With the founding of this new site and a new ideology, many of you may be wondering what exactly is an anarcho-statist? The term seems like a contradiction, as anarchy implies no rulers, but statism is defined as “a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs,” but this conundrum couldn’t be further from the truth.

Let’s begin by pondering the concept of the state. Murray Rothbard describes it as “”that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion,” and I would agree with it for the most part.

Today’s state is coercive and oppressive; it takes away our freedoms as if they were free samples at Charley’s in your local mall. Any earned money and property is stolen from its citizens in the form of taxation and redistributed to pay bureaucrats and bribery in the form of welfare. That’s why the anarcho-statist ideology believes the only way for everyone to be truly free is to continue to increase the state until all earthly troubles disappear.

I understand that making the state bigger seems contradictory to all forms of anarchist thought, but it is the only way to create an anarchist society. As the state continuously grows, people actually become more free as they have less stress and anxiety over the decisions they make because it is the responsibility of the state.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote a book in 2004 titled “The Paradox of Choice” where he describes how having too many choices actually can harm us. Because one has so many options, we imagine alternatives to every decision and create unrealistic expectations.

“To the extent that we engage our imaginations in this way, we will be even less satisfied with the alternative we end up choosing,” the author stated to Business Insider continuing to explain “when your choice isn’t perfect, knowing there were alternatives out there makes it easy to imagine you could have made a better choice.”

One might inquire at this point what makes the anarcho-statist ideology different than the tyranny of Joseph Stalin or Bennito Mussolini. The difference here is that an anarcho-statist does not want absolute control over the lives of people because of the desire for power, but want to elevate the state to such a size that it becomes near omnipotent. This is where the ideology becomes an anarchist nation.

The issue with today’s state is that it is run by flawed people that all want different forms of society. Again, we see the paradox of choice causing people more harm than good. When the choice of society is in the hands of governing officials, it leads to stress, poverty, and misapplication of resources.

The omnipotent state won’t have these conflicts because there won’t be the conflict of differing ideologies, only a continual inflation making less and less choice. Eventually, there won’t be elections of officials, and those who have reached this point in the anarcho-statist plan will have the abilities of forces of nature. Forces of nature can’t rule you because they exist outside of human control and thus they are anarchist.

The glories of the market and ever increasing technology as can make it so that even these forces of nature can be relieved of their choices. Isaac Asimov details in his robot series a government built of three super-computing robots who receive data input by scientists which then make the political decisions for the world. With a computer’s ability to think and calculate leagues faster than any person, it would only make sense to employ them to create the anarcho-statist utopia.

This is the anarcho-statist ideology in a nutshell. To increase the state is to pursue anarchy not only from government, but also from those abstract concepts that cause pain and suffering such as ideology, belief or choice.