutions.” If there is a
nonviolent way to help the poor, heal the sick, educate the children,
protect property, build roads, defend a geographical area, mediate
disputes, punish criminals and so on – then the state turns from a
regretfully necessary institution to an outright criminal monopoly.
This is a rather large and jagged pill for people to swallow, for any
number of psychological, personal, professional and philosophical
reasons.
Another paradox that anarchy brings into uncomfortable view is the
contradiction between coercion and morality.
We all in general recognize and accept the principle that where there is
no choice, there can be no morality. If a man is told to commit some
evil while he has a gun pressed to his head, we would have a hard time
categorizing him as evil – particularly compared to the man who is
pressing the gun to his head.
If we accept the Aristotelian view that the purpose of life is
happiness, and we accept the Socratic view that virtue brings happiness,
then when we deny choice to people, we deny them the capacity for
virtue, and thus for happiness.
There is great pleasure in helping others – I would certainly argue that
it is one of the greatest pleasures, outside of love itself, which
encompasses it. Helping others, though, is a highly complex business,
which requires detailed personal attention, rigorous standards, a
combination of encouragement, sternness, enthusiasm, sympathy and
discipline – to name just a few!
Using coercion to drive charity is like using kidnapping to create love.
Not only does the use of coercion through state programs deny choice to
those wishing to help the poor – and thus the joy of achievement, and
the motivation of happiness – but it corrupts and destroys the complex
interchange required to elevate a human soul from its meager
surroundings and its own low expectations.
If we believe that violence is a valid way to achieve moral ends – of
helping the poor for instance – then there are two other approaches
which would be far more logically consistent than the forced theft and
transfer of taxation.
If violence is the only valid way to create economic “equality,” then
surely it would make far more sense to simply allow those below a
certain level of income to steal the difference from others. If we
understand that state welfare agencies skim an enormous amount of money
off the top – they represent a truly savage expense – then we can easily
eliminate this overhead, and have a far more rational system besides,
simply by eliminating the middleman and allowing the poor to steal from
the middle and upper classes.
If the prospect of this solution fills you with horror, that is
important to understand. If you feel that this proposal would degenerate
into armed gangs of the poor rampaging through wealthier neighborhoods,
then you are really saying that the poor are poor because they lack
restraint and judgment, and will pillage others and undermine the
economic success and general security of society in order to satisfy
their own immediate appetites, without thought for the future.
If this is the case – if the poor really are such a shortsighted and
savage band – then it is clear that they do not have the judgment and
self-control to vote in democratic elections – which are essentially
about the forcible transfer of income. If the poor only care about
satisfying their immediate appetites, without a care for the long term,
then they should not be at all involved in the coercive redistribution
of wealth in society as a whole.
Ah, but what if taking the right to vote away from the poor fills you
with outrage? Very well, then we can assume that the poor are rational,
and able and willing to defer gratification. If a man is wise enough to
vote on the use of force, then he is certainly wise enough to use that
force himself.
Indeed, the barriers to using force personally are far higher than
voting for the use of force in a democratic system. If you have to pick
up a gun and go and collect your just property from richer people, that
is quite a high “barrier to entry.” If, on the other hand, you simply
have to scribble on the ballot once every few years, and then sit back
and wait for your check to arrive, surely that will drive the escalation
of violence in society far more rapidly.
If you still feel that this solution would be disastrous, because the
poor would act with bad judgment, then you face a related issue, which
is the quality of the education that the poor have received.
If the poor lack wisdom, knowledge and good judgment, but they have been
educated by the government for almost 15 years straight, then surely if
we believe that the poor can be educated, we must then blame the
government for failing to educate them. Since the poor cannot afford
private schools, they must surrender their children to government
schools, which have a complete and coercive monopoly over their
education.
Now, either the poor have the capacity for wisdom and efficacy, or they
do not. If the poor do have the capacity for wisdom, then the government
is fully culpable for failing to cultivate it through education. If the
poor do not have the capacity for wisdom, then the government is fully
culpable for wasting massive resources in a futile attempt to educate
them – and also, they cannot justly be allowed to vote.
Again, although I know that this must be uncomfortable or annoying to
read through, I am willing myself to refrain from providing the clear
and moral anarchistic solutions to these seemingly intractable problems.
There is no point trying to give society a pill if society does not even
think that it is sick. If your appendix is inflamed, and I offer to
remove it for you, you will doubtless cry out your gratitude – if I run
up to you on the street, however, and offer to remove an appendage that
you believe to be both necessary and healthy, you would be highly
inclined to charge me with assault.
Given that anarchism represents a near complete break with political
society – although, as described above, a highly moral and rational
expansion of personal society – it remains in no way attractive if
nothing is seen to be particularly wrong with political society.
Churchill once famously remarked: “Democracy is the worst form of
government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from
time to time.” Anarchists believe this to be true, but would add that no
form of government is better than no government at all!
This is not to say that democracy is not a better form of government
than tyranny. It certainly is – my problem is that we have in the West
achieved democracy over the past few hundred years, and now seem to be
eternally content to rest on our laurels, so to speak.
I spent almost 15 years as a software entrepreneur, which may have
colored my perspective on this issue to some degree. The software field
reinvents itself almost from the ground up every year or two, it seems,
which demands a constant commitment to dynamism, continual learning, and
the abandonment of prior conceptions. The swift currents of perpetual
change quickly sweep the inert away.
Thus I fully appreciate the significant step forward represented by
democracy – but the mere fact that a thing is “better” in no way
indicates that it is “best.”
When medieval surgeons realized that a patient had a better chance of
surviving gangrene if they hacked off a limb, this could surely be
called a better solution – but it could scarcely be called the best
possible solution. Recognizing that prevention is always better than a
cure does not mean that all cures are equally good.
I have no doubt whatsoever that the first caveman to figure out how to
start a fire shared his knowledge with his tribe, and they all sat in a
cave, with their feet pointed towards the flickering flames, warm in the
midst of a winter chill for the first time, and grunted at each other:
“Well, it can’t possibly get any better than this!”
No doubt when, a thousand years later, someone figured out that it was
easier to capture and domesticate a cow rather than to continually hunt
game, everyone sat back in front of their fire, their bellies full of
milk, and grunted at each other: “Well, it can’t possibly get any better
than this!”
These things are genuine improvements, to be sure, and we should not
ever fail to appreciate the progress that we make – but neither should
we automatically and endlessly assume that every step forward is the
final and most perfect step, and that nothing can ever conceivably be
improved in the future.
Democracy is considered to be superior to tyranny – and rightly so I
believe – because to some degree it imitates the feedback mechanisms of
the free market. Politicians, it is said, must provide goods and
services to citizens, who provide feedback through voting.
It would seem to be logical to continue to extend that which makes
democracy work further and further. If I find that, as a doctor, I
infect fewer of my patients when I wash one little finger, then surely
it would make sense to start washing other parts of my hand as well.
Really, this is what my approach to anarchism is fundamentally about. If
voluntarism and feedback – a quasi-“market” – is what makes democracy
superior, then surely we should work as hard as possible to extend
voluntarism and feedback – particularly since we have the example of
real markets, which work spectacularly well.
There is a great fear among people – or a great desire, to be more
accurate – with regards to abandoning this system, when the perception
exists that it can be reformed instead.
