Liberty and Anarchy
1. The Black Rag of Anarchy
In law school, at the urging of a friend, I read a slim book called THE BLACK FLAG OF ANARCHY. Or, at least, that is the title uncertain memory recalls: perhaps it bore a similar title. The author’s name escapes me.
It was, I confess. the most shallow treatment of the subject of any political topic I had ever read. On the first page, in his introduction, the author establishes the assumption on which his argument is based, namely, that there is no valid reason authorizing the use of force.
After many meandering pages discussing tangential matters, diligently trouncing strawman arguments no real person ever made to justify authorized uses of force, the author triumphantly concludes that there is no valid reason authorizing the use of force, ergo no valid reason for government of any form: anarchy alone is right.
His final word was to end in a parable of banditry. He said that governments are born when bandits raid villages, and return every season, until the villagers thus looted forget freedom. Eventually they accept the bandit leader as a legitimate sovereign.
By condemning all law whatsoever, the author condemns all civilization as immoral. I do not recall what, if anything, the author said about the morality of tribes of nomads or barbarians gathered in caves or villages, but if force cannot be used to enforce written laws, it cannot be used to enforce unwritten custom.
I do not recall if the author’s parable of the origins of government entertained the opposite parable.
For it is no less reasonable to attribute the birth of government to a group of villagers gathering their meager wealth to hire seven samurai to defend their village from bandit raids, and following samurai leadership in battle, accepting the enforcement of the discipline needed to organize defense. Eventually they accept the samurai leader as a legitimate sovereign.
Of course, and more to the point, before even hiring samurai, the villagers needs must accept the wise elder who first suggested hiring the samurai as sovereign, relying on his wisdom to make plans, set policy, settle disputes.
When I spoke to my friend who recommended the book, he was shocked that I dismissed it. Apparently he thought the author profound and subtle.
I pointed out that the whole book was a circular argument: If the use of force, by definition, can never be authorized, then there is no such thing as authority, hence no government. I remember my friend was a bit dumbfounded at how simple, and simple to refute, was this particular variant of the Anarchist argument.
I recently had reason to walk through this line of thinking again, inspecting another anarchist making roughly the same argument. I did not speak with the follow myself, and so to save him from embarrassment, I will not quote him directly, but I do think it worthwhile to inspect his line of thinking.
The Anarchist’s argument is based on the unspoken axiom that when a sovereign authority resorts to force to punish a breach of a duty, including such duties that love and loyalty demand of us, this is one and the same as criminal or conqueror coercing compliance out of fear.
A father is owed filial love and obedience by his son. This is a natural obligation, without which the family cannot exist. A sovereign is owed patriotic love and obedience by subject and citizen. This is a legal and customary obligation, without which civilization cannot exist. Whereas a slave owes nothing to a slavedriver, nor the invaded to the invader.
To preserve the family and love our nation is natural and right, even if were not also in our long term self interest.
Here is the crucial distinction: The lawful command of a father or sovereign binds the conscience, even if that father or sovereign lacks the present capacity to punish disobedience. When a father or sovereign punishes disobedience, it is lawful; when a criminal or conqueror coerces obedience through fear, this is not punishment properly so called (for he has no right to punish) but assault and battery.
The difference is that a sovereign, when acting within lawful authority, acts for the common good. Keeping the law and repelling invasion benefits every soul in the commonwealth, including, ultimately, the criminals seeking to break those laws. Likewise, a father, when acting as a father should, acts for the benefit of his child, and no order he gives is meant to harm or destroy the child, and certainly not for his own benefit.
To the contrary, a slavedriver must compel the slave to produce goods and services he robs from the slave. That is the mere definition of slavery. The slave suffers a loss of liberty and dignity, and the slavedriver robs the benefit of the another man’s labor. The fact that the slavedriver has no right to exact obedience from the slave is what makes the slave a slave.
(It is outside the scope of this argument to examine whether certain cases of servitude or serfdom are allowable, such as the case where a man defeated in war offers his conqueror to be his slave in in return for his life. For the purpose of this argument, we take it as a given that slavery is immoral.)
The difference is that authorities have right to command hence have the right to punish disobedience. Criminals and conquerors lack any right to command hence lack any right to compel.
Both authorities and criminals use force. The difference is the one is authorized and the other is not.
This is the distinction the Anarchist dismisses. Anarchic argument is conflating two opposite things, and consequently the conclusions suffer from the informal logical error of ambiguity, as well as the formal error of undistributed middle.
The Anarchist proposes that the most moral system is one in which any functions currently performed by government are entirely devolved to private organizations and voluntary individual choice.
This proposal necessarily includes all forms of government union whatever: clan, tribe, city-state, kingdom, nation-state, republic, federation, empire. (It would be an odd sort of anarchist who held that nomad chieftains enforcing tribal law to be valid, while holding village elders enforcing folk law to be invalid, or princes in walled cities.)
For such a union to be entirely voluntary, a member, a citizen or subject, must enjoy an unalienable right to secede from the union unilaterally, at any time, for any reason or not reason.
Please note the Anarchist is not proposing an idea of liberal, that is, limited government. He does not limit his proposal to those government functions that can be safely, wisely, or practically devolved to voluntary private organizations. Nor does he propose that all government functions that can be devolved to voluntary private organizations must be, even if unsafe or unwise, but that those which cannot be so devolved must be retained. If he retains any government function whatever, even one, he is not an anarchist properly so called.
