Are We Good Enough?

A few months ago I discovered that I'm an anarachist, meaning I had developed certain opinions over the years and then a few months ago I came to realize they were in line with anarchist philosophy. In relation to this I was having a discussion with my father about the idea of communism in general and its relationship to the history of anarchists. He brought up something which I have often heard him say before, but which I now mostly disagree with. It relates to the United Order, a communist like organization Joseph Smith triewd to establish within the LDS Church in the 1830s, basically my father's argument is that men are imperfect and so we can't live without government, the failure of the United Order is evidence that there will always be corrupt/wicked men who take adavntage of others if there is no government to stop them. We need government because we won't be good enough to live under a perfect system until the Second Coming/Millennium.

I was going to draft a rather long rebuttal, mostly because I'm better at expressing my ideas through writing than speech, but then I found out someone had beat me to it by over 130 years! The perfect answer to this argument was written by Pëtr Kropotkin in 1888 and is titled "Are We Good Enough". I listened to the audio version today, and a copy can be found on the web here.

Sure people are imperfect, but that doesn't mean we should wait for revolution and/or reform until everybody will miraculously become perfect. I'm under no illusions that the current system of nation-states and capitalism/corporations will be overthrown in my lifetime. However, I do think that a public opinion will trend toward wanting/demanding a more direct form of democracy, and leaders/those in power will work even harder to consolidate the power they do have. I guess what I really want to say is that just because people aren't perfect doesn't mean we should hesitate to work toward the dissolution of corrupt systems that oppress us.