Democracy is messy, it is said – politicians pander to special
interests, court voters with “free” goodies, manipulate the currency to
avoid directly increasing taxes, create endless and intractable problems
in the realms of education, welfare, incarceration and so on – but let’s
not throw the baby out with the bathwater! If you have good ideas for
improving the system, you should get involved, not sit back in your
armchair and criticize everything in sight! One of the rare privileges
of a living in a democracy is that anyone can get involved in the
political process, from running for a local school board to prime
minister or president of the entire country! Letter-writing campaigns,
grassroots activism, blogs, associations, clubs – you name it, there are
countless ways to get involved in the political process.
Given the degree of feedback available to the average citizen of a
democracy, it makes little sense to agitate for changing the system as a
whole. Since the system is so flexible and responsive, it is impossible
to imagine that it can be replaced with any system that is more flexible
– thus the practical ideal for anyone interested in social change is to
bring his ideas to the “marketplace” of democracy, see who he can get on
board, and implement his vision within the system – peacefully,
politically, democratically.
This is a truly wonderful fairy tale, which has only the slight
disadvantage of having nothing to do with democracy whatsoever.
When we think of a truly free market – otherwise known as the “free
market” – we understand that we do not have to work for years and years,
and give up thousands of hours and tens or hundreds of thousands of
dollars, to satisfy our wishes. If I want to shop for vegetarian food,
say, I do not have to spend years lobbying the local supermarket, or
joining some sort of somewhat ineffective advisory Board, and pounding
lawn signs, and writing letters, and cajoling everyone in the
neighborhood – all I have to do is go and buy some vegetarian food,
locally or over the Internet if I prefer.
If I want to date a particular woman, I do not have to lobby everyone in
a 10 block radius, get them to sign a petition, make stirring speeches
about my worthiness as a boyfriend, devote years of my life attempting
to get collective approval for asking her out. All I have to do is walk
up to her, ask her out and see if she says “yes.”
If I want to be a doctor, I do not have to spend years lobbying every
doctor in the country to get a majority approval for my application.
Neither do I have to pursue this process when I want to move, drive a
car, buy a book, plan for my retirement, change countries, learn a
language, buy a computer, choose to have a child, go on a diet, start an
exercise program, go into therapy, give to a charity and so on.
Thus it is clear that individuals are “allowed” to make major and
essential life decisions without consulting the majority. The vast
majority of our lives is explicitly anti-democratic, insofar as we
vehemently reserve the right to make our own decisions – and our own
mistakes – without subjecting them to the scrutiny and authority of
others. Why is it that we are “allowed” to choose who to marry, whether
to have children, and how to raise them – but we are violently not
allowed to openly choose where they go to school? Why is every decision
that leads up to the decision of how to educate a child is completely
free, personal, and anti-democratic – but the moment that the child
needs an education, a completely opposite methodology is enforced upon
the family? Why is the free anarchy of personal decisions – in direct
opposition to coercive authority – such a moral imperative for every
decision which leads up to the need for a child’s education – but then,
free anarchic choice becomes the greatest imaginable evil, and coercive
authority must be substituted in its place?
There is a particularly cynical side of me – which is not to say that
the cynicism is necessarily misplaced – which would argue that the
reason that there is no direct interference in having children is
because that way people will have more kids, which the state needs to
grow into taxpayers, in the same way that a dairy farmer needs his cows
to breed. Those who profit from political power always need new
taxpayers, but they certainly do not want independently critical and
rational taxpayers, since that is fundamentally the opposite of being a
taxpayer. Thus they do not interfere with havingchildren, only with the
education of children – just as a goose farmer will not interfere with
egg laying, but will certainly clip the wings of any geese he wishes to
keep alive and profit from.
At this point, you may be thinking that there are good reasons why
political coercion is substituted for personal anarchy in particular
situations. Perhaps there is some rule of thumb or principle which
separates the two which, if it can be discovered, will lay this mystery
bare.
If I break up with a girlfriend, for instance, I do not owe her anything
legally. If I marry her, however, I do. When I take a new job, I may be
subject to a probationary period of a few months, when I can be fired –
or quit – with impunity. We can think of many examples of such
situations – the major difference, however, is that these are all
voluntary and contractual situations.
The justification for a government – particularly a democratic
government – is really founded upon the idea of a “social contract.”
Because we happen to be born in a particular geographical location, we
“owe” the government our allegiance, time, energy and money for the rest
of our lives, or as long as we stay. This “contract” is open to
renegotiation, insofar as we can decide to alter the government by
getting involved in the political process – or, we can leave the
country, just as we can leave a marriage or place of employment. This
argument – which goes back to Socrates – is based upon an implied
contract that remains in force as long as we ourselves remain within the
geographical area ruled over by the government.
However, this idea of the “social contract” fails such an elemental test
that it is only testament to the power of propaganda that it has lasted
as a credible narrative for over 2,000 years.
Children cannot enter into contracts – and adults cannot have contracts
imposed upon them against their will. Thus being born in a particular
location does not create any contract, since it takes a lunatic or a
Catholic to believe that obligations accrue to a newborn squalling baby.
Thus children cannot be subjected to – or be responsible for – any form
of implicit social contract.
Adults, on the other hand, must be able to choose which contracts they
enter into – if they cannot, there is no differentiation between
imposing a contract on a child, and imposing a contract on an adult. I
cannot say that implicit contracts are invalid for children, but then
they magically become automatically valid when the child turns 18, and
bind the adult thereby.
It is important also to remember that there is fundamentally no such
thing as “the state.” When you write a check to pay your taxes, it is
made out to an abstract quasi-corporate entity, but it is cashed and
spent by real life human beings. Thus the reality of the social contract
is that it “rotates” between and among newly elected political leaders,
as well as permanent civil servants, appointed judges, and the odd
consultant or two. This coalescing kaleidoscope of people who cash your
check and spend your money is really who you have your social contract
with. (This can occur in the free market as well, of course – when you
take out a loan to buy a house, your contract is with the bank, not your
loan officer, and does not follow him when he changes jobs.)
However, to say that the same man can be bound by a unilaterally-imposed
contract represented by an ever-shifting coalition of individuals, in a
system that was set up hundreds of years before he was born, without his
prior choice – since he did not choose where he was born – or explicit
current approval, is a perfectly ludicrous statement.
We can generally accept as unjust any standard of justice that would
disqualify itself. When we are shopping, we would scarcely call it a
“sale” if prices had been jacked up 30%. We would not clip a “coupon”
that added a dollar to the price of whatever we were buying – in fact,
we would not call this a coupon at all!
If we examine the concept of the “social contract,” which is claimed as
a core justification for the existence of a government, it is more than
reasonable to ask whether the social contract would justly enforce the
social contract itself! In other words, if the government is morally
justified because of the ethical validity of an implicit and
unilaterally imposed contract, will the government defend implicit and
unilaterally imposed contracts? If I start up a car dealership and
automatically “sell” a car to everyone in a 10 block radius, and then
send them a bill for the car they have “bought” – and send them the car
as well, and bind their children for eternity in such a deal as well –
would the government enforce such a “contract”?
I think that we all know the answer to that question…
If I attempted to bring a social contract to an agency that claims as
its justification the existence and validity of the exact same social
contract, it would laugh in my face and call me insane.
Are you beginning to get a clear idea of the kind of moral and logical
contradictions that a statist system is based upon?