To be an Anarchist, the Anarchist must propose that all government functions — all whatsoever, without exception — must be voluntary, presumably including the two core functions of (1) abolishing private vengeance in favor of public lawkeeping, or (2) providing for the common defense.
He must renounce the possibility of limited government.
Libertarians speak of a “sweet spot” found by enacting the minimal laws needed to maximize enjoyment of individual rights. The Anarchist cannot accept this compromise.
The core Anarchist principle is this: no form of involuntary governance or “social contract” is morally permissible, and that secession therefrom—even by a single individual—must be allowed.
This statement necessitates that any contract to join a private organization, or oath of fealty to such an organization, to which the government functions of lawkeeping and common defense are to be devolved, is an unenforceable contract or an unenforceable oath.
Logically, such contracts must be null and void at the time of signing, and any oath of fealty must be meaningless, because there can be no lawkeeping authority to enforce any such contracts or oaths.
Please note what this argument implies.
If all government functions are to be devolved to voluntary private lawkeeping organizations, on the grounds that government is involuntary hence immoral, by the same logic, those organizations once joined are involuntary hence immoral, and hence cannot be formed at all.
Let us take it as a given that men cannot live in mere anarchy, for, if we could, we would not be having this conversation at all.
If man could live in peace with man, as if such peace could be maintained merely by the fear of private retaliation from each man who, in his own eyes, thinks himself wronged, no one would have ever even imagined the idea of having elders or clan chiefs or kings or parliaments forbid private vengeance, and keep the peace by enforcing public law.
Let us take it as a given, that man’s native desire to keep his word, obey contracted obligations, fulfill his natural duties, and live in peace with his neighbor is insufficient to see these things are done.
If we take that as given, it follows immediately that contracts are null and void if they can never be enforced, as are oaths, covenants, and duties of any kind.
Let us examine why this is.
2. Anarchy, Oath, Contract, Covenant
Suppose a man, seeking protection from a gang of forty thieves, makes a contract with his neighbors to serve in a lawkeeping organization meant for their mutual defense, agreeing to pay dues or fees into a common coffer, and to march in ranks and drill with weapons and fight the enemy on command.
The lawkeeping organization is ruled by the will of a recognized ruler, or else by a recognized body of ruling laws to which the ruler himself is subject. The recognition is by the consensus of the membership, perhaps formally ratified by vote or coronation or other ceremony, or perhaps not. Whether formal or informal, ruled by men or ruled by laws, the organization must have a public authority recognized by the membership as ruling the membership. Recognition means that the membership agrees the leader or the laws he enforces are authoritative. Authoritative means each man is duty-bound to obey the laws or follow the leader, regardless of each man’s personal interests or willingness.
Suppose further that once the danger of the thieves is past, man who joined then refuses to pay his dues. He renounces his fealty, and announces his secession from the organization. He gives no grounds, aside from the grounds that his continued involuntary submission is immoral.
The neighbors object. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that all the neighbors make the claim that if a member’s dues are fully paid, he may secede from the organization, but that if dues are still owing, he may not. In other words, let us suppose that the neighbors claim secession is legal in some cases, according to the laws of this organization, and in some cases not.
Either this claim will be judged by an arbiter upheld by the authority of the law, or not. If not upheld, any opinion of the arbiter is a private opinion, of no more weight than the opinion of a random passer-by. If upheld, then the legality of the secession is itself a question subject to the arbiter, that is, to the authority of the law. If the legality of the secession is subject to the authority of the law, by definition, that is an authority from which secession is not allowed.
But if secession is allowed in all cases where the man withdraws his fealty, for any reason or no reason, merely because he wills it so, then no fealty, no contract, no agreement can ever exist, except as an unenforceable figment or fiction: mere words without meaning.
Let us make one further supposition in our hypothetical. Suppose our man in his own mind, without announcing it, revokes his fealty to the lawkeeping organization. He is now bound by no law and no obligation to them, any more than to any passing wanderer met in the wilderness. Suppose he takes funds from their coffers, and reports their numbers and movements to the forty thieves mentioned above, meaning the villagers harm. Let us again suppose, for the sake of argument, that the neighbors make the claim that if a member openly announces his secession, he may secede from the organization, but that if unannounced, he may not.
The same logic applies to an unannounced secession as to one attempted while funds are due. If the legality of the secession is subject to the authority of the law, such secession is not allowed.
Hence, by the terms of the Anarchist’s core principle, if erecting a government to enforce the law is impermissible because involuntary, so are voluntary organizations meant for the same purpose. The only other option is mere anarchy, where false oaths, faithless contracts, theft and treason are legal and permissible and prudent.
I place this hypothetical of the man who secedes from his private lawkeeping organization at the beginning to forestall any talk of a halfway position between civilization and mere anarchy. The Anarchist, by his argument, abolishes not only all forms of government, but also, whether he knows or not, all forms of oathtaking, contract-writing, making wagers, or giving one’s word. Nothing can be enforced.
This applies to formal as well as informal agreements, both to written contracts, as between employer and employee, and to the sacrament of marriage. An employer, once the chambermaid’s work is done, can refuse to pay to her the owed wages and laugh, saying he seceded from the contract. Likewise, the chambermaid, instead of doing the work, can pocket the wages, and pilfer items from the chambers she was meant to clean, to pawn for drinking money, and no one can say her nay.
