Ambiarchy is an interesting worldview, because it is simultaneously anarchy and statism. Many would think this an impossibility.
To understand how Ambiarchy is simultaneously anarchy and statism, one must understand the Ambiarchist conceptions of anarchy and statism. These are intrinsically bound up in the Ambiarchist conception of rights.
Ambiarchy starts with early humanity, in our nomadic and hunter-gathering stages.
Hunter gatherers lived in a primitive anarchy. That is, they lived without rulers. This is, in part, because Stone Age technologies and nomadic lifestyles are not conducive to slavery, the way Bronze Age technologies and complex horticultural, agricultural, or pastoral lifestyles were. This was a condition of anarchy de facto, in which anarchy existed as a fact of nature.
De facto anarchy represented the pinnacle accomplishments of the genus Homo, before African Homosapien stock moving out of Africa. The establishment of an intraspecific equilibrium of sorts–wherein power could not be unilaterally claimed on behalf of alpha males– was the result of a longstanding trend against pronounced sexual dimorphism. Many anthropologists believe that such conditions were brought about through the evolution of stone projectile weapons and the cooperation between beta males against the alphas.
Somehow, this equilibrium was thrown off.
Even within the equilibrium there were elites of sorts, but natural pressures ensured that the status of elites never evolved into political control. Instead, socio-anthropologists like Gerhard Lenski suggest that the roles of elites were predominantly functional, and awarded the player with actual earned merit, rather than control.
It seems reasonable to consider the land and its associated differences as a key factor in the development of states. Differences in grades of land and its weather– unlike the equilibrium conditions in which we had evolved in Africa before moving outward– created an ecological niche for states to develop within.
“Nature abhors a vacuum.”
In biology, it is clear that organisms fill niches within ecosystems. It is also clear that organisms tend to evolve with increasing order and complexity as they fill and refill those niches. The origins of statism are no different. Opportunities were presented by nature, and they were taken up.
And that put anarchy de facto— our instinctual self and its interactions– under the domination of (what we now understand to be) bad government. Anarchy is lost and losing, for the time being. For 30,000 years or more, that is. As played out on Earth in real life, between people and cultures of different proclivities to organize and associate, atop different grades of land, this is what we got. We can’t go backwards.
Funny that today some individuals think that simply ignoring the state will move us forward. Don’t ya think the elders tried that, before being conquered?
Modern anarchism, or social anarchism, is more along the lines of an anarchy de jure, or an anarchy by law. Revolutionary anarchists such as Nestor Makhno and Buenaventura Durruti– who literally battled states in the modern era– used large social organizations to abolish the state by force. An anarchism of this sort I call de jure, because it is almost like a new legal structure designed to continually abolish government as it arises, as governments seeks to abolish organized crime– its competition– in the same manner.
Some have charged social anarchists with having formed states or governments. By some definitions, and considering some of the less consistent actions taken at times, the accusation holds water. However, those definitions are not always universal, and anarchists have criticized the same actions from within.
Ambiarchy is interested specifically in organized social anarchism, and rejects primitivism, individualism, ad hocism, and other trends which do not recognize the trend in history for bigger powers to fill ecological niches. It sees this anarchy de jure as, interestingly enough, being the matured result of statism, something which could not have occurred without it. For this reason, Ambiarchy is also good government, as opposed to the earlier bad government.
In Ambiarchy, all who want to, participate.
It is impossible to jump from anarchy de facto to anarchy de jure, or good government. The loosely-affiliated (in a legal sense) hunter-gatherer lost to the pastoralist hoards and agriculturalist legalists, who sought to combine themselves into a superorganism, the state. Get over it, and learn from your mistakes. Certainly don’t repeat them.
Anarchy de jure, good government, or Ambiarchy, is not the taking away of something, but the subduing of it.
All of this brings to the table the Ambiarchist conception of rights. To the Ambiarchist, there are different levels of rights, or law. The most primary level of rights are those found in individual ability and jungle law. One has the natural right to use one’s capacity to get by, but nature promises no success, as the hunter-gatherers discovered. These are rights as granted directly by God or Nature.
But there are other rights in nature which are expressed indirectly, through us. Earlier forms of these were presented by bad government in its various generations; oligarchy, monarchy, and oligarchy again. Anarchy preceded oligarchy, and Ambiarchy will follow after it. With it, will come the rule of all by all and none by none, anarchy de jure, or good government. Such a law will collectively render external government of man by man illegal.
If one wants rights, one has to organize.
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