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May 7, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:22
1058 Proof of Anarchy

A simple proof that anarchy will work.

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I hope that you're doing well.
This is a little presentation entitled The Proof for Anarchy.
It's sort of embarrassing how long it took me to come up with this as a thesis, but we will look on the bright side and hope that it holds or stands.
This is more details from an argument in the free book, Everyday Anarchy, available at freedomainradio.com in e-book or audio book format.
So, anarchy.
The proof. Well, there's a core anarchist claim, or the core anarchist claim, is that a central coercive monopoly, a state, a government, is not required for criminal sanctions, punishment of criminals, violent crime, and so on, for the provision of public goods, roads, and pollution controls, and so on, and for contract enforcement, Furthermore, using a state to solve these problems is both counterproductive and immoral.
Now, fairly simple argument, why has it made so little headroads or headway among educated and civilized debaters?
Well, there's a real challenge.
Two main challenges, I would say.
When you attempt to convince people of the validity of a stateless society, What happens is you kind of have to go one of two routes.
And the first route is you say, well, there are historical examples of a stateless society, but they don't tend to get very far with people.
People don't really know much about them.
It requires a lot of research.
The research can be biased by people's political opinions, either pro or con.
It seems very distant and vaguely not credible because they've never heard about it before.
So that doesn't generally tend to clinch the case.
And the second, of course, is to provide theoretical models of how public services could be provided without a government, of how law courts could work without a government, and so on.
And what this does is it tends to provoke the endless, yeah, but, problem of endless questioning.
Well, you might not need this, but what about this, and how would this work, and how would that work, and the other, and what if, and what if.
And that doesn't tend to clinch or close the case either.
So... These have been the typical weapons in the anarchist arsenal, so to speak, but they have not been effective for the reasons that I mentioned.
So, the historical examples people bring up, well, a couple hundred years of medieval Iceland, there was medieval Ireland, feudal Europe, as some people say is a decent example, anarchic communes during the Spanish Civil War, Rothbard talks a lot about Pennsylvania, 17th century, modern Somalia, kibbutzim in Israel, and so on.
But these aren't terribly convincing.
There's very few people who are going to be saying, we should run our society according to the principles that were enacted in medieval Ireland.
Iceland doesn't tend to be very, very convincing.
It requires a lot of research and doesn't tend to get over the hump.
These are distant examples, so you don't know much about them.
They seem inapplicable.
They seem foreign.
And in the example of Iceland and Ireland and feudal Europe, they were ended by statist intervention, either domestically or from other countries.
It requires a lot of research.
It's just not terribly convincing, and we can see the results of the general acceptability of anarchistic theories that it doesn't really come about, that these things don't.
Really work. So the holy grail of anarchic argument is, what if, what, what, what, what if, there was an example of political anarchism that was in practice that every reasonably educated adult was perfectly aware of and understood deeply?
If we could use that example to prove that anarchism worked, not could work, not might work, not worked in ancient Ireland or worked in some future theoretical thing or doesn't work in Somalia because of state funding and state intervention, arms sales and so on, the rational society and so on, at least we would overcome a core argument against anarchy, which is that it is functionally impractical.
Does such an example exist?
Oh yeah. All I can say is, abse positive le frequent lutely.
But first, because I'm very keen on creating as many barriers to acceptance of the truth as possible, let's create the most difficult conceivable or possible case for anarchy.
Because a theory which operates very well under the most adverse conditions can be assumed to operate even better under less adverse or less extreme conditions.
So if a man can lift 100 pounds, it's perfectly valid and an entirely true statement to say, yes, he can lift 5 pounds too.
If the escape velocity to get out of Earth, to get away from Earth is 11.2 kilometers per second, 30 kilometers per second will escape Earth even faster.
This is just a logical thing. That which works right on the borders or works under the most negative situations will also work under the most positive situations.
If a bridge can hold a train, then it can hold a baby carriage.
This much we can logically understand.
So, the premise.
If, my friends, we can find an example of a highly functional form of anarchism that operates under the most adverse conceivable conditions, and as a benefit which is familiar to people as well, then the theory of anarchism can be considered more than possible, more than theoretical...
It's proven. This may be our Einsteinian relativistic eclipse.
It may be our Darwinian theory of evolution.
We don't know as yet, but let's hold out for the mere possibility.
Furthermore, if this example is commonly understood by just about everyone, then the last remaining theoretical barrier to the practicality of anarchism will come down.
The challenge. So a stateless society, the advocation of a stateless society, faces the challenges of, you know, how do you deal with, without a government, how do you deal with criminal prosecution, contract enforcement, the provision of public goods, roads, national defense, sewage, garbage collection, and so on.
Anarchist theorists do not say that these services are not required.
