A critical look at anarchy-politics Part 3
Politics
Who makes rules? Why are they important? Who rules the rule maker? Why are rules even important? These are a lot of the cliched questions that come from studying politics and as a habitual rule breaker I am a bit obsessed with them. The meta questions about politics will be discussed in later article, but for this one I want to discuss the enforcing of rules through means of restraint.
The biggest question I have is how does the state come to be? My personal theory which I am still trying to formulate is that the state is a natural step in human evolution much like the economy. Studying human anthropology there seems to be two separate branches of community. The tribe and the state.
"Noble savage" was a term coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in which he makes the claim that humans’ goal is to dominate nature for our advantage, yet we forget that humans are made from nature itself. Conquering nature means conquering ourselves and would lead to our ultimate destruction. This is often interpreted as a call back to nature. We as humans lived happiest when we were hunters and foragers roaming the countryside. Karl Marx makes the claim that we should return to our "primitive communism" which suits well for an anarchist political theory. A call to end the state and live out in the wilds seems utopian, but it does bear some truth. Any environmentalist I think would strongly agree with this approach.
A hippie myself has a rebuttal to this claim though. How do we know we aren't self-sabotaging ourselves? How long can we continue to live in tribal communes before power divisions cause us to war with each other. Even in tribal conditions war for resources or honor was still existent. Replace the state with fundamentalist warlords and I feel we might be setting up a trap that would enable a feudal system to emerge.
When our families get sick and there are no hospitals what do we do? If there is a bad harvest one year where do we find food? Most enlightened philosophers could not have even considered the internet as an invention so how do we rationalize that in our tribal communities?
I don't want to advocate the status-quo but I fear we are basing our political beliefs on nostalgic romanticism rather than logic. It’s so easy to look into the past and think "life was so much simpler back then". I would argue this way of thinking is dangerous and regressive.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://lifestonellc.com/politics/political-science/political-theory/a-critical-look-at-anarchy-politics-part-3/