Anarchism is collectivism?

Many who consider themselves right-wing extremists rail against the “collective.” They hate when people classify themselves according to gender, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. They hate identities, they say, the hate groups.

But what happens when we remove these identities from an individual? What happens, for example, when we lose all concept of nationality?

We all become…the…same.

Identifying with a group is not the same as “identity politics” or “groupthink.” It is wrong to expect people to vote for a candidate of the same race, and it is wrong for people to feel like they have to vote the way most people of the same race, gender, religion, orientation, age, etc, do. It is wrong to expect people in a certain group to care about one issue only (e.g. Women only carry about abortion, or about so-called equal pay). But it is also wrong to expect people to lose all sense of belonging to a group and identify as only a member of the human race or citizen of the world.

The Right is supposed to prize the individual, but the various groups we sort ourselves into are essential aspects of who we are. They are not everything, of course. But you would not be who you are without your religious or spiritual beliefs. You would not be who you are without your culture – which is informed by your religion, your ethnicity, and your nationality. Our sex is also an important part of who we are. Men for the most part do not want to be women, and women for the most part do not want to be men, because that means changing more than just a few body parts. Why are transsexuals not satisfied by just acting more masculine or feminine, why are they unhappy not physically being the opposite sex? Because deep down they feel that the opposite sex is what they really are. It shows that you cannot erase the concepts of male and female from the human mind because they contribute to the persons we become; whether we are a man or a woman is part of our very self.

Anarchy is right-wing, some images of the political spectrum will tell you, and totalitarianism is left-wing. But it’s not that simple. Leftism isn’t necessarily statism, it is collectivism. Communists – the idealists, not the evil people who want to be murderous dictators – dream of a stateless society, in which people no longer need the threat of force to tell them how to live. Anarchists on the left want everyone to naturally sacrifice for the good of everyone else, to build a world in which all are equal. Those on the right accept that there will always be inequalities and imagine a world in which all are free to pursue their own interests without any sort of interference from a central authority. Right-wing anarchy, or anarcho-capitalism, is radical individualism. Many of these individualists, however, can start sounding like collectivists when they reject the notion of nationality. In their ideal world, there would be no borders, no boundaries between nations. Anyone could go anywhere. When anyone can go anywhere, how do you protect different cultures? When too many people with their own ideas about how to behave and how to live their lives go to another place where the people have different views on how to behave and how to live their lives, they will come into conflict with those people; their culture may even overtake the one already present. In some cases that may not be bad. Indeed there are some cultures that are better than others. But in many cases, they are just different. For anarchy to work, there really would need to be a homogenous culture, and a great deal of conformity. Otherwise, there will be too much conflict. Members of different groups will look to leaders to represent them. Then what? Some speak of “Christian anarchy” or “conservative anarchy.” Everyone must conform to those values. If one didn’t that could be very dangerous. They could get a group of people together who want to rebel against the status quo, who disturb the peace, and there is no state to stop them. A peaceful anarchy couldn’t last for long.

I don’t believe anarchy could happen. Not all governments are going to put down their weapons, anyway. Many weapons of war would have to be destroyed. What to do with people who know how to make them? I have no doubt somebody would rediscover the technology. I have no doubt governments would form again. There will never be enough people who reject a central authority for anarchy to last. Members of different ethnic groups and religions would fight, or to avoid fighting would claim pieces of land to be all their own. A high level of conformity would be needed to sustain anarchy. Is that right, when that requires us to lose many aspects of who we are as individuals?

I am not saying all anarchists envision the exact same society. However, when the individualists tell us to see ourselves only as human beings or citizens of the world, and not in terms of any group we might belong to, they overlook parts of us that make us individuals.

What’s so great about freedom?

“Someone’s dead! Fuck your freedom!” was a line in a short story I wrote recently, expressing what I felt like a lot of people were saying in the aftermath of a few tragic events of 2012.

Americans still have a relatively free country. They are allowed to insult people and to be armed, but it seems that some (too many) have questioned or even attacked these liberties. The Second Amendment has, as everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows, come under fire. Even though the same weapon has not been used in every recent “mass shooting” as Piers Morgan would have us believe, many have begun to think that certain types of guns should be banned to prevent these occurrences and hopefully lower the murder rate as a whole. Some even go as far as to say that there is no justifiable reason for any private citizen to own a gun at all. (Which is really stupid, but okay.) When Second Amendment advocates make freedom the essence of their argument, they run the risk of being met with the response of “So what?” Who cares about your freedom when people are dying?

