I don’t know if I’m wrong. Of course, like most people I want to be right, but wanting to be right and actually being ahead of the curve are different things. What we can do is say how we would find out we’re wrong, what history has already tested, and the lines we won’t cross. The rest of the book hangs off those three things.
It also holds writing that argues against it, chosen on purpose. Some of those points are right, some a wrong map with a coastline or two drawn right. Some of it is the strongest case against the leanings argued here — not a straw man, but the hardest objections to answer. Each borrowed piece carries a note: why it’s here, and which parts run counter to the premises here, and why.
How to find out
Start with a distinction that gets blurred constantly. An argument is valid when its conclusion follows from its premises. That is all. Garbage in, valid garbage out. Whether it is true is another question, and logic alone can’t answer it.
Ask for the proof of any claim, then the proof of that proof, and you end in one of three places: a regress that never stops (turtles all the way down), a circle, or an axiom taken on trust. Hans Albert called this the Münchhausen trilemma. Every system that claims to have proved liberty, or socialism, or God, or the market, has quietly picked one of the three and called it bedrock. Usually it is an axiom dressed up as a proof.
The three aren’t equally bad. Turtles all the way down sounds humble, but nobody lives on it: people who say everything is groundless still lock their doors and trust their brakes. They have picked axioms; they just won’t own them. Having an axiom isn’t the problem. Making it immune to challenge is, whether by forbidding the question, giving it the run-around, patching the theory after every failure, stretching a word to cover every counterexample, or never answering at all. The test for any starting point: would it be kept when it cuts against the argument? If it never does, it was picked backwards from the conclusion.
William of Ockham said plurality should never be posited without necessity. The razor is a tiebreaker, not a proof. When two explanations fit the evidence equally well, the one that needs fewer extra assumptions wins: it has fewer places to hide, and, as Popper argued, the simpler claim is the easier one to test. The razor is also the best self-check: if a view needs a fresh excuse every time it fails, it is multiplying assumptions to survive, and that goes for our side as much as anyone’s. It has limits. A simple wrong answer doesn’t beat a complicated right one, and what looks “simple” depends on where you start. To many people, “order needs a ruler” sounds simpler than order without one. That’s settled by evidence, not by the razor. The same razor works on oughts: every restriction adds a premise to defend.
So “am I wrong?” becomes a sharper question: how would anyone find out? That one can be answered. A view earns trust by surviving criticism and matching what actually happens when it is tried. “More valid” really means better tested. Karl Popper thought that was how we creep toward the truth without ever getting a certificate saying we’ve arrived. He was right, and that stays open too.
That is an empiricist’s position, but not an old-style foundationalist’s. Observation is the best footing we have. Film is close to bedrock. Even so, observation isn’t raw: what we see comes already sorted by what we believe, which Wilfrid Sellars called the Myth of the Given. Popper’s picture fits better than bedrock or turtles. Science, he wrote, “does not rest upon solid bedrock”; it is a building on piles “driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base.” We stop driving them when they are firm enough to hold the structure, for now.
So claims here come in two kinds. Some are empirical: rent control shrinks the housing supply; licensing raises prices. Data can sink those, which is what makes them worth something when they hold, and where we can, we’ll cite the best study against us, not just the ones on our side. Others are values, like the lines below. No camera reaches them. Those are named as starting points and defended as such, not passed off as proofs. The same discipline applies to the distinctions we lean on. “That wasn’t real capitalism, it was cronyism” is the same move as “that wasn’t real socialism” unless the test is set in advance and applied to the cases we’d like to claim as wins too.
How many truths are there? Probably one world and many maps of it, some better than others. Values are harder. Isaiah Berlin argued that real goods — liberty and equality, security and freedom — can’t all be maxed out at once, and that the honest response is pluralism, not a master formula. That is a reason to keep more than one map on the table.
What has been tried
What has never been tried is a black box. What has been tried is not, and the record is older than human history, though it is mostly recent human history under examination here.
