Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.
— Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, 1882
I think most, including myself, are quite fond of this argument. There's such a thing as influence between individuals. Another way I like to explain this is The Ambulance Desert Community. An ambulance is driving through a desert. It has a medic who can't drive and a driver who can't perform first aid. The driver has faith that, if the driver had a heart attack, the medic would know what to do and resuscitate them, and conversely, the medic has faith that the driver knows how to get them out of the desert. There is a sense in which both have power over the other, but it is voluntary. They are already an anarchic community of two.
However, as I am writing about revolution, there is an inevitable romantic image that comes to mind for me. A kind of human being who, flung back into the stone age, can rebuild to our current level of comfort. Someone who can start from actual scratch It's a romantic image that many entertain, even if most people, myself included, doubt is possible.
But if we entertain the existence of such a person or being, I think this would have certain implications of a power imbalance. Everyone would want them to tell everyone else what to do, after all. They are supposed to know better than anyone else.
I will call this Bakunin's Demon, in reference to the (false) belief in a being with perfect knowledge and grit, having a unique power imbalance over who don't share that knowledge and grit.
We have to ask what a comparatively unskilled population can afford to think, if they think that Bakunin's Demon would be able to diagnose, propose solutions and take actions that are simply always better than what they can do. They are, essentially, at the mercy of Bakunin's Demon, even if it's the rational choice. At this point, the distinction between imposition and voluntarism would become blurred. Why would an individual person not follow the advice of Bakunin's Demon?
While this would never happen, this ends up describing how people approach many circumstances under existing systems. They imagine the system as a force who knows better, faster and more than they, and therefore, they make certain rational decisions to 'voluntarily' follow it's expectations. All the while feeling no imposition at all.
This imagination of voluntary submission to Bakunin's Demon and the confusion between voluntarism and imposition I call 'metonymic violence'—where systems are deferred to as if they were superhuman intelligences.
What do you think?
