Let us think about anarchism, anger and anti-statism. Most people’s view of anarchism is that it is an angry, impassioned plea for governments to be disbanded or overthrown. It has no plan and has not thought the consequences through.

If brought up among the average group of intelligent people at the top of any profession, anarchism is dismissed as nothing more than an overly idealistic political philosophy among youths. Indeed, many people are only interested in anarchism during their youth, and later “realize” the state is necessary once they are paying their taxes etc.

However, most people don’t realize how many influential and dominant intellectuals in fact favor anarchism. The tendency to dismiss anarchists as an angry, passionate lot who have not thought through the consequences of their zero state goal is an example of the political habit of assuming the speaker either has all the solutions or has none. Not for a moment do people realize that in fact no-one has all the solutions to society’s problems, although some theories and philosophies can be of great aid. I tend to use the term anti-statism rather than anarchism, because many interpretations of anarchism are about all authority being disbanded. That would be an impossibility, since even the people who first thought through such a goal and proposed it were themselves natural authorities in their field of interest. The most credible type of anarchism, the type preached by their best today, is merely criticism of the modern state and corporate hierarchies. There’s no proposition there that all forms of organization and authority are evil, just a yearning for more organic and less paradoxical forms of organization and authority.