"People arguing for the stateless society, i.e. the abolishment of the state along with whatever coercive hierarchies in society, sometimes find themselves in a position where they hesitate to use the word best describing their position: anarchism. The reason, and this is often explicitly stated, is that anarchism often makes people think of violence, terror, and destruction. Hence, using the word makes it unnecessarily difficult to argue for the ideal.
The general public has been taught the false idea of anarchism being chaos, that is true. This idea has been further strengthened by fascists causing violence and destruction "for fun," who falsely claim to be anarchists. But anarchism as an idea or ideal has nothing to do with violence. Contrarily, anarchism is a message of peace and harmony - an ideal of non-structure, non-system, non-hierarchy, and non-force. How could that translate into burning and destroying people's possessions and violently aggressing on whoever happens to be within reach? It can't. As most dictionaries assert, there are two distinctly different uses of the term anarchism. One of these is for the anarchism movement and the anarchism ideals, which is a definition completely devoid of violence or anything that could translate into violence. It includes direct action, but never destruction, violence, aggression, hierarchy, coercion, force, or power. The other, which is the definition most people are aware of (and the "definition" used by the aforementioned fascists) is the statist interpretation of any non-system - a conclusion of what a free society would be like based on a Hobbesian view of man. This use of the term anarchism is simply nothing but the utterly false idea that people necessarily lose any sense of morality if they are not forcefully subjected to a set of rules. According to this view, anarchism is and must be the Hobbesian state of nature - a never-ending "war of all against all." http://www.strike-the-root.com/72/bylund/bylund3.html [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
