We Need Anarchy

[This article is from a talk I gave on July 31, 2016, at the seventh annual “Capitalism and Morality” conference held in Vancouver, B.C. Sponsored by Jayant Bhandari – a very bright, energetic libertarian – the conference brings together speakers and participants interested in exploring the deeper implications of liberty, private property, and free markets.]

To think that I attempted to force the reason and conscience of thousands of men into one mould and I cannot make two clocks agree.

– Emperor Charles V

Dating back at least to the time of Plato, most of us have been conditioned in the mindset that the more complex a society becomes, the greater the need we have for vertically-structured, top-down definitions of, and prescriptions for, social order. Such thinking has provided the symbol for most organizational systems: the pyramid, wherein authority flows downward to those expected to be obedient. Institutions – be they political, educational, religious, business enterprises – have long employed this organizational model in one form or another. The Egyptian pyramids, the Washington Monument, and the pyramid on the reverse side of the dollar bill are familiar examples of this concept. Chain-of-command hierarchies are generally used to identify roles within institutions.In his book, Against Method, another highly respected student of science, Paul Feyerabend, elaborated on what he termed “epistemological anarchism.” He elaborated on this: “The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules are both unrealistic and pernicious.”  To think otherwise is to overlook the contributions to scientific understanding that have arisen by accident, through dreams, guesswork, emotions, intuition, and spontaneous, diffused processes. Characterizing science as an “anarchistic enterprise” that is “more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives,” Feyerabend rested his case on the epistemological principle that “anything goes.”

At a time when computerized technologies provide for the widespread dispersal of both information and alternative systems for social practices, the works of Kuhn and Feyerabend may serve as a base for efforts to transform traditional models of imposed authority into networks of mutual independence. Perhaps Albert Jay Nock’s “Remnant” – those individuals who, following the collapse of civilization – will use their awareness of the “august order of nature” to “build up a new society.” In the course of their efforts, these people may have occasion to inquire into an etymological dictionary to discover why the words “peace,” “freedom,” “love,” and “friend” share an interconnected history. Perhaps in the mindset of our more distant ancestors we can find a more personal sense of what it means to live with others in society.

Those who have schemed so insistently to create and maintain their monopolies of violence over all of mankind never found comfort in Gutenberg’s invention. But neither the banning nor burning of books, heresy trials, Inquisitions, the hanging or burning of witches, nor Luddite machine-breaking riots, were able to destroy the civilizing consequences of the decentralized and liberating character of expanded information that produced the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Age of Reason, or the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Perhaps our children and grandchildren, sharing with one another the dispersed and individualized powers of information that the established order so mightily fears, will transform the thinking, and clean up the mess, that my generation so ignorantly allowed to be created.

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