But Ain't I An Anarchist?

I recently distanced myself from anarchism.

A 40-second clip from a stefbot video
epitomizes quite well the conception
of anarchists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULJQnaHD1Bw
2:20 - 3:00

"I kind of ran out of arguments for... anything
the State can do.
...
Larry, I'm beginning to realize something.
There's nothing that the State can do well
that the Free Market can't do better. Does
this mean that I'm an anarchist?"
"Yes, it does."

The stereotypical conception of the anarchist,
of course, is the rebellious teenager who wants
to disobey the rules and hasn't grow up to the
"real world" where laws exist and people work
with each other, as opposed to being rebellious
individualists.

This, however, was not the reason for distancing
myself. And, if it was, I ought be ashamed for
"leaving" for such a silly reason. What I left
for was something a bit different, though perhaps
equally childish.

Let's look at the definition of anarchism:
An-arch-ism.
Disregarding, first, the obvious
grammar aspects of the word - first the "an", meaning
not, and then the "ism", standing for philosophy,
ideology, or something like that, we're left with
ARCH.

Arch here stands for Archon, or Archy. Starting with
the word "archon", you can google and find references
such as "ruler", "prince", or "king". Now that sounds
quite like what people who are against authority -
especially illegitimate authority, are about. No rulers,
meaning no kings or princes -- de facto ownership without
the effort.

And now with archy, that's a more familiar root, found in
such things as Hierarchy, Democracy (actually, no...),
Monarchy, Theocracy (well, that c keeps getting in there...),
... other terms don't come to mind, so we'll use
Hierarchy and Monarchy, disregarding the cracy's at the moment.

The important one, actually, is Hierarchy. I'm not against Hierarchy.
The example I most commonly use for this is someone who rocks
at basketball and someone who sucks at it. Are you sure you don't
want to put them into a hierarchy with a scale such that one of
them is obviously better, and one worse?

Actually, now having realized that the root words may be misleading,
and perhaps I am in fact doing some amount of equivocation, I'll
leave this slightly open-ended.

So now to one of the other versions of the word:
An-archy.
Which brings us back to the ruler issue. Does Archon indeed mean
"ruler", "prince", or "king", or does it mean ruling? Or... what?

A common complaint against anarchists is that they don't
believe in rules, law, or regulation. In other words, the stereotype:
Anarchy is lawlessness and chaos.

With some people I've talked to, it's assumed that I left it for
that reason, for that assocation. Not in the least. If that was
what I was up against, I would lead with this rebuttal, and let's watch
the string of responses:
"So you're telling me that you're going to give a group of people
to which you've designated a special name (gov't, police, whatever)
that means they get the resources... guns,
and do you expect them to solve problems? What's their incentive to?
I'm not against laws, I'm not against regulations; I'm against
giving a group of people guns, and then just trusting them with the
guns."
"Who's going to enforce the laws?"
"Let me reflect that back to you: who's going to make sure the special
people are going to be subject to the very laws they apparently enforce?"
"Voting and the legal process."
"So you're telling me that if 51% of people want so and such,
the 49% are ignored? So, are you telling me that if 51% of people want
money from 49% of people, then the special people will, with their
guns, take the money from the 49%?"
"Do you have a better system? Democracy might not be the best, but
it's certainly better than chaos and anarchy."
"You're repeating a point from before that is still in contention.
Repetition works, but only for so long. My not having a system
does not mean defaulting to Statism is a better option, any more than
not having an alternative to Christianity or The Venus Project
means that not having a solution is bunk."
"I'm sure when you get older you'll understand why what you're talking
about is utopian. We can't have a society without laws. And you've told
me that you don't vote. If you don't vote, why are you criticizing the
system? You haven't even participated or done anything. Why don't you
let your voice be heard? Vote! That's the only way to change the system."
"Ageism. Again bringing up an assumption that is still in contention -
I said that I'm not against laws. And by voting you're saying that you,
at least in part, agree with how the system currently is - you've participated.
If the system is shitty, you have no-one to blame but yourself. I, on the
other hand - and I'm quoting Carlin - who did not participate, can not
be blamed for this shitstorm of a mess that we're in. At least, not in '
the arena."
"Ok the, wise guy, what do you propose? What's your solution?"
"I just want to get rid of the cancer that is the State. I just want
to get rid of the belief and support for the monopoly on force that the
supposedly-special group has. And I'm going about to do this in two ways:
1. Conversing about this to convince people otherwise.
2. Refining my conversation, tactics, and other things to be more effective
at dismantling The State."

Of course it's biased.

Now, why did I reject anarchism? It was because of a little quibble
in a comment section, to do with how anarchism is against hierarchy.
To me, this was insane, and so I rejected the label. At this point,
I'm thinking that it was premature to do so. To give some more context,
this was just after I'd been having heated debate on the Anarchism
page on facebook about Capitalism. What I consider Corporatism is
how people were using the word Capitalism. I consider[ed?] Capitalism
as essentially synonymous with "Free Market", and so was confused to
hear about "anti-Capitalism". From what I saw, it is related to
Marxist rhetoric.

For this lack of definitiveness that I saw in anarchism, I rejected it,
after having had this long history of trying to find a label that would
fit the "neo-anarchists" on YouTube, and moved overtly into Anti-Statism.
Anti-statism had a much more concise definition (and a much more
obvious one), and this is what I wanted. Although it has also an ironic
twist to it, which is that it aided conversation away from discussing
labels and into discussing the ideas themselves, since the anti-statism
label is, of course, not associated with chaos. But I hadn't gotten
away from anarchism for that purpose. It was a nice addition, though.


So, accordingly, it appears that I am, indeed, an anarchist.


Are there subgroup labels for anarchism like there are for atheism?
Like, an anti-statist anarchism? anstat-anarchism? Anstachism?
Astatchism? The problem with going near a-statism is that we are not
without the State. Unlike with A-theism, lacking belief in the thing
does not make This thing go away. It's more social than that.

To a certain extent, it's the same with atheism. However, this is only
the case to the extent that a State exists, since the State has a referent,
whereas God does not.

Unlike with Meme, a term for this has not come up yet...