AntiAnarch — For A New Danger To Civilization

Antifa developed at the end of World War II as a reaction to the Nazi soldiers coming home from their lost war and wanting to continue it in their national politics. The characteristic use of violence by fascists for political gain was met by Antifa which said that they would return blow for blow. In the long arch of history, the naturally larger groups supporting freedom have tended to overcome the smaller fascist minorities trying to impose their rule. Unfortunately, it was usually only after the minority had caused so much trouble that they had aroused the majority to see what danger their nations were in. It was also only possible after the weapons developments of the nineteenth century that changed the balance of power. Now we are seeing a new danger, Anarchists that threaten our civilization. They must be fought as actively as fascists, but mostly in different ways. Fascists largely use violence to attack the laws nations depend on. Anarchists use chaos to attack the laws and strategies that societies and civilizations depend on to function.

Civilization is an innovation largely created as humans left the hunter-gatherer tribal world for the farms and cities of civilization. It is a life support system that can support twenty or more times as many people as any previous ecology humans have lived in. Civilization is many things and should be understood as such, but one way it should be understood is as an ecology, because that is quite revealing. Civilization is an ecology that is created. It does not exist in nature any more than farms or cities do. It must be built and protected. Science can describe ecologies and their nature pretty well and can describe the interconnectedness that causes them to be healthy or ill.

Civilization is based on cooperation, which is unusual in nature. Evolution mostly operates by creating extreme competition to drive natural selection. It can select for cooperation though, not well, but it can. When humans entered the new ecology based on walking at least four million years ago, the time of australopithecines like Lucy, they were similar to modern humans. They had very good eyesight, dexterous hands, good walking ability, and other recognizable human features, but they had very small brains compared to any modern human. They were in a new ecology though that they were not well adapted to and it was hard for them to survive. Their survival strategy came to focus on communication and cooperation as shown by the rapid evolution of their brains. Again, that kind of strategy is rather unusual in nature and sort of in conflict with the more common strategy of mindless competition. That can be a problem for civilization. It is easier to destroy by conflict than to build with cooperation. We have an instinct for both conflict and cooperation. It is easy to see in the modern world. For civilization to survive we will have to choose to use and teach our cooperative instincts because our competitive instincts will lead to conflicts that will damage or destroy civilization.

Civilization is also a social system. It embraces many different peoples of different tribes and cultures. That does not happen in nature because while evolution has selected for peoples that have hybridized, the evolutionary drives push a blind competition that leads to replacement. Two populations with similar survival requirements cannot survive indefinitely in the same place. They mix or one eventually replaces the other. Civilization is amazing in that it offers a wide variety of niches and opportunities for different strategies of survival. Traditionally there were occupational castes of farmers, herders, crafters, scribes, warriors, priests, and kings. A variety of tribes could fit into different occupations and tribes of the same occupational castes tended to intermarry over time because they understood and respected each other. There was mixing between castes for a variety of reasons including war and slavery. Civilization brought people together genetically and culturally like no other social form could. The coming together of peoples is how humans have always progressed.

The problem is that there are many groups that do not like civilization. It requires internal peace and cooperation. It requires compromise. It requires controlling the commonest evolutionary drive to mindless competition. For some people, that drive to mindless competition is or seems to be a good strategy. Certainly the requirements of civilization, the cooperation and compromises needed as well as the constraints against breaking things that others have built can seem like onerous restrictions. If you believe that might makes right, the laws of civilization may just seem wrong to you or an intolerable inconvenience. Cooperation is the worst system of survival, except for all the rest.

Modern nations and civilizations are based on laws that go back to political charters like the American Constitution. They are the blueprint for nations and civilizations. They define where and how competition can occur as well as where and how people must cooperate as well as the consequences of cheating or breaking the law. The problem is that cheating can be a very good short term strategy for groups in the civilization, though in the long term it endangers the entire civilization. Much of what Machiavelli described in The Prince was about how effective cheating was and how hard it was to fight while preserving the laws and cooperation that made nations work. It has become harder as power has become more embodied in laws instead of individuals with their own incentive to protect order. Those laws must be protected for a civilization to survive let alone thrive.

In the United States, Newt Gingrich who is a student of biology wondered about this. Frustrated by the conservative's failure to gain dominant political power he started a campaign to recruit conservative political representatives that would challenge the laws of the nation in the pursuit of power. He wanted to bring the Law of the Jungle to the nation. It made sense from a biological point of view. Violence and conflict are very effective strategies. Now decades later, we see how that has developed. Our nations and civilization are endangered by those trying to gain power by weakening laws and the rules of civilization. Machiavelli would have recognized those strategies in a moment.

