Should society be based on striving to be made on merit or equality? Does it matter? Are hierarchies a social construct? Do we all play by the same rules all the time?
This is a nail biter of a subject and I really do not like to resort to the left-right paradigm when trying to dig into hard concepts, because the lines are blurry and nobody gets along well when the lines are blurry. I, therefore, opt to only look on concepts here and let better people sort out the political directions; I am more interested in the ideas themselves than putting everything in different boxes with labels on them.
“Anarchy is Order Without Power,” Proudhon wrote in his classic ‘The Confessions of a Revolutionary’. That quote itself has haunted political discussion among groups of anarchic-interested individuals forever under the ever-returning phrase “not real anarchism, you are proposing a hierarchy, there is no hierarchy in anarchy,” whenever someone suggests private property rights of some form or voluntarily engage in production for someone else (the wage earner vs boss dynamic).
If we walk that logic to its final destination we will sooner or later end up next to the followers of the anarcho-primitivist school of thought: civilization itself is a hierarchy and if we want to abandon hierarchies altogether we should strive to abandon the societal structure that will produce it over and over again. If that is the goal, truly, we need to disband this current way of life and go back to the basic hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
“Why is that, Alex?”
Because we are different and if we are going to have this sort of society we currently have, we are sooner or later competing for resources, even on the most insignificant level. Even if we happened to build the perfect egalitarian little bubble world we would be competing for resources more than 0% of the time in some way. If I can walk somewhere faster than you by, let’s say, 30 minutes, I have earned 30 more minutes than you that I can use on non-walking activities.
No matter how much I wish to be as fast as Usain Bolt, having read as many books as Thomas Woods, or be as strong as Hafthor Bjornsson, I simply can’t. I can train and try to become as fast or strong as those three guys (okay, I think I’d arm wrestle the heck out of Mr. Woods), but I will fall short every time because of my body’s limit.
True equality, or the absence of power-structures (hierarchies), is simply not possible for natural reasons – I can’t possibly learn everything there is to learn in the world, my life length doesn’t allow for it. Even if I limited myself to just a few things I’d still be at the mercy of teachers (living or dead) to speed up the learning curve. The dynamic of student-teacher is a hierarchy, just as much as the wage earner vs the boss is.
Even among teachers (or bosses), there is a hierarchy – we’ve all had good and bad teachers, good and bad bosses. We know the difference by comparing them. We are ranking them internally. You cannot have order without some semblance of power, even if you tried. Would you, given the choice, settle for the worse teacher when you knew there was a better out there that you could get by walking down a street in one direction rather than the other?
Working toward true equality is a waste of time and we should embrace our differences as strengths instead. Anarchy as Order without Power would be nothing but frustration as it will never work in any sensible, satisfactory way. It will be a constant game of trying to equalize differences in humans. What you try and squash and equalize today is access to private property, tomorrow it might be the length of peoples femurs, the day after that it will be something else.
If we operate under the assumption that Anarchy has to mean Order without Power, nobody but the few who wants to smash civilization and gather berries in the woods has any form of claim to the title worth anything.
– ALEX UTOPIUM Scandinavian anti-establishment blogger, editor for the Utopium Blog. Counter-economics, agorist-separatism, and free market advocate.