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by Gary 'Z' McGee
and he'll rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he'll rob the world."
Unknown
Give people just a little bit of knowledge and courage and they will track down those greedy-ass bankers and hold them accountable.
All we need is just a little courageous anarchy.
The problem, the crux, the fly in the ointment:
Yes, the very worldview that is keeping people indebted to an immoral, unhealthy, unsustainable, unjust system of human governance, is precisely the worldview that the majority of people are clinging to.
Indeed, most people, even though they would probably say otherwise, would rather be kissed with a lie than slapped with the truth. They would rather deny facts that tarnish their worldview than reject the deceit that upholds it.
But as Martin Luther King, Jr. said,
Healthy human evolution requires authentic vigilance.
It requires a consistent upheaval of the status quo. This requires proactive human beings who are willing to be authentically vigilant and consistently rebellious. It requires courageous interdependent individuals who dare to recondition the status-quo-junky original condition.
It turns out that the wisdom gained from anarchy is precisely the ability to distinguish between sacrifice that is transformative and healthy from mere suffering caused by the state that we've allowed because we were too cowardly or too unimaginative to think of a healthier way to live.
Like Stefan Molyneux said,
Here are five reasons why anarchy will improve human governance and thereby cultivate a healthy human evolution.
1.) It Has Inherent Checks and Balances
This one alone is reason enough to give anarchy a try again.
The other four are just icing on the cake. I say "again" because human beings lived in hunter-gatherer groups that were characterized by what anthropologists call Fierce Egalitarian Anarchy.
They not only shared things, they demanded that things be shared: meat, shelter, and protection… this was simply the best way to mitigate risk in a survival context in a world with limited resources.
Fierce egalitarianism and primal politics (tribal anarchy) worked exceptionally well for the human race for 95% of our existence on this planet. Indeed, it's one of the only reasons why we've survived as long as we have.
In an amazing game theory study by Duéñez-Guzmán-Sadedin on the topic of police corruption, they concluded that once a police system becomes entrenched, nothing can stop it from eventually becoming corrupt, with the result being a population of gullible sheep and hypocritical overlords.
But they didn't stop the study there. They decided to tweak it ever so slightly.
In the words of Suzanne Sadedin:
This is a critical aspect of anarchy:
Freedom is primary. Health is secondary. Understanding how everything is connected is third. And immorality is not tolerated.
The monumental problem with our Statist society is that we are not taught to be as moral or as amoral as we need to be in order to maintain a healthy cosmic, ecological, and social order.
In fact, statism purposefully forces whatever the state decrees to be healthy, as healthy, whether or not it is actually healthy according to cosmic law.
This creates an exorbitant amount of problems.
2.) It Would Nullify Debt Slavery and Eliminate Poverty
How does our legal system authorize plunder?
It allows banks to create fiat money out of thin air and then charge interest on it, which keeps the poor wallowing in poverty, and entrenches the rich in corruptible power structures based upon immoderate wealth.
How does our moral code glorify plunder?
It pushes militarization, creates profit prisons, creates "war heroes" out of violent psychopaths, and makes war itself a profitable endeavor.
It puts profit over people, equity over equality, transforms elections into auctions, and creates a fundamentally unsustainable and unhealthy money first, human heart second, mentality.
Like Naseem Nicholas Taleb said,
How does anarchy flip the tables on the authorization and glorification of plunder?
It prevents plunder from ever becoming possible because anarchy-based modes of governance are engineered in such a way that groups never get to the point of concentrated centers of power. The monopolization of power never gets to the point to where it becomes corrupt, because of controlled leveling mechanisms such as reverse dominance and wealth expiation.
Like Jim Dodge said,
Whoever "they" may be: monopolizing corporations, overreaching governments, tyrants.
Self-aware critical thinker beware:
But as George Orwell warned,
Have no illusions: within the current systems of human governance, poverty is a business.
Profits are made on the labor of the poor, the consumption of the poor, and the debt of the poor. Anarchy is a system of human governance built to lift people out of poverty and into freedom. It gives people hope for a more balanced future of human prosperity.
Like Raymond Williams advised,
3.) It Would Be Eco-Morally and Ecologically Healthier and More Sustainable
Authority tells you what to see, and therefore must be questioned.
Authority is telling you that it's okay to live immoderate, over-indulgent, violent, ecocidal lifestyles. It's not okay, because it is fundamentally unhealthy and leads to unsustainable devolution.
In a system of human governance that is systematically transforming livingry into weaponry, it is the supreme duty of all healthy, moral, compassionate, eco-conscious, indeed anarchist, people to question authority to the nth degree.