Do not mistake fascists for anarchists. Their strategies are different though the desire for power is the same. The fascist uses violence to make themselves the law. The anarchist destroys the law so that no one can control their power. Antifa tries to neutralize the violence of the fascist by blocking it with violence. (Having studied potential responses to violence extensively, it looks like only deterrence generally works.) So how could anarchy be fought? The first thing is to understand it, the reasons and dangers of it. It cannot be ignored. Civilizations have weak points and are vulnerable to damage. So the second thing is to recognize that civilization must be protected and anarchy must be fought. Civilization is many things but as said before, it is our life support system. It is most of the value that humanity can build.

Currently, the anarchists seem to be what are usually called Libertarians. Libertarian beliefs reject mutual responsibilities and social compacts. It rejects states and the laws of states. It values extreme individualism. Note that so does the most basic evolutionary strategy. Libertarianism seems to represent blind competition the way evolution does, but that kind of evolutionary strategy has been known as “red in tooth and claw”. It prevents the cooperation and compromises that civilization requires.

A funny thing is that there is a built-in weakness of Libertarianism and extreme individualism. Human evolutionary success, which has been great enough that it now endangers us, has been based on cooperation. Extreme individualists have trouble using that strategy, though we do see that they can unite in a cause. (Note that extreme individualists and power-seekers tend to eventually naturally turn on each other.) What we seem to be seeing today is wealthy, extreme individualists promoting anarchy. If you are wealthy you have far fewer constraints on yourself than most people and may feel that you should have none, especially if the wealth is inherited. Much wealth comes from “exploitation of the commons” including not taking responsibility for pollution. The creation of wealth is often the creation of civilization, but it can also come at a cost to the civilization. There is a balance needed. Extreme individualists are not about balance. What we are seeing with the “trucker protests” is a very effective attack on law and civilization by attacking commerce and political centers. What investigation is showing though is that these protests are funded by libertarians. They have always supported the think tanks and institutions that will promote their ideals The protesters are not supported by trucker associations or unions. Most of the protesters seem to be motivated by various conspiracy theories, but are supported by outside funding that is about politics rather than a conspiracy. They are “useful tools”. The protesters claim that it is about vaccine mandates. The truckers, as a group in Canada, tend to be highly vaccinated. Largely the protesters seem to be there because they are financially supported in their own conspiracy theory driven causes. The protest methods though are about attacking the strategies that allow civilization to work.

Many thinkers have considered the strategies of order and chaos. Order is necessary for human survival. Chaos is needed for progress. Like so many human things, there is a balance needed. So much is changing in the human world right now. We need to respond to climate change but vested interests… in civilization as it has been built… stand to lose from that change. Both the fascists and the anarchists attack laws and norms to get the changes they want and both are dangerous to civilization. Our Western philosophical history and our evolutionary nature focus on individualism but our interconnections and interdependencies become more obvious every year. Modern “conservative” political thinking is not about connectedness or balance. Humans are social animals that need mutualistic strategies somewhere between a honey badger and a social insect. Only the future will show how much cooperation is needed to survive in a civilization, but clearly it is a lot and right now we have forces attacking the foundations of civilization. Like Antifa fights fascists, we need a new army of AntiAnarchs to fight the anarchists. The strategies of the anarchists are generally weaker than the violence of the fascists, but no less dangerous. They are more subtle and prey on human weakness from the darkness of the internet. This group already exists, those that fight disinformation and protect the law, but we need a more explicit understanding of the danger and sources of the attacks on civilization so as to resist them. We need think tanks to expose them. There needs to be more confrontation as Antifa learned and as Machiavelli would explain. We need a new philosophical recognition of our connectedness and the limitations on freedom as dictated by the patterns of biology and the requirements of survival.

There is a myth about American freedom that comes from the unusual time when there was an American frontier. One civilization had replaced another and allowed for a type of mobility that had been rare since the start of civilization. Really, there was a time when a person could pick up if they wanted to and just go somewhere else to try their luck There was open land and endless possibility. Now those tend to be owned by vested interests but they make for a great myth. The stories are retold in ways that claim we had some special freedom that we have lost but that freedom was pretty tenuous at any time. You always had the freedom to starve or freeze, but as soon as you have a family you have given up a great deal of your freedom, willingly. Some of the most basic rules of a civilization are about who is responsible for taking care of children. That is part of the social compact and if you do not accept that do not expect the society to accept you. Being a part of a society and civilization is to agree to many other rules that restrict one’s freedom. Do not complain about it. Civilization offers far more benefits to the individual and family than does the wilds.

