Robert: But dear boy,…
But dear boy, you don’t have to think it. You don’t even have to be the one to do it. The point is that, faced with oppression or tyranny or banditry under anarchy, some group of farmers is going to get together, spit, and say “you know, if we each just gave 5 percent of our crop to a central body, and then the central body used it to hire soldiers to patrol each of our farms, that’d keep the bandits out.”
They’re welcome to arrange for the defense of their farms in this way if they want to do so. After all, those are their farms, so if they want to host armed patrols to protect it that’s their business. Although there are pacifist anarchists, I’m not one of them. You’ll notice that I listed armed self-defense as one of the options for ways to resist tyranny that don’t involve forming embryonic states. The important thing is that (1) farmers are not coerced into ponying up the money for the patrols, (2) farmers can refuse to allow the patrols access to their land, and (3) farmers can choose to arrange for a different means of defense if they decide that they’d prefer to. (N.B.: in the list of attributes I gave for miniature states, all of them are important. The example that you gave is not coercively funded, or violently enforced, and whether it’s permanent or unchallenged is thus far up to the farmers who support it.) Historically speaking, I doubt that they’d really want full-time mercenaries to tromp around in their fields; it’s expensive and usually unnecessary. This kind of stuff is what citizen militias used to be for.
Of course, you may very well be right that if you have a lot of organizations like this around, and people interact with them in much the way they interact with government police forces today, it’s unlikely to be conducive to maintaining liberty:
But I think they’re a lot more likely to just organize an entity that carries guns, and have it shoot their enemies. And once that starts, the entity itself will want to continue existing.
The difficulty with the approach you outline is that it assumes everyone is a trained theoretical anarchist with a distaste for hierarchy and a commitment to avoid statist solutions to their immediate problems. I don’t think that’s a realistic premise. You’re going to have folks out there whose first solution is “let’s form a government”. And governments have a way of growing.
But the simple answer to this is that anarchism has material and cultural preconditions for flourishing. That might seem like a liability, but it’s a liability that anarchy shares with most other political theories (democracy, for example, requires a population that’s at least minimally willing to, and interested in, participating politically in order to function; republican politics in general is supposed to work best when caste sentiment and class deference are weakest; most modern statist theories presuppose at least a certain respect for process and the rule of law; etc.). I certainly agree with you that a sudden transition to anarchy is not likely to be sustainable in the current cultural climate. But the current cultural climate will not always be current, and there are plenty of reasons to think that a number of the things you mention (lack of scruple about coercion, deference to ritualized hierarchies, adherence to traditional political forms, etc.) are not natural or inevitable facts, but rather facets of a culture that can and ought to be changed.
I’m with you up until 3. But when seeking to minimize (or maximize) a variable, the optimal strategy may be to pursue a second-best solution.
You’ve actually misunderstood my argument if you think that I’m primarily making a point about how to “minimize a variable” or suggesting that the primary reason for anarchism is that it produces the least coercion on net in society. Some anarchists lean on that kind of consequentialist argument; I don’t.
To be clear, I think it’s true that anarchy is a necessary but insufficient condition for minimizing the total amount of coercion in a given society. But I don’t think that’s the primary reason to be an anarchist. The primary reason is (1) that it’s wrong for any one person to coerce any other peaceful person; (2) that the State, as such, exists by one group of people coercing another group of peaceful people; and (3) that peaceful people have no special obligation to defer to morally illegitimate commands. (1) and (2) together establish the moral illegitimacy of all governments, and (1), (2), and (3) together establish the moral legitimacy of ignoring, defying, or resisting arbitrary government demands. It’s not an issue of whether this maximizes liberty on the whole or minimizes coercion; coercion is something that each individual person is categorically obliged to abstain from, and liberty is something that each individual person has an inalienable right to exercise, independently of whether or not this “minimizes” the former and “maximizes” the latter on the whole.
… For if anyone demonstrated freedom of conscience and expression, it was Ayn Rand. …
Ayn Rand was not an anarchist. She said so in quite explicit and vituperative language (see e.g. her writings on Murray Rothbard). So her life decisions don’t say anything in particular about anarchism at all.
That said, the argument you offer is frankly a silly one. I’m pretty fed up with the U.S. government, but where else would I go, and why? All this tells you about anarchism or anarchists is that (1) anarchists have reasons, much like everyone else, to stay in their own homes rather than uprooting their whole lives to move somewhere else, and (2) there aren’t any stateless societies that are worthy enough of relocating to to overcome (1). Back around 1740 there were many French-speaking republicans, who opposed the absolute monarchy and feudal privilege in France, but who did not move out of France to live somewhere else without an absolute monarchy and feudalist privileges. So what? Is that supposed to prove that late Bourbon monarchy was the ideal political system at the time? Or does it simply prove that sometimes your options suck and you have to go with the least-worst that’s available until something new comes up?
There’s a lot of points that I haven’t answered yet; it’ll have to wait a while longer, I fear.
Anticopyright.