How Would History be Written in Anarchy?

http://anarchiststandard.com/2015/09/11how-would-history-be-understood-in-anarchy/

Anarchists are at a disadvantage compared to those who support the state. Our disadvantage has to do with the nature of our ideas. Simply stated: we understand that we don’t understand the world. We understand that our knowledge is limited. When we look at the world we see billions of unique individuals, all with their own stories. To us, the world is unfathomably complex. Because we have this perspective, we do not think we know the solutions to the world’s problems. What we do know is that nobody working for the state knows them either. And we also know that when state employees try to solve problems they generate unexpected consequences that make things worse.

So, we restrict ourselves to arguing for freedom. We argue that if individuals are left free, they will, on their own, figure out the best ways to solve the world’s problems. We can predict that they will do so, because we know that when people are free they apply the greatest amount of thought, energy, and resources toward solving their problems. While we don’t know specifically how they will solve any particular problem, we do know that they will do a better job of it than the state. This fact follows logically from our recognition of the limits of our knowledge. Because, if we could predict in advance how people would solve a particular problem, we would not need to give them liberty. In that case, we could just order the state to implement that solution. But we don’t know, and we can’t know, which is why we need liberty. Liberty allows the solutions to problems to be “crowd sourced”. It incentivizes the massively parallel processing of the problems of the world. It vests billions of minds with the task of fixing things for the better. Because we understand this dynamic, anarchists often find ourselves arguing for liberty, a general solution, in response to questions about specific problems. “How will your solution help so and so?” A person might ask. To which we reply “It will free you and others to do something about it.” That is the best response we can give. It is the right response. Unfortunately, such answers rarely satisfy people, because they want an actual plan about that particular problem. When we try to explain to them why we can’t give them a plan, why the market would devise a far superior plan to any that we or people in the state, could devise, their eyes gloss over. They just want us to tell them how we would fix so and so.

Statists think differently. They give people the type of answers they want and that gives them an advantage in selling their message. Statists are able to give such answers, because they think differently than us. They believe that they DO have the capacity to understand the world. They believe this because they have a very simplistic way of seeing the world. Instead of seeing the world as composed of billions of unique minds, statists see the world as composed of a few large groups. Instead of seeing the world as impossibly complex, they see the world as remarkably simple. They have a simplistic view of the world. Therefore, they do not hesitate to propose state intervention to address particular problems. When they sell state action to people, they follow a simple and effective playbook. First, they identify a problem. Then they propose a state imposed solution. Problem and solution. It is so very easy to understand. So, for example, if there is disorder and bloodshed somewhere in the world, they will propose military intervention to impose peace. Simple. Or, if there is a sense that income and wealth are unfairly distributed, they will propose forcible redistribution to make things more equal. Again simple. Because they boil the complexity of life down into such simplistic language, they are able to rally people to go along with them. Unlike anarchists, who can only offer general, abstract solutions to specific problems, statists offer clearly relevant action steps. This is their great rhetorical advantage.

They are completely wrong, of course, as are those who give them their consent. The root of the statists’ error is the inaccurate way they view the world and other people. Instead of seeing people primarily as individuals, statists see people primarily as members of groups, and then they treat those groups of people as if all their members are the same. They think about a particular individual only as a Jew, black, muslim, member of such and such a district, member of a certain party, woman, person from a certain nationality, elderly etc, everything except as a unique and complex individual. Statists think in terms of groups. They do not think in terms of individuals. Of course, if you ask them, they will acknowledge that, yes, people are individuals, but this is merely window dressing. In reality, in their minds, what informs their decisions, are their attitudes towards groups. They strip the uniqueness from each individual. They caricaturize people and oversimplify them, and in doing so they oversimplify their own mental representation of the world. When thinking about a person they think to themselves. “He is this, and I know it is true because he possesses this characteristic.”

