Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → how tax resistance fits the bill → isn’t some government worth paying for? → doing without government

More grab-bag material:

  • You can now visualize the U.S. war fatality statistics in Iraq in two new ways:
    • Obleek’s Flash animation moves forward in time at a pace of ten days per second , and peppers a map of Iraq with dots, where each one “indicates the geographic location that a coalition military fatality occurred.”
    • A Palm Beach Post map turns this around, and shows where in the United States each of the American fatalities from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came from (at least those who hailed from the contiguous 48 states).
  • Robert F. Hawes Jr. got my attention with his summary of a Twilight Zone episode:

    revival of the Twilight Zone series featured an episode entitled “Button, button”, based on a short story by Richard Matheson. In the story, a gaunt, black-clad gentleman arrives uninvited at the cramped apartment of a financially destitute couple and presents them with a tempting though somewhat ominous offer. He gives them a simple wooden box with a clear plastic lid overtop a large red button — the type of nondescript contraption teens might build in a high school Woodshop class — and explains their options: 1) Don’t push the button. Nothing happens; the man will come back tomorrow to claim the box. 2) Push the button and get $200,000 — tax free — and someone will die. “Who?” the wife asks. “Someone you don’t know,” the man replies. He then leaves them to think about it. The husband decides it’s unconscionable, but the wife wants to go for it. After all, what is the death of someone they don’t know? People die all the time, don’t they? Maybe a bad person will be the one to die. “And maybe it’ll be someone’s newborn baby,” the husband counters.

    In the end of the story, after much deliberation, the wife decides that they’re owed this and pushes the button. Nothing happens immediately. Then, later in the day, the gaunt, black-clad gentleman returns with a briefcase full of cash. He gives the couple their money and takes his box back. The wife asks what will happen now and the man replies: “The button box will be reset and the same offer will be made to someone else… someone who doesn’t know you.”

  • Those of you who have been intrigued by my mentions of freeganism and its potential for a lifestyle of radical frugality may be interested in the Dumpster World discussion board, where dumpster divers from all over the place share their wisdom. It’s not all “do you think this meat is still good?” — there is a lot of discussion of restoring and repairing discarded furniture and appliances and other such topics as well.
  • How’s our great national flashback coming along? Read the transcript of the President assuring the world “We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw.”
  • David Morris at Alternet reviews some of the history behind (Economic) Independence Day. Apparently Gandhi wasn’t the first one to try swadeshi in a campaign to break free from the British Empire:

    Before we declared our political independence we declared our economic independence. All things English were placed on the blacklist. Frugality came into fashion. Out of the First Continental Congress in New York came the embryonic nation’s first Chamber of Commerce. Given the current policies of the Chamber, it might be useful this July 4th to recall its first campaign slogan, “Save your money and you can save your country.”

    Bostonian Sam Adams, the fiery leader of the movement, knew that frugality was not enough. To become truly independent, America had to produce at home what was previously imported from England.

    Members of Boston’s Whig Party demonstrated their patriotism by nursing tea leaves and mulberry trees in their gardens. New England farmers were exhorted to convert their oak plains into sheep pastures and produce enough wool to clothe every American. Colonists were urged to abstain from eating lamb or mutton in order to encourage American woolen manufactures.

    In less than a year the boycott had so disrupted Transatlantic trade that thousands of British workers lost their jobs.

  • And, going back a bit more into American history, Murray Rothbard makes a very interesting investigation of Pennsylvania’s Anarchist Experiment —  when the Pennsylvania colony was “in a de facto condition of individual anarchism, and seemed none the worse for the experience.”

Bits & Pieces from around the web:

  • Have you ever been tempted to want to expand the federal government with a new bureaucracy? Lord knows, many people have. But those few libertarian hold-outs may have finally met the ultimate temptation — the anti-agency agency:

    The Government Reorganization and Program Performance Improvement Act of 2005 would create a standing sunset commission, which would review all federal agencies and programs every 10 years and recommend changes. If lawmakers did not vote to continue a program, its funding, not just its authorization, would automatically cease.

    Of course, the commissions (it will take two, apparently) would be full of people appointed by the politicians, so I’d be a fool to expect much good to come out of them, but daydreams are free.
  • Rahul Mahajan at Empire Notes takes a critical look at the U.S. anti-war movement:

    I begin with the observation that criticism of the war has been almost entirely as a fiasco, a failed and reckless venture, and not as a moral failure.…

    In one breath, one mentions torture by U.S. troops, checkpoint killings, the savage destruction of Fallujah, and then in the next one talks about the great bravery and nobility of the troops that did it and of one’s complete support for them. Well, such a complete disjunction between the evil of the enterprise and the nobility of those who carry it out is just untenable. There is no need to paint the American soldiers as any more monstrous than the cogs in other monstrous machines have been. But neither are they any less so.

    More important, the way they have conducted themselves and the way that Iraq has been treated since the regime change doesn’t just reveal something about the Bush administration. It doesn’t just reveal something about the military-industrial complex and corporate CEOs. It reveals something about American culture and about the deeper morality of this country and its people.…

    The Iraq occupation is a mirror in which to look at this country, and so far nobody wants to take a serious look.

  • Zeynep Toufe of Under the Same Sun examines the implications of a recent claim by a U.S. General that “U.S. and Iraqi forces have killed or arrested more than 50,000 Iraqi insurgents in the past seven months.”
  • And here’s a little something for the “harm reduction” advocates. Alcohol prohibition finally ended in in Athens, Tennessee — one of those freakish “dry town” hold-outs in our nation’s noble experiment. Well, when you keep an experiment going that long, you’re bound to pick up a few data points along the way. For instance:

    According to court records, Athens police made one less misdemeanor driving under the influence arrest in than in . The Sheriff’s Department and troopers made 37 fewer DUI arrests last year. That figure includes Athens police’s felony arrests.

    Driving under the influence includes alcohol and drugs.

    The city’s numbers are not staggering, but Athens police Capt. Marty Bruce said he sees an impact.

    On the weekends since Athens went wet, police typically arrest two to three drivers for DUI, Bruce said.

    “Before, it was eight to 10 people,” he said.

    How did legalizing alcohol cut down on drunk driving? The Decatur Daily decided to ask a drunk driver for his opinion:

    Kendall Dowell of Athens, who has four DUIs on his record, making him a felon, said going wet has kept people from driving to Huntsville and Decatur for alcohol.

    “It is much easier for people to get the alcohol here, stay home and stay safe,” Dowell said.

