Anarchist Cheerleading: A Selection from Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All (2019)
“What connects these various notions is a fantasy of living free of government. These rich and powerful men engage in what the writer Kevin Roose has called ‘anarchist cheerleading,’ in keeping with their carefully crafted image as rebels against the authorities. To call for a terrain without rules in the way they do, to dabble in this anarchist cheerleading, may be to sound like you wished for a new world of freedom on behalf of humankind. But a long line of thinkers has told us that the powerful tend to be the big winners from the creation of blank-slate, rules-free worlds. A famous statement of that finding came from the feminist writer Jo Freeman, who in her 1972 essay ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ observed that when groups operate on vague or anarchic terms, structurelessness ‘becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.’
Freeman’s idea could be traced back to the Enlightenment and Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes also believed that structurelessness wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, especially for the weak. The powerful Leviathan for which he advocated is often treated as shorthand for monarchy or authoritarianism. But in fact what Hobbes suggested was that the choice is not between authority and liberty, but between authority of one sort and authority of another. Someone always rules; the question is who. In a world without a Leviathan, which is to say a strong state capable of making and enforcing universal rules, people will be ruled by thousands of miniature Leviathans closer to home—by the feudal lords on whose soil they work and against whom they have few defenses; by powerful, whimsical, unaccountable princes.
Hobbes articulated a vision of an authority in which everyone had a formal legal investment, an authority that belonged to us in common and that trumped local authorities. He believed that there could be greater liberty under such an authority than in its absence: ‘Men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company where there is no power able to overawe them all.’ In a world without rules, he wrote, ‘nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice.’ The cardinal virtues in a such a world are ‘force and fraud.’
The self-styled entrepreneur-rebels were actually seeking to overturn a major project of the Enlightenment—the development of universal rules that applied evenly to all, freeing people from the particularisms of their villages, churches, and domains. The world that these elites seemed to envision, in which rules receded and entrepreneurs reigned through the market, augured a return to private manors—allowing the Earl of Facebook and the Lord of Google to make major decisions about our shared fate outside of democracy. It would be a world that let them deny their power over the serfs around them by appropriating a language of community and love, movements and win-wins. They would keep on speaking of changing the world. But many, down in the world, would feel, not without reason, that what was bleak in the world somehow wasn’t changing.
It is not inevitable that what passes for progress in our age involves the concentration of power into a small number of hands and the issuance of stories about the powerful being fighters for the little guy. There are people thinking about other, more honest ways of making the world a better place, and thinking freely, without the burdensome MarketWorld requirement that progress must tend to the winners and obey their rules.”—Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2019)
