Malice, Michael

author, anarchist, and political commentator; editor of The Anarchist Handbook

Michael Malice: Totalitarianism and Anarchy

Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 15, 2021

• Michael Malice
• anarchism versus the state
• Emma Goldman
• Albert Camus and absurdism
• George Orwell
• Tolstoy and Christian pacifism
• North Korea and totalitarianism
• banality of evil
• taxation versus voluntary pricing
• drug policy and criminalization
• voting and representation critique
• The Anarchist Handbook
• conspiracy theory framing

Core ideas

Malice frames Animal Farm as a broader indictment of totalitarianism generally (not only Stalinism), and uses it to introduce three intellectual heroes — Emma Goldman, Albert Camus, and George Orwell — as left-wing figures whose courage came specifically from criticizing totalitarianism from within left political circles, at high personal cost to their standing among ideological allies. He recounts Goldman's disillusionment with the Soviet Union (recorded in her book My Disillusionment in Russia) after confronting Lenin directly about free speech and individual rights, and Camus's WWII-era Communist Party membership as tactical anti-fascist resistance rather than doctrinal communism, alongside Camus's essay "Reflections on the Guillotine" as a model of moral reasoning that resists ideological simplification (opposing the death penalty not by claiming murderers are innocent, but by asking what premeditated killing does to the executioners' own society).

On heroism, Malice argues Western culture over-associates heroism with martyrdom and argues real-world circumstances (families held hostage, as under Stalin's policy of holding visible child-death-warrants during interrogations, or North Korea's three-generation collective punishment doctrine) make defiance far costlier and rarer than armchair judgments assume; he cites a Nazi guard who quietly lied about a child's age to spare them at Auschwitz as a model of "quiet, low-cost heroism," contrasted with performative, consequence-free political statements. He extends this into everyday life, arguing small, low-cost acts of kindness (e.g., taking someone out for their birthday) are underrated forms of the same moral courage, and that most people are capable of such acts but lack the "catalyst" to recognize the opportunity — a view Lex pushes back on as overly optimistic about universal human capacity for courage, with Malice countering that he doesn't believe such capacity is universal, citing a "Scare Tactics" TV episode in which a security guard, told to enforce fake imprisonment of "workers," never questioned his orders as an example of people who lack an active conscience.

Discussing Camus's absurdism (which Malice distinguishes from existentialism and from Sartre, whom he criticizes for defending Soviet gulags), Malice frames life's lack of inherent meaning not as bleak but as radical opportunity — using the metaphor of a blank canvas on a mountainside as either confusing or a gift depending on one's outlook — and connects this to his own Orthodox Jewish upbringing's framing of life as an undeserved, joy-oriented gift from God. He explicitly rejects cynicism as "a lie" that happiness requires moral compromise, and frames his own worldview (which he prefers to call "inherent benevolence" rