Re: Down with Democracy!
Seth David Schoen (schoen@uclink4.Berkeley.EDU)
16 Dec 1997 11:42:15 GMT
George J. Lee writes:
>"Daniel C. Burton" <dburton@ocf.berkeley.edu> writes:
>
>> I think we should have an anti-democracy protest next semester. People
>> who actually believe in government can just protest unlimited democracy,
>> and people like me can go all-out and promote anarchy. We can have a
>> little democarcy efficy on a hangman's noose.
>
>Sounds fantastic. Let's do it. Hmm.... I'm not sure whether I'm an
>anarchist or not. On the one hand, having multiple defense
>organizations and different court systems to choose from has its
>advantages, but I have some doubts about how well an anarchy will
>stand up against other countries and other governments. How well would
>it prevent a dictator from assembling an army and trying to take over
>your anarchy? How long could anarchy exist before some people
>establish governments?
Of course, how well does a democracy prevent a dictator from assembling
an army and trying to take over the democracy? In many cases, historically,
not very well.
Similarly, other systems don't necessarily stand up against "foreign"
invasion that well.
Vernor Vinge's story "The Ungoverned" (cited by many people as their first
exposure to the concept of anarchocapitalism; Heinlein seems to be the
main alternative, though I've only read Vinge) has as its plot a case of
a foreign governmental attack on a future anarchocapitalist United States.
Most of the story revolves around the collaboration between private
police agencies to defend their clients against the Mexican government, and
cases like that of one "armadillo" with a private weapons stockpile which
proves devastating when his property is threatened. Vinge clearly believes
that people can see their _temporary_ common interests well enough to
fight together even when they disavow any formal _long-term_ common interests.
And, after all, guerilla warfare is pretty hard to fight. If we only fought
as well as the Viet Cong did to defend our own properties or local
associations, we would probably be pretty hard to take over, even without
a big centralized army. Imagine modern New York City as the Warsaw Ghetto or
something. I doubt that invaders would get very far when individuals felt
threatened enough to fight back; some people feel threatened enough in New
York City as it is without the danger of guerilla and sniper attacks.
Yes, you could bomb it, but I think few wars of the future will be fought
merely over control of territory, and besides, the NYPD already has attack
helicopters in the movies -- it can't be that far off in reality. :-)
As to how long anarchy lasts without governments being established, this
probably depends on how well people are willing to defend themselves
against the governments. And _this_ depends, as does the very establishment
of the anarchy, either on the presence of "overwhelming force" (in which
case the anarchy is absurd and transitory), or on the ability to persuade
people that the anarchy is the only moral possibility as a political
system. If most people cannot be persuaded that way, the anarchy is
certainly doomed before it even gets started.
But the traditional "state of nature" arguments are silly; they suggest
that people once had anarchy and then voluntarily formed governments. They
then suggest that if we ever had anarchy again, people would once again
voluntarily form government.
Nothing like the anarchy envisioned by any contemporary philosophical
anarchists, left or right, has ever existed before, because people had no
education or culture the last time a "state of nature" existed. I think
that governments and the concept of authority in general developed, in
most cases, _accidentally_, rather than voluntarily. There are therefore
potentially significant differences between anarchies which might exist
today, when people can _discuss_ and _debate_ actual reasons for not wanting
government, and actual objections to it -- and the accidental anarchy which
existed thousands of years ago before anyone had thought about morality or
politics at all. That was anarchy before anyone knew any better; today, if
anarchy existed, it's possible to suggest that people would know enough to
be able to see the reasons why they actually wanted it to exist that way.
(To put it crudely, and from one view, many right-anarchists see the purported
"social contract" as a rationalization, and as so crazy in its far-reaching
claims that nobody would really be stupid enough to enter into it voluntarily;
so they tend to think that if it were actually _offered_ to people in the way
social contractarians pretend it once was, many people would actually now
reject it, not accept it.)
So there are many potential differences between an anarchy found for lack
of any alternatives in a preliterate society and one found deliberately as
a result of conscious decisions in a postindustrial society.
Whether these differences would mean that modern anarchy was somehow stabler
than historical anarchy is, as they say, anyone's guess.
--
Seth David Schoen L&S '01 (undeclared) / schoen@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Magna dis immortalibus habenda est atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo
custodi huius urbis, gratia, quod hanc tam taetram, tam horribilem tamque
infestam rei publicae pestem totiens iam effugimus. -- Cicero, in Catilinam I