A husband, bound by however many oaths and vows he can imagine, can leave his wife or wives for any new woman or women, or catamites or goats, at any time for any reason, or for no reason, as can she, and neither has any enforceable duty to rear their children, who can be left wailing in the wilderness with no one to object. There is no compulsion of child support payments in an anarchic commonwealth.
If governments are impermissible because the duty to obey the law is unenforceable, then so are all duties of every kind, no matter how they were first enacted, voluntarily or not, explicitly or not.
3. Blackbeard and Self-Ownership
The Anarchist idolizes self-ownership to the point of absurdity. His claim is that the law is impermissible, since it rests on coercive force to exact obedience, which is indistinguishable from the coercion by which a slavedriver terrifies a slave into a lifetime of toil.
He is arguing that a morally permissible law could only be enforced on those who agreed to obey it, and only when and where they so agreed, and to what degree. But every criminal who breaks the law withdraws his voluntary consent to obeying the law. This means law itself is defined as morally impermissible. No law can ever be enforced, under any conditions.
But if no law can be enforced, on what ground would a grim and grisly pirate, or would anyone, respect a law recognizing your right to self-ownership? Why is the pirate claim to your person not equal to your claim?
If no laws are enforced, Blackbeard need only decide to secede from any commonwealth protecting your alleged right to self ownership, scuttle your ship, and slap you in chains for a quick sale in Tortuga. Blackbeard never signed a document saying he would respect your right to life and liberty. Indeed, when he hoists the Jolly Roger, this is an explicit sign that he seceded from any social contract or civilized law binding him to other men.
If Blackbeard’s secession is lawful and right, so is his piratical career. Only if there are natural and involuntary obligations (such as a natural right to respect the rights of others) would it be lawful and right to hunt down and hang Blackbeard. And if he knows you will never be avenged, your ship, flying the black banner of anarchy, will be the first he seeks to take.
How did the Anarchist come by his absurd conclusion? His footsteps paralleled those of the forgotten author mentioned above, and, as best I know, the mainstream of anarchist thinking.
An Anarchist will often begin by asking why slavery is impermissible. If the answer is that it is wrong to extort the fruits of his labor from any man, the Anarchist will gleefully retort that that government does that exact thing: All government raise taxes and tariffs by law, that is, by force and the threat of force.
This retort is one where the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority is unaddressed. It equates taxation and extortion. By that same logic, a father ordering his son to do yardwork is slavery.
4. Authority is Authorized
The Anarchist here is ignoring the distinction between authority and coercion. An authority has a moral right to ask you to do your duty, even if he lacks the present ability to punish neglect of that duty; whereas coercion imposes no moral duty to obey.
When the dying King Arthur (as Tennyson tells the tale) commands Sir Bedivere to take the great sword Excalibur and drown it in the lake, and the knight disobeys, the king has no ability to rise to his feet and punish him. And yet to say that Bedivere has no obligation of fealty, despite all vows or benefits remembered, to any king too weak or wounded to enforce his commands is orc-talk, and too despicable to dwell on. The king’s personal ability to terrify his own knights into obedience by threat of force is not what makes him king; nor is the knight’s ability to terrify the peasant into tilling the land and paying tax and tithe what makes a kingdom. The punishments only enforce a previously recognized duty, avowed or natural.
A slavedriver commands by threat of the whip, and no obedience is obligatory once the threat is absent. Indeed, if any moral duty is obligatory on behalf of the slave, it is to run away.
A man is meant to pay taxes out of patriotism, just as a son is meant to obey a father out of love.
A slave obeys the slavedriver out of fear. The slavery is involuntary and non-consensual.
Love and fear are not the same. Love of one’s nation and fear of one’s taskmaster is not the same. That is the distinction being dismissed by the Anarchist as insignificant.
Instead of the strawman answer, a more truthful answer to this question would be to say the taxes exacted by the government is with the consent of the governed for the general welfare and common defense. When government exact taxes at confiscatory levels, or to benefit private parties, only then does it become unauthorized hence immoral. That is not because the obedience is involuntary. It is because any act that goes beyond what is authorized is unauthorized.
Let us return to our parable of villagers menaced by forty bandits. Suppose the villagers discuss how to gather funds to hire samurai, and for this purpose open the public till, asking each man to contribute. A prudent man, before tossing his meager wealth inside, needs reassurance that all his neighbors will do likewise. If one man withholds promised funds, his hut, if it is physically situate inside the village, will be protected nonetheless. If the promise to contribute is not enforced, even perfectly honest men will be under a clear temptation to be the one “free-rider” getting free protection from samurai whose wages all his neighbors shoulder.
If a prudent man has good reason to fear that one of his neighbors will be a free-rider, prudence dictates he volunteer to have his promise enforced on himself, on the condition that all his neighbors likewise be bound.
This is the condition the Anarchist parable never contemplates, namely, that a man would be eager to be placed under the threat of force for breaking a law or breaking a promise, even if it were a law or promise he is under no temptation to break, on the condition that his neighbors (who may or may not be under such a temptation) be likewise placed under the threat of force.
He himself is the author of the force. The sovereign who carries out his will, whether that sovereign be a prince or parliament or village elder, whether that sovereign be anointed or elected or selected by unspoken consensus, is his agent, and acts on his behalf. Anything the sovereign does beyond the scope of the author’s grant of agency is literally unauthorized. That is what the word means.
