Episode #194 ... Do we really need the police? - Anarchism pt. 3 - (Gelderloos, Security)
36:06 Share

Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Apologies for the episode not being out on Monday. I woke up with COVID Sunday morning. No complaints, just saying my voice might still be recovering from that. Heads up. Patreon.com slash philosophize this for an ad-free RSS of the show. Find it in your Patreon settings. Could never do this without you. For updates on new episodes, check out Instagram at philosophizethispodcast, all one word. Hope you love the show today.

So back in episode 188 of this podcast, we started talking about the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. He is a modern-day philosopher, South Korean-born, clearly one of the favorites we've covered on the show as of late for his overall pessimistic outlook that really doesn't feel too pessimistic because it still leaves room for all of his great loves in this world, his love of gardening, his love of working with his hands, his love of sitting at home on a quiet evening and just playing his piano, being a handsome gentleman. But the point of bringing him up here today

is that when we covered his philosophy in that episode, if you recall, he had a lot to say about the rise of narcissism in modern society. Narcissism was an important part of his analysis of what you see when you look out at the world and you pay attention to how a lot of people are acting these days.

He talked about how if you're just born into the world as it's set up today, how you can be otherwise a totally good person, no bad intentions, but just in practice, you spend very little time actually caring or trying to understand the lives of people around you who are truly different from you. It really is a modern sort of trap to fall into, he thinks. You're born, you're told you can be whatever you want to be in this world. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

And you're told that when you go throughout your day-to-day life, you've got to be as authentic of a person as you possibly can be all throughout that process. Don't worry too much about the haters if they try to get in your way. And with all this time people are saving, not worrying about the haters in the modern world, you know, those pesky other opinions out there, he says the natural thing to do for people is just to channel all that attention back to the only place people really have left to focus. They channel it all back into focusing on themselves.

This often turns for the average person into a hyper-focus on yourself, a heightened focus on your personal achievements and your career, a heightened focus on self-improvement of all kinds. What could be wrong with that, after all? In this world where you are obviously a personal brand and a personal product, why shouldn't you be always looking to increase your market value in the corporate world, in the dating world? You have to compete with all your fellow people.

On top of all that, you are a medical project to be optimized by doctors. You're a psychological project where there's always something to be improving. Self-growth, self-care, self-love. These are sacred concepts you can never really question. And you know, if there's anything that feels like it's missing from your life, if something feels off to you, in the modern world, it's probably that you're just not focusing on yourself enough. You don't love yourself enough.

You know, it couldn't be that you're too focused on yourself, that you lack any semblance of a meaningful connection with the community that you're participating in, with people you actually know, issues you actually care about that directly impact you, ideas from other people that are truly different from yours. It couldn't be that, could it? But then again, on the other hand, to be fair to the average person living today, what are you really supposed to do otherwise? You're a product of the world you're born into. It's not like the way the world's set up right now makes it easy to have these meaningful connections with the community.

Which is why a lot of the books that Byung-Chul Han has written over the years focus on how the things that bind and connect people together historically are slowly disappearing from the world. And how technology, with things like the digital panopticon, just seems to be amplifying the speed of us being socially isolated from each other. It's a grim picture, if you buy what Byung-Chul Han is saying. You know, Nietzsche famously declared at the end of the 19th century that God is dead.

And one of the key points he's making when he says that is that this clever invention of religion by human beings that historically has offered people a ready-made story that gives them an easy identity, a meaning to their life, a moral code to follow. Nietzsche says that with all the advances in the sciences that are going on, again, just given the world as it's set up for the average person being born into it, it's not impossible for someone to find a way to believe in a religion.

But for a thinking person, it becomes a much more difficult thing than it used to be. And he predicts this will lead to a severe crisis in those areas that religion used to provide for people, identity, meaning, moral confusion, etc. Well, in a similar sort of way, could we say that what Byung-Chul Han is saying is not God is dead, but something more along the lines of community is dead and we have killed it? Has it become just difficult for someone to simply find a community to be able to participate in?

