Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.

I am, alas, not particularly inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement,  for sentiments suggested by the poem above and reasons expressed by Thomas Knapp, Gerry Spence, and especially Claire Wolfe, who advises: “Occupy Your Ownself.”

Beware: Should you happen to spot me on the streets of Westminster, you are exhorted to summon law enforcement immediately! That London borough’s “Counter Terrorist Focus Desk” considers me a threat to the public safety (“Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminster anti-terror police,” The Guardian, July 31).

Yes, I am an anarchist. I state this without apology, understanding that you may find it strange or even scary, or may not understand the term well. I’d like to explain myself to you, while there’s still time, before someone else tells you a scary story and urges you to assist in my apprehension.

I’m not a nihilist — someone who rejects all structure in, or institutions of, society. Nor am I an agent of chaos, who believes that life absent government would consist of ongoing, unrestrained mass rampage and wants to see that happen.

In fact, I consider myself a defender of society and agent of order, opposed to the institution most responsible for the disintegration of social institutions and the attendant orgy of looting, torture and mass murder that was the 20th century: Monopoly government, also known as “the state.”

Why is it important for me to convey this to you now? Because the world’s several states, as is their periodic wont, appear set to launch a new round of “scares,” with anarchists as bogeyman, to re-assign blame for their own failures.

The Anarchist Scare never really dies out. It’s a convenient hook to hang blame for any popular discontent on. Look at any mass protest: If a million people turn out to express dissent toward some government action, the establishment media intently focuses on a few masked window-breakers to discredit the whole affair, dubbing them “anarchists” whether they are or not.

And when things begin to get really bad — when multiple governments find themselves flirting with default on “national debt,” fighting and losing numerous wars of aggression around the globe, and visibly losing their grip on putative “consent of the governed,” for example — they break that masked, bomb-throwing stereotype out of the Excuse Locker and parade it around the block in high profile.

The unacceptable alternative to such theater is for politicians to accept full responsibility for the consequences of their own actions, and the next time we see that happening will be the first time. So, prepare for the next Anarchist Scare.

Why pick on anarchists? Why do politicians think you’ll find us scary? Because they find us scary, of course … and with good reason!

Political government is the past. Anarchy is the future.

Political government brought you hundreds of millions of murders in the last century, and sent you the butcher’s bill.

In any given month, a typical state kills more of its own citizens pro rata than al Qaeda killed in the United States on September 11th, 2001 — some openly, bullet to brain, some through the suffocating effects of regulation and prohibition — while extorting from those same citizens a double-digit percentage of their earnings for “protection” from the likes of Osama bin Laden.

By any standard of human decency and well-being, the state’s performance constitutes not just massive failure but a monstrous negation of all that is right and good.

While anarchists cannot reasonably pledge to end murder and theft, we can and do offer an end to the institutionalization and legitimization of mass murder and theft in the name of “government.” An end to, in a word, politics.

Not an end to law, which existed before the state and will exist long after the state is mere bitter historical memory. All societies outlaw murder, rape, assault and robbery, and if societies vary in their effectiveness at suppressing those activities, none has failed so spectacularly or expensively as the state.

Nor an end to common defense, a notion the state turns on its head and into a one-stop shop for aggressive capability in its service and at the expense of that capability’s own providers. Local watchmen and constables, and citizen militias, are transformed by the state into occupying, militarized police forces and standing armies whose chief purpose is to tyrannize the very people they’re pledged to “defend.”

Hobbes got it backward: The state offers not an end to “the war of all against all,” but endless escalation of that war, so that it can loot the dead and rob the dying in perpetuity.

Anarchy is the cease-fire agreement. It’s the peace craze that the politicians desperately hope will blow over so they can get back to their sociopathic, serial killing ways.

Remember that a week, a month or a year from now when some uniformed animal with a gun and badge tries to tell you that I am the common enemy of you both.

