What is it Good For?

As the maniacs in Washington continue to drive us toward a war with Iran, even while the "opposition" has somehow managed to find the hero of the New Red Scare in no less perverse a personage than George W. Bush himself, it is perhaps worthwhile to step back from the madness for a few moments and consider what an alternative to all of this mayhem might actually look like.

My friend Luke Tatum posted on Gab quite some time ago that "peace requires anarchy." I countered him a bit; peace, I said, is anarchy. I wasn’t just being flip or cute, either; no, I maintain that, in a non-trivial sense, peace and anarchy are one and the same. In the wake of weeks of "antifa" violence, this can be a bit tough to understand, so let’s dive into it a bit.

First things first: we need to know what we’re talking about. "Anarchy" comes from the Greek word ἀναρχία ("anarchia"), meaning "without a ruler." Note carefully several things this word emphatically does not mean:

  • Chaos
  • Disorder
  • Without structure
  • Setting fire to a Starbucks and smashing up somebody’s car because Milo speaking might incite violence

The next thing we need to know is what it means to be a ruler. What it means to rule, just in a vacuum, is to have control over. At first blush, this may make it appear as though anarchists are opposed to anybody having any control over anything; like, hey, take your hands off that steering wheel! We’re against control! Obviously this is silly. What anarchists oppose is people having control over other people. This is a sticky wicket, though; there is obviously no way to object to people having control over other people without at least tacitly asserting control over those very same people!

Fortunately, we have an easy escape from this dilemma. Anarchism is a political philosophy and nothing more; as such, its conclusions are limited to the political realm, and it has nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of whether or not actors must rebel against directors or what-have-you. All anarchism is actually saying is that nobody has the rightful authority to assert political rule over other people.

So next up: what is "political rule," and how does it differ from the exercise of authority that a McDonald’s shift supervisor might have over his workers? The primary difference is the feature that defines political action as political: the absence of consent. Political rules and the penalties for noncompliance are determined in an entirely unilateral way; the subject has no real say in the matter (which may be disguised through such means as "voting" rituals), and is granted, if anything, a Hobson’s choice.

Since it is this absence of consent that forms the core of what makes a thing "political," it is that that anarchism stands against. As anarchists, we are opposed to doing things to people without their consent.

Merriam-Webster tells us that "peace" means (among other things) "harmony in personal relations." It is to this definition of "peace" that I refer when I say that peace is anarchy. One surely cannot have "harmony in personal relations" if one’s personal relations are rooted in violence and compulsion! If one cannot compel other people to do things they don’t want to do, in contrast, then personal relations cannot avoid being harmonious in an ex ante sense, since nobody can freely agree to do anything against his will.

This is, charmingly, almost wholly unrelated to the point I consistently make about war in a libertarian world. I regularly claim that, in a libertarian world, there would be far less war than there is in the current world. When I do so, the regular reply that comes is accusations of being "utopian," and supporting the silly Marxist notion that my politics are somehow able to transform man into something he is not. This is not at all what I’m saying. "Libertarian man" would be exactly the same as regular man. In a libertarian world, there would be good people and bad people in roughly the same proportion that they exist now. The key difference — the critical element that would suppress warfare in a libertarian world — is that war is impossibly expensive. According to Wikipedia (which is still bravely echoing the Obama administration lie that says the Iraq war ended in 2010), that war cost well over a trillion dollars. Who’s going to pay for that? Who is it anywhere who was so staunchly in favor of blood and death that he’s willing to pony up a cool trillion to make his fantasy come true?

In the real world, of course, the "merchants of death" are a major driving force behind these wars. They push for slaughter because they stand to make a ton of money from it. Am I saying those interests would suddenly wither away in a libertarian world? Not at all. I’m saying that it doesn’t cost very much to buy a senator or twelve compared to the share of that trillion dollars that went to, say, Northrop Grummond or Lockheed Martin. When those senators (and their cohorts in Washington) have the power to disperse that trillion dollars in expenses among four hundred million serfs, and they have central bank voodoo that makes some of the bills vanish into the future, suddenly war starts to look like a big winner. Socializing the costs and privatizing the benefits is exactly what the state is for, after all!

In a nutshell, what I’m saying is that, in a libertarian world, the drive to war would not be eliminated, but the means to achieve it would be sharply curtailed. The James Mattises of the world would still want to bomb Iran, and the Hillary Clintons of the world would still want global thermonuclear annihilation, but who could afford it? And, without sovereign immunity, would even these creeps be willing to face the legal consequences of committing murder on such a scale? Signs point to no.


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