Order and Anarchy

Notice the title, Order and Anarchy. Anarchy is the absence of imposed order, not the absence of order per se. In fact, no one is more invested in the emergence of order than the Anarchist. Anarchism celebrates the spontaneous emergence of order, i.e. ‘self-ordering’ aka ‘bootstrapping’.

In fact, to be is to combine an element of order inherited from the Actual World with an element of spontaneous ordering (novelty); every genuine event requires both: Order + Order! 

Every event is both rejection of an old order and appetition for a new order. Of course, from the perspective of inherited order, emergent order appears as mere discord; and from the perspective of emergent order, inherited order appears as institutionalized resistance to novelty. Yet, every event inherits a settled past and proposes a novel future. That’s exactly what an event is. 

The reaction of the present (event) to the past is never mindless copying or blanket rejection. Something of the past must be conserved to serve as exoskeleton for the present and endoskeleton for the future. Rejection of inherited order is never blind or capricious. It is always done in the service of a proposition, i.e. a concrete proposal.

Sidebar: Abbie Hoffmann notwithstanding, there is no such thing as a Revolution for the Hell of it…except in book(s). Where is the Youth International Party today? What happened to yesterday’s Yippies? Did they turn into Yuppies?

A coherent critique of the 60’s radical youth movement in the US might include the observation that the radicals lacked a coherent ideology. Sure they had issues: Vietnam, Civil Rights, etc. but issues alone do not translate into a detailed political platform and, per Lenin, “There can be no revolution without a revolutionary ideology.” 

Something of the past must be destroyed to ‘make room’ for novelty. New order cannot simply pile-up on top of old, like levels of civilization at the site of an archeological dig. Gertrude Stein wrote that mortality is nature’s way of making room for the future. 

Philosophical Anarchism is the belief that all true order is sui generis, that it emerges in the course of an event, any event, and that it is conserved as the ground from which all future events emerge. 

True order must be organic and unconstrained. Freedom is prerequisite; imposed order, on the other hand, springs from a desire to preserve what is at the expense of what might have been and could yet be. It is a form of disorder disguised as its opposite. Think 1930’s Germany for example.

Some men (sic) see things as they are and ask ‘why change’; others dream of things that are not yet and ask, ‘why bother’. Inherited order is the exoskeleton that protects embryonic order in utero, but later, as imposed order, it functions as a strait jacket. 

Neither is anarchy synonymous with chaos. In fact, it might be its antonym. Chaos, ab initio, appears as disorder, but upon deeper investigation chaotic systems are shown to be deterministic. Anarchy is neither! Anarchy is order, freely emergent. 

An-arch-ism is the belief that certain entities are capable of self-government but  self-government must include the ability to enter into ordered relationships with other entities; otherwise it becomes a form of nihilism. 2025 NYC Bumper Sticker: “Socialism not Solipsism!” 

At the risk of repeating myself, the order that emerges among self-governing entities is the only real order. Freedom and order have a dialectical relationship. There is no freedom without order and no order without freedom. Order without freedom is tyranny while freedom without order is barbarism. Pure order and pure freedom are concepts only; neither can be realized alone, by itself, in any actual entity. 

Taking a page from Sartre, no event can be what was, every event must be what is not yet. Without negation of the past and appetition for the future, there are no events. An event is not the Actual World it inherited, nor is it the Superject it contributes to the future, nor is it the self-satisfaction it hopefully feels.  An event is the transition per se from what was to what is not. 

An event is a double negative: “Not what was, not what will be, therefore I am!” Anarchism then is the gnosis and praxis of Being. Anarchy is the universe in the image and likeness of God.

Likewise, Political Anarchism does not advocate the disintegration of society; it merely opposes the mirage of order known as the State. But alleged anarchist plots to blow up critical infrastructure have understandably given it a bad name.

We think of order and freedom, past and present as a continuum, a spectrum ranging from the complete absence of institutional constraints on one end all the way to a full-blown police-state on the other. But even that model may be too restrictive.

It would be more useful and accurate to ‘graph’ the relationship between order and freedom on a plane with order on the X-axis and freedom on the Y. Every possible non-degenerate social structure (event) includes elements of order and elements of freedom in varying proportions. 

What then could be our paradigm? How about a Bach concerto? It is as rigidly structured as can be, but every note is astonishing, and every performance is brand new. We understand order and freedom so poorly that we do not see that they are locked in a dialectic embrace that spans all scales and all systems.   

“They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.” (Joni Mitchell) But the very next day, green shoots appeared in the cracks and 10 years on, the lot was advertised for sale as ‘unimproved land…some litter removal required’.