And power attracts the worst and corrupts the best among men. It is no accident that police work, for example, appeals to those (if not only those) with the bully’s instinct. We know the type. Or put a captain’s bars on a perfectly ordinary, decent man, give him a measure of arbitrary power over others and he tends to become—unless a man of unusual character—a martinet, another petty despot. Power corrupts; and as Lord Acton pointed out, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The problem of democracy is the problem of power—how to keep power decentralized, equally distributed, fairly shared. Anarchism means maximum democracy: the maximum possible dispersal of political power, economic power and force—military power. An anarchist society consists of a voluntary association of self-reliant, self-supporting, autonomous communities. The anarchist community would consist (as it did in preagricultural and preindustrial times) of a voluntary association of free and independent families, self-reliant and self-supporting but bound by kinship ties and a tradition of mutual aid.

From One Life at a Time, Please (1988)

Anarchy is democracy taken seriously, as in Switzerland, where issues of national importance are decided by direct vote of all citizens. Where each citizen, after his period of military training, takes his weapon home with him, to keep for life. Anarchy is democracy taken all the way, in every major sector of social life. For example, political democracy will not survive in a society which permits a few to accumulate economic power over the many. Or in a society which delegates police power and military power to an elite corps of professionals. Sooner or later the professionals will take over. In my notion of an anarchist community every citizen—man or woman—would be armed, trained, capable when necessary of playing the part of policeman or soldier. A healthy community polices itself; a healthy society would do the same. Looters, thugs, criminals, may appear anywhere, anytime, but in nature such types are mutants, anomalies, a minority; the members of a truly democratic, anarchistic community would not require outside assistance in dealing with them. Some might call this vigilante justice; I call it democratic justice. Better to have all citizens participate in the suppression and punishment of crime—and share in the moral responsibility—than turn the nasty job over to some quasi-criminal type (or hero) in a uniform with a tin badge on his shirt. Yes, we need heroes. We need heroines. But they should serve only as inspiration and examples, not as leaders.

No doubt the people of today’s Lebanon, for example, would settle gladly for an authoritarian government capable of suppressing the warring factions. But such an authoritarian government would provoke the return of the irrepressible human desire for freedom, leading in turn to rebellion, revolt and revolution. If Lebanon were not so badly overpopulated, the best solution there—as in South Africa—would be a partition of territory, a devolution into self-governing, independent regions and societies. This is the natural tendency of any population divided by religion, race or deep cultural differences, and it should not be restrained. The tendency runs counter, however, to the love of power, which is why centralized governments always attempt to crush separatist movements.