Applied Anarchism Part 1: Take Care Of Your People.

It's the Fourth of July, and I'm living in Independence, Kansas. The folks around here would probably slice their arms open if you told them they didn't bleed red, white, and blue. It's kinda disturbing, after all they're celebrating their freedom from one type of heavily-authoritative government while they're living firmly under the boot of another type of heavily-authoritative government.

Apparently, a tyranny in which power is inherited is worse than a tyranny in which power is accumulated through lies, manipulation, and cronyism. At least that's what folks would tell you nowadays, that Monarchy is Bad, while Democracy (even though the US is supposed to be a Republic) is Good.

Left Boot, Right Boot, King's Boot, President's Boot...they're always a little too firmly planted on somebody's neck, and the neck never cares what kind of boot it is.

So what's an anarchist to do? How are we ever going to get rid of tyranny?

Actually, it's not as hard as it seems, it's just counter-intuitive.

See, what we need to realize is that tyranny is authorized by those at the top, often thousands of miles away from us, but it's implemented by those who are locally-based. The President is NEVER going to personally kick down my door. Congress will NEVER personally attempt to take my guns from me. No, they'll simply authorize (in an egregious abuse of power) a local thug to do it, and the local thug (utilizing the Nuremberg Defense of "We were just following orders") will do what he's told.

Those at the top justify their tyranny of a country based on very, very local situations, too. It wasn't a nationwide slaughter that led to the latest series of attempts at gun control, it was one kid shooting up a school. It's one city having a huge drug problem that leads to trouble for the rest of the country. Scaling down the problem, it's a bad neighborhood that causes a city to overreact and create a city-wide policy of heavy-handed policing. So that, really, is the first thing we need to fix. Bad neighborhoods, and specifically, the ones we live in now.

Think back to that idealized depiction of the 1950s that we have in America. All the lawns were mowed, all the trees were green, all the houses were well-kept, and everybody knew everybody. The kids had nothing to fear from the adults, just the bully down the street. The husbands were strong family men, the wives were the best of friends with each other, and all the kids were on the same baseball teams, and were in the same class at school.

Ever notice that the cops never really showed up in Leave It To Beaver? How they never doorkicked the neighbors because of suspected drugs, and never prosecuted Eddie Haskell for being a rascal? How the cops in Mayberry carried revolvers, sometimes unloaded?

What would it take to get that back?

Well, if we want that lifestyle back, we have to deal with the problems ourselves. Simply put, an Anarchist is a proponent of self-governance. We take care of our own problems, we don't go running to Big Brother to solve them for us. All that does is keep Big Brother fat, happy, and far too involved in our lives.

So what's a practical step to start with? For starters, we have to get off our couches and get to know our neighbors. And I don't mean "Oh, yeah, Jim and Nadine live to the north of us, while Tyler, Marla, and Robert live in the house to the south. They're nice folks."

No, I mean that we need to actually get to know them. That means spending enough time that we know Jim's entire shift liable to be laid off at the plant, and that Tyler occasionally has to work 16-hour days at his job. That we know which of the local kids is the natural leader, and which of them is the one with good grades. It means we get involved in their lives enough that we're there for them when they need help, every time.

It's not enough to want the government boot to get lighter, or cast votes in that direction. No, to really get rid of it, you have to make it unnecessary, starting with taking care of Your People. That may mean big things, like finding a neighbor a job if he gets laid off, or little things, like feeding the neighbor's kids if they were over playing anyways.

The goal is to have a neighborhood full of people that trust and take care of each other. It doesn't take long for people who are good friends to start dealing each other directly when there's a problem, instead of dealing with the cops. If Sam gets into a fight with my boy Johnny, I'll be more likely to go to Sam's dad to sort it out if we've been friends for five years. If I'm angry and have no idea who Sam's dad is, I would have to deal with the authorities instead.

Then there's a police report, and maybe charges, and what may have been a schoolyard squabble over something stupid turns into a statistic. Sam won't ever make it up to Johnny, and his dad will only know me as the guy who called the cops over a fistfight. That's a lot of bullshit that could have been avoided, when you think about it.

It's a lot like that old Mafia concept of Omerta, really, only with the emphasis placed on friendship instead of vendettas. Instead of talking to the cops, or to any other authorities, we deal with the other person directly. If they need help, we help them directly instead of getting them help. If they need a talking-to, we'll do that directly as well, instead of calling the cops.

Pretty soon, your neighborhood gets marked on the police map as a place that doesn't need patrolled. That's a hell of a good start, isn't it?

But that's just your neighborhood. You want your whole city to change.

Which means that the parents in your neighborhood are going to be well-known (but perhaps not especially well-liked) by the teachers at your kids' schools. When there's a parent-teacher conference, you're all there, and if the teacher's doing stupid shit, you're at the next school board meeting to make sure it doesn't happen again. If there's enough stupid happening, one of the parents in your neighborhood is going to be *on* the school board, with the openly-stated intent of firing people.

It means that you, AND/or the parents in your neighborhood are just as well-known at city council meetings, too. And probably less-liked, because every time the mayor does something stupid, you're there to take him to task. You're at planning & zoning meetings, you're at everything, all the time. You're a busy, busy person.

