Lately I’ve found that I’m doing some of my best writing on Twitter, but since it’s an ephemeral medium I’m going to start reposting especially good tweet threads here. On Saturday, while we were watching the mass protests against Trump’s executive order preventing people from a number of predominantly-Muslim countries from entering the US even if they had green cards, I tweeted the following; the second paragraph was tweeted later in response to people who kept erroneously referring to the protests, and the actions of lawyers rushing out to help detainees pro bono, as “democracy” when in fact it was (the republican form of) democracy that created and empowered the very system which these people were fighting. 
If I were the sort of person who found comfort in being right, I’d be very smug now that millions are waking up to the danger of giving more than a tiny amount of power to “leaders”. But since I’m NOT that kind of person, I’m just shaking my head. I’m not a seer or a brilliant analyst of mob psychology; I just understand that ALL humans are too flawed to be given power over others except in very limited circumstances & subject to revocation of that power by EACH individual subject to it. In other words, no person is morally bound to obey “authorities” merely because he or she happens to be physically located within imaginary lines on a map which those “authorities” claim belong to them. Donald Trump’s moral authority, or the moral authority of ANY politician, is exactly as legitimate as the moral authority of a tiger pissing on trees to mark its territory. In other words, one should be mindful that there’s a dangerous and irrational animal in the area which believes it has the “right” to do anything it wants to those within that territory, but that animal’s behavior doesn’t represent “justice” or a “social contract” or “divine right” or anything else but the predictable behavior of a violent animal with no understanding of what right & wrong actually mean. “Authorities”, like tigers, are best avoided unless they’re locked up in cages where they can’t maim others due to some whim, urge or emotion. What they are NOT to be given is any kind of obedience or deference except what’s minimally necessary to get away safely if one happens to run into one. And the same cautions apply whether it’s a Bengal tiger or a Siberian one, whether it has white, black or orange coloring behind the stripes, whether it’s male or female, or whether it’s actually a lion, leopard or jaguar instead of a tiger. And replacing one tiger with another one won’t change anything except what that particular individual tiger might be most enraged by.
Individuals acting toward some shared goal, without a formal structure enforced by violence, is not “democracy”; it’s anarchy. Grasp that. Those who think “anarchy” is evil need to look at these protests & lawyers voluntarily helping immigrants. THAT IS ANARCHY. So the next time some ass tells you about how we “need” government to prevent anarchy, remember these protests; the truth is, we need anarchy to protect us from government.
