Tuesday, February 10, 2015

State? Or No State?

The idea of anarchy strikes fear in the hearts of most people. Their imaginations run wild with scenes of social disorder, violent gang warfare, and unrelieved insecurity. Yet, strange to say, these same people live comfortably in the present world, a world in which states bring relentless plunder, brutal oppression, unjust laws and punishments, gargantuan waste, endless wars, and political measures that generally enrich the already rich and powerful and ensure permanent marginalization of the down-and-out.

Can it be the case that the present state-dominated situation with all its horrors is necessarily superior to every possible stateless alternative? Is the world in its present condition really the best of all possible worlds? Your rulers want you to think so. They tempt you with visions of reform, but the reforms they allow, as a rule, only make matters worse for the masses, who must settle for the delusion that in a de facto one-party state such as the USA their votes can alter either the current situation or the trend of events.

Sensible anarchists do not promise heaven on earth. They understand that even in the absence of the state, the full range of human folly, foibles, and capacity for evil will remain, and hence so will crime and bad behavior of many kinds. What the anarchists do promise, however, is that under anarchy no overwhelmingly dominant organization will exist to suppress people's decentralized experiments in building better lives founded in freedom, rather than in centralized predation and oppression by an overarching ruling class.

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