💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › edward-abbey-theory-of-anarchy.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:27:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Theory of Anarchy
Author: Edward Abbey
Date: 1988
Language: en
Topics: theory
Source: a chapter from “One Life at a Time, Please”

Edward Abbey

Theory of Anarchy

The bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil. But what

is the essential meaning of money? Money attracts because it gives us

the means to command the labor and service and finally the lives of

others—human or otherwise. Money is power. I would expand the biblical

aphorism, therefore, in this fashion: the root of all evil is the love

of power.

And power attracts the worst and corrupts the best among men. It is no

accident that police work, for example, appeals to those (if not only

those) with the bully’s instinct. We know the type. Or put a captain’s

bars on a perfectly ordinary, decent man, give him measure of arbitrary

power over others and he tends to become–unless a man of unusual

character–a martinet, another petty despot. Power corrupts; and as Lord

Acton pointed out, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The problem of

democracy is the problem of power–how to keep power decentralized,

equally distributed, fairly shared. Anarchism means maximum democracy:

the maximum possible dispersal of political power, economic power and

force–military power. An anarchist society consists of a voluntary

association of self-reliant, self-supporting, autonomous communities.

The anarchist community would consist (as it did in preagricultural and

preindustrial times) of a voluntary association of free and independent

families, self-reliant and self-supporting but bound by kinship ties and

a tradition of mutual aid.

Anarchy is democracy taken seriously, as in Switzerland, where issues of

national importance are decided by direct vote of all citizens. Where

each citizen, after his period of military training, takes his weapon

home with him, to keep for life. Anarchy is democracy taken all the way,

in every major sector of social life. For example, political democracy

will not survive in a society which permits a few to accumulate economic

power over the many. Or in a society which delegates police and military

power to an elite corps of professionals. Sooner or later the

professionals will take over. In my notion of an anarchist community

every citizen–man or woman–would be armed, trained, capable when

necessary of playing the part of policeman or soldier. A healthy

community polices itself; a healthy society would do the same. Looters,

thugs, criminals may appear anywhere, anytime, but in nature such types

are mutants, anomalies, a minority; the members of a truly democratic,

anarchistic community would not require outside assistance in dealing

with them. Some might call this vigilante justice. I call it democratic

justice. Better to have all citizens participate in the suppression and

punishment of crime–and share in the moral responsibility–than turn the

nasty job over to some quasi-criminal type (or hero) in a uniform with a

tin badge on his shirt. Yes, we need heroes. We need heroines. But they

should serve only as inspiration and examples, not as leaders.

No doubt the people of today’s Lebanon, for example, would settle gladly

for an authoritarian government capable of suppressing the warring

factions. But such an authoritarian government would provoke the return

of the irrepressible human desire for freedom, leading in turn to

rebellion, revolt and revolution. If Lebanon were not so badly

overpopulated, the best solution there–as in South Africa–would be a

partition of territory, a devolution into self-governing, independent

regions and societies. This is the natural tendency of any population

divided by religion, race or deep cultural differences, and it should

not be restrained. The tendency runs counter, however, to the love of

power, which is why centralized governments always attempt to crush

separatist movements.

Government is a social machine whose function is coercion through

monopoly of power. Any good Marxist understands this. Like a bulldozer,

government serves the caprice of any man or group who succeeds in

seizing the controls. The purpose of anarchism is to dismantle such

institutions and to prevent their reconstruction. Ten thousand years of

human history demonstrate that our freedoms cannot be entrusted to those

ambitious few who are drawn to power; we must learn–again–to govern

ourselves. Anarchism does not mean “no rule”; it means “no rulers”.

Difficult, but not utopian, anarchy means and requires self-rule,

self-discipline, probity, character.

At present, life in America is far better for the majority than in most

(not all) other nations. But that fact does not excuse our failings.

Judged by its resources, intentions and potential, the great American

experiment appears to me a failure. We have not become the society of

independent freeholders that Jefferson envisioned; nor have we evolved

into a true democracy–government by the people–as Lincoln imagined.

Instead we see the realization of the scheme devised by Madison and

Hamilton: a strong centralized state which promotes and protects the

accumulation of private wealth on the part of the few, while reducing

the majority to the role of dependent employees of state and industry.

We are a nation of helots ruled by an oligarchy of

techno-military-industrial administrators.

Never before in history have slaves been so well fed, thoroughly

medicated, lavishly entertained–but we are slaves nonetheless. Our

debased popular culture–television, rock music, home video, processed

food, mechanical recreation, wallboard architecture–is the culture of

slaves. Furthermore the whole grandiose structure is self-destructive:

by enshrining the profit motive (power) as our guiding ideal, we

encourage the intensive and accelerating consumption of land, air,

water–the natural world–on which the structure depends for its continued

existence. A house built on greed will not endure. Whether it’s called

capitalism or socialism makes little difference; both of these

oligarchic, militaristic, expansionist, acquisitive, industrializing and

technocratic systems are driven by the same motives; both are

self-destroying. Even without the accident of a nuclear war, I predict

that the military-industrial state will disappear from the surface of

the earth within a century. That belief is the basis of my inherent

optimism, the source of my hope for the coming restoration of a higher

civilization: scattered human populations modest in number that live by

fishing, hunting, food gathering, small scale farming and ranching, that

gather once a year in the ruins of abandoned cities for great festivals

of moral, spiritual, artistic and intellectual renewal, a people for

whom the wilderness is not a playground but their natural native home.

New dynasties will arise, new tyrants will appear–no doubt. But we must

and we can resist such recurrent aberrations by keeping true to the

earth and remaining loyal to our basic animal nature. Humans were free

before the word freedom became necessary. Slavery is a cultural

invention. Liberty is life: eros plus anarchos equals bios.

Long live democracy.

Two cheers for anarchy.