Nobody says, oh, we don't need roads.
Roads are a fool's game. They're a con man's game.
But rather that essential coercive agency is not required, not moral, and impractical in the long run.
So the Free Domain Radio Solution, and this is just stuff that I've been working on for the last couple of years, are these things called DROs, or Dispute Resolution Organizations.
And these are like quasi-insurance companies that provide customers with things like contractual enforcement.
And this is not necessarily if you're doing business with someone in Taiwan or Jupiter, but rather contractual enforcement with issues you may have with your landlord or with your school or whatever.
Protection from criminal victimization, collective defense if necessary, and the public goods argument does not require the existence of a state.
It doesn't justify it.
You can have roads without. In fact, roads were invented long before the state came along and so on.
So really, we're just going to focus on the contractual enforcement, protection from criminals, and collective defense.
So here's a totally minor example.
This covers virtually nothing, but it's just a way of looking at it.
If you and I enter into a business arrangement for $100,000, let's say we can choose a mutually acceptable DRO to provide restitution if one of us fails to adhere to the contract.
If I fail to adhere to the contract, the DRO will pay you for your relevant losses and then will come after me to pay restitution or would have me pay you directly.
If I refuse to, if I welch on the contract, break the contract and refuse to pay any restitution, then DROs will raise the price for me to do my next contract.
Like if you take up smoking, your insurance rates go up.
If I end up welching on my contracts, it becomes that much more expensive to enforce my contracts.
And thus the price of me having contracts goes up.
And of course, contracts are necessary for just about everything you do in a modern economic society.
I mean, and if I piss off every DRO on the planet and nobody wants to do business with me or raise my rates so high that it becomes impractical, which wouldn't actually be that high to begin with, then I just can't patrify.
Until I make good, until I provide restitution to the people whose costs I've incurred by watching on my contracts, I simply can't participate.
I can't rent a room. I can't buy groceries.
I can't have a bank account.
I can't use an ATM. I just can't participate until I deal with this all nonviolent ways of dealing with things like...
Contract enforcement. Property crime.
Again, this is a total massive sprint through.
There's lots to this and you can listen to the first podcast or look at freedomain.blogspot.com starting from the bottom up for more on this in terms of how it could handle things like pollution controls and so on.
So if I contract with a DRO for property protection, if I'm robbed, well, the DRO is going to pay me restitution.
He's going to give me back the computer that was robbed.
I'll pay for it. If the DRO can identify the criminal, it's going to require him to pay restitution instead.
If he doesn't, then DROs are going to share names with other DROs.
This already happens with insurance companies.
And these other DROs will refuse to enforce his contracts until he makes good on that which he stole.
So he can't buy groceries, can't use a bank, can't get on a bus, can't take a cab.
He's just going to find himself increasingly hampered in his participation in civil society.
And people say, well, yes, but what if he decides to go off the grid as far as the DRO system goes?
Well, of course people can do that.
It's still very hard to function.
But people can do that in a state of society anyway.
Nobody can catch you if you go off the grid, fundamentally.
So, you know, a DRO system's not perfect, but it's a vast improvement over what we already have.
And if the guy's broke, he can pay off the restitution through garnished wages or whatever.
So, violent crime.
So, I could, and probably would, sign with my DRO.
Maybe a variety of them, or maybe a one-stop shop.
Restitution for rape, assault, and so on.
And they won't punish self-defense, so if I am getting attacked and I defend myself, they won't sanction me.
So if a man is assaulted, his DRO pays him.
Restitution then pursues his assaulter to recover the costs.
Either the assaulter pays the costs or is driven out of the society through ostracism.
There are tons of historical examples of this, just in case you're interested.
And anyone who deals with the criminal is going to face sanctions from the DRO system as a whole.
So this can be a really closed-ranks kind of situation.
Everybody's going to rely at least for some period of time in their life.
Maybe after 20 years, the DRO just, you know, you can do that with insurance companies, right?
After you've paid for a certain amount, you're just insured for free because you paid off the costs of your whole lifetime.
Same thing with DROs. After you've been in the DRO system for maybe 15 years or whatever, everything else is just free because obviously you're not going to do that just to shaft someone in some contract down the road.
But if you are unproductive for people to do business with, DRO is going to kind of close ranks and make sure that you're not around.
That having been said, if someone can make money out of enforcing your contracts, that person will find a way to do it.
So it's not a totally closed-ranked monopolistic system, but if people can't find a way to make money out of enforcing your contracts, they just won't, in which case you're going to be enormously crippled in any kind of economic life.
And all of this... It's achieved through ostracism, through the sharing of information, through non-contracting with people.
It's totally non-violent.
Again, I'm not saying this is going to be convincing to anyone who's totally against the theory, but it's just a possibility of how it could work.