Is that why we create these little narcissistic communities of one with ourselves?

You know, at the end of reading Byung-Chul Han, if you were expecting some sort of solution from him for how we're going to alter the society people are raised in, you know, change their values, when you're told by him to just live the contemplative life and go work with your hands in your garden, go plant some zucchinis, go sit and think really, really hard about the perspective of the other, there's a sense in which, yeah, that's fine if it's just me. But how does that in any way get us closer to escaping this digital panopticon as a society?

Well, here's anarchism and this series coming along and saying, hey, Han, I see the problems you're talking about in the world. And in my opinion, the majority of this is only going to be solved by fundamentally changing the way that human beings relate to each other into something that doesn't involve forced hierarchical authority.

That that's the way this stuff actually gets better. That just like Bookchin talked about last episode, how when it comes to the environment, you can try to treat just the symptoms of what's going on. You can pick up some trash, you can ban plastic packaging, but it does nothing to solve the fundamental social issues that caused those problems in the first place. Just like that, you can talk about the symptoms of the way that society is currently set up. You can talk about mental illness. You can talk about addiction. You can talk about a lack of focus on the family unit or community.

You can talk about poverty and racism and gun violence, but as it's been said before, and not just by anarchists, if you really wanted to fix these problems, if you really wanted to fix gun violence, for instance, you've got to eventually ask the deeper question of why do we have a society where so many people want to kill each other in the first place? What is it about the way that things are currently set up that seems to reliably lead to abuse of so many different types?

Well, it's a funny thing about abuse. You don't typically have an ongoing abusive relationship with someone who sees you as an equal. No, when parents abuse their kids, it's because they think at some level that children are inferior to adults. You are to be seen and not heard if you're a child. You speak up, you're going to get smacked.

When people abuse their spouses, domestic violence, or abuse of an ethnic group, or against a particular sexual orientation, these things happen because these people are seen by the abuser as less than them. In other words, to an anarchist, it's all centered around this deeply embedded notion of hierarchy that people commonly use to understand their reality.

But maybe if society was organized differently, it would produce people with different values. And maybe if we had more people with different values, we'd see less of the type of behavior that makes people so pessimistic about the future. Point is, we have to be able to imagine a different way that the world might be organized in the future. And maybe anarchism is the way that's going to get us there.

Now, for every one of these people on the anarchist side of things who would say something like that, there are more people on the other side that are skeptical of this whole grand strategy of theirs. Because from another perspective that's pretty common today, removing forced hierarchical authority, you know, totally restructuring the way we organize everything, that just sounds incredibly naive. I mean, among other things, it is a complete denial of so many of the problems that always arise when you're trying to organize large numbers of people, even in the best of circumstances.

A person on this side of the argument would say, how about one of the most obvious examples of that, what we know to be true about human nature? They might say, are you really, as an anarchist, going to sit there in your little anarchist PTA meetings and deny the fact that this whole experiment we're running here called civilization is not a guarantee? There is a thin veil of civility that lies between people getting along great on one day and chaos on the next day.

As we've seen, when government systems have collapsed in the past, it is just human nature to be selfish and greedy, independent, violent if we have to be. How can you not expect that exact same thing to happen en masse once this anarchist society of yours is put in place and there's no central authority to hold people accountable? There are actually serious anarchists out there who are saying that society would be better off as a whole if we didn't have things like the police.

And just by saying that to a person on this side of the argument, you instantly show your hand to someone who's never actually lived in a bad neighborhood. You've never actually witnessed firsthand the evil that people are capable of, even when they're not desperate. You know, it's not a coincidence that you probably grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, had the luxury of going to some liberal arts college and learn about all these ideas. No, you just sit there on the internet with your totally privileged view on how much we can sweet-talk this primal nature of people away.

But what do you do when bad people with bad intentions show up on your doorstep and there's no one to call to come save you? That's the reality of the world.

