All The Tails in a Fairy Tale: A Polemic Against Anarchism
In this polemic, Roberts wants to make a few things clear about his view of anarchism, the first of these declarative: he is not an anarchist.
I am not an anarchist. Nor do I particularly like them. A famous doctor once said that idiots are fun, and it was no wonder that every village had one. And what ideology, truly, occupies a space in every political circus other than anarchism? You have the anarchist capitalists, the anarchist anti-capitalist. You have Christian anarchists and atheist anarchists. Libertarians, socialists, conservatives, and fascists all, at one point take up this name. Every political village has an idiot, and I call them anarchists.
I could try to mount a philosophical critique of anarchism. Like an old movie, it would be comfortable and I would feel good about it. But like all cinematic kishmet, it will lead you nowhere. Not to mention that, given the many factions, ideas, philosophies, and slogans that anarchists have, to go after them on that level is futile; you end up playing whack-a-mole with definitions, authors, and merchandise producers, chasing and trying to disprove every form of anarchism that is created. Mencken once wrote that liberals have many tails and chase them all; anarchists have many tails, but they are fairy tales. And yes, they chase them all.
Another reason, of course, is that a number of the writers at my Writer's Table are anarchists. Jean Paul Sartre, Oscar Wilde, Emma Goldman and Robert Heinlein were all declared anarchists. Dorothy Parker, the wit of my life, and H.L. Mencken both protested the deportation of anarchists from the U.S., while not being anarchists themselves. And that is not to mention that anarchists will appropriate any thinker that deem able to fit into their shifting paradigms. Even writers who snubbed the anarchists, like Gore Vidal, Aldous Huxley, or Friedrich Nietzsche, are eventually appropriated by them in one fashion or another. Most likely because the average anarchist treats politics as a fashion than anything else.
But just because I like an anarchist does not mean, of course, that I have to like anarchism itself. I like Vidal, who was a populist, but I dislike populism. I like Huxley, who was a communitarian, but I am skeptical of communitarians. I like H.L. Mencken, who was a Tory, but I am not given to conservatism, on this side of the pond or the other. It turns out that ideology has little relation to how good or bad a particular idea is; ideology, after all, a mere confusion of language, and an idea is a thought realized by language. Ideologies, as far as ideas are concerned, are inane ac vacuum.
But all that said, I wish to approach anarchism from eye-level. From the place of an observer, of a human being. What I see of anarchism, on the ground here, is that anarchism is almost solely focused on some concept of power. It becomes rabid when power is mentioned; the foam in its mouth bubble-pops the phrase 'power relations'. To the anarchist, the power relations of the day are not just wrong, they are evil; to demand power or to have power immediately puts you on the side of the Devil.
But upon this meeting with the Devil, anarchists tend to split in two; some are phobic to power, and some clamor for it. To some, power is evil through and through, and they will gasp and growl about it, but like a kid obsessed with cooties, they will avoid it at all costs. Sometimes this comes as a form of delusion: power becomes a form of propaganda that shields people away from how unimpressive power is. They hurt us because we let them, they say. The power of love will overcome the use of police. If we chant in the street--and nothing more--things will change by magic. But only so long as you don't get cooties.
The other anarchists see in power a chance for regime change. To them, the powers-that-be are built by bad people. You often read them ranting on Twitter or Facebook about the 'psychopaths' who built our system, chalking up any success in society to either being or internalizing psychopathic traits. To them, power doesn't corrupt people as much as people corrupt power. And, as every fairy tale goes, that particular anarchist is always on the side of the angels. If given power, they would never do what the people in power now do. How could they? They believe in their own morality with a conviction whose power puts hurricanes to shame. And their solution mirrors these hurricanes; they think tearing everything down is the solution. And who will put it back together? Why, the representative of the angels, of course.
But, at the very, very, very bottom of this--in most versions that anarchism takes--there is a belief in the human being as a gutmensch at their essence. There is an idea that a person is good and strives for goodness or that people are good but being in society makes them bad. There is a moralism at the bottom that justifies the position of anarchism to spurn power, either as hypochondriacs or as opportunists. Psychopaths are just warped care bears and the fascist opposing them merely needs to be extradited from the source of power so they might get better. At the bottom, anarchists tend to make wonderful missionaries, bearing the conviction that every person can be converted, either by logos that is freedom or by the logo of anarchy that is meant to scare them away from the power that corrupts all but the good. And the fact this might contradict something else they said…well, freedom, am I right?
I am not an anarchist. And I enjoy mocking the anarchists. There are some, of course, I like more than others; existentialist anarchists will always have my sympathetic ear, and will not join the other anarchists as I toss them over the edge of a ship into the Atlantic. And I never, really, feel the need to try to 'stop' the anarchist; even I find the village idiot funny, and I exist to remind you not to give them a torch or a pair of scissors. With the former, they would hurt us, and with the latter they would hurt themselves. But giving them tin foil for their hats or buttons for their clothes is fine. Throw in a wig, if you want. Maybe even a red squeaking nose, along with some red shoes…
Some fall in love with anarchists for their idealism. And they're right to recognize their idealism. But, like Stanley Kubrick, I pity the idealist the way I would the village idiot. Because, in this case, they are one and the same.
as a self-proclaimed anarchist, I approve this message. may your care bears remain unwarped!