On The Futile Delusion Of Anarchy

First, government is not an external entity, nor a mysterious overlord, nor an unyielding and ineffable omnipotency. If you live in a functioning democratic system – a system in which, one way or the other, the people’s voice controls who represents them and how – the government is you. If your government is acting in a way contrary to what you think best, it is up to you to get up and fix it.  You vote.  You lobby your representatives.  You organize public demonstrations.  You run for office yourself.  That’s how this is supposed to work.(*)

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. – Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

– Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

This insipid abuse of stupidity by picking words to artificially demonize is obnoxious to critical independent thought. “Government” is not some outside actor imposing its will on people. If you live in a democratic system and your government is not governing to your satisfaction, you change the government.  That’s literally what democracy is for, the reason our form of government exists, to ensure that “the government” – that is, the citizens elected to represent their fellow citizens in the processes of determining the details of being a successful country – is always responsible to its citizens.

This idea that anyone does, or even CAN exist without some form of government outside a single-person vacuum is as frankly ridiculous as it gets. I’ve gone into the question of anarchy itself in a previous article that I’ll resurrect when I find it, but the key point is the simple reality that “anarchy,” this notion of free people freely choosing to live in peace without government, is a delusion.  It literally can not exist.  See now:

There are two people. Those two people meet. Those two people carefully approach each other, find they can communicate effectively, and arrive at some basic agreements to avoid displeasure.

You now have two governments and an international treaty. If you decide that guy is better at chopping logs but he sucks at hunting meat so you’ll trade him some of your excess meat for his excess logs, you now have an international trade agreement. You agree not to kill each other, you now have laws.

That is “government.”  I’m quite sure someone reading this, and probably many of them, are thinking well you just don’t get what they mean by “no government.”  That’s not my problem, frankly; what they said was “no government,” and if that’s not what they mean then they should speak more accurately.

(* After publication, a reader pointed out that any number of exigent circumstances might prevent someone from taking any of the actions I described, running for office, voting, etc.  I do understand this and probably should have clarified that in the absence of an ability to do these things, at the very least you can support organizations and individuals working in your interest by sharing their content on social media, talking with your friends about these issues, and other activities that are free, easy, and take little time.  Really, the effort to be a genuinely good citizen isn’t much.  It just gets built up that way by the ownership class to discourage participation.

The point is, in a democratic system the government is by definition responsible to the people, and the people are responsible for their government.  For instance in the 2016 election it’s pretty fair to say that at least an effort was made to subvert the process, but it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well as it did if people hadn’t cooperated by backing a status-quo candidate in a rebellion election, by tolerating the obvious dirty pool on behalf of the DNC with regard to Sanders, by not pushing back against those stunts.

The degree to which any one person in your democracy may be disenfranchised, excluded, or subverted in their political choices is precisely the degree to which you do not live in a true democracy.  Even in a republic, the job of the elected representatives is to work on behalf of the best interests of the people.  If they’re not doing that, get rid of them before they break the system to the point you can’t.)