Now an anarchist might hear this, stand up, start to clap very slowly, and say, uh, hey, congratulations. You, my skeptical friend, have officially achieved the highest level of brainwashing that's possible by the state to make you think that the people around you are all psychopaths and that you're hopeless without the state being there all the time to keep you safe. You've been promoted. You are now a lieutenant colonel in the army of morons. Congratulations. Congratulations.

Because there are anarchists out there like Peter Gelderlus. He's the author of a great book called Anarchy Works, where the goal of the book is twofold. It's one, designed to answer some common questions about how an anarchist society could ever work in practice. And two, it gives dozens of examples throughout history of moments where, as he puts it, people have in different ways at different times demonstrated mutual aid, self-organization, autonomy, and horizontal decision-making, whether they called themselves anarchists or not.

And to the skeptic who thinks the world couldn't possibly function without some sort of central police force in place to find and punish all the criminals, he might start by saying that first of all, let's just take a closer look at what's going on in the modern world and understand what it is that the police are actually doing.

Let's try to answer that. What do the police do? Well, in one sense, there's a very simple answer to that question. Obviously, police enforce the laws. But what are laws? Laws are just rules about your behavior handed down by people in positions of central authority. You don't follow these rules. You've now committed a crime. You commit a crime. Now you're a criminal. And criminals are locked inside of a concrete cell so we can keep people safe from them.

And that sounds great on paper, until you consider the fact that once you put laws on paper, they become codified into something that can be enforced based on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. In other words, to Peter Gelderloos,

It often doesn't even matter if anyone's currently getting hurt by someone's behavior. The police always have this list of predetermined, codified reasons to enforce social order, even when it's not necessary. To see this in your own life, just think about what it's like to drive down the road, if you're someone who drives. When you're driving down the road, and you look into your rearview mirror, and there's a cop behind you,

Is there any part of you that feels safe, you know, thankful that the cop is there? Like, oh, thank God Officer Friendly's here to patrol the streets. He really is keeping the world safe for me. No, the first thing you think is, oh my God, am I doing anything wrong? What am I doing wrong? Uh, I'm gonna put my hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. I'm gonna signal 800 feet before my turn. I'm gonna be a good little boy. So this cop doesn't just pull me over and take their day out on me.

Now is that a reaction you have to an institution in society that's just keeping everybody safe? Just responding to the needs of the public? Or is that your reaction to a situation where there's policing going on that's clearly enforcement for enforcement's sake? But why would the police ever do that if their job is just to protect and serve people? It doesn't make any sense.

Well, it doesn't make sense from that perspective, but it starts to make perfect sense if you remember from episode one of this series, that an anarchist is not thinking about the state or any central authority as though it's some ethereal concept like the will of the people or to protect and serve. A central authority like the police, these are just people, people who are given positions of power where it's their responsibility to constantly justify that power. The

The way you gotta think about it, as Peter Gelderlus puts it, is that quote, "The state is a mafia that's won control over society, and the law is the codification of everything they've stolen from us." End quote. The law is a way to codify and legitimize the control that the state has over individuals. So yes, the police enforce the laws, but consider the fact that laws are disproportionately applied to certain communities rather than others.

Consider the fact that specific laws have been put on the books over the years just to allow for police to enforce the law more in certain lower-income areas.

Consider the us versus them dynamic that often emerges from this kind of setup. Could it be that the presence of the police in this disproportionate way just preserves our social inequalities, makes it so we don't have to know our neighbors? Could it be that it just spreads more fear and resentment amongst people or even alienates entire communities? Do the police, in practice, just strengthen social division? To Peter Gelderlus, the police do not exist because crime is rampant and that the world would be pandemonium in the streets without them.

He says police often get a lot of hype in the media and movies as being these superheroes, but through no fault of their own, the real reason the police are here, the reality of it, is that they are a tactical arm of the state to be able to maintain the state's monopoly on violence and conflict resolution. The state doesn't want anybody other than them able to do either of those two things.