  • More from MANAS:

    In any society of the future worth talking about and working toward, independent moral decision will be the dominant cultural habit — the universal goal and the highest abstract good. So, when it comes to making a living, here and now, the primary task is to build a pattern of endeavor which permits that kind of decision — a pattern which, if and as it is successful, increases the opportunity for that kind of decision.

    In this regard…

    We recall the story [of] an eminent engineer whose professional abilities led him most naturally to municipal employment. This man, who was young in his career at the time of this episode, realized that municipal governments are sometimes corrupt. For him, right livelihood meant foresight in respect to the possibility that he might some day be asked to participate in dishonest practices, under pressure from the city fathers. Confronted by this abstract possibility, he laid plans for a small business of his own, so that he would be economically free, should he feel morally obliged to resign as city engineer. He was a man with a wife, two small children, and a mortgage, which made a steady income of substantial importance. It eventually happened that the small business was the means of preserving this man’s integrity without harm to his family.

    People sometimes tell me that they admire the stand I’ve taken, and “wish” they could do such a thing themselves, but for some financial reason or other, they cannot. Sometimes these reasons are unforeseeable and urgent — more often, they’re ordinary but expensive lifestyle choices. It is a rare person who, like the engineer in the example above, has the foresight to consider moral autonomy an asset worth valuing as such and worth including in financial calculations.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has been a highlight reel of government incompetence and hostility. Not only isn’t the government helping, but they seem perversely intent on energetically interfering with the help being offered by others. Emergency workers are sitting idle, or are assigned to do public relations work, or are being posed as backdrops to photo-ops while relief helicopters are grounded for the president’s safety. Meanwhile, having failed to do anything helpful or useful, the government is starting “combat operations” against the “insurgency” in New Orleans, that insurgency seemingly being defined in such a way as to include anybody doing anything useful.

This has led even some dyed-in-the-wool liberals to wonder why we keep governments around if they can’t even provide the minimum of coordinated relief and disaster-management. It’s gonna be a lot harder to hate big bad corporations like Wal-Mart now that they seem to be more generous with their money and more concerned about their workers and customers than governments are with our tax dollars and their citizens.

Fortunately, some people learned from that when the shit goes down, it’s a good time to ignore the people with badges and titles. The voice of authority told the people in the towers to stay put — some of the ones who thought for themselves instead survived to tell us about it. That lesson has been reinforced a thousand times since.

An 18-year-old also decided to take matters into his own hands and stole an abandoned city school bus and drove storm victims to Texas, according to a CNN report.

The teen driver, Jabbar Gibson, 18, said he had never driven a bus before but wanted to save people. “If it wasn’t for him, we’d still be in New Orleans on the Gulf,” bus passenger Randy Nathan said. “He got the bus for us.”

Authorities allowed the renegade passengers inside the Astrodome but Gibson could find himself in trouble after taking the school bus.

Another account tells of “the pirate bus crew that seemed to come in and out of town through back roads that were quite dry as opposed to news accounts that water compromised all land rescue efforts” and wonders “If [they] could privately engineer a rescue effort to bring in ten buses, then how is it possible that the city and state could not organize a fleet of 100 buses to rescue all the people left behind?”

If anything good comes out of this, it will be to remind us that in times of crisis, we are better off looking to each other than foolishly waiting for our rulers to help us. And maybe, rather than waiting for the crisis to come, we might be wise to ask in what ways we unwisely rely on government today.

I have a love/hate relationship with Harper’s Magazine. I love Harper’s “Readings” section, which makes me feel like a boy standing on tip-toes looking through the holes in the fence around a big construction site. But I hate Lewis Lapham’s inevitable pompous multi-page editorial about the bemusing hypocrisies of those members of the ruling class who invited him to dinner just the other night.

Their short stories are almost never ones I feel much richer for having read, and their popular “Index” is the information equivalent of junk food — empty calories of factoids without context. Their feature articles are more hit-or-miss. Occasionally, they’re pretty darned good, other times they’re tone-deaf liberal choir-preaching or an insecure mocking of cretinous stereotypes from the fly-over states.

This month’s issue has an interesting article by Rebecca Solnit called “The Uses of Disaster” that, according to the Harper’s web site, “went to press ” — which is pretty good shooting for a monthly magazine, since the article predicts very well what happened after the Hurricane. (The on-line version of the article, which differs from the print version that I’m quoting from here, has a postscript written by Solnit that addresses Katrina and its aftermath directly.)

Solnit notices that frequently after disasters, even terrible ones like the San Francisco earthquake of , there have been ironic feelings of elation and displays of a carnival-like atmosphere among the displaced people. Her hypothesis is that disaster, like carnival, causes us (or forces us) to drop certain parts of the status quo and to create new identities and take up new responsibilities and that this is liberating and thrilling:

Again and again, we see a latent civil society — a community — arising from the ruins of some disaster and becoming the grounds for connection and joy. Moreover, for those who are not overwhelmed, for those who participate in rescues, who improvise substitutes for the electricity or the heat or the house itself, disaster can give them a sense of potency and purpose that everyday life lacks.

Although this version of disaster aftermaths has happened again and again — people coming together spontaneously, strangers helping strangers, and furthermore people feeling genuine joy in voluntary community even amid the sorrowful results of disaster — official preparedness programs see these victims and volunteers as if they were escaped lunatics from a burst asylum who mostly need to be confined and condescended to:

Many official disaster-preparedness scenarios nonetheless presume that human beings are prone to panic and in need of policing. A sort of Hobbesian true human nature emerges, according to this version, and people trample one another to flee, or loot and pillage, or they haplessly await rescue. In the movie version, this is the necessary precondition for John Wayne, Harrison Ford, or one of their shovel-jawed brethren to save the day and focus the narrative. In the government version, this is why we need the government.… But “the authorities” are too few and too centralized to respond to the dispersed and numerous emergencies of a disaster. Instead, the people classified as victims generally do what can be done to save themselves and one another. In doing so, they discover not only the potential power of civil society but also the fragility of existing structures of authority. And perhaps this, too, is grounds for joy.

was one example of this:

That day saw the near-total failure of centralized authority. The United States has the largest and most technologically advanced military in the world, but the only successful effort to stop the commandeered planes from becoming bombs was staged by the unarmed passengers inside United Airlines Flight 93. They pieced together what was going on by cell-phone conversations with family members and organized themselves to hijack their hijackers, forcing the plane to crash in that Pennsylvania field.

