As an anarchist that hangs out with statist libertarians I am often involved in political and philosophical debates. When I mention my belief that we humans don’t need to be ruled my more statist cohorts have to quickly jump in to tell me how wrong I am. According to them government is absolutely critical for a free society (because nothing says free like being ruled). When I ask why they almost always claim that a government is necessary to protect the rights of the citizenry.
This reason has always amused me. Governments have it easy. They get to make all of the rules, including what is considered a right under their legal system. You would think that they would write a set of rules that they intend to follow. But governments are the biggest violators of the very rights they declare. When I point this out my statist friends reply by saying that we need to stand up to the government whenever it violates our rights.
So the theory of statism goes like this. We need a government to protect our rights and we must protect our rights against the government. If we’re worried about our rights why would we want to charge the biggest violator of those rights with protecting them? That makes as much sense as charging the fox with guarding your chickens.
Being forced to choose between defending my rights against smaller groups of vicious people or one large, centralized organization with a monopoly on violence and perceived legitimacy by a sizable portion of the population I’d choose the former. It’s much easier to defend yourself against small mostly disorganized groups who nobody considered a legitimate authority. When you have to defend yourself against a government, which is nothing more than a very large gang, you end up not only having to fight the government but all of the people who believe it to be a legitimate entity (because, after all, it’s their gang so it must be the right one).
“It’s much easier to defend yourself against small mostly disorganized groups who nobody considered a legitimate authority.”
I’ve waded through more “anarchy can’t work because the thugs will just gang up and take over” logorrhea then I care to contemplate, and what you say/imply above, that under anarchy the thugs would have no legitimacy, making resisting them much more feasible, has always occurred to me as a blindingly obvious rebuttal. I’ve NEVER seen anyone make it. So, thanks.
It’s good to know that there’s at least one other person who understands.
Most statists when imagining anarchy seem to have visions of warlords roaming the land and killing people. What they don’t stop to consider is that those warlords are almost never seen as legitimate authorities by the people they supposedly rule over. This is probably why there is so much regime change in those areas (unlike “legitimate” states warlords seldom last very long). Of course exceptions exist and it’s usually when an established state helps prop up a warlord (for example, the United States has a long history of financing and arming warlords so long as they opposed whatever perceived enemy America had in the region).
I foresee anarchy as taking on a resemblance of stateless Iceland, medieval Ireland, and Neutral Moresnet. But even if warlords did spring up they most likely wouldn’t last very long due, in part, to their lack of legitimacy in the eyes of the people.