The fact is, within self-governing communities of people who know each other, it is entirely possible to resolve conflicts on your own, without some sort of militarized enforcement body of the police. It's been done all throughout history, in most societies since we've been hunter-gatherer tribes. But the state doesn't want you to know that. They want you to feel scared of your neighbor. They want you to believe that the only way we can ever resolve conflict is through the medium of the state and its various legal appendages.

Think of a common story you hear in today's world. Someone's living in a neighborhood or an apartment complex.

They put their kids to bed and the people living next door to them are having a party and they're playing really loud music late at night. Now how common is it for someone in this situation to be more willing to call the police on their neighbor, who then knock on the neighbor's door and tell them to turn their music down, than to just go over, talk to their neighbor, hey, kids are going to bed, can you turn it down a bit, and resolve the situation themselves? Not a lot of people feel comfortable doing that. And can you blame them for not wanting to ask their neighbor?

Here's something to consider: imagine yourself in that exact same situation. And imagine the person living next door to you is a friend of yours, cool person, you know them. You know they're not gonna hurt you. You know they care about the relationship with you and your family. Would you call the police on your friend for playing loud music instead of just going over and talking to him? Of course not. In fact, at almost every point in human history before this, if you're living next door to someone and they're having a party, you're most likely invited to that party.

But in the specific setup of today's world, where social bonds are so hard to achieve, again the world where Byung-Chul Han says that everything that binds and connects us is disappearing, in this world, you're likely not invited to that party. And in what would otherwise be your local community, and basically every other era of human history, in today's world, talking to your neighbor is something that has to be outsourced to the police.

As many anarchist philosophers have aptly pointed out, in a society where social bonds between people are weaker, that society will often turn towards things like increased police presence and increased surveillance just to be able to organize social interactions. And in the right climate of technology, you might even see this type of society also start to gravitate towards something like a digital panopticon.

And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank every listener out there that supports the podcast by going through the sponsors and using our links. The first sponsor of the show today is Element.

Staying hydrated and doing it in a healthy way is more than about just water. It's about water and electrolytes. Because when you sweat, you don't just lose water. You also lose sodium in your body. There's some athletes out there that lose like 7,000 milligrams a day. And even if you're not an athlete, there's a reason the daily recommended intake of this stuff is 4,000 to 6,000 milligrams of sodium, 4,000 milligrams of potassium, 600 milligrams of magnesium. Your body needs a balance of water and electrolyte intake to make sure everything's running well.

Element has you covered. It's an electrolyte drink mix, you put it in water. When you're old like me, you can tell when your body doesn't have enough salt. It's like when grandma's knee starts hurting because a storm's a-brewing on the horizon. It's what I'm like. Element's got a bunch of different flavors. Citrus salt, raspberry salt, that's one of the best ones. They have a spicy one called mango chili. Or apparently what some people do is they put the chocolate salt from Element into their coffee.

Anyway, if you want to compare the difference before and after, Element came up with a great offer for the listeners of this podcast. Go to drinklmnt.com slash philo to get a free sample pack with any purchase. That's drinklmnt.com slash philo.

Moving on, this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. We're now at the end of January, which means you've either started on your New Year's resolutions and given up after three days and then said, maybe next year, or you're a month into it, feeling good, but just thinking about how now this New Year's resolution has to become my normal for the rest of my life.

Either way, you need therapy, my friend. That's what you need. Just kidding. It's a thing, though, right? I mean, I don't know what your resolutions are, but if you want to get better at anything in this life, you have to find out how to lean into your strengths. And therapy can be a great place for a third party to give you a neutral take on how to be a version of yourself that you just like hanging out with more. The problem usually is navigating the channels of actually finding a therapist you vibe with. Well, that's the strength of BetterHelp as a service.

BetterHelp is a company that's trying to make people's lives better. Just think about that.

