Also, read "The Wealth of Nations" - specialization INCREASES efficiency. If you tried to farm your own food, I bet you wouldn't do very well. Oh sure, you could learn - but are you going to till the soil at sunrise, are you going to gather the crops, plough the dirt, water the fields, irrigate the channels and collect the manure for use as a fertilizer? Are you willing to do that? Because I've got to tell you - that's a full time job. It isn't easy. If you are a doctor, you don't have time to really grow a lot of crops. Oh sure, you can have a small cabbage patch. But you'd better be damn sure your neighbours are willing to lend you some vegetables if you get a pest or a crop disease or if your area experiences a drought! Can't really grow your own food very well if it ain't raining very much! Oh, sure, you can water your garden with that water that the state provides! Except that in an anarchist commune, there is no state and you'd have to go fetch that water yourself.
Anarchists, put your money (although you guys don't believe in money) where your mouth is - go off and found your own commune. Accept no help from the State or our "vast" "corrupt" "evil" civilization. We'll see how long you last or how good a life your children have. You want to live a life that is truly anarchistic? Well go to Brazil and join one of those tribes that remain nearly out of contact with the rest of the world! If you haven't noticed, those guys don't have very long life-expectancies. There's a reason for that: They don't have hospitals.
You want to overthrow society? Okay, say goodbye to modern science. In case you haven't noticed, modern science takes a lot of resources. You can't perform a PCR reaction with a couple of rocks in the wilderness. You can't build the LHC out of HAY and STICKS. You want to say bye-bye to society? Say bye-bye to almost every modern convenience you have. Say bye-bye internet, say bye-bye hospital and MRI machine!
The system is far better than the alternative. Sure, the system has problems. I'm not denying that capitalism is imperfect, it's VERY imperfect and unfair. But no other WORKABLE, LARGE SCALE system has presented itself as a valid alternative. Communism has failed IN EVERY COUNTRY IT HAS EVER BEEN TRIED IN. Don't believe me? Go live in North Korea! Let's see what a happy time you'll have there! Or Cuba!
You want to smash the system? Well you can experience what it would be like to live without the system! Yeah! Right now! You can experience a genuine anarchist lifestyle right now! It's called the jungle! It's called the woods! You want to know what it's like to live without the system! Well go experience it, right now! Move to a desert island, or go camp in the woods for the rest of your life. Move to a jungle, or go to a deserted place in inner Mongolia! You have the power, and it won't cost you a dime!
You can't eat your cake and have it to. You can't enjoy the luxuries the system has provided and angrily demand that it must be destroyed! And these anarchists are lacking in imagination - yes there are problems, but their pessimistic attitude precludes the idea that we could create solutions to those problems with technology. So Oil is running out - build Solar Power Panels! Build Nuclear Power plants! So fish stocks are running low - well, just impose government tariffs on fish to reduce demand!
The solution to our problems is not in the past, it is in the future. These anarchists and anarcho-primitivists imagine that at one point in time we lived in a veritable paradise! They literally believe some version of the Garden-of-Eden myth, Man-before-"the fall" sort of nonsense, they believe that if only we could return to some more primal, past state, everyone and everything would be perfect!
That's nonsense. If the world was perfect in the past, we wouldn't have tried so damn hard to escape it. Want to go back to the past! Okay! Enjoy having 1 in 3 infants die before their second birth day. Enjoy being at the absolute mercy of droughts and natural disasters. Enjoy living a primitive existence in which nothing ever changes and humanity aspires to do nothing more than sit around and eat.
I love my species more than that. Anarchists want us to stand still - I believe we must move forward. We must explore the universe, we must create and imagine and use our brains to the best of our abilities. We need to do science, for without the eternal strive for a better world or a better understanding of the universe we are in, what are we?
And because modern day science requires such enormous resources, I support the system. I can't do science without the system, and I am convinced that without science, human civilization is worthless. Without science, our species is nothing. We already know that the sun will burn out one day - we need to find our way off this blasted rock. Find a new sun and terraform a planet to fit human needs. And you need science for that.
If we go with what the Anarchists want, we are condemning humanity to an inevitable extinction. Nature has killed billions of species in the past, it will have no qualms killing us. Science is our only hope of creating a truly perfect world, a truly immortal species. If we exist only to die, what has been the purpose of existing at all? For our species to have any meaning, we must survive. If we die, imagine what has been lost: Bach, The Principia Mathematica, the Einstein papers, Beethoven, and all, all of our history. The suffering of our ancestors would have been for NOTHING if our species just dies, and without science we surely will, whether it is now, or a million years from now.
I would rather die early in a glorious attempt at something greater, than just subsist and live a meagre existence for the sake of existing. Anarchists want us to go back in time. They are welcome to stay stagnant. The rest of us want the future and the possibilities it holds.
