Don't Call Me A Utopian

by Fred Godinez

If you really wish to draw my ire, refer to as "utopian" the idea that a society may successfully operate upon principles of private property and non-coercion. You see, utopianism has shown itself to be a sanguinary creed, and I find repugnant the idea of being associated with it in any way. While we may tend to dismiss utopians as harmless "frogpondians" (to use Edgar Allen Poe's properly derogatory term for the utopian mystics of his day), and their cogitations as mere eccentric fancy, we would do well to remember that some utopians have taken their fanciful pipe-dreams very seriously, usually with disastrous (and thoroughly dystopian) results.

In fact, the sins of militant utopianism are far too numerous even to adumbrate here, and I shall not attempt to do so (for an excellent, though by no means exhaustive survey, the strong of stomach may wish to consult The Black Book of Communism by Stephane Courtois, et al.). Suffice it to say that the amount of human suffering which has been caused by high-minded busybodies with a yen to effect some imagined perfect social order, particularly when these busybodies have managed to avail themselves of the means with which to murder those who resist (i.e., the State), simply defies comprehension. Tragically, most people have taken this as an indictment merely of certain specific ideologies (such as, e.g., communism, national socialism, etc.) rather than of the State qua State.

Unfortunately, private property anarchism, the only true alternative to this cycle of predation and slaughter, can be a tough sell. This is not to say that the conceptual underpinnings of private property anarchism are innately evasive of comprehension, or that the literature is unduly recondite; quite the opposite, in fact (see, e.g., The Market For Liberty by Linda and Morris Tannehill). And it is easily demonstrated that private property anarchism, contra statism of all stripes, including the various genera of minarchism, is the only social order which follows logically from the axiom of self-ownership (see, e.g., The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard). Further, unlike almost all forms of statism, private property anarchism takes into account all of our foibles as human beings and provides mechanisms for dealing with them peacefully, allowing us to remain human beings instead of requiring that we reshape ourselves into an Army of Saints, a Herrenrasse, or a New Soviet Man (or else!).

The problem, however, is that government is such an everyday part of human existence, like the traffic congestion which results from government's gross under-pricing of road use, that many have come to view its existence as an eternal, undying fact of life to which they must resign themselves, in perpetuum. Further, for large sections of the population, the cerebral atrophy engendered by staring at the television set for several hours a night, literally entranced, probably does make comprehension of the theories underlying private property anarchism an overly weighty proposition.

So never, ever let anyone describe private property anarchism as "utopian" without taking that person to task for it. Unlikely to be practiced over any considerable geographic area within the foreseeable future, possibly; a decidedly minority viewpoint at the present time, certainly; but, unlike the naïve and profoundly ahistorical belief that the State will ever be anything but a thief and murderer, most emphatically not utopian.

March 26, 2002

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