Many times throughout human history, certain societies have come to the
valid conclusion that an institution can no longer be reformed, but must
instead be abolished. The most notable example is slavery, but we can
think of others as well, such as the unity of church and state,
oligarchical aristocracy, military dictatorships, human or animal
sacrifices to the gods, rape as a valid spoil of war, torture,
pedophilia, wife abuse and so on. This does not mean of course that all
of these practices and institutions have faded from the world, but it
does mean that in many civilized societies, the essential debate is
over, and was not settled with the idea of “reforming” institutions such
as slavery. The origin of the phrase “rule of thumb” came from an
attempt to reform the beating of wives, and restrict it to beating your
wife with a stick no wider than your thumb. This practice was not
reformed, but rather abolished.
However well-intentioned these reforms may have been, we can at best
only call them ethical in terms of halting steps towards the final goal,
which is the elimination of the concept of wife beating as a moral norm
at all. In the same way, some reformers attempted to get slave owners to
beat their slaves less, or at least less severely, but with the
hindsight of history and our further moral development, we can see that
slavery was not fundamentally an institution that could ever be
reformed, but rather had to be utterly abolished. We can find
encouragement in such “reforms” only to the degree that they reduced
suffering in the present, while hopefully spurring on the goal of
abolishing slavery.
Any moralist who said that getting rid of slavery would be a criminal
and moral disaster of the first order, but instead encouraged slaves to
attempt to work within the system, or counseled slave owners to
voluntarily take on the goal of treating their slaves with less
brutality, could scarcely be called a moralist, at least by modern
standards. Instead, we would term such a “reformer” as a very handy
apologist for the existing brutality of the system. By pretending that
the evils inherent in slavery could be mitigated or eliminated through
voluntary internal reform, these “moralists” actually slowed or stalled
the progress towards abolition in many areas. By holding out the false
hope that an evil institution could be turned to goodness, these
sophists blunted the power of the argument from morality, which is that
slavery is an inherent evil, and thus cannot be reformed.
The finger-wagging admonition, “Rape more gently,” is oxymoronic. Rape
is the opposite of gentle, the opposite of moral.
This is how many anarchists view the proposition that the existing
system of political violence should be reformed somehow from within,
rather than fundamentally opposed on moral terms, as an absolute evil,
based on coercion and brutality, particularly towards children – with
the inevitable consequence that its only salvation can come from being
utterly abolished.
Along with the anarchistic moral arguments against the use of force to
solve problems come many well-developed economic arguments against the
long-term stability of any democratic political system.
To take just one example, let’s look at the problem of unequal
incentives.
In the United States, thousands of sugar producers receive massive state
subsidies and coercive protection from foreign competitors – benefits
which have been in place, for the most part, since the close of the war
of 1812. Although $1.2 billion was spent in 2005 subsidizing sugar
production, the majority of the money goes to a few dozen growers.
These sugar subsidies cost the US economy billions of dollars annually,
while netting major sugar producers millions of dollars a year each. The
average American consumer would have to fight for years, spend untold
hours and dollars attempting to overturn the subsidies in Congress – to
save, what? A few dollars a year apiece? None but a lunatic would
attempt it.
On the other hand, of course, these sugar growers will spend whatever
time and money it takes to preserve their massive influx of cash. It is
not that hard to figure out who will present stronger “incentives” – to
say the least – to Congress. It is not that hard to figure out just who
will donate as much as humanly possible to a Congressman’s run. It is
embarrassingly easy to figure out who will keep calling the congressman
at 2 a.m. with dire threats should he dare to question the value of the
subsidies, and promises of money if he refrains.
Politicians, like so many of us, take the rational path of least
resistance. A congressman will receive no thanks for killing these
subsidies and returning a few unproven and ignored dollars to his
average constituent’s pocket – such a “benefit” would scarcely even be
noticed. However, the sugar growers would raise bloody hell to the very
skies, as would all their employees, their hangers on, the professionals
they employ, and anyone else who benefits from the concentration of
illicit wealth that they enjoy.
Furthermore, should the subsidies be somehow cut, and the price of a
candy bar dropped a nickel, all that would happen is that some other
politician would impose a tax of, say, about a nickel on candy bars – to
save the children’s teeth, of course – thus generating more cash for him
to hand out and utterly nullifying any benefit to the consumer. Would
any rational politician pursue a policy that would enrage his
supporters, strengthen his enemies and win no new friends?
Of course not.
Thus it is clear to see that while no incentive exists to do the right
thing, every conceivable incentive exists to do the wrong thing. In the
case of sugar subsidies, the “sting” to the consumer is only a few
dollars a year – multiply this, however, thousands and thousands of
times over, for each special interest group, and we can see how the
taxpayer will inevitably die a death not by beheading, but rather by the
tiny bites of 10,000 mosquitoes, each feeding its young by feasting on a
droplet of his blood.
No democratic government has ever survived without taking a monopoly
control over the currency. The reason for this is simple – politicians
need to buy votes, but that illusion is hard to sustain if those you
give money to have to pay that money back within a few years in the form
of higher taxes. Taxpayers would get wise to this sort of game very
quickly, and so politicians need to find other ways to fog and befuddle
taxpayers. Deficit financing is one way – give money to people in the
present, then stick the bill to their children at some undefined point
in the future, when you’re no longer around – perfect!
Another great way of pretending to give people money is to inflate their
currency by printing more money. This way, you can give a man a hundred
dollars today, and just reduce the purchasing power of his dollar by 5%
next year by printing more. Not one person in a thousand will have any
idea what’s really going on, and besides, you always have the business
community to blame for “gouging” the consumer.
Another “solution” is to promise public-sector unions large increases in
salary, which only really take effect toward the end of your office, so
that the next administration gets stuck with the real bill. Also, you
can sign perpetual contracts giving them plenty of medical and
retirement benefits, the majority of which will only kick in when they
get older, long after you are gone.
Alternatively, you can sell long-term bonds that give you the cash right
now, while sticking future taxpayers in 10, 20 or 30 years with the bill
for repaying your principle, and accumulated interest.
One other option is to start licensing everything in sight – building
permits, hot dog stand permits, dog licenses and so on – thus grabbing a
lot of cash up front, and leaving your successors to deal with the
diminished tax base from lower economic activity in the future.
Or you can buy the votes of apartment-dwellers with “rent control” –
leaving the next few administrations to deal with the inevitable
resulting apartment shortage.
This list can go on and on – it is a list as old as the Roman and Greek
democracies – but the essential point is that democracy is always and
forever utterly unsustainable.
A basic fact of economics is that people respond to incentives – the
incentives in any statist society – democratic, fascist, communist,
socialist, you name it – are always so unbalanced as to turn the public
treasury into a kind of blood mad shark-driven feeding frenzy.
Well, say the defenders of democracy, but the people can always choose
to vote in other people who will fix the system!
One of the wonderful aspects of working from first principles, and
taking our evidence from the real world, is that we don’t have to
believe pious nonsense anymore. Except directly after significant wars,
when they need to re-grow their decimated tax bases, democratic
governments simply never ever get smaller.
The logic of this remains depressingly simple, and just as depressingly
inevitable.
A central question that any voter who claims to wish to be informed must
ask is: why is this man’s name on the ballot?
The standard answer is that he has a vision to fix the neighborhood, the
city, or the country, and so he has nobly dedicated his life to public
service, and needs your vote so that he can begin fixing the problem. He
is a pragmatic idealist who knows that compromises must be made, but who
can still make tangible improvements in your life.