And right now you're saying "But dude, aren't we anarchists? Why the hell are we dealing with mayors? We need to get rid of the mayors, the cops, everybody with a title and a badge!"

Yeah, and in a perfect world, that would be possible, but we don't live in a perfect world. We live in a nasty world, with lots of idiots. So while we can AND SHOULD do everything we can to make the government unnecessary, like taking care of our people, we also can AND SHOULD be as involved as possible in the local (city and/or county) governments to make sure they A) don't screw up too badly, and B) stay as much out of our affairs as possible.

And here's how the ideal system works:

You're taking care of your neighbors so much that the cops haven't had to deal with anything in your neighborhood for a decade. Your local school has a reputation as a place with good teachers, because you and your buddies got all the bad ones fired. The mayor craps himself when you and yours show up at city council meetings, because you and your buddies are the ones that got the last mayor ousted instead of reelected.

(The local (city and county) governments are the ones that authorize the local PD/Sheriff to get an MRAP from the Feds, after all, and they're the ones that keep the police chief on the payroll. If you and the rest of your good neighbors raise a shitstorm on a biblical scale when the subject first comes up, it won't be a popular move for the local guys, all of whom need LOCAL support to get reelected.)

And your neighborhood watch is the one that has night-vision security cameras and interlocking fields of fire. Your neighborhood is the one that doesn't call the cops, because it's the place where drug dealers are escorted out, the very first time they show up, by a collection of concerned dads wearing plate carriers and carrying rifles. The place where there just happens to be a concerned dad getting some fresh early-morning air every time someone shows up to the "bad" house at 4 AM.

Criminals aren't stupid, they won't hang around a place where they can't hide what it is they're doing. Cops on the clock generally follow criminals, and if a cop happens to move in next door, just convert the bastard as soon as you can, and hide everything you can't trust him with until then.

And while it's true that this isn't a recipe to fix the whole country, what everybody needs to understand is that there *isn't* a recipe for that. We can vote on new guys all day long, but until we fix our neighborhoods, what changes can we actually expect? We'll fix our neighborhoods, and the guys in the next neighborhood over (who're really just neighbors of your neighbor's neighbor), will fix theirs, and when the assholes on the Federal level try to start shit, nobody in the area will want to do their dirty work.

And your local cops don't have military gear, because you and all your good neighbors shut that down at city council meetings.

Your local schools aren't using the federal curriculum, that got shut down at school board meetings. So did the grant money that came along with it, because it had strings attached.

Your mayor isn't part of Mayors Against Guns, because the last one failed to get reelected because of his membership

No, in your neighborhood, people depend on their familes, and on their neighbors, to get through hard times. When the government tries to get involved, the help is politely declined. Even the local thugs know that if they cause trouble, they'll have to deal with the consequences of it, because your neighborhood takes care of each other.

It sounds like a whole lot of hard work, but it also sounds like a much better plan than hoping that doing the same things we've always done will have a different result this time. If you want a nice neighborhood, start there. Worry about some asshole that some other assholes elected another day.

And some day, you'll look around and realize that Big Brother isn't paid any heed in your area, and nobody cares what he says when he's blathering on about something on the television. You'll realize that nobody's running to the feds just because a neighbor did something suspicious, they handled it themselves.

It ain't a perfect solution, but it's not a perfect world, and it's a much better solution than what we're doing now. I'll probably talk more about how the government actually controls folks next, understanding how that works is key to undoing it.

That Anarchy Post

When discussing a philosophical, political, or religious viewpoint, it helps to start with a precise definition of what certain terms mean. Especially, perhaps, when discussing Anarchism, because after 40 years of punk rock, angry kids, and tyrants misusing the term, "Anarchy" has been redefined as "burning cop cars, doing drugs, and wearing black clothing."

According to dictionary.com:

noun

1.

a doctrine urging the abolition of government or governmental restraint as the indispensable condition for full social and political liberty.

Etymologically, it comes from the Greek "anarchos", which is a combination of "an-" meaning "no", and "archos" meaning "ruler".

There is nothing in the basic definition of "anarchy" that promotes violence, chaos, or even being an asshole. So bear that in mind as I proceed from here. It's also worth pointing out that there are many, many, MANY different ways of having an anarchist society that have been promoted over the years, and I'm not even trying to encompass all of them, it is simply the only common term that comes close to encompassing my political views.

It should also be stated, at the beginning of this post, that anarchism as a political ideal is not the same thing as having anarchy as a daily lifestyle. This post is about the political ideal, and reality is just a bitch. America was founded as a Republic, that doesn't make it a Republic, nor does it make "A republic" a perfect system. Same with Democracy, and in this case anarchism. I'm an anarchist because that is the political ideal I believe in most (*right now, which is subject to change in the future), not because I think it's perfect.

At it's most basic, a society (be it a nation, a tribe, or whatever) is a group of people who come together for the common benefit. It makes a lot more sense to work together to raise crops and fight off wolves than it does for everyone to work on their own, because someone needs to be up at night to keep watch, and someone needs to work during the day. Cooperation is a good thing, obviously.

I'm also a Christian. This means that on a basic level, I don't believe in aggression (Romans 12:18, Matthew 5:39). I do believe that the Bible teaches that self-defense is a basic human right and that extends to defending others (Nehemiah 4:17-18) and even to capital punishment (Genesis 9:6), but aggression without just cause is a vile thing. Those who start wars without just cause (even if it's just "limited airstrikes with no boots on the ground") are guilty of murder.

In 1 Samuel 8, the Israelites ask God for a king so that they can be like other nations. They want a warrior, a man who will go out and fight their battles for them. God warns them that the reverse will happen, and that wanting a king is a rejection of God, and God's place as the sole ruler of the nation. They choose to disregard the warning, and Saul, the first Israelite king, is a disaster by any standard. David, who followed, was not exactly a good man, and had a loyal general murdered because he'd knocked up the general's wife.

Israel's government before Saul could be best described as a kritarchy with occasional incidents of theocracy. The Israelites were left to do as they saw fit, with disputes mediated by judges, as long as they generally followed God and weren't being invaded at the moment. It's the only part in the entire Bible where God weighs in on a specific form of gov't, and it's explicitly anti-State. It says "Follow God, and do not desire any other ruler."

Having no earthly ruler sounds like anarchism to me. Going through life with nobody telling me what to do, only God, and the only people I need to submit to are the judges, and that only comes up when there's a dispute with a neighbor? With the only law being God's law, not an endless-changing list of man-made rules and regulations?

An-archos. No rulers...sounds pretty similar.

Of course, Romans 13 tells me to obey the rulers that do exist. Which doesn't sound at all like an anarchist statement, so how do the two reconcile?

Basically, it's a question of realism versus idealism. 1 Samuel 8 is the ideal. Just follow God's Law, put God first in my life, and there won't be a need for a string of loser kings (and most of Israel's kings were bad). The reality is that kings do exist, though, so even though it's not the ideal that God had in mind, we should obey them out of respect for God. Notice that Romans 13 doesn't say "Obey the king because he's right." or "Obey him because his father was a good man.", it says "Obey the king because God put him there."

The reality is that because people screw up, leaders, rulers, and law-makers are something we're stuck with, but it's not the ideal that God had in mind for us.

"Really?" You ask.

Sure. Look at it this way:

In the Garden of Eden, what system of government did God institute? Kings? Presidents? Communism? How about none of the above, just a single commandment to not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve had absolutely no other obligations, regulations, rules, laws, or even social customs to follow.

In fact, it was their adding to God's laws that messed them up. Notice how in Gen 3:3 Eve says "...and you must not touch it, or you will surely die" while in Genesis 2:17 God only said that they cannot eat the fruit. Had Adam and Eve not added to God's laws, the serpent would not have been able to cast doubt on what God said. In the additional laws there was room for doubt and confusion.

But Adam and Eve did eat, and were cast out. Skip forward a few chapters, The Flood happens, and God gives Noah ONE law. In Genesis 9:6, again there is no system of government established, no endless codex of prescriptive laws to follow, just a commandment that murderers are to be put to death.

Even after the Torah was given to Moses and a full system of laws was established, the only system of government was "Follow God and the Law", there wasn't a king who had absolute power. The judges had absolute power, but were only raised up in time of need, not during peacetime, as it were, and they did not add to the laws.

Had God actually wanted a certain system of government, it does not make sense that He would not have instituted that and made it clear, but at no point in the Bible is there any such thing.

Instead the repeated commandment is to love our neighbors, which is referred to by Jesus as the second-greatest commandment, the first being to love God. So let's examine what that would look like, if everyone was totally committed to keeping those two.

First off, if everyone loved their neighbors, poverty is gone. Period. Instead of some guy being homeless and starving, his neighbors would take care of him, help him find a job and a place to stay, and get him back on his feet. In a loving manner, not just flicking a nickel at him as they drive past.

Second, if everyone loved their neighbors, crime would largely be a thing of the past. Murder isn't love, neither is rape, theft, or any of a thousand other things that we have laws against. The need for cops would be over.

Third, it would be the END OF WAR. While there would always be a need for weapons in case a neighboring country got hostile, the days of punitive bombing of countries thousands of miles away would be gone.

Now, granted, this ideal system also has as a basic requirement that everyone loves God. That means it's predicated on everyone being a Christian, which sadly will never happen. Ultimately it is just an ideal system, and not a realistic system.

On the other hand, a cursory glance through history has seen EVERY system of government yet devised fail as well. They are all idealistic, because the simple reality is that people are corrupt and selfish, and placing people in power only amplifies corruption and selfishness. Kings become tyrants, voters become leeches, and anarchist burn cop cars.

I'm not saying that anarchism is perfect, but I am saying that if we all really follow God's commandments, we'll remove any need that exists for rulers. The result of everyone following God's commandments would be a peaceful, lawful, healthy society that didn't need cops, courts, or rulers. Everyone would be left alone to do as they saw fit, with no one who would threaten to jail or kill them if they didn't play whatever games the government is playing that day.

If the two greatest commandments, according to Christ Himself, are followed, government becomes superfluous, and for that reason, I consider myself an anarchist.