The police and fire departments responded valiantly to the bombings of the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, but most of the people there who survived did so because they rescued themselves and one another. An armada of sailboats, barges, and ferries arrived in lower Manhattan to see who needed rescuing, and hundreds of thousands were evacuated by these volunteers, whose self-interest, it is reasonable to assume, would have steered them away from, not toward, a disaster.…

This is the other face of : tens of thousands of people peacefully evacuating Manhattan by way of a pedestrianized Brooklyn Bridge; Union Square turned into a public forum in which people gathered to reach a common understanding of the event; volunteers converging from around the city and the country, donating blood and food and caring for emergency workers.… Astra Taylor, a young publicist living in Brooklyn and working in Tribeca, told me about the first few days of aftermath: “Nobody went to work and everybody talked to strangers” — the most succinct description of an anarchic paradise I’ve ever heard.

But here is where the article begins to go awry. Having just sung pæans to anarchic paradise, having told us that perhaps the joy of the survivors working together comes partly from the knowledge of the fragility of the authorities and from realizing their own power and usefulness, having contrasted the useless and distrustful government response to disaster with the inventive and productive and uplifting spontaneous voluntary community that develops naturally in disaster’s aftermath — how does Solnit conclude the piece? By bemoaning the decline of big government safety net programs:

Americans work more hours now than anyone else in the industrialized world. They also work far more than they themselves did as recently as a few decades ago. This shift is economic — call it Reaganomics or Chicago-style “liberalism” or “globalization” — but it is cultural too, part of an odd backlash against unions, social safety nets, the New Deal and the Great Society, against the idea that we should take care of one another, against the idea of community. The proponents of this shift celebrate the frontier ideals of “independence” and the Protestant work ethic and the Horatio Alger notion that it’s all up to you.

Solnit’s essay demonstrates that when the chips are really down, and when the government is broken in its fragility and helplessness, people will naturally, without prompting and certainly without guns at their backs, come together in spontaneous community to take care of each other — and that this gives them joy — and that part of this joy comes from discovering in their own power to be useful and helpful a “sense of potency and purpose that everyday life lacks.”

How can she then go on to say that there has been a shift “against the idea that we should take care of one another [and] against the idea of community” (one that is typified by a backlash against the big government rescue programs that made up the New Deal and the Great Society)? Those “ideas” are there and have been there all along and are just waiting for some “disaster” to shake off the wet blanket of government so that they can joyfully erupt.

I checked out the documentary Anarchism in America from the library and gave it a watch last night. As an overview of American anarchism, it’s pretty superficial, and too deferential to the halloween-costume anarchism of punk rock. But the movie has its moments, and includes good interviews with a couple of tax resisting anarchists: Karl Hess and Ed Hedemann.

As it turns out, I could have spared myself a trip to the bookmobile. The documentary is on-line:

Being as it’s and all, I thought might be a good time for a visit from The Anarchy Boogeyman.

I’ll be taking the bold and ridiculous step of defining anarchism as properly understood and thereby infuriating generations of anarchists, almost none of whom, as far as I know, would agree with me.

That said… while everybody knows that anarchism is a bit of an extreme, “out there” political philosophy, I think that most people actually underestimate just how out there it is, and make the mistake of seeing it as a merely quantitatively different edge-case that more-or-less plays the same game on the same playing field as other political philosophies. Then they judge it according to that standard. This leads to misunderstandings.

I’ll try to explain. Just about every other political philosophy can be best defined by reference to an ideal, utopian state, and by a process for approximating it in the real world. These philosophies can then be judged by the desirability of this ideal state, the likelihood that we might be able to get close to that state, and what the cost of doing so would be.

So, for instance, a proponent of monarchism might define it as a system that features one single authority figure where the buck stops, who has more-or-less absolute authority (perhaps bounded by tradition or common decency), a well-defined line of succession that keeps trouble at bay, and what have you. Real-world monarchies, then, can be judged against this standard: does the monarch have ultimate authority, or is this authority diluted or countered by other institutions? is there a well-defined line of succession or are there various pretenders to the throne with their own teams of intriguers? and so on.

Democracy, constitutional republicanism, communism, democratic socialism, fascism… whatever you can think of — they can all be evaluated in this way. But anarchism — as properly understood mind you — cannot. And because its opponents, and frequently its proponents, do not understand this, they tend to misunderstand anarchism and distort it and make it ridiculous.

Anarchism is not a utopian end state and a method for getting there. It is not something of the sort that is appropriately judged by searching for existing or possible quasi-anarchies and comparing them to an ideal “anarchy.”

It would be as if in the debate over atheism the atheists kept being asked why we should worship their non-existent god rather than Allah or Jehovah. Or if in the debate over abolitionism, the abolitionists kept being asked to show how we would be able to tell the masters from the slaves once slavery was abolished. I imagine also the frustration felt by mathematicians who come up against students who have somehow gotten it stuck in their heads that ∞ is just the name of one really big integer and can be treated like one for all intents and purposes. It’s the same kind of missing the point. There’s something qualitatively different between anarchism and the host of non-anarchist (utopianist) political philosophies that you have to come to grips with before you can compare them competently.

Several years back, on a mailing list, I was venting some hostility towards abusive cops who enforced vice laws. Someone took umbrage and responded, “What have you really got a problem with, the cops or the laws? Because, last I checked, cops don’t make laws.” I responded:

I think cops are responsible for their own behavior, and can’t blame a bunch of politicians for “making” them do evil things (cf. Nuremburg trials). They have no excuse for not knowing that their business involves terrorizing people who are innocent of anything that could properly be called a crime. And they have no excuse for going along with it.

A spirited back-and-forth ensued that really demonstrates the point I’m trying to make today. I tried desperately to engage my debater but he was completely unable to hear what I was saying because he kept wanting to force me into a utopianist political philosophy paradigm, and had tight blinders on that wouldn’t allow him consider any arguments outside of that paradigm that did not conform to it.

He took government for granted, as so many people do, but could not even begin to wrap his mind around the idea of not doing so. In response, he wrote:

I love how you keep mixing up police abuse with enforcing a law passed by congress. You try to convey the impression, somehow, that I’m in favor of police abuse. Rather odd. I’m just saying the police are supposed to uphold anything that gets passed as a law. It’s unreasonable to expect them not to.

I shot back:

You try to convey the impression, somehow, that I’m in favor of police abuse

But you are — as long as that police abuse is legally authorized. And even when it isn’t, you seem far too eager to look the other way or make excuses. Why not just say “it’s wrong to break into somebody’s home, drag them away in chains, and lock them in a dungeon just because they were in possession of some illegal drug. If you do that, you’re doing something rotten. If you help people do that, you’re helping people do something rotten.” No. You’ve got to get all lawyery and say, “well, maybe it’s wrong, but it’s the law, and we have to make exceptions for the law, and besides it’d be wrong if you or I did it, but it’s a police officer, and they have the authority and besides it’s only their job and they don’t make the rules.” Bullshit. There’s nothing you can’t justify that way, and there were 175,000,000 tombstones engraved with that feeble argument in the last hundred years.