Of course, this is all pure nonsense, as we can well see from the fact
that things in a democracy always get worse, not better. Standards of
living decline, national debt explodes, household debt increases,
educational achivements plummet, poverty rates increase, incarceration
rates increase, unfunded liabilities skyrocket – and yet, election after
election, the sheep run to the polls and feverishly scribble their hopes
on to the ballots, certain that this time, everything will turn around!
(For those reading this in the future, we are currently right in the
middle of “Obama-mania.”)
The question remains – why is this man on the ballot?
We all know that it takes an enormous amount of money and influence to
run for any kind of substantial office. The central question is, then:
why do people give money to a candidate?
I’m not talking about a national presidential campaign, where obviously
people give a lot of money to the candidate in the hopes of giving him
power to achieve some sort of shared goals and so on.
No, I mean: where does the money to get started even come from?
Why would pharmaceutical companies, aerospace companies, engineering
companies, manufacturing companies, farmers, and public-sector unions
and so on give money and support to a candidate?
Clearly, these groups are not handing out cash for purely idealistic
reasons, since they are in the business of making money, at least for
their members. Thus they must be giving money to potential candidates in
return for political favors down the road – preferential treatment, tax
breaks, tariff restrictions on competitors, government contracts etc.
In other words, any candidate that you get to vote for must have already
been bought and paid for by others.
Does this sound like an odd and cynical assertion? Perhaps – but it is
very easy to figure out if a candidate has been bought and paid for.
Candidates will always talk in stirring tones about “sacrifice” and so
on, but you surely must have noticed by now that no candidate ever talks
specifically about the spending that he is going to cut. You never hear
him say that he is going to balance the budget by cutting the spending
of X, Y or Z. Everything is either couched in abstract terms, or
specific promises to specific groups. (At the moment, the current fetish
– in leftist circles – is to pretend that 47 million Americans can get
“free” healthcare if the government lowers the tax breaks on a few
billionaires.)
In other words, if you don’t see anyone else’s head on the chopping
block, that is because it is your head on the chopping block.
Of course, if the government really wanted to help the economy at the
expense of some very rich people, it would simply annul the national
debt – in effect, declare bankruptcy, and start all over again.
Why does it not do this? Why does it never even approach this topic? We
have seen price controls on a variety of goods and services over the
past few generations – why not simply place a moratorium on paying
interest on the national debt, at least for the time being?
Well, the simple answer is that the government simply cannot survive
without a constant infusion of loans, largely from foreign lenders.
This is a bit of a clue for you as to how important your vote really is,
and how concerned your leaders are about your personal and particular
issues – relative to, say, those of foreign lenders.
Ah, you might argue, but why would a pharmaceutical company, say, give
money to a potential candidate, since no deal can possibly be put down
in writing, and that potential candidate might well take the money, and
then just not take the calls from that pharmaceutical company when he or
she gets into power?
Well, this is a distinct possibility, of course, but it has a relatively
simple solution.
When a candidate is interested in taking a run at any reasonably high
office, he goes around to various places and asks for money.
When you ask someone for a few thousand dollars, naturally, his first
question is going to be: “What are you going to do for me in return?”
Early on in any particular political race, there are quite a number of
candidates. Anyone who wants to donate money to a political candidate in
the hopes of gaining political favors down the road is only going to do
so if he believes that the candidate will fulfill the unwritten
obligation – the “anti-social contract,” if you like.
In politics, as in business, credibility is efficiency. Those who have
built up reputations for keeping their promises end up being able to do
business on a handshake, which keeps their costs down considerably. No
new person entering a field will have the credibility or track record to
be able to achieve this enviable efficiency, and so will have to earn it
over the course of many years.
Thus we know for certain that when a company gives money to a political
candidate, in the expectation of return favors in the future, that
political candidate already has an excellent track record of doing just
that. This kind of information will have been passed around certain
communities – “Joe X is a man of his word!” – just as the reliability of
a drug dealer and the quality of his product is passed around in certain
other communities.
Thus we know that any candidate who receives significant funding from
special interest groups is a man who has consistently proven his
“integrity to corruptibility” in the past – for if he has no track
record, or an inconsistent track record, no one will give him money to
get started.
(Just as a side note, this is a very interesting example of exactly why
anarchism will work – we do not need the state to enforce contracts,
since the state itself functions on implicit contracts that can never be
legally enforced.)
In other words, whenever you see a name on the ballot, you can be
completely certain that that name represents a man who has already been
bought and paid for over the course of many years, and that those who
have paid for him do not have, let us say, your best interests at heart.
But we can go one step further.
Since all the money that moves around in a political system must come
from somewhere – the millions of dollars that are given to the sugar
farmers must come from taxpayers – we can be sure that just about every
benefit that special interest groups seek to gain comes at your expense.
Pharmaceutical companies want an extension on their patents so they can
charge you more money. Domestic steel companies want to increase
barriers against imported steel so they can charge you more money. If a
government union wants additional benefits, that will cost you. If the
police want to expand the war on drugs, that will cost you security,
safety and money.
Whoever strives to benefit from the public purse has their hand groping
towards your pocket.
Thus it is perfectly fair and reasonable to remind you that every name
that you see on the ballot is diametrically opposed to your particular
and personal interests, since they have been paid for by people who want
to rob you blind.
Another aspect of “democricide” is the inevitable and constant
escalation of public spending necessary to achieve or maintain political
power.
Let us take the example of a mayor running for his second term. When he
was running for his first term, sewage treatment workers donated $20,000
to his campaign, and in return he granted them a 10% raise. Now that he
is running for his second term, and cannot give them another 10% raise,
they have no reason to donate to his campaign. Thus he either has to
offer the sewage treatment workers some other benefit, or he has to
create some new program or benefit which he can dangle in front of some
new group, in order to secure their donations. This is why political
candidates always announce new spending when they throw their hats into
the ring – the new spending is the rather unsubtle promise of benefits
which will be granted to those who donate to his campaign. A new
stadium, a new convention center, a new bridge, a new arts program, new
housing projects, highway expansions and so on – all of these inevitably
and permanently raise the “high water mark” of governmental spending,
and are an absolute requirement of running for office.
Now, our aforementioned sewage treatment workers would of course prefer
a permanent 10% raise rather than a one-time cash bonus. Thus they will
always try to negotiate a permanent contract rather than continue to be
at the mercy of the will and whim of their political masters.
As this process continues, the proportion of non-discretionary spending
in any political budget grows and grows. This is another reason why new
spending initiatives must always be created in order to secure new
donations. Money cannot be shifted from one area to another, because it
has permanently been earmarked for a particular group in return for a
one-time political contribution in the past.
If the mayor who is running for his second term decides to attempt to
roll back the 10% raise, in order to free up money which he can then
offer to someone else in return for campaign contributions, he would be
committing political suicide. He would be breaking a freely-signed
contract, sticking it to the working man, and provoking a very smelly
strike – but for his own particular self-interest, the effects would be
even worse.
Remember, people will donate to a political campaign based on an
implicit contract of future rewards from the public treasury. If a
candidate attempts to “roll back” benefits that he has distributed
previously in return for donations, not only will he incur the wrath of
the existing special-interest group, but he will be revealed as a man
who breaks his implicit and unenforceable “contracts.” Since this
candidate can no longer be relied upon to give public money back to
those who donate to his campaign, he will find that his campaign
donations dry up almost immediately, and his political career comes to
an abrupt end.
Of course, ex-politicians are highly prized as lobbyists as well, but if
this mayor breaks faith with a donator, he will no longer be valuable in
that capacity either, and will forego significant income in his
post-political career.
