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Title: Anarchism and Pandemics Author: William Gillis Date: April 4, 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19, individualist anarchism Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-07 from https://c4ss.org/content/52761
Anarchists face the question:
Without nations and states wouldnât a free society be especially ravaged
by pandemics? Who would enforce quarantines without rebuilding a
centralized institution of violence?
Itâs a fair question.
Anarchism isnât about a finite goal, but an unending vector pointed
towards increasing liberation. Weâre not in the habit of âgood enoughâ
compromises, we want everything. However itâs always worth talking about
prescriptive or aspirational visions to shake out what is and isnât
possible with freedom. âHow might we solve this without depending upon
the state or relationships of domination?â is always a useful question.
And anarchists should take pause and consider the situation with
fearless honesty. While freedom solves many problems very well, there is
no law of the universe that it will inherently solve every conceivable
problem better than alternatives.
No ideology or society will do everything with perfect efficiency. There
is no reason to suspect, for instance, that an anarchistic society would
be great at industrialized genocide. It is also possible that there are
some legitimate issues that a state would solve quicker than a free
society. Organized and centralized violence is a blunt and destructive
tool â but there occasionally problems for which blunt and destructive
means excel.
As anti-statists it is our assertion that the inherent downsides to the
existence of a state vastly outweigh any such positives. These downsides
are manifold and many of them are inclined to make a pandemic situation
worse.
The nationstate is founded on the twin evils of hierarchy and
separation. Nationstates slice up the worldâs population into separate
prisons and impose hierarchies within them.
nationstate system disincentivizes global collaboration, instead
encouraging rivalry as power loci see each other as threats. Nations are
disinclined to communicate the entire truth quickly to one another, they
are also game theoretically incentivized to exploit many situations of
relative weakness. Unlike individual humans who have opportunities for
reflective and adaptive agency, states are ossified masses built upon
the suppression of human agency âan institution inherently dependent
upon selfish domination is far less capable of defecting from that
strategy and truly selflessly collaborating. While some small privileged
nationstates relatively removed from fierce geopolitical pressures as
well as some larger nationstates attempting to build soft power may
donate some resources to other nations, there are harsh limits to
overall collaboration.
structures against their own populations. This means lying to their
populations and coercing them in ways that prioritizes the maintenance
of power over the best interests of the population. These interests
partially coincide â a state entirely devoid of population ceases to be
â but in no sense do they perfectly overlap. States and their attendant
ecosystem of reinforcing power structures frequently have interests that
conflict with minimizing the net life lost. Further, even if a stateâs
long-run survival is entangled with the survival of its population, the
desperate psychology of domination bends towards short-term and limited
thinking. Rulers are inclined to strategies â thanks to their struggle
for power, remove from more rounded experience, and the precarity of the
structures they depend upon â that are otherwise out of step with
collective survival. And states tend to secure their existence by
shaping a broader hierarchical society that pushes this kind of thinking
on all scales â eg precarious wage laborers are conditioned into
short-term and zero-sum thinking.
overall solutions and impose them sweepingly without a lot of nuance or
attentiveness. To maintain its own existence a state cannot fully
decentralize many tasks related to the collecting and processing of
information. This leaves states relatively disconnected and sluggish.
And because states actively work to suppress internal competition there
arenât robust ecologies of social projects and protocols by which a
population can pick up the slack. The state atrophies civil society and
constrains or enslaves what organizations are allowed.
To summarize: States are sluggish and hamfisted, their hierarchies
inherently create incentive structures where power (whether a
politician, ruling party, ruling class, or geopolitical contra other
nations) interferes with most efficiently saving the population.
Conversely itâs worth noting freedom is quite good at communication,
adaptation, and resiliency â societal virtues of significant value in a
pandemic.
communication networks. In the absence of centralized coercive
institutions, societies fall back on more decentralized bottom-up means
of networking and reporting. Social freedom inherently implies freedom
of information, not just through the absence of censors but via emergent
network topologies that avoid centralized logjams. And thus different
social mores, norms, habits, associations, and protocols are forced to
emerge to fluidly handle news, tracking, alerts, etc. This means
critical information doesnât flow through state monitors or media
institutions, but eventually becomes much more natively handled in a
decentralized and specifics-attentive way that robustly filters out
deception. Rather than relying on dishonest states, or tentatively
trying to figure things out in their shadow, a truly decentralized
society routes critical information more efficiently.
information instead of violence wherever possible to solve social
problems. We donât brutally imprison dangerous people â we collaborate
in watching them and alerting other community members to the risk they
pose. This sousveillence is facilitated by information technologies, but
it is a continuation of the shame and reputation dynamics that stateless
Indigenous societies have long used. âDave was in contact with someone
who tested positiveâ is a crucial bit of information to relay to the
mutual friend who would otherwise have invited him over. Decentralized
communication is a matter of granting informed agency to individuals,
and itâs also the most natural way to apply social pressures towards net
positive ends. Where a purely selfish individual might otherwise defect
in everyday prisoners dilemmas, the old lady watching him go out in the
pandemic from her kitchen window and shouting down that she knows his
mom and friends is far more effective at instilling prosocial,
positive-sum results and less brutal than a truncheoned gang of pigs
beating random joggers.
