Anarchy
Definition: a state of society without government or law; political and social disorder due to the absence of governmental control; lack of obedience to an authority or sovereign; confusion and disorder.
Origin: English
Before I start this week’s newsletter, I must apologize for not writing for a while. The toll of parenting a young child, managing the holidays, and finishing the semester at GW gave me virtually no time to write for a couple of months. What used to be time I could dedicate to writing had been replaced with chores or the fleeting opportunity to grab a nap. Each week I intended to write something, but the weeks kept on getting away from me.
Needless to say, I started writing this newsletter as my son slept next to me on the couch. Now let’s get back to The Word.
A little more than one week ago, America witnessed an expression of political in-fighting, incompetence, and chaos that the Republicans describe as freedom. We watched the chaotic ascent of far-right Republicans in the House of Representatives, including a minor scuffle on the House floor as Alabama Representative Mike Rogers attempted to confront Florida Representative Matt Gaetz because he had prevented the 14th round of votes from electing Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House.
Under the influence of the Republican Freedom Caucus, the act of naming a Speaker of the House—a formality normally decided on the first vote—had become a week’s worth of chaos and nearly a physical fight between two congressmen from the same political party. The chaos of American politics while under the stewardship of the GOP made me think about the word anarchy, and how the contradictions contained within this word explain the political agenda of today’s Republican Party and especially the Freedom Caucus.
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The word “anarchy” means both “chaos or disorder” and “the state of living in the absence of government control or the control of a monarch.” The word derives from the Greek word anarchía that literally means “lack of a leader,” but is also interpreted as “lawlessness.”
This word derives from an authoritarian perspective in that it describes a society that is absent of a powerful authority figure as being chaotic. Yet the United States’ notion of freedom derives from our success at liberating ourselves from the British monarchy.
American freedom is the manifestation of the English word anarchy, so it should not come as a surprise when Americans create chaos by expressing what they consider to be freedom.
The Leviathan, Civil War, and Anarchy
For the last handful of months, I’ve been thinking a lot about Thomas Hobbes Leviathan because I think it can help make sense of much of America’s political turmoil. Yet I don’t think it is beneficial for understanding the present because Hobbes supposedly has great ideas. Instead I think it can help explain the present because Hobbes has bad ideas.
Hobbes’ Leviathan is still regarded as a vital piece of European political philosophy, and western civilization’s desire to embrace nearly four hundred years of bad ideas (the Leviathan was first published in 1651) can help explain why we are still prone to embracing bad ideas in the present. Also, a key aspect of Hobbes’ bad ideas is the merging of chaos and freedom (which is represented with the English word “anarchy”), so that the distinction between good and evil becomes blurred and indistinguishable.
The most famous quotes of the Leviathan come from when Hobbes describes a concept he and other 17th century British philosophers called the “state of nature,” which is a theoretical state of existence they allege existed before human beings became civilized. Frankly, the idea of the “state of nature” is a bad idea that makes zero sense, but it is still an idea that people believe in to this day.
Hobbes describes the state of nature as “the war of all against all” and that the life of humankind without a central authority would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The English Civil War from 1642-1651 greatly influenced Hobbes’ work and the Leviathan, and the chaos that consumed England as the people rebelled against the monarchy shaped Hobbes’ concept of the state of nature. The English Civil War was arguably more chaotic than the American Civil War because there were no clear geographical divides that distinguished one side from the other. There was no North vs. South. Instead there were Royalists who supported King Charles I and Parliamentarians who opposed the king. It was common for family members to support opposing sides, so the war consumed all of England and fighting could occur anywhere. It was a “war of all against all.”
According to Hobbes, rebelling from the king brought chaos and the monarchy brought civilization. Therefore, the state of nature for humankind if left unchecked was chaos, and peace could only occur by submitting to some form of an authority figure. Hobbes called submitting to the authoritarian as the “social contract.”
It is easy to see how a Hobbesian worldview and the assumption of a “state of nature” influenced colonization as Europeans saw Indigenous people as uncivilized savages who would benefit from being subjected to European authoritarianism.
