Our numbers our growing.
With each day, I hear from more people who are done with the system. Done pretending that it can be controlled, corralled, or limited. Done pretending that it is in any way legitimate. Done pretending that their vote matters.
With each day, more people are ready to begin building something new.
But what?
Part of my job is to attempt to clarify questions like this—to sort through the options and create big-picture overviews. I believe that if we are serious about exit-and-build, we ought to try to understand the full range of choices. So let’s go on that journey together.
We will start at the very beginning:
You are a human.
As such, you have two choices: You can be in complete isolation (marooned on a desert island, hiding in the woods, etc.) or you can be with people. We will call these choices solitude and society.
A ton of ink has been spilled over the last few centuries on this subject: Virtually no one wants to be alone… We are naturally social creatures… Without economic specialization, we are doomed to a life of hardscrabble misery… No man is an island… People in solitary confinement go mad… And so on. We will thus take it as given that you will prefer society to complete and permanent solitude.
Societies can be comparatively stable and ordered, or they can descend into chaos. We are similarly going to take it as given that you prefer some kind of order to a condition of Hobbesian chaos. Even thieves and brigands need someone to be productive. No one wants total mayhem.
So, here’s the picture thus far.
So we want order. But what kind of order?
A fair amount of ink has been spilled on this question as well, both in these pages and of course by great thinkers elsewhere. In simplest terms, we have two choices:
We can have order imposed upon us without our consent. This is a condition of involuntary order, imposed by a government.
Or we can use consensual systems and principles to create a condition of voluntary order. Libertarians generally refer to this condition as anarchy—rules without rulers.
We already know what government is like, and if you are reading these pages, there is a good chance you’re not a fan. It may even be the case that you have begun to have some consciousness-shifting realizations:
That a truly “limited government” may be more elusive than a bigfoot riding a unicorn;
That keeping a government limited may be more difficult than an emu maintaining a love affair with an angler fish;
That “democracy”—yes, even our constitutional republican kind—does not solve these problems;
And maybe you’ve even discovered…
That no form of involuntary governance is morally supportable at all.
Thus, for the purposes of this exercise, we will assume that you are at least interested in exploring the possibilities of a voluntary order.
What do those possibilities look like? Here too, a lot has been written.
Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Linda and Morris Tannehill, and many others have discussed the possibility that the services normally associated with government (law, justice, security, infrastructure) could instead be provided by private agencies competing in an open market.
Others have discussed the likelihood that in the absence of involuntary governance, small independent polities would form, each offering its own style of governance and way of life. In Robert Nozick’s conception, the autonomy of such polities would be protected within a minimal-government framework. In Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s, private-law jurisdictions might still avail themselves of market mechanisms for the provision of many services.
Yet the picture is actually significantly more complex than this, and the possibilities much more numerous. Over the past half a year or so, I have been contemplating how to taxonomize this complexity.
I made some early attempts, but they weren’t quite right. Last night, I sat with my wife while she watched a show in which I had no interest. I started off into space and gave this question some deep thought. And when I woke this morning, I had some better answers.
The challenge here is to determine which categorization metrics are more general and which are more specific (think Kingdom–Phylum–Class-Order–Family Genus–Species). And I think I have it now.
Subsets of Anarchy
Below ANARCHY, the next level must be territoriality. Where is it—whatever it is—taking place? This can be described in two subcategories: panarchy and inarchy.
Panarchy is a concept developed in the 19th century by Paul Emile de Puydt and then expanded by Gustave de Molinari. The idea is simple: Instead of governments claiming a monopoly over a given territory, governments (or providers of government-like services) can coexist within a given region and compete for citizen-customers.
The classic analogy is churches. No one church controls an area—there might be five or six or more different denominations nearby, all coexisting—each with different members. The members also coexist in the given area—a Lutheran living next door to a Catholic living next door to a Buddhist, and so on.
The salient feature of panarchy is the jurisdictionally coterminous nature of the entities in question. The jurisdiction of each is entirely coextensive with all the others…as opposed to any one entity holding a monopoly.
I have been struggling for months to find a word to describe the other option: a single entity having jurisdiction over a fixed territory. For a while—piggybacking on the “phyles” in the work of Neal Stephenson—I began using the term “phylarchy” (rule by a tribe). I realized, however, that a phyle and its members can just as easily be dispersed as they can be fixed in a single location.
