Your distinction between gnostic and directional anarchists maps cleanly onto a divide I’ve watched for years: some libertarians treat the ideal end-state of complete exit as the only legitimate political condition and collapse all real-world jurisdictions into “not-A,” refusing to distinguish between degrees of freedom, adjacent possibilities, or the strategic value of incremental improvements. To them, every government is equally illegitimate, every tradeoff equally compromised, and every step short of perfection equally meaningless. By contrast, others keep the same destination in view but operate on real terrain, recognizing that some institutional arrangements widen the space for future exit while others close it, and that the climb has a topography requiring tradeoffs, sequencing, and adjacent-possible moves. One mindset keeps its principles spotless by never touching the ground; the other moves the needle by understanding the slope.
Max, I love your attitude and vision. I don't knownwhat kind of anarchist I might be. At first I thought that a government based on Living Systems could only arise after a total collapse of our current system, which is not scalable to the planetary level. But then I began to see ways in which it might be applied here and there to at least make our governments less bad. Anyway, I do believe that I have an over-arching strategy to arrive at the goal of a truly functional way to organize our human collective at all scales, from local to planetary. I've been thinking out loud about it on my own substack. I am heartened, almost daily, by finding kindred spirits trying to find a way forward out of the mess we made of our nest.
Assuming we have the same idea of living systems, I absolutely agree. The 'a' word can be scary, so I hesitate to use it. That said, when we take a living systems view (and not a 'systems thinker' view) we will find greater humility and try to set up protocols for the emergence of a more organic society. High modernists think of society as being like a machine.
Excellent point, which begs the question: what are the indisputable evidence based principles of organic structures and processes? Fractal, partly decentralized power and decision making, positive and negative feedback loops, flexible membranes, polarized brain hemispheres, and Heart.....what else?
But you already met them. Prospera, network states idea, liberland etc etc.
People are already building it. The path is to build alternative and provide an exit for those who want it
P.s. also there is an example in the past of flourishing and enduring civilization built on such principles: greek polices.. effectively a pluralistic patchwork of microstates, united by common trade and interests
I wish I was both gnostic and directional. I’m working on a PhD to solidify my ideas in reality. My thought is that it will lead to a way forward that is set in reality and provides a real way to live without coercive relationships!
It seems time to stop talking ideals and plant some real world solutions. My words.
In draft form only, my proposed Q is this: What conditions, present at the level of the individual and in the relationships between individuals, naturally produce thriving at every scale?
I thought you might be interested. I find your work very inspiring!
(Thank you! I am honored to learn my work inspires you.)
In a way, I'm currently writing a book on this. I wish I could offer a concise answer, but I'm of the mind that we need a more holistic life philosophy.
Let's just say I'm writing a book virtually no one will read. I just hope the ideas aren't lost to time.
One more thing, as we ponder and work our thoughts out, they are released into the collective. I find more and more people who agree to various degrees.
I wish this were so. I would like to find the key to persuading others in this way. If you have any good ideas for modest projects, feel free to reach out!
Interesting piece, and a better case than I usually see in the "abolitionist vs. incrementalist" argument.
I do tend to find the "gnostic anarchist" descriptor something of a strawman, though, and believe that "directional anarchists" who DISMISS the less compromising sorts suffer from a calculation problem:
1) voting doesn't mater in a fully corrupted system. If the system ends up in tyranny, and it is only the illusion of direction, then we have been duped, and the outcome is the same
2) We cannot head in the right direction without the right tools. Step one should be building these tools
"The gnostic mistakes the clarity of the destination for a map. He has no path. He proposes no sequence of steps from Z to A. He offers no account of which tradeoffs move the position forward to Y and which entrench it at Z. Knowing precisely what the summit looks like, he declines any serious discussion of the climb, and treats anyone studying the slope as having compromised his principles."
This is a feature of modern critical theorists (who are a kind of gnostic, I think): they are purely negative, obsessed with dismantling and eroding... and with no plan to build or make anything. That tracks, since most of them have never built anything in their lives.
You say: "most libertarian anarchists are gnostics." I'm curious what you base that on. From my own experience, I don't find that most libertarians are gnostics. But perhaps that's because I mostly hear from people who develop policy and work within the system (Cato, Pacific Policy Institute, etc.)
