Why Faith In The State Over Anarchy Is Flawed

Why Faith In The State Over Anarchy Is Flawed

The Government does not hate you. The Government does not like you. It is indifferent. The Government is not an entity with feelings, remorse, ethics or conscious. It is a collective of individuals working according to rigid flawed guidelines. The government is not an individual therefore the government as a whole has no rights whatsoever. People can have rights, this corporate entity called the United States has no rights. It functions to take rights and to oppress. There are often individuals within the government who wish to ‘do good’ but overall that is impossible. The nature of government prohibits any good for the very means of which the state reaches its ends is immoral.

Individuals who work within the government or are employed by the government may have rights, but no more than any other individual. This makes the actions of many of the states employees criminal by the very nature of their jobs. Marines and Soldiers often engage in murder and invasion. They justify this by stating that the non-individual ‘the state’ is responsible. What is the state? It is nothing more than these individuals acting in a criminal manner to assert force and control over other human beings. If a gangster claims they have the right to murder because the gang they belong to calls for this murder, do we accept that as a justified?

Police by the nature of their job simply defend the will of the state with force. They partake in what would be seen outside of the context of the state as extortion, theft, murder, assault and kidnapping on a daily basis. This is simply justified by stating ‘they were just doing their job.’ Even the youngest elementary school child is taught this is wrong. “Would you jump off a bridge if Jimmy told you to?” We learn that just because someone tells us to do something it is not justified. Somehow statist apologetics seem to defy those simple ethics.

These people who have committed crimes against humanity under the titles the government provides them would still exist in a system without government. The aim of eliminating government can be seen as an aim to end the unethical nature of the state. By eliminating the crux of the state which is the power of the Police and Military that uses force to obtain it’s will and command over others. The average person sees these as necessities for order. To bring up alternatives for order in a more ethical manner tends to bring up doomsday scenarios and a debate that compares anarchism to a certain utopia they have even failed to obtain through their force. As an anarchist I do not seek utopia, but to reject a system that is every bit as criminal as what it claims to oppose. I seek to oppose hierarchy, power over others and oppression. To claim that we must accept oppression on one level to avoid oppression on another level is inaccurate. This returns to the statist mindset that in order to end crime we must also partake in those crimes under the title of ‘Police.’ I am not asking for oppression or crime on any level, rather pointing at how we accept it on one level for a ‘greater good’ justified by ‘the will of the people’ or the ‘divine rights of kings.’

If you have faith in these people to keep order and to find solutions with coercion why then do you not believe that this order can not be found outside of criminal means?

Those in the state that seek to keep order are just people. Individual human beings preforming a job under a misguided ethic. Once we have eliminated the hierarchy and oppression of the state it will still be people or individuals in non-coercive entities and through voluntary means providing similar services. There is a misunderstanding that somehow order is only found with these people if the state exists. The only tool for order is often seen as the state. This is partially because the state has educated us to believe such. Individuals have a difficult time perceiving a system outside of the systems that they have always known.

I am not one to say that a Dispute Resolution Organization (DRO) or Voluntary Contractual Arrangements are the definitive answer. In a truly non-coercive system we would see all and more. We would see amalgams of these as well as other concepts for protection defense and order. To state that we must choose one is the flaw of the statist. I n a truly liberated society I am not forced to choose between Mutualism, Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarcho Capitalism, but I am free to join in the systems of order I find most effective or appropriate. To cling to only one is the way of the state. This keeps the flaws of the system choose also with no option and no way out.

Society like the government is not an individual or an entity with rights to supersede the rights of the individual. Society however is a reality. We may each be individuals with rights but we often find we are interdependent. This interdependence creates society, markets, syndicates and all forms of interaction. To say that one solution is sufficient for all needs is to oversimplify reality. To embrace anarchism is to embrace the reality that there is no one perfect way to interact and to embrace that there are flaws in systems. To embrace the state is to embrace one way that is believed to be the only solution and to enforce that belief and way upon others.

The expectations of statists for anarchism are far above that which they have achieved with statism. It is the statist who will ask for a solution to a problem and when given one they are restricted to the statist idea that this is the only solution. They will then ask impossible tasks that they have even failed to find effective solutions for. One example is defense. The statist sees the state as the only solution. When one looks at anarchist solutions we see many options. The anarchist will often start with prevention and move to other solutions from there. The statist is limited to the government they grant a monopoly over the industry of aggression.

In closing I will state that to reject the state is not to stand in opposition to order or to ignore problems that exist, but to embrace the reality that there is no one way that will be the answer to all. We embrace that fact that people can bring solutions and that they should not be disregarded because they do not lead to utopia.