Well, this went on for quite a bit in the classic internet flame-war style. Then my debate partner said, “you’ve got one thing left to do before I can respect your point of view… give me a coherent suggestion for a solution.”

And this is how things got so weirdly frustrating. Because what he meant by “a solution” was a quasi-utopian political ideal end-point of the type I was describing earlier. So what he really was saying, whether he knew it or not, was that in order for him to respect my point of view I was going to have to abandon my point of view, because a quasi-utopian political ideal end-point was exactly not what I was arguing for.

But I tried to come up with something that would fit the bill:

Well, it’s a rough draft, but it goes a little like this:

I want you, M— H—, to realize that it’s a cop-out to loan out your conscience to your employer, your neighbor, the majority, the Constitution, or the editorial page of Newsweek — and to understand that you’re faced with the awesome responsibility of testing and developing your conscience against the demands of real life, and then living according to the standards that you reveal. I want you to know that you are your own best and most qualified judge. If you ignore your own conscience you’re committing a particularly dangerous form of suicide — killing off your soul, and leaving behind the sort of dangerous robot who swerves from cradle to grave building gulags and genetically engineering more evil forms of smallpox.

(partially stolen from Gina Lunori’s Direct Action which itself is a liberally paraphrased update of a similarly titled essay by Voltairine deCleyre or some such, but you didn’t ask)

Part two goes like this:

Now I want you to expect the same from your friends, your co-workers, and even the police. Don’t let anyone who is doing something you know to be wrong get away with thinking that they don’t have to take responsibility for their actions. That means no “I’m only following what the law says,” no “I’m going to cede to the will of the majority,” no “I wouldn’t do it, except it’s my job,” no “if I didn’t do it, someone else would,” none of that bullshit.

To the extent that I had a “suggestion for a solution” to debate with M— H—, this was it. Not a “solution” in terms of a utopian endpoint for society at large, but just a reasonable code of conduct to apply to both of us — an egalitarian ethics (that is, an ethics that applies to everyone equally, without dividing people into castes or classes with varying qualities of ethical expectations and responsibilities).

That was the closest thing I had to “a solution” but to M— H— it was as good as nothing at all. “I’m not going to read this right now,” he wrote, “because it starts with ‘I want you, M— H—’ which means you’ve missed the point.” He concluded that my solution was really “just a big fat personal attack” and told me more explicitly what he was looking for:

Assume that whatever vector you need (protests, bills, laws, whatever) to get the end state you desire works. What end state do you desire? What system of laws, etc., do you think is the appropriate way to address narcotics, drugs, etc.?

I tried to disabuse him of his misunderstanding:

I think I got your point but you missed mine. I don’t want an end system of laws, etc. to address narcotics, drugs, etc. What I do want is for people to take responsibility for themselves and their actions and to demand the same of others, and to that end, I’m starting with you — trying to convince you to take on that challenge. The “end result” I have in mind isn’t a system that I’ll design and that other people will adhere to, but a society in which everyone realizes that to the extent they have will, they must assume responsibility for how they exercise it.

As for how this intersects with the particular case of narcotics, it means that people must take personal responsibility for their drug use and that people who intervene in the lives of drug users (cops, for instance) must take personal responsibility for the way in which they do so. Drug users can’t say “but dude, I was high” to pretend that they don’t own the consequences of their actions, and cops can’t say “I’m only following the law” when they cage a pothead. I’ve just got to convince them of that, which should only take another hundred billion emails… at this rate, only several weeks.

…I see it’s basically just a big fat personal attack.…

No, no! Read it again! It’s not meant as an attack at all. It’s a challenge, the same challenge I give to myself and test myself against and sometimes fall short at. You asked me what my solution is, and my solution is to try to hold myself to this standard, and to try to convince other people to do likewise.

But he kept pushing for me to pull back the curtain and reveal my unworkable utopia in which I play dictator and cackle over my hoard and concubines — there must be one back there somewhere. “In your society,” he asked, already implying a lot with that second-person possessive, “what happens if someone doesn’t accept responsibility? Who gets to decide if they’ve accepted enough responsibility? Who is responsible for dealing with those who no longer exercise sufficient responsibility?”

All fair questions, if taken naïvely literally, though really there’s an unspoken scaffolding of assumptions behind them: most offensively the assumption that in “my” society there must be some well-defined caste of people with authority and responsibility and some other caste without and some caste who gets to divide people up.

He followed this by prematurely attacking the utopian paradise he hoped I was going to try to construct: “I, too, would love to flip a switch and have everyone suddenly realize their duty to their fellow man, the amount of space their fellow men need, the need for personal responsibility and ethics, and, for that matter, their own personal potential. I would also like a million dollars in my primary checking account and a large harem… Systems that are designed around reasonable expectations instead of unrealistic ideals can roll with the punches a whole lot better. You can’t get rid of greed…”

All the while, ironically, he’s the one who can’t imagine a society that isn’t set up in pursuit of a utopian ideal.

At first I took the bait, though trying to avoid the hook, and talked about how we ought to deal with other people not taking responsibility for their actions, and how we go about judging when other people step over lines and we have to intervene. But I had a hard time accepting the framework of his question without it subtly forcing my answer into one that described a “system” of some sort, which really wasn’t what I had in mind at all. Finally, I wrote:

How each of us decides to act based on the decision that we make, though, is our own individual responsibility — not the dictate of a pre-written law or the output from a political establishment.

In my vision, there’s no set of authority-emblazoned citizens who have the ability to carry out justice on everyone’s behalf, and there’s no algorithm or game used to determine a result — I, you, and everyone else must decide what to do and must accept the consequences of our decisions.

What if we don’t? Well, it turns out we have no choice. We are responsible for our own actions, even if we pretend to loan out our responsibility to an institution or person. But in a practical sense, the only penalties are that A) we’re lying to ourselves, and B) we’re relinquishing control over our lives to some external force, thereby restricting our freedom, thereby inflicting our own punishment.

All systems have an error rate. What are your detection, correction, and prevention methods?

What system? The error rate is just human imperfection. This imperfection is only magnified when someone tries to codify human laws, or create human institutions to do our reasoning for us.

