The Impossibility of an Island

I think my favorite rejoinders, when the delicate sandalwood scent of anarchy threatens to turn the abattoir into an ashram, is the Crackpot Survival Situation Scenario, in which two men, a desert isle, a .45, and a single coconut are blithely posited, or deposited, as the case may be, with the implication that, but for an amphibious landing by the Marines, the NYPD, and the Fourth Circuit, guns blazing and quills appellating, these two fine specimens of the human manimal would descend posthaste into a sort of Lord-of-the-Flies-cum-Alive scenario, leaving nothing for our sentient sea-otter inheritors, or whatever, but picked-over bones, signs of struggle, and the ineluctable conclusion that in the absence of a system of totalitarian social control, we were, all of us, just too violent to live.  This little fantasia is invariably played as if its author were Bach at the organ, improvising a work of such inestimable genius and novelty that even the bitterest skeptic must find himself transported by it.  Ahem.

Well, there are anarchists and there are anarchists, I suppose; I count myself among the latter variety--I don't anticipate the kingdom of heaven here on earth in my lifetime, nor in any lifetime, although, to put more of a point on it, I don't think that anarchy promises utopia.  This is a common confusion among liberal defenders of the state, that those of us who think it a bad thing imagine in its absence a peaceable kingdom of some kind.  Personally, I imagine anarchy as . . . what would a liberal democrat call it?  A workable system.  I do not suspect that it will eliminate human frailty or avarice and so forth; I only say, perhaps the absence of vast, totalizing systems of human extraction is something to take a look at.

But back to the scene.  In general--I am speaking only for myself--I find that my natural instinct, if that's the word, is to help people, to cooperate with them, and not to enter a violent berserker rage each time I approach a revolving door at the same time as someone else without an authority figure to mediate who will step through first.  Since I am an arrogant, self-regarding prick, I can only assume that for much of the rest of humanity, the less emotionally crippled portion, the general inclination is to work together, even without the diktat to do so.  In fact, it seems to me that when cooperation is compelled, it is generally in the service of something fundamentally evil, the pursuit of some awful corporate end, or obeying the law, or going through airport security, or registering to vote.