While the state of nature remains a troubling theory that Europeans have embraced, I think the most disturbing idea of Hobbes’ Leviathan may be the name itself.
In the Leviathan, the Leviathan represents the authority figure that people must submit to in order to elevate themselves out of the state of nature, end chaos, and bring peace. Yet prior to Hobbes’ Leviathan, the Leviathan had always been an evil sea monster or serpent from the Bible. The biblical Leviathan was the embodiment of chaos, threatened to eat the bodies of the damned after they died, and was a powerful enemy that the forces of good needed to defeat. Christian theologians even defined the Leviathan as a demon that embodied the deadly sin of envy.
Hobbes clearly knew of the biblical Leviathan because his book the Leviathan often references biblical scriptures. In fact the cover of the book features a depiction of Hobbes’ human, non-serpent, Leviathan with a quote from the Book of Job "Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei. Iob. 41 . 24" ("There is no power on earth to be compared to him. Job 41 . 24")
Hobbes essentially re-branded an evil, chaotic serpent monster into the powerful authoritarian who would bring civilization and end chaos. The bad guy has become the good guy and those fighting for freedom against a monarch are labeled as the uncivilized bad guys. The powerful authoritarian, or Leviathan, is calling the freedom fighters anarchists.
Hobbes’ work struggles to distinguish between good and bad, and freedom and chaos; and American politics still struggles with this distinction.
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American Freedom and American Chaos
As the Republican Party has displayed for years, and especially since they won the majority in the House, they have a clear inability to distinguish between good and bad, and freedom and chaos. They are a party that pursues power. They want to be the Leviathan and create a social contract built upon the subjugation of the masses, but they want the subjugation to appear benevolent where they remain the good guys despite creating chaos.
Yet as Hobbes shows, this Republican political philosophy is not a bizarre aberration within American democracy, but instead the continuation of European political beliefs.
Additionally, the chaos caused by the Republican Leviathan can be explained by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, which is also a concept that is integral to American society.
The master-slave dialectic describes the relationship between the master, or Leviathan, and the people he has oppressed or subjugated. The master’s objective is to remain the master and keep his power, so every interaction with the slave will prioritize power ahead of truth and goodness. Also, the master will use his power to claim responsibility for any successes created by the slave, and deny any responsibility for any wrongs committed by himself or his slaves. It is a dialectic, or relationship, built upon power and irresponsibility and American ethnocide has for hundreds of years encouraged primarily white Americans to embrace this toxic relationship and to define the power of irresponsibility as a form of freedom.
American freedom derives from liberating ourselves from a British Leviathan, yet America’s individualistic pursuit of freedom has encouraged Americans to become Leviathans. Becoming the authoritarian has become the American pathway to freedom, yet we are also encouraged to destroy the Leviathan in a person’s pursuit of freedom. We are encouraged to become Leviathans who believe that freedom comes from destroying the Leviathan.
This is chaos, but we call it freedom. It is both sides of anarchy. The good guy and the bad guy are one in the same. This is “civilized” people needlessly creating incivility. It is a “war of all against all,” and this is how the GOP works.
The word is "leftist totalitarianism."
A word that captures two and a half centuries of savagery, mass murder and destruction starting with the French Revolution going right up to the present corrupt and totalitarian Grifter in Chief wielding unconstitutional executive power.
Now that we can look at the results of the fight to wrest control of the house from the Uni-Party and force McCarthy to use the power of investigation and oversight to expose unchecked "leftist totalitarianism", McCarthy, with a 52% favorability overall and 71% among Republicans has erased whatever it was that some House conservatives didn’t like about him during the drawn-out, four-day, 15-ballot speaker election controversy in January. We could go into detail about "leftist totalitarianism" abetted by McConnell the Uni-Party donors and the completely corrupt media but that is obvious and boring.
Your delusional wet dream and word "Anarchy" now looks even more pathetic than when you wrote it. Maybe you should bone up on the word "pearl clutching."