Elinor Ostrom spent a career documenting commons that people governed themselves for centuries, with neither a state nor a private owner in charge: alpine pastures in Törbel, Switzerland; irrigation courts in Valencia; fisheries and forests on several continents. The Rochdale Pioneers opened their co-op store in 1844, and the principles they wrote still run cooperatives worldwide. Mondragon has grown since 1956 into a federation of worker-owned firms. In Catalonia in 1936, workers ran factories, farms and transit for months and in places years, until they were crushed — first by their own side’s Stalinists, then by Franco.
The other column is just as clear. Soviet collectivization and the famine of 1932–33. The Great Leap Forward, 1958–62, which killed tens of millions. Final solutions, imposed from the top, with no way out.
The pattern is not market against socialism, or public against private. It is whether the people living under an arrangement wrote it, can change it, and can leave it if they choose. Where they could, things tended to hold. Where they couldn’t, the bodies piled up.
The lines
There are two lines we won’t bargain over, and one rule under both. The first line is a test, not a list: is a subject being used as an input, and can they leave? It is settled by looking at what is being done, never by checking who counts first (The Unfinished Exclusions makes the full case). Slavery fails it. The camps fail it. Forced collectivization fails it. So does a good deal of what passes for free markets and for normal: the quiet watching and managing Foucault wrote about, and a state that assumes your consent and bars the door. Exit alone doesn’t settle it, though. A charter city run by appointed technocrats lets you leave, and its defenders think that is enough. So the test also asks who wrote the arrangement: if the people living under it had no hand in writing it, they are inputs, whatever the door says. No first premise can be proved, and this one is no exception. We won’t trade it for any gain, but it stays open to argument, and whoever wants it to stop short, at a species, a signature or a border, carries the burden of showing why.
Experiments that fail that test shouldn’t be allowed. If the people inside never agreed to be the test, and if they can’t leave, their leaving can’t tell anyone it failed — the experiment loses its only way of finding out it’s wrong. Then comes the hard part: who stops them? The best answer comes from Ostrom. The commons that lasted all enforced their rules — people watched each other, the monitors answered to the users themselves, penalties started small and climbed, and disputes were settled cheaply and close to home. Enforcement was never optional. It just wasn’t a monopoly, the way police and armies are. The second line is about who enforces: the danger starts when the enforcer can’t be left, voted out, instantly recalled, or held to its own rules. Hired guns don’t fix this; they answer to whoever pays.
The rule under both is old. Robert Ingersoll put it in one sentence: “Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.” It asks for nothing new, only consistency: whatever grounds your claim grounds everyone else’s. That levels the playing field. Everyone’s life is their own, and no one else’s to run. One phrase needs widening: “human being” is the list sneaking back in. The rule should reach every being that can be wronged, and who that is gets settled by looking, not by a list. Not every right fits every being, since a sow, or any other non-human animal, has no use for a vote, but the two under all the others still do: not to be used as an input, and free to leave.
Both lines assume people can see what is being done to them. No one can agree to terms that are hidden, call back what they can’t see, or leave what they don’t know is happening. So power has to be watchable by the people it falls on, or neither line can be checked. Power Has to Be Watchable makes the case.
Seeing takes more than open books, though. An animal raised in captivity may never miss a wild it has never known, and people raised inside an arrangement can take it for nature. Custom and schooling can hide a harm from the very person it falls on. Philosophers call these adaptive preferences, and they are why “no one is complaining” proves nothing.
Order without a single beginning
Some history first. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first to call himself an anarchist, in What Is Property? (1840). In 1857 Joseph Déjacque, an anarchist taking Proudhon to task over the freedom of women, coined libertaire — libertarian — in an open letter to him. Proudhon wanted no masters for men and kept them for women. Déjacque was in the right tradition, and he pushed it from “let her in” toward “no masters.” Within a generation, the women of the movement were making that argument themselves. So the word libertarian was born inside anarchism, as a protest against sexism inside anarchism itself, a century before the American right borrowed it, and born as a charge that an anarchist had stopped short. The full story is in The Origins of the Word “Libertarian.”
