Anarchy of Love

The word "anarchy" means "without a head or ruler" - for which, one might read "self-organised", or "decentralised". Although the opposite is "hierarchy", perhaps the most interesting contrast to "anarchy" is with "heterarchy", where control is imagined to be distributed. Warren McCulloch considered the brain to be a heterarchy. The internet (stemming from McCulloch's work) was envisaged to be one - although as time has gone on, it has become increasingly hierarchical - or rather, it has been used to reinforce existing social hierarchies. Here's an interview with McCulloch (there's a hilarious comment in YouTube "in my day, scientists wore clothes!")

His question "What is a number that a man might know it? And what is man that he might know a number?" is one of the great questions of cybernetics. He says he'd sorted the first part, but had no idea about the second.

Anarchy is not is "disorder". All these words are descriptions of different kinds of order. But order of what? One can get from anarchy to heterarchy by simply defining different kinds of self-organising units. This is particularly so if one considers relations as the fundamental building blocks of order, not entities.

So what if the unit is a couple? Maybe lovers or friends... It is a relationship. There can still be anarchy and organisation together. Is it a heterarchy? Well, it could be, but one wouldn't necessarily need to determine control in a couple. It's just a couple, by which each component knows the inner workings of the other. At least if it's well organised. 

Some couples however have imposed control by one party. But then it isn't really a couple - it is two units with a power relation between them. It's not anarchy but a kind of hierarchy. 

Which is more stable? The anarchic couple of course! 

There's a political point to make here. Ecological approaches to society and politics cannot be hierarchical. We cannot have a political system which is unlike the natural system it seeks a healthier relationship towards. This is fundamentally the problem with Green politics. Marxist politics is hierarchical and statist. Maybe only an anarchy of love could deliver a true ecological society. But how to do it?