Such audacious questioning has the potential to create robust eco-centric communities based upon permaculture, wellness, creativity, and a sacred economy that takes the interconnectedness of all things into deep consideration.
It incentivizes individuals who value human flourishing, environmental flourishing, permaculture, sustainable building, alternative education, and nature-based wellness.
An anarchist society divorced from the oppressive Big Brother bitch-slap of Statism, reveals a society that is capable of preserving the moral Golden Mean and the middle-way, as opposed to the immoral, suffocating greed of state politics.
It will uncover a society that exemplifies the Golden Ratio of nature, as opposed to the state's expropriation of nature and nature-based cultures.
4.) It Would Result in the Expiation of Power and Wealth Through an Ethics of Reciprocity
The ultimate leveling mechanism inherent within anarchist modes of human governance is the ethics of reciprocity combined with the expiation of power.
Anthropologist Christopher Boehm has proposed a social theory that anarchist, egalitarian hunter-gatherers maintained equality through a leveling mechanism he calls Reverse Dominance:
Reverse dominance hierarchies are broken down into four different leveling mechanisms:
These mechanisms work because human beings are social creatures and hugely influenced by peer pressure and social acceptance.
Anarchist modes of human governance are largely based upon shame as a regulatory method. Within such a society individuals are socially, morally, and ecologically compelled to expiate their power and reciprocate wealth because the alternative is the risk of shaming, ridicule, and/or ostracism.
Like A.C. Grayling explained it,
In order for power and wealth not to become a psychological burden within anarchist systems, the powerful and the wealthy must be able to expiate and reciprocate their power and wealth, lest people become oppressed, and entire systems become corrupt.
But this does NOT mean that skill, courage, intelligence and perseverance are not rewarded. Anarchy does not imply socialism.
Ours is a cultural problem. We've been raised to believe in the false ideal of greed. We've been conditioned to own. Our culture has become ego-centric, as opposed to eco-centric. It has become ownership-based, as opposed to relationship-based.
But prestige and merit can still be highly strived for values within an anarchist society that practices expiation of wealth and the ethics of reciprocity.
As I wrote in Breaking out of a Broken System,
Anarchists are crazy enough to think they can change the world, which is precisely why they will.
5.) It Would Create Compassionate, Humble, but Courageous Leadership
Anarchist modes of human governance create precisely the type of self-educated, autodidactic individual that predatory capitalist's and pacifist socialist's fear.
As Louis G. Herman wrote,
An individual (ego) acting on the good of the whole (eco) is a force of nature first, a person second, which provides them the phenomenal power of standing on the shoulders of giants while also wearing a wide array of masks of self-mastery.
If we can combine fierce egalitarian primal politics along with the type of progressive self-interested people who are capable of considering the bigger interdependent picture, then we have a recipe for a healthy, prestigious anarchic leadership.
We have a blueprint for authentically venerated and wise leadership that has the potential to transform the currently unlivable human world into a livable one.
Like Martin Luther King Jr. said,
Indeed, it is typically the nonconformist who is the one testing the outer limits of the human imagination: stretching comfort zones, shattering mental paradigms, and flattening status quo boxes that those hooked on conformity so desperately try to think outside of.
As Henry David Thoreau said, in true anarchist leadership form,
Four Things the 'Powers-That-Be'... Don't Want You to Know about Anarchy
by Gary 'Z' McGee
"None are more enslaved than those who believe they are free."
There are few subjects as controversial and taboo as the concept of anarchy.
It mostly leaves a bad taste in people's mouth due in no small part to years of psychological conditioning, backwards reasoning, and smoke & mirror political propaganda.
But, as Voltaire ingeniously suggested,
By explaining what anarchy truly is, we indirectly end up criticizing the powers-that-be, revealing the emperor is not only naked, but insecure and weak at the prospect of free men and women.
Here then are four things the powers-that-be don't want you to know about anarchy.
1. Anarchy ≠ Chaos
Anarchy does not equal chaos.
Anarchy has been the natural order of human beings since time immemorial. There's a reason why tribal and nature-based societies have survived the trials and tribulations of millions of years of evolution, because they governed themselves in a healthy way: through natural anarchy.
It's actually hierarchal and state-run society's that equal chaos. It all comes down to a matter of power.
Here's how: hierarchal and state-run societies have centralized institutions with the monopoly on the use of violence. This large concentration of power attracts a particular type of leader: politicians who crave power. And since "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" then such power almost always leads to war.