The slide from “without rulers” to “chaos” is as old as the word. An-archia says only “without a ruler.” It came to mean chaos by riding on an assumption nobody stated: that order is something a ruler hands down. If order flows from the top, then no top means no order, by definition rather than by evidence. The Greeks drew that picture everywhere: a general orders an army, a king orders a city, a god orders the cosmos out of chaos. So anarchia named a leaderless army or a city coming apart, and in Sophocles’ Antigone it is Creon, the king, who calls it the worst of evils. Even Aeschylus’ Athena, counselling moderation, sets anarchy as one ditch and despotism as the other. Plato complains in the Republic that the democrat renames anarchy “freedom.” Read from the other side, that is the whole quarrel in one line: the name goes to whoever is doing the judging. Hobbes said as much in Leviathan (1651): people unhappy under a democracy call it anarchy, as people unhappy under an aristocracy call it oligarchy. Then he built the assumption into a system: without a sovereign, the war of every man against every man. Milton, in Paradise Lost (1667), wrote it into the cosmos, with Chaos and Night holding “eternal anarchy” until a creator imposes form. The word did not decay into a name for chaos; it began as one, because those who wrote it took for granted that order must be imposed. Fittingly, the most famous line against it belongs to a king. The best-known answer came from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1848: liberty is “not the daughter but the mother of order.” Benjamin Tucker later ran it on the masthead of Liberty.
Libertarianous uses left libertarian and anarchist interchangeably. Anarchism usually gets dismissed by equivocation: anarchy means no rulers, chaos means disorder, and the argument slides from one to the other — chaos is bad, anarchy is chaos, so anarchism is bad.
Bellegarrigue answered that in 1850: anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war. In Greek, archē means both “beginning” and “rule.” The ruler is the one who claims to be the only beginning, the source all order must flow from — a mon-archy, literally. Anarchy keeps beginnings plural. Everyone a beginning.
Brian Patrick Mitchell’s map of American politics, from Eight Ways to Run the Country (2007), sorts positions by two Greek roots: archy, acceptance of rank and rule, and kratos, acceptance of force. These pages sit in the corner that refuses both: no rank imposed, and no force to impose it.
That is why this is a process and an ethic, not a blueprint. David Graeber said the problem with utopias isn’t having them; it’s having only one. We need as many as we can test — inside the lines above. Slavery, the lash and cruelty are not experiments. Even if there is no final right or wrong, we can choose, and choosing is not the same as anything goes. A built ought can be tested; one that claims to be found can only be obeyed. We can choose to put respect for human beings at the center. That is humanism. Agency is the ground, respect the principle, solidarity the practice. Respect keeps people safe to act; standing with them, in mutual aid and the co-ops and commons people already build, lets them do more together than apart. And it reaches past our own species, to every being that can be wronged, as What Moral Words Do argues. It is open to argument like everything else here, but no utopia that treats people as test subjects, or as anyone’s subjects at all, is worth pursuing.
How order shows up when nobody designs it — chaos, feedback, and why movements need fuzzy coordinates — is the subject of Order Without a Master Plan.
Neither progress nor collapse
History looks less like a staircase than like punctuated equilibrium, the idea Eldredge and Gould brought to evolution in 1972: long stretches of drift, then sudden breaks forward. In spite of evolution, hopefully toward better things, or our “better angels,” devolution is real, as Devo kept telling us in the seventies. Herbert Spencer watched Britain slide back toward militarism and command and called it re-barbarization.
It has happened before. In Alexandria the Serapeum, the last home of the great library, was torn down in 391, and in 415 a Christian mob murdered the philosopher Hypatia. Later writers made her death the start of a dark age. The decline was slower and less complete than the legend, but it was real. Rome is instructive too. The Western empire ended in 476 after decades of debased coinage, crushing taxes and civil war, while the Eastern half lasted another thousand years. Historians still argue over what its fall meant for ordinary people: Bryan Ward-Perkins finds living standards collapsing, others see change more than ruin. Either way, an empire falling and a society falling are not the same thing.
The same slide is under way now, in the US and abroad — the things the United States spent decades shaming other governments for, done at home and in its name. Of course the US track record is pretty bad. The School of the Americas and Dark Alliance come to mind. Daniel Ellsberg showed in 1971 how far a government will lie to its own people to keep a war going, and he paid to show it. John Perkins carried Ellsberg’s torch in a different manner.
