Words are tricky. When I tried to describe how I believed we should progress moving forward, people kept trying to apply words that had centuries of baggage attached. They asked: Will this be a democracy? A republic? What do we call this? And all of the words we've used before seemed inadequate.
The word anarchy, especially, was adopted from the beginning by assassins and the like, people who used violence to attempt to overturn or otherwise throw a monkey wrench into the works of government.
In its original sense, of course, the word was perfect, rooted in the Greek anarkhia, which means “lack of a leader, the state of people without a government.” It need not take violence to convince people to live together, as we proved. In its most basic sense, a government is an instrument of force, and in its original sense the word anarchy means the absence of that force.
But after all these years, declaring that Sirius 4 would be an anarchy would have suggested to many people that we were writing the description of our new society in blood, even after all that happened to reach this point. And in any case we needed to find a word that meant more than the lack of something, even as positive a development as building a world without the tyranny that inevitably is government.
Most likely the best result would have been coining a new word, but when embarking on new paths people take some comfort in an echo of the familiar. And so I landed on “commonwealth.” Yes, many governments have assumed that title over the years, but I meant the word in a different sense.
A free world is a wealthy world, and we have a common access to that wealth, guided by the principle that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate the initiation of force. Thus, “the common wealth of Sirius 4.”
Of course, commonwealth is still imprecise because of the baggage attached to that word “common.” Someone no doubt will eventually argue that for the “common good,” we all must be forced to take some action. No: The person who is coerced to do something remains unconvinced.
In turning down a title or an office – and in pointing out that no one need hold a title or an office for this to work – I tried to clarify that this commonwealth is not a state, and that anyone may take a leadership role for any project so long as its implementation doesn’t involve coercion.
Humans have been accomplishing great things over the years by convincing each other to do great things together. I proposed that we leave each other alone to do great things without forcing anyone to follow our path, each of us free to live our lives as long as we don’t infringe on our neighbors’ freedom.
It’s an easy concept that takes some getting used to, after centuries of the other. But it’s working out so far.
Entry 6. Buffalo Springsteen
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