If your reasoning is out-of-whack and it’s causing you to do something rotten while thinking you’re doing something good, I can try to convince you otherwise. I can even try to put you in a cage if you’re not listening to reason and I think that what you’re doing is rotten enough that I want to spend my time that way, but not out of some abstract law or because I’ve been appointed CageMaster, but simply because I, taking responsibility for my own actions, am caging you.

Is this perfect? Hell no. If you’re stronger than me, maybe it’ll be me who ends up in the cage. And there’s no guarantee that the strongest one of us is the most sensible.

Fatal flaw? Not really. I never claimed that I was creating a perfect utopia, only showing a better way.

As our society is now, the stronger imprison the weaker, but are able to do so in vast numbers and without any person taking responsibility for being an imprisoner.

I, too, would love to flip a switch…

You asked for my program. It starts with you. It works one person at a time. The nice part is that it doesn’t require universal participation, majority participation, or even a critical mass. Each person who takes responsibility for themselves benefits themselves and those around them. Each incremental step is a step forward.

He thought I “totally dodged the question” of what happens in my as properly understood anarchism when somebody doesn’t accept responsibility. Which I did, I guess, but mostly because the question masked an assertion that I didn’t want to implicitly accept.

So I tried to meet the question, and the assumptions behind it, more directly:

In your society, what happens if someone doesn’t accept responsibility?

I guess it’s just too broad a question. Doesn’t accept responsibility for what? What do you mean by “what happens”? Do you mean, “what am I going to do about it?” or “what are you going to do about it?” or “what bad tidings must thereby befall the irresponsible person?”

It sounds like you’re asking me to come up with a commandment like “In Utopia, if you fail to accept responsibility for your actions, you will be set adrift on a raft and exiled from civilized society” or an admission like “In Utopia, there are no police, so if someone does something rotten because they refuse to take responsibility for their actions or because they’ve got a distorted idea of what their responsibility demands of them, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

But neither of those statements, nor anything like them, describe what I’m envisioning. I could go into more detail if someone doesn’t shove a sock in my keyboard soon, but a shortcut is that I’m not trying to envision a utopia in which everybody behaves harmoniously like in some seventh day adventist pamphlet illustration. I just have in mind a way for people to regain freedom and dignity and to extinguish the greedy and deadly inferno of the state. Not utopia, but not a bad consolation prize.

Alas, none of this made any headway. He still insisted that because I had never specified some final state that he could judge as good or bad, practical or impractical, there was nothing else in my argument that he could grapple with. He concluded that I just hadn’t developed my ideas to the state where they were worth arguing with, and suggested that maybe I assist my poor imagination by trying to write some science fiction about “my society” in order to better flesh out the details.

It really did seem to have all the talking-past-each-other quality of a “but this one goes to eleven” argument.

Ask an anarchist (as properly understood) to describe what an anarchist society looks like, and the utopianist expects to hear a description of some wholly-other, alien society, nothing like our own, that can be dismissed as an unlikely fantasy. But the anarchist instead responds with something much like “you’re soaking in it” — that is, anarchy is not some future utopia that the anarchist is striving for, but it is the way of interpreting and understanding the society the anarchist already lives in.

Oh, there is no Great Thunder God Oog, and his name isn’t some holy word that mustn’t be pronounced by man on pain of damnation, but just another syllable. Oh, there is no Santa Claus, it must be someone else’s generosity I have to be thankful for and I don’t have to worry about how the reindeer keep warm the rest of the year. Oh, there is no State, and that guy over there in the suit and tie ordering people around in its name is just a prick with lots of sycophants, not anyone I owe any respect to.

That’s all there is to it. Anarchy is what you see when you take off the blinders. It’s not utopian. In fact, it’s the only non-utopian political philosophy. And being that historically, proponents of anarchism have often been promoting utopian programs only quantitatively different from those of their socialist or liberal counterparts, and seeing as the word “anarchism” itself has such unfortunate and undeserved connotations, I think that those people (or is it “that person”) who adhere to anarchism as properly understood might well adopt the name “topianists” to make this distinction more clear.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • I posted an update about the ongoing IRS software modernization fiasco. They seem to have more or less thrown in the towel, after years of missing deadlines and busting budgets and burning through contractors. The latest news goes into some more detail about how they started playing fast and loose with their budget and their milestones as the project started taking on water faster than they could bail. Basically, when they would miss a milestone and run out of money, they would steal money budgeted for a future milestone and apply it to the work on the one they’d failed to complete under budget.
  • Robert Higgs reminds us that waste, fraud, and abuse in military contracting isn’t a bug — it’s a feature. And Ryan McCarl notes that “defense funding is not, as it stands, based on our national security needs [but] the political need to appease the defense industry and its dependents.” If we had a huge, bloated, cancerous, parasitical candy industry sucking on the public teat, we’d be wasting just as much money, but at least we’d have candy. As it is, though: The more we spend on war, the more war we get.
  • Clarence Lee Swartz’s book What is Mutualism? () is now on-line. It includes a section on “passive resistance,” including tax resistance, from which I take this excerpt:

    Many of the less important laws are openly and guilelessly ignored or violated every day, to say nothing of the constant and consistent evasion of taxes by rich and poor, pious and pagan, without the least sense of wrong-doing; but the citation of the foregoing is sufficient to point the way to the ultimate refusal of everyone to support or recognize any authority which denies equality of liberty or which fails to give an equivalent in services for every cent demanded for them.…

    Until a majority of the people can be brought to see the need for the legislative repeal of certain laws, passive resistance suggests itself as the best means for securing relief from the oppression of such statutes. This is a method that seems to occur most readily to the average American, for he is always eager to ignore and evade any law that is not supported by a preponderance of public opinion. He has no great reverence for law as such, and he is encouraged in that disregard of laws and regulations when he observes the impunity with which they are, in many conspicuous instances, violated and flouted. He sees, furthermore, that a great deal of sumptuary and otherwise obnoxious legislation receives only hypocritical support from many who were instrumental in securing its enactment, and this decidedly lessens his respect for it. The way is therefore open for making a law so unpopular that the community will not consent to its enforcement.…

    Everyone is familiar with the reluctance with which the average citizen faces the tax collector. Tax dodging, wherever possible, is practiced by high and low, rich and poor, pious and impious, without distinction, And, in all cases, without the slightest compunction. Since this habit is indulged in by persons who give no other evidence of dishonesty, it may be believed that the motive is not to shirk a just obligation, but that there is an almost universal feeling that no equivalent ever is received for money thus taken.