The Anarchist’s confusion comes because this unspoken agreement to bow to laws and keep promises all men are likely to follow anyway, is so obvious, and so much a part of the common experience of mankind, that a tacit and explicit agreement is not wanted or needed.
Here is the paradox: the reason why prudent men volunteer to be bound to a law from which none can voluntarily secede, is that no other option is possible. The thing is inescapable.
Even in a village where no one was selfish enough to be the free-rider withholding promised funds from the common defense, the mere fear that one among them might be such a free-rider, or might one day be, demands steps be taken to deter the possibility. All villagers would agree to take an oath, and if any broke the oath, public shame would persuade him otherwise; and shame proved not enough, the villagers would use force.
There is no other way to see to the common defense. There is no other way to create a reasonable expectation that men will keep their oaths. To call enforcement of oaths immoral, is to call the common defense immoral.
For communities larger than a village, passing a law by decree of a prince or vote of a parliament has the same effect, is done for the same reason, is likewise an inescapable necessity of prudence.
5. The Consent of the Governed
An Anarchist will object that government is involuntary, just as slavery is. Did you agree to be governed? Did you sign the “social contract”? Did anyone you know sign it? Is it even possible to sign it? Et cetera.
By that same logic, since the son did not ask to be born, he is under no obligation to love, honor, or obey his father.
Alas for the Anarchist, the answer to all these rhetorical questions is not just “yes” but “certainly yes”.
By receiving the benefit of living in a civilized community, you place yourself under an obligation to support that community, including by payment of taxes, submission to the draft in wartime, the preservation of the legacies of culture to posterity, and more.
The “social contract” is metaphorical, not literal, for it refers to the mutual obligations between rulers and ruled. Those obligations have the same moral force as a signed contract which depends on mutual performance, even if no literal contract is present.
The mutual obligation is this: the subject is required to uphold the laws for so long as the laws keep the peace. When the laws degenerate into despotism, the bond of obligation might be broken.
The mutuality is voluntary, in that whether you have explicitly consented to the obligations or not, you are obligated to consent when called upon to do so. Anything else shows a lack of love and a lack of loyalty to those who have sacrificed to protect you. Some — I speak of those who died on the battlefield for your liberty — have sacrificed more than any one man can repay.
An argument to prove that the social contract is not a real and literal piece of paper is irrelevant. The mutual obligations are real and literal.
For let us suppose they were not mutual: this would mean that it would never be allowable to resist any no tyrant, no matter how badly his laws harmed the public weal, no, not even if he commanded his subjects to worship him as a god.
Contrariwise, if the obligations were not mutual, rebellion against a just and good ruler would be allowable at will, for light and transient reasons, or no reason, no matter what oaths were broken, mere disorder, tumult, or terror were the outcome.
Both these two results are absurd. Therefore the obligation to rule justly and obey loyally are real and reciprocal.
And, in passing, let it be noted that each time a man pledges allegiance to the flag, that recitation of those words is a literal oath as binding on him as any signed contract. Moreover, soldiers, lawyers, and other public officers take an oath to uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and similar oaths are enacted from naturalized citizens. A similar oath was exacted from all colonies when the United States was formed, and their authorized representatives did indeed sign a literal compact to which they pledged their lives and fortunes and sacred honor. And these signatures were on behalf of the polities they represented.
In order to argue that one is exempt from the obligations of patriotism, would have to argue that fathers, by immigrating to new lands or founding new nations, cannot be allowed to bind their sons to the obligation of patriotism to those nations.
As a matter if logic, if fathers cannot bind their sons to an obligation of patriotism, no nations can be formed, not even by means of an explicit and literal social contract such as the US Constitution. If no nations can be formed by an explicit and literal social contract, then it does not follow that an absence of explicit and literal social contract abolishes the nation, or abolishes one’s obligation to it.
It is as if one were to argue that a child cannot form a contract without signing it in ink, when one is also arguing that a child cannot form a contract at all. The argument simply does not follow.
And, besides, we established at the outset that if all governments, by being involuntary, are impermissible, then so too are all contracts, social or otherwise.
6. One-Acre Nation
Our Anarchist has more rhetorical questions: Can you unilaterally opt out of the social contract? If you declare independence and allodial title over your own land, you will be attacked and put in jail. If you resist, you will be killed. If you leave and try to go to another place, you will simply be put into another version of the same arrangement.
Note that this reasoning is circular: until and unless we grant that unilateral secession from any form of contract is always permissible, it is illogical to argue that the absence of a provision for unilateral secession proves the contract impermissible.
Indeed, as a matter of logic, the whole point of a contract, the definition, as it were, is that is cannot be breached by either party at will, under any conditions. Contracts establish duties. Duties, by definition, are precisely those things one is obligated to do even when one is not inclined, or see it as not in one’s best interest.
The punishment for breach of obligation is not what forms the obligation. The obligation exists regardless of present likelihood of punishment. Enforcement only enforces duties previously established, it does not create the duty.
Unenforceable duties are nullities. Human nature does not permit the assumption that every man will do what is against his will and inclination, or against his self interest, whenever unenforced duty says so.
In any case, the lack of a secession clause in the social contract does not support the Anarchist’s argument one way or the other. It is not the lack of ability to escape that makes slavery immoral, it is that the slaveowner lacks any right to exact the fruits of his labor of his slave, nor to compel his obedience by coercion.
