blog.kennypearce.net

Some Political Ramblings - "Controlled Anarchy"

It's been just over a month since I've written here and I noticed that according to my web-server logs, somebody actually looks at this page (specifically, twelve unique IPs hit this site in the last week - only one can be mine). I was most surprised at this finding, and so, when I determined that there was, in fact, something to be written, I decided that I had better write it.

I had just come from a few hours spent in Leon Uris's Trinity, when I got up to check my e-mail and noticed in the RSS feeds that Evolution gives me on my summary page that slashdot was running some rant about Lawrence Lessig predicting the imminent death of the internet. It turns out that slashdot was citing The Register, and The Register was citing Lessig's blog, and there was considerable misquoting going on.

However, regardless of any such considerations if a person such as myself who considers freedom of information particularly important and tends toward political discontent spends an entire afternoon reading Uris and Lessig, he is bound to come away ranting about some kind of oppression or another.

Of course we all recognize that the government is involved in only a trifling amount of oppression in the United States. The government is a pawn manipulated by greater and far more evil forces, such as Microsoft and AOL/Time Warner. This is a government "of the money, for the money and by the money", and of course it always was. The men who started the Revolutionary War and founded the United States were not particularly concerned with human dignity, but rather with not giving their money to an English government that didn't serve them as they thought it should. So much for idealism and America as the "white knight" out to show the world what democracy is really about.

So what's to be done? Well God once established a government of His own choosing, and it operated in a fashion surprisingly similar to Wikipedia. You're laughing, but I'm serious. Let's call the concept "controlled anarchy". It works like this: you have a set of rules or laws and provisions for what is to be done (by the people themselves, not some central governing body) if someone breaks these rules or laws. The vast majority of people agree on these rules and enforce them appropriately. This gives rise to all the "Law and Order" needed without any type of central government whatsoever! This is precisely what went on in ancient Israel during the period of the judges, and it is how Wikipedia operates. If you don't think a reliable encyclopedia can be created by a bunch of mostly untrained and unqualified people operating under these principles, go there and look up a topic you have personal knowledge of and check the article for accuracy. You'll find it's every bit as accurate and reliable as anything on the internet can be (which is to say it's usually right, but you should always consult more than one source), and probably less biased than anything you will find in print, due to being worked on by people of diverse ideological persuasions. If you don't think a country can run on these principles, brush up on your Jewish history and you'll notice that Israel was quite well governed during that period, by people who were followed out of respect for their skills and without any type of coercion. Justice was seen, attackers were fought off, and the nation prospered. You will also notice that God, through Samuel, objected quite strenuously when the people demanded a king.

Now of course the important questions is whether or not this can be done in the modern world. The answer? I don't have it. Go ask someone else. What I do know is that this represents the best government possible (if, that is, you can call it a government at all) and we can certainly move closer to it than we are now. Minarchism, then, with the (possibly unattainable) ultimate goal being this "controlled anarchy". The best of luck and the help of God to the world in getting there.