    This skepticism is due to the common knowledge that the politicians who administer the government are rarely capable business man, are primarily influenced, in the expenditure of the taxpayers’ money, by political considerations or motives of self-aggrandizement, and have every other temptation to become prodigal in dispensing funds the provision of which is not due to their own industry.

    Even the most uninformed citizen is aware that all government undertakings are incompetently conducted, that the taxpayers’ money is wasted right and left, that there are hordes of grafters in all such operations, who must be taken care of, and that favoritism, at the expense of efficiency, is everywhere the rule rather than the exception.

    On the other hand, all experienced business men know that no private enterprise could ever be successfully conducted by the methods pursued by political management and control, and that, were not the supply of funds for covering government deficits inexhaustible by reason of the power of compulsory taxation, every government project would be bankrupt today.

    Small wonder, then, that the harassed and beleaguered taxpayer turns eagerly and naturally to the only mitigation of his distress, which is to evade payment of his taxes wherever possible. The poll tax, the harshest form of taxation ever conceived, has now been abandoned in many states, for it was discovered that more and more citizens were evading it by the simple expedient of failing to register and vote, since the registration lists were the means relied upon by the assessor for locating the person who had no assessable property. Expediency, that ever-faithful friend of evolution and progress, has again pointed to a logical and serviceable form of passive resistance.

    Therefore, by withdrawing support from the State, where it may be done with impunity, and by ignoring it wherever possible, and where its hand bears most heavily upon the non-invasive citizen, the rigors of governmental interference with individual liberty and with the practice of the principles of Mutualism may be modified by creating a vacuum around the arch aggressor.

  • I noted that a federal grand jury had served a subpoena on a newspaper’s web site demanding the personal information of everybody who had left comments on the site about an article about a tax protester trial. A followup article from Silicon Alley Insider suggests that this absurdly broad subpoena — which asked for

    all records pertaining to those postings, including “full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers… the IP address,” et (kitchen sink) cetera.

    was because of a single one of the comments, which included the following:

    The sad thing is there are 12 dummies on the jury who will convict him. They should be hung along with the feds.

  • Are you considering withholding your California state taxes after Proposition 8 made second-class citizens out of people seeking same-sex marriages? Here’s a good letter template you can use to tell the politicians what you’re doing and why.

I went on at some length about my idea of the proper understanding of anarchism in contrast to utopian political philosophies, and complained that people frequently seem unable to evaluate political theory outside of a utopianist framework.

I was very interested, then, recently to read Tolstoy’s “Letter to the Editor of the Daily Chronicle” in which he comes up against a similar stubborn misunderstanding of his own species of Christian Anarchism and responds in a very similar way. Excerpts:

Ever since the appearance of my book, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, and of the article, Christianity and Patriotism, I frequently have had occasion to read in articles and in letters retorts, I shall not say to my thoughts, but to their misinterpretations. This is sometimes done consciously, and sometimes unconsciously, only through a sheer misunderstanding of the spirit of the Christian teaching.

“All that is very well,” I am told; “despotism, capital punishment, the armament of the whole of Europe, the oppressed condition of the labourers, and the wars are all great calamities, and you are right when you condemn the existing order, but how can we get along without a government? What right have we, the men with a limited comprehension and intellect, because it seems better to us, to destroy that existing order of things, by means of which our ancestors attained the present high degree of civilization and all its benefits? While destroying the government we ought to put something else in its place. If not, how can we risk all those terrible calamities, which must inevitably assail us, if the government is destroyed?”

But the point is, that the Christian teaching, in its true sense, has never proposed to destroy anything, nor has it proposed any new order, which is to take the place of the older one. The Christian teaching differs from all the other religious and social doctrines in this very thing, that it gives the good to men, not by means of common laws for the lives of all men, but by the elucidation for every individual man of the meaning of his life, by showing him what the evil and what the true good of his life consists in. And this meaning of life, which is revealed to man by the Christian teaching, is so clear, so convincing, and so unquestionable, that as soon as a man has come to understand it and so cognizes what the evil and the good of his life consists in, he can in no way consciously do that in which he sees the evil of his life, and cannot fail to do that in which he sees its true good, just as water cannot help but run down, and a plant tend toward the light.

But the meaning of life, as revealed to man by Christianity, consists in doing the will of Him, from whom we have come into this world and to whom we shall go, when we leave it. Thus the evil of our life lies only in the departure from this will, and the good lies only in the fulfilment of the demands of this will, which are so simple and so clear that it is as impossible to miss understanding them as it is absurd to misinterpret them. If you cannot do unto another what you wish that he should do unto you, at least do not do unto another what you do not wish that another should do unto you: if you do not wish to be compelled to work in a factory or in mines for ten hours at a time; if you do not wish your children to be hungry, cold, ignorant; if you do not wish your land, on which you can support yourself, to be taken from you; if you do not wish to be locked up in a prison and hanged, because through old age, temptation, or ignorance you have committed an illegal act; if you do not wish to be wounded and killed in war, — do not do the same to others.

All this is so simple, so clear, so incontestable, that a small child cannot help but understand it, and no sophist can overthrow it.

[W]hat must be the feelings of a Christian, who is approached with the demands that he shall take part in oppression, in the seizure of land, in capital punishments, wars, and so forth, demands which are made upon us by the governmental authorities[?]… that unquestionable knowledge of every man who is uncorrupted by false teachings, that he must not do unto others what he does not wish to have done unto himself, and that he, therefore, must not take part in acts of violence, in levying for the army, in capital punishments, in the murder of his neighbour, which is demanded of him by his government. Thus, the question for a Christian is not, as it is unwittingly and sometimes consciously put by the advocates of the government, whether a man has the right to destroy the existing order and put a new one in its place, — a Christian does not even think of the general order, leaving this to be managed by God, being firmly convinced that God has implanted His law in our minds and hearts, not for disorder, but for order, and that nothing but what is good will come from following the unquestionable law of God, which is revealed to us; the question for any Christian, or for any man in general, is not, how to arrange matters in an external or new way (no one of us is obliged to solve this question), — what is subject to the solution of every one of us, not at will, but inevitably, is the question as to how I am to act in the choice which presents itself to me all the time: must I, contrary to my conscience, take part in the government, which recognizes the right to the ownership in land in the case of those men who do not work upon it, which collects the taxes from the poor, in order to give them to the rich, which deports and sends to hard labour and hangs erring men, drives soldiers to slaughter, corrupts the masses with opium and whiskey, and so forth; or must I, in accordance with my conscience, refuse to take part in the government, whose acts are contrary to my conscience? But what will happen, what the government will be as the result of this or that act of mine, I do not know; not that I do not wish to know it, but I cannot know it.

I am told, “This is the destruction of government and the annihilation of the existing order.” But if the fulfilment of God’s will destroys the existing order, is not that an undoubted proof that the existing order is contrary to God’s will and ought to be destroyed?

I’ll return to this topic tomorrow, as I think this may be worth fleshing out some.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Some links that have graced my browser in recent days:

The Satyagraha Foundation for Nonviolence Studies recently came to my attention. It has a few pages that touch on tax resistance, including:

  • An interview with Kathy Kelly. Excerpts:
    Street Spirit
    Did the U.S. government ever press charges against Voices in the Wilderness for violating the sanctions?
    Kathy Kelly
    They would bring us into court with some regularity. It was curious because at one point there was a $50,000 fine. I thought, “What are you going to take — my contact lenses?” I just had to laugh. I mean, I haven’t paid a dime of taxes to the U.S. government as a war tax-refuser since 1980. So there is nothing they could take from me. The people that would go over were in the same boat. So good luck collecting from them!
    Spirit
    But as it turned out, they did fine your group $20,000, didn’t they?
    Kelly
    Yeah, they finally took us into court. And I think Condoleezza Rice inadvertently might have saved us. This is speculation on my part, but this much is true. Chevron settled out of court, acknowledging that they had paid money under the table to Saddam Hussein in order to get very lucrative contracts for Iraqi oil.
    Condoleezza Rice was the international liaison for Chevron while it was paying money under the table to get these lucrative contracts. So when we finally had our day in court, Sen. Carl Levin’s staffers were still digging up this information and it was beginning to become public evidence that Chevron, Odin Marine Inc., Mobil and Coastal Oil had all been paying money for these oil contracts under the table to Saddam Hussein.
    So there were big fish in the pond that broke the sanctions and there were little fish in the pond that broke the sanctions. I think some of the big fish said, “That is one hot potato. You drop that hot potato as fast as you can, and don’t make a big deal because those people are little fish but they’re mouthy little fish.” So they never tried to collect a dime from us. The money was just sitting there.
    Spirit
    Well, what exactly did happen to you when the U.S. government took you to court for violating the sanctions?
    Kelly
    We were found guilty and were fined $20,000. Federal Judge John Bates wrote in his legal opinion that those who disobey an unjust law should accept the penalty willingly and lovingly.
    Spirit
    Unbelievable! A federal judge lectures you about lovingly accepting this unjust fine using the words of Martin Luther King?
    Kelly
    Yes. We said to Judge Bates, “If you want to send us to prison, we will go, willingly and lovingly. We’ve done that before already. But if you think we will pay a fine to the U.S. government, then we ask you to imagine that Martin Luther King would have ever said, ‘Coretta, get the checkbook.’ We are not going to pay one dime to the U.S. government which continues to wage warfare.” At that time, supplemental spending bills appeared every year, sometimes two or three times a year, and congressional representatives and senators continued to vote yes on those spending bills for the military. So we said, “No, we won’t pay a dime of that fine.”
    Spirit
    You have also been a war tax resister for a long time.
    Kelly
    I’m a war tax refuser. I don’t give them anything.
    Spirit
    Oh, you’re not a 50 percent withholder, like many war tax resisters. You’re a 100 percent withholder?
    Kelly
    Yes, I’m a 100 percent withholder. I think war tax resistance is important but I happen to be a refuser. They haven’t got one dime of federal income tax from me since 1980.
    Spirit
    Why did you begin refusing to pay federal taxes entirely?
    Kelly
    I won’t give them any money. I can’t and I won’t. I won’t pay for guns. I don’t believe in killing people. I also don’t want to pay for the CIA, the FBI, the corporate bail-outs or the prison system. But particularly, I began as a war tax refuser. I wouldn’t give money to the Mafia if they came to my door and said, “We’d like you to help pay for our operations.” I’m certainly not going to pay for wars when I’ve tried throughout my adult life to educate people to resist nonviolently.
    Spirit
    How have you gotten away with not paying federal taxes ? Do you keep your income low?
    Kelly
    Many years I have lived below the taxable income. But in , someone from the IRS came to my home. I had in some years claimed extra allowances on the W-4 form. And I just don’t file. I haven’t filed . Now, that’s a criminal offense and they could put me in jail for a long time for that. If I was earning over the taxable income, I would just calculate how many allowances I have to claim so that no money is taken out of my paycheck. It says in the small print on the W-2 form to put down the correct number of allowances so that the correct amount of tax is taken out. Well, that’s easy. The correct amount of tax to take from me is zero, so I just do the math.
    Spirit
    Why do you think they haven’t come after you?
    Kelly
    Well, they have come to collect taxes. But I don’t have a savings account, and I don’t own anything. The IRS is like my spiritual director [laughs]. I don’t know how to drive a car, and I’ve never owned any place that I’ve lived in. I just don’t have anything to take.
    Spirit
    So has the IRS given up on even trying to collect?
    Kelly
    Once they came out to collect in 1998 when I was taking care of my dear Dad, who was wheelchair-bound, and a bit slumped over in the chair. Dad liked to listen to opera and I had a really awful old record player playing a scratchy record. I had been in the back of the house and I didn’t know she was coming, so I ran down to answer the door while the record player was making such a horrible noise. The apartment was fine but it only had a few sticks of furniture.
    The woman asked me if I was going to get a job, and I told her I couldn’t leave my father. Then she asked if I had a bank account, and I said no. She said, “And you don’t own a car?” And I told her I didn’t even know how to drive. Then she just kind of leaned toward me and said, “You know what? I’m just going to write you up as uncollectible.” And I said, “That’s a very good idea.” [laughs] They’ve never tried to collect since. There was just nothing to take! Zero. Nothing.
  • Correspondence between Bart de Ligt and Mohandas Gandhi. Here’s some of what de Ligt wrote in :

    On your side, you state that those who set themselves against Western wars pay, nevertheless, taxes, which are used by the State for war and the oppression of the colored peoples. That is quite true. In fact our anti-militarist struggle also is as yet only something very relative, and it must go on extending. But in any case, we have fixed clear and inflexible borders: we refuse absolutely all direct, personal participation in war and in its social and moral preparation. But several of us employ still other means of fighting against it.… Moreover, a few of us have already decided individually to refuse to pay any taxes, whilst the organization of which I am a member has already several times been the propagandist of collective refusal of taxation. But whereas refusal, even on a very restricted scale, to do military service has been morally and socially efficacious, the refusal to pay taxes by a restricted number of citizens only has so far had very little result, as the authorities, in confiscating property and inflicting fines, take possession of sums much larger than a direct payment of taxes would have brought them. From this point of view, your compatriots have already given some impressive examples of collective refusal, although they also were not able to avoid regular unfair demands of the Government.