First, I admit this claim is not scientific. In response to your perspective on the policy people, I would also say that most libertarians at the think tanks are not anarchists. (Or if they are, they don't say much about it.) A libertarian anarchist (or ancap), to me, anyway, is a subset of libertarians whose goal is a stateless society rather than a minimal state. Of course, these arguments tend to be gnostic/theoretical, too, whether minarchist or anarchist. To answer your question: I base that claim on my interactions with anarchists, which are probably not strong enough to support it. So good call.
Anarchy is an extremely scary word to me. I listened to your podcast about subscription government, and while I understand where you’re coming from, I think what you’re really making an argument for is the smallest possible government. That's because, practically speaking, government is almost by definition a monopoly for many of its functions, and since monopolies are at best a necessary evil to be resorted to only when necessary, the fewer things that government does, the fewer monopolies we’ll endure.
To me, the private sector is the ideal place for competition. There are many situations and challenges that, almost by necessity, must be relegated to the public sector, which practically have to be monopolies—for example, police and fire protection and national defense. I don’t see how it would be feasible to have competition for, say, national defense, because the duplication, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness would be overwhelming. Public transportation is a classic case. It began with multiple private sector competitors, but as the rise of the automobile took hold, private companies weren’t able to make it financially, so there was a market failure, and now public transportation has taken over things like rapid transit and passenger trains that we as a society consider necessary but cannot be profitably provided by the private sector.
The bottom line is that in cases of
market failure or if it’s impractical for there to be multiple providers, public monopolies are a necessary evil, but we should try to minimize that, and therein lies the wisdom of conservative philosophy, which treasures free markets and free people.
When it comes to choice in government in the United States, we have 50 states; some red, some blue. Blue states have bigger, more expensive government; red states have smaller, less expensive government. People in the US are free to choose between the two.
Maximizing freedom of choice in the cost and extent of government is a good argument for federalism and states' rights. The federal government in the US, by definition, has monopolies in certain public sector functions, so the fewer that are resident in the federal government and left to the states, the more freedom of choice US residents have in picking their government, freedom exercised by voting with their feet.
When it comes to nation-states, the dominant form of global governance since the 17th century, people aren’t necessarily completely free to move from country to country, but in fact all the nations are competing for human resources and capital, and that’s really why we don't have a global public sector monopoly. That's probably for the best, since people can and do vote with their feet through emigration, although such international mobility is not as frictionless as intrastate mobility is in the US. Those who want one world government would argue to the contrary, and there are upsides to a world government in theory (e.g., world peace), but I think the downsides pose some pretty significant trade-offs. We do have the UN, but it’s pretty weak and ineffectual.
So, I agree with you on the desirability of public sector competition, but I think realistically it’s between states in the US and nation states in the world. I find it hard to envision how competition for government services within any particular jurisdiction would actually be practical.
I understand that one finds it "hard to envision" yet arguing from incredulity strikes me as arguing from a failure of imagination. Even, for example, with national defense, polycentric defense is not only possible but has some precedent:
I used to have my hangups about it as well. I had a kind of A-Ha moment many years ago and I'm firmly in the anarchist camp now.
Another article to look at might be "The Obviousness of Anarchy" by John Hasnas. It's not hard to find. It's not long, good arguments with real world examples, and is sufficiently footnoted.
It may be that my imagination is limited, but I’m speaking from many decades of experience. If competition were practical in areas like national defense, public transit, police services, and fire protection, I would support it. Competition is generally preferable to monopoly. However, I remain unconvinced that it can work effectively in those particular functions.
That’s one reason I favor keeping government as small as possible and leaving everything that can be handled by the private sector to the private sector. The fewer monopolies, public or private, the better.
Ancient Rome experimented with private firefighting, but history also demonstrated the limitations of that approach.
I read the paper you kindly shared on polycentric defense, and I remain skeptical. To me, it sounds similar to vigilantism—private groups stepping in when government fails to provide security against crime or external threats. While that may sometimes occur out of necessity, it strikes me as a poor substitute for effective public institutions.
When it comes to core public safety functions—defense, policing, and firefighting—I believe a government monopoly is often the least bad option, provided it is well run and accountable.
That’s where democracy comes in. We don’t create competition by having multiple armies or police forces; we create it through competing political parties. If citizens don’t like how those services are being managed, they can vote for new leaders who will run them differently.
