Humans originated in a state of anarchy, that is, without centralized power. Monopolies on force eventually emerged and took on the structure of “states” of various types in order to legitimatize their monopolies in the eyes of the people, so that they could retain their monopoly powers.
Now a critic of anarchy would say, “Anarchy has failed before. In fact it has failed everywhere, all across the world, because there are no lasting anarchist societies today. So why would we expect anarchy to work now?”
It’s tempting to counter this by bringing up Somalia, but that is a very weak case since it has only been around for a short while. It’s a little better to counter with the fact that countries are in anarchy with respect to each other, but that argument is not nearly incisive or comprehensive enough. Even if we win that debate decisively, all we’ll have to show for it is the weak assertion that “anarchy can work in certain cases.”
We’ll still not really have touched on the basic issue: “Why did individual anarchy fail before, and how can we assert that it will be different this time?” After all, in anarchy nothing can be decreed; in the end, the chips will fall where they may, as determined by consumer preferences on the market. The first time, those consumer preferences led to monopoly and statism. We cannot escape or wiggle around this objection. We must attack it head on.
Below is my attempt at taking this bull by the horns.
First a note on terminology: I use the word “anarchy” in its original meaning of “society without a leader,” from the Greek “an-” (without) + “arkhos” (leader). “Anarchy” does NOT mean “without laws.”
Also note that “anarcho-capitalism,” “market anarchy,” etc. are simply theories about how a society would most successfully organize itself under anarchy. Once we achieve anarchy we have no control over how society organizes itself. All we can do is educate, for example, that people should beware of monopolies on violence, and should embrace the free market - or show the same by example.
I now offer four major driving forces that stabilize society by moving it toward the “market anarchy” that AnCaps theorize would be the most stable and successful type of social structure.
Interconnectedness, Decentralization, Education, Advancement (IDEA)
I suggest that increases in these four forces are what can and will enable stable anarchy versus the failed anarchies of the past (which were only high in decentralization, but low in the other three).
That is,
Interconnectedness of individuals and institutions (economic relationships, contractual agreements, etc.)
Decentralization of power (the very definition of anarchy)
Education and enlightenment of the people (especially in political economy)
Advancement of economic prosperity and technology (in a word, civilization)
INTERCONNECTEDNESS of individuals and institutions is at the heart of many of the arguments for PDAs, private courts, etc. We can see that the more economically interconnected countries become, the less they tend to fight each other (hence the saying, “if goods don’t cross borders, troops will”). The same is clearly true for private security and adjudication providers, who will have every incentive to cooperate rather than act violently. The underlying factor is how interconnected their interests are. If their interests we not so intertwined they would have much less reason to avoid open violence.
Factors raising the level of personal and institutional interconnectivity include:
- Language: spoken, then written, followed by standardization and then the current push for English as a global language, not to mention economic advancement (see below) enabling education (see below again) and thereby increasing literacy rates. Now the Internet is vigorously boosting all of these language factors.
- Contract law conventions: these have developed in common law over time - I’ll leave the details to someone more knowledgeable
- Market interactions and the (limited) recognition of the value of unhindered free exchange, especially after Adam Smith
- Greater value of reputation: a result of the rise of free-market capitalism (and of course language)
- Greater power of social sanctions, thanks to several of the above
DECENTRALIZATION of power is the very essence of anarchy: no leaders or rulers, no monopolies on force. This is both the goal and a means toward the goal, because if centralized power tends towards centralization ever more quickly, then increasingly decentralized power must for the same reason tend toward more and more suppression of centralization (monopolization). In other words, the more decentralized power is, the weaker the forces toward centralization tend to become. As I mentioned above, decentralization is the one factor that was higher back when humans originated. Thus it was anarchy, but without the other stabilizing forces.
EDUCATION levels (and human knowledge itself) are far far higher - despite the ill effects of the Dept. of Education - than they were back in ancient history when the most anarchies failed. Education is probably now our most important role; if enough people understood what we do, we’d have AnCap very soon indeed. Other than that, education contributes in important ways to many other factors mentioned here, such as entrepreneurship. We are now, more than at any other time in modern history, in a strong position to destroy the old paternalistic superstitions that we need States, divinely-inspire despots, or “genius leaders” to watch over us. This superstition is indeed deeply ingrained in our language and culture, but we can shake it out of people with a little common sense and clarification of the statist bias inherent in much of our language.
ADVANCEMENT of economic prosperity and technology not only tends to strongly drive the above forces of interconnectedness and education, it also raises people’s overall standard of living, reducing resource-based disputes and such. The retrogressions of statism, Keynesianism, and central banking notwithstanding, civilization is far more advanced now, and hence in a far better position to maintain anarchy for reasons too numerous to list. In some other threads, I noted that the development of privacy technologies and the Internet could blaze the most expedient path to microsecession. [Edit: Harry Felker notes the development of individual weaponry, which I think is a major key. “Right to bear arms” doesn’t mean much when the strongest weapons are sticks and stones.]
Finally, as a clarifying thought exercise, imagine we’re in a cyber-classroom centuries in the future, long after a stable anarchy has been achieved and society has reached levels of peace and prosperity unimaginable to us. We’re listening to a biologist or historian taking about the history of statism. He takes a much simpler, more scientific/objective view of the issue than we do, saying,
"Well it’s simple. Entities can be organized in either top-down or bottom-up structures.
"Top-down is clearly impractical for humans, because it is in human nature that power corrupts to the extent to which that power is absolute. It was only their lingering statist superstitions that kept the ancient humans from seeing this obvious truth, or knowing it yet dogmatically ignoring it in Orwellian doublethink fashion. If we consider other entities for which this is not the case, something like minarchy may well succeed in the long term, but human nature utterly precludes it. For humans, totalitarianism and/or collapse was the inevitable result of minarchy and all other statism.
"Having eliminated top-down organization categorically, we are left only with bottom-up. Now here is the key point: the way in which entities will organize bottom-up depends on their qualities and the conditions they face. For humans, that means their human nature and the tendencies they have developed/learned in their lives, coupled with their current circumstances (resource availability, etc.).
"Back in the Stone Age, people didn’t learn much, and their circumstances were bleak, so bottom-up organization failed. Human nature does not change, but the other factors did, and pretty soon bottom-up organization became viable. As humans advanced, anarchy became more and more viable until its superiority was so overwhelmingly obvious that the old statist superstitions were finally abandoned and we truly began to reach for the stars.
“I know you’re all baffled as to why this superstition was allowed to persist for so long, even after the scientific revolution. This is a more complicated matter, but it’s illuminating to first note the parallels between statism and the flat-earthism we studied last week…”