    I think “the organization of which I am a member” may have been War Resisters International. Gandhi’s response to this point is an interesting one:

    A non-violent man will instinctively prefer direct participation to indirect, in a system, which is based on violence and to which he has to belong without any choice being left to him. I belong to a world, which is partly based on violence. If I have only a choice between paying for the army of soldiers to kill my neighbours or to be a soldier myself, I would, as I must, consistent with my creed, enlist as a soldier in the hope of controlling the forces of violence and even of converting my comrades.

    You can find more of Bart de Ligt’s thoughts on tax refusal, non-violent struggle, and Gandhi’s campaigns in the essay The Effectiveness of Non-Violent Struggle, also on the Satyagraha Foundation site.

And from the academic and related worlds:

“A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster” by Rebecca Solnit

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

In times of disaster institutions are overwhelmed, authorities vanish or are unable to keep up, society itself is spun ajumble, and people must rely on their wits and each other. What happens next?

Perhaps you’ve heard that with the thin fabric of civilization ripped suddenly away from us, we become bestial and savage in our civic nakedness: “nature, red in tooth and claw” reemerges, in some Lord of the Flies or Mad Max way, and, until we can bring ourselves back under the protection of our authorities and institutions…

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain… no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

―Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Rebecca Solnit says this is all — Max, Baalzebub, Hobbes, and the rest — something of an urban legend. More typically, when civilization breaks down in the face of disaster, the survivors crawl out of wherever they’ve managed to ride it out and they come together to help one another. Not only is this typical, usual, and ordinary, but it’s also such a delight and a welcome surprise to people who participate in it that they often feel a warm nostalgia for the disaster they’ve survived and for the latent parts of their characters that the disaster allowed to shine forth:

Just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, so human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster… [W]e revert to something we already know how to do.

Solnit gives us many examples, from her research of historical disasters and from her on-the-ground reporting of more recent ones, of this spontaneous grassroots organizing to cope with the aftermath of disaster, and of the delight people express when they recall what it felt like to be part of it.

She supplements this with summaries of the findings of the sociological subdiscipline of “disaster studies” — which finds that in times of disaster, the people on the ground who are most affected tend to cope with it creatively, generously, and cooperatively, while incidents of indiscriminate violence or panic are more likely to be found among the relatively safe members of the social and political elite, who are paranoid that unleashed mobs will threaten their authority and privilege.

“Elite panic,” indeed, is the term of art in the disaster studies community for this frequently-encountered phenomenon. “My own impression,” Solnit writes, “is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image. In a society based on competition, the least altruistic often rise highest.… Those in power themselves are often capable of being as savage and self-serving as the mobs of their worst fears.” These fears, in turn, help to justify the status and authority of these loathsome elites: just as Hobbes enlisted his nasty-brutish-and-short myth to justify the authority of royalty.

The elites eagerly deploy such myths because disaster can be particularly disastrous to authority. The Bush Administration’s response (and those of other state and local governments) to Hurricane Katrina is a familiar example.

“In the immediate aftermath of disaster, government fails as if it had been overthrown and civil society succeeds as though it has revolted: the task of government, usually described as ‘reestablishing order,’ is to take back the city and the power to govern… So the more long-term aftermath of disaster is often in some sense a counterrevolution.”

Solnit quotes Lee Clarke, one of the disaster scholars who coined the “elite panic” term:

Disaster myths are not politically neutral, but rather work systematically to the advantage of elites. Elites cling to the panic myth because to acknowledge the truth of the situation would lead to very different policy prescriptions than… that the best way to prepare for disasters is by following the command and control model, the embodiment of which is the federal Department of Homeland Security. Thus do panic myths reinforce particular institutional interests. But it is not bureaucrats who will be the first-responders when the next disaster… comes. It won’t even be the police or firefighters. It will be our neighbors, it will be the strangers in the next car, it will be our family members. The effectiveness of disaster response is thus diminished to the degree that we over-rely on command and control. This is another case where political ideology trumps good scientific knowledge about how the world works.

One of the themes of the book is that people do not just behave well in disasters, but extraordinarily well — a wellness that puts our ordinary lives to shame. Our ordinary isolation, selfishness, zero-sum competitiveness, and mutual suspicion seem to require a civilization to maintain them — when civilization is disrupted, we revert to our better, natural, undomesticated states. The state of nature, it turns out, is the opposite of of our solitary, nasty, and brutish civilized states. (Maybe Rousseau was right all along.)

The existing system is… mitigated every day by altruism, mutual aid, and solidarity, by the acts of individuals and organizations who are motivated by hope and by love rather than fear. They are akin to a shadow government — another system ready to do more were they voted into power. Disaster votes them in… Disaster reveals what else the world could be like — reveals the strength of that hope, that generosity, and that solidarity. It reveals mutual aid as a default operating principle and civil society as something waiting in the wings…

A world could be built on that basis… This is the only paradise that is possible, and it will never exist whole, stable, and complete. It is always coming into being in response to trouble and suffering; making paradise is the work that we are meant to do. All the versions of an achieved paradise sound at best like an eternal vacation, a place where we would have no meaning to make. The paradises built in hell are improvisational; we make them up as we go along, and in doing so they call on all our strength and creativity and leave us free to invent even as we find ourselves enmeshed in community. These paradises built in hell show us both what we want and what we can be.

Solnit interviewed a woman who had come through the 9/11 attacks who came to this conclusion: “People say it’s how people behave when things are bad that matters. But that’s easy. It’s how they behave when things are good.”

With this in mind, Solnit also considers how some people have managed to preserve these positive parts of their human nature even when civilization threatens it. Some of her examples are volunteers from groups like Habitat for Humanity, Burners Without Borders, the anarchist movement, and the Rainbow Gathering who have turned up at some of the disasters she’s reported on to help both in the immediate aftermath and during rebuilding:

The volunteers are evidence that it doesn’t take firsthand experience of a disaster to unleash altruism, mutual aid, and the ability to improvise a response. Many of them were part of subcultures, whether conservative churches or counterculture communities, that exist as something of a latent disaster community already present throughout the United States and elsewhere. Such community exists among people who gather as civil society and who believe that we are connected, that change is possible, and who hope for a better earth and act on their beliefs. They remind us that though disasters can be catalysts to bring out such qualities, disasters do not generate them; they are constructed by beliefs, commitments, and communities, not by weather, seismology, or bombs.