As far as collective defense goes, well, collective defense costs very little in a free society.
It's a basic fact of history that no nuclear-armed country has ever been invaded because the retaliatory possibilities are just too big.
It only takes a few dozen nuclear warheads to deter invasion of any particular geographical region.
Cost of defending that, a couple of nukes, a couple of bucks a year, maybe.
So that's just not a big enough issue or cost or price that that would be a barrier to collective defense.
So when you put these ideas forward, what happens is these endless objections come up.
Well, what if a DRO grows to become a government, gets rid of all other DROs, or a DRO just picks someone to badmouth?
Or what if the DROs themselves don't follow their own contracts?
And of course, there's endless checks and balances that are invented by the free market.
So I'm not going to go into those objections here because we all know them, we've all thought of them, and so on.
However, let's go even further and try and cripple this theory as much as humanly possible.
And if we can find an example where it works even though it's crippled, then we know that it works in a free society even better.
So if we can find an example of an anarchic theory working well in practice despite every conceivable obstacle we could throw in its path, the practicality of anarchism is proven.
So... Let's say that I put forward this proposed anarchic DRO system, and you could call this any number of names, just the one that I happen to use.
Now I say, okay, well, I want to get rid of the government, and I want a DRO system, but no contract can ever be written down.
No contract can ever be enforced in any legal or coercive or ostracism manner whatsoever.
No information can ever be shared at all.
And a super DRO monopoly already exists and it's going to kidnap and imprison anyone found to be participating in any of these super secret, quote, non-contracts.
And hundreds of thousands of people are constantly sniffing around and will be well paid for revealing these secret non-contracts.
That is about the most absurd and ludicrous hobbling of any kind of anarchic, voluntaristic theory of contract enforcement and so on.
If I put that forward, do you think it would work?
Do you think that this system, you can't write down contracts, you can't enforce them, you can't share information, and you get thrown in jail for even coming up with these contracts, and tons of people are constantly sniffing around and will be highly paid for finding these secret non-contracts.
Do you think that would work?
If you say no, then you're totally wrong.
Sorry, not my fault.
But if you say, well, no, DRO systems, even in a free society, are hard to believe that a DRO system like the one you just described would never work well, you're actually completely incorrect.
This system that I just described, you can't talk about contracts, you can't enforce them, it's all handshake deals and it's all hidden and it's all under the table and people are sniffing around to try and find them all the time.
Well, this system, shockingly, works almost perfectly.
This system... It's all around you.
The system works all over the world.
The system has worked for thousands of years in hundreds of countries.
What, you ask me, what system is this?
What, red pill, am I offering you, perhaps not even orally?
The anarchic system that you live in.
This system is hard to see.
Well, at least it was for me, because it is so well camouflaged.
This anarchic system is the state itself.
Indeed. Well, the thesis.
The state, the state, the state, the government, is the best conceivable example of a functional anarchic system, because it functions almost entirely on the spontaneous enforcement of rules without central coercion, without using violence.
The process.
Special interest groups give money to political candidates in return for political favors after the election.
These, quote, contracts can never be written down, are completely non-enforceable, are illegal, can never be discussed openly, and are a real scoop for the media if the media discovers them, and function almost flawlessly all over the world and all throughout history.
A state of anarchy.
Democratic governments function on anarchic principles.
That's why it's so hard to see, at least it was for me.
These, quote, contracts that can never be written down, never be enforced, never be discussed, are punished by imprisonment, and are lucrative to expose, function almost perfectly.
The state runs on, quote, contracts that can never be enforced by the state, and are in fact violently opposed by the state.
Thus the government, the state itself, is the best example of a perfectly functional state of anarchy.
The proof.
Remember we said, if anarchic principles can work under the most adverse, conceivable conditions, then anarchic principles will work almost infinitely better under the least adverse conditions.
If a man can lift 100 pounds, we know for certain that he can lift 5 pounds.
If anarchy can work in the state, if the state functions because anarchy works, then we know for certain that anarchy can work without the state, and far better, too.
The example we gave of crippled anarchy, the existing state system, is the man lifting 500 pounds.
We get rid of the state, it's that much better.
You can openly discuss these contracts.
You can publish them. They're objective.
They're enforceable through overt means.
Nobody cares if they're discovered because they're open and they're public and they're not illegal.
This is a trippy idea.
You might want to watch this again.
At least it was for me.
This is, if this is the proof, I think it is the proof, then this is all that we need to make the case because we are already embedded in a perfectly functioning though highly crippled anarchic system and if we remove the crippling nature and aspect of secrecy Subterraneanness, handshakes, non-enforceability.
Things will only function almost infinitely or enormously better.
Thank you so much for watching.
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