Usher and Ethan
The fifth Chinarchy audio post. This episode I talk about going to an Usher concert, my awesome dancing skills, how my class environment has changed, dealing with a hitting problem, and the authoritarian vs. permissive parenting false dichotomy.
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Note: It’s forty-eight minutes long. Forty-eight minutes of baller. Don’t hate.
Graduation Day
The fourth Chinarchy audio post. This episode I talk about a teacher who mistreats children and her actions on Graduation Day. Also, I discuss the frustrations of trying to do the right thing in such a bad environment.
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Note: It’s a bit rambly, just so you know going in.
Treatment of Children
The third Chinarchy audio post. This is my general thoughts on the treatment of children. Most of you guys already know this and it’s nothing new, but it can’t be said too many times. And if you’re a reader who doesn’t know me personally or know my thoughts on this, I think this is a really, really important thing to listen to.
As always, leave your comments or email me.
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From Childhood To Statism: Conflict Resolution
Anarchists are often accused of being utopian. Critics suggest that we are naive to believe human beings can peacefully coexist. “There will always be conflicts and you will always need an authority figure to resolve these conflicts,” they say.
I was always perplexed by these responses. They were part straw-man — suggesting that anarchists naively believed in a conflict free world — and part invalid deduction — asserting that if there was conflict then it was necessary for an authority figure to resolve it.
The first part wasn’t hard to understand. Straw-man arguments are a dime a dozen. But the second part seemed so illogical; how could anyone reach such a conclusion?
Why would so many people automatically associate the resolution of conflict with the necessity of authority?
Now I know at least part of the answer.
Everyday in school I see my students being taught two lessons that lead directly to the acceptance of statism:
Lesson 1: Conflict Is Bad
This is the first and less obvious lesson that is being reinforced constantly.
Conflict is a bad thing. It’s bad when it happens. It should be avoided at all costs. Conflict is the worst possible outcome of any interaction.
That’s what kids learn.
Teachers and assistants hover over children during every activity. And at the first sign of a disagreement they swoop down to “break it up.” The result of their interference is often that somebody gets in trouble.
These situations occur dozens of times every day. Two kids will argue over who gets to play with a toy or who gets to be first in line for their snack. They get into conflicts over taking each others’ crayons or books or whatever. They fight over who holds the jump rope they’re using to tie up their teacher and tickle him (I always get them back).
Almost every time something like this happens a teacher or assistant is waiting to step in and stop the disagreement — and sometimes to punish the student “responsible.”
This sends one message: conflict is bad.
Conflict Is Natural
Conflict isn’t bad. And it isn’t good either. I wouldn’t use any moral labels when defining conflict. Conflict is neutral.
Conflict is the natural result of interacting with other human beings. Every person has their own values, desires, and needs and everyone has different ways of satisfying those needs. In any relationship or community or society it is absolutely NORMAL that these different and competing interests result in conflict. It’s not a bad thing. How could it be?
What I would apply terms like “good” and “bad” to are the ways of handling conflict. For instance, violence is a pretty bad way of handling conflict (I’m looking at you, statists). Peaceful negotiation, on the other hand, is generally a pretty good way of handling conflict.
When a conflict is handled poorly the consequences can be devastating, as surely all of us have experienced. But a when a conflict is handled well, it can be a great thing and actually improve the relationship.
It is the bad ways of handling conflicts that causes teachers and assistants to interfere. They want to prevent the children from hitting or fighting or name calling. It’s well-intentioned. But by constantly interfering they don’t teach children real conflict resolution skills, they just teach them that conflict is a bad thing.
It also teaches them the second lesson, that when there is a conflict, the best thing to do is appeal to authority.
Lesson 2: Authority Resolves Conflicts
This is the second lesson. It’s more overt but it is also more dangerous.
The consequence of training kids that conflict is bad and that an authority will always be there to intervene imprints this programming onto them: when there is a conflict, an authority figure will resolve it.
On my first day of class — no exaggeration, my very first day — a student I had never spoken to before came up to me and said, “Arthur took my pen, will you give him a frowny face?”
I can’t remember the rest of the conversation, but it went something like this:
“No sorry, Eric, I don’t think I’m going to give him a frowny face.”
“He took my pencil!”
“He didn’t take my pencil, though, why should I give him a frowny face?”
