Why Anarchy Can Never Work
By
Marushia Dark
All interactions should be completely voluntary, and people should be
left to their own devices because the politically monopolistic entity
known as the State is grossly inefficient, immoral, and just an outright
waste of resources.
It seems like such a simple, straight-forward, and intuitive concept,
right? Experientially, we know this to be true, and yet people are
afraid to trust people to look after their own interests.
There are many good arguments in favor of a Stateless society. However,
I’m going to raise some arguments against it – ones you’ve likely never
heard before – that show why it’s simply unachievable.
For starters, there’s the fact that – much like Communism – anarchy
can’t work unless the entire world is on board with the idea, which
can’t ever happen simply because there will always be those who would
prefer to come together, even through voluntary means, to subject
themselves to an external political authority.
Anarchists are unhappy with the way a statist society operates; they
feel various behaviors are logically or morally inconsistent and violate
their consent, and wish to remove themselves from such a society only to
find that the self-interests of the system do not want them to leave.
Naturally, I have sympathy for such people and support their right to
leave and go off to do their own thing in peace. However, if we extend
the principle that everyone is free to do what they want, we inevitably
find that some people actually want to be statists. As long as everyone
within that group only imposes their rules on themselves and each other,
while leaving everyone else alone, that is perfectly consistent with the
non-aggression principle and property rights, yet winds up creating a
State within a stateless society.
“Consent makes the law. To one consenting, no injury is done.” That’s
the whole point, right? You want out because you don’t consent, but
others still want to remain in. Everyone’s just looking for their own
little political niche.
Freedom of association means giving people the right to enslave
themselves if they really want. You have no more right to force them to
accept a stateless society than they have to force you to accept a
statist one. It’s one of the reasons I’m a nationalist and a
secessionist, because I think nationalism solves a lot of problems.
States essentially become large-scale political and ideological safe
spaces, wherein so long as everyone keeps to their side, everything is
fine. People can freely experiment with the system of their choosing.
Unfortunately, not everyone thinks that way, so we must ask, What to do
with these residual masochistic statists?
“But wait,” I hear you say. “If it’s voluntary association, then it’s
not a State because States are necessarily coercive.”
Wrong. I know anarchists like Larken Rose love to redefine the word to
suit their own vision of reality, but that has about the same effect as
SJWs redefining racism <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qgb9Davqo8>
beyond its commonly understood meaning to include power in the
definition. At best, it’s a semantic argument, rather than one that
attacks first principles. It either renders the word meaningless as it
can only be applied to something that doesn’t in fact exist (much like
the word “supernatural”), or else it leaves us with the need for a new
word to assume that definition.
Just as natural laws for individuals have been discovered by
philosophers, so too have natural laws for groups. This is sometimes
referred to as the “Law of Nations,” which has been codified in our
Western legal tradition and is even expressly referenced in the U.S.
Constitution. In his book /The Law of Nations/
<http://www.constitution.org/vattel/vattel_01.htm>, Emmerich de Vattel
defines a nation or State as follows:
/“A nation or a state is, as has been said at the beginning of this
work, a body politic, or a society of men united together for the
purpose of promoting their mutual safety and advantage by their
combined strength. From the very design that induces a number of
men to form a society which has its common interests, and which is
to act in concert, it is necessary that there should be established
a Public Authority, to order and direct what is to be done by each
in relation to the end of the association. This political authority
is the Sovereignty; and he or they who are invested with it are
the Sovereign.”/
The concept of a State or nation simply refers to the particular
organization of individuals as a group with regards to their political
rights and duties. That’s it. The actual form and means by which it
comes about is frankly irrelevant to the question of whether a
particular group is or is not a State.
/You guys are a walking contradiction./
“So… what?” I hear you say. “You’re in favor of the idea of people
ruling over others?”