Finally, any political candidate who has channeled public money to past
donators faces the problem of blackmail. If he attempts to cross any of
his prior supporters, mysterious leaks to the press will start to
emerge, talking about the sleazy backroom deals that got him in power –
thus also effectively ending his political career. All the other
candidates will piously deride his cynical corruption, while of course
making their own sleazy backroom deals in turn.
(It is highly instructive to note that two well-known fictional
portrayals of the political campaign process – “The West Wing” and “The
Wire” – repeatedly portray the candidate begging for money, but never
once show why he receives it – the motives of his donors. The reason for
this is simple: they wish to portray an idealistic politician, and so
they cannot possibly reveal the reasons why people are giving him money.
If the fictional story were to follow the inevitable “laws” of
democracy, the storyline would be abruptly truncated, or the lead
character would be revealed as far less sympathetic. The candidate would
ask for money, and then the potential donor would indicate the favor he
wanted in return. Then, the candidate would either refuse, thus ending
his campaign for lack of funds – or he would agree, thus ending any real
sympathy we have for him. This basic truth – like so many in a statist
society – can never be discussed, even on a show like “The Wire,” which
has little problem revealing corruption everywhere else. A policeman can
be shown breaking a child’s fingers, but the true nature of the
political process must be forever hidden…)
Thus we can see that – at least at the level of economics – democracy is
a sort of slow-motion suicide, in which you are told that it is the
highest civic virtue to approve of those who want to rob you.
I do not want this book to become a critique of democracy – but rather,
as I have said before, my goal is simply to help you to understand the
myriad contradictions involved in any logical or moral defense of a
state-run society.
If you do not even know that society is sick, you will never be
interested in a cure.
In the interests of efficiency – both yours and mine – I have decided to
keep this book as short as possible. If I have not shown you at least
some the logical and moral problems with our existing way of organizing
society by now, I doubt that I shall ever be able to.
If we accept that perhaps some of the criticisms of statism presented in
this little book are at least potentially somewhat valid, one essential
question remains.
If you can easily understand the above simple and effective criticisms –
compared to, say, the mathematics behind the theory of relativity – then
the question must be asked:
“Why have you never heard of these criticisms?”
This question packs more of a punch than you may realize.
If I put forward the charge that our society is currently organized
along the principles of violence, control and brutal punishment, but you
have never heard this argument before, despite the eager talents of tens
of thousands of well-paid intellectuals, professors, pundits,
journalists, writers and so on, then there must be some reason – or
series of reasons – why such a universal silence remains in place.
The standards of proof for startling new theories must be raised exactly
to the degree that those new theories are easy to understand. New
theories that are very hard to understand are easier to accept as
potentially true, simply because of their difficulty. New theories that
are very easy to understand, however, face a far higher hurdle, since
they must explain why they have not been understood, discussed or
disseminated before.
In this final section, I will talk about why I think anarchism is almost
never openly discussed – and is in fact constantly scorned, feared and
derided – and I will present what I think is an interesting paradox,
which is that the degree to which anarchism remains undiscussed is
exactly the degree to which anarchism will undoubtedly work.
Let’s have a look at academia, focusing on the Arts, where anarchism
could be a potential topic – areas such as Political Science, Economics,
History, Philosophy, Sociology etc.
It is true that a few intellectuals have had successful careers while
expressing sympathy for anarchism – on the left, we have the example of
Noam Chomsky; in the libertarian camp, we have the example of Murray
Rothbard. However, the vast majority of academics simply roll their eyes
if and when the subject of anarchism as a viable alternative to a
violence-based society ever arises.
To understand this, the first thing that we need to recognize about
academia is that, since it is highly subsidized by governments, demand
vastly outstrips supply. In other words, there are far more people who
want to become academics then there are jobs in academia.
Normally what would occur in this situation – were academia actually
part of the free market – is that wages and perks would decline to the
point where equilibrium would be reached.
At the moment, academics get several months off during the summer, do
not labor under oppressive course loads, are virtually impossible to
fire once they reach tenure, get to spend their days reading, writing
and discussing ideas (which many of us would consider a hobby), travel
with expenses paid to conferences, receive high levels of social
respect, get paid sabbatical leaves, a full array of highly lucrative
benefits, and can choose comfortable retirements or continued
involvement in academia, as they see fit – and often make salaries in
the six figures to boot!
Given the number of non-monetary benefits involved in being an academic,
in a free market situation, wages would fall precipitously, or job
requirements would rise. However, since academics – particularly in the
US – basically work under the protection of a highly subsidized union,
this does not occur.
Since the job itself is so innately desired by so many people, what
results is a “sellers market,” in which dozens of qualified candidates
jostle for each individual job. Like Angelina Jolie in a nightclub,
those with the most to offer can be enormously picky.
Also, since academics cannot be fired, if a department head hires an
unpleasant, troublesome, difficult or just unnerving person, he will
have to live with that decision for the next 30-odd years. If divorce
became impossible, people would be much more careful about choosing
compatible spouses.
This is one simple and basic explanation for the exaggerated politeness
and conviviality in the world of academia. People who are cantankerous,
or who ask uncomfortable questions, or who reason from first principles
and thus eliminate endless debating, or whose positions place into
question the value and ethics of those around them, simply do not get
hired.
In a free market situation, original and challenging thinking would be
of great interest to students, who would doubtless pay a premium to be
mentally stimulated in such a way. However, since the majority of
funding in academia comes from governments, students have virtually no
influence over the hiring of professors.
Let us imagine the progress of a wannabe anarchist graduate student.
In his undergraduate classes, he will annoy the professors and irritate
his fellow students by asking uncomfortable questions that they cannot
answer. If he talks about the violence that is at the root of state
funding, he will also be open to the charge of rank hypocrisy – which I
can assure you will be lavishly supplied – since he is accepting state
money in the form of a subsidized university education.
His implicit criticism of his professors – that they are funded and
secured through violence – will be highly annoying to them. Although
this anarchist may grind his discontented way through an undergraduate
degree, he will find it very hard to get any kinds of letters of
reference from his professors to gain entrance into graduate school. If
a professor talks about the applicant’s anarchism in his letter of
recommendation, anyone evaluating such a letter will be utterly
bewildered as to why such a recommendation is being made – thus
devaluing any such letters from said professor in the future.
If the professor who recommends an anarchist finds that his future
recommendations fall on more skeptical eyes, then the word will very
quickly spread that taking this professor’s course, and getting a letter
of recommendation from him, is the kiss of death for any academic
aspirant.
Thus this professor will find enrollment in his courses mysteriously
declining, which will not be helpful to his career, to say the least.
If the professor does not mention the grad student applicant’s
anarchism, his fate becomes even worse, since even more time will be
wasted interviewing an applicant that no one actually wants. Those on
the receiving end of such a letter of recommendation will find it
impossible to believe that the professor did not know that the student’s
anarchism was a factor, and so will view his letter as a bizarre form of
passive aggression, and will be that much less likely to view any future
recommendations even remotely positively.
Thus an academic who writes a letter of recommendation for a student
whose views will be disconcerting or discomfiting to others is
undermining his value to his future students for no clear benefit
whatsoever. We can safely assume that an academic who has reached the
rank of professor – even prior to tenure – is not a man blind to his own
long-term self-interest.