And the way they try to do that is by being a bastion of discovery, five-minute questionnaire, and they match you with a licensed therapist, meaning they take away that awkward barrier that sometimes gets people too frustrated to find someone great to talk to, the kind of person that can literally change the future of someone's life. If that's something you're interested in trying, you can also help the podcast continue. Celebrate the progress you've already made. Visit betterhelp.com slash fillthistoday to get 10% off your first month. P-H-I-L-T-H-I-S.com.

That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash fill this. And last but not least, AG1 is what they call a foundational nutrition supplement. It's the foundation, my friends. I first gave AG1 a try. I'm supposed to fill this in. Well, because honestly, the children in my life scare me a little bit, if I'm being totally real. I have a daughter, comes home sick from school all the time.

I have a baby on the way in May. Apparently he's healthy now. That's what the doctors tell me. But you know, the second he gets out, he's going to be a little, you know, crawling septic tank all over the floor. I can't be patient zero for every strand of the common cold that goes through the United States. At a certain point, I have a life to lead.

Let's see. Since drinking it daily, I felt, and I'm supposed to fill this one in too, solid, responsible, many adjectives here. And not only does AG1 deliver my daily dose of vitamins, minerals, pre and probiotics, and more, but it's a powerful, healthy habit that's also powerfully simple. It's just one scoop mixed in water once a day, every day. I'm also supposed to link this to the episode of the podcast in some way. I'm not sure if I can do that.

But I want to thank AG1 for being a sponsor of the show today. Thank you. If you want to take ownership of your health this year, it starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a free one-year supply of vitamin D2K2 and five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase exclusively at drinkag1.com slash philo. P-H-I-L-O. That's drinkag1.com slash philo. Check it out. And now, are the police really so bad? Let's get back to the podcast.

But let's slow down here with all we've been talking about, because the skeptic of anarchism probably has a bit of a response to give here. Something along the lines of, you know, before we get too far into this fantasy world where everyone's holding hands and going to each other's parties, you know, I gotta say, Mr. Anarchist, you've done a really good job so far of avoiding the reality of the world that I talked about before.

I mean, sure, maybe police wouldn't have to exist in a world where the biggest problems we face is you going over to your neighbor's house and tell them to turn the volume down on who let the dogs out. But how about the actual world we live in? You know, the one with murder, rape, human trafficking, real crimes. What about dealing with people that have severe mental illnesses? What about organized crime of a scope and a scale you can't possibly imagine that you need a specialist to be able to deal with properly?

I mean, are there actually real world examples of communities where the police cease to function and then ordinary people step up and do just as good of a job as the police were doing before?

Well, an anarchist like Peter Gelderlus might reply by saying that not only have situations like that happened throughout history, but there's good reason to believe that in some areas, having members of a community resolve their own conflicts may actually work out better. For example, take the events that went down in February of the year 1919 in Seattle, Washington, what's become famously known at this point as the Seattle General Strike.

Now, a general strike is a particular kind of strike where workers from a lot of different industries all gather together and walk out of their jobs in solidarity to demand any number of things. Higher pay, better working conditions, employee benefits, you get it. And in Seattle in the year 1919, what was going on then was that cost of living was going up after World War I, wages weren't going up along with it, so the workers decided to take things into their own hands and organize a strike.

Now, just to put this into perspective, we're not talking about a strike where there's a couple hundred people outside in the rain waving signs around, chanting. In the Seattle general strike, this was close to 70,000 people.

And what happens when a strike is that big is that the entire city starts to shut down. When you don't have longshoremen taking resources in, or transportation to move all the stuff around, or medical services, or garbage collection, or any of the crucial things the city needs, local government can't just find a way to replace these things overnight.

So instead of allowing basic services to fail and for untold amounts of suffering to go on, the workers in the labor unions that were striking realized their problem isn't with the people of the city of Seattle. Their problem was with their employers. So the workers were going to organize a bottom-up, community-driven effort to keep the city functioning while the workers were on strike. The type of bottom-up organization that we've mentioned in the last couple episodes.

