Anarchism vs. The State: Looking at the Facts

I've been thinking lately about how the atheistic arguments against religion being needed for a peaceful society are similar to the arguments for the need of a government for a peaceful society and I've come to some interesting conclusions.

First I'll go over the arguments against the need for religion for a peaceful society. I've gone over this extensively in another post so I'll just address the basic argument.

Looking through several studies, it's been demonstrated that societies that have a higher level of secularism (ie. a larger number of atheists and agnostics) the healthier and more prosperous the society. The more religious the society, the more social problems plague that society.

The sociologist Phil Zuckerman has this to say about these findings:

"If this often-touted religious theory were correct - that turning away from god is at the root of all societal ills - then we would expect to find the least religious nations on earth to be bastions of crime, poverty and disease and most religious countries to be models of societal health.

A comparison of highly irreligious countries with highly religious countries, however, reveals a very different state of affairs. In reality, the most secular countries - those with the highest proportion of atheists and agnostics - are among the most stable, peaceful, free, wealthy, and healthy societies. And the most religious nations - wherein worship of god is in abundance - are among the most unstable, violent, oppressive, poor and destitute" (Zuckerman, 2006) (Source: 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a god, by Guy P. Harrison, page 296).

A similar situation seems to be happening with anarchist societies.

After looking at several such societies they seemed to be more peaceful and orderly than societies that are run by coercion and force (ie. the government). For example, in one such city called Modern Times, conceived by the anarchists Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews, during the entire time that the society was running there were no police, courts, laws, etc. and there were no reports of any crime whatsoever.

Now, this society did have a relatively small number of individuals living there and that may have been an influence on the lack of crime, but this leads me back to a recent post I did, in which I argued that perhaps anarchists are more "civilized" than statists and maybe anarchists are more level headed and do not need a "big brother" (in the case of statists) or "imaginary friend" (in the case of theists) to make them moral and kind to their fellow man.

Having said that, I find it ironic that atheists use the studies provided to show that atheistic societies tend to be more moral, even though there has never been an entirely atheistic society to judge by, while the same atheists who make appeals to that research completely dismiss the successful anarchist societies that have been developed and show that they can work.

Seems kind of like they're talking out both sides of their mouth to me.

An argument that might come my way could be the following:

Someone might claim that anarchists are such an extreme minority (which is true) that such a society could not work because the majority do need the government to tell them what to do. Because of this, a majority of the people will be running amok and the anarchist society cannot work.

I think there is a flaw in this argument though, because it's the exact same argument that atheists use. Atheists are also a minority (just like anarchists) and yet many argue that people do not need a god in order to be moral and run a smooth society. However, again, what if the majority (all the theists) end up running amok because they need god and because of that, such a society could not work.

I think you can see I'm playing devils advocate here, but I think I have a legitimate point.

Now, after laying out my thesis, the question remains how to set up such a society. Well, the answers are not simple, though I've given some basic ideas about how to go about this in other posts.

Sometimes I'm amazed at the similarity in the arguments that both atheists and anarchists put forth, but then I have to remind myself that this makes perfect sense because statism grew out of theism, and the same things that plague theists are pretty much the same things that plague statists (in certain respects) when they attempt to argue for their belief that they need such institutions in place (whether the church or the state) for a society to function.