Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)
They lost me in the first paragraph with:<p><pre><code>    “Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion.”
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Having dealt with the dark side of humanity, there are lots of people who will not behave reasonably if left unchecked, due to one reason or another.<p>And there are a lot of these people. Some of them lifelong criminals, some of them even your friendly neighbor that keeps his yard looking really nice.<p>So you need a system of checks. You need some sort of enforcement arm that apprehend and deals violence to these people. You need some place, away from society, to secure these people. And now, you’ve more or less reinvented the current structure.<p>Whether we like it or not, violence is the foundation upon which society ultimately sits. The threat of violence keeps everyone inline. If you resist each step of the law, ultimately, you will be dealt violence.<p>You may choose to be a pacifist, and that is somewhat admirable, but you’ve really chosen to outsource the violence required to survive to other parties. Society provides us a useful curtain that covers the horror of nature’s rules.