Anarchism

I used to be a liberal. I believed that society was perfectible, that the problem with the US government was that it spent too much money on guns and not enough on butter.

My political views have changed quite a bit since then, and have become much more anarchistic. This term tends to throw people off, however. They tend to think this means either "bring it all down, man!!!" or equate it with some form of libertarianism.

So, here's my stab at defining these political viewpoints.

Liberal

I define a liberal as someone who believes that, given enough resources and attention, most problems can be made better ... primarily through new or improved programs created by governments or nonprofits.

I'll repeat a Daniel Quinn quote used in a previous posting, I think it helps to make this point:

“Programs make it possible to look busy and purposeful while failing. If programs actually did the things people expect them to do, then human society would be heaven: our governments would work, our schools would work, our law enforcement would work, our penal systems would work, and so on. When programs fail (as they inevitably do), this is blamed on things like poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training. When programs fail, look for them to be replaced by new ones with improved design, increased funding and staff, superior management, and better training. When these new programs fail (as they invariably do), this is blamed on poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training.
This is why we spend more and more on our failures every year. Most people accept this willingly enough, because they know they’re getting more every year: bigger budgets, more laws, more police, more prisons — more of everything that didn’t work last year or the year before that or the year before that.” (Quinn. Beyond Civilization.)

Liberalism is an ideology that makes sense if you believe that bureaucracy is capable of deep and lasting reform.

Anarchist

Anarchism is an ideology that has very little traction in academia, particularly in political science. It is dismissed as the unenlightened stepchild of communism or socialism, or as an impractical utopian ideal.

I would argue, however, that anarchism has its roots in traditional methods of human social organization. It is a political viewpoint that respects natural law (defined here as the way the natural world organizes and sustains itself), time-tested methods of human social organization, and looks with skepticism on young upstart ideologies which are intent on transforming the world for the short-term benefit of human bureaucracies and economies.

That being said ... anarchism is difficult to define because it is not a very uniform ideology. In the context of modern society, however, most anarchists believe that increasing the scope and scale of human bureaucracies misses something essential about human society and natural law. At some point, these programs can become iatrogenic and do more harm than good.

The typical life cycle of a program or bureaucracy is as follows:

1. A problem is identified (for example: preventative health care in retirement homes), a small and limited program is created to solve it, and this program seems to work well. The net benefit is large.

2. The program is expanded. (After all, it worked so well in the small-scale or pilot program!)

3. Procedures which worked well in a small program are found to be flawed in a larger program. Loopholes are found, the program is abused by some people. The program is found to be lacking formal criteria to evaluate who it helps and the manner of help offered to them. To remedy this, case workers are given strict criteria on how to manage the needs of their clients. A bureaucracy is created to manage these new rules and mandates.

4. The program's managers and employees get used to their jobs, they like having a steady paycheck. There may be a few doubts ("We could help people so much more effectively in the old days, before we had all these managers and rules"), but most members of the program believe they are doing good by helping people. The program becomes an established part of the bureaucracy.

5. A new manager comes in, she intends to work there for 2 years ... then move up the ladder. In order to maintain this 2-year promotion cycle, she needs to pad her resume with a new initiative or program. She finds willing ears in the nursing staff when she talks about the need to expand the current program to reach more people -- rural retirement homes are being underserved. This means more jobs for nurses, perhaps even overtime.

6. Wouldn't you know it? Once the program is expanded, the nurses identify several other unmet needs in the rural retirement home population. The program expands to cover nutrition and psychological counseling.

7. The government has a budget crisis. 10% of the case workers are laid off, and one more middle manager is added to manage their caseloads (to maximize efficiency). The elderly population the program is serving is given less individual attention.

8. This same process, steps 5-8, occur half a dozen more times.

9. What was once a small, adaptive program that offered individual attention to retired people has now become a large, complex bureaucracy that does an awful lot of paper shuffling. The program absolutely improves the lives of some people. However, it also tends to push prescription medication (the costs are covered by a Federal program) and reinforces the idea that retired people are simply clients to be served.

10. The program has come to help people, yes, but it has also come to replace human social institutions which used to serve in its place ... such as families taking in their grandmothers and great uncles, where they are kept active by the bustle of life taking place around them.

Bureaucracies require complex rules and procedures to manage these programs, and the end result is that we become reliant on these technologies (see Marshall McLuhan) which causes our own internal aptitudes to atrophy.

An anarchist does not necessarily argue that this sort of a program is wrong, or bad on the face of it. An anarchist questions whether the establishment of another layer of complex bureaucracy is really the best way to help older people be more healthy and happy.

An anarchist is not opposed to programs and bureaucracy as a tautology, but as a practical matter believes that their scope should always be limited ... and that these programs should work with, rather than against, the natural processes that are already in place. Anarchists would never tolerate a bureaucracy that displaces older people from their communities, places them into holding rooms (called retirement communities by people with no sense of irony), then introduces new programs to help these older people cope with their disconnection from anything of consequence in the outside world.

An anarchist is much less hesitant to end a program or hobble a bureaucracy if they believe that it is causing harm. The reason is not that they hate government, but because they do not believe that these complex social institutions are capable of deep and lasting change. For example -- the aforementioned a retirement home is highly unlikely to transform into a thriving center of the community, a place that young and old alike come to in order to form connections with other human beings. The retirement home is far more likely to institute a 'community outreach program', make a lot of noise about it for 6 months, then quietly drop the program in 12-18 months.

In the case of the fictional program described above, an anarchist response might be to simply end the program and seed the money out directly into the community (let the locals figure out the best way to help retired people). Other anarchists might simply want to end the program and allow the natural societal processes the program replaced to re-emerge. Still another response might be to fire 75% of the managers, shred 90% of the program's governing rules, and let the case workers use their own discretion to a much larger extent than they've been allowed to. Another anarchist solution might be to fire *all* of the managers, put the retired people themselves in charge, and allow them to define what sorts of things the case workers should actually be doing to improve their lives.

Libertarian

While there is some overlap between anarchism and libertarianism, there are also significant differences on their views on property, power and human nature.

Libertarians want government to get out of the way so that individuals can do whatever they want. They don't seem concerned with what individuals will do with this power, just so long as the government isn't involved.

Anarchists want all private and public sources of authority to get out of the way whenever they infringe unduly on natural social or environmental processes. They are deeply concerned with the concentration and application of power, and seek to limit its scope whenever it is practical.