centralized hierarchical institutions imposed upon us that once held a
tight monopoly on claims to knowledge and expertise are clearly rotten,
but these zombified dinosaurs continue lumbering even as the flesh falls
from their bones. A chaos of conspiracies, grifters, and bubbles of
delusion have proliferated because robust antibodies and verification
systems havenât had time to grow from the bottom up. But the other half
of this is on academia and how it has withdrawn and signed pacts with
the existing rulers. When scientific experts arenât captured servants of
power â marginal in number, socially isolated, and subverted by the
needs of power â more people begin to listen to them. To be truly free
science needs to not just be open in the sense of technically operating
in the public domain, it must be accessible, rather than walled off in
expensive academic ponzi schemes.
quite hard in a divided, hierarchical and centralized society. To serve
the need for control much is ossified into rigid forms and traditions,
as well as capturing oversight and twisting it towards the interests of
those with power. The freer the people the quicker the processes of
discovery, invention, and implementation.
There will always be exceptions. What we are talking about is
inclinations to behavior. A free society â particularly a young one with
insufficiently developed liberatory infrastructure or habits of
organization â might seize up unproductively. A state â particularly one
relatively insulated by happenstance from the vicissitudes of its power
â might act quickly, openly, and largely for the sake of human life.
In the face of COVID-19 there have been a wide array of responses. A
rebel network under siege in Chiapas may not be able to rapidly produce
their own ventilators. A technocratic quasi client state like South
Korea may see institutional alignment with quick and honest mass
testing. These are however statistical exceptions to easily trackable
general tendencies.
On the whole COVID-19 has been a dark parable of the dysfunction of
power structures and the advantages of freedom.
In a free society the experts issuing initial warnings wouldnât be
silenced and suppressed.
In a free society tracking the movement of the infected wouldnât be left
to impossibly disconnected and overwhelmed central authorities.
In a free society the production changes needed to quickly build things
like testing kits, ventilators, and respirators wouldnât be impaired by
closed borders, intellectual property law, as well as rigid and
centralized production chains, to give just a few examples.
In a free society the research needed to cure diseases wouldnât be
impaired by intellectual property and national secrecy.
In a free society robust bottom-up community safety nets and general
economic fluidity would make disruptions easier to weather.
In a free society experts wouldnât be widely distrusted because they
wouldnât be systematically enslaved under the boot of self-interested
authorities.
In a free society where people are used to the responsibility of
personal decisionmaking and have grown accustomed to evaluating risks,
experts wouldnât feel the need to transparently lie about things like
masks âfor the greater goodâ â nor would people be barred from
participating in trials and experimentation.
In a free society enforcement of social distancing wouldnât be
arbitrarily and brutally handled by state planners and police, but
instead use social pressure via shame and reputation.
Freedom of association isnât just a matter of the fluidity and breadth
of our connections, it means having agency in who we associate with, it
means taking responsibility, rather than having those hard choices taken
from us.
Reactionaries like Ben Shapiro think that borders are magic blankets
that protect from everything. In response to COVID-19 Shapiro wrote âif
we had no countries, weâd all be dead today or in the very near future.
Every major country has shut its borders.â Similar absurd proclamations
are without end in reactionary circles. The state, the nation, are seen
as comforting simplicities that inherently wipe away all complexity and
danger. If only we had stronger states/borders thereâd be no bad things
to fear.
Much could be written about this psychology of mewling bootlicking, but
I want to focus on the broad notion that borders protect us from
pandemics.
Itâs worth emphasizing from the start that strong borders are a
relatively recent invention. No state in history has had non-pourus
borders. Even massive constructions like Hadrianâs Wall and the Great
Walls of China were geared towards impeding armies, not absolutely
stopping the movement of individuals. While walls are used by states to
better enslave their own captive populations, no political border in
history has prevented the eventual transmission of pandemics. Absolutist
âstrong bordersâ like the USSR tried in vain to completely erect are a
science fiction concept, an abstract aspiration â at least as much as
anarchist prescriptions. People and materials always slip through. (And
weâll always help them.)
Borders at best buy a given nation a little longer to watch a pandemic
overwhelm their neighbors before it overwhelms them. With new
surveillance and militarization technologies it may well be possible to
establish âstrong bordersâ capable of entirely and permanently sealing
out a pandemic (thatâs not air or water borne), but the costs are
immense authoritarianism as well as the societal suffering and
dysfunction that comes from such. Borders infringe upon freedom to
untold degrees and inflict catastrophic social dysfunction.