You might be right. What I'm trying to do with directional anarchy is to join with those like you who think our governments need we need a lot more decentralization. Our collaborations and our objectives will almost certainly be similar. For example, you seem quite comfortable with federalism. That would be a great start. If we got to the point that we had to argue about defense, that would be a good problem to have. That said, the Hanseatic League did a very good job of maintaining that arrangement, which involved coordination on defense, via treaties. In any case, I think you can agree we need to move toward A, even if our paths diverge further down the road.
I agree we have much common ground. I am not a happy customer of the government at this point, so anything that has the potential to improve the situation merits serious consideration, and I think competition is perhaps the best way to achieve excellence.
I think that also argues against the collectivist mentality of communism. My biggest concern right now politically within the US is the rise of the DSA, which seems quite hostile to the competition in meritocracy.
I agree 100%. In fact, that’s what makes free markets and free people the best path to prosperity. However, some areas are exceptions to that rule, and they are the exceptions that prove the rule. As the world is currently organized, the competition in areas such as national defense rests among nation-states; if you don’t like one country, you can go to another one, which is what drives the immigration crisis.
Your distinction between gnostic and directional anarchists maps cleanly onto a divide I’ve watched for years: some libertarians treat the ideal end-state of complete exit as the only legitimate political condition and collapse all real-world jurisdictions into “not-A,” refusing to distinguish between degrees of freedom, adjacent possibilities, or the strategic value of incremental improvements. To them, every government is equally illegitimate, every tradeoff equally compromised, and every step short of perfection equally meaningless. By contrast, others keep the same destination in view but operate on real terrain, recognizing that some institutional arrangements widen the space for future exit while others close it, and that the climb has a topography requiring tradeoffs, sequencing, and adjacent-possible moves. One mindset keeps its principles spotless by never touching the ground; the other moves the needle by understanding the slope.
^^^^^^ This all day ^^^^^^
Max, I love your attitude and vision. I don't knownwhat kind of anarchist I might be. At first I thought that a government based on Living Systems could only arise after a total collapse of our current system, which is not scalable to the planetary level. But then I began to see ways in which it might be applied here and there to at least make our governments less bad. Anyway, I do believe that I have an over-arching strategy to arrive at the goal of a truly functional way to organize our human collective at all scales, from local to planetary. I've been thinking out loud about it on my own substack. I am heartened, almost daily, by finding kindred spirits trying to find a way forward out of the mess we made of our nest.
Assuming we have the same idea of living systems, I absolutely agree. The 'a' word can be scary, so I hesitate to use it. That said, when we take a living systems view (and not a 'systems thinker' view) we will find greater humility and try to set up protocols for the emergence of a more organic society. High modernists think of society as being like a machine.
Excellent point, which begs the question: what are the indisputable evidence based principles of organic structures and processes? Fractal, partly decentralized power and decision making, positive and negative feedback loops, flexible membranes, polarized brain hemispheres, and Heart.....what else?
If you can aggregate these, it's the stuff of a book!
-Emergent complexity flowing from simple rules
-Societies : ecosystems :: organizations : organisms
-Constructal Law (Law of Flow)
-Healthy mix of competition and cooperation
-Innovation is mutation
-Self-organizing
-Scale matters but so do niches
-Failure and extinction are necessary a part of the cycles
-Diversity creates resilience
-Decentralization creates resilience (antifragile systems)
-Knowledge is dispersed
Thank you. Feel free to write that book. I have the vision, but not the skill set. Own it. Run with it.
One is reality based, the other is as lost to the real word as the most ardent socialist...and as dangerous...
But you already met them. Prospera, network states idea, liberland etc etc.
People are already building it. The path is to build alternative and provide an exit for those who want it
P.s. also there is an example in the past of flourishing and enduring civilization built on such principles: greek polices.. effectively a pluralistic patchwork of microstates, united by common trade and interests
Exactly. I should have put greater emphasis on the examples. More doing. Less talking.
We need better tools first. Many of these network states have already become corrupted because their tools were not antifragile enough.
I love those thoughts and agree.
I wish I was both gnostic and directional. I’m working on a PhD to solidify my ideas in reality. My thought is that it will lead to a way forward that is set in reality and provides a real way to live without coercive relationships!
It seems time to stop talking ideals and plant some real world solutions. My words.
In draft form only, my proposed Q is this: What conditions, present at the level of the individual and in the relationships between individuals, naturally produce thriving at every scale?
I thought you might be interested. I find your work very inspiring!
(Thank you! I am honored to learn my work inspires you.)
In a way, I'm currently writing a book on this. I wish I could offer a concise answer, but I'm of the mind that we need a more holistic life philosophy.
Let's just say I'm writing a book virtually no one will read. I just hope the ideas aren't lost to time.
A holistic life philosophy? I’m intrigued.
I do have an answer to my question and I’m still playing with the ideas to see if they are true, valid, and naturally moral (meaning, non-coercive)
To me writing books, articles, and notes feels important for you to work out your own thoughts! I’ll read it when you’re done!!
One more thing, as we ponder and work our thoughts out, they are released into the collective. I find more and more people who agree to various degrees.
I wish this were so. I would like to find the key to persuading others in this way. If you have any good ideas for modest projects, feel free to reach out!
Thanks 🙏 That’s a gracious offer. I may take you up on that as I work on my PhD.
Love the framing here.
Interesting piece, and a better case than I usually see in the "abolitionist vs. incrementalist" argument.
I do tend to find the "gnostic anarchist" descriptor something of a strawman, though, and believe that "directional anarchists" who DISMISS the less compromising sorts suffer from a calculation problem:
https://knappster.blogspot.com/2010/11/blast-from-past-without-net-compromise.html
Ooh, I'm excited to read this.
It's overly long and the prose gets pretty purple. These days I write to op-ed length and am always appalled at how verbose I get in my older stuff.
This is how every writer feels, I think.
Directional Anarchist here!
1) voting doesn't mater in a fully corrupted system. If the system ends up in tyranny, and it is only the illusion of direction, then we have been duped, and the outcome is the same
2) We cannot head in the right direction without the right tools. Step one should be building these tools
Keep rocking Max. Good stuff.
"The gnostic mistakes the clarity of the destination for a map. He has no path. He proposes no sequence of steps from Z to A. He offers no account of which tradeoffs move the position forward to Y and which entrench it at Z. Knowing precisely what the summit looks like, he declines any serious discussion of the climb, and treats anyone studying the slope as having compromised his principles."
This is a feature of modern critical theorists (who are a kind of gnostic, I think): they are purely negative, obsessed with dismantling and eroding... and with no plan to build or make anything. That tracks, since most of them have never built anything in their lives.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/social-justice-as-a-gnostic-cult
You say: "most libertarian anarchists are gnostics." I'm curious what you base that on. From my own experience, I don't find that most libertarians are gnostics. But perhaps that's because I mostly hear from people who develop policy and work within the system (Cato, Pacific Policy Institute, etc.)
First, I admit this claim is not scientific. In response to your perspective on the policy people, I would also say that most libertarians at the think tanks are not anarchists. (Or if they are, they don't say much about it.) A libertarian anarchist (or ancap), to me, anyway, is a subset of libertarians whose goal is a stateless society rather than a minimal state. Of course, these arguments tend to be gnostic/theoretical, too, whether minarchist or anarchist. To answer your question: I base that claim on my interactions with anarchists, which are probably not strong enough to support it. So good call.
Anarchy is an extremely scary word to me. I listened to your podcast about subscription government, and while I understand where you’re coming from, I think what you’re really making an argument for is the smallest possible government. That's because, practically speaking, government is almost by definition a monopoly for many of its functions, and since monopolies are at best a necessary evil to be resorted to only when necessary, the fewer things that government does, the fewer monopolies we’ll endure.
To me, the private sector is the ideal place for competition. There are many situations and challenges that, almost by necessity, must be relegated to the public sector, which practically have to be monopolies—for example, police and fire protection and national defense. I don’t see how it would be feasible to have competition for, say, national defense, because the duplication, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness would be overwhelming. Public transportation is a classic case. It began with multiple private sector competitors, but as the rise of the automobile took hold, private companies weren’t able to make it financially, so there was a market failure, and now public transportation has taken over things like rapid transit and passenger trains that we as a society consider necessary but cannot be profitably provided by the private sector.
The bottom line is that in cases of
market failure or if it’s impractical for there to be multiple providers, public monopolies are a necessary evil, but we should try to minimize that, and therein lies the wisdom of conservative philosophy, which treasures free markets and free people.
When it comes to choice in government in the United States, we have 50 states; some red, some blue. Blue states have bigger, more expensive government; red states have smaller, less expensive government. People in the US are free to choose between the two.
