For proponents of government the answer yes.
This means that if a group of people gets stuck in a remote island outside of the ambit of civilization and government, the immediate reaction by the concerned is to instinctively go for each other’s throats.
In other words, since people are inherently nihilistic, chaos is the default response for everyone, whereby rules do NOT and CANNOT ever exist. You can picture this scene from the Mad Max movie series.
And for this camp, government is the only entity that can provide lasting peace and order among people.
The Hobbes Doctrine
This position has long been argued by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his book the Leviathan where he sees man’s innate “state of nature” is to resort to war for three reasons: competition, diffidence and glory
According to Wikipedia.org, ``Beginning from a mechanistic understanding of human beings and the passions, Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes), and thus lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (xiii).
Overtime, many philosophers, including the illustrious John Locke and David Hume, challenged the validity of the Hobbes "state of nature" doctrine.
Although it would probably take a book to respond to such philosophical themes, below are my simplified objections to the man-is-evil doctrine as an excuse for government.
Granted that man’s default nature is indeed nihilistic; since government is an organization composed by men, then obviously government will not last.
This is for the simple reason that leader-subordinate relationship will perpetually be in a state of turmoil, as government will be subjected to coups and counter coups or repeated upheavals. This, in effect, would be a Machiavellian utopia.
In short, if man is truly evil or barbaric, no amount of organization will stop him from revealing his chaotic nature.
And the same reasoning can be applied to the justification where man is inherently good. At the extreme where people are all angelic like in virtue then government will probably not be required.
But the propositions here doesn’t escape the fact that the real matter about the debate of the need for government or anarchism (defined in this statement as no government) isn’t because of good or evil, which is nothing but a floating abstraction, but because of scarcity.
It is the allocation of scare resources which serves as the foundation for a majority of politics.
Man As Social Animal
People are neither inherently good nor evil, but we certainly are social creatures.
And such social tendencies aren’t even limited to men, they can be observed in mammals, according to Wikipedia,
``All mammals (and birds) are social to the extent that mothers and offspring bond. The term "social animal" is usually only applied when there is a level of social organization that goes beyond this, with permanent groups of adults living together, and relationships between individuals that endure from one encounter to another.”
Wikipedia adds, ``A chief debate among ethologists studying animal societies is whether non-human primates and other animals can be said to have culture.” [As a side note, if non-human animals can have a culture, then obviously man with vastly more intelligence is likely to be more intuitively organized, formally or informally.]
And since we are the supreme specie in the animal kingdom, then the penchant is for more social cooperation and not militancy, as alleged by Hobbes, given the right environment.
Proof?
Hobbes wrote that people’s lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, which is obviously, as shown in the above charts from Google on life expectancy and population trends and Allyunintuitive also on populaton trends, is dead wrong.
Global population keeps growing while life expectancy has been expanding.
Think of it, if man’s genesis from a few thousand years ago emanated from 2 persons (Adam and Eve) or from a Darwinian evolution of primates (probably a few hundreds), then the explosion of population growth came amidst a transition of social arrangements, notably from tribal to feudal to the modern forms of government.
In short government or no government people’s population have continually grown.
So what has allowed man such expansive growth in population and life expectancy trends amidst scarce resources?
The obvious answer is the deepening trends of division of labor, comparative advantage and technology.
In short, real wealth has allowed society to grow in spite of government.
True, we had episodes of nasty wars and vicious political experiments that have led to massive losses in life and wealth, aside from pandemics, but apparently this hasn’t stop people’s realization that trade makes for social cooperation.
Of course, social acceptance has been reflected on politics or governance, where the ensuing policies has accommodated more trade and integration as shown in the above chart.
Yet it is misleading to argue that governments has prompted for such a progress considering that government does not produce anything but to tax only her constitutes and engage in redistribution of wealth.
Anarchy In Different Perspectives
My other major objection is the use of the same false “Hobbes” doctrine to argue that anarchism (defined as no government in this statement) is even a worse alternative than communism.
