Friday, January 30, 2009
Iceland was started by tax-evaders seeking to escape King Harald Fairhair's attempt to impose central control and property taxes on all of Norway. Iceland was a frontier land with no formal leagal structure until 930 CE when the althing was established. Iceland then adopted a statist mode of organization in 1096 CE, whereupon it collapsed into chaotic statism in 1220 CE and submitted to Norway in 1262 CE.
Iceland had "no king but the law". Every year, about 40 chieftains would meet for two weeks a year to talk about issues and how to deal with them. The Icelanders called this meeting the althing, but is translated by most historians to mean a "parliament". However, it was very much unlike a parliament today in that bills weren't passed which affected all of Iceland. It was more of a gathering of the chieftains to make deals with each other and sort out whatever needed to be sorted out.
The chieftains were not elected and their power was not maintained by some army. The chieftains emerged into their positions - they were natural elites. Their power as political governors rested entirely on the voluntary support of each individual being governed. Not a majority, each individual person. It was not mob rule.
Chieftains existed primarily to resolve disputes, and appointed and paid judges to do carry out their law. They also appointed a few armed men to deal with cases where justice needed to be accelerated. The judges and soldiers who resolved disputes in connection to the chieftain formed the chieftaincy. The chieftaincy can thus be termed most appropriately a "dispute resolution organization".
If any customer of a chieftaincy was unsatisfied in any way, he could subscribe to another chieftaincy, start his own, or live off the grid. Anyone could start their own chieftaincy, all that was required were people willing to subscribe and recognition from the other chieftaincies.
One could also sell their chieftaincy to another man in the same way one can sell a company. However, if the customers of the chieftaincy didn't approve of the new owner, they could subscribe to another chieftaincy, and the judges and guards could quit and sell their services to another chieftaincy as well.
The chieftaincies were non-geographic. That is, you didn't have a border between chieftaincy A and chieftaincy B. There were no borders between the chieftaincies anymore than there are borders between coke and pepsi. This made it almost impossible to wage war since it wasn't clear where the "enemy" was.
In addition to the non-geographic nature of the chieftaincy, members of one chieftaincy could just subscribe to another. And so as soon as one chieftaincy started building up a large army for war, the customers would see their bills go up and then just leave that chieftaincy. If a chieftain said "I do not allow you to leave! You must pay the war tax and men of a certain age must fight!", and tried to use his armed men to enforce the taxation and conscription, then that would be a perfect opportunity for the other chieftaincies to move right in and take customers just as the aggressive chieftain was in the vulnerable position of fighting a guerrilla war against his own customers. On top of that, there was no guarantee that the tyrannical chieftain's armed men would even listen.
That explains, for lack of a better word, the "political" system of Iceland at the time. Though really there was no political system, and the services of defense and law were provided by individuals making deals with each other and were enforced by each other. There was no archon - no ghost, god, goblin or "government" to issue commandments from the clouds.
For the bulk of Icelanders, life centered around work and the accumulation of property. Property - like food, shelter and clothing, and land. Land ownership in Iceland was emergent. That is to say, it emerged from the interaction of individuals. Individuals each agreed who owned what land, and communities formed which agreed to common plots, rights of passage through property (easements), common services, and all of the things which are a part of living and getting along. People who meet each other face to face and parcel up land together formed the first-order cluster. Then when they came into contact with other clusters, they worked out how land is parceled up again. Typically the result was an agreement that the property arrangements within the clusters would be honored between them as well. That is, any person from cluster A would honor the property arrangements of any person in cluster B. This is much more complicated to explain than it is to understand.
If there was a dispute over grazing, fishing or land rights, that was submitted to the chieftain's judge. The chieftain's judge's rulings were mostly obeyed because the judge would issue a ruling boycotting the person who was in contempt of the court. That is to say, if someone shirked the judge's ruling, the judge would issue a warrant to the entire relevant community saying not to do business with this man, and the members of the relevant community would almost always comply. If the judge issued a ruling that was considered heinous, the community could choose to not boycott, appeal to the chieftain himself, or subscribe to another chieftaincy, or any combination of those things. If a single member of a community didn't like the ruling, he himself could subscribe to or form another chieftaincy.
Or if a man received a claim by a judge and was unable to collect on the claim and a boycott was impossible, he could sell the claim to a powerful individual who would then be able to enforce it and take the sum awarded by the judge to the original victim. And remember, said powerful individual's power rests on his men following him, who can desert or offer their services pro-bono to anyone they choose at any time.
But what if a dispute arose between people subscribed to two different chieftaincies? Well because chieftaincies want customers, the chieftaincies that can get along with other chieftaincies are the ones that succeed. And in this sense, a common, Iceland-wide law emerged. You had standard law in Iceland for the same reason you don't see rectangular credit cards, and for the same reason you have standard shoe sizes, soda sizes, rail gauges, and even time zones (it was the rail companies that agreed upon the time zones, not congress). Standardization just makes doing things easier, and given the "disutility of labor" (a fancy way of saying that people don't like to work) people will tend to standardize in things where they are dealing with other people. And so during each year the Icelandic parliament had the law of the land recited, and amendments were made as needed and agreed upon. If a cheiftan didn't agree, then he could apply a different law and be compatible with the other chieftaincies to the extent that those other chieftaincies were still willing to accommodate him.
