Love your work @Larkenrose and I appreciate the sound exhaustive logic you have promoted throughout the years. I think flags often do symbolize a movement and as you pointed out movements are often easily hijacked and manipulated into controlled opposition. Ideas are much more difficult to hijack than symbols. If you take a good idea, change it into a bad idea and then promote that idea, why would anyone listen? But if you take a symbol representing a good idea, and promote bad ideas while displaying that symbol, people can easily assume those bad ideas are representative of what the general collective using and promoting that symbol believe in.

Why do you say anarchism is be "opposed" to the existence of a ruling class. Could it not just as easily be framed as "promoting" the liberty of self-ownership or at least the option of self-ownership, thus emphasizing what is done instead of what is not done. If I am missing something, I would ask you to please clarify but I think voluntarism and anarchy are to some degree conflicting given the definition you provided of anarchism.

Say we all live in a voluntary society, and I lack either the will or the skill to farm fresh fruit. I should be allowed to voluntary delegate my farming activity to someone who I believe to be a better fruit farmer than myself and compensate them accordingly. Obviously, this requires me to place a certain amount trust in this fruit farmer, we will call him Tommy, for he could decide to lie to me about the freshness of the fruit, the chemicals used, etc. What if Tommy polluted a river providing fresh water to a large group of people downstream in the growing of this fruit? Or perhaps he murdered some neighboring farmers and took the farms to grow the fruit he sells to me. Would you say it becomes my responsibility to find out and maintain certainty that my self-delegated farmer is acting according to my moral values or beliefs? How could I ever be absolutely certain? It comes to a certain point where, given how much time I spend just keeping an eye on what Tommy and what he is up to, that I could just grow my own fresh fruit more efficiently. In this sense, it is never advantages to delegate any job to anyone, which would mean in a voluntary society, everybody does everything themselves. Perhaps I can only justified to delegate tommy as my fresh fruit farmer after I determine him, to the best of my ability, to be trustworthy and operating under solid morals? Now say a lot of people decide to voluntary delegate their fresh fruit needs to Tommy, have we not just collectively decided to give tommy governance over our farming production and given him power roughly equal to our desire to consume fresh fruit? With out comparing Tommy’s actual power in this scenario to the power of the ruling class of today, is Tommy here, now part of the new ruling class? Does voluntarism inevitability lead to some sort of a ruling class, with power delegated to them from the people? If that is the case, anarchism and voluntarism are conflicting and must go separate ways at some point.

You cant stop people from delegating authority to whoever they choose without instigating aggression or threatening forceful violence. Who would decide which farmers people were allowed to delegate their trust in? Who would monitor the farmers for moral production methods. Who would enforce the prohibition of said black market fresh fruit from unauthorized farmers. It just seams like there is still a lot of room for error in a voluntary society. Its kind of easy to inadvertently create various delegates with certain powers with the capacity to do great harm to others, for profit, as a result of a misguided decision with good intentions, to voluntary place authority and trust in an entity other than the self.

In a way we already live in a voluntary society. The biggest problems we see are a result of the vast majority of people, the statist, naively delegating power and authority, which they do not have, onto the state.

It is very common for statists to buy things they can not afford. They call it credit. They often overlook the obvious distinction between delegation of authority we do not have and buying things on credit, the commitment and possibility to someday pay it back and settle up. As the natural rights of rational free human beings have never changed, it is logically absurd to essentially delegate authority you do not have, nor never will, under the assumption or commitment of someday settling up. I wonder what interest might look like for those operating under this kind of moral deficit.

Just because you delegate your “trespasses on other people”, murder extortion, etc., to someone else, that does not magically make those acts morally sound, logically justifiable or at all necessary. People are only allowed to do this because people are inherently allowed to believe whatever they want. It’s a shame to see the freedom of belief manipulated into this self destructive convoluted waste of possibilities.

If we take as an axiom that Anarchy is not an “absolute” goal or ideal, it would follow that anarchism does not seek to destroy all power and authority but rather restore a balanced justified system of self ownership. Perhaps the idea of anarchy was born out of divine necessity with a single mission, coming to collect the moral debt owed by the statist society. Once it collects that debt, it should no longer be necessary. If and when that day ever comes, anarchy will become obsolete. Perhaps a new pattern of balance and unbalance will emerge, to be experienced by a proud society of peaceful self ownership. In this way Anarchy could be defined as a balancing force aimed to revoke the excessively overdue moral debt of the statist society operating under morally unauthorized power and unjustifiably consistent trespasses on individual freedom.