Failing to See the Trees for the Forest
There is no forest. There are only trees. The “forest” is a human fabrication, an abstraction that exists only in our minds. Abstractions serve a purpose in human communication, of course. However, we must never forget what they really are and that they only exist in our minds.
If you take a particular cluster of trees and establish boundaries in your mind and decide to name it Fangorn Forest, then until you tell others about it and they agree with you, Fangorn Forest exists only in your mind. Even when you do tell people about it and perhaps draw some boundary lines on a map, some may agree, some may disagree about what the boundaries are, or may want to call it something else, or may not want to acknowledge it at all. Even then, Fangorn Forest exists in some minds but not others. At no point has reality ever actually been altered. The “forest” does not exist. The forest has only abstract existence and even then it exists only to the extent that various people consent to it and to the extent that they agree on its properties.
If I and a number of others decide to create a liberty club, the purpose of which is to combine our efforts to protect the liberties of each of the members, then the club exists in our minds. It’s an abstraction that serves a useful purpose. If a new person shows up and we tell them they’re a member of the liberty club and that they have to pay dues each quarter and stand watch one night a month against criminals, this club is something they’ve never heard of. In fact, the liberty club does not exist to that person unless and until they choose to accept it. When the “liberty club” demands dues from that person, we are just ganging up and stealing from him. When it commands him to stand watch, we are enslaving him. What the liberty club is in fact doing is contradicting it’s proposed purpose which was to protect liberty.
There is bad news and there is good news. The bad news is we can’t just make a new liberty club to replace the old one. We must acknowledge that the liberty club only exists in the minds of those who consent to it, and that the reason it failed was because it was internally inconsistent and irrational. We can’t fix the problem by just repeating our old mistakes. That seems to make the task quite a bit harder, because you can’t force people into the liberty club or it stops being the liberty club. What makes liberty work is that it respects individuals and their choices. With liberty, there is no collective club. There are only individuals. Liberty can only be achieved to the extent that we wake up individuals to what it really means. On its face, that sounds quite a bit more difficult than just fighting a revolution and violently imposing a new mental abstraction on everyone.
The good news is that while there can be no single liberty club, there can be many. There are as many groups as people choose to believe in, as long as we recognize that they exist only as abstractions for the people who consent to their existence. People can belong to groups with varying purposes. Remember that abstractions serve a purpose as long as people understand what they really are. The moment you believe that the abstraction you’ve created in your mind and perhaps many other minds is something that exists in the real world, your abstraction has become a distraction from reality, and failing to acknowledge reality is like driving while ignoring obstacles in the road. Sooner or later, you’re bound to crash.
Constitutions, flags, political titles, boundaries on maps, badges, and black robes are symbols with meaning only in our minds. A piece of paper can’t protect your rights. A badge or a robe doesn’t make a person more competent with a gun or more moral or altruistic in their decisions. A political title is meaningless in the middle of nowhere with no minds to acknowledge the title and pay allegiance to the title holder. We’ve let these things distract us from reality for far too long. It’s time to face the truth.
The most liberty-minded among us believe that no one should be enslaved to another, that we are responsible for all our own needs whether that be food, shelter, health care, or the raising of our children. But many of these seemingly wise individuals still feel that our most important responsibility of all, can, and in fact must, be delegated to someone else. They absolve themselves of the most important responsibility of all, the one responsibility that ensures we’re able to fulfill the many others, the responsibility of protecting our own rights. They pass this critical task on to a non-existent state, an ambiguous abstraction that exists only in imagination and whose properties vary tremendously from one person to the next. In so doing, we stifle our own maturity and remain perpetual children to a paternalistic state which is nothing more than a nebulous fantasy. This fantasy has, as any sensible person would expect, failed to fulfill the most important task assigned it. We can certainly work together for the protection of our rights just as we can work together for any shared goals, but we cannot do so through a single organization, because such a monolithic entity does not and cannot exist. It is a figment of the imagination.
This is why I do not see anarchy as a state of the world or of any nation that we achieve collectively and overnight in some violent overthrow of the state. We are all individuals. Liberty is not binary– all or nothing. Liberty is a sliding scale linked to the social evolution of many individuals. To the extent that we convince others to abandon their delusions and their fantasies, and to the extent that we convince people to stand up for their own rights and responsibilities, and to the extent that we convince people to work with others voluntarily and to respect the rights of others, we will have liberty, and with it we will have peace and prosperity. There is no state. There are either peaceful consensual cooperative acts or violent criminal coercive acts. Changing words is merely an abstraction in our minds and does not change reality. Taxation is theft. Arresting someone when there is no victim is kidnapping. Conscription is slavery.
