Anarchy
Anarchism is a political ideology that has become more and more popular these days. With the growing totalitarian methods of our current democratic societies, where people are being bugged, phone calls are being tapped and surf habits on the web are being documented (it's to "enhance" your "freedom," remember?), people today are getting very critical of any present authority. Children learn that leadership is Nazism and discrimination, and that they should be their own masters to lead the future liberal society into a new golden age of economical progression. Will they make it?
According to the anarchist logic, they will. Anarchism believes that society functions best when we have no State authority and people are allowed to do what they please. For most people, this sounds a lot like our society today: as long as you drag your butt to work every day at eight o'clock in the morning and pay your bills, you're free to do most things, especially if you've got money to cover for it. Anarchism could therefore in many ways be seen as an off-shot of liberalism, where the individual and his/her intentions are trusted to be able to co-operate in a social group and administer itself without someone to tell them what to do.
For anyone who's been in a class room today, or worked on a large business project with several co-workers, or taken the family out on a week's vacation, it's more or less obvious that many people have a problem performing a task or taking care of their personal problems, without someone to either guide them or tell them explicitly what to do. But,  like with all things, power can be abused or become corrupt, and this is the kind of authority we should be attacking; the false power that doesn't serve a higher purpose beyond the interest of a few individuals.
Anarchism, or ignoring the function of authority, is stupid, because it's not realistic. We already tried letting people rule each other, as seen in Soviet Russia and Cambodia - what happened? The few "smart" people took control over the workers and manipulated them for their own selfish ends. The utopian idea of equality and peace between all people around the world has never turned into reality, and never will, because since most people by nature only seek personal pleasure and wealth unless someone tell them otherwise, they will viciously compete with each other despite that "equality," to try to become the new Stalin or Pol Pot. Anarchists have a point though: our society today is corrupt, because it forces people through dogma to think in a certain way, due to a lack of consensus on why we're here, which values to uphold, and how to move forward. Loss of direction internally means the State has to oppress people externally.
Like most things in life, some things are true, some are not. Not all leadership is "bad," just because our leaders today are corrupt - and knowing most of the problems are caused by people who don't know what they want nor know how they will solve the mess they've put us all in, the solution could no way be a leadership-free society. No such society exists, for there is always power, only in different forms. What we need, and the intelligent anarchists agree, is to remove the authority that serves no purpose, create consensus among people, and install new leadership based on what's good for the whole, thus ensuring true freedom.
by Alex Birch
June 14, 2007
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