Even if this anarchist were to somehow get through to a Masters program,
the same problems would exist, although they would be even worse than
his undergraduate degree. Those who are in a Masters program –
particularly in the Arts – are mostly there with the specific goal of
securing a position in academia. In other words, they are not there for
the relentless pursuit of inviolate truth, but rather to ingratiate
themselves with their professors, do the kind of research that will get
them noticed, and gain the kind of approval from those above them that
will give them a boost up the next rung of the ladder.
Thus, when the anarchist begins talking about his theories, he will face
either passive or aggressive hostility from those around him, who will
view him as an irritating and counterproductive time-waster. Whether or
not his theories are true is actually beside the point – the reality is
that his theories actively interfere with the pursuit of academic
success, which is why people are in the classroom in the first place.
Also, since the anarchist claims the power to see through the universal
veneer of proclaimed self-interest to the core motivations beneath – yet
does not see the core motivations of those around him in graduate school
– he will also be seen to be obstinately blind. “You should believe the
truth,” he will say, without seeing that these academic aspirants are
not there for the truth, but rather to get a job in academia. In other
words, he is avoiding the truth as much as they are.
Furthermore, by continually reminding people that the existing society
in general – and academics in particular – is funded through violence,
the anarchist is actively offending and insulting everyone around him.
There are very few people who can absorb the moral charge of blindness
to evil and corruption and come back with open-mindedness and curiosity.
If the anarchist is right, then the professors are corrupt, and the
academic aspirants should really abandon their fields and go into the
private sector, or become self-employed, or something along those lines.
However, these people have already invested years of their lives and
hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income in pursuit of a position
in academia. They obviously do not want a position in the free market,
since they are in a graduate arts degree program – and should they leave
that program, a good portion of the entire value that they have
accumulated will vanish.
We could examine this process for much longer, but let us end with this
point.
Let us imagine that a tenured academic reads this book and agrees with
at least the potential validity of some of the arguments it contains. He
does not have to really worry about getting fired, so why would he not
begin to raise these questions with his colleagues?
Well, because these views will discredit him with his colleagues,
display what they would consider “poor judgment,” (and in some ways they
would not be wrong!) and this would have a highly deleterious effect on
his ability to get published, speak at conferences, attract students,
and enjoy a convivial and collegial work environment with his peers.
He will thus harm his own pleasure, career and interests, without
changing anyone’s mind about anarchism – so why would he pursue such a
course?
When an environment is corrupt, rational self-interest is automatically
and irredeemably corrupted as well. We can see this easily in the realm
of politics, but it is harder to see in the realm of academia.
Before I started this section, I said that I would present an
interesting paradox, which is that the degree to which anarchism remains
undiscussed is exactly the degree to which anarchism will undoubtedly
work.
Anarchism is fundamentally predicated on the basic reality that violence
is not required to organize society. Violence in the form of
self-defense is acceptable, of course, but the initiation of the use of
force is not only morally evil, but counterproductive from a pragmatic
standpoint as well.
Anarchism – at least as I approach it – is not a form of relentless
pacifism which rejects any coercive responses to violence. My
formulation of an anarchistic society is one which has perfectly
powerful and capable mechanisms for dealing with violent crime, in the
absence of a centralized group of criminals called the state. In fact,
an anarchistic society will undoubtedly deal with the problems of
violent crime in a far more proactive and beneficial manner than our
existing systems, which in fact do far more to provoke violence and
criminality than they do to reduce or oppose it.
Anarchists recognize the power of implicit and voluntary social
contract, and the power of both positive incentives such as pay and
career success, as well as negative incentives such as social
disapproval, economic exclusion and outright ostracism.
Thus in a very interesting way, the more that anarchism is excluded from
the social discourse, the greater belief anarchists can have in the
practicality of their own solutions.
In the realm of academia, obviously there is no central coercive
committee that will shoot or imprison anyone who brings up anarchism in
a positive light – there is no “state” in the realm of the university,
yet the “rules” are universally respected and enforced, spontaneously,
without planning, without coordination – and without violence!
This irony becomes even greater in the realm of politics, where the
implicit “contracts” of political backroom deals are universally
enforced through a process of positive selection for corruption, in that
those who do not “pay back” their contributors with public money are
automatically excluded from the system.
Thus both academia and the state itself work on anarchistic principles,
which is the spontaneous self-organization and enforcement of unwritten
rules without relying on violence.
A truly stateless society, where such rules could be made explicit and
openly contractual, would function even more effectively.
In other words, if anarchism were openly talked about in state-funded
academia, it would be very likely that anarchism would never work in
practice.
If the unenforceable corruption of democracy did not “work” so well,
that would be a significant blow against the practical efficacy of
anarchism.
Academics face an enormous challenge – particularly in economics – which
is the charge of rank hypocrisy.
Economists are nearly universal in their support for free trade, yet of
course most economists work in state-funded or state-supported
institutions such as universities, the World Bank, the IMF and so on –
and in academia in particular, take shelter behind enormously high
barriers to entry in the form of institutionalized protectionism, and
shield themselves from market forces through tenure.
Economists have a number of sophisticated responses to the question why,
if voluntarism and free markets are so good, do they specifically
exclude themselves from the push and pull of the free market?
First of all, academics will argue, the truth of a proposition is not
determined by the integrity of the proposer (if Hitler says that two
plus two is four, we cannot reasonably oppose him by saying that he is
evil). Secondly, many academics will say that they have merely inherited
the system from prior academics, and that they held these free-market
views before they achieved tenure. Thirdly, they can argue that they do
face possible unemployment, however unlikely, should their department
close, and so on.
These are all very interesting arguments, and are worthy of our
attention I think, but are fundamentally irrelevant to the question of
academia.
It is a common defense of hypocritical intellectuals to say that their
arguments cannot be judged by their own contradictory behaviour, but
must be viewed on their own merits – but this argumentdoes become rather
tiresome after a while.
To see what I mean, let us imagine a man named Bob who claims that his
sole professional goal in life is motivating others to lose weight by
following his diet. He continually proclaims that it is very important
to be slim, and that only his diet will make you slim – but strangely
enough, Bob himself remains morbidly obese!
It is certainly true that we cannot absolutely judge the efficacy and
value of Bob’s diet solely by how much he weighs – but we can
empirically judge whether or not Bob believes in the efficacy and value
of his own diet.
Life is short, and the more rapidly we can make accurate decisions, the
better off we are.
Imagine that, this afternoon, a disheveled and smelly man stops you on
the street and offers his services as a financial advisor, but says that
he cannot take your phone calls because after he declared personal
bankruptcy, he has been forced to live in his car. It is certainly
logically true that we cannot empirically use his situation to judge the
value of his financial advice – but we can know for sure the following:
either he has followed his own financial advice, which has clearly
resulted in a disaster, or he has not, which means that he does not
believe that it is either valuable or true.
Thus, based on the principles of mere efficiency, you would never hire
such a vagrant as your trusted financial adviser – partly also due to
the basic fact that he seems completely oblivious to the effect that his
approach has on his credibility. Does he not recognize how you will view
him, based on his presentation? If he does not realize how he appears to
you, this also indicates his near-complete disconnect from reality.
In the same way, if I show up for a job interview wearing only a pair of
underpants, two clothes-pins and a colander[1], it is clearly true that
my choice of dress cannot be objectively used to judge the quality of my
professional knowledge – but it certainly is the case that my judgment
as a whole can be somewhat called into question, to say the least.
If you do not follow your own advice, I cannot ipso facto use that to
judge your advice as incorrect, but I certainly can judge that you
believe your advice to be incorrect, and make a completely rational
decision about its value thereby.