Such wars naturally lead to more power, and so the vicious cycle continues, while keeping the powers-that-be continuously in power.
This is not to say that anarchic societies don't have hierarchy, they just have considerably less hierarchy. But even anarchic societies with hierarchies are less likely to monopolize power, because they are engineered in such a way that groups never get to the point of concentrated centers of power.
They are engineered so that brutes, or even groups of brutes, cannot rise to power.
The checks and balances inherent within the anarchic system, along with the polarizing effect of self-governance, maintains a healthy equilibrium within a society.
When it comes down to it, anarchists are peaceful people who just want to govern themselves. Anarchism does not imply nihilism.
Anarchism implies only adherence to, and respect for, the natural order of things:
To say that anarchy only ever leads to chaos is not only ignorance of the natural world, but ignorance of the nature of the human condition itself.
2. Anarchy = Freedom
Simply put, anarchy prefers dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery. It prefers uncomfortable truth over comfortable lies.
It prefers the pain of knowledge over the bliss of ignorance.
As was written in the Bhagavad Gita:
A common argument against anarchy is that there is no governance.
But a society without a government isn't necessarily a society without governance. Really, there is no such thing as a society without governance. A society with no sense of order is oxymoronic; it isn't a "society" at all.
A society (a group of people who agree to live among each other) that allows its people to govern themselves is an anarchic society.
A group of people allowed to govern themselves is a free society (anarchy). A group of people who are not allowed to govern themselves is an unfree society (tyranny). The question is what type of order is preferable: liberty or tyranny.
Most reasonable people will choose liberty. And liberty is, by nature, anarchic.
As H.L. Mencken wrote,
3. Anarchy ≠ Slavery
The Confederacy of Dunces is always ballyhooing,
But what these dunces fail to realize is that they are confusing domination with leadership, in the first place.
Raised, as these dunces are, under the tyranny of the state, they cannot see that they are subordinate it. They are under the false notion that the state is a benign institution which satisfies their need for leadership.
When, actually, the state is nothing more than a malignant institution of coercive authority that is satisfying its own need for power.
This is domination, not leadership. The fact that these dunces vote is just smoke and mirrors, the illusion of freedom, but is not actually freedom itself. It's important to note that anarchists do not reject all authority, only that which is unhealthy or unjust. They don't have a problem with rules, but with rulers.
Like Simone De Beauvoir wrote,
If human beings are the most intelligent animal on the planet then why do we need to pay other people to think for us while we slave away for them?
No other animal is stupid enough to do this, probably because no other animal is stupid enough to invent such a thing as money.
That aside, the current economic slavery perpetuated by the state is unprecedented in the history of mankind. We live in an authoritarian society that most of us are not even aware of because we've been conditioned to accept it.
We are daily being preached to buy propagandized advertisements on the one side and polarizing bipartisan politics on the other: conform, buy this, be afraid of "the other," you must be approved of by others, be less than you are. It turns out that the best slaves are the ones that don't even know they're slaves.
As Naseem Nicholas Taleb wrote,
4. Anarchy = Harmony
If, as Nietzsche wrote,
This is the power of Nietzsche's Übermensch:
And so it should also be the duty of the anarchist to subsume such power. The only thing preventing the anarchist from his/her responsibility to the earth is the smoke and mirrors of the state.
The state perpetuates the psyche-cosmos split. It aggrandizes mankind over nature itself. It dissociates us from the natural order of things so that it can maintain its power over us. One of the ways the state does this is by claiming that human nature is inherently corrupt and therefore must be governed. But human nature is not fixed. It changes according to its environment.
The idea that humans are naturally evil and greedy creatures by default is a complete farce. If we live in an environment that perpetuates militarization, violence, greed and power, then we will behave in militarized, violent, greedy and power-mongering ways.
If we live in an environment of compassion, empathy, love and prestige, then we will behave in compassionate, empathic, loving, prestigious ways. It really is that simple.
This has been proven time and time again by nature-based cultures the world over.
The difficult part is seeing through the mess of it all. To be truly free is both very easy and very difficult. But if we can keep our moral compass focused on the principles of liberty, peace, love, and the ethics of reciprocity, then it will point the way, True North, toward a truly free society.
It will reveal a society that preserves the moral Golden Mean and the middle-way, as opposed to the immoral, suffocating greed of state politics. It will uncover a society that exemplifies the Golden Ratio of nature, as opposed to the state's expropriation of nature and nature-based cultures.
It will bring to light a society that realizes that by hanging the "greater villain," in the first place, neither man nor woman would ever have to steal the goose from off the common.
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