Well, anarchism is the belief that all, if not most, of the justifications for rule are flawed excuses that human rulers use to justify their rule over others. There is not, anarchists will say, any real justification that believers in anarachism will contemplate. Who says human kind needs to be ruled over in the first place?
I will, of course, be summarizing many different views in this section and some differ in minor ways and others quite a bit.
The "State of Nature" Idea
1. Humankind once existed in a state of nature, {Rousseau,} where he lived simply, in small villiages, was quite innocent in his outlook, had minimum government and, in this "state of nature," he existed for hundreds of centuries.
Then, we became citified, learned the ways of the city and fell into sin and adopted habits that will destroy this planet for greed, lust, a yearning for power and control.
This is a view we see in the bible and in other religious writings, but, also, it is present in revolutionary tracts, in messianic literature, where human kind needs to go back to that innocent state and abandoned this "modernization" "progress" tract we are on.
This is small town life compared to cities and is present in our current views in the United States, currently. And it is not old and was most prevalent over a hundred years ago in this country.
The city folks, since have won and we see over 50% of the population on this planet living in huge cities where it is clear there is great deal of poverty and great inequality evident; where the planet's down fall is connected, in the mind some anarchists with the rise of the rich and the 1%.
Many say, however, we cannot go back to a more innocent time and some say on the other hand, what we have is unsustainable.
One branch of anarchism believes we must up end all of "society" and start all over again, believing that what we have is unsustainable, will kill us, and will destroy the planet.
Smaller and simpler is what they recommend.
They may recommend that after this re-orientation of our society we may follow on with some brand of socialism, or even a more human version of communism. But socialism is gaining adherents here in the United States and holds sway in some form in Europe.
So, we cannot go back and we cannot sustain what we have because it may destroy us.
What to do?
Let us leave the answer to this question for the time being and come back to it later.
For the time being let's just focus on one aspect of reform: Creating the ethical society, one without corruption, graft, and inequality.
Big issues here.
But first, we may ask what is ethical, what is ethical behavior,something our new society demands.
However,ethical and ethical behavior often varies and what may be ethical in one society may not ethical in another society.
What, then, are we to do?
Which brand of ethical behavior, then, are we to recommend here?
Well,first it can be seen that ethical is situational, therefore, dependent upon which society we are talking about; we first then must identify "ethical behavior" initially, as "situational" in nature and cultural in context.
How can it be that in one culture I am engaging in ethical behavior and in another, contemporaneous society this would not be the case at all.
Many have tacked this problem and next time we will review some of their answers and solutions.