It finally happened.
My dad asked me about anarchism!
First, some context: My dad is pretty damn cool. When I first started making videos, before I had my own tripod and microphone, he enthusiastically let me borrow his for weeks at a time. When I made my Obama blowtorch video, my laptop was too old to run Adobe Premiere so I edited the footage on his computer. When I showed him the rough cut before I released it, he seemed a little freaked out (I was talking about being on government watch lists and lighting a symbol of the president on fire), but he supported me all the same. He kept checking the view count as the video went viral.
He shares my videos and articles with his baby boomer friends, some of whom think my content is great great and some of whom end conclude he raised a dangerous, disrespectful, loud-mouthed miscreant. He doesn’t care, he loves me and is proud of me all the same.
Mr. Wedler refused to go to Vietnam when he was drafted in the late 1960s, and he’s often told me over the years that he’s never put much faith in the political system. In 2012, though, he let me register him as a Republican so he could vote for Ron Paul in the California primary.
That being said, he’s still of a completely different generation. For example, he still plays tv news, MSNBC in particular (to his credit, he never disagrees with me when I either call out the B.S. or suggest we turn it off because it’s trash). He still thinks it’s probably a good idea to ticket people to discourage unsafe traffic behavior.
But a few weeks ago, while we were driving to hike out here in Los Angeles (it’s one of our dad-daughter things), he turned down the music in his car to ask me out of nowhere:
“What is anarchy?”
I’ve spent a lot of time talking with my dad about how immoral, violent, and exploitative the government is, and I often use anarchist phrases (like “monopoly on violence” and “non-aggression”), but I don’t often use the actual word. I try not to scare him all the way to the edge, at least not all the time.
But this was interesting. When I asked him first and foremost why he was asking now, he told me he realized the term is often thrown around but that he has never been quite sure what it means. He spent the morning Googling it.
Awww, Dad!
So I started with what I see as the basics, explicitly breaking down the moral double standard government enjoys. Where it’s wrong for us lowly peasants to kill — and we’ll most certainly be punished for it — government agents get a free pass. Not only that, they’re often glorified for such murder. “Right, exactly,” he lightly scoffed. Okay, we were getting somewhere.
Where it’s wrong for us to steal, it’s their right to “tax” us. This one hit home for both of us because my dad is a small business owner. The California government does absolutely nothing to facilitate his prosperity, yet multiple times a year he’s forced to pay them tithes for the right to operate and provide his products to customers who voluntarily choose to buy them. Between property taxes, income taxes, and other operating fees, this hurts his very small business. (Most recently, the city came knocking on his door to mandate that he purchase his own waste disposal bin and service rather than splitting the costs with his neighbor at his business complex. Much service, very represent!)
This all brought us right back to the monopoly on violence, through which he’d have his property stolen and would be locked in a cage if he opted not to pay the amounts the government insists he owes them. It would undoubtedly come to violence if he resisted.
Yep, he totally got all that.
Then it came to voting in the era of Donald Trump.
My dad’s lady friend, who was riding in the backseat, is a super sweet lady (she took the back because I get car sick) who volunteers her time helping animals and doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. But, like many kind, well-intentioned people, she thinks voting is still the greatest power we have to restrain the current president. I expressed my opinion that that’s exactly what got us in the situation we’re in. Bless her heart for asking questions and being curious, though.
I obviously had to whip out Lysander Spooner, conveniently opening up a recent Steemit article I wrote about the inherently combative nature of statism. From No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority:
“[The voter] sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he maybe become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defense, he attempts the former.”
My dad was so engrossed, he missed our exit, which gave us an extra few minutes to keep talking about Spooner and move on to decentralized, non-state solutions that are completely voluntary. If not statism, then what?
Cryptocurrency, alternative sources of energy, and growing your own food came up (like I said, my dad is cool; he watched Banking on Bitcoin with me and loved it, expressing his need and desire to watch it about three more times). We also discussed the fundamental reality that most human interactions are anarchist. His sales to his customers (minus the government taking a cut) are anarchist. Our conversation about anarchism was anarchist – no one was being forced to participate.
So we hiked out in Angeles National Forest, and during quiet moments I reflected on how grateful I was that my much older father was interested in understanding a philosophy that in many respects, he already agrees with.
Further still, I found myself grateful for and comforted by the fact that for generations, the principles and sentiments of anarchism have found their way into contemporary thought. At least one ancient Greek understood the danger of government, even if he wasn’t an an anarchist outright. Tacitus wrote that “the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
Henry David Thoreau, who was willing to go to jail for refusing to fund an immoral system, wrote even more explicitly in favor of no government in the 19th century:
“I heartily accept the motto,’That government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,’That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”
Mark Twain, who probably wasn’t a full-on anarchist but understood the threat of all-imposing government, wrote:
“The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivalry of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.”
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, “My political opinions lean more and more to anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs),” though he added that he also leaned toward ‘unconstitutional monarchy.’
But he went on:
“[T]he most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”
“I dislike all forms of government,” said a child in the 1957 film A King in New York (by Charlie Chaplin, an anarchist), going on to on to talk about, for example, the ridiculousness of needing the government’s permission to travel. “Politics are rules imposed upon the people.”
“In a free world they violate the natural rights of every citizen.”
In short, anarchism — or at the very least skepticism of the state — is consistent throughout history, and for good reason. As Nietzsche said, “A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’"
If philosophers and great minds across the span of history can recognize the state for what it is; if my dad — a baby boomer from Ohio raised by conservative Republican parents in an era of American exceptionalism — can open his mind to skepticism of the state and, ultimately, anarchism; and if I, a former hardcore liberal who unironically once posted “I’ve got a crush on Obama on Facebook” can arrive at the same peaceful philosophy, there is hope for us yet.
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