Posted on 01/14/2002 6:38:35 AM PST by SteamshipTime
Anarchy, I must point out, is not synonymous, at least in my mind, with bomb-throwing lunatics, or rioting in the streets. It is as placid as a pond, as peaceful as a park. There is nothing chaotic about it. It is certainly not the absence of government, but only of government imposed by strangers. The anarchist governs himself, based upon principles found to be enduring and valuable: the Ten Commandments, for example. Anarchy has been the basis of society, long prior to the existence of government. Does your family have bylaws? Are there regular elections, or meetings for the sake of writing new laws to cope with new problems? Do family members regularly charge one another with violations of the law, and demand justice, as meted out by strangers? Not in my family. Family members may disagree, of course, but these disagreements are worked out and eventually settled without recourse to written statutes or judges. No lawyers are necessary. God’s law, we have been taught, is written on our hearts. We don’t need to quibble about the precise meaning of words in laws because we all know, instinctively, what is right and fair, and what isn’t. It is only when we leave the family that we encounter the world of legalisms. As a physician, I am on the staff of several hospitals. All have staff bylaws. These are bulky multi-page documents, intended to deal with any and every circumstance surrounding a physician’s staff privileges. Before being accepted on the staff, you must sign the bylaws and agree to abide by them. Indeed, one hospital even affixes to its signature-line the jurat that the signer will be bound not only by these bylaws, but by any additions that may be made in the future. Astonishingly, this absurdity seems to provoke little reaction from the doctors. Perhaps that is because they realize that the bylaws don’t mean anything anyway, but exist mainly to provide the hospital with justification for acting against a particular physician if his actions might be considered dangerous to the hospital. Strangers from hospital-accreditation, who, ultimately, control the purse strings, require them. The laws of your local community, not to mention state and federal governments, are sufficiently numerous and complex that you cannot possibly know them, although ignorance of the law – an excellent excuse for any alleged lawbreaker—is considered no excuse by the lawmakers, who may profit from infractions. You manage your day to day activities quite nicely without reference to these countless regulations. Indeed, were you to consider them prior to acting, you would be reduced to inactivity; they would overwhelm you. In fact, the innumerable laws which are said to apply to all of us are out of our thoughts. That undeniable fact is, in itself, an excellent argument for anarchy. We have government, with its innumerable laws, but we function as though we didn’t, because otherwise we’d spend more time pouring over the statute-books, and haggling over definitions, than doing our work. Moreover, the government itself, though passing new laws with alacrity, pays little attention to them, at least where its self-interest is concerned. It does what it thinks it must do, and if its actions are prohibited by the laws, it ignores them. The proof of this is all around us. To wit: "No state shall make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender for debt." That constitutional provision would virtually eradicate our economic problems; the government not only ignores it, but violates it. Actions not specifically permitted to government by the constitution are denied it. Nearly all of the government’s actions are, by this constitutional standard, unconstitutional. Does anyone in Washington care? Do most Americans? The written laws are tools to be used, when it is considered desirable to do so, against individuals and corporations, except the federal corporation, which ignores any laws it finds oppressive. What keeps society together are not the myriad laws imposed by government, to be applied as needed; it is the law written on our hearts. The shootings at schools around the country have undoubtedly stimulated a new outpouring of laws, but there are already numerous laws prohibiting shootings at schools, or anywhere else. "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is the relevant law, and it’s already written, though not taught. Indeed, it is forbidden to be taught in many schools. Therein lies the problem! There is freedom in the law, we are told, but that is only true if it is God’s law, not that of some strangers who call themselves government. Those laws bring slavery. Indeed, that may be their purpose.
I believe it was Chesterton who remarked that Christianity had not failed; it had not been tried. And Ayn Rand described capitalism as the unknown ideal. I would like to suggest, in a similar vein, that anarchy has been tried, is being tried and is a universal success, but remains an unknown ideal. I’ll explain.
Anarchy has two traditions present in this country. The older one, American anarchy, is based on sufficient self-discipline that civil government is not necessary. The European model which came out of Russia and Eastern Europe is based on overthrowing civil government by force.
If, as statists content, all men are fallible and thus incapable of self-governance, then why would a group of them be any more capable?
Rational anarchist bump.
Good. You have admitted your illness.
That's the first step on the road to recovery.
Force is no order.
It works in the free market because there's a force ready to beat the crap out of anyone who steals, murders, destroys or otherwise does something centrally detrimental to the free market. You can't participate in a free market well if someone just waltzes off with whatever you're marketing, or just shoots you and dumps your remains behind a grocery store dumpster.
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
- George Orwell
(Shall the "rough men" be hired only by those who can afford their services, or hired for all by general taxation?)
Anarchy only refers to an absence of government, not an absence of order. The word specifically refers to government, not order, which is why there is a different word for the absence of order, known as "disorder."
Monarchy - from "mono" and "archy" meaning "government with one ruler."
Aristocracy - meaning "government of and by aristocrats.
Democracy - meaning "government rule of the people."
Anarchy - meaning "absence of government."
The government whose absence we refer to by the term "anarchy" is the institution of government , not individual self-government in the sense of self-discipline, which term might better be used for the latter concept to avoid confusion. Thus, anarchy need not a and in fact does not mean the absence of order.
on the subject of crime, is the fact that a crime committed against an individual is punished by the state for the 'good of society'. The victim of that crime is most often victimized, yet again, by the very people who are charged with protecting them.
How would anarchy better deal with individuals who couldn't/wouldn't govern themselves?
Yet, the fact remains that anarchy - in the strict sense of the word "without government" - is the natural human state of affairs. We evolved to live in circumstances in which there is no government. Despite the lack of government, there most definitely was order.
One of the more important insights of this article, something I had never considered, is how much we ignore the rules and strictures of government and legalisms. If we did not we could not survive. After all, government is not order. It is stasis.
Since we do ignore government in running our lives, this means to me that it is an expensive and intrusive irrelevance.
Take it up a notch: Absence of societal government is societal disorder.
Not really. This is apples and oranges. And you are again equating level of "governance of self" with good behavior.
This is the error. By way of example, I'm sure many religious terrorists have extremely well ordered, well-disciplined lives. Look what they end up doing.
By contrast, look at the disorder that is often part of the personal lives of many happpy, productive geniuses in history.
In fact, a touch of obsessive, irrational behavior can be a very productive force for an individual, or it can be detrimental to their lives. The same in government leads to, well, you know the history of the Soviet Union. They had no shortage of government, but who could call that a healthy, productive society.
But the most important difference in the comparison you make here can be summed up simply by this: If you choose to self-govern well or poorly, that is YOU making that choice and you are free to change that. When (societal) government governs, it does so whether you like it or not.
Wise guy. Of course such things will happen with government...but it would happen a lot more without government.
"The only reason some people are alive is because it's illegal to kill them."
Absolutely untrue.
0.000000000000001 may be small, but it's not zero - and there's a big difference.
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