And what the workers quickly realized after taking over the city was that regardless of whether there were managers or governors there to put their fingerprints on everything, they were totally capable of keeping the city running. In fact, what they realized is that they were always the thing that kept the city running.

It's almost like when a company buys another company and the new company comes in and starts auditing things and realizes that the workers don't really need a bunch of bosses lording over them all the time, micromanaging, that the workers can usually do things better on their own. That's kind of what happened here. The people maintained public services. They started public cafeterias to get food out to anyone who needed it. And all of this, to some of the people who witnessed it and wrote about it later, this whole situation started to foster a mutual feeling amongst the people of community.

The people started to feel a part of the city of Seattle in a way they just hadn't before. They felt responsible for the city. Now, the big question here is what happened without the police? Did the world inevitably descend into chaos? Well, no. Turns out people were much more interested in working together than burning the city down and ransacking each other's lives.

Same way it's been for most of human history, by the way. Same way if we suddenly didn't have the police tomorrow, I wouldn't magically go to my 80-year-old next to our neighbor's house and start stealing doilies off her kitchen table. But what actually happened back then when the city shut down? Well, when conflicts inevitably arose in the city, a temporary council made up of representatives from all the different unions appointed volunteer people, all of whom cared very deeply about the safety of their community and their city,

And their job, when a conflict arose, was to go down to where it was happening. And under a strict policy of nonviolence, they would just try to de-escalate the situation, whatever that was. And they did this with all sorts of conflicts between people, both violent and nonviolent. In other words, it was a needs-based approach to conflict resolution, not a law-based one. And far from things descending into chaos, the whole operation supposedly went very well. Turns out, with nobody starving because of the public cafeterias,

With the increased feeling of solidarity among the people, feeling a mutual responsibility for the management of their city, turns out under certain circumstances, people are much more interdependent than they are independent, they value cooperation over constant competition with each other, and they can handle things themselves like adults through delegation rather than always needing some authority figure lording over them making decisions. You know, again, the way social organization has been done for most of human history.

But the skeptic of anarchism can say back to all this, okay, so then why are murder and rape and other horrific crimes such a thing in the world we live in? If people are capable of being this way, then why aren't they? I mean, we have a lot of this stuff going on, even in a society with a militarized police force. You think removing consequences like that is going to make this situation better?

Well, an anarchist might reply by saying that understanding the reasons people do horrific things to each other can be pretty complex. Let's take it one at a time. Take murder, for instance. He asked why it's a thing. Well, let's look at the statistics and figure out why people commit the murders they do. And what you'll see is that many of the situations people find themselves in where they're committing these sorts of murders, say in a gang or out of desperation, ultimately these are caused by socioeconomic factors driven by the specific structure of the hierarchical system that we're living in.

And if it's not that, how about the glorification of violence in the media? How about the lack of focus on the family unit or the community or having any sort of meaningful connection with the people around you? How about the increasing rates of mental illness? The increasing rates of drug addiction? You know, Murray Bookchin had a quote one time, and he was describing the effects that our hierarchical society has on the psychology of the people living within it. And he said something to the effect of, you know, you lock people in solitary confinement long enough, and eventually they start to go crazy.

If the skeptic of anarchism is worried about what would happen if we unleash these people that are raised in this society with no barrier of the police between them and their neighbors, how much of the crime that they're worried about happening there is caused by something deep down in our human nature? And how much of it is because of how the world is structured? The history of the world proves to some anarchists that the current setup has produced this situation, and that if we change the values we prioritize in culture, we will likely change our situation.

And to this, the skeptic might just say, you know, fine. Let's not argue about human nature anymore. I'm done trying to convince you that the people around you can be a threat to your existence. And to be fair to your position, maybe you can just talk to everyone and make peace with most people within your community. But that's the thing about what you just said. It's just in your own community. What happens, though, when other communities of people start to threaten yours from the outside?

