Anarchy in the UK

When Johhny Rotten sang about anarchy he was about twenty and in his own estimation ‘an ‘orrible little c*nt’. Now he’s over sixty and appears in butter commercials. There in a nutshell, the trajectory of man in the west: Mewling, puking babe in arms, snotty-nosed kid, smelly teenager, angst ridden youth, student political activist, job, kids, responsibility... Those few who resist the ravages of age and unwished for wisdom are variously old hippies, new age charlatans, Jeremy Corbyn or Keith Richards. And unless you’re the latter it really isn’t cool.

So, imagine my delight yesterday on being confronted by a self-declared anarchist.

Anarchy /ˈanəki/ noun, absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But who mends the roads, polices disorder, collects the means to build the hospitals and heal the sick? Who pays for the clean-up operation after they’ve all kicked off, as anarchists are wont to do? Who, even, does the washing up? Even at a basic family level you have an automatic hierarchy and the most simple of human societies – all animal societies – have order; a form of governance.

He argued, lamely, that Spain had an anarchist ‘system’ for three years up to 1939. Leaving aside the obvious oxymoron, the simple absence of a government is not the same as choosing to live without one. And in any case, Spain’s anarchy had a long history of failure and several different and competing forms, which all ended up organising into ersatz governments, as they have to do if the principle feature of anarchism is to be contained, namely:

‘a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems’

But my little interlocutor had his dander up; to be fair I did provoke him by suggesting that he still lived with his mother and probably had homework he should be getting on with. But that’s par for the course on The Twitter. He began searching back through my timeline, grasping at anything at all to prove his predetermined thesis about my character. And evidence was there plenty: I had retweeted a news story, thus I was gullible. I had been disparaging about so-called anti-fascists, therefore I was a fascist. And I had more followers than he had, therefore I must have bought them; in fact he seemed unduly fixated by this last point.

Impressed by his research techniques and critical thinking skills I fed him a few bones, shared him around a few of my – obviously purchased – followers and sat back to watch. He rapidly veered off from a conviction that anarchy was a noble and achievable aim and a perfect model for society and began trashing the place. He invented fictions about those he was attacking and then embellished them further and then, bored with it all, he drifted off, no doubt to record another Carpenters song on his YouTube Channel. I take it all back; maybe he is an anarchist after all.