Anarchy and experience: Can people still learn from their mistakes?

Anarchy is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Hopefully, the thousands of Americans toying with anarchy in the current Occupy Wall Street movement will eventually grow to feel the same.

I understand that there is an appeal to not being answerable to any authority — at least until you want to know who’s going to take care of it when you are robbed, raped or assaulted by those lawless bums who don’t share your same high principles.

At that point, order is much preferable to chaos. Yet we might agree that lawlessness IS in some ways the pristine blank slate on which all of mankind’s eventual accomplishment’s have been written. At some point in every society we throw everything out and start over, and that essentially is a point of anarchy.

But from there, things can go in either one of two ways. Because lawlessness is essentially a vacuum, it is most likely that power will fill that vacuum in the most direct way possible — through brute force. We just watched that on a tiny scale with the death of Gadhafi in Libya, but we have also seen it on a much larger scale repeatedly in history through the example of opportunistic tyrants such as Napoleon and Hitler.

On the other hand, every once in a while, anarchy (or something close to it) can be replaced with a new order — a new social contract — but that requires “enlightened self-interest,” a state of mind so unlikely to prevail in anarchic conditions that instances of it are mostly the stuff of fiction such as Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” — or even science fiction — such as Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.”

There is one prime example in history, however, of enlightened self-interest that shows mankind to be capable of learning from a failed social experiment without pivoting into tyranny first.

I am talking about the U.S. Constitution, and the decision by our forefathers to hold a constitutional convention to improve their common lot rather than giving in to the more banal self-interest that leads to civil war and tyranny.

The constitutional convention of 1787 was essentially an acknowledgment that the laws and systems in place following the successful American Revolution were not working, and needed to be tossed. In essence, the Articles of Confederation codified a kind of lawlessness or anarchy. With no strong central power, the states were under no particular compulsion to act civilly to each other, nor without a strong central government could much of anything get done. The Articles didn’t even establish a real nation per se, but only a “firm league of friendship.”

No wonder that only a decade later, in 1787, the citizens of the United States — also known as “We the People” — began the Constitution with the proclamation that they intended “to form a more perfect Union.”

It would not be hard to make a more perfect union than the mess that existed under the Articles of Confederation, but yet we have to assume that the folks who gave us the Articles had done so with the best of intentions.

So what had changed?

Well, here — for the sake of brevity — we need to adopt a philosophical point of view, rather than a historical one. Let us say that what had changed is that our Founding Fathers had gotten an education — courtesy of hard knocks and experience.

That, as much as anything, is what makes those early Americans worthy of so much respect. Unlike politicians today, they did not dig in their heels and defend the status quo simply because they had voted for the status quo 10 years earlier. The status quo sucked, and by admitting it, they took bold action to change things and make a better world.

Which brings us to Occupy Wall Street.

On one hand, the protesters and demonstrators envision themselves as the equivalent of our forefathers because they recognize that “the status quo sucks.” It would be hard to find anyone who didn’t agree with the occupier’s complaints about federal bailouts of big banks and corporate greed.

But where Occupy Wall Street falls down is that it doesn’t have a plan to create “a more perfect union” when the current system collapses. Instead, it has “high hopes” and an earnest desire to improve life for all mankind.

No doubt that the French Revolution had “high hopes” too before it collapsed into mass murder. No doubt the Russian Revolution had high hopes before it descended into the madness that led to the deaths of millions. Even Mao’s Chinese Revolution in 1949 had high hopes. Probably very few people could have predicted the deaths of up to 40 million people in the next 25 years from purges and “re-education” under Mao’s leadership.

It’s easy NOT to imagine such a bloody conclusion to any revolutionary movement in America — because we are “different” — but the very things which make us different, which shield us from the insanity of mass murder and civil war — are the things which Occupy Wall Street wants to tear down. The freedom to be different. The freedom to achieve success without feeling guilty. Most importantly, the freedom to fail.

If you support Occupy Wall Street and don’t support the collapse of the government and capitalism, then please re-evaluate now. The thing that our forefathers had going for them was the ability to learn from their mistakes. The only hope we have today is the ability to do so, too — and quickly.

I do see one glimmer of hope in the prairie fire revolution that has been lit across the American landscape today. It seems like many of our fellow citizens are learning the lesson that our great-grandparents knew by heart — life is not fair, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up.

In story after story, I have read about how communistic high hopes have had to bend to reality the tent city now known as Occupy Wall Street.

Some protesters tried to get the organizers of Occupy Wall Street to “share the wealth” from their $500,000 bank roll, but the organizers held tight to the money they had collected. They were now the 1 percent, and they saw that the money would just be wasted if it were divvied up among the protesters instead of put to a higher and better use.

More recently, the kitchen staff of Occupy Wall Street went on strike because they were angry about working 18-hour days to feed ungrateful “professional homeless people” and ex-cons who were being lured to Zuccotti Park by the promise of free food. A security volunteer said the cooks felt “overworked and underappreciated.”

Imagine that! Maybe those cooks will be joining the Tea Party movement next, which already has figured out that giving money to people who haven’t earned it creates a sense of entitlement that will rapidly drain life and spirit out of a nation.

If we are looking for common ground, that is a better place to start than anarchy.