Objection #10OBJECTION #10: Some libertarians have defined libertarianism as based on the premise that it is illegitimate to engage in aggression against non-aggressors. As far as it goes, this is fine, but you can do all sorts of damage as well as intolerable annoyance without any physical aggression whatever.
William J. Boyer ANSWER: You are right, of course. There are all sorts of "aggressions" such as you suggest in your objection.
Thus gradually a separate class evolved whose occupation was war and rulership over others. But no power can in the long run rely on brute force alone. Brutal force may be the immediate means for the subjugation of men, but alone it is incapable of maintaining the rule of the individual or of a special caste over whole groups of humanity. For that more is needed; the belief of man in the inevitability of such power, the belief in its divinely willed mission. Such a belief is rooted deeply in man's religious feelings and gains power with tradition, for above the traditional hovers the radiance of religious concepts and mystical obligation. Over the centuries the rationale for this legitimacy has changed, but it's there nonetheless. From being the will of the gods, to being something sanctioned by divine right, form an expression of democracy to the product of an historical dialectic, governments have grasped onto whatever fashionable political theology was current to excuse and defend their existence. Particular governments might fall, but government itself as an institution stood bedrock-solid. Anarchists, however, challenge the whole structure of government itself, recognizing in it the chief cause of the principal ills facing human society. Our position strikes at the roots of the whole system, not just at the people who temporarily hold power. We know that power corrupts and that the solution is to eliminate the power structures that breed social discord, not to find perfect humans who will be immune to the tempting spell power casts over people. Anarchists recognize that when coercion is used to settle disputes, the conflicts, as often as not, expand, they don't contract. Force by its nature generates an excuse for more force. Whether the wielder of the force be the individuals immediately involved in the dispute or whether it be the government (through its police), the nature of force remains the same and eventually the outcome of its use is disastrous. While coercion, no matter who uses it, is destructive, there is a crucial distinction between the private use of coercion as it is wielded by the state. To illustrate this fact, let's return briefly to one of the examples cited earlier. Suppose that my patience with the loud music coming from a neighbor's home has reached its end and I physically restrain them from playing the music. Whether my other neighbors agree with what I did or not, they would recognize my action simply as a violent reprisal for which I am accountable. The rightness or wrongness of my action will be judged on the merits of the case itself. Suppose, instead, that I call on a policeman to do the coercing for me. Once the uniformed coercer intervenes, the public will no longer judge the issue solely on its merits. Rather, it now becomes a question of "was the law broken?" As a result, people become more interested in controlling the lawmaking and interpreting machinery than they are with establishing systems for justly settling their conflicts. Law relieves people of the need to find ways for peacefully negotiating solutions to their problems. It gives them a club with which they crush their neighbor into submission, and having the club, they use it. In the name of the "law" government can do all sorts of legally atrocious things and with confidence proclaim, "we had a right to do what we did." Because government exists, my college-age neighbors and I can struggle to dominate each other behind the shield of the policeman. We can deal with each other violently and righteously and that's a fact that has far broader implications than statists wish to recognize. Among those ignored consequences of state-administered coercion are these: 1) By using the policeman we can remain anonymous in our acts of violence against our neighbors. No one ever need know who "complained" to the police and, consequently, all the neighbors become suspect in the eyes of the one accused of violating the law. It's hardly a way to foster strong community bonds. 2) By resorting to the government we mask the nature of coercion behind a shield of respectability. We have hidden from ourselves the genuine brutality of the act itself. We ignore the essential nature of the act, uncritically excusing it as something the government has a right to do simply because it is the government. 3) We give to the political machine a power and "right" to act under a set of moral guidelines quite unlike any that are applicable to the rest of the human community. Where it would be blatantly wrong for an individual to use force and violence against another, the wrongness of that violence is obscured when it is used by the state. For me to steal from my neighbors is wrong. Without exception I couldn't find a neighbor who would disagree with me on that. But if I "authorize" a third party (the tax collector) to do my robbing for me, my neighbors become confused about their right to defend themselves from the thievery. This whole mental subservience makes us perfect targets for most anything the government wants to do to us. In conclusion, then, I argue that coercion, and in particular institutionalized coercion administered by the state, is a socially destructive way of handling disputes. I also challenge the idea that legislated violence is a time-tested means for achieving peace among people. But having argued that, the original question still remains unanswered: "in anarchist societies can people protect themselves from offensive behavior?" Let me answer this in two ways. First, by referring you to an article that appeared in Liberty, an American anarchist journal published by Benjamin R. Tucker. The article appears at the [at this location]. The article is an exchange between Wordsworth Donisthorpe and Tucker. It covers the same issue we are discussing here and in outline form presents Tucker's answer to this objection. Second, in addition to Tucker's answer, let me add that the foundation on which an anarchist society will be built is toleration. There will be no anarchist world unless people are genuinely tolerant of the things that make their neighbors different from them. Sometimes these differences are offensive to us, but unless we are willing to bear with them until they become threateningly oppressive, we will never see a world built on peace through a respect for individual freedom. This doesn't mean that we can't let our neighbors know we don't appreciate their quirks or outrageous behavior, but it does mean we will first search for every means other than coercion to deal with the conflict. If we become totally frustrated, having exhausted every peaceful means we could, and, we finally resort to coercion, we must recognize it as a collapse of a better way of dealing with problems and not, as it is today, as something we have a "right" to do. When there really is no socially sanctioned alternative--when people can no longer rely on the police to do their bidding--then people will begin dealing with problems personally and peacefully. Being an anarchist, I had to respect my neighbors' wish to listen to loud music. I can assure you I didn't enjoy it. Fortunately, those neighbors have since moved and the problem resolved itself. But if the problem had become unbearable my first responsibility would have been to talk with them about it. If that had failed, then I would have had to look for other, non-violent means of handling the situation. I could have suggested to their landlord that he ask them to turn their music down, or I could have bought some earplugs and shut the noise out totally. There are other things that could have been done before I ever turned to coercion. The point is that when people are committed to finding non-coercive means of dealing with the things that annoy us, then we will have made our first major step toward a peaceful world. Violence may still erupt sporadically, but it will not be the institutionalized violence so widespread today. In a libertarian society it will no longer be a matter of trying to minutely define and determine where our "rights" end and another begin. The emphasis will be on toleration and it will create an entirely different approach to dealing with problems. When violence does flare up I suggest that one means of trying to handle such situations would be through community juries. Such juries would have a full range of responsibility for dealing not only with whether the parties to the conflict were justified in resorting to violence, but also what if any punishment should be inflicted for a wrongful use of force. Lysander Spooner detailed the powers and responsibilities such juries might have, so I refer you to his An Essay on the Trial By Jury for further reading. But community juries are only one possibility. Free people have been ingenious in finding ways for overcoming their problems--and they will be equally ingenious in this area of administrative justice. It would be foolish for us to define and limit those possibilities now. The future must be free to make itself. There is no single way for handling all problems and I trust that in a libertarian world people would discover many effective ways for peacefully and constructively dealing with the social difficulties they encounter. Since government-dominated society has led us repeatedly to gross injustice, to wars, and to other massive violence, the libertarian alternative is certainly worth considering. ✳ ✳ ✳ |