Although we humans have an inherent need to reconcile the
world we live in so that we might ameliorate any measure of maddening
dissonance between our beliefs, our aspirations, and the brutal realities
thrust upon us, the truth is our world is a messy and chaotic place that
progresses through random events. Many
of those events are originated by the few among us who engage in what Yale’s
James C. Scott recently described as thoughtful disobedience. Anarchism, he argues, is alive and well
throughout both the developed and developing world and can be credited with
much of the progress we herald as great.
At times, Scott illustrates, anarchism is expressed as acts of insubordination
– both large and small – that alter our world.
Small, like students tromping a new path through the well-groomed grass
of a university quadrangle that is later made ‘official’ by being paved with
concrete once grounds crews realize that reseeding the preferred route is a
fool’s task, and large like Rosa Parks act of defiance on a bus in Montgomery,
Alabama in 1955 that gave rise to the civil rights movement, which resulted in
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Official
order, largely conjured to protect those in power, is no match for what Scott
describes as “vernacular order” that is claimed, expressed, and maintained by
the “petty bourgeoisie.”[1]
Disorder, in Scott’s
interpretation, is the necessary condition of progress; without it we would be
staking our future on official committees that at birth lack the necessary
chromosomal attributes to produce anything at all that might be considered new
or better. For example, as we reflect on
great accomplishments in education (KIPP Academies), technology (iPhone), and
medicine (stem cell research), each were advanced by one or a few people
working against official order including well-funded adversaries with access to
seemingly overwhelming political power.
And yet, working in the ether of disorder, they have prevailed and
created new models of success for others to follow. Scott’s message is worth serious consideration
while our politicians, corporate titans, central bankers, Davos elite, and the
jester-pundits that dance in their vaporous wake, fight over the microphone in a
gratuitous attempt to persuade us that our future flows through them. Disorder, not the order inferred by institutions,
norms, and opinion polls is the incubator of greatness. Although many of us, myself included,
appreciate President Obama’s recent clarion call for togetherness in his second
inaugural address, the quest for the benefits of common interest and collective
action – rooted (as he argued) in the words of the Declaration of Independence – must be preceded by the inspirations
of the few among us who find no trepidation in ignoring official order that is guarded
by the vapid sentries of banality.[2] Indeed, those who penned the Declaration itself rejected the order of
the day. The togetherness that followed
and gave birth to a new nation was also courageous, but absent the impetus born
of inspiration and insubordination in the oft-maligned chaos of disorder, the
United States would have never come into being.
The benefits of disorder are
further substantiated in the work of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. His thesis, which has been developed in his
books Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007), and Antifragile (2012) argues that the world
advances largely by events that no one – especially those who live in the
trappings of official order – see coming, but which have profound effects on
financial markets and the societies we call our own. The strategic implications are, he argues,
quite obvious: seek an antifragile state of being in order to gain from
volatility and disorder, which is predominant (and always has been) in the
world in which we live. The great model,
which both Scott and Taleb use as a referent for their monikers of anarchism
and antifragility, is nature itself, which is the most antifragile system in
the world, constantly adapting to, and benefiting from, volatility and
disorder. How to become antifragile
starts with accepting that the world does not function according to the
theories and models taught in most academic institutions that seek to provide
their students with tools to fit the world inside of a box constructed from
magical (and tenured!) thinking. Then,
structure an autonomous life disconnected from systemic risk by, for example, eliminating
debt. Seek not just resilience – the
capacity to recover from the inevitable shocks that occur – but aim to benefit
from the volatility and disorder that crushes the fragile. In effect, win the game before others even
realize it has begun.
The great work-arounds that I wrote
about here in December 2011, and regaining personal sovereignty, which I wrote
about in June 2012, are emblematic of disorder-friendly modalities. One must simply ignore the silliness of those
who claim that by virtue of their position or birthright they are worthy of our
attention … that we ought to follow them without questioning first the very
source of their presumed power. If it
originates from beyond their own personal intellect and character, we should
turn our faces away and treat them as a nuisance of distraction while we pursue
our own ambitions and dreams under the counsel of our own hard-won
sensibilities. There exist innumerable
stories throughout history of how individuals changed the course of history
while there are very few (if any) that can be credited to those who claim the
mantle of official order. It is in our
power – as antifragile anarchists – to change our world.
[1]
James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press), pp. 30, 84.
[2]
A transcript of Obama’s second Inaugural Address can be found at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/01/21/inaugural-address-president-barack-obama.
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