Philosophical Anarchism. What is it?

Growing up more often than not I would hear people when they discussed anarchy and anarchism as a whole as this horrendous idea that society couldn’t operate under and that it just leads to unnecessary violence and total mayhem. However, as I started studying the idea during my bachelor's degree in my first political philosophy class I realized that maybe it wouldn’t be too bad since it seems to be that whenever humans are given power over another human they use it to dominate and not support which leads to all sorts of suppression and discrimination in the direction of the oppressed.  I'm here to hopefully address the misconception that anarchism as a whole is a terrible idea and inform more on philosophical anarchy and how so often it gets mislabeled as a terrible idea.

A very common misconception about anarchism is that if it was instilled in society there would be no order. Or to simply put in there would be utter mayhem. But this is simply not the case since people still are autonomous beings that hold their own instilled values and beliefs. This autonomy that people have can be defined as a self-legislating of oneself. And since it takes many people to create a society there will be many autonomous people who all have different beliefs but when there is an authority aspect that gets thrown into the mix things start to heat up. This heat is enough to want to keep you out of the kitchen though because we appoint an authority in hopes that they will make the best decision regarding the “good” of all people in their society but when they are blatantly wrong we are forced to either surrender our autonomy and free will and let the government dictate what happens in all situations or we must realize that this clash between authority and autonomy doesn’t mix and thus this leads us to philosophical anarchism.

This is not to say in an anarchist society that there wouldn’t be any bad people because there still would be but too often people focus on the bad apples when there are plenty of good and just people as well. And people wouldn’t have to deal with the organizational injustices that can happen when a government has this authority over people. Look at what's going on in the U.S right now for example people are finally standing up to this institutionalized and systemic racism that has been happening in this country for a long time and it's about time. Again this is not to say that an anarchist society would be perfect but without an authority that has to ability to cause so much injustice in its society, it could be a refreshing change to even entertain this idea of philosophical anarchism if this is the first you're hearing of it.

Many people will say though that the government or the authority in your society is always interested in the good for all its citizens, but this is just a plain ignorant claim. If this was the case, there never would've been segregation or slavery or a need for women to fight for women's rights. Seeing how the authority can be cruel is important because it takes away the unrealistic view that authorities are always in our best interest. After all, they won't always be. This forces our decision to either give up our autonomy and submit ourselves to the most encouraging authority we like or to consider ourselves to be a philosophical anarchist.

Looking also at the philosopher Murray Bookchin and his theory of social ecology can give us an important insight in terms of anarchism. This social ecology theory states that were just a social extension of nature since we underwent the evolutionary process as human beings. And in Bookchin's theory to understand ecological problems we must first understand social ones. The part of his theory I want to focus on however is this idea that humans dominate nature and each other for that matter to get ahead and how this grow or die imperative is not a healthy one. Bookchin as well as myself believe that we need to shift from a dominating species to a supporting one since we have the capabilities to do so. However, capitalism instills in us that we must do whatever we need to do to get ahead or we may never make progress. To look at this in terms of philosophical anarchism though shows how our government dominates us to keep its power and how most governments will probably do the same since throughout history man has notoriously held power over other men no matter the country and maybe this is why we might need a shift in the political agenda towards anarchism as an organizational setup for society.

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