By this logic, any nation which permitted emigrants to depart is legitimate. Likewise, any nation allowing settlers to found homesteads in wilderness beyond its frontier is legitimate. Many nations have had such laws, including this one.
If the Anarchist wishes to argue that any nation erecting an “Iron Curtain” that forbids her subjects from departing thereby loses legitimacy, and becomes a slave state like Cuba or East Germany, he will get no argument from me.
The only thing that is not permitted by any nation is to decree a plot of land in a nation no longer one’s own to be under one’s own personal laws, not the laws of the land.
This is theft, or, to be precise, this is larceny by false pretenses. Legally, you may own the land, in that you have the right to its exclusive use and possession, but you do not and never did own the laws of the land.
You can buy a house in fee simple and tear it down and put up a parking lot; you cannot buy a parking lot and put up a sign saying murder is now legal within the bounds of this lot, on the grounds that you now are sovereign there, and can overrule the laws your neighbors follow.
Again, by this same logic, if a man at any moment may declare himself sovereign of his own parking lot, then by right he can declare war against Mr. Mugwump of 822 Inkstain Lane, beat in his head with a tire iron, and annex the garage and Gran Torino car found therein, and carry off this vintage automobile as a war prize. All one need do is declare grand theft auto to be legal within the bounds of the parking lot.
The argument that the sovereign does not own the plot of land on which a landowner lives also applies with equal force to the landowner, for then he has no right to the land either.
Logically, if the state has no right to retain the territory over which is rules, neither do you.
Logically, if you are not bound to recognize the laws you decide to renounce, your neighbors are not bound to recognize your claim to absolute self-sovereignty. They have as much right to declare your lot belongs to the town as you have to declare it to be your own private one-acre nation.
The same flaw as was seen in the prior argument are here seen again. (1) sovereigns use force to punish lapses of duty owed the commonwealth (2) slaverdrivers use force to coerce slaves (3) therefore sovereigns are slavedrivers.
This argument is formally impermissible. It violates the law of the undistributed middle. For example (1) all Englishmen are men (2) all Frenchmen are men (3) therefore all Englishmen are Frenchmen.
7. Citizens are Helots
The Anarchist may at this point claim that if slavery is wrong because it is morally impermissible for one man to own another, then the government does the exact same thing. Taxation or the draft is compulsory labor for the benefit of others, to which no man formally consents and no man can escape. It is an arrangement from which you cannot withdraw your “tacit” consent without being attacked and killed. Even if not said explicitly, the government acts as if it owns you. So says the Anarchist.
This argument is mere a gratuitous assertion that governments subject their subjects and citizens to an involuntary arrangement. In logic, a gratuitous assertion can be gratuitously denied.
First, the arrangement is clearly voluntary, certainly for nations immigrants risk life and limb to enter, or when immigrates take an oath of loyalty when naturalized. The idea that no one can move from one state to another within the union to escape high tax rates may apply to other nations, not to this one.
Second, emigration is permitted. You may leave at any time.
Third, the only forced labor is that which is enacted by law, which, in a functioning democracy, at least, is publicly debated and ratified, a process where all citizens have opportunity and duty to participate.
It is odd indeed to call yourself a slave owned by a slaveowner, when, at any time, you could stand for public office, get elected, and yourself be the slaveowner. Whatever one might call that arrangement, it is not slavery.
To be clear: when government oversteps its authorized bounds, it is no longer authorized. Neither citizen of a republic nor subject or a monarch has any duty to obey unlawful orders. No officer has a right to give unlawful orders. No magistrate has a right to punish disobedience to unlawful orders. Only disobedience to lawful orders can be lawfully punished. Otherwise, is it not punishment properly so called: it is assault and battery.
The argument at the Anarchist argument point grows unsupportable. By this logic, a tribesman or villager in the wilderness is forbidden to gather with his fellows, and mutually to agree on a law to forbid stealing, and mutually to bind themselves to enforce that law on high and low alike with an unbreakable vow, nor can they agree that oathbreakers will be punished by equal punishment as judged by an elder.
All this, according to the Anarchist’s logic, is the same as kidnapping a child, chaining him in a mineshaft, and forcing him to dig coal.
The Anarchist apparently can see no difference and no distinction between villagers seeking to deter theft, murder, and invasion by binding themselves to act in concert against mutual foes, and a pirate abducting a villager to sell to the Turk as a galley slave.
8. Slavery or Anarchy
At its root, the Anarchist argument is a strawman argument. He claims that philosophers for countless years, no doubt for sinister motives, have promoted the bad faith argument that all men must be slaves to the state, or else live in anarchy, a riotous war of all against all.
This is false. No one has ever made any such argument.
Socrates argued one owes loyalty to one’s city for the same reason one owns filial piety to one’s father, namely, because the city protects and nurtures her subjects, without whom life itself would be in jeopardy. Aristotle argued that the laws are necessary because man is a social animal, and cannot prosper alone, nor live well. Aquinas argued that An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts humanity is just. Any law that degrades humanity is unjust.
And so on.
The closest one can find to this strawman argument is that of Thomas Hobbes, who indeed says that the alternative is between anarchy, which Hobbes calls “the state of nature” and sovereign law, which he analogizes to a leviathan.