Popper’s warning cuts both ways: history has no built-in direction. Progress isn’t guaranteed. Neither is collapse. Neither is “better devils” over our better angels, as Naomi Klein has pointed out. Nor will better AI settle it; a tool that strong can serve the angels or the devils, and which one depends on who holds it and who can say no. It is made or unmade by what people build. The old Wobbly line says it best — form the structure of the new society within the shell of the old — so that if the break comes, the alternatives are already standing. That doesn’t mean the old society has stood still. It has moved forward and backward at once: medicine and science, and the bomb; rights won by people once shut out, and new ways of shutting people out; more abundance than ever, and more of it held by fewer hands. There is no ladder, only a record, and the new should keep what moved forward without what moved back. Telling which is which takes looking where power would rather we didn’t.
The site’s first purpose hasn’t changed: reverse the panopticon. Watch power the way it watches us, to help level the power disparity. Steve Mann’s word for it is sousveillance: watching from below.
Roadmap
This introduction opens a book being written here in the open, Archē: Everyone a Beginning. The full contents, part by part, are on the Archē page. The next chapter is The Unfinished Exclusions, which sets out the argument each part takes up. A companion book, Labor and Property: A Critical Guide to Political Economy, works through the economics more fully.
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Read anything here the way it was written: open to being wrong. If you find where it is, contact us.
Sources
- Hans Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason (1968; English translation, Princeton University Press, 1985). The Münchhausen trilemma.
- William of Ockham, Quaestiones in libros Sententiarum (c. 1317–19). “Plurality should never be posited without necessity.” The better-known “entities must not be multiplied” is a later paraphrase.
- Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (Routledge, 1963). Truth approached by criticism, never certified. Also The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), against history with a built-in direction.
- Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934; English edition, Hutchinson, 1959), section 30. The building on piles driven into the swamp; chapter VII, on simplicity as testability.
- Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956). The Myth of the Given: observation never arrives raw.
- Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (lecture, Oxford, 1958). Value pluralism: real goods that collide.
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Törbel, the Valencia huertas, and the design principles of commons that last. See also “Elinor Ostrom’s Legacy” on this site (currently private; link once published).
- Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founding principles (1844). International Co-operative Alliance
- Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism” (in Models in Paleobiology, 1972).
- Herbert Spencer, “Re-barbarization” (in Facts and Comments, 1902).
- Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Knopf, 2007). Crises seized to push through what people would never otherwise accept.
- Steve Mann, Jason Nolan and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments” (Surveillance & Society 1, no. 3, 2003). Watching power from below.
- Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, 2002).
- Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (Seven Stories Press, 1998). Began as his 1996 San Jose Mercury News series.
- John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler, 2004). Debt and aid as tools of empire.
- Aeschylus, Eumenides (458 BC), lines 696–697. Athena counsels Athens to honour neither anarchy nor despotism.
- Sophocles, Antigone (c. 441 BC), around line 672 (numbering varies by edition). Creon: no evil worse than anarchy.
- Plato, Republic, Book VIII (560e). In the democratic soul, anarchy is renamed freedom.
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chapters 13 and 19. The war of every man against every man; those grieved under a democracy call it anarchy.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book II, lines 894–897. Chaos and Night hold eternal anarchy.
- Anselme Bellegarrigue, L’Anarchie, journal de l’ordre (1850). “Anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war.”
- Peterson Roberto da Silva and David Graeber, “Freedom and Anarchy: An Interview with David Graeber” (Anarchist Studies blog, 2020; recorded in London, 10 March 2020). Source of the utopias point: the criticisms of utopianism assume there is only one; many are not a problem, though integrating them is the work of deliberation. original · Anarchist Library copy. See also Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm, 2004), “against anti-utopianism”: original.
- Robert G. Ingersoll, “The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child” (lecture, 1877).
- Industrial Workers of the World, Preamble (1905). “The structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”
- Martin Elson, “The Unfinished Exclusions: How the First Exclusion Foreclosed the Other Two.” here