One might protest âisnât the whole point supposed to be slowing the
spread of the virus?â But productive slowing isnât measured in relation
to the solar rotations, but in relation to the creation of
infrastructure, treatments, and cures. It does you no good to slow the
arrival of a plague a few months if you donât get anywhere developing
and deploying what you need in that time.
The critical processes are scientific and economic, and anything that
slows them effectively speeds up the transmission rate. Nothing else
matters besides the race between those processes.
Borders impede both economic and scientific processes.
A large nation like the US has a large border â and thus a particularly
porous border that is very expensive to seal. But in the other direction
â as you approach the fascist dream of a patchwork of micronations â you
have less economic and scientific capacity on your own. In particular
sealing a small nationâs borders means curtailing the very same trade
necessary for a flourishing and dynamic economy.
Self-sufficiency, internally closed supply chains, localized production,
etc, do have benefits for resiliency, but they have serious consequences
for efficiency. On the far end of this, if we follow certain
contemporary fascistsâ suggestions and retreat to closed ethnotribes of
around 150 people, not only is that tribe not going to have full
hospital facilities when a pandemic eventually strikes â itâs not going
to have hospital facilities at all, for anything. Such inefficiencies
end up killing a hell of a lot more in the long run than a pandemic.
Thereâs an inherent tradeoff here: the more trade a nation tolerates the
faster itâs possible to mobilize and coordinate rapid production of the
equipment, facilities, materials, etc necessary to save lives. But also
the faster it will be infected. And once a nation gets breached by
infection the growth rate internally is going to be the same global
growth rate weâd otherwise see.
The wider our networks of collaboration the more shock absorbent we have
overall AND the greater resources we can muster AND the faster we can do
it.
The other thing to note is that borders actually provide very minimal
and arbitrary prunings of the social graph that donât necessarily line
up with what would actually be needed in a given situation to curtail a
pandemic.
The connectivity you want severed in a pandemic is not clumsy aggregate
clusters but personal interactions. This is where tracing points of
contact, carriers, etc, becomes vitally important. Setting up military
roadblocks around a city â while cinematic â isnât anywhere near as
useful as getting everyone inside that city to temporarily limit their
interactions and tracing vectors. Borders-style approaches create
arbitrary and capricious kill zones, guaranteeing that regional
resources will be overwhelmed, not an efficient reduction of harm.
The reality is that no pandemic in history has looked like zombie films
and yet conservatives rush to the comforting reactionary simplicity of
the zombie premise. Pandemics are complicated messy things that take
expertise and collaboration; nationalism and war promise simple
straightforward conflicts with straightforward prescriptions. This is
why such infest our media narratives. We like clean, reassuring stories
filled with quick âcommonsenseâ fixes. Itâs easier to imagine a pandemic
in war terms with familiar, conventional war solutions.
This is not to say that violence is never justified. Violence may in
fact be justified to save net lives in a pandemic. For example using
force to stop likely carriers from irresponsibly entering dense
populations makes sense, especially early on when containment is still
plausible. Many people are not, by default, altruistic. And the mere
abolition of nations and states would not be the victory of anarchism. A
significant percentage of the population are selfish pricks, pickled in
the zero-sum perspective of power. In a pandemic one asshole can kill
thousands. Violence can clearly be justified to curtail such actions.
But when and if such situations arise in a free society it is unlikely
to look anything like the violence of the state.
Reactionaries facilitate slaughter and then present their own slaughter
as the only safety. And people who are afraid, who are made precarious,
start longing for stability and simplicity at any price.
As with so many things, so it is with pandemics: the state creates
problems and then, having demolished or forbidden all other solutions,
embraces the few things it actually is good at. The state breaks your
legs and then offers you shoddy crutches. It impoverishes you and then
provides foodstamps. But that doesnât necessarily mean you should reject
foodstamps. A prisonerâs first obligation is to escape, and sometimes
that means accepting the wardenâs poisoned meals. There may be pandemic
situations while the state still reigns where brutal quarantines are the
lesser evil, even while we must acknowledge the longterm poison they
represent.
Benjamin Tucker said it a century ago, âThe State is said by some to be
a ânecessary evilâ; it must be made unnecessary.â
Fighting to save lives inevitably obliges fighting to destroy the state,
and we must be mindful that we donât make that longterm task harder. But
strategy is complex, triage is complex. There are no simple pat answers,
the state is always our enemy, but it is not always our worst enemy. We
mustnât lose sight of how it created and worsened this situation, but
that doesnât mean always prioritizing resisting it rather than a virus.
Reactionaries isolate into prisons and fixed traditions. Anarchists
build connections and possibility. They have the benefit of one path, we
have the burden of having to evaluate many.
Thatâs why so many of them didnât see this coming. And itâs why they
wonât see us coming.