25A029 Anarchist Airlines by Jim Davies, 7/22/2025

Give me an anarchist pilot, any day of the week, for the reasons shown below; and in the coming Zero Government Society I think it likely that at least one airline company will use that virtue in its name and advertising.

Why so? - because only anarchists adhere to the Self Ownership Axiom (SOA), which observes that everyone has the right to run his or her own life.

So the skilled flyer at the front end of my plane knows not just that he has that right, but that everyone behind and below him does too, and hence that the only obligation he has towards others is to do them no harm - to over-rule their wishes for themselves in no way at all.

At this writing, it looks as though Air India Captain Sumeet Sabharwal deliberately crashed flight AI 171 on June 12th. A short analytical video by Dan Gryder shows the rationale.

That being so, Sabharwal was evidently not an anarchist. Like most people he must have known in some degree that he had a right to run (and therefore end, if so desired) his own life, but he had not adopted the SOA and thereby accepted that everyone else had the same, equal right. Result: he murdered 293 other human beings, by flicking a pair of switches.

A Zero Government Society will come into being only after all in society have learned and accepted the SOA, so actually all airline pilots will be anarchist and the low but horrid incidence of pilot-suicide crashes will shrink toward zero. Even so, I'll be surprised if at least one airline company does not promote its virtues by advertising the fact. After all, it may well be flying routes to countries that still have governments! The firm will want to attract passengers from there by clarifying that if ever one of their pilots decided to end his life, he would certainly not also end theirs.

Meanwhile, annually one man in about 12,000 takes his own life, so a big airline employing 12,000 pilots can expect one of them to die that way every year. Only if he is an anarchist can passengers be confident that he won't do so while caring for their lives.