I’m a child of the 1960s and 1970s. I grew up in the era of the war in Vietnam, hippies, LSD, and “do your own thing.”
My friends and I never understood how the “land of the free” could round up eighteen-year-old boys and force them to fight in a war that was 8,000 miles away.
More than 50,000 US soldiers died in that war, including a few of my friends – and untold millions of Vietnamese people.
My circle of friends thought there had to be a better way. And there is. It’s a decentralized world without nation-states, without government coercion, without war, and without the enforced extraction of wealth via taxation.
A world like this isn’t just a pipe dream, either. Throughout history, societies have successfully existed this way. One of the best-documented examples was in central Turkey, at a site now occupied by the modern city of Catalhoyuk.
My friend and colleague Paul Rosenberg summed it up when he wrote about Catalhoyuk several years ago:
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[Catalhoyuk was] the first large human settlement after the ice age and also the most concentrated. [It] had no government and no priesthood. And it thrived for 1,400 years. Two thousand families lived in this compact city between 7,400 BC and 6,000 BC, with no master and no overseer. There was no courthouse, no tax collector, no central administration of any kind …
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The first real human city was an anarchy [a state with no central authority] … it thrived for 1400 years; longer than Rome, Greece, or any of the Sumerian or Egyptian Dynasties.
We know these statements are factual based on overwhelming archeological evidence. Catalhoyuk had no…