I noticed a similar phenomenon after the (probably preventable, but whatever) deaths of some Americans in Benghazi, Libya last September. As is now widely known, government officials blamed an entirely irrelevant movie trailer for the attack. In fact, it almost sounded like our government was apologizing for freedom of speech. People wrote articles saying that we had to censor ourselves so that others wouldn’t be offended and, uh, kill people because they were offended. Before any of us knew that the video story was bullshit, I remember discussing what happened with some people. Though some fellow expats were in agreement that nobody should be apologizing for or attacking freedom of speech, my mother cried, “But someone’s dead!” (To hell with freedom! was all I heard.) She believed that YouTube administrators should have removed the video immediately upon the president’s request “because if the president’s asking you to do something, you do it.” What an unfortunate and, quite frankly, embarrassing statement for an American to make, don’t you think? Citizens are a president’s employers, not his subjects. But I digress. When a man not responsible for the attacks was arrested because the president asked for it, some people thought this was good. I couldn’t believe it. If you do not have the right to say something offensive, then what do you have the right to say? After all, who decides what’s offensive enough to warrant punishment? To not support freedom of speech, even when you think someone has died as a result, is a dangerous position to take.

I wondered at the end of last year if I was going crazy. Were people really saying “Screw freedom!” (the November election certainly seemed to suggest so) or was I overreacting? I honestly don’t think so.

As brilliant blogger/journalist Daniel Greenfield said in a recent article,

Like Russians in the 1910s, Americans in the 2010s, are becoming more comfortable with the rhetoric of redistribution and a strong central government that will provide them with stale bread in exchange for their freedom. “What good is freedom?” is the question being asked in every sphere of life and the answer is rarely positive. If giving up freedom can get you cheaper health insurance, fewer school shootings and less worries about the future, then who needs it anyway?

At first glance, it might sound like a tough question to answer. But think of what Benjamin Franklin once said: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” This might sound horrible to some. They might protest that they merely want to give up some freedom out of compassion. Why is what Franklin said true? Because if you keep trading freedom for safety you will eventually be neither free nor safe. Each time you give up a little freedom it means your government gets a little more power. It means your government gets control of another aspect of your life and the lives of your fellow citizens. Orwell’s 1984 should be enough of an explanation why safety is not the inverse of freedom.

Freedom, though at times it may appear to lead to unnecessary suffering, is preferable to the illusion of safety created by big government. Government, after all, is the ultimate mass murderer.

Theory and Practice.

It’s safe to say you’re right if the numbers support what you believe. But in order to really be safe, you have to go a bit further. People will always find a way to interpret facts to support a conclusion they’ve already made. As one person said in regards to this (amazing) post, “If a long, well-reasoned article could actually win the debate, the debate would have ended a long time ago.”  That’s why you have to have ideas in the abstract backing you up, a philosophy that is the root of all your positions.

The post was about the Second Amendment, so I’ll first use that as an example. On all sides of the “gun control” debate, people will cite facts. Sometimes, naturally, they will cite lies – but let’s accept that many times all sides are presenting true, documented facts. And they are all picking and choosing numbers about how the rates of firearm ownership correspond with rates of violent crime from country to country (and sometimes city to city or state to state), selecting only those that make their side look right, and leaving out the numbers that don’t. Some countries in which firearms are banned have less crime than countries where they are widely available. In some places, firearm possession is high but crime is low or no higher than places where no one or hardly anyone has them. So whose side do you choose to take? There is still a conclusion to be drawn from this – that the availability of firearms is not the only factor in violent crime rates and so reducing the availability of firearms will not guarantee a drop in violent crime. But is that enough? I don’t think so. The root of your position cannot be numbers. What are your principles? What do you believe justifies violating someone’s rights? What justifies taking a law-abiding citizen’s possessions? What justifies inhibiting somebody’s ability to own something they want? What justifies removing a means of defense of his life, his liberty, his property, or that of others? Now you see that you need not only ideas, but facts, and you need not only facts, but ideas. Otherwise, your side may lose to another side that has documented facts, too. Otherwise, the philosophy of natural law may lead you down a slippery slope into regarding property rights as absolute, into asking why the government has a right to stop you from owning drones or tanks or chemical weapons or whatever you want provided you’re rich enough to own it – I don’t think you will actually start to believe this, but you run the risk of having your argument for firearm ownership ridiculed. People will ask you why the government should not stop you from owning certain types of weapons if they can stop you from owning others, and you must respond with facts of your own.

Of course having both abstract ideas and facts on your side has to do with multiple issues. It can be a defense of free markets – yes, people prosper when the government gets out of their way, but there is a deeper reason to support a free market. That is the rights of people to control what they do with their property – who they sell their labor too, who they sell their goods to, who they buy their goods from, how much of their money they spend, and so on. It is, essentially, people’s freedom.

The general question of why you believe what you believe should have to do with both philosophy and empirical evidence. If one is under attack, you can still defend your positions using the other.