Libertarians are often accused that without a strong state, we will have mess and chaos. And for some reason, we usually start making excuses, saying that there will be no mess, that we will have order too! By doing this, we haven’t even really said anything yet, but we have already taken a seat in the defendant’s dock. This is a losing strategy by design, because when you are making excuses, you look like a loser. Someone else’s accusation sets the rules of the conversation, and you are trying to earn leniency. Therefore, it is worth going on the attack and saying: mess and chaos are cool!

Different schools, unexpected ideas, dissimilar people, debates, experiments, new ways of living – this is why we need freedom, and we should only be proud of such “mess.” Development has a feature that is inconvenient for those in charge: it needs options. An evolutionary mechanism also works in society: new ideas and practices emerge, people test them, adopt them, combine them, and remake them. Diversity provides material for searching, and feedback helps to learn. But when only a single method is allowed, society is deprived of the opportunity to compare. And for cultural evolution, unlike biological evolution, it is enough just to exchange a successful idea – there is no need to wait for the birth of the next generation.

Take education, for example. One child loves a strict schedule, another gets excited about physics while assembling a bicycle, a third needs a small group and a calm pace. Let there be different schools, homeschooling, workshops, and online classes. Let teachers try new methods, show results, and adopt each other’s findings. Parents and children get a choice. The convenience of reporting is a poor reason to cut everyone to the same cloth.

Scientific and technological progress looks roughly the same. Programmers publish code, colleagues find bugs, and someone builds a new tool based on that. Different laboratories test different hypotheses. Competitors become partners, and an amateur suggests an unexpected solution to a specialist. It is useful when a person with an idea has several doors they can knock on. After all, you cannot pre-approve a plan of inspirations.

In medicine and biotech, such an opportunity is particularly precious. Katalin Karikó faced years of funding rejections for her RNA research, but later, her collaboration with Drew Weissman helped create RNA vaccines and earned them a Nobel Prize. The conclusion here is simple: different research groups, approaches, and sources of money are needed. A researcher must have the opportunity to challenge the conventional approach and find support for a different hypothesis. A single commission can easily be wrong, so it would be terrible to hand it the keys to all the laboratories.

Diversity is even more important in cities. Housing, small shops, workshops, cafes, a courtyard with trees – every part of a neighborhood has its own life. Imagine if residents could agree on a courtyard garden, an entrepreneur could revive a vacant space, or neighbors could test a new use for a common area. They try it, see who finds it convenient and who finds it bothersome, and then they fix it. The neighborhood gets the chance to change gradually, taking into account the experience of those who live there.

It is even more interesting with social norms. Some live in large families, some live alone, some share a household with friends. One person changes professions at fifty, another chooses the role of a father who looks after the children while the mother builds her career. Thanks to such people, others’ conceptions of what a possible life looks like are expanded. Even if we personally feel fine with the old way, someone else’s freedom of choice makes the world more spacious.

Of course, this diversity comes with working conditions: voluntariness, respect for the rights of others, responsibility for harm caused, and the ability to criticize and refuse. Thanks to them, one can try things, notice mistakes, and correct them. It is good to live in a society where you can say: “Let’s try something different.” In a place where a new idea gets a chance, and a dissenter can find like-minded people and do things their own way. If all of this is called “mess and chaos” – we should accept it with pride!

Voluntarist, Bitarch