Cue the blank stare I’ve seen hundreds of times by now. “But…but…you’re the teacher!”
“Want me to go talk to Arthur with you?”
“No, I want you to go beat him up and get my pencil back.”
The point of that dialogue is to show you just how much children are trained that authority is the ultimate conflict resolver. Whenever there is a disagreement, if you handle it on your own, an authority will intervene anyway and you’ll get in trouble. But if you appeal immediately to authority you might just get your way.
Authority is there to resolve your conflicts, whether or not you want it.
Conclusion
The connections to statism should be blatantly obvious.
Instead of teaching children infinitely valuable conflict resolution skills so that they can learn to handle disagreements peacefully and efficiently, they are taught to fear and avoid conflict. And in the case conflict does arise, they are trained to run immediately to the nearest authority figure and plead their case, otherwise there will be punishment.
This is what most children are exposed to for 12 years of school — and probably longer in their homes.
Is it any surprise that they become adults and can’t imagine a world where conflict is resolved without authority?
From Childhood To Statism: Introduction
This series is the result of an idea I’ve been toying with for the past several weeks. The idea is to identify some of the ideals, values, and lessons that children learn and to explain how these lessons from childhood lead to statism in adulthood.
I want to show some of the ways that schools, teachers, and parents train children to become statists.
In this introductory post I want to set up and explain what this series will cover.
For starters, this is not a complete analysis of the origins of statism in childhood. I will use the examples that I have seen first-hand. It will be based on my experiences.
Secondly, it is not about the origin of statism as an intellectual theory. I don’t want to examine where the idea of statism came from, but rather where the psychological acceptance of that idea comes from.
In order to explain the difference, we should start with some definitions.
Statism
Statism is the ideology that proposes and supports the use of states — or governments — to organize human society.
A state, if we go by the standard political science definition provided by Max Weber, is an entity which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. This is actually a pretty good definition, considering it’s widely accepted by academics.
Let’s break down a little bit more, just so we can be really clear on what we’re talking about when we say “statism.”
The word entity is of course meant very loosely in the definition. There is not a physical thing that exists called The State. There is a group of people. They may be fixed or they may be a rotating group of people but they are just people. They are the bureaucrats, politicians, policemen (and so on and so on) that fill offices and buildings and barracks. This aggregation of people is what we call the state.
And this group of people “claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” What does that mean? It means they claim that in a given area, only the people making up the state are allowed to use violence and it is moral for them to do so but immoral for anyone else to do so.
This is starting to sound a little bit like “I’m allowed to hit you, but you’re not allowed to hit me.” And it should, because at its basic and truest form that’s the idea of statism. One group of people is allowed to use violence against the rest.
As Leo Tolstoy famously put it: “Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”
Acceptance of Statism
Despite the endless justifications for statism (“voting this” and “social contract that”) the core premise is completely…retarded and insane.
The idea that you can solve complex social problems like education or health care or poverty by allowing one small group of people threaten and coerce everybody else is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard. And one reasonable people would never accept. But almost everyone does…maybe even you.
I’m not here to convince you that statism is evil and supporting it is immoral — maybe I’ll do that in another post. So before you start writing me emails saying, “But Anderson, if one group of people didn’t have a monopoly on violence who would build the roads?” I want to remind you that my purpose in this series is to identify why people accept such a clearly retarded and wrong idea.
Because, although the idea may be wrong, it’s only dangerous when people buy into it.
If I had the idea that every human being should drink bleach, well, without widespread acceptance it’s just a stupid idea. But imagine if everyone starting believing in it and supporting it? That’s where the real danger lies.
The same analogy can be made with slavery. The idea that one person should be able to own another is an evil idea — and an idea not unrelated to statism — but it was only truly vile because people accepted it.
That is why I’m not interested in the origin of the theories that promote and support statism, but rather the origin of the acceptance of statism.
It is the acceptance of statism that has allowed it to become a plague on this planet. In the 20th century alone states have murdered over 260 million people — I’m talking about unarmed, innocent people, not soldiers in war. Faced with this pile of bodies, most people still never question whether or not statism is a good idea.
And as I said in the first section, I believe it is because we are trained to accept it as children.
So, over the next few posts I want to talk about some of the “lessons” I see that lead directly to this unquestioning acceptance.
Check back soon…
