CRAIG EDWARD KELSO, Anarcho-Capitalism

The sentence you’re reading is a prime example of anarchy.

Language used to construct it spontaneously arose through peaceful cooperation and organic order.

There isn’t a language czar, and there are, in fact, competing codifiers we commonly refer to as lexicographers who fill dictionaries.

No one is commanded to do so.

Collection of words spring from usage, and the linguistic challenge has been to find the genesis of users, the etymology – not to obey legislative dictums.

  

Our day-to-day lives are infused with archy, all-encompassing governments, of course, and the point of Anarcho-Capitalism is to highlight them in parts, hopefully shedding badly needed light on their commonalities and functions.

But more so, in our workaday world, are plentiful examples of anarchy – government-less systems which we depend on to make the good we love and cherish bloom.

All of the hard sciences are anarchic. To be sure, boards of governmentalism exist and lord over more than a few academic journals. However, it’s no stretch to assert biology, physics, astronomy existed before bureaus decided to appropriate empirical science for official uses.

There wasn’t and isn’t one guy wielding the ship of science, and yet it’s done.

Prices of goods, white, gray, black market are also anarchic means, but of human communication.

The price of a breakfast plate is itself the result of many seemingly chaotic events coalescing toward an order, assembling themselves in deliciousness upon your table.

And nobody was forced to do a thing.

And yet it all happens.  

Orwell mused how he knew he  had  facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life (Why I Write).

And having a power of facing unpleasant facts is what my forthcoming tome, Anarcho-Capitalism, intends to do.

Crotch-grabbing hoodlums, decked out in bandana face covers aren’t ever anarchists.

They’re fashionable, and they’ve captured a certain media eye. Cameras pointed at them are telling a story. It’s a convenient narrative designed to embolden legislators and law enforcement, serving to encourage domestic docility. Portraits are only instantaneous caricatures, and they serve a purpose.

Wouldn’t it be nice.

Wouldn’t it be nice to believe life is neatly divided between good and bad, without much gray, purchasing this filtered image wholly: we’re kicking around, doing our own thing when thugs come upon us, tossing trash cans at McDonald’s storefronts, screaming Occupy slogans. Order is then preserved only thankfully as uniformed and badged persons administer justice, clearing the streets and making us safe once again. Wouldn’t it be nice.

For sure, these faux anarchists exist.

Fashions change, by definition, and these mostly college-aged students soberly realize raging against the machine pales in comparison to inducements offered by middle class lifestyle choices and societal maturity. 

And we should be honest about them, these shrill and ugly anarchists: they were only dabbling, slumming through an idea (anarchism) in an effort to defer boredom.

In college they hopped on the narcotic bandwagon. They allowed themselves requisite youthful promiscuous indiscretions. Maybe they picked up a ragged vanity press pamphlet, thrilling at the possibilities therein. Perhaps an underground punk band turned their head.

The notion of something like a stateless, lawless society entered them, made its way through this phase in their lives, and then promptly exited in a haze of responsible seat-taking at the bourgeois table.

It’s not a unique pattern.  

Maligning – setting as representative of anarchism undisciplined Peter Pans – a potentially great worldview is what such imagery has accomplished. The word anarchism has survived iterations connoting violence, is nearly synonymous with the word chaos, and is almost always used as a pejorative.

The above milieu and image has had its day, and now is the moment to retire them and it to back of the closet just beneath a folded, loathsome Che t-shirt.

Anarchism, the simple idea of self-rule, is worth consideration beyond whatever fad.

The implications are real for its holder, and anarchism requires the deepest reflection on what it means to be human.

It simply impacts everything.

And when freeing oneself philosophically, an immediate vacuum occurs. All other thoughts fade. It’s close to a void, at least for a little while. This mental space is often the most dangerous period in a person’s life.

To paraphrase Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, when such a moment unlatches shackles on the brain … everything appears permissible.

It’s a perfect gap of time, ideal for mischief and pain.

The void can be filled terror-free, however. It can be exciting and exhilarating rather than oppressive and libertine. No need to slam heroin in existential despair.

Instead, it’s a time to engage and fill that hole left by previous attachment to flags and politicians. It’s a time of discovery. It’s a time to fulfill life’s meaning by way of reason, rationality, romance, principle.

Such a world exists. It is real. It is yours. It can be had.

Nothing less than the building of civilization awaits.

All over the world, people are performing heroic deeds, laboring against tyrannical encroachments on their liberties. All over the world, people are trading, creating wealth and value in ways unthinkable at any other epoch in world history. All over the world, a revolution of gargantuan and very personal proportions is happening.

Anarcho-Capitalism isn’t a book of overly academic, footnoted , chart/graphed, turgidly dense prose. It’s not supposed to be an intellectual ending point.

While I wrote it to be exhaustive as a primer to the subject, Anarcho-Capitalism isn’t exhaustive on the subjects of anarchy and capitalism. Start here. Move on.  

And so, again, it’s time.

It’s time to gather up the courage to think beyond fashion and fad.

The following is my contribution.

And I mean it.

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To those who've asked WHERE the hell the book is, I can only report it's on its way to be published formally this year. All the pieces are there, but life interrupted its publication at the exact moment of distribution. It was a wonderful interruption, but an interruption none-the-less. There's a market for this thinking. All it really needs is those confident enough to espouse it. More information soon.