If it’s done knowingly and willingly, then sure, why not? Again,
consent makes the law. To one consenting, no injury is done. That’s
the whole crux of the anarchist’s objections to statism; I’m just
holding up a mirror, keeping them consistent to that principle.
The natural order of things is to construct a bottom-up voluntary
society, rather than a top-down involuntary one. Individuals come
together to form families. Families form tribes. Tribes form cities.
Cities form nations. Nations in turn form international alliances.
That is the natural order of things and is perfectly consistent. The
power disparities and levels of dependence in a family or tribe are far
greater than those of a nation. It’s just that, the higher up the
pyramid you go, the more people it applies to, and thus fewer powers
must be delegated to it because there is less commonality and agreement
among those subjected to it.
People forget that we once had global anarchy in the pre-civilization
era, and life sucked. We formed tribes, and then states, for a reason.
At first, it was through largely /voluntary/ means that social compacts
were formed as a protection against other groups who came together to
initiate force on them, seeking to impose their will through
/involuntary/ means because they coveted scarce resources. The relation
between scarcity and freedom is the history of politics, and is why
something like The Venus Project is actually more pro-liberty
<https://beinglibertarian.com/libertarianism-venus-project/> than most
libertarians realize, because it removes (at least part of) the
incentive to control others.
The alternative to forming states for collective defense was being
conquered by a more powerful self-organized collective.
A while back, before I started writing for Being Libertarian, I crafted
an allegory entitled /Birth of the Minarchist Syndicate/
<http://marushiadark.wixsite.com/the-freeman-state/birth-of-the-minarchist-syndicate>,
which attempted to illustrate how and why humanity might make such a
transition from statelessness to minarchy. The idea is that political
power, like all other forms of power, is amoral and neutral. Its
morality depends upon the wielder, which is why, as Sargon of Akkad
correctly points out
<https://beinglibertarian.com/rebutting-sargon-akkads-answers-libertarians/>,
the absolutist argument that governments and states are always bad lacks
nuance, because it is built upon a false dichotomy. Some people are
good. Some people are bad. The key is in figuring out which is which
and getting the good to control the bad.
Of course, if you /really/ want to adhere strictly to raw natural law,
then coercive force falls under the purview of might makes right, the
will to power, and survival of the fittest, all of which precede even
symbiosis – Nature’s precursor to the later human concept of voluntarism
and contract from which all other law derives.
Short of global anarchy, which we’ve already shown to be impossible, the
only other way to give anarchists what they want would be to have
statism exist in parallel to anarchy. Whether it’s majority anarchists
or majority statists is irrelevant as the result would ultimately be the
same. Statists would carve out territory for their nations while the
anarchists would carve out territory for Ancapistan.
However, this would be a logical contradiction. A “stateless state,”
would not believe in public borders, or delegation of sovereignty to a
collective, only private ones and individual self-ownership,
respectively. For this situation to work, a public dividing line between
the two groups must exist.
/If you kill all the authoritarians, does that make you authoritarian?/
In demarcating the two territories, a unifying social organization to
enforce the statelessness of that society so that the ideologies of both
groups are forced to remain isolated would have to be present, which is
yet another contradiction for anarchists, though it remains perfectly
consistent with the statist worldview. It even remains consistent with
other non-anarchic forms of libertarianism, since minarchy and
nationalism are not mutually exclusive concepts.
Of course, this raises an interesting question. Why are territorial
borders necessarily a bad thing? I get that, in practice, they’re
largely arbitrary and imposed by fiat or through the momentum of
historical tradition. However, at least in the abstract, there is
nothing inherently nefarious about the concept of public borders. It’s
a famous quip of anarchists to say that borders are just imaginary
lines; but if you think about it, the same can be said of your body and
your land, and no anarchist would ever argue that property rights and
self-ownership are immoral.
/Well, except for an ancom, that is./
Again, this goes back to the bottom-up philosophy. If I, as an
individual, can define and establish property rights, then part of that
right necessarily includes the ability to delegate or otherwise alienate
such a right to a collective. For instance, a family, club, or business
can own property jointly because the several individuals within it can,
and their wills are in alignment. Why would this be any different for
larger scale organizations like cities and States?