Even Hobbes says only that the obligation is involuntary only after being entered into voluntarily. Hobbes accepts the notion of a social contract, but denies that it is mutually binding on the sovereign and subject. Hobbes claims the obligation is binding on the subject only.
Hobbes forbids withdrawing from the social contract once made. At no point does Hobbes claim that all men must be slaves to the sovereign: he merely rules out rebellion as an allowable recourse against the sovereign, who, in his scheme, is immune from all accusations of wrongdoing.
However, the flaw the Hobbesian argument is not that the obligation is involuntary the flaw in his argument is that the selfsame reasons Hobbes lists for justifying the creation of a sovereign power must justify rebellion against it once that sovereign power acts in opposition to those reasons.
It is not the philosophers who see no third option between slavery and anarchy. To the contrary, the whole mainstream of social contract theory, as well as the claim of a divine right of kings, are clearly third options. In the first case, the state is not slavery because the sovereign is curtailed by the provisions of the social contract; and in the second case, the state is not slavery because any human law the sovereign makes has authority only be subservient to divine law, which is may not overstep.
Rather, it is The Anarchist who sees no third option. By conflating lawkeeping and slavekeeping, he establishes a crude binary choice: either all things are voluntary or none are.
As a matter of logic, if we allow the Anarchist to eliminate all distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate uses of force, then all uses of force are one and the same. The kidnapper is the same as the judge who punishes the kidnapper, on the grounds that both use force.
But then it is he, and he alone who makes the choice a stark binary. It is he who says the only two options are slavery and anarchy. Without this false binary, his argument falls apart.
His argument, pared to its minimum, reads (1) all things not anarchy are slavery (2) slavery is immoral (3) therefore anarchy is moral. This is a false dichotomy.
To be consistent, the Anarchist must claim that all forms of government—monarchies and democracies alike—categorically forms of enslavement.
In logic, a gratuitous assertion can be gratuitously denied. This statement is false and absurd on its face. If all government were enslavement, so taking any oath or obligation, or signing a contract.
By this logic, a king whose acts are restricted by custom, or by parliament, or by written law, is also a slave, as are all his subjects: everyone a slave with no master in sight.
By this logic, lawmakers voting on laws binding also only themselves are self-enslaving themselves. Any obedience to a Constitution whose drafters are all dead means we are all slaves whose master has passed away. To be a slave without a master is a paradox.
The Anarchist pretends Kings leap out of bushes to thrust unwary passers-by into potato sacks, spirit them away into far lands, bind them with fetters and menace them with iron, whereupon one and all, his own soldiers included, cheer and insist he wear a crown, and lead them in war against the Philistines, hanging murderers and rapists along the way.
And if the form of commonwealth is a republic, government by an assembly or senate, then we merely imagine a gang of graybeard senators feebly hobbling along in purple-hemmed robes, descending in a gang upon the slumbering villagers to bind them up and carry them off.
Alas! The village is harassed by crowned kings and elderly senators! If only we could mutually agree to have a leader provide for lead and organize our common defense against them — but sadly, by Anarchy logic, organization and leadership are forever and always immoral.
Calling lawkeeping slavekeeping is nonsense on stilts.
In reality, nearly all obedience to governments of any kind is largely voluntary. No king has knights enough to keep a whole kingdom in chains, and even the Party in a modern totalitarianism must rest on the loyalty of the party members, at least to a degree. There are not enough taxmen to find and punish everyone were all citizens and business refuse at once to cooperating in gathering the payments. Even in tyrannies, most subject obey the laws because laws deter theft, fraud and murder, even though the excesses of tyrants call the legitimacy of all their orders into question.
I put it to you that if it were true that all governments were categorically slaves, no government would need or seek any justification for its acts, neither by appeal to religion or ideology, nor by appeal to the will of the people, nor would, as all governments save the most barbaric do, make distinctions between lawful and unlawful exercises of power by its officers.
At this point, soundly losing any argument, the Anarchist will usually resort to an ad hominem attack, either saying non-anarchists are in the pay of the state, or receive some benefit from it, or are unwilling or unable to imagine any third alternative between total tyranny and total anarchy, due to a lack of good faith or a lack of imagination. The non-anarchists are merely scared, because abolishing government would require vertiginous changes in our social mores and customs.
Ad hominem is not an argument but a way to avoid an argument. If the Anarchist accuses others of cowardice for not assenting to his utopian vision, by the same token he can be accused of recklessness for assenting to it, or gullibility, or folly. Such accusations are easily made, impossible to prove, and irrelevant to the discussion.
9. The Right to Enforce the Law
The Anarchist wonders why any man, lawkeeper or not, can have a right to use force against any other, except, perhaps, in self defense against aggression, and then only against the aggressor, and in proportionate amount.
It is not a difficult question for any man to answer, unless he suffers from Libertarianism, as I myself did for many years. (And, I must hasten to add, nearly any Libertarian can find a sound and reasonable answer to the Anarchist challenge, or else he would be one himself.)
Why? Because we are born into natural obligations to our family, into our home and nation. Because even if love and patriotism does not engender a natural desire to protect yourself and your fellows, your own long-term self interest can and does and must.
Again, the whole analysis is based on the ambiguity of holding authorized and lawful uses of force to be the same as unauthorized and unlawful uses of force; of holding punishing crime to be a crime, since both use force; of holding self-defense to be the same as unprovoked aggression, since both use force.
