Is anarchy utopian ?

In my previous entry, I talked about arbitration in a market anarchy. This is, I think, the second most popular argument against anarchy. The most popular argument is that anarchy is utopian, either in nature or as a future possibility.

Like Stefan Molyneux, I think this objection is absurd is a basic way. The fact is that the vast majority of interactions in our lives are anarchic - they do not involve or rely on government force. Anarchy is already about 95% of our lives. This of course raises a question - if government is not necessary, and in fact harmful, to 95% of our lives, how could it possibly help the last 5% ?

The other problem is that, while government intervention in our lives is relatively unnoticeable, the areas of our lives controlled by government are of extreme importance for social life. So government invervention is dispersed and mostly in the background, but extremely damageable as a whole.

Another fact is that anarchic societies have existed in history, and still exist, and have been shown to be more stable and progressive than governments. Of course, no one ever learns that in history class. What interest does the government has to teach you that it's not necessary ?

And now here's the clincher : the most successful discipline in the history of mankind is anarchic ! Yes, I'm talking about science and the scientific method. Science is not based on force. It is based on curiosity and an honest search for the truth, reined in by testing and peer review, driven by the ambition to overturn old paradigms, and made legitimate by how well it works. It is not based on the force of the gun, on manufactured legitimacy, or on parasitical rhetoric (although the "science for science's sake" contingent can sometimes come close to that).

True, government has always been entangled in science, and especially today government twists science for its own ends, like it does for anything else in a society. Both right and left wings in politics use activist science to legitimize their worldviews, and interest groups that mascarade as science manipulate the media and government power all the time.

But even though it profits from organized theft, science is still by and large anarchic in nature. Its outputs are founded on networks of testing and cooperation instead of force.

Fundamentally, what does utopian mean? It is used to designate a belief system that one desires to impose on society, when such system goes against human nature. Statism is fundamentally utopian. It denies the basic moral fact that the individuals in a society all have different value systems, and tries to impose a singular value system (as expressed in the law and state intervention) on an entire society, leading inevitably to social warfare. Market Anarchy is nothing more than the recognition that all individuals should be free to live the way they want, and give them the possibility of expressing their nature. Market Anarchy is therefore the polar opposite of utopian.

As we've seen, the belief that anarchy is utopian is almost trivial to disprove. So where does it come from and why does it persist ?

The main source, I think, is the constant propaganda and brainwashing we get from day 1 about the necessity of government, more specifically the confusion between "law" (a single body of rules enforced by government) and "order" (absence of coercion and presence of structure). Even though the two were separate for most of history, we have grown so accustomed to state slavery that we can't see the difference anymore.

It takes mere seconds for anyone to understand a principle as clear as "government is force", but the emotional investment most people have in the system is so great that, like a cultist confronted with internal contradictions, they have no choice but to rationalize it.