Martin Elson
This isn’t an argument against planning; it’s an argument against one plan for everyone. Anarchy rejects the ruler’s claim to be the only beginning, and in doing so keeps beginnings plural. It is democracy carried all the way through: not one ruler, not a majority ruling the rest, but everyone a beginning. It is democracy without the kratos (power or rule).
In everyday speech, chaos means randomness and disorder, and anarchy, as anti-politics, gets lumped in as chaos rather than order. The usual reasoning is equivocation: chaos is bad, anarchy is chaos, so anarchy is bad. Can Order come out of the chaos of many paths, maybe if there is one vision, Anarchy as Order, not following orders.
What chaos theory says
Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics showing that behavior that looks random can come from simple, deterministic rules and hide a deeper order. Fractals are one picture of this: self-similar patterns repeating across scales, made by feeding an equation’s output back into itself again and again. Oddly, even though the process is fully determined, or without free will, the result can’t be predicted. A system’s future is set by its starting state, with no randomness involved, yet the tiniest change to that state can send it down a completely different road.
People are feedback loops
Human interaction works like the butterfly effect: a small change can snowball, or jump, into very different outcomes. Every small decision and every bit of feedback shapes what comes next, which makes prediction hard. That’s chaos in the mathematical sense.
The state’s mistake
States build linear, cause-and-effect thinking into their structure: rigid, “orderly,” top-down patterns, with some window dressing of order by democracy from below. States try to control outcomes through fixed inputs, and they still produce chaos, often the worst kind. Libertarianism, or anarchism, puts the sovereignty or agency of the individual above that of the state. The difference comes down to feedback. Under a state, a few people decide and everyone else lives with the consequences. Under libertarianism, everyone’s choices shape the pattern, and liberty is what gets amplified.
Anarchism as quantum
To stretch the metaphor further: anarchism is quantum. It’s nonlinear and its concern is the very small, the individual. To borrow from Heisenberg, the more precisely we measure the momentum of libertarian action for change, the less we can pin down where any one libertarian stands, and vice versa. Momentum needs fuzzy positions. Coalitions that got things done, like ending the draft, the criminal justice reform push of the 2010s, and cannabis legalization, worked because nobody asked whether you were a minarchist, an anarcho-capitalist, a left-libertarian, or a “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” suburbanite. People agreed on the direction and left the coordinates vague. Precise positions kill momentum. Ask everyone to say exactly where they stand on roads, the Fed, intellectual property, open borders, or the non-aggression principle in edge cases, and the movement turns into a seminar. Libertarian purity fights prove the point. And here we are…
The Heisenberg analogy does creak in one place. In physics the trade-off has a fixed floor (ħ/2). In politics the constant seems to depend on how individualist the members are, and libertarians may have the biggest Planck constant of all. That’s one reason “herding cats” is the other go-to metaphor.
When emergence goes wrong
Here is the strongest case against all this. Emergence doesn’t only amplify liberty. Nobody planned the tulip mania, the housing bubble or a lynch mob either. Robert Michels studied the most democratic parties of his day and found that every one of them grew a ruling clique; he called it the iron law of oligarchy. And the state itself was never designed from scratch. It grew, one bandit settling down and calling his take a tax. If order without a master plan can produce a master, what was the point?
Michels was partly right, and that is why I don’t trust emergence on its own. The difference isn’t whether an order was planned or grew. It is whether its feedback still reaches the people making the decisions, and whether the people inside can leave. A bubble that bursts is the system finding out it was wrong; a bailout that keeps the bubble going is someone switching the feedback off. A state is what an emergent order becomes once it closes the exits and makes itself the only beginning. Oligarchy will keep trying to grow. The answer is the one the long-lived commons found: leaders who can be recalled, rules the users can change, and a door that stays open. Those are the lines in Start Here, and this is why they matter.
The take-home
The take-home lesson? Live in the moment, don’t expect perfect outcomes, engage with people, give feedback, and make sure the starting state, or beginning, is a good one. Being an ass along the way can snowball into a fractal of repeating asses. We don’t need asses amplified. The “chaos” of anarchism, amplifying liberty at the beginning, is a far more beautiful future than a goose-stepping bureaucracy that smells like ass. Wait, did I just step in kratos?