If the lawkeeper is enforcing an obligation that man would have freely volunteered to perform, were he honest, the lawkeeper’s action is authorized and lawful.
If this is true for voluntary oath and obligations, such as a contract one signs, by the same logic it must be true for involuntary obligations into which one is born, such as obligations running to brothers or fathers, or, more to the point, the patriotic obligation to love and protect one’s motherland.
The Anarchist’s argument tacitly assumes it is lawful to use force against those who initiate force, but, by his selfsame logic, that is impermissible, because the aggressor merely by a silent act of will, at any time, unilaterally secede from whatever body of laws, customs, or moral obligations which previously held him to be forbidden from initiating force.
Again, refer to the argument I gave before beginning this analysis. At the risk of tedium, let me repeat myself.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that all the neighbors gathered into a voluntary lawkeeping union or organization, enacted for their mutual defense, make the claim that if a member does not initiate force, he may secede from the organization free and clear, but that if he initiates force, he may not. In other words, some cases of secession are lawful, some not.
Suppose he carries off a cashbox from his neighbors, and when asked to return it, announced he has unilaterally seceded. He declares the theft not to be force because no blood was shed, whereas wrestling the cashbox out of his hands is force, because blood is then shed. He asserts that violence against property is not violence.
Either this claim will be judged by the law, or not. If judged, then the legality of the secession is itself a question subject to the authority of the law. If the legality of the secession is subject to the authority of the law, by definition, that is an authority from which secession is not allowed.
10. Sovereignty from Paternity
The Anarchist argument rests on the unsupported assumption that duties cannot be imposed by birth, or against one’s will.
It is not so. Children are not only born owing a duty of obedience to a father, their natural sentiments incline them to obey him, and prudence cannot imagine any other possible arrangement. Children below the age of reason cannot grant consent to any other arrangement because they lack the capacity to grant or to withhold consent.
The father’s obligation is mutual and reciprocal: the very point on which the Anarchist’s argument rests, that all authority is slavedriving, is the very point where the father’s authority ends.
The father simply may not treat his children as chattel, nor slaves. As father, he has a natural duty to rear, protect and educate his children, and provide for them until they reach such age as they can provide for themselves. Likewise, his duties to his own ancestors creates an obligation to pass along any legacy, material or spiritual, to his posterity. He must honor his parents as well as teaching his children to honor him.
Primitive governments are merely this principle of paternal care extended to clan and tribe; when and if the unwritten laws of the tribal grandfathers proves insufficient, either due to a growth of numbers or alliances through marriage, or the adoption of a way of life, such as farming, requiring precise measurement and exclusive use and ownership of land, the laws must become a matter of public record, either chanted or written. Without this, there is no possibility of the laws being equal and consistent across the years or when resisting the temptation to be partial.
Civilization formalizes law, identifying leaders in peace and war, judges and magistrates, and sometimes lawmakers and lawkeepers. This introduces a distinction between the mere will of the leaders and lawkeepers as private citizens, and their official rulings and statutes. Rites are enacted to eliminate ambiguity, such a formal vote by counting pebbles, or a king’s seal, without which the document has no legal force, and so on. But the paternal obligation, despite being regularized by legal rites, is the same as in the primitive case of a father ruling a family.
The main danger to man living in civilization is twofold: on the one hand, if the laws are weak, criminals rule. Each man will feel free to avenge any slight or injury as he sees fit, each in his own eyes, or to commit any crime he deems practical. on the other hand, if the laws are overbearing, draconian, or too intrusive, the rulers are criminals. Those entrusted with the powers of the law abuse that trust, and the subjects in their paternal care become slaves indeed, mere victims.
Again, instead of asserting there is no difference between authorized use of force and slavery, the mere opposite it true. When the use of force become slavery, then and there the authority ends.
A man born into any nation, whether ruled by king or parliament or despot, is likewise born with an obligation to uphold, obey and protect his fellow man for the same reason a child born into a family is obligated to obey his father: namely, without such obedience, the family cannot exist, nor the commonwealth. All talk is social contract is a metaphor employed in the one sole case of when a decision to secede against a lawful sovereign is justified.
Political philosophy since days of Pericles give two answers to that. Socrates says that the laws no matter how unjust must be obeyed. He drank hemlock in living example of this principle. Aquinas says that rebellion is justified if and when the sovereign misuses human law to disobey eternal law, but only when the rebellion will not create more disorders than it cures. The Founding Fathers of this nation are a living example of that. (Very, very few other rebellions or secessions in history match this standard: as bad as was the autocratic tyranny of the Czars, for example, the genocidal tyranny of Stalin was worse).
Hence, in truth, the decision to secede is allowable only in very rare and limited circumstances.
The Anarchist asserts that the decision to secede is always lawful, legitimate, and moral, without giving a single reason why. Every other moral decision in human life must examine the ends sought, the means utilized, and the nature of the act. All are subject to a rule of reflection, which weighs ends and means, seeking prudent ways to enact what ideals enjoin.
There is no reason for the decision to secede from civilization and unleash mere anarchy upon the world to be immune from any rule of reflection.
11. Self-Ownership
The Anarchist may well argue it to be a paradox to have those asserting natural authority, or authority based on implicit consent, to enforce it upon anyone who denies the right of the authority to do so.