Iceland was known as a land of constant feuding. This is because for most of it's history there was no war as we know it. Without a state, chieftains couldn't conscript massive numbers of unwilling men, and so quarrels were settled between the quarrelers themselves. This is in contrast with most of Europe at that time where disputes between kings where settled by way too many men dying for them with oaths of fealty and holy pomp and regalia in a manner best described as gang-like and psychotic.
Unfortunately, Iceland did eventually break down. In the late 900's and early 1000's, King Olaf of Norway sent christian militants to Iceland to intimidate Icelanders to become christian. Icelanders who were related to chieftains who visited Norway were often held as ransom, the ransom being that the chieftain had to convert to Christianity if he wanted his loved ones to return.
In 1000 CE, Iceland was split between the Christians and the Pagans, with the Christians wanting to make their faith compulsory and the Pagans advocating religious pluralism. But instead of war, Iceland settled on an appeal to the most respected member of Icelandic society, Chieftain Throgeirr Thorkelsson. Thorkelsson sided with the Christians, and that was that.
The reader may be puzzled as to how a society on the verge of civil war could end the conflict with a simple arbitration. The culture of due process, law and conflict avoidance was so ingrained in Icelandic society that this ruling was rather nonchalantly accepted. An illustration of this mentality is that many Icelanders would have trials to get the ghosts out of haunted houses. At the trial, it would be ruled that the ghosts were trespassing, and apparently the ghosts promptly left after receiving the verdict (?). The psychology of persons who lived their entire lives in an ordered and structured stateless society is radically different than that of persons living in the chaos of state "order".
At first the compulsion of Christianity didn't seem to pose a threat to Iceland's order, but it was a crack that could be expanded. A fully fledged state requires compulsion, and a compelled religion was in place.
Then in 1096, the churches all throughout Iceland issued a tithe at the behest of bishop Gissur Ísleifsson. He placated the Icelandic populace by assuring them that those who were willing to pay one-tenth of god's gifts receive a commensurate share in heaven.
The tithe was a 1% property tax. The first real tax in the history of Iceland. Moreover, the church tithe was geographically based, and so a person couldn't just subscribe to a new church. The church and the right to tithe the people in the area around it (until it bumped against another church's tithing zone) was called a Churchstead. And because everyone was required to be Christian, Icelanders couldn't just convert back to Paganism to avoid paying the tithe. Icelanders were stuck in the game because of what happened in 1000 CE.
Given the difficulty of moving into the area of a church that didn't tithe, this gave the chieftains (who typically owned the church in some manner) their first real power base. Beforehand they were dependent on trade with their customers, their services for their money and / or agricultural products. But with the introduction of the tithe, the chieftain had a steady source of income that he could use to spend on whatever he wanted. Before, if he spent his income on things like an army or personal luxuries, he would be less competitive in selling his dispute resolution services and could go out of business.
Now the chieftains had no accountability (except the hazy prospect of revolution). What's more is that by tying the chieftaincies to geography, it became impossible for a new chieftaincy to emerge, and so the chieftaincies could raise the tithes together.
And so with this steady stream of income-for-nothing (tithing aka taxation) over a given geographic area, the chieftains could finally build up armies and wage wars. This still took a very long time, 124 years until war broke out between chieftaincies with their tithe-supported armies. Between 1230 and 1264 intermittent war raged across Iceland as wealth became much more concentrated than ever before. As many people died during this time on a per-capita basis as die from murder or manslaughter in the United States today, that's how bad it was. The situation was exacerbated by King Haakon of Norway doing all he could to stir up trouble, spreading rumors, supporting invasions and then sending money to chieftains on the losing side of a conflict in order to prolong it. A more overt version of the Iran-Contra scandal.
In 1262, after several years of agonized discussion, the people of Iceland held public meetings throughout the land and eventually agreed to let Haakon take over. In 1264 Iceland was effectively under Norwegian rule.
The lesson here, which is the same lesson that can be culled from other anarchistic societies, is that the Icelanders needed a theory of anarchy. They were living in anarchy, and it was truly glorious especially given the natural resources of Iceland, but they weren't anarchists. They didn't understand why their system worked so well, that it worked because of the infinite fallback and negative feedback mechanisms that are inherent in human interaction.
Without understanding this, it is inevitable that a stateless society will stumble into archon rule. For a stateless society to be maintained, it must have a widely accepted theory of anarchy and the ability to identify and oppose archons, and not be fooled when archons claim that they need them to fight other archons, and never to compromise with archons. The artificial man of the state is immortal, and waited 70 years to impose Christianity, another 96 years to impose the tithe, and another 168 years rule over Iceland altogether.
Posted by khydraa at 7:50 PM
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