Why Promote Anarchy

For the last few months, I have been writing a book exploring the practicality of anarchism. It's an issue I am becoming more and more passionate about, as I see the state as something that as a matter of principle violates people's consent.

I hope to have it available for reading on Kindle soon. In the meantime, I thought I posted a few chapters here starting with the intro.

I'm assuming most people who read my work are not anarchists, or at least don't know you are. I ask that only you keep an open mind.

When I do publish this work in completion I will have a link

Thanks.

“The best way of removing negativity is to laugh and to be joyous”

David Icke

Why? Why write a book proclaiming we don’t need something that is so taken for granted as government? If having a government is not desirable it must at least be necessary. Serious entertainment of a stateless society surely is a symptom that someone is divorced from reality. Never mind most of the people who instinctively dismiss ideas such as actual freedom, have gone through "public education" which was designed to make such ideas unthinkable. And forget that most people over consume media that subtlety trains them of at least the inevitability of government. So why do I feel the need to express the dissonant thought that people can cooperate voluntarily without government? And why do I feel this idea will resonate with people?

I'll answer the second question first. I know it's possible to change one mind on the necessity of government. I like most people wasn't born an anarchist. Like most people, I conflated what was normal with some immutable condition of the world. If government is not necessary then why is it everywhere, I reasoned. I'm sure most livestock would have similar thoughts about farmers if they were capable of such thoughts. “We may not like farmer John but he's better than farmer Bob. What, a world world without farmers, you say. That's crazy, Where will we get our grass from? Baa Baaa."

When first confronted with anarchist ideas I had such thoughts. Who will build the roads? How will we defend ourselves? Essentially I was asking where we will get our grass from. The problem wasn't that I was thinking like a sheep. The problem was I was thinking like a domesticated sheep. And why would I not be? We are all to a large extent the product of our environment. In my life, the state is just as much of an all-encompassing reality as the farm is to livestock.

Through countless conversations, with people of all political persuasions, I eventually began to see this reality. I slowly began to see that those who advocated for the abolition of the state had the only logical and consistent argument. Since the state gained power through force, not consent it is only logical that any relationship we have with it would not be desirable. Ideas such as a stateless society may seem radical, but they are rooted in the almost universally accepted idea that all human interactions should be consensual. If having a ruling class was desirable there would be such services we could consensually purchase.

Most people don't need to change their morality or behavior to be an anarchist. They already live in a live-and-let-live way. They only have to apply their morality to include all parts of their life.

So why then is a state society desirable? Libertarian philosophy is rooted in history and peoples' lived reality. As it turns out peaceful interactions between people promote more prosperity than violent interactions. Who knew? Of course, prosperity is not guaranteed. People can always find ways to impoverish themselves. But living nonviolently generally pushes people in a successful direction. But government doesn’t merely impovish us but is an unacknowledged danger to humanity. To explain this I will offer an analogy.

As a child, I remember watching a nature show about a spider. I long forgot the name of the spider but I vividly remember the spider's strategy for feeding itself. It would camouflage its scent to smell like ants. Then it would simply find a spot surrounded by ants who were busy doing whatever ants do. When an unsuspecting ant got close to this undetectable predator it got eaten. None of the other ants seemed to mind as they had no way to perceive the danger they were in.

From the perspective of any non-ant observer, the situation looked preposterous. There was a clear danger that could easily be avoided. The spider looked nothing like an ant and was an order of magnitude bigger. Yet, the spider could munch away on the unsuspecting ants all it wanted to, merely by disguising its scent.

I became fascinated by this concept. A creature could disguise aspects of itself to the point that it was completely unrecognizable to the specific species it preyed upon. I thought if there are ants who are oblivious to such an evident predator then there have to be other examples of this in nature. Then, I wondered do we have something clandestinely preying upon us. From that point on I could no longer live in the cozy fiction that we are safe from predatory forces just because we don't see them.

And a couple of decades later, I concluded that if only some weirdo ant wrote a book exposing the spider the rest of the ants would all be better off. I joke but the government is our spider. It is the entity feeding on our energy. Like the ants, we seem to be incapable of perceiving this obvious phenomenon though.

Don't believe me? How much of our money is confiscated from us as "taxes"? A third maybe? Perhaps more. It's hard to say. Not only does the state take our money through taxes but then it steal value from our money through inflation. What is money but an imperfect metric that measures the value we created through some expenditure of our time and energy. The only difference between stealing our money and directly feeding on us is one of strategy.

If for instance, someone forced us into slavery keeping all the value we created, everyone would see this as parasitic. If they only kept us in slavery for a third of the year it would still be seen as parasitic by most people. So, why is it not parasitic when they take at least a third of our value throughout the entire year? Could it be camouflage? Instead of masking its scent the state hides itself in the illusion that it's keeping us safe. It lures us closer with grand ideals of what it could accomplish if we just give it more power.

Evolution is a non-stop game though. It can be terrifying to witness the state for what it is. However, if we don't succumb to paralysis, channeling this fear can give us the motivation we need to attain actual security in our lives. The spider has an evolutionary advantage in being able to be midst the ants undetected. But this gives the ants an evolutionary opportunity to adapt to the spider. Once one ant successfully mutates to perceive the danger of the spider it can pass those genes down. By doing so it renders the spider's advantage obsolete.

Like the ants, we too can adapt to the evolutionary incentives the state puts on us. We, unlike the ants, also have the advantage of spreading ideas. We can out-compete the state philosophically rather than biologically. A good first step to this is to promote the idea that all relationships should be consensual. As more people understand this concept, we will see all the services the state provides for us as nothing more than a web to trap us.

However, if the ants only evolved to perceive the spider they would still get eaten. Action is needed. In many ways gaining a correct perception of reality without being able to change behavior is a worse fate than ignorance. Along with getting eaten, the ants would also have to live with the stress of being in constant danger. Fortunately for ants, they have no problems scuttling away from things they deem dangerous.

Our situation is a bit more complicated. It's not as simple as outrunning our predators. The reality is that it's not hard to see the predatory nature of the state once it's pointed out. What is difficult is making someone see this obvious reality when they are dependent on the state. For this reason, the state grows ever more adept at coaxing people into compromising situations. It will take away people's ability to do what they need to do so they can live a good life.

To rid ourselves of this parasitic force we not only have to learn to see through its propaganda. We also have to learn to be self-sufficient again. Anything that we depend on the state for is ultimately a tentacle clenching around our throats. We have to ask ourselves where are we dependent on the state and what can we do to rid ourselves of that dependence.

Many people who advocate freedom want to skip this step. They want to simply push a magic button that eliminates the state. Doing so would be disastrous as many critics of freedom rightfully proclaim. To quote Robert Pirsig “If a revolution destroys a systematic government but the systematic pattern of thought that produced that government is left intact these patterns will repeat themselves.” Even if we eliminate the state if we don't eliminate the need for the state, we will at best just recreate it. More likely though we will create a more intolerable system. We can’t merely use the state's logic of decreeing that we are free to be free. We must look at what the state does that is useful and find ways to do it better. While not easy it's through this process that we evolve.

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