What do you do then as an anarchist? Do you call campus security? Tell them they're a fascist? You know, how about the extreme version of this? What happens when something like a global superpower decides they don't really care about your bottom-up organizational methods, they just want to take over and occupy the territory you're on and then force their culture upon you? What do you do then?

Well, a couple things need to be said to be able to answer this fully. First thing: it's pretty widely accepted by anarchists that you can never be totally safe from imperialistic threats from the outside. Basically every society, anarchist or not, is gonna have to deal with other societies that try to threaten it. That's just a fact of the world, unless if literally everybody was not an imperialist, which is never gonna happen.

The second thing that needs to be said is that if coming into this question, if your overall military strategy that you have in mind is just to be the biggest, baddest military on planet Earth that no other country can possibly compete with in a full-on conflict, if you've accepted that as your chief goal, then there's no way anyone will ever be able to convince you of alternative options.

To do that strategy, you're going to need trillions of dollars in taxpayer resources and a powerful central authority to continue to impose that military presence on the rest of the world. At that point, you become kind of like the police of the entire world. Unsurprisingly to an anarchist, doing what states and unregulated capitalism always does, they always seek more control over more resources until they run into an inevitable war or conflict.

But an anarchist like Peter Gelderlus might want to point out that there are certainly weaknesses to having that big of a military and that much of a global presence. Several examples of this. For one, it's an incredibly expensive thing to maintain, which then makes it incredibly easy to get overextended if you're spread out across a global campaign. Another weakness is that the soldiers in a global campaign like that are often fighting because they have to obey orders and not because they're fighting for some cause that they believe in, which might improve their resolve.

Another weakness is that the bureaucracy of government can oftentimes make decision-making slow in a global military. Chain of Command itself is something that's pretty fragile. Soldiers at the lowest ranks often aren't filled in on all the strategic objectives that are going on, so if the enemy targets people at the top of the chain of command, it can lead to chaos or confusion in the lower ranks. I mean, he's just saying, it's not all sunshine and rainbows to be the global superpower. There's strengths and weaknesses to every position.

Now, contrast this setup with a more anarchist military setup, which wouldn't involve the hierarchical structure of something like a traditional military unit. You know, instead of units, anarchists form something more like a militia. Now, what's the difference between the two? Well, there are many. But typically in an anarchist setting, militias are things that start to resemble the voluntary communities we've talked about in the last two episodes. Militias are horizontally organized by voluntary members that decide to join and stay. They can often leave at any time.

When the militia needs a leader for some combat organization, leadership is appointed as needed by taking a vote from the members of the militia. So there's no rigid chain of command that people are fixed to, which not only makes each militia member more competent in their ability to fight without leadership constantly having to give them orders, but it also makes the militia as a whole more adaptive than military units possibly can be.

Because an anarchist militia is not just one part of a battalion that's all executing some larger war game that's going on at the top of a chain of command somewhere. Because of that, militias are capable of defending the land that they know best, you know, the land that they care about the most, and doing so in a way where they're fluidly moving from guerrilla-style tactics one day to more frontal-style assaults in coalition with other militia units on another day, should their objectives align.

As you probably saw coming, just like in the communities we talked about in other episodes, where these communities can talk to each other, they can make arrangements, and they can form confederacies. In an anarchist society, the same thing could go on at a military level as well, should an imperialistic threat like this ever really emerge.

So to answer the question of the skeptic from before, of what happens if a global superpower wants to invade you one day, well, the goal would not be to try to meet them in battle head-on. That's just stupid. But instead, to steer into the different strengths of militias as fighting units, to use tactics that have been used against other global powers effectively all throughout human history. Think of the American Revolution. Did the American rebels want to meet the English in the middle of an open field, musket to musket?

No, it's like they leaned into the strengths they had. They used guerrilla tactics, they cut off supply lines, they attacked garrisons, ran away. These are the types of tactics that are, by the way, the specialty of a highly mobile, adaptable militia that can truly whittle away at an overextended global superpower.