But why do they, and those who go along with them, think this way? Why are they unwilling to see each person as unique? Why do they label people and then try to shoehorn them into a group? Why do they depersonalize people in this manner? Do they honestly think that there is no variability between individuals who share a certain characteristic? Do they really believe claims such as “all so and sos are x?” Are they really that simple minded? I think the answer to these questions is that statists think this way because of a combination of poor education, and skewed incentives.

The incentive part is clear enough. No politician or person whose livelihood depends on the state could sleep at night if he genuinely saw people as individuals. Because if he did, he would have to condemn the injustice that the state inflicts against them. Every law passed by the coercive state, by definition, harms some individuals and helps others. So for any law to pass there must be people willing to arrogate to themselves the right to make judgments about the proposed law’s effects on aggregate groups of people. To be passed, laws need to be evaluated not by their impact on particular individuals but instead, their impact on groups of people. If laws were evaluated by their impact on unique individuals, all it would take is one individual who does not want the law, for the law to necessarily be labeled “unjust” and rejected. So, if statists did see people as unique individuals, they would have no other option but to reject all legislation and the state itself. But they don’t. The great “we” comes into their minds. “Yes, I know that there are some people who disagree with this law, but, we, as a society, think it’s a good idea.” Lost in that “we”, is the “me”, or “I” that disagrees, and does consider myself part of that group: “society” that the statist claims has decided something.

So the only logically consistent position for someone who sees people as individuals, is anarchism. Nevertheless, as long as the state exists, politicians and their supporters will have an incentive to continue their sloppy thinking. But what about the rest of the people? Most of them do not directly benefit from the state. So, why do they also see individuals primarily as members of groups? Why do they also oversimplify their mental representation of the world? I think the answer is bad education. We teach people to see groups instead of individuals.

To illustrate what I mean I want to talk about history. Few academic disciplines are as intimately related to our sense of identity as history. But I want you to imagine history in a different way than you are used to imagining it. I want you to try to imagine that one day humankind actually does achieve a state of global anarchy. No states remain on earth. Now a question. In such a world, how would history be written? Traditionally, most of history has been framed by political boundaries and the actions of political rulers. But with no state, historians would have to figure out a new way to tell stories about the past. Certainly there would still be history and historians, because people would still want to know from where they came, and would be willing to pay a person to find out and document it.

But with no nation states, historians would have a more difficult job. They would have to select some other cohering topic around which to craft a narrative. How would they do that? Here are a few ideas. Maybe they would write histories about geographic regions, and in those histories they would describe the companies, the notable personalities, and the events of that region during a certain period of time. Or maybe there would be historians for hire who would write customized histories of companies, or families. Or maybe historians would write about movements, religions, or cultural trends. Who can know for sure what the profession of history would look like in that world? But it is interesting to think about.

Suffice it to say, history as a profession, in such a world, would become just as fragmented as the political system. And just as the political system would be almost completely local, so history would become much more personalized and customized. History would become something unique and different for each person. Without political boundaries around which to wrap the collective history, each one of us would be left to construct our own unique historical sense. There would be no common historical narrative. The aggregate history of the world would be recognized by everyone as impossibly complex, and it would be far more difficult, in that world, for any person to deceive himself into thinking that the world is easy to understand. When a person would try to think about what has happened in the past, there would be no clear, collective images. All of history would be disaggregated. A person might imagine a globe and try to conjure up images of the past, but there would be no clear boundaries to give those images definition. Everything in the past would be a mystery, impossibly complex, unique, and indecipherable. And that’s how it should be. This is how the world actually is! There is no way of understanding everything. We shouldn’t have a unified, agreed upon picture of the past. It is actually incomprehensible to a single mind. So that is how history should be written as well. The existence of the state only permits an illusion of simplicity, not the reality. This is why we, anarchists, already see the world that way.

