That's what got my gander up previously.
Hated to think that my chosen ideology could ever evolve to anarchy and mayhem, just because I want to see limits placed on governmental power over the individual.
It can't be just east and west. The 4 corners looks more realistic to me.
I was really busy last night and this morning, but your post kept running around in my head.
Basically, it reminded me of how a nice, hard-working, upstanding family would be horrified at the idea that one of their own would be a terrorist, a child molester, or a liberal, thinking that this individual's membership in the gene pool would forever taint the family's reputation.
That of course would be untrue. Just as untrue as thinking that the fact that anarchy exists at "our" end of the political governance spectrum in any way defines us.
What it does illustrate very clearly, is the dangers of extremism of any form.
It also exposes the paradox of conservatism. We all instinctively and intellectually understand that the greatest enemy of freedom is government, with the possible exception of the lack of it.
We are today trained to read the word "anarchy" to mean mayhem and violence. Yet, even as we watch governments perpetrate mayhem and violence on people, we don't call that anarchy.
Why is that the case?
Why is it easy to assign scary unknown bad things to something that we don't know, but sort of ignoring the scary bad things hat which we know does pretty consistently?
It's difficult to discuss anarchy because of today's understanding of the theory. As difficult as it was to discuss atheism in the Middle Ages. Then people never wondered whether or not God existed, or at least not out loud out of fear of prosecution for heresy. They just assumed that the existence of God was self-evident. Many people still do. Today, the vast majority of people never ask themselves if government is necessary, they just assume that the necessity is self-evident. They're wrong, but only because mankind has not evolved to a point where we don't require governments to protect us from other members of our species.
In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth, and He populated it with birds and fish and all manners of beasts, and Eden was an anarchist's Paradise. Them He created Man, and with His creation came the very first, and very limited, form of government.
A government with but one rule.
"Don't eat that."
Government (like religion) has grown quite a bit since then.
If you can imagine a world with no rules and where there is no government and that moment when people decided to band together to enact laws and collectively exercise their natural rights to defend their person, their liberty and their property, you have just envisioned the first move to the left of theoretical "Eden" anarchism:
Some government <------ no government.
As we continue to move away from anarchy and toward a safer and better organized society, government grows exponentially, and we move further to the left.
At one point in time however, this government that was created began to use the law to destroy the law's own purpose, and the collective force created for the purpose of safeguarding our natural rights began to be used in direct opposition to its purposes> Laws and the collective force are used to exploit the person, property and liberty of the very people they're supposed to protect. Lawful defense has been made illegal in order to punish lawful defense, and plunder has been converted into a right, in order to protect plunder.
So now, conservatives and libertarians try pushing government back to the right, and those to the left of that middle line, evoke the boogeyman of anarchy's chaos and tumult to drill into us that without government, the things that government do to us now, will be done by others, in much larger scale.
Hard to imagine that.
Anarchism, like Communism, is a concept that exist in a theoretical world where humans are perfect, By the sane token, anarchists and Communists CAN exist today because the flawed society and governments that we mere humans have managed to duct tape together, protect them from the flaws of their inoperable governing concepts.
And here we are, trying to just find the perfect spot on that little line. A perfect spot nestled somewhere between losing all freedom and losing all freedom.
H/T Bastiat
