Ants and Anarchism

I have always found ants fascinating; why, I am not sure. When I was little, I used to spend hours in the dirt looking for ants, digging up nests to look at them, trying to start wars between ants (I inadvertently succeeded once when I spilled the cat's food across the floor, which precipitated a massive three-way war between tens of thousands of ants - our basement floor was literally covered with them), and other such things.

While most would argue, with obvious reasoning, that apes are the closest relatives to humans, I would argue that ants are our closest relatives. Not to a human being, but rather to human society. There is an enormous range of behaviors that ant colonies engage in that resemble human societal behavior: urbanization, migration, herding cattle/aphids, farming, and even taking slaves. See the WP page for more information (spec. "Types" and "Relationships between Ants and other species"). When one considers the complexity of the tasks involved, it can be truly amazing to consider.

The society of ants is somewhat misunderstood because of the misnomer given to the "queen" of the colony. This "queen" is not a queen in the sense that it is usually used; she does not give orders or make laws. Rather, ants make decisions based on some form of group consensus; how exactly is poorly understood. But what we have is a sort of anarchist-communist community; not only is decision-making based on group consensus, but all ants are guaranteed the protection and support of the community. Each ant is fed "according to her need," and works "according to her ability." While the argument can be made that ants do not have all the complicating emotions and schemes of humans that makes (human-) anarchism "unfeasible," they also do not have the reasoning ability of humans. Whether they are empathetic is unknown, though other animals have been recorded as showing empathy.

The end point here is that there is a lot we can learn from ants. Plus, they're just really cool.