No Coercion

After posting my last entry (Are you willing to hold the gun?) on a local news site’s online community, I got quite a few comments on that site indicating a severe misunderstanding of anarchism on the part of many people. I’ve gotten similar responses on other explicitly anarchist blog entries in the past. I decided that I should take a little more time and try to clear up some of the confusion that many people seem to have about anarchism.

A common misconception about anarchism is that it’s a philosophy completely opposed to rules and order. Anyone who believes that probably gets too large a proportion of their information from outlets like CNN and Fox News. The fact is that anarchism is a philosophy that opposes a coercive, non-consensual government, i.e., the state. Anarchists (except maybe those violent nut jobs I’ve mentioned before) are strong supporters of purely voluntary interaction and the organic rules and order that naturally flow from that (i.e., common law, social mores, contractual obligations, etc.). Rules are fine, as long as it’s the result of voluntary interactions that don’t violate natural rights. Anarchism rejects the initiation of force to create artificial rules and recognizes that any rules that have to be imposed by violence are probably contrary to natural law.

So, on to the anti-anarchists from the other day. One of the specific comments I received was this:

“…in a pure anarchy…who’s going to stop somebody from holding a gun to your head and demanding all of your money anyway?”

In an anarchic society, there would be any number of ways available on the open market to stop that, whereas there is no real way to stop it when the state does it. This is actually a good topic for another blog post, so I won’t go into it here.

Paraphrasing several related comments:

“How can you be an anarchist and support HOAs? They have rules and governance and stuff.”

Yep, and they’re a form of government–but they’re private, consensual governments, just like the governments (i.e. Boards of Directors) that govern your local Rotary or Kiwanis clubs or any number of other private, voluntary associations. I often try to specifically use the word “state” as opposed to government (unless the context makes it unambiguous). Also, HOAs don’t claim ownership of other people’s property or kidnap or kill people who don’t pay their dues. Of course, to the extent that HOAs are more predominant than they would be without coercive state regulations, I’m opposed to them. But I’m not opposed to them in principle.
Another paraphrasing of comments:

“Isn’t Somalia an ideal anarchist society? Look how well statelessness has worked there!”

Actually, in many respects Somalia seems to have done decently well since the ousting of the government in 1991:
Somalia: Failed State, Economic Success?
Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It
The Anarchy Advantage in Somalia
Somali Anarchy is More Orderly than Somali Government

The continued violence by some factions appears to be a reaction to attempts by foreign powers to impose an unwanted central government: Are the Salad Days for Over Somalia?

To the extent that Somalia is anarchic, it’s doing quite well (especially compared to it’s previous, state-governed condition), and to the extent that it’s NOT anarchic, it appears to be because of statist elements (i.e. U.S. and U.N. intervention, Ethiopian and Eritrean attacks and meddling, and the general authoritarianism of Sharia law under the Union of Islamic Courts).

Moreover, the actual conditions in Somalia–even if it was really an anarchistic society–would have nothing to do with the fundamental moral argument that it is wrong, always and everywhere, to aggress against another person or their property, whether you do it individually or as part of a group you call “the government.”

Here’s another interesting comment:

“Human nature would cause any society based on anarchy to fail. Human nature will cause the stronger to prey on the weaker.”

This is important, because the commenter has it exactly backwards. It’s human nature that makes anarchy absolutely necessary. It’s true there are certain people who will prey on others. So why on Earth would it make sense to allow one particular group of predators to have all the most powerful weapons and a legal right to engage in predation against everyone else? Here’s how Stefan Molyneux cogently puts it:

The logical error always made in the defense of the State is to imagine that any collective moral judgments being applied to any group of people is not also being applied to the group which rules over them. If 50% of citizens are evil, then at least 50% of the people ruling over them are also evil (and probably more, since evil people are always drawn to power). Thus the existence of evil can never justify the existence of the State. If there is no evil, the State is unnecessary. If evil exists, the State is far too dangerous to be allowed existence.

Well, that’s enough for now. There were some other odd comments about how anarchic societies somehow wouldn’t have banking or roads or would be full of friends robbing each other at gun point on a regular basis, but I think those were just kind of the last throes of some uninformed interlocutors being suffocated by the oppressive emptiness of their own arguments.

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