Maximizing freedom of choice in the cost and extent of government is a good argument for federalism and states' rights. The federal government in the US, by definition, has monopolies in certain public sector functions, so the fewer that are resident in the federal government and left to the states, the more freedom of choice US residents have in picking their government, freedom exercised by voting with their feet.
When it comes to nation-states, the dominant form of global governance since the 17th century, people aren’t necessarily completely free to move from country to country, but in fact all the nations are competing for human resources and capital, and that’s really why we don't have a global public sector monopoly. That's probably for the best, since people can and do vote with their feet through emigration, although such international mobility is not as frictionless as intrastate mobility is in the US. Those who want one world government would argue to the contrary, and there are upsides to a world government in theory (e.g., world peace), but I think the downsides pose some pretty significant trade-offs. We do have the UN, but it’s pretty weak and ineffectual.
So, I agree with you on the desirability of public sector competition, but I think realistically it’s between states in the US and nation states in the world. I find it hard to envision how competition for government services within any particular jurisdiction would actually be practical.
I understand that one finds it "hard to envision" yet arguing from incredulity strikes me as arguing from a failure of imagination. Even, for example, with national defense, polycentric defense is not only possible but has some precedent:
https://www.independent.org/wp-content/uploads/tir/2020/09/tir_25_2_08_coyne.pdf
Anyway, would you think it better if it were possible?
I used to have my hangups about it as well. I had a kind of A-Ha moment many years ago and I'm firmly in the anarchist camp now.
Another article to look at might be "The Obviousness of Anarchy" by John Hasnas. It's not hard to find. It's not long, good arguments with real world examples, and is sufficiently footnoted.
It may be that my imagination is limited, but I’m speaking from many decades of experience. If competition were practical in areas like national defense, public transit, police services, and fire protection, I would support it. Competition is generally preferable to monopoly. However, I remain unconvinced that it can work effectively in those particular functions.
That’s one reason I favor keeping government as small as possible and leaving everything that can be handled by the private sector to the private sector. The fewer monopolies, public or private, the better.
Ancient Rome experimented with private firefighting, but history also demonstrated the limitations of that approach.
I read the paper you kindly shared on polycentric defense, and I remain skeptical. To me, it sounds similar to vigilantism—private groups stepping in when government fails to provide security against crime or external threats. While that may sometimes occur out of necessity, it strikes me as a poor substitute for effective public institutions.
When it comes to core public safety functions—defense, policing, and firefighting—I believe a government monopoly is often the least bad option, provided it is well run and accountable.
That’s where democracy comes in. We don’t create competition by having multiple armies or police forces; we create it through competing political parties. If citizens don’t like how those services are being managed, they can vote for new leaders who will run them differently.
You might be right. What I'm trying to do with directional anarchy is to join with those like you who think our governments need we need a lot more decentralization. Our collaborations and our objectives will almost certainly be similar. For example, you seem quite comfortable with federalism. That would be a great start. If we got to the point that we had to argue about defense, that would be a good problem to have. That said, the Hanseatic League did a very good job of maintaining that arrangement, which involved coordination on defense, via treaties. In any case, I think you can agree we need to move toward A, even if our paths diverge further down the road.
I agree we have much common ground. I am not a happy customer of the government at this point, so anything that has the potential to improve the situation merits serious consideration, and I think competition is perhaps the best way to achieve excellence.
I think that also argues against the collectivist mentality of communism. My biggest concern right now politically within the US is the rise of the DSA, which seems quite hostile to the competition in meritocracy.
This is troubling me as well. It makes me sympathize with the Red Scare(s) much more.
Interesting that police services was one of the first examples given in the Hasnas piece I mentioned earlier.
Hasnas?
https://underthrow.substack.com/p/the-obviousness-of-anarchy
https://underthrow.substack.com/p/common-law-colonialism-a-vision
Yes, see my prior reply. "The Obviousness of Anarchy" by John Hasnas
https://underthrow.substack.com/p/the-obviousness-of-anarchy
https://underthrow.substack.com/p/common-law-colonialism-a-vision
Competition for anything results in improvements for all, as long as the information is shared openly.
Why? Because competition forces us to discover new knowledge, new techniques, and trial and error. Evolutions of systems.
I agree 100%. In fact, that’s what makes free markets and free people the best path to prosperity. However, some areas are exceptions to that rule, and they are the exceptions that prove the rule. As the world is currently organized, the competition in areas such as national defense rests among nation-states; if you don’t like one country, you can go to another one, which is what drives the immigration crisis.