Boundaries of Order by Butler Shaffer

[Anarchological]

Just finished Boundaries of Order, 2009, by Butler Shaffer, a professor at Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. It was a fairly difficult, but enjoyable read for me. Shaffer argues that institutions, particularly governments, organized from the top down in pyramidal fashion are inherently dehumanizing, and he calls collectivism "the ultimate pyramid". He says on page 169 "Today, there is scarcely a realm of human actvity over which the state does not demand the powers of micromanagement."

On page Shaffer argues for individual sovereignty, saying that "It goes to the very essence of what it means to be a human being. Individual liberty and self ownership are synonymous concepts"; and he says on page 282 that "We pay too little attention to history...the sanctioning of state authority to regulate even one percent of our conduct is to admit its authority as to the rest."

I agreed with every single thing that Shaffer said that I understood. He endorses a horizontally arranged, rather than pyradmidal society, but also says on page 275 "Systems based on the a decentralized, holographic model of organization may provide the best means of generating social behavior capable of protecting both individual liberty and cooperative undertakings; thus ending the diviseness that inheres in institutionalism." He talks about chaos theory and explains what he calls "the holographic model" in chapter three, and then mention it at other points during the book, but I didn't grasp the concept, and have to go back and see if I can understand what he's saying.