Is Anarchism Impossible?

It is a common criticism lobbed against anarchists that the idea may be pleasant but is, of course, unworkable in the real world. Notice that they always say "of course" — it saves them the work of having to justify their out-of-hand rejection.

Now, Mormons — like any Christians — are used to people telling us that things we believe in fervently are, of course, impossible in the real world. We believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, that he was crucified to expiate the sins of all mankind, and that on the third day after his crucifixion he rose from the dead to live forever. As Mormons, we believe that the resurrected Lord appeared to Joseph Smith on multiple occasions beginning and 1820 and continuing throughout Joseph's life to instruct him as he had instructed Paul so many centuries before. We believe that a prophet who lived 1600 years ago somewhere on the American continent came to Joseph Smith as an angel and told him of a sacred record written on golden plates that he had buried while he was alive. We believe that after Joseph Smith acquired this record, which was written in a language that seems to have been completely unknown by any but its writers, he was able to translate the record into English by the power of God. Every one of these claims is the sort of thing that most people reject as impossible in the real world. But as Christians, we know that "With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible" (Matthew 19:26).

As a result, the simple claim of impossibility is insufficient to make us, as people of faith, reject a notion we believe to be based on true principles. Nevertheless, the claim of anarchy's impossibility deserves some answer for the sake of those who lack faith in Jesus Christ's statement that "all things are possible."

The basic ideas of anarchy are simple. Everyone must be free to make his own choices. Everyone must be free to spend his time as he chooses. Everyone must have full control over what he does with his time and what he makes with his time. An extension of that last concept is the idea that everyone should receive, as a reward for his own labor, neither more nor less than the full product of that labor. The only proper restriction on one man's freedom is the freedom of his fellowmen. All of these concepts are readily understandable and even observable by most people.

The only difficulty occurs when we consider the possibility that a minority of people will want to abuse the weaker among their fellowmen for their own gain or pleasure. This criminal tendency is seen as inevitable by anarchism's detractors, and the only solution they see for it is the establishment of a body which will have the sole legal right to exert legitimate force — that is, the establishment of a state. I question both those views.

First, I do not believe that criminal tendencies are as inevitable as we think they are. The Lord has said, "I, the Lord God, make you free, therefore ye are free indeed; and the law also maketh you free. Nevertheless, when the wicked rule the people mourn" (D&C 98:8–9). Notice what he's saying there. He makes us free. The law (i.e., his commandments) makes us free. But when the wicked rule, the people are not free.

The example of King Noah from Mosiah 11 in the Book of Mormon shows us how the people lose their general God-given freedom. The example of wickedness set by wicked rulers encourages the people to become wicked as well. Now the wickedness mentioned in D&C 98 is contrasted with freedom: it is almost certainly the opposite of that freedom, the criminal tendency toward controlling other people for your own gain or pleasure. When rulers with that mindset rise up, they propagate that mindset throughout the nation.

I believe that one of the primary reasons the criminal tendency to control others is so prevalent in our society is because we have established so many systems of control. How can a child learn he is free if he is controlled by his mother? How can a woman treat her children with freedom if she is controlled by her husband? How can a man respect the freedom of his wife and children if he is controlled by his employer? How can an employer respect the freedom of the laborers if he is controlled by a state? It can be done — with God all things are possible. But when we establish so many complex systems of control and exploitation, when we embed the principle of controlling one another instead of cooperating with one another into our society at a structural level, we certainly make it difficult for people to learn to respect every one else's freedom.

If we dismantled all these systems of control by which men are held in bondage one to another, we would go a long way toward removing the examples of control and exploitation from people. It's easy for a criminal to feel justified in exploiting his victims of those same victims embrace their exploitation at the hands of their employers and their governments and even their so-called loved ones. If all those systems of bondage were gone, the criminal would truly be abnormal, in a much deeper sense than any criminal is abnormal today. That would cut down on a lot of crime. Not all crime, I think, but probably most. And what crime remained would not be enough to destroy society. It would be a nuisance, to be sure, but it would not dissolve society anymore than the far more common occurrence of unpunished crime under our current state system does.

Second, the solution to the amount of crime that would remain after government were abolished needn't involve any kind of monopoly of legitimate force (as though such a thing could exist). One solution to the problem is simply to ignore it. That seems to be the primary solution employed by our governments today, since only a minority of crimes lead to the criminal's punishment, and it seems to work reasonably well for society as a whole. With the lower crime rate that would occur if people had no need to break free from vertical control and no incentive to gain more wealth than their insufficient wages supply, unpunished crime would become even more manageable.

But other solutions exist as well. If it becomes known that a given person has behaved in a criminal manner and, in response, the members of the community decide to shun him, that person will have little enjoyment with the fruits of his crime. He might steal, but he'll never be able to spend what he stole. He might rape, but he'll never be able to enjoy a woman's free association with him again. He might defraud, but he'll never find a trusting neighbor again. Much of this will happen naturally — people don't like doing business with thieves; women don't like dating cads; boys who cry wolf end up getting eaten when no one comes to rescue them. The pain of gaining a reputation for harming people is often a powerful deterrent for potential criminals and a strong impetus toward repentance for those who debase themselves through crime.

Some crime will still remain, though, even after the removal of governmental example & incentive systems and the reinvigoration of reputation's sting. Some criminals will not care about reputation. Some will even seek infamy. But we don't need to create any monopoly of force to deal with them. If their activities become too unbearable to a free populace, a sufficient expression of free force will naturally occur. We think of this sort of thing as vigilantism, a societal impulse that naturally occurs when a state is either absent or too weak to suit the needs of the people. It works very well, and its expression of force is usually commensurate to the extent of criminality: murderers and rapists get hanged or shot, batterers get beaten, confidence men get ridden out of town on rails.

The only reasonable worry we might have about vigilantism is that the group of vigilantes might unduly restrict the freedom of individuals who, though not behaving criminally, are still considered offensive by the people of a community. There are two reasons, though, why that is an unlikely occurrence in an anarchistic society.

First, in an anarchy, vigilantism would not be carried out by organized groups, but by spontaneous actions of the people. Such spontaneous crowds are a lot less likely to form in response to any non-criminal behavior than in response to any criminal behavior. Consequently, the rate at which spontaneous vigilantism would occur to restrict the freedom of an individual to engage in non-criminal activity would be quite low — low enough that it could be ignored without tearing at the fabric of society.

Second, in an anarchy, the individual vigilantes would feel less motivation toward control than would individual vigilantes under the influence of systemic control and exploitation. Every individual would be less inclined to control people in a criminal manner if all the systems of control were removed. As a result, the vigilante impulse in the individuals who would participate in vigilantism would be far less urgent than it is for people who are accustomed to systemic control.

So crime, the primary argument for the creation of governments, can be dealt with by society without using force to combat it. Of course, some crime would occur in an anarchistic society. Anarchists aren't trying to convince people that crime would be done away with if we made the transition to anarchy. They're merely saying that fighting undue force and coercion with tools like force and coercion can lead to problems, particularly when force and coercion become embedded in the structure of the society. If we remove the force and coercion from the structure of our society, then crime will drop dramatically — probably to levels that can be absorbed by society without difficulty — and what little crime remains would be responded to without resorting to systematizing force and coercion through such natural impulses as shunning and vigilantism.