Could Anarchy Improve Human Governance? Five Arguments Examined

Originally published 2015-06-05.

Could a society without rulers actually govern itself better than the states we have now? Writer Gary Z McGee thinks so. In a 2015 essay for Waking Times he set out five reasons why anarchy would improve human governance: it builds in checks and balances, it would end debt slavery and poverty, it is better for the planet, it spreads power and wealth through reciprocity, and it produces humbler, braver leaders.

This page walks through each of those five arguments in plain terms, adds the research and history behind them, and sets out the strongest objections. It is an opinion piece at heart, so the aim is not to tell you what to conclude but to give you what you need to judge it. An old line of unknown origin captures the mood McGee starts from: “Give a man a gun and he’ll rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he’ll rob the world.”

What anarchy means in this debate

In everyday speech “anarchy” means chaos. In political philosophy it means something narrower: a society organised without rulers. The word comes from the ancient Greek anarkhia, “without a ruler”. Anarchism as a movement seeks to replace institutions built on coercion and hierarchy, above all the state and, for most anarchists, concentrated private wealth, with voluntary cooperation.

The first thinker to call himself an anarchist in a positive sense was the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose book What Is Property? appeared in 1840. Later currents include Bakunin’s collectivism, Kropotkin’s anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism built around unions, individualist anarchism and, more recently, green anarchism. The writer Jim Dodge summed up the attitude neatly when he said anarchy is not about being out of control but about being out of their control.

McGee’s case draws on this tradition, but his tone is personal and moral. He opens by arguing that most people cling to a worldview that keeps them in debt and obedience, citing Martin Luther King, Jr. on how progress demands sacrifice and the libertarian broadcaster Stefan Molyneux on how avoidance, more than force, keeps people in their cages.

Argument 1: Checks and balances from below

McGee’s strongest point, and the one he says would be enough on its own, comes from anthropology. For most of human history people lived in small hunter-gatherer bands, and many of those bands were strikingly egalitarian. They shared meat and shelter not out of sentiment but because sharing spread risk in a world of scarce resources.

The anthropologist Christopher Boehm, in Hierarchy in the Forest (1999) and Moral Origins (2012), argued that this equality was not natural or automatic. Humans inherited ape-like urges to dominate, so groups had to suppress would-be bosses deliberately. He called the result a “reverse dominance hierarchy”: the group as a whole held power over anyone who tried to rise above it. Boehm lists four main levelling tools: public opinion, criticism and ridicule, disobedience, and, in extreme cases, sanctions such as expulsion or even killing.

McGee pairs this with a game theory model described by the biologist Suzanne Sadedin in Aeon. Building on a 2010 model by Francisco Úbeda and Edgar Duéñez-Guzmán, which found that corruption in a policing system tended to become permanent, Sadedin and Duéñez-Guzmán found that some societies could shift into a stable state they called “righteousness”. Her key line: “In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order.” Enforcement was shared by everyone, so corruption stopped paying. McGee also borrows a thought from Ryan Holiday: failures show us which paths not to take.

Argument 2: Ending debt and poverty

The second argument targets money and law. McGee leans on the 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat, who warned that people who live by plunder eventually write laws that permit it and morals that praise it. In McGee’s view, modern banking does exactly this: banks create money as debt and charge interest on it, keeping the poor indebted and the rich powerful.

There is a factual core here. Central banks themselves acknowledge that most money in modern economies is created by commercial banks when they make loans. Whether that system is inherently exploitative is a political judgement, not a fact. McGee also quotes Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s jibe comparing employment to slavery, George Orwell’s warning in “Politics and the English Language” that political language makes lies sound truthful, and the Welsh critic Raymond Williams on making hope possible rather than despair convincing.

A sceptic would point out that poverty existed long before modern banks, and that the large fall in extreme poverty over recent decades happened under states and markets, not without them. Defenders reply that this progress has been uneven and that debt still traps millions of households.

Argument 3: A healthier relationship with nature

Third, McGee says anarchist communities would be better for the planet because they would rest on an understanding that all living things are interdependent. He imagines local economies built around permaculture, sustainable building, alternative education and nature-based health, and contrasts them with states that, in his words, turn “livingry into weaponry”.

He supports this with a line usually credited to Alexandra K. Trenfor, about good teachers showing you where to look without telling you what to see. The attribution is often repeated but hard to trace, so treat it as “often attributed”. He also cites Nikola Tesla’s 1915 description of every living being as an engine geared to the wheel-work of the universe.

Green anarchists and social ecologists, such as Murray Bookchin, have made similar arguments for decades. The counterpoint is that large environmental problems such as climate change and ozone depletion have so far been tackled mainly through agreements between states, and it is not obvious how a stateless world would coordinate on that scale.

Argument 4: Sharing power and wealth through reciprocity

The fourth argument returns to levelling. McGee uses an unusual word, “expiation”, to mean giving away or atoning for power and wealth so that they do not harden into domination. In small societies, he says, people share because the alternative is shame, ridicule or being cast out.

He invokes Simone De Beauvoir’s point in The Ethics of Ambiguity that a freedom which exists only to deny freedom to others must itself be denied, and the philosopher A.C. Grayling on letting go of the feeling of having won. He insists this does not mean rewarding everyone equally or adopting socialism: skill, courage and effort could still earn prestige. In an earlier essay, “Breaking out of a Broken System”, he described his ideal as less about ownership and more about relationships.

Critics worry about the other side of shame-based order. Small, tight communities can punish difference as harshly as any state, and informal sanctions offer no appeals court.

Argument 5: Humble but courageous leaders

Finally, McGee argues that a society of self-educated, independent people would produce better leaders: people who balance self-interest with the good of the whole. He cites the 2012 documentary The Four Horsemen, the political theorist Louis G. Herman on Socrates, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s praise of “disciplined nonconformists” in Strength to Love.

He closes with Henry David Thoreau, whose essay on civil disobedience (1849) contains the defiant lines: “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” The word is “born”, not “designed”, as it is sometimes misquoted.

The strongest objections, and what history shows

Anarchist ideas have been tested more often than many people realise. During the Spanish Revolution of 1936, workers and peasants collectivised land and industry across Catalonia and Aragon before Communist forces suppressed them. In Ukraine, the Makhnovist movement ran large territories during the Russian Civil War until the Bolsheviks crushed it. Today, the Zapatistas in Mexico and the administration in Rojava, northern Syria, draw on anarchist ideas while not being fully stateless.

The recurring objections are practical. Bertrand Russell argued that some functions, such as sanitation and distribution, need central coordination. Robert Nozick argued that a minimal state would tend to re-emerge from anarchy anyway. Others question whether human nature allows self-government beyond small groups, and whether stateless communities can defend themselves from organised armies.

Even Sadedin, whose work McGee relies on, added caveats. Not every society could reach the “righteous” state, real minds are more complex than a model, and quiet cheating persists even in egalitarian bands. Her research suggests ways to make any institution less corrupt, such as spreading enforcement and reducing power gaps, rather than proving that abolishing the state would work.

That may be the most useful takeaway. You do not have to accept anarchy to take McGee’s questions seriously: who holds power, how can ordinary people check it, and how do we keep wealth and authority from hardening into something nobody chose?

About the author of the original essay

Gary ‘Z’ McGee is a former US Navy intelligence specialist turned philosopher and the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man.

Sources: Suzanne Sadedin, Aeon (2015): Game theory’s cure for corruption; Wikipedia: Christopher Boehm; Wikipedia: Anarchism; Project Gutenberg: Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience; original essay by Gary Z McGee at Waking Times, via The Mind Unleashed.