Absent such a centralized organization, every individual’s property
would become its own nation under Castle Doctrine
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine>, which would lack
sufficient political, military, and economic force to fend off attacks
by other entities of greater or equal scale, such as state actors.
This may actually be an argument you /have/ heard before – the sort of
Mongol Army style conquest wherein some powerful, organized force of
evil intent rides through, conquering small patches of weak individuals
here and there until eventually the whole continent is brought under
heel and a tax farm is imposed.
Such a scenario actually has numerous historical precedents, from the
Mongols, to Western imperialists, to the Nazis, to the several states
under the Articles of Confederation who chose to band together for fear
that Britain would reclaim them one by one if they didn’t (which it
nearly did in the War of 1812). Threats such as these are quite real
and a perfectly valid concern.
The common rebuttal to this argument is that a determined and vigilant
group of anarchists would rise up in armed rebellion against such an
entity, reject the occupiers’ claim of legitimacy, and fight to the
death in defense of their honor and liberty until they all died
valiantly, or the conquerors were ousted.
My response to this rebuttal is threefold. Firstly, it’s unlikely you
could ever rise up to defeat them if you couldn’t defend against them
initially. I can’t think of a single instance in history wherein a
conquered people rose up to overthrow their masters without help from
another state-sized entity, or which didn’t have to wait hundreds of
years for the political system to collapse under its own weight. So,
small comfort there.
Secondly, it’s naïve to think that everyone can or would have the
courage of Patrick Henry to stand in the face of evil and say, “Give me
liberty or give me death.” I know I’m certainly not such a person. Are
you? I envy you if you are, but the reality is you’ll always be in the
minority. If it were that easy, we wouldn’t have this sort of problem
in the first place. People would have stood up to the income tax and
the Federal Reserve and gotten it thrown out in 1913, instead of trying
to justify and defend it.
Dying in a blaze of glory doesn’t actually solve the problem; it just
leaves fewer people to resist in the future, sort of like how not voting
doesn’t convince the political class to become anarchic, it just means
there are fewer objections the incumbents have to ignore.
That’s not to say I’m out to defend such things. I’m simply pointing
out that reliance on self-rule for all things is naïve because not
everyone is willing or able to do it. Some people really /do/ require a
government to tell them what to do, even if /you/ personally don’t.
Again, it’s a false dichotomy to say that all should be ruled or no one
should be ruled. Indeed, some should and some shouldn’t. The key is to
get those who /should/ rule to rule those that need to be ruled.
/Just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean there aren’t still plenty of
children around./
Whether through cowardice or apathy, or inability, or simply the
division of labor, there will always be those who prefer to outsource
the defense of their liberties to others. That some need, or wish, to
be ruled creates a need for rulers; and as with any other commodity or
service, there is a nuance to the relationship created between the haves
and have-nots. In a way, you could say the State itself is just another
child of the free market.
So long as it’s all done voluntarily, this is in keeping with the
natural order of things; and so long as they’re not subjugating
anarchists, the anarchists have no recourse to tell the statists they
can’t be statists if that’s what each group feels best protects their
own self-interests. Again, the main issue is in separating the one from
the other and figuring out which is which. I get that it’s complicated,
but the solution is not blanket generalizations and false dichotomies.
This brings me to the third part of my rebuttal, which is: if vigilance
is the price of liberty, why is that true only of anarchy but not
minarchy? Or for that matter, any other form of government? As Thomas
Jefferson said:
/“Though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or
delusion, yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may
again rally and recall the people. They fix, too, for the people the
principles of their political creed.”/
Some anarchists like to claim that minarchy can never work because the
Constitution either permits authoritarianism or is otherwise powerless
to stop it. It is that very argument which Jefferson’s quote rebuts by
pointing to the fact that the Constitution is a set of expressed
principles around which people can rally because it’s the people who
allow tyranny or liberty.