Academics claim that their teachings are designed to have some effect in
the outside world. No medical school teaches Klingon anatomy, because
such “knowledge” would have no effect in the world.
Economists teach ideas so that better solutions can be implemented in
the real world, which we know because they constantly complain that
governments ignore their economic advice. In other words, they are
frustrated because politicians constantly choose personal career goals
over objectively valuable actions and decisions.
If I am trying to sell a diet book, and I am morbidly obese, obviously
that totally undermines my credibility. What is the best way, then, for
me to increase my credibility? Is it for me to endlessly complain that
other people just don’t seem to believe in my diet?
Of course not.
The simple solution is for me to apply my efforts to that which I
actually have control over – my own eating – and stop nagging other
people to do what I obviously do not want to do.
This way, I can actually gain even more credibility than I would have
had if I had been naturally slim to begin with. Since most people who
want to diet are overweight, surely a man who loses a lot of weight –
and keeps it off – by following his own diet has even more credibility!
What does this translate to in the realm of academics?
Well, almost all economists accept that free trade is the best way to
organize economic interactions – thus they have the enormous collective
advantage of already sharing common ideals, which is scarcely the case
with politicians and other groups that economists criticize for failing
to implement free trade.
If economists believe that free market voluntarism is the best way to
organize interactions – and clearly they have far more control over
their own profession than they do over governments – then they should
work as hard as they can to apply those principles to their own
profession. To lose their own excess weight, so to speak, rather than
endlessly nag other people to follow the diet that they themselves
reject.
Thus rather than lecture about the virtues and values of a voluntary
free-market – with the clear goal of changing the behavior of others –
economists should get together and change their ownprofession to reflect
the values that they expect others to follow.
This way, they can do all the research, keep careful notes and publish
papers describing the process of getting an organization to reform
itself according to the commonly-accepted values of its members. The
pitfalls and challenges of achieving such a noble end would be well
worth documenting, as a guide and help to others.
Furthermore, since economists all believe that free trade improves
quality and productivity, they could as a group measure the quality and
productivity of the economics profession before and after the
introduction of free trade and voluntarism. This would be an enormously
valuable body of research, and would empirically support the case for
going through the challenges of undoing protectionism within a
profession.
Since academics very much want to have an effect on the outside world,
by far the best way of achieving that goal is to reform their own
profession to reflect the values that they already profess and hold as a
group. They can then bring their own experience – not to mention
integrity – to bear on the far greater challenges of helping governments
and other organizations reform themselves.
It is quite fascinating that economists – to my limited knowledge at
least – have produced virtually endless studies on the negative effects
of protectionism in every conceivable field except their own.
If economists do take on the challenge of reforming their own profession
according to their own commonly-held values, either such a revolution
will succeed, or it will not.
If the revolution succeeds, academics would have the theoretical
understanding, empirical evidence and professional credibility to bring
their case for free trade to others, with a far greater chance of being
successful.
If the revolution does not succeed, then clearly economists would have
to give up the pretense that their arguments could ever have any effect
on the outside world, and could begin the process of dismantling their
own profession, since it would be revealed as little more than a fraud –
the “selling” of a diet that was impossible to follow.
If economists cannot achieve conformity to their values within their own
profession, where they share very similar methodologies, have the same
goals, and speak the same language, then clearly asking other
professions – with far greater obstacles – to reform themselves is
ridiculously hypocritical, and fundamentally false.
I am sure that economists have far too much personal and professional
integrity to take money for “snake oil” solutions that can never be
implemented.
Thus I eagerly look forward to these economists taking their own advice,
and reforming their own profession, where they have real control, in
order to show other people that it can be done – and how it should be
done – and to, as a group, truly achieve the goals that they so nobly
profess as their main motivation.
What do you think the odds of this occurring are?
This is why you have never heard of anarchism.
Human beings are so constituted – and I in no way think that this is a
bad thing of course – to be exquisitely good at negotiating cost/benefit
scenarios. This ability is fundamental to all forms of organic life, in
that those who are unsuccessful at calculating these scenarios are
quickly weeded out of the gene pool – but human beings possess this
ability at a staggeringly brilliant conceptual level.
If you have gotten this far in this book, I can tell at least a few
things about you. Obviously, you are curious and open-minded, and
largely un-offended by original arguments, as long as they at least
strive for rationality. I strongly doubt that you are in academia – or
if you are, I fully expect lengthy, obtuse and condescending attacks on
my arguments to appear in my inbox, or on your blog, within a few hours.
Potential academics have in my experience been irredeemably hostile to
what I do because it puts them in an exquisitely tortuous position (this
is particularly the case with my book “Universally Preferable Behavior:
A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics”).
Wannabe academics have to believe that they are motivated by the pursuit
of truth, not of tenure. Given that they have to ingratiate themselves
with their academic masters, they must also believe that their
professors are motivated by the pursuit of truth as well, not of power,
salary and tenure. We can honorably submit ourselves to a moral teacher;
we cannot honorably submit ourselves to an amoral teacher.
If academics is about the pursuit of truth, then my particular
contributions to the field should at least garner some interest, if only
because of the success I have had with laypeople. However, a wannabe
grad student will face extreme anxiety at even the thought of bringing
some of my work to the attention of his professors, because he knows
what their reaction will be – scorn, dismissal, cynical laughter or
genial bewilderment – and also that by bringing my work to his
professors, he will be undermining the forward progress of his academic
career.
Thus what I do is tortuous, particularly to graduate students, because
it reveals to them the basic reality of academia, which is that it is
not largely to do with the pursuit of truth, but rather is about the
currying of influence and favor, and the pursuit of career goals –
inevitably, at the expense of the truth itself.
When this is revealed, the long barren stretch of half a decade or more
required to pursue and achieve a Ph.D. becomes a desert that truly feels
too broad to cross. The anxiety and despair that my work evokes creates
fear and hostility – and it is far easier to take that out on me then to
question or criticize the academic system or the professors whose
approval these moral heroes depend upon.
Furthermore, questioning the moral roots of the system they are embedded
in will simply get them ejected from that system (just as anarchistic
theory would predict) and will in no way reform that system, or change
anyone’s mind within it, or improve the quality of teaching. Thus those
who remain will inevitably tell themselves the comforting lie that the
system is flawed, granted, but that leaving it would be to abandon one’s
post, so to speak, and so the practical and moral thing to do is to
struggle through, and improve the quality of teaching as best one can in
the future.
Of course, this is all utterly impossible, but it is a tantalizing
mythology that does help the average grad student sleep at night.
The reason that I’m talking about these kinds of calculations is that we
all face this choice in life when we are presented with a startling and
unforeseen argument that we cannot dismantle. Our truly brilliant
ability to process cost/benefit scenarios immediately kicks out a series
of syllogisms such as the following:
· Anarchist arguments are valid BUT…
· I will never have any influence on the elimination of the state in my
lifetime;
· I will alienate, frustrate and bewilder those around me by bringing
these arguments up;
· I will not have any influence on the thinking of those around me;
· If people have to choose between the truth that I bring and their own
illusions, they will ditch both me
and the truth without as much as a backward glance.
· Thus I will have alienated myself from those around me, for the sake
of a goal I can never achieve.
These sorts of calculations flash rapidly through our minds, resulting
in an irritation towards the arguments that can never be directly
expressed, and fear of any further examination of the truth of one’s
social and professional relations.