Tolstoy said it better:

All men are brought up to the habit of obeying the laws of the state before everything. The whole existence of modern times is defined by laws. A man marries and is divorced, educates his children, and even (in many countries) professes his religious faith in accordance with the law. What about the law then which defines our whose existence? Do men believe in it? Do they regard it as good? Not at all. In the majority of cases people of the present time do not believe in the justice of the law, they despise it, but still they obey it. It was very well for the men of the ancient world to observe their laws. They firmly believed that their law (it was generally of a religious character) was the only just law, which everyone ought to obey. But is it so with us? we know and cannot help knowing that the law of our country is not the one eternal law; that it is only one of the many laws of different countries, which are equally imperfect, often obviously wrong and unjust, and are criticised from every point of view in the newspapers. The Jew might well obey his laws, since he had not the slightest doubt that God had written them with his finger; the Roman too might well obey the laws which he thought had been dictated by the nymph Egeria. Men might well observe the laws if they believed the Tzars who made them were God’s anointed, or even if they thought they were the work of assemblies of lawgivers who had the power and the desire to make them as good as possible. But we all know how our laws are made. We have all been behind the scenes, we know that they are the product of covetousness, trickery, and party struggles; that there is not and cannot be any real justice in them. And so modern men cannot believe that obedience to civic or political laws can satisfy the demands of the reason or of human nature. Men have long ago recognized that it is irrational to obey a law the justice of which is very doubtful, and so they cannot but suffer in obeying a law which they do not accept as judicious and binding.

(Scalia has said as much too, taking it to an absurd and self-contradictory conclusion.)

But such an understanding, although necessary, is not sufficient for a real anarchist. After all, a relatively enlightened man might recognize that the modern State is of no authority and yet still support its dominance and power as a “necessary evil.”

Anarchy, etymologically, means leaderlessness. [Thomas Knapp notes here that he understands anarchy to entail “rulerlessness,” not “leaderlessness,” and that there’s a difference. My clarification is here.] Anarchism supposes that such “leaderlessness” rather than the Hobbesian dominance of a leading power is the fundamental condition of peace and justice. It therefore entails in the political context the distribution and balance of power, as well as the rejection of authority. An “ideal” world of individuals in which power was completely distributed and balanced equally among them (i.e., a world approximating albeit more ideal than the “state of nature”) would be a world in which rights were absolutely secure, since no individual would have the power to overcome the rights of any other. But in the real world one man will have more power than another and enough to overcome his rights, or may conspire with other men to do so. To guard against this threat men may associate or contract with others to balance the threat. But if their true purpose in doing so is only to secure their own rights, and not to conspire to violate rights themselves, their associations will tend to maintain (both internally and externally) as much of the state of nature’s indigenous “leaderlessness” and equilibrium as possible. Randy Barnett has suggested one way in which this tendency might work out in the real world:

Some libertarians prefer a different legal structure, one that promises to work better than the structure provided by the Constitution. Such a structure would take the principles or strategies embodied in the Constitution farther than did the Framers. These principles are (1) reciprocity of power between the ruler and the ruled that is supposed to be accomplished by voting, (2) checks and balances on power that are supposed to result from federalism and separation of powers, and (3) the power of exit that is provided by free emigration and, formerly, the power of secession. These libertarians merely propose two itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie changes to the status quo: First, end the government’s power to put its competitors out of business by force (which violates the freedom to contract of those who wish to provide and obtain such services); second, end the government’s power to confiscate its income by force (which violates the freedom from contract of those whose property is taken without their consent). Not much really.

What these libertarians hope and expect would result from these two changes is the evolution of a polycentric constitutional order in which one would subscribe to a legal system of one’s choice as today one subscribes to cell phone service, health and auto insurance, or private security providers. The ability of buyers to withhold their patronage and payments from sellers is the most powerful form of reciprocity. Having competing separate legal systems would provide far more effective checks and balances. And simply by switching justice and law enforcement providers, individuals would be able to assert the power of exit without leaving home. Of course, there is much more to be said about all this, which I explain in far greater detail in my book, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford, 1998).

(John Hasnas has suggested another way.)

But how might we ever get to a point where the United States government could be taken down to a size reflecting its true nature as a merely human organization like other human organizations, and its power balanced by other powers in society, to the end that our rights might be better secured? First and foremost, by speaking, or at least not denying, the truth. To that end, there’s a lot of speech we could do without:

Flags

The Pledge of Allegiance

The National Anthem

Oaths to support the Constitution

Parades for police officers or soldiers killed in the line of duty (since we don’t have parades for private security guards killed in the line of duty)

Voting

Addressing judges as “Your Honor”

Etc.