Gunslinger
Regular Member
imported post
Tomahawk wrote:
Tomahawk wrote:
"Rational anarchy" is a contradiction in terms.Well, I'll type quickly because this thread will almost certainly be locked soon...
I think it's human nature to not be completely independent and look to authority. If you put a bunch of humans together in a colony, an authority figure will arise from their mudst almost immediately. Part of this is tradition, because it's all they have known, but part of this is tribal mentality, which goes back in human behavior to the dawn of man.
Rational anarchy is a wonderful base to start from for thinking of individualism; I think Jefferson went there in his fascination with the Indians and their lack of a formal government. But even the Indians were tribal in nature, and worse, their primitive form of government was unable to withstand contact with the more complex social and political structures of the European culture. The Indian tribes were too balkanized to stand against the combined might of a French or British or Spanish system of colonies united under a single empire and ruled by a king most of the colonists had never laid eyes on 3000 miles away.
An example of a modern anarchy would be Somalia. The Somalians, when unmolested by outsiders (like, ahem, the US and UN, but now mainly neighboring countries), live a fairly peaceful life, using family or clan-based courts, which compel criminals to pay restitution to victims or victims' families. The problem is that in the modern world a society that exists without a government is viewed as a target by both UN/US do-gooders and base brigands alike. Somalia never gets a peaceful moment.
The lesson I take from this is that humans do not remain in John Locke's "state of nature" any longer than they have to. As Locke described, they form governments for mutual defense from predators and to protect their rights from their neighbors by providing an alternative to the family feuds and bloody vigilantism in the form of a formal court system with fact-finding procedures, open to the public. The challenge is to keep government from growing out of control and becoming just another organized crime system. In Locke's day they focused on tyrannical monarchs, in the modern day government has grown into a complex system of institutionalized tyranny in which every bureaucrat and armed agent is covered by a myriad of legal protections and complex regulations that allows him to claim innocence.
The anarchist decries the minarchist as being on the first step toward statism, but I think the anarchist is being unrealistic about human nature. Humans self-organize, and once we find a structure that works for us right now, we tend to institutionalize it. Even Jefferson was a minarchist and actively participated in both Virginia and federal government.