Society is really an ecosystem of agreed-upon premises or arguments,
usually based on tradition. Those who accept the “truth” of these
arguments find their practical course through the existing social
infrastructure enormously eased; they do not ask people to really think,
they do not discomfort others with uncomfortable truths, and thus what
passes for discourse in the world resembles more two mirrors facing each
other – a narrow infinity of empty reflection, if you will pardon the
metaphor.
When a new idea attempts to enter into the intellectual bloodstream of
society, so to speak, those who have placed their bets on the
continuance of the existing belief structure react as any biological
defense system would, with a combination of attack and isolation.
When you get an infection, your immune system will first attempt to kill
off the bacteria; if it is unable to do that, it will attempt to isolate
it, forming a hard shell or cyst around the infection.
In a similar way, when a new idea “infects” the existing ecosystem of
social thinking, intellectuals will first attempt to ignore it, but then
will attempt to “kill it off” using a wide variety of emotionally
manipulative tricks, such as scorn, eye-rolling, cynical laughter,
aggression, insults, condescension, ad hominem attacks and so on.
If these aggressive tactics do not work for some reason, then the
fallback position is a rigid attempt to “isolate” those who support the
new paradigm.
These tactics are so staggeringly effective that hundreds or thousands
of years can pass between significant new intellectual movements and
achievements. The last great leaps forward in Western thinking, it could
be argued, occurred around the time of the Enlightenment, several
hundred years ago, when the new ideas of the free market, and the power
and validity of the scientific method emerged. (“Democracy” and the
“separation of church and state” were not new concepts, but were
inherited from the expanding interest in Roman jurisprudence that
occurred after the 14^(th) century through the rise of cities, and the
subsequent necessity for more comprehensive and detailed civic laws.)
Since then, there have been some dramatic increases in personal
liberties – notably, the non-enforcement of slavery and the expansion of
property rights for women, but in the 20^(th) century, most of the “new”
developments in human thinking tended to be tribal throwbacks,
irrational in theory and evil in practice, such as fascism, communism,
socialism, collectivism and so on.
Society “survives” by accepting a fairly rigid set of unquestionable
axioms. If people start poking around at the root of those axioms, they
are first ignored, then attacked, then isolated. Individuals have almost
no ability to overturn these core axioms within their own lifetimes –
and thus it takes a somewhat “irrational” dedication to truth and reason
to take this course.
This is also something that I know about you…
Socrates described himself as a “gadfly” that buzzed around annoying
those in society through his persistent questioning – but he himself was
bothered by an internal “gadfly” which constantly nagged at him with
these same problems.
Given the extraordinarily high degree of discomfort that is generated by
questioning social axioms, I know for sure that you are also possessed
by one of these internal “Socratic daemons” which will not let you rest
in the face of irrationality, or remain content with pseudo-answers to
essential questions.
Now that I have opened up at least the possibility of these answers up
in your mind, I know that you will keep returning to them, almost
involuntarily, turning them over, looking for weaknesses – because of a
kind of obsession that you have, or a mania for consistency with reason
and evidence.
There are very few of us who, in some sort of Rawlsian scenario, would
get on bended knee before birth and demand to be granted this kind of
obsessive compulsive dedication to philosophical truth. Given the high
degree of social inconvenience, the resulting anxiety, hostility and
isolation, and the near-certainty that we shall not live to see the
truth we know accepted at large, it would seem to be almost a form of
masochism to reopen arguments which everyone else accepts as both proven
and moral. We might as well be a police detective questioning a case
with 200 eyewitnesses, a confession, and a smoking gun. Just as this
detective would be viewed as annoying, irrational and strange…
Well, I’m sure that you get the picture, because you live in this
picture.
Thus in attempting to answer the question as to why these ideas, though
rational and relatively simple to understand, remain unspoken and
unexamined, we can see that any purely practicalcalculation of the costs
and benefits of bringing these issues up, either in academics, or in
one’s own personal social circle, would lead any reasonable person to
avoid these thoughts for the same reason that we would give a hissing
cobra a wide berth.
Of course, the reason that society does progress at all is because all
thinking men and women pay at least a surface lip-service to the
principles of reason and evidence.
The corruption and falsification of social discourse that inevitably
results from state-funded intellectualism represents an enormously
powerful and seemingly-overwhelming “front” that can forever keep a
rational examination of core premises at bay.
Unfortunately for the academics – though fortunately for us – the rise
of the Internet has to at least some degree diminished the threat of
isolation, so that those of us dedicated to “truth at all costs” can
never be fully isolated from social interaction, even if we must be
satisfied with the arm’s-length intimacy of digital relationships.
Whereas in the past I would have had to endure a crippling and futile
isolation from those around me, which would have very likely broken my
spirit and my desire for “truth at all costs,” I can now converse freely
with like-minded people at any time, day or night.
The cost of “the truth at all costs” has thus come down considerably,
making it a far more attractive pursuit.
Without a doubt, there is no conceivable way to make the case that you
should examine or explore anarchy in order to achieve anarchistic goals
at a political level. That would be like asking Francis Bacon, the
founder of the modern scientific method, to pursue his ideas in order to
secure funding for a particle accelerator.
When I was younger, I studied acting and playwriting for two years at
the National Theater School in Montréal, Canada. On our very first day,
we eager thespians were told that if we could be happy doing anything
other than acting, we should do that other thing. Acting is such an
irrational career to pursue that no sane calculation of the costs and
benefits would ever lead anyone in that direction.
In the same way, if you can be happy and content without examining the
core assumptions held by those around you, I would strongly suggest that
you never bring the contents of this book up with anyone, and look at
what is written about here as a mere unorthodox intellectual exercise,
like examining the gameplay that might result from alternate chess
rules.
If it is the case, however, that you have a passion for the truth – or,
as it more often feels, that the truth has an unwavering passion for you
– then the discontentedness and alienation that you have always felt can
be profitably alleviated through an exploration of philosophical truth.
Once we begin to cross-examine our own core beliefs – the prejudices
that we have inherited from history – we will inevitably face the
feigned indifference, open hostility and condescending scorn from those
around us, particularly those who claim to have an expertise in the
matters we explore.
This can all be painful and bewildering, it is true – on the other hand,
however, once we develop a truly deep and intimate relationship with the
truth – and thus, really, with our own selves – we will find ourselves
almost involuntarily looking back upon our own prior relationships and
truly seeing for the first time the shallowness and evasion that
characterized our interactions. We can never be closer to others than we
are to ourselves, and we can never be closer to ourselves than we are to
the truth – the truth leads us to personal authenticity; authenticity
leads us to intimacy, which is the greatest joy in human relations.
Thus while it is true that while many shallow people will pass from our
lives when we pursue the “truth at all costs,” it is equally true that
across the desert of isolation lies a small village – it is not yet a
city, nor even a town – full of honest and passionate souls, where love
and friendship can flower free of hypocrisy, selfishness and avoidance,
where curious and joyful self-expression flow easily, where the joy of
honesty and the fundamental relaxation of easy self-criticism unifies
our happy tribe in our pursuit and achievement of the truth.
The road to this village is dry, and long, and stony, and hard.
I truly hope that you will join us.
I do thank you for taking the time to run through this little book. I
hope that I have stimulated some interest within you about the thrill
and value of exploring anarchy.
If you are interested in exploring these ideas further – in particular
some thoughts on how an anarchistic society could work – you might enjoy
some of the earlier Freedomain Radio podcasts, which are available at
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[1] I would like to apologize for any trauma caused by this image.