I saw a movie last night, one that shall remain nameless for this post. It was impressive on quite a few levels, but a few scenes in it made me think about the meaning of anarchy and anarchism again.
They're problematic words, and part of me wishes we could just abandon them and pick another set of terms. After all, they're just nouns, and given the absence of any large, nonlocal, "prospering" anarchist associations or organizations in America, they only serve as placeholders for people of similar sentiment to find one another and conceptualize interventions in the world. They honestly seem to be a hindrance in two major ways. External to the anarchist community, people get scared by the idea. Internal to that community, it looks and feels often enough life a self-reaffirming subculture instead of a movement or even a coherent worldview.
I'm mostly concerned with how the external world views the words and ideas. People think anarchy means chaos. We mean without an arkos, without a king (or of course anything that looks like an imperial order, namely a regimented hierarchical system in general). But people don't know Greek, and if you have to explain an etymological distinction you've already lost the interest of 95% of society.
People think anarchy means against order, and in favor of chaos. And when people think of chaos, they think of violence, the negation of social connection and meaning. When people think of anarchy (and by extension anarchism) they imagine raw nihilism.
That's a problem. We can explain the difference, and it's important to explain it, but since on a certain level our whole system of explaining the world is radically divorced from how most social institutions work and have worked for, well, hundreds or thousands of years, it's a long tedious goddamn argument.
That means we're pretty much left to argue by way of example primarily and hope people get the point. That anarchism is not a denial or rejection of organization, it's a denial that organizing force should originate outside living, acting communities. That it is no more nihilistic than a neighborhood planning a block party.
The question, as always, is how to develop this, and how to develop a discourse that allows us to experiment with methods and build up institutions.