I was listening to a podcast from Actualanarchy.com about “Night of the Living Dead,” an apropos movie right before Halloween. Daniel, one of two hosts, made the observation that in 1968, seeing reanimated humans was something the movie going public hadn’t seen before. Hmmm.
There is a long history of horror in which one thing is the evil. In “From Hell it Came,” one fellow comes back as a evil tree. There has been a Fly, a Tingler, a Thing, a Blob, a Bat, a Werewolf, and a Creature. But, not until George Romero was there a legion of walking dead demanding food, and particularly brains. Creepy, right?
The previously unseen is now seen: ghouls attacking humans. Well, what remains unseen? My answer went almost immediately to the observation posed by French economist Bastiat about the seen and the unseen. His most classic example was the parable of the broken window.
I surround myself with podcasts on economic thinking and read books by economists and libertarians so I gravitate to such thought almost as a reflex. Previously unseen ghouls now seen eating the brains of humans must mean there remains things unseen.
What of unseen policy ghouls? Or, unseen economic ghouls? Mightn’t the same be the case that when economists or policy makers make something, there remains something which is not known, not seen? Sometimes those kinds of effects are labeled unintended consequences, as if getting what was unwanted, unexpected, and unneeded is part and parcel to policy making. Getting something which might do more harm than good, unintended after all, seems a good place to stake a position that we might be better without policy in the first place. If we are better without policy, then we are also benefitted by no policy makers.
Mayhem! Almost certainly most people would, and probably do, view a world of no rulers as chaos, just like the scene of the ghouls making their way from their coffins, staggering forth with a primal drive for food. Despite the horror of the situation in the movie of the humans having no control over the ghouls and only a limited chance to stop them, it is very scary. However, no rulers does not mean no rules. The Anarchists tagline is just that: No rulers; not no rules. The scene in the cemetery might well be a stretched-for-my-convenience illustration, but movies have a way of exaggerating something to make it plain. The people in the house had rules and first and foremost was keep the ghouls out. Self preservation is a high priority. The ghouls, zombies really, had no rules only impulse. Eat brains. By extension, the government is a band of zombies lurching forward, rarely yielding, in its almost unquenchable thirst for more everything: power, control, policy, authority. The humans who recognize this are seeking survival. We differ from the humans in the movie in that we have this misplaced foolish hope, which, to our credit and detriment, we hold to tightly, that we can change the behavior of the zombies. We can, we just have to take away their agency to do, and that is by making a stateless society.
New ideas can be scary. Not as scary as zombies walking up the path, but anything which takes us out of our comfort zone feels odd. That is a challenge to be embraced. Here is a link to some information about anarchy. It isn’t chaos; it isn’t mayhem. It is a better way to get what we want: peace.