There seem to be about four or five types of people pushing the chaos that endangers our civilization.

There are the fascists that are for anything that weakens the law and causes discontent with the system as it is.

There are the wealthy libertarians that want anarchy and the state weakened so that they are not subject to the laws, social compacts or expectations of civilization. They do not want to pay taxes, the price of civilization. They are willing to pay to support think tanks and protesters that forward their goals.

Psychologists that wanted to examine how misinformation is propagated found two groups that seemed to do it most. There was a group that wanted to feel like they had some special information that others did not have access to. Some of these are the Qanon types. There was another small group that seems just by nature to want to cause chaos. I have met the type. They tend to respond to social notes with lists of conspiracy theories. They are usually not trying to show they have special knowledge or are smarter than others. They just like to cause chaos. Maybe it is manipulating others, but they are very dangerous because they do tend to be convincing and spread misinformation effectively. Recognize them and call them out. They will not care. They have rejected civilization.

There are the foot soldiers, the protesters on the streets. They tend to believe their conspiracy stories. They may have gotten convinced in a number of ways such as media personalities. A common manipulative trope is about children as in sex trafficking or human sacrifice. Humans respond to those stories by instinct. It is a common starting point of manipulation into some strange, false beliefs. Some people have fallen prey to pseudo-intelligent computer algorithms taking them down paths of conspiracy stories on social media. Some actually have mental health problems. Some think they have found something extremely important and bigger than themselves. They all believe that there is something that needs to be stopped. Often it is just an illusion like lizard people or JFK’s resurrection, but sometimes it is more. It is widely believed that the protests are a fight against a global conspiracy. That part is true. There is a long-term global conspiracy to advance humanity and human civilization. The changes it involves can be scary. Some people, both rationally and irrationally, do not want those changes.

Clearly, a lot of the conservatives have been convinced that liberals are just evil and trying to destroy everything America represents that is good. Lies have great power and much of the training to discern truth from lies comes from philosophy that has not been taught as much in the last century as science has ascended and claimed a monopoly on truth. These lies convert into profits for those that tell them and power for those that pay them to.

People that have been lucky enough to live where they grew up tend to be the most angered by change. I can understand that, but “you can never go back”. It is more than a place and time they have lost. It is their youth and its wonderful intoxication newness of life. They are angered by change. They are told that their freedom has been stolen and their world has been destroyed. Who they are being told it is being stolen by depends on the telling but the inevitable changes are a natural progression driven by economic development by people trying to survive and to build. It is not anything personal, but they are told it is and that it must be fought. It cannot be fought. It is change and change cannot be stopped any more than their aging can be. It must be adapted to. Still, these people that feel they have lost their freedom can be used as troops in the war on the institutions of civilization.

I am all for freedom but I understand the requirements of survival of a society and civilization. It constrains you and places requirements upon you. It repays you with the potentials of long-term, comfortable, secure survival that nature never provides. Civilization offers humanity an existence as far more than animals. It seems like the wealthy are all for their freedom, but not always so much for everyone else’s. The arc of history shows an increase in individual freedom as humans and civilizations develop, but it is not easily won. At the same time, obligations and regulations grow as well. For complicated reasons, I believe that freedom is necessary to long-term human survival, but that is another story. Right now, the unbalanced extreme individualism of the anarchists endangers us all and the civilization we depend on for survival. So gird your loins, sharpen your thoughts, fight misinformation. Do not tolerate conspiracy stories. Teach the logic and reason of critical thinking that is the armory of truth. There are people that just respond to conspiracy stories and believe them. To those that would weaken civilization, those people are useful tools, cannon fodder. We live in a tolerant society, but recognize the danger to it and do not tolerate it. Explain that their beliefs endanger us all and our future. Tell them that they will not even be tolerated unless they can use truth to support their beliefs. Yes, that is a slippery slope, but that is where survival exists. It is always precarious and must be worked for and sometimes fought for. Understand the source of the danger, the toxic individualism of the Libertarian. It is more than that. Civilization is a complicated thing that must be maintained. The moral battle is one for survival. Human survival as more than animals depends on civilization. The war to defend civilization is not a battle to be won but the ongoing struggles of all good men and women to defend their world and preserve it for future generations.