I’ve been reading this book called The Social Instinct by Nichola Raihani, a psychologist who researches the evolution of cooperation of various species. That’s what the book is about, cooperation. Cooperation between members of a given species, cooperation between different species, the evolutionary source of cooperation, and comparing human cooperation to that of other species. It’s quite fascinating and well-written. I highly recommend it. It’s not too science-y, but she still gives a lot of interesting information.
Before I get to my main point, I want to just share a quick example from the book. She talks about the different social tendencies between chimpanzees and humans. Chimps don’t compare themselves to other chimps. They don’t really care if another chimp has more stuff than they do. Humans, on the other hand, do compare ourselves with each other, and we do care about someone having more stuff than us.
She mentioned a study wherein children sit opposite each other. There’s a contraption with candy in the middle [kids like candy]. One child can press a button to release the candy to the two kids, or another button where neither of the kids gets any candy. So you’d think the kid would always push the button to get candy. But here’s the thing: the contraption is designed to give the button-pusher a lot less candy than the other kid. Because of this inequity, a lot of kids opt for no candy at all. Kind of interesting.
Anyway, Nichola also wrote about the mutiny on the Bounty, to discuss rebellion and authority and such. The Bounty was an 18th century merchant ship, and there was a famous mutiny. She explained that mutiny was a common threat around this time. Most merchant ships were owned by rich guys, and rich guys didn’t usually want to sail the dangerous seas themselves, they just wanted to make more money. So they buy the ship and they hire the crew. But they didn’t want to hire a bunch of random sailors because they might be dishonest and steal and whatnot. So they hire a captain, whose monetary interests align with the rich guy, to have absolute power over the ship, maintain order, make sure the job is done and all that. But if the captain is an asshole, there’s the threat of mutiny.
Okay, that all makes sense. Then she writes about pirates and how pirate ships are organized differently, and how the people cooperate differently. She writes, “for the most part, life was actually more peaceful and less anarchic than on the merchant ships.” She then describes how pirates often engaged in self-governance, direct democracy, common ownership of the ship. You know, things that anarchists advocate for. She describes pirates as less anarchic than merchant ships, then shows them to be more aligned with anarchist-ish things.
She’s using the term “anarchic” to mean “chaotic” instead of “having to do with anarchy or anarchism.” That’s quite common, and that’s what I want to talk about. Some people use the words anarchy, anarchism, or anarchist to simply mean chaos. Even the Joker, in The Dark Knight, calls himself an agent of chaos before telling Harvey Dent to “introduce a little anarchy.”
Now I don’t call myself an anarchist, but I’ve listened to plenty of anarchists, I know a few anarchists, and I’ve read a bit of anarchist literature. None of them, at any point, have ever said, “Hey, you know what I want in society? Just a whole bunch of chaos. Let’s just make things more chaotic, that sounds like a good idea.” In fact, they usually want a more organized society. They usually want basic needs of the people in society to be met. The provision of basic needs to everyone is a chaos-reducing practice. They want to organize truly democratic institutions, they want to dismantle unjust hierarchies like racism. Racism can cause some chaos, among other things, wouldn’t you say? So maybe if we had less of it, we’d have less chaos. That would be cool, I think.
Anarchism is different things to different people, but it’s rarely just an advocation of chaos for no reason. Some anarchists have some cool slogans, too! One is that anarchism is “democracy taken seriously.” That’s kind of a cool one. It’s like, democracy’s cool, I like that. Taken seriously? That’s kind of an interesting thought, tell me more!
There’s another one which goes, “I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal.” Wow, that’s a cool quote. And it’s from a guy named Rudolf Rocker, which is a cool name. And I like that quote because it reflects my attitude about politics and society as well. The point of being a political person is not to hold the correct opinions on everything [though we should try our best], nor is it to “achieve” a certain type of society, wiping our hands like the job is complete. Society will change as long as it exists, and the goal is to make it better, not to just think correctly about it or achieve something and then walk away. And of course, we’re each guided by our -ism’s that we believe in.
So yeah, I like that quote.
Now you might think that anarchism is silly or unrealistic or whatever, but it would probably be best to understand what it is and what anarchists are actually saying. It’s not just a whole bunch of chaos flying around. My first introduction to an actual anarchist was a YouTube channel called Non-Compete, in his best video [in my opinion]: “Why are you working 8 hours per day?” It’s a fantastic introductory video to thinking about lefty thought. And hey, my name is Lefty!
So check out some anarchists, listen to what they have to say. You don’t have to agree with them, I’m not pressuring you to agree, but it’s well worth it to at least understand them.
Oh! Another thing. There was that funny story about a guy who defaced his own property with “Biden 2020,” and then an anarchist symbol. That was so funny. It was a prime example of totally not understanding what anarchists actually believe. He just thought, “Hey, the far-right loves Trump, right? So that means that the far left loves Biden. Right?” No. Anarchists don’t love Biden.
Lefty Forrester 