Let me now offer a couple specific examples to further illustrate my point. If you lived in an anarchy, instead of reading about a stranger being assassinated in Dallas 50 years before you were born, you might instead read a history of the valley in which you grew up. That history would be more relevant to your life. In it, you might find names of the ancestors of people you know, or it might even have some interesting historical information about your own grandfather and what he was doing at that time. Compare the two. Why would care about some random guy getting killed in Dallas? He would have no bearing on your life. But what your grandfather did, that would! Try to think about it like this: Does it ever strike you as strange that you know more about Abraham Lincoln, then you do your own ancestors who were his contemporaries? Can you even name one of your ancestors who lived at the same time as him? Don’t you think it unfair that so much of our collective historical energy is spent discussing and detailing the same few historical actors? In a world with no state, the efforts of historians would be much, much more evenly distributed. They would detail the lives of more people, and not focus so much on a few. My point is that each of us could have a much more personalized history. The only reason we don’t, is because of the state. In this way, the existence of the state alienates us from what could be called our “true identify”, and replaces it with a strange mish mash of stories about people who have no real connection to our lives except that they claim the right to rule over us. So, instead of historians writing histories about us, they write about the state.

So history as it is currently taught and written imposes a false uniformity upon us. It teaches the same stories over and over again, until we all begin to internalize these stories and adopt them as “our” history, even though they aren’t “ours.” They involve strangers. Our actual unique and distinct history is never told, and so we never learn it. Which is really sad. No wonder so many people who support the state look at other people and see them primarily as a part of a group. They’ve all been indoctrinated. This is why anarchists have such difficulty arguing with statists. They assume that we are like them. They assume we have internalized and adopted all the same stories about the past. They assume that we, like them, identify with the American government’s past wars abroad. They assume we, like them, identify with the changing structure of the American government. They assume that we, like them, agree with their nauseating cliches about America. And when they argue “We are all Americans!” they assume that what they are saying is a given. They don’t even recognize that people can think different. They don’t even understand what it means to be an anarchist.

But in the future we are trying to create, such arguments could never be made. People would recognize that each person has his own unique history, and a unique identity. And there would not even be an entity called the state to provide us the illusion of a shared sense of history. I am reminded of Gibbon’s the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. After about the 4th century AD, the center of the narrative of the book shifts to Byzantium. The reason is obvious. The Roman Empire in the west had splintered. There was no longer any collectively shared history of the region to tell. Only in the east did a politically unified empire continue, and therefore continue to have a shared history. Similarly, when we eliminate the state, we will also eliminate the idea of large groups of people having the same history. The average person in the future will have no illusion that he can understand the history of the world. Groupings of people will be transitory, with slippery and unclear boundaries.

I hope the above has made it clear why I think that the way that history is written and taught is responsible for the mentality that makes groups, instead of individuals, primary in the way people think. It is one way that people reduce the importance of individual identity and amplify the importance of group identity. But it is not the only way. The policies taken by the state also cultivate group identities. As I mentioned above, policies implemented by the state never deal in particular ways with unique individuals. Policies always deal only with groups of people. Every law either helps a group or hurts a group. Social security helps the elderly at the cost of everyone else. Minimum wage helps some poor at the cost of everyone else. Military intervention helps military contractor and large oil interests at the cost of everyone else. Etc.

But whenever a groups benefits or suffers from a particular policy, the group identity becomes stronger. Let me put forward one metaphor to help you think about this. Imagine all individuals in a society as a pool of hot wax. They are fluid, changing, unified. Then imagine state employees metaphorically stamp their arbitrary group definitions onto that society. Now all the sudden there are different group identities, forged by the evil coercion of the state. Consider african-americans. For hundreds of years they were enslaved. Their enslavement was enshrined in the state. The state made an arbitrary distinction between them and other immigrants. Had there been no state, there could not have been slavery. Because if anarchy existed, property owners who claimed to own a person would have had no recourse in the case their “slave” escaped. So for hundreds of years state policy harmed an arbitrary group of people. It was decided that if your skin was black, you would be a slave. As a result, a group identity was forged that would not otherwise have come into existence. Had there not been a state, African Americans might see themselves today in the same way as Irish American or Italian American do. They might find their ancestry interesting, but it would not define them. Their group identity is a direct result of state policy. There are a million examples of this phenomenon. When the Belgians entered Rwanda. They allied with one tribe, the Tutsi’s, and their investment and elevation of that tribe as the puppet rulers of the state exacerbated the conflicts between them and the rival Hutu. Without a state, there would have been much less identification between the tribes, and there would have been much less intergroup hatred today. People would see themselves, and each other, much more as individuals instead of members of a group.