When people ask me if anarchy is possible, the question has its origin in a misunderstanding of what anarchy is, and the answer to that question is “no”. What they’re referring to is anarchy as some sort of collective state of humanity. But that’s not possible because that collective does not really exist. The state itself, call it a Democratic Republic in the U.S., is an illusion built on that abstraction of a collective. We can not achieve a single collective state of anarchy any more than we could have any sort of collective state when there are only individuals and we are all different. But once they understand what anarchy really is, then I can confidently answer “yes”. Yes, people are capable of becoming fully mature and adult. Yes, we can evolve individuals to a fuller acceptance of their own rights and responsibilities toward a more civilized world. Is it possible for you? That depends on whether you can let go of your comforting delusions, no small feat after years of indoctrination to an abstraction that was fabricated centuries ago and has been perpetuated ever since. Let go of the fantasy that there is some monolithic entity out there looking after your best interests and protecting your rights. Achieve personal maturity and accept responsibility. Start working voluntarily with other fully adult individuals to achieve common ends. Anarchy is a personal act of rejecting years of brainwashing and seeing the real world with eyes wide open. Anarchy is an individual rejecting the forest and seeing the trees. Anarchy is a form of personal enlightenment. Anarchy is in your head.
** If this is your first visit to the site, make sure you check out the comic strips before you leave.
great essay Dale..
http://digg.com/political_opinion/Failing_to_see_the_Trees_for_the_Forest
Digg it!
As usual you’re dead on, Dale.
Great article!
It actually made me think, especially the part about maturing, of humanity as a race of kids who still have to learn how to operate by the laws of this universe. We have this programming tool in our brains that I could called “abstractions management” and clearly most of us are still quite bad at using it so end up confusing abstractions for reality. Learning about individualism and subsequently voluntaryism is like finally growing up.
It certainly seems like the obvious direction of human evolution. Everything else somehow seems like stangation or devolving. And I think that if not enough humans evolve into people who see individuals as individuals and are willing not to coerce anyone or support coercing anyone, we’re pretty much doomed. How many more wars and how much more tyranny can the human culture and civilization really last? I’d rather we don’t find out.
“YES, WE’RE ALL INDIVIDUALS!”
“I’m not.”
“Shhh!”
Sorry, old Monty Python joke.
I’m very glad I found this site. That was the most accessible and cogent explanation of anarchy that I’ve read yet. I’ve never considered myself an anarchist, but now I may just have to re-consider.
Sorry, this essay is an exercise in reductio ad absurdum — you may as well say, “there are no trees, only collections of cells”
“there are no cells, only collections of molecules”
At the end of the day, it’s all quarks and leptons, man.
I think there’s some sarcasm there, but I’ll respond anyway because some people will take it seriously. Scott Adams once made a good point about analogies– that the only perfect analogy for something is itself. Any analogy can be picked apart at some level because it is not EXACTLY the same as what you’re comparing it to. Of course, that would defeat the point of analogizing in the first place, which is intended to simplify for the sake of examining a certain fundamental logic.
That said. There are fundamental differences between the cells that make up a tree and the trees in a forest that make it a good analogy, keeping in mind that there are no perfect analogies. The cells developed together from a single seed and are interdependent. One cell would not be able to survive on its own. And yet we see trees off by themselves all the time. There can be three trees, twenty trees, a hundred trees. There can be a space between two sets of 50 trees each. One person might see two small forests and another might see two large forests. There is tremendous room for variation of opinion on what makes up the boundaries of a forest. Not so for the boundaries of a single tree.
The analogy is sufficient for making the point and if someone decides to focus on imperfections in the analogy, it’s really just an evasive tactic because they can’t argue against the substance. I know that doesn’t describe you though because I doubt you would even want to argue the substance of the post.
Another fundamental difference between the cells of a tree and the trees in a “forest” is the difference between natural bottom-up order and unnatural top-down order. There’s an excellent YouTube video that compares these two very different things. Click here to watch it.
Denis makes a good point; the idea of a human being as a single entity is an abstraction in itself.
However, humans, just like trees in a forest, are usually best considered as individual entities. Forests or groups cannot reasonably be said to have a single motive or single thoughts because of diversity.
I checked out the reductio ad absurdum fallacy and it doesn’t seem to apply here; “Reductio ad absurdum is a mode of argumentation that seeks to establish a contention by deriving an absurdity from its denial, thus arguing that a thesis must be accepted because its rejection would be untenable.” (http://www.iep.utm.edu/r/reductio.htm)
Actually, Denis, I think that would more apply to your statement, since you derived an absurdity from Dale’s argument and used it to prove your contention that his argument is flawed.
