The first episode of the HBO docuseries The Anarchists opens with a book burning. Children on a Mexican beach scream obscenities, tear pages from massive hardcovers they can barely carry, and whip the paper into the flames. Their parents laugh and hand them more kindling: Communication Regulation, Criminal Law — basically anything that mentions governments or rules. These arsonists have only one concern: absolute freedom. Or, in anarchist lingo, “statelessness.” That is, the eradication of the state. “Anarchy,” after all, comes from the Greek anarkhos: an, meaning “without,” and arkhos, or “ruler.”
What a concept. For anyone reading the headline news of the past two years, The Anarchists will likely bring to mind radical leftist calls to abolish the police. They’ll think about cities on fire and failed attempts at the creation of anarchist zones, such as Seattle’s CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), in which over the course of nine days, four people, including two teenagers, were shot. Or they’ll think about the protests against the mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closings due to COVID-19.
Others, when watching The Anarchists, will recall the philosophers they studied in college, specifically Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose conflicting ideas about man’s natural state of nature can inform most modern debates about state power. To Hobbes, life outside society, that is, life with no regulatory body, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” At heart, man is selfish. And if society breaks down, without law enforcement, man will cheat, steal, and kill. Rousseau, on the other hand, saw man as inherently peaceful and communal and industrial society itself as the corrupting force. Agriculture and industry, Rousseau noted, bred economic inequality, which turned us into ruthless competitors for wealth and power.
The Anarchists is a success because it provokes thoughts like this. The docuseries, which took director Todd Schramke six years to make, is about an annual anarcho-capitalist conference called Anarchapulco and the community of anarchists that grew up around it. A murder occurs at the end of the third episode — one of the year-round anarchist residents is gunned down. But it’s much more than a crime mystery. The Anarchists is a meditation on what it means to be free and what it takes for free humans to live harmoniously. It’s also an exquisite character study, opening windows into the intriguing life histories of a motley crew of characters — their childhoods, their professional lives, their run-ins with the law, and the various events that led each of them to decide to abandon their American homes and move to the second-most dangerous city in the world.
For Jeff Berwick, the founder of Anarchapulco, it was his disgust with taxation and central banking. Berwick, once a nerdy and reclusive teenager, launched the financial website Stockhouse.com in 1994 before selling it when the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. For a year, he traveled around the world on a sailboat, becoming radicalized by the things he read, specifically G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island, which paints the U.S. Federal Reserve as an instrument of war and totalitarianism. He finally settled in the “failed state” of Mexico, intent on building a new world. With the dawn of cryptocurrency, Berwick, like many other Anarchapulco attendees, rode the bitcoin wave, raking in millions.
The Freemans arrived in Acapulco by way of the Atlanta suburbs. Nathan, a tech entrepreneur, and Lisa, a teacher, had the two children, the big house, and the fenced-in backyard. But they hated the cookie-cutter American lifestyle. In 2015, they attended the inaugural Anarchapulco conference and were enchanted by the community. In the end, their decision to move to Acapulco came down to their children. “The state owns children as soon as they’re born in the U.S. because you have to ask permission not to send them to school,” says Nathan. “We’re anarchist unschoolers.” (Unschooling is a radical form of homeschooling, in which the children initiate the learning activities themselves.) “I’d sooner send them to a porn set than I’d send them to a public school,” he adds.
In the second episode, the Freemans welcome the birth of their third child, a daughter, Irebel (“I rebel” — get it?), whom Lisa delivers at home in an inflatable birthing pool. The following day, Berwick interviews the Freemans for his podcast.
“I did not realize how much we’ve been lied to in the hospital,” Lisa tells him. “They make it scary ‘cause then, you’re willing to listen to everything they say in the U.S. and buy their medical business.”
Nathan says, “The first thing they do with a baby in a hospital is measure it, type it. You know, they have to encode it in every way.”
Miranda Webb and Shane Cress are on the run from the law. (Throughout the series, they are identified by their pseudonyms, Lily Forester and John Galton.) They were arrested with a car full of marijuana and are facing 25 years of imprisonment in the U.S. It’s Shane who gets gunned down by a group of young Mexican men. Miranda initially suspects they were the henchmen of Paul Propert, an unhinged military veteran who had a falling out with the couple and had threatened revenge. But, more likely, and this is the conclusion the documentary seems to come to, the local drug cartel wasn’t happy with the drug-dealing gringos who had suddenly moved into their sales territory.
A wise woman once told me, “Never trust a white person with dreads.” Her proverb stuck with me as the story of Miranda and Shane unfolded (her dreads are fiery red; his are brown). Maybe I’m biased — I knew a lot of “Mirandas” and “Shanes” in the ’90s — but I had a hard time seeing the pair as the self-possessed visionaries that others on screen tried to make them out to be. To me, they were shady, out-for-themselves drug dealers, addicted to their own supply. It wasn’t the state that stood in the way of Miranda’s and Shane’s freedom. It was Miranda and Shane.
Months after Shane’s death, Miranda is able to more accurately evaluate her relationship and the choices that led her to Acapulco. “My relationship with [Shane] was awful,” she admits. “He had a habit of putting the bigger things on me when they went wrong. He told me I was useless and that I shouldn’t have crossed the border with him.” But Miranda didn’t have any examples of what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like. Her father left when she was little, and her mother, a drug addict who battled mental health issues, was killed when she ran into traffic during a psychotic episode. (Shane, too, had his fair share of challenges throughout his life, and he also had a mentally ill parent; his bipolar father committed suicide.) In the final episode, Lily combs out her dreads. “My dreadlocks — that was like the closest thing we had to a wedding ring,” she tells Schramke in a separate interview, her red hair landing in smooth layers.
The series ends on a somber note, the sort that most viewers will see coming. The attendance at Anarchapulco shrinks from thousands in 2018 to perhaps a few hundred in 2020. After Cress’s murder and the cryptocurrency bust, which left some rich and others wanting, the dream is fading. Berwick drinks heavily. He even gets into a physical altercation with a conference attendee. Nathan, once a main organizer of the conference before being pushed out by Berwick, literally drinks himself to death. Some of the last moments of his life are caught on camera. He is yellow, bloated, his face shrouded by an oxygen mask. His young children stand over him, saying goodbye.
In the end, the truth about human nature appears to lie somewhere in between Hobbes and Rousseau. Jason Henza, an anarchist who was shot by the same men who killed Cress, explained, perhaps unwittingly: “A lot of the people with money in the community have so much security, they’ve gotten to a point where they’re really comfortable. And they feel like everyone can just interact voluntarily. But if you take away our comfort, our food, and all that kind of stuff, we’re animals. We will do the worst things to each other. We have to see the animal side of ourselves before we advocate for the responsibility of freedom.”
Ben Appel is a writer living in New York City. He is at work on his first book, about his liberation from the church of social justice. Find him on Twitter @benappel and at benappelwrites.com.
