A famous quote from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Confessions of a Revolutionary in 1849, and the origin of the famous anarchy symbol Ⓐ.

For a person unfamiliar with the ideas of anarchism, this quote appears to be a contradiction.  After all, if anarchy means no laws and regulations, why wouldn't there be more random murders and rapes?

It would depend on your definition of anarchy. If you define it as a free-for-all, where everybody (or almost everybody) only cares about themselves, and nobody tries to protect the freedom of others, then that's a completely different situation than a society where everybody (or almost everybody) believes in protecting eachother's freedoms.

The second scenario is what most anarchists mean when they are trying to spread the ideas of anarchism.

Any organization can become corrupt, whether it's a union, a corporation, or a government. Even if you didn't have organizations, you could still have individuals running around behaving like mafia or a member of an unaccountable army.

When you say a person is sovereign or an organization is sovereign, you also have to consider how other sovereign individuals / organizations will react when this one attempts to harm others.

If we assume an anarchist society is populated mostly by anarchists and that anarchists agree that they will protect eachother from hierarchy and coercion, then I don't think society has to worry about a few random rogue individuals that don't agree with freedom for everyone.

Ipso facto brotherhood. That’s why an ontological anarchy has a theoretical better order than even a democracy. However, Hakim Bey claims order is an illusion, an illusion in which that can kill.

You see, in a democracy as we know it today, we elect official to represent us to create order. In anarchy, consensus in its chaos is true "order." The minority is suppressed in a democracy, leading to its death. However, you can still have a government in anarchy, but you cannot have a state. Consensus avoids the question of suppressing the minority in an anarchy. Stateism then, is antithetical to the anarchy ideals.

Freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill

Then how does anarchy avoid hierarchy? Ipso fact brotherhood. Or in other words, horizontal government, instead of vertical government. Anarchy then is the status quo of the cosmos! Statelessness. A country like Afghanistan is a prime example of this. The United States goes in and tries to elect democracy, pulling away from anarchy. But they mislabel what anarchy is. They think that Afghanistan is constantly falling into a state of anarchy, when in reverse, it is falling into a state of statehood. It was an anarchy full of patches of leadership, like the Taliban. Thus it is reverting back to its true nature.

Order is an illusion

”Anarchists have been claiming for years that "anarchy is not chaos." Even anarchism seems to want a natural law, an inner and innate morality in matter, an entelechy or purpose-of-being. (No better than Christians in this respect, or so Nietzsche believed—radical only in the depth of their resentment.) Anarchism says that "the state should be abolished" only to institute a new more radical form of order in its place. Ontological Anarchy however replies that no "state" can "exist" in chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of chaos (which however is undetermined) and therefore that governance of any sort is impossible. "Chaos never died." Any form of "order"… is an illusion.” (Hakim Bey)

Hakim Bey is an American anarchist who publishes literature on the subject of anarchy. Bey explains that chaos is a better order than order itself. It seems paradoxical of course. Explaining chaos can be complicated in nature, but for simplistic analysis, consider weather as a good representation of “ordered”-chaos. Chaos then, is more natural. Order attempts to choke something, something to call an enemy, causing many to flock to a cause at the external enemy.Civilized states build on the logic of exclusion, bloodletting the citizenry through a denial of desire. A collective feeding tube of negation and alienation is used to inject false dichotomies. Giving what appears to be choice, when in fact it is slavery. (The example of asking your children whether they would like to go to bed at 8 or 9, instead of telling them to go to bed, giving them only the option of obedience.) The fleshless bones of commodity control our deaths, and thus, control our living moments. “Individual vs. GroupSelf vs. Other — A false dichotomy propagated through the Media of Control, and above all through language.” (Hakim Bey)

Anarchy also attacks capitalism. “Capitalism, which claims to produce Order by means of the reproduction of desire, in fact originates in the production of scarcity, and can only reproduce itself in unfulfillment, negation, and alienation.” (Hakim bey) Bey claims that instead the grouping of the self versus other into one, a complex web of relations, causes the abundance. “Values arise from this turbulence, values which are based on abundance rather than scarcity, the gift rather than the commodity, and on the synergistic and mutual enhancement of individual and group;—values which are in every way the opposite of the morality and ethics of Civilization, because they have to do with life rather than death.” (Hakim Bey) Thus capitalism too, under the ontological question of anarchy, is spuriously an illusion of order. Chaos solves best here too.

Consensus, the anarcho dream.

”Although the debate within the field of economical and political/administrative systems probably will never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction, the anarchist view that state power can never be ethically justified - even in its American representative majority-rule variant - finds impressive support within academic philosophy.” (Sasha) This author, only identified by “Sasha,” is hiding his identity just like Bey is hiding behind his pen name. He is analyzing some work by Chomsky, and brings up a great point about anarchists conforming only due to practicality. “That anarchists do in fact conform to the demands of their political state is a matter of practicality, not ethics, in much the same manner that a decision to hand over one's money to an armed mugger is often the wisest course of action.” This explanation brings light to why anarchists seemingly hide. Because “order” would crush them. But the best explanation of why anarchy is a better order is this, “The key point is that individuals are ethically bound only by decisions that they themselves participate in making, and anarchists consequently approve of decisionmaking procedures that move towards consensus and direct democratic decisions while allowing dissenters to preserve their autonomy.”

If any religion was closest in ideals of anarchy, it would be Islam.

”Reality is not given but it is the result of the human action of perception which constitutes the phenomena under investigation.”

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