Powerful essay, Dale; great job!
Friday typo’d her own URL
Shoulda been
http://www.freestateobserver.com/
Excellent essay. Love the forest analogy.
Well, it kinda makes sense to me to think about the universe as a sort of a fractal in which case everything can be consisted of something and be consistent in something. There’s no such thing as a final fundamental beneath which there are no fundamentals. There’s just a fundamental to this or that.
So, trees are fundamental to a forest and materials and moleculs are fundamental to a tree, and then atoms, subatomic particles etc. etc.
But when something is fundamental, it must always be considered first because without it the thing which it forms couldn’t exist. So since without individuals you cannot even pose an abstraction of a society or a community, you must first consider individuals. And that’s why this analogy works great.
I really love what the freedom movement has spawned. I used to think the youth of today would be terrible. Now I see that they will teach the baby booming theives what America was really supposed to be.
These people are scared of their own shadows, and I am sorry but they need to hurry up and die off or shut up and let us get on with restoring this nation to a liberty above all things mentality.
Keep up the good work all of you have made me have faith in humanity again.
Viva la Anarchy! Viva la rEVOLution!
Perhaps I don’t understand your example. In your liberty club example, no one was forced to be a member. The notion of paying dues was essentially a free choice- you can choose to be a member of this organization, or not.
In so far as the stateless collective thing, it seems you’re talking about anarcho-capitalism here. The problem I have always had with anarcho-capitalist formulations is that they are somewhat internally inconsistent. It doesn’t sound like you are talking about competing security forces- what are you talking about exactly?
I don’t see why a stateless collective, as you put it, is any more or less realistic then militia groups, or even armed individuals, protecting liberty. Both presuppose what history has not shown, which is that there will be a group of armed, “anti-liberty” people who will be willing to organize to attain power.
Dave, I’ve read your comment several times and I’m honestly having trouble deciphering it. In my liberty club example, people WERE being forced to become members. That was the point. It was an analogy for statism/minarchy. And I don’t know what you mean by “stateless collective thing” or by “anarcho-capitalist formulations”. I never used either term and don’t even know what they’re supposed to refer to. Are you sure you aren’t replying to someone else’s post?
Awesome article. It kinda reminds me of a little essay I wrote at a site called gather.com, except you are much better at putting concepts into words and making them easy to understand than I am.
Well done.
I really enjoyed this article and your cartoons in general. I hope you don’t mind if I add you to my blogroll.
Collectives have an empirical objective existence. They exist in the relation between individuals. If one person acts to say pump chemicals into the air and a hundred people become ill from those pollutants you have just demonstrated a collective interest objectively and empirically.
Not to mention that the vast majority of human grow up, live, learn, and become who they are as a result of a massive web of dependency that can be precisely tracked.
So no, the forest is very real. The forest is that thing which is produced by the interactions and dependencies of the trees on each other and other organisms.
Also, your imagery is not an argument against anything other than a specific use of the terms state and collective.
You’re talking about abstractions. I conceded the existence of abstractions in a certain sense and also conceded that they have value. The forest has abstract existence in many minds. What you’ve said doesn’t counter my points.
No I am not talking about mental abstractions I’m talking about relational facts. The trees are interdependant on the ecosystem and other trees around them. There are observable relations between them.
So when I observe that a human being relies on parents, neighborhood, national safety, international trade, and a whole host of interdependant relations I am seeing collective interests.
Collectives exists as states of relation. You are saying that they must be a super-person or non-relative entity or nothing at all. I am saying that collectives are real and empirically verifiable because they are relative states of being.
I don’t deny those relations. The point you’re trying to ignore is that people will interpret those things differently, particularly boundaries. I’m repeating myself, but what looks like two clusters of trees (two forests) to me and might get two names, might just seem like one cluster to you and be considered one forest. You could say every tree in the world is interdependent, and to some extent they could be considered so, and so there is only one forest in the entire world. The boundaries of the forests exist in our minds and we can reasonably disagree on them. Those boundaries do not exist objectively and it is absurd to say that they do.
Clubs and organizations do exist for their members. They have a purpose. They can be described as collectives, certainly. As long as I can choose to be a member or not, then the club is accountable to me to some extent. The existence of this abstraction to me is validated by my acceptance of its existence. When I can’t choose to be a member, it’s not accountable to me and it is simply a group working together to enslave me. Any claim that it owns (can force membership) on all people within some abstract and arbitrary boundary that exists in the minds of some and not others, and that to avoid membership they must exit that boundary, is absurd and irrational and is simply a pathetic and contrived excuse for using aggressive violence against innocent people.