Article by Colonel Nogov on Sept. 10, 2015
Some think we’re going to educate the people until enough people understand freedom and anarchy on a philosophical level and then we’ll just ignore governments out of existence. Some think we’re going to get to a certain percentage of people understanding and then there will be some sort of violent revolution. Either of those things could happen. I see it happening in a different way.
Slavery wasn’t abolished overnight. It took the better part of 3 centuries to abolish planet wide. It really got rolling in the earlier 1700’s. First a single country here then another country there etc. etc. Three hundred years later the entire planet had formally abolished slavery.
This is how I see the abolition of governments happening. I see sometime within the next 10 years a small (relatively) completely free stateless anarchist society will form somewhere on the planet. It will appear like a small ray of sunshine breaking through a cloudy sky.
When this happens, anarchists from all over the planet will migrate to this free society. This society will grow rapidly in both size and prosperity. Then before you know it, maybe 5 or 10 more years another free society will appear somewhere else on the planet. And so it will go. A new free society popping up every few years. Once this ball starts rolling it will never stop. It may take 300 hundred years before the entire planet is free. For impatient anarchists this seems like forever, but that is the wrong attitude. You and your friends and family can move to a free society while still continuing your activism to educate the rest of the world to free their minds.
Unfortunately in our lifetime, freedom is not likely coming to us. We have to go to freedom. Just like when the U.S. was formed. People from all over the world came to the U.S. to be free(mostly free anyway).
I don’t know how or where that first free society will happen, but I know it will and it will happen soon. Why do I think this? Is there evidence? Oh yes.
Today’s anarchists are not the anarchists of old. Today’s anarchists, for the most part, are highly educated and free marketeers. As free marketeers we understand that if there’s a market demand for something, the market will find a way to provide it. I believe the worldwide anarchist community has become large enough that the market it trying to find a solution.
In the last ten years I’ve seen evidence of this. The free state project, floating libertarian paradises, Galt’s gulch projects. All failures yes, but these are the first sparks of the free market trying to create a free society. After all, the free market is not magic, it’s often a trial and error process. How many times did it take Edison to invent the light bulb? How many times for Henry Ford and the Model T?
Is the worldwide anarchist community big enough? I think so. I can only make assumption because data is impossible. Let’s make the assumption that between 1% and 3% of the worldwide population is anarchist. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable assumption. It also seems incredibly small as far as a percentage basis. But let’s look at the numbers. If 1% that is 73 million people. If as high as 3%, that amounts to 219 million people. That is a population larger than any other country in the world except four (China, India, U.S., Indonesia).
So when I see these failed free society projects, I don’t get depressed or think those ideas were stupid pipe dreams and they were just another failure, I think holy crap these are the markets first attempts at creating a completely free stateless anarchist society.
This new one, Liberland, shows promise as possibly being the first free society. Will this one fail or succeed? I don’t know. If this one doesn’t work the next one will or the one after that. It’s coming.
