The Nomadic Alternative – Page 195

one family with all living creatures." In the Taoist Paradise men and women, old and young, lived pleasant amicable lives, roaming about freely together, knowing their mothers, but ignorant of their fathers. Being unsettled, they lacked private property. They robbed nature for their immediate needs, but never robbed each other. They stored no grain and were ignorant of writing; it was a Taoist hope that the "people would go back to knotted cords" like the ancient Peruvian quipu for their calculations. For selfishness bred selfishness and property led to the unnatural birth of the class system.

The description contained in Han Fei Tzu of this pre-property idyll is phrased in terms very similar to Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality:

The men of old did not till the fields, but the fruit of plants and trees were sufficient for food. Nor did the women weave, but the feathers of birds and the fur of animals were sufficient for clothing. Few people and plentiful resources prevented quarrels, and the people governed themselves without large rewards or punishments.

But Taoism was more than a protest movement against the ills of the present. It set about solving the ills of the present by ignoring them. The Taoists saw themselves as heirs to a universal culture which had survived from time immemorial and, like human nature, was not susceptible to change. Lack of class distinctions, that is, Anarchy in the strictest sense, was a pattern established at the beginning of human time. Anarchy was a reversion to root. The State was a recent aberration. Governments initiated disorder, not disorder governments. And it is a measure of the universality of human thought that, two thousand years earlier, the Taoists had articulated concepts of individual liberty, in essence identical to those of 19th Century libertarian thinkers, such as Proudhon and Bakunin.

Unlike Western idealists, however, the Taoists never confused their terms of reference. They knew that the most effective way to emasculate the state was to forget its existence. Moreover they assessed more accurately why 'primitive solidarity' has passed from