Thankfully, this morning, before I even hauled myself out of bed, I realized that the correct counterpart to panarchy ought to be enarchy inarchy…
Panarchy: prefix pan– (all, every), meaning all the entities coexisting and competing,
contrasted with
Inarchy: prefix in– (in, within), meaning a particular entity in a particular territory.
(Editorial note: “Enarchy” would have been preferable because the [en] prefix is Greek [and thus more consistent linguistically]. However, I realized after publication that when pronounced aloud, “enarchy” is difficult to distinguish from “anarchy.” So I switched to the Latin version of the prefix [in].)
Inarchy is easy enough to understand. We’ve lived our whole lives, and most humans have lived for most of history, with the notion of single entities ruling over fixed territories. The primary difference here is that membership in an inarchic polity is voluntary. No one is forced to submit to its rule the way governments do to the people in the territories they control.
Thus, in inarchy, you might have…
Internally self-governing communities (think the Amish, but without the U.S. government acting as their ultimate overlord)…
Polities run by a for-profit corporation…
Anarcho-aristocratic private-law jurisdictions (think Hoppe)…
City-states… micro-nations…the sky’s the limit.
Based on my early reading of the concept of panarchy, I presumed that it had to refer specifically to jurisdictionally coterminous governance providers. You choose Government A, your next-door neighbor chooses Government B, and so forth. That may have even been primarily what de Puydt was thinking.
Yet it occurred to me this morning that the innovation of panarchy is the jurisdictionally coterminous nature of the entities, not the type of entities.
Subsets of Panarchy
In market anarchism (a.k.a. anarchocapitalism), it is private agencies, rather than government-like entities, who are operating in a state of jurisdictionally coterminous coexistence. Market anarchism must thus be a subset of panarchy.
My working term for the other subset is distributed phylarchy.
Here, instead of agencies providing services, we have entities with a more cohesive identity.
A single provider of governance and authority.
A “tribe” or group with a collective mission or moral imperative.
An ethnic diaspora.
Even a virtual entity, such as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), or initially virtual concepts such as the network state or distributed nation.
Overlaps
market anarchism and distributed phylarchy
Many distributed manifestations of an anarchic condition—be they DAOs, individual members of a diaspora, networks states/distributed nations, etc.—will likely allow and avail themselves of at least some market provision of justice, security, and related services.
distributed phylarchy and inarchy
Entities such as Srinivasan’s network state, or my concept for the distributed nation (more to follow on that), are technically pre-territorial. That is, they are designed to form virtually and develop territorial presence over time. Thus, they are shown here as overlapping both categories.
From the other side, we see the possibility of entities with a fixed territorial presence eventually expanding into a distributed archipelago of such territories.
inarchy and involuntary order
Here we have the phenomenon whereby some entities are granted special status as sub-jurisdictions of an involuntary state. The degrees of autonomy vary, but only once they are fully seceded and no longer under the control of any overlordship by an involuntary government can they be moved into the fully inarchic category.
So now it’s your turn.
Does this work for you? Which sort of manifestation sounds good to you?
We are the ones who will begin building the next world. What do we want it to look like?
And in the meantime, don’t fall for the shiny dangling lie that “limited government” can be restored, maintained, or even exist in the first place.
It’s a trap!
Yo man, your brain works in a beautifully organized, structured way. Mine’s all woohoo and shit lol. I’m gonna pour over this and put some thought into it. However my initial reaction is the same as the reasons we came to the decision we did and the way we are trying to set our lives up moving forward. The people in the Highlands of Scotland, or Afghanistan, or the Appalachias even have always been strong because the family tribe was strong. They put the majority of their energy in their home and their tribe and were therefore strong, they gave very little of their power away. I can only control the way my family and I live, the serenity prayer being what it is and all, that’s good enough for me. If others choose the same then govt will eventually have to follow, in theory anyway ❤️
This is a very similar rabbit hole (In a good sense) as what I have found myself in, I have concluded that we will end up with a hybrid social system where a loyalty to territory and the systems/organisations including online/meta will bring a new way of being.
It is hard to get our heads around these things, it is truly a life work, but current systems are hard to understand too, like how many of us actually understand the tax system? we generally just know the parts that we need to right, so what you are talking about is bigger than our normal headspaces, however in order for humanity to expand more of us need to be stretching our minds like this. (Expand volume and quality of perceptions)
I believe a portion of human choice is in our location, a portion within our political system, and personal choices in general, our challenge is to expand human ability and opportunity to be responsible and actively engaged in choice. Whatever systems we run should have this in front of mind.
Thanks again for tilling our thinking in your posts Christopher!