Indeed, people are the key to everything. The character of people is
ultimately what creates good and evil and what defines whether a
political system will work or not. The people are more important than
the system. If we could reliably roll Marcus Aurelius and Solomon every
turn, even dictatorship could be made to work. The only reason we shy
away from that is because those are long odds, but even a completely
voluntary society will still have evil men seeking power.
Power is neutral and amoral; the only thing that stops a bad guy with a
gun is a good guy with a gun.
Whilst I might have my own qualms with the Constitution, if it were at
least adhered to, it would be a far better situation than what we have
presently, and I don’t think most anarchists would get out of bed to
protest tariffs and the post office if that were the case. At most,
they might quibble about it over the Internet, but somehow it just
doesn’t strike the same chord as irradiating children in Iraq.
Minarchy has the best payout-to-odds ratio, and has the benefit of not
falling into the same logical or pragmatic contradictions as anarchy.
The only thing that is lacking is for that dedicated group of people to
actually hold government accountable.
But few people are actually doing that, few enough that we can’t even
solve the big problems right now, let alone the petty ones. I’m talking
about things the vast majority of people agree are bad, like income
taxes, the Federal Reserve, the DMV, or marijuana prohibition, compared
to tariffs, IP, and the post office.
/An anarchist’s daily struggle./
This brings me to my final point: anarchists tend to hyper-focus on
ideology and moral posturing whilst ignoring – or worse, decrying and
obstructing – the practical steps needed to actually reach their goals.
This is why their ideology will never come to fruition.
I can’t think of a single anarchist who wasn’t at one point a statist
and who didn’t first pass through the gateway of minarchy to reach their
present position of anarchy. Not even guys like Larken Rose or Stefan
Molyneux made such a giant leap (the latter even recently admitted he
gave up on the abstract things he can’t change, to pursue the tangible
things he can change).
They all went through phases to get there. So if that’s true of
individuals, why would it be any less true for society as a whole?
The vast majority of social media anarchists I’ve talked to tend to hold
all other libertarians’ feet to the fire with ideological purity tests.
They argue with non-anarchists and get really angry and emotional over
petty shit like the morality of roads while the rest of us are focused
on those aforementioned big things, like children being bombed in Syria
or Gaza. Such disagreement actually hurts their cause by wasting time,
resources, and political capital. Worse still, we non-anarchists allow
ourselves to get caught up in minutia.
/Getting kind of sick of “taxation is theft” and “muh roads” memes to be
honest./
Nearly all anarchists remove themselves from the political process,
whether out of disenfranchisement with the system or a sense of
adherence to their principles. This leads to less political support for
libertarian political action, which in turn means those candidates most
likely to help bring about freedom are less likely to win.
If that wasn’t bad enough, couple it with the fact that authoritarians
are actively trying to import and/or breed more statists to expand their
voting block, and the situation appears even more bleak. It will only be
a matter of time before a downward spiral is created from which we will
never again have sufficient political power to escape.
Anarchy is simply a logical contradiction, an impractical strategy, a
romantic fantasy. It’s a Utopian ideal, and we need to get back to the
real world, refocus our priorities
<https://beinglibertarian.com/principle-prioritizing-principles/>, and
deal with things pragmatically, because we’re running out of time to
preserve our liberty.
If history is doomed to repeat itself, if America is reliving the same
phases that Rome went through, then Trump is our Gaius Gracchus
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Gracchus> – the last breath of
republicanism before the modern equivalents of Marius
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius> and Sulla
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla> emerge to lead us irrevocably
towards dictatorship. We dodged a bullet with Hillary, but we
libertarians need to get our acts together fast. Anarchy won’t be
enough. Anarchy won’t save the republic, or the people. Anarchy isn’t
the answer because anarchy can never work.