But if a man cannot be forced to carry out obligations and duties imposed on him, involuntary as well as voluntary, then duty itself does not exist. The word duty means a moral obligation to do what one is not inclined to do. If duty does not exist, the act of binding oneself to a duty voluntarily likewise cannot exist. One cannot sign a contract or a social contract, or, for that matter, be a member of a family, tribe, or nation.
But we have already seen, that by the Anarchist’s logic, the mere fact that I signed a contract or made an oath cannot be used to enforce the terms on me, since all I need do is secede from any authority that seeks to enforce oathkeeping. This act of secession, when done merely to escape from terms to which I once agreed, cannot be unlawful if I live under the Anarchist’s moral code, for his is a world where no act of secession is unlawful.
The Anarchist uses the idea that one is sovereign over oneself as a basis to claim that this self-authority is inalienable. Logically, this means I cannot agree to work for another man in return for a wage, or for any other terms, on the grounds that my self-ownership is inalienable. If my self-ownership is inalienable, that means I cannot alien it. This is a legal term, meaning I cannot swap it, give it away as a gift, renounce it, or sell it.
If the Anarchist meant only that a man cannot lawfully sell himself into chattel slavery, on that grounds that no man may own another man’s soul and self, we would have no argument: but then, in that case, such a man cannot have self-ownership. By definition, whatever you own, if the ownership is absolute, you can sell.
If and only if the ownership is limited (what lawyers called “entailed”) so that some uses of the self by the self are permissible and others are not, is voluntary entry into slavery impossible.
Contrariwise, if self-entry into slavery is impossible, this proves self-ownership is and must be limited.
If self-ownership is limited, this suggests that we are at best stewards of our lives, since life itself comes as a gift not of our own making. In that case, proper stewardship imposes obligations on us from the moment we enter into life. These duties are the moral and legal conditions of being alive, perhaps even the practical conditions.
To object that one never agreed nor volunteered to be alive is an objection only a living man can make. As a matter of logic, unless one is a spirit-medium able to speak to the soul awaiting birth, one is never in a position to ask the unconceived to consent to birth. The matter is involuntary.
This leaves open the question of what, if any, natural and involuntary obligations exist. That question is for another discussion. Here, we need only note that if voluntary entry into slavery is impossible, self-ownership is not absolute, but burdened with certain obligations. These obligations are natural and involuntary.
This does not prove, as a matter of logic, one has a natural and involuntary duty to obey one’s father, love one’s homeland, or care for one’s civilization; but it does disprove the Anarchist categorical statement that such obligations do not exist.
Finally and frankly, the most the Anarchist argument can produce is the conclusion that unilateral obedience is not always the only allowable option. There are cases where mutiny and secession are arguably justified, perhaps obligatory.
12. Self-Defense in Concert
The whole Anarchist argument is made absurd if and when he says that the use of force in self defense is permissible, but the use of force to enforce any oaths of fealty or military discipline needed to carry out that self defense, particularly when acting in concert with others, is impermissible.
The Anarchist introduces a distinction between coercive force, which is force meant to achieve some end, and defensive force, which is force used to protect from coercive force.
In so doing, he reintroduces a distinction between permissible and impermissible uses of force which his whole argument must take pains to deny, lest it fall to pieces.
Were it the case that the use of defensive force is permissible, then those things necessary to exercise protective force prudently become obligatory. Defensive force is rarely employed by an isolated individual. Even those who deter a highwayman by flourishing a pistol report him to the justice of the peace to raise a posse, gather all the hale men in the parish, and hunt the scofflaw down.
This requires concerted action. If defensive force is permissible, those things without which defensive force cannot be employed are likewise permissible, or else the permission is null and void.
If one lives in the mountain pass were the enemy is likely to march, an order to evacuate, or to house troops in your barn, to pay taxes to erect a fort in that pass, tearing down your house to do so, all become obligatory — for, if not, then the use of defensive force is not permissible. To will the end is to will the means necessary to the end.
Again, naturally, if the sovereign wants to tear down your house in the mountain pass to erect a ski-lodge for his own personal use, or a chateau to house his mistress, this is an abuse of the power granted him for the common defense.
Were it the case that the use of defensive force is permissible, then agreeing with one’s neighbors to provide for the common defense, let us say by hiring seven wandering samurai to stave off an anticipated attack from forty bandits, is an obligation into which one can enter, but, once entered, cannot simply be dismissed.
For one thing, your neighbors, relying on your promises to help defend the village, most likely have taken steps or forgone opportunities (such as the opportunity to flee) they would not have otherwise done. To back out of a contract where one has duties due and owing is no different from breaking a contract when one had monies due and owing.
If you are in the village, the whole village is going to be attacked, you included, whether you hang a pro-bandit sign on your hut or not.
As a matter of physical fact, if your hut is in the village, it will be protected by them; and as a matter of moral fact, if you receive a benefit, you are obligated to reciprocate.
If you agreed to the mutual defense, or even if you benefit from the mutual defense against your will and over your objections, you have an natural obligation to see to whatever military prudence says must be done.
Otherwise, the village burns.
Naturally, if the samurai make demands unrelated to the defense of the village, as when one of them demands your wife be his, this severs the mutual obligation: such a samurai has in truth become the very bandit he was hired to fend off.
The Anarchist is unable to distinguish between wandering samurai protecting a village and a bandit, because both carry swords. And yet in his own argument, once he distinguishes between defensive force and aggressive force, he makes exactly that distinction. This is a direct, logical self-contraction.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
