I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

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JOSEPH SOBRAN
THE RELUCTANT ANARCHIST
My arrival at philosophical anarchism has disturbed some of my conservative and
Christian friends. In fact, it surprises me, going as it does against my own inclinations.
As a child I acquired a deep respect for authority and a horror of chaos. In my case the
two things were blended by the uncertainty of my existence after my parents divorced and
I bounced from one home to another for several years, often living with strangers. A stable
authority was something I yearned for.
Meanwhile, my public-school education imbued me with the sort of patriotism encouraged
in all children in those days. I grew up feeling that if there was one thing I could trust
and rely on, it was my government. I knew it was strong and benign, even if I didn’t know
much else about it. The idea that some people—Communists, for example—might want
to overthrow the government filled me with horror.
G.K. Chesterton, with his usual gentle audacity, once criticized Rudyard Kipling for
his “lack of patriotism.” Since Kipling was renowned for glorifying the British Empire, this
might have seemed one of Chesterton’s “paradoxes”; but it was no such thing, except in the
sense that it denied what most readers thought was obvious and incontrovertible.
Chesterton, himself a “Little Englander” and opponent of empire, explained what was
wrong with Kipling’s view: “He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire
things with reasons, but love them without reason. He admires England because she is
strong, not because she is English.” Which implies there would be nothing to love her for
if she were weak.
Of course Chesterton was right. You love your country as you love your mother—simply
because it is yours, not because of its superiority to others, particularly superiority of power.
This seems axiomatic to me now, but it startled me when I first read it. After all, I was
an American, and American patriotism typically expresses itself in superlatives. America is
the freest, the mightiest, the richest, in short the greatest country in the world, with the
greatest form of government—the most democratic. Maybe the poor Finns or Peruvians
love their countries too, but heaven knows why—they have so little to be proud of, so few
“reasons.” America is also the most envied country in the world. Don’t all people secretly
wish they were Americans?
That was the kind of patriotism instilled in me as a boy, and I was quite typical in this
respect. It was the patriotism of supremacy. For one thing, America had never lost a war—I
was even proud that America had created the atomic bomb (providentially, it seemed, just