And think of how this has been done with global powers occupying countries in the last 50 to 100 years. Peter Gelderlus in his book talks about the Ukrainians after the end of World War I and their anarchist militias that were organized with a lot of the same ideas we're talking about here and how they were highly successful against the White Army and the Soviets despite being heavily outnumbered and outgunned. Or how about the Spanish Civil War or any other recent insurgency?

Now, hearing all this, the skeptic of anarchism here might just say, oh, you know what? Okay. Okay. What I've learned from you here today, my anarchist friend, is that there's no question I can ask you about the security of a society that you don't have an answer to for how anarchism is going to solve this problem in some hypothetical world out there.

And I like the sound of your hypothetical world, by the way, for what it's worth. I like the idea of knowing all my neighbors, you know, being connected to the community around me, physically, myself, helping to participate and maintain the community of people I live in. I love the sound of that.

But even if we could accept everything about this hypothetical world that you're painting, that things could work if only we got people to a place where they understood all this stuff and had these sorts of values, I feel like it's just necessary to also say that even if we accept all that, the fact is we're not quite there yet. It's just not feasible right now, given where people actually are and their views on the world. We do live in the society that Byung-Chul Han talks about. We do lack social bonds.

And if you did implement all this anarchist stuff overnight, we would have some kind of chaos that nobody out there wants to see.

And I can agree with the anarchist point that greater levels of liberty, equality, and solidarity, that these are all part of a larger human tendency that transcends anarchism to desire these things whenever it's actually possible. But again, because it is at present something that's so infeasible to just implement, it almost starts to seem like anarchism is less of an actual political philosophy that's being proposed, and it starts to seem more like it's an ethical philosophy for individuals to apply to their lives.

Maybe anarchism is a set of ideas that's best if it's applied personally. You know, when you're raising a family, when you're starting a company, maybe you encourage this horizontal decision-making and mutual aid whenever you can actually affect something. And then maybe eventually through enough generations, we'll eventually get to the type of world that an anarchist is describing.

But we have to acknowledge that that has to take time. That has to come about at a pace that corresponds with culture, or else again, you're just being naive if you expect anything other than a violent bloody revolution to bring it about. The anarchists could say back to that look. You can call me naive for imagining an alternative way that things might be organized.

But I could call you naive back for being someone who fails to recognize that sometimes these leaps forward when it comes to how ethical we're being and the way we organize things have to come about when a considerable portion of the population in a given culture can't imagine the world in any other way.

Think of the slave economies in the southern United States in the 17-1800s. It was unethical to run an economy based on slave labor. Many people at the time wondered how you could ever run an economy without something like slave labor. But then they did it because it was the right thing to do. You know, there have been many moments all throughout history where the people thought that organizing a world in a more bottom-up way was going to be impossible. And yet they found out a way to do it anyway.

To the anarchists, we are in a situation here that's kind of like that. Because in the immortal words of Murray Bookchin, when we're faced with a challenge like this that seems to us to be impossible, quote, we must do the impossible or wind up with the unthinkable, end quote. Look, even if you buy every argument the anarchists gave this episode, even if security isn't the problem with organizing an anarchist society, we are far from letting anarchism off the hook when it comes to just accepting it as how we should organize society.

It's a fun exercise too, to imagine alternative ways the world might look. But there's so many more questions. What about the economy? What about the tragedy of the commons? What about private property? Does capitalism have to be at odds with anarchism? Are there ways to combine the good parts of both? Or are they just fundamentally incompatible? By the way, if you know an anarchist in your personal life and you want to see him turn really red and start shooting steam out of their ears like they're a steam whistle,

Just tell them that anarchism and capitalism are perfectly compatible with each other. They love hearing that. Tell them also that United States brand libertarianism is basically the same thing as anarchism. Basically the same. Just make sure you're faster than them. They might come running after you trying to, I don't know, be peaceful anarchists. Next episode. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.