It’s fundamentally a strawman fallacy.
First of all, I’m not committed to the anarchy position, but having followed the Austrian school of Economics, I have seen some of the merits of their theory. Besides not all Austrians are anarchists.
Second, there are four mainstream definitions to the word anarchy, according to dictionary.com:
1. a state of society without government or law.
2. political and social disorder due to the absence of governmental control: The death of the king was followed by a year of anarchy.
3. a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.
4. confusion; chaos; disorder: Intellectual and moral anarchy followed his loss of faith.
It is important to distinguish between the carrying definition of the term anarchy or the reference of the word, so as not to lead to confusion and to wrong interpretations.
The commonly held impression of anarchy is the fourth definition; chaos and disorder.
And many have argued strictly from this sense of the word, without considering the other definitions, which is arrantly fallacious or misleading.
Example, the statement where property rights or rules of law cannot exist in anarchy as defined in chaos and disorder is perceptibly correct strictly under such assumptive parameters. Whereas property rights that cannot exist in anarchy as defined by no government is incorrect, as the Somalia’s experience will show.
Nevertheless, the communist experiment in the last century left a wave of horror with an astounding estimated 94 million lives lost, according to the Black Book of Communism.
In addition, the other grand big government experiment which resulted to 2 major world wars at the cost of some 50-100 million lives had been extreme or Ultra nationalism.
We can observe that the repeated attempts to concentrate political and economic power through government leads to only more deaths and societal decadence.
For me, this exemplifies as systematized anarchy (as defined by organized chaos and disorder-in this statement) which led to a massive loss of lives, rampant poverty and general suffering. It’s even worse than having no government.
While there is NO existing society where a model based on libertarian anarchy [defined here as a society based on private institutions] can be made to make an adequate comparison with, the only country we see today which operates under an anarchic system [defined here as stateless society] is Somalia.
That’s because the Somalian military dictatorship government collapsed in 1991.
Somalia has a provisional government, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), albeit this is more nominal, as the country operates free from formal government institutions. In short, Somalia’s anarchy [statelessness] emerged from its being a failed state [population threw out government and have yet to replace it].
True, there have been repeated violence in the country, but this has been due to attempts by foreign groups as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) to foist a government on her. ICU’s splinter group, the Al-Shabaab, continues to harass Somalia today.
However, the death toll from these violent episodes in Somalia seems to be a mere fraction when compared to even the Pol Pot regime of communist Cambodia, where nearly a quarter of the population have been killed, considering that it has been more than a decade where Somalia has had a formal government.
If we go by the argument where people are inherently nihilistic then obviously Somalia would already have been non-existent today. This proves the fallacy of the assumption.
Yet the failed state-anarchy has reportedly a thriving economy, according to Wikipedia.org,
``Despite civil unrest, Somalia has maintained a healthy informal economy, based mainly on livestock, remittance/money transfer companies, and telecommunications. According to a 2003 World Bank study, the private sector grew impressively, particularly in the areas of trade, commerce, transport, remittance and infrastructure services, in addition to the primary sectors, notably livestock, agriculture and fisheries. In 2007, the United Nations reported that the country's service industry is also thriving. Anthropologist Spencer Heath MacCallum attributes this increased economic activity to the Somali customary law, which provides a stable environment to conduct business in.” (bold emphasis mine)
So a stateless society thrives amidst its own community based rules and regulations outside a formal government. In short, it simply is misguided to argue that societies cannot exist without government.
Somalia may not be prosperous on a relative scale when compared to the world but they seem to be better off than they were during a military dictatorship or compared to a systematized anarchy [defined as organized chaos] via a communist regime.
In addition, Somalia continues to survive for the simple reason that people, as a social creature, as shown above, will default to the fundamental laws of the land, which on the part of Somalis, has been the customary law, the XEER.
Based on the definition of Wikipedia.org, Xeer “is the polycentric legal system of Somalia. Under this system, elders serve as judges and help mediate cases using precedents. It is a good example of how customary law works within a stateless society and is a fair approximation of what is thought of as natural law. Several scholars have noted that even though Xeer may be centuries old, it has the potential to serve as the legal system of a modern, well-functioning economy.” (bold highlights mine)
Essentially this serves as the rule of law, where as we have quoted F. A. Hayek in Mainstream’s Three “Wise” Monkey Solution To Social Problems ``Political wisdom, dearly bought by the bitter experience of generations, is often lost through the gradual change in the meaning of the words which express its maxims...Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand.”
Of course the major difference why violence would have less incidence and casualties even in a nihilistic ‘Mad Max’ anarchy [defined here as complete chaos and disorder] compared to a frenzied communist or totalitarian states is because armaments are unilaterally held or that the coercive powers are strictly monopolized by the government. Hence, the conduct of violence is systemic, organized or wholesale as compared “Mad Max” anarchy where everyone fights to save his skin. Yet to remind you, nihilistic anarchy is different from libertarian anarchy.
Yet, if anarchy from a failed state did not wipe out Somalia from the face of earth, the same nihilistic Mad Max anarchy is not what comprises as libertarian anarchy.
This from Hans Hermann Hoppe,
``Rothbard's anarchism was not the sort of anarchism that his teacher and mentor Mises had rejected as hopelessly naive, of course. "The anarchists," Mises had written,
“contend that a social order in which nobody enjoys privileges at the expense of his fellow-citizens could exist without any compulsion and coercion for the prevention of action detrimental to society … The anarchists overlook the undeniable fact that some people are either too narrow-minded or too weak to adjust themselves spontaneously to the conditions of social life. An anarchistic society would be exposed to the mercy of every individual. Society cannot exist if the majority is not ready to hinder, by the application or threat of violent action, minorities from destroying the social order.”
``Indeed, Rothbard wholeheartedly agreed with Mises that without resort to compulsion, the existence of society would be endangered and that behind the rules of conduct whose observance is necessary to assure peaceful human cooperation must stand the threat to force if the whole edifice of society is not to be continually at the mercy of any one of its members. One must be in a position to compel a person who will not respect the lives, health, personal freedom, or private property of others to acquiesce in the rules of life in society.
``Inspired in particular by the nineteenth-century American anarchist political theorists Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker and the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari, from the outset Rothbard's anarchism took it for granted that there will always be murderers, thieves, thugs, con artists, etc., and that life in society would be impossible if they were not punished by physical force. As a reflection of this fundamental realism — anti-utopianism — of his private-property anarchism, Rothbard, unlike most contemporary political philosophers, accorded central importance to the subject of punishment. For him, private property and the right to physical defense were inseparable.”
In short, a libertarian anarchy isn’t a world predicated on disorder and chaos from a false premise of the evil state of man, but on a system of private based institutions.
I am not here to argue about the merits of these private institutions, but the point is to put into perspective the argument about anarchy [as defined by nihilism], libertarian anarchy [system of private social institutions] and communism and totalitarianism.
The Strawman Fallacy
But one would point out, how about religious zealots, gangsters and other social misfits? Are they not reasons why we need government?
These arguments serve as a strawman for the simple reason of failing to account the cause and effect of why social miscreants emerge.
We do not argue that libertarian anarchism will bring about a society of perfection, as there would always be misfits or non-conformist, but as shown in Somalia, society can compel their constituents to act within traditional rules and regulations.
Religious extremism comprises only a fraction of the world’s population.
To consider, even as the world population growth has been swiftly expanding, where world religions has divergently dispersed as shown above, yet we aren’t seeing an explosion of religious wars.
The other way to see it is that while there are indeed some frictions or conflicts brought about by religious diversity, this hasn’t stopped the world from advancing or from globalizing.
However, as pointed out earlier, many of these religious frictions have not been due to ideologies from religion per se, but from external causes that has amplified a rift in religious standings or some sectors see policies undertaken as having undermined their religious interests.
A major reason of the global religious tensions has been caused by geopolitical interventions, Congressman Ron Paul says,
“According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of re-evaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it...Shutting down military bases and ceasing to deal with other nations with threats and violence is not isolationism. It is the opposite. Opening ourselves up to friendship, honest trade and diplomacy is the foreign policy of peace and prosperity.” (bold highlights mine)
And we find the same reasons attributed to Osama Bin Laden’s war against America, who incidentally was a former ally.
Whyguide.com enumerates some of these: US Presence in the Middle East, US Support for Israel, Imperialism, Undermining Islam and Acts of Aggression.
In other words, cause and effect tells us that many of the terroristic activities which has been colored by religion, have been political ramifications from geopolitical interventionism or has manifested as retaliatory measures against perceived abuses by the government (the US government as in the above instances).
So government policies seem to be the source of the problem and not from inherent human action.
Besides to consider the diversity of religion or of culture, does this mean that a unified world government should exist to impose a "law among laws" in order to resolve such conflicts?
Yet, for many, only the visible is worth being interpreted. Lacking the reasoning to adequately explain societies’ troubles, they resort to oversimplification.
Many of society’s woes aren’t because of the natural state of man to be evil, in fact, many of society’s miscreants have been a manifestation of the consequences of poor, abusive, unilateral or skewed regulations, policies or government actions.
According to Murray N. Rothbard, ``the institution of the state establishes a socially legitimatized and sanctified channel for bad people to do bad things, to commit regularized theft and to wield dictatorial power. Statism therefore encourages the bad, or at least the criminal elements of human nature. As Frank H. Knight trenchantly put it: “The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.”’ A free society, by not establishing such a legitimated channel for theft and tyranny, discourages the criminal tendencies of human nature and encourages the peaceful and the voluntary.
``Liberty and the free market discourage aggression and compulsion, and encourage the harmony and mutual benefit of voluntary interpersonal exchanges, economic, social, and cultural. Since a system of liberty would encourage the voluntary and discourage the criminal, and would remove the only legitimated channel for crime and aggression, we could expect that a free society would indeed suffer less from violent crime and aggression than we do now, though there is no warrant for assuming that they would disappear completely. That is not utopianism, but a commonsense implication of the change in what is considered socially legitimate, and in the reward-and-penalty structure in society.”
Summary And Conclusion
To sum up, our point is that people aren’t inherently bad or nihilistic.
The Hobbesean error has fundamentally been based on wrong or misplaced assumptions, where according to Rodney Long, (bold highlights mine)
``Well, Hobbes is assuming several things at once here. First he’s assuming that there can’t be any social cooperation without law. Second, he’s assuming that there can’t be any law unless it’s enforced by physical force. And third, he’s assuming you can’t have law enforced by physical force unless it’s done by a monopoly state.
``But all those assumptions are false. It’s certainly true that cooperation can and does emerge, maybe not as efficiently as it would with law, but without law. There’s Robert Ellickson’s book Order Without Law where he talks about how neighbors manage to resolve disputes. He offers all these examples about what happens if one farmer’s cow wanders onto another farmer’s territory and they solve it through some mutual customary agreements and so forth, and there’s no legal framework for resolving it. Maybe that’s not enough for a complex economy, but it certainly shows that you can have some kind of cooperation without an actual legal framework.”
And it’s a strawman to argue a case for government and against a libertarian anarchy model strictly based on the above premises- man is evil, societal misfits, anarchy equals communism.
So while there are many issues to discuss in the libertarian anarchy model or a society premised on privately held institutions, I guess I am stepping out of my bounds.
Nevertheless, there are tons of literatures that deal with objections to the libertarian anarchy model.
Perhaps when time allows, we can deal with this in the future.