I cannot emphasize enough that thinking in terms of groups is an essential part of running a state. There is no “neutral” policy. Every policy affects different individuals differently. Every policy is driven by the emotional attachments or an interest that the policy makers have to the different groups that exist in their minds. An effective politician or ruler “balances” competing groups, but all politicians must ignore the individual. That is the nature of the state.

So a vicious cycle manifests whenever there is a state. Statists make arbitrary distinctions between people. They foolishly assign an emotional charge to groups based on their arbitrary favor or disfavor. Then, they pass legislation that reflects how they feel. This in turn accentuates the distinction between groups of people, and further separates them from each other. Then the people themselves begin to internalize that arbitrary distinction. They begin to view themselves primarily as members of particular groups. Finally, they begin to engage in politics themselves as a group to help their group gain power. This is the cycle that we must break.

How do we do so? How do we begin to see ourselves primarily as individuals, and insist that others do the same? How do we deprogram ourselves? I say this because I assure you that many, or even most anarchists, still unconsciously identify with the state, and have internalized the state’s version of their history and the state imposed group identity. So, what steps can we take in our life to change that? Well, to begin with, we must be very conscientious of our use of pronouns. We must not tolerate anyone using a pronoun that includes us without our consent. (To clarify, when I use the word “we”, I am referring to anarchists who agree with my point of view only.) So, we are not the government because we do not consent to it. We did not commit or participate in its past crimes nor do we participate in its present crimes. Therefore, we do not accept guilt which is properly theirs. Nor will we accept responsibility for fulfilling promises that they have made. We must challenge people whose use of pronouns reflects this type of group thinking, where individuals are implicitly included, even though they may not consent.

Next, we must make sure that we do not identify ourselves primarily with any particular group. We cannot allow ourselves to play their game. Statists love when we are divided. Each of us must make sure to see ourselves primarily as individuals. That means we must make sure that we do not allow prejudice to cloud our judgments of others. Just as only history that is relevant to us, should play a part of our personal historical narrative, so particular facts and particular evidence that is relevant to an individual should be all that we permit to affect our judgments of that individual. We must be impartial, and withhold judgment about any event with which we are not intimately familiar. But for those things with which we are familiar, we should feel free to judge. We should only think about and speak about individuals. Not groups. Similarly, we should reject the state categorically, and every piece of legislation that it’s employees pass. Every intervention by the state will further divide people and perpetuate this groupthink identity.

If we can clarify this issue in our mind, we will begin the long process of deflating the group identity paradigm that currently enslaves most peoples’ minds. We have an advantage over them. Our view of the world as a complex place, where each person is unique, is true. No matter how much coercion they use to try to cover up that fact it won’t change it. Contrarily, their simplistic view of a world composed primarily of groups of people, is false. No matter how much coercion they use to try to remake the world according some ridiculous vision they have, they will fail. Every chance we get, we should exploit our advantage, by pointing out how they have failed, and why they have failed. Ultimately, we will not need to sell an alternate “solution” to the problems of the world. It will be sufficient for us to point out errors and deflate the conceited view that most people have toward each other. Eventually, they will learn to withdraw their foolish projections.

The world we want is one full of unique individuals. It is a world where the individual, sovereign mind escapes from all arbitrary group classifications. It is a world where each individual is encouraged to survey the landscape around him, think about his particular circumstances, and the people he knows, and listen to his conscience, so as to adjust his self-identity to best conform to his unique values. It is a world of thoughtful and constantly changing individuals, people responsive and dynamic, unable to be put themselves or others into any mental container. We can no longer permit the state to prevent this process. Our goal is not liberate our people. It is to liberate ourselves.