For a long time, the word “anarchism” unnerved me. My friend Justin Longo, co-founder of Liberty On The Rocks, seemed to bring it up every chance he got, mostly because he knew it made me squirm.
I don’t think I’m alone in that discomfort. Say the word “anarchism” out loud in most rooms and watch what happens to people’s faces. It conjures up images of black flags, broken windows, Molotov cocktails, and some vague promise of chaos where the strong eat the weak and nobody is left to stop them.
I knew the word had brushed up against libertarianism somewhere in its history. I’d read enough political philosophy to know that much. But I filed it in the same drawer as “nihilism” and “chaos,” as a doctrine of no, with nothing underneath it except rubble.
At a certain point, I finally got up the gumption to look for what the word actually meant instead of what it had been made to mean. What I found ran counter to almost every assumption I’d been carrying. Anarchism, as it turns out, is not a philosophy of destruction. It is a philosophy built around a very specific, very old question: Where does legitimate order actually come from?
The Definition No One Gave Me
Here's the activist Emma Goldman's own definition, from her 1910 essay “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For:”
“Anarchism is the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”
Notice what's missing from that sentence. No call to arms or romance around deadly bombs. Just a claim that the coercion baked into the government is not a regrettable side effect but the whole engine, and that human beings might be capable of order without it.
Goldman went further, in the same essay, to describe anarchism as “the teacher of the unity of life,” a philosophy that “brings to man the consciousness of himself.”
I sat with all of this for a while, because it reframed the whole question for me. If anarchism at its root is really about the location of legitimate authority, then I realized I already knew a Taoist philosophy that had been asking the exact same question for over two thousand years. I just hadn't been reading it that way.
The Old Man Who Never Said the Word
Lao Tzu never called himself an anarchist, obviously, as the word wouldn't exist for another 2,300 years. But when actual anarchists went looking for ancestors in the 19th and 20th centuries, more than a few of them settled on the Tao Te Ching, and scholars have kept returning to that claim ever since.
The Greek term anarkhia (ἀναρχία) appears as early as Homer’s Iliad. It was not until the 1840s that the term acquired its modern, positive libertarian meaning, when Pierre-Joseph Proudhon reframed anarchy as a social theory of “order without power” — cooperative, voluntary organization in place of centralized government — most notably in What Is Property?
Chung-Ying Cheng, a philosopher-scholar of Chinese and comparative philosophy, once famously noted “the general consensus that Taoist thought is supremely anarchistic.”
John Clark, in his essay titled “The Tao of Anarchy: How Modern Anarchism Echoes Ancient Wisdom” went further, calling the Tao Te Ching “one of the great anarchist classics” and arguing that “no important philosophical work of either East or West has ever been so thoroughly pervaded by the anarchistic spirit.”
I personally understand why. Chapter 57 of the Tao Te Ching reads less like ancient scripture and more like a policy paper someone should mail to every legislative government body on earth:
“The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people become. ... The greater the number of statutes, the greater the number of thieves and brigands. Therefore the sage says: I do nothing and the people are reformed of themselves.”
And Chapter 75 makes the mechanism explicit: “The people are hungry because those in authority eat up too much in taxes. ... The people are difficult to govern because those in authority are too fond of action”
Read that next to Goldman's claim that government “rests on violence” and is therefore “unnecessary,” and the two texts start finishing each other's sentences across twenty-three centuries.
Emma Goldman’s Actual Journey
This is where Goldman's narrative becomes essential, because her life is the proof that the fear I started with—that anarchism enables violence, destruction, and bad intentions—wasn't a total fabrication. It was a chapter she lived through and then, crucially, grew past.
Goldman's radicalization began with grief, not theory. In 1886, a bomb went off during a labor rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square, and in the panic that followed, eight anarchists were tried and four executed for a crime the evidence never actually tied them to. Goldman, seventeen years old and newly arrived from Lithuania, heard a speech about it and later wrote that it gave her “a great ideal, a burning faith, a determination to dedicate myself to the memory of my martyred comrades.”
That's not the origin story of a bomb-thrower, but of someone radicalized by watching the state kill people for a crime it couldn't prove.
But she didn't stay in pure theory for long. In 1892, Goldman and her lifelong partner Alexander Berkman plotted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick, believing the act—the “propaganda of the deed,” they called it—would ignite the workers’ revolution. Frick survived, and Berkman served fourteen years in prison. And the uprising Goldman hoped for never came.
It's worth sitting with that failure, because Goldman herself did. Historians note that “the disastrous aftermath of his attempt, which neither killed Frick nor aroused the masses, convinced Goldman to relinquish her support for acts of violent individual protest.” She didn't abandon anarchism but the theory that violence was the shortcut to it.
Where the Two Threads Actually Meet
Here’s the essence of where I am heading with all of this. Lao Tzu and Emma Goldman, separated by two millennia, a continent, and every conceivable difference in culture and circumstance, arrived at the same structural insight. Both believed that coercive authority manufactures the very disorder it claims to prevent, and that legitimate order must be relocated from the state to the self.
There is actually a name for that relocation in Western political philosophy, and it is more literal than you might expect. Robert LeFevre, an American libertarian philosopher, coined the term “autarchism,” from the Greek meaning self-rule. It literally means “self-government,” and he defined it with a line that I think belongs on a wall somewhere:
“The man who is able to govern himself is the free man. The man who is governed by others is the slave.”
LeFevre rejected the label “anarchist” for himself, insisting that his philosophy was something quieter and more personal. It was not the absence of rule. It was the presence of self-rule.
Why All of This Matters Now
While I could leave all of this in the realm of history, I don’t think that would be honest to what’s actually happening around us today. We are living through a genuine, visible erosion of trust in almost every large institution that has claimed the authority to govern us, including governments, central banks, legacy media, and even the traditional employer-employee relationship. And the responses people are reaching for are anything but random.
Take, for example, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. Through his “Network State” concept, he proposes online communities organized around shared values that crowdfund actual territory, effectively exiting existing nation-states instead of trying to reform them from the inside.
Strip away the crypto and the Silicon Valley branding, and what remains looks remarkably familiar. It is Josiah Warren’s sovereignty of the individual running on new infrastructure. It is Lao Tzu’s water finding the path of least resistance around the stone instead of breaking itself against it.
And wu wei itself has not gone anywhere. Policy researchers are still invoking it directly. One 2015 paper on civil service reform argues that wu wei “identifies bureaucratic non-action as the essential skill of anticipating problems … before they grow into major challenges,” and describes Lao Tzu’s theory of government as “the minimum interference conducive to the individual’s quest for personal fulfillment.”
Twenty-three centuries after Chapter 57 of the Tao Te Ching, people trying to cut red tape are still, whether they know it or not, quoting an old man from the state of Chu.
The Fear I Started With, Revisited
So, back to where I began: the fear. I think what actually scared me about “anarchism” was never the philosophy. It was a caricature, the idea that questioning authority automatically means wanting chaos, and that self-governance is just a polite word for selfishness with no brakes.
Goldman’s own life is the strongest rebuttal to that caricature I’ve found, precisely because she lived it for a while before rejecting it herself. She discovered that bombs wouldn’t convince, or free, anyone. What she landed on instead was the slower, harder, and far less cinematic work of teaching people “faith in liberty” and “consciousness in themselves.”
That sounds a great deal like the discipline I try to practice every morning through meditation, qigong, and journaling before the rest of the world wakes up demanding things from me.
Self-government is not the absence of order. It is the much harder practice of becoming the kind of person who doesn’t need someone else’s law to behave as though they already have one.
That’s the thread I never expected to find when I went looking for what “anarchism” actually meant. I discovered it was not about someone having granted themselves permission to burn things down. Rather, it was an invitation to build the government inside yourself first, and then see how much of the other kind you actually still need.
