"I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
I don’t think we can ever abolish hierarchy entirely, but we can make it temporary and rotating. Like a symphony orchestra needs a conductor, but that doesn’t mean he is going to take over the lives of the musicians, telling them what to eat and what to smoke and what to drink and so on—where they can travel and where they can’t travel. And a baseball team probably needs a manager, and so on. There are probably lots of places where we need a temporary hierarchy, but it doesn’t have to cover lifetimes or even four years. And it doesn’t have to cover as much as the hierarchies we’ve got with current corporations, bureaucracies, and governments.
You know I think I began realize the danger of hierarchy and developed the snafu principal about communication when I was working for the second largest engineering firm in the United States. I listened to the engineers bitching all the time about how the financial interests wouldn’t them do any of the work that seemed really important for them to improve their output. And I was reading William Faulkner’s Go Down Moses, which is still one of my favorite novels, and there was a sentence in there which was like a mini satori for me. And the sentence goes: "To the sheriff, Lucas was just another nigger and they both knew that; to Lucas the sheriff was an ignorant redneck with no cause for pride in his ancestors, nor any hope for it in his prosperity. But only one of them new that." And I suddenly realized, yeah, every power situation means the people on top are not being told what the people on the bottom are really noticing. Then I could see how this applied to this engineering firm. And then how it applied to corporations in general and so on.
I tend to shy away from the word anarchist, because most people think it means bomb throwing. And a lot of people who consider themselves anarchists seem to think that too. But I can’t use libertarian, because the people who got their grip on that word are even less rational by my standards. I guess "decentralist" is the word I’d have to pick out for myself. Decentralist grassroots Jeffersonian something or other." Robert Anton WILSON
"Utopia USA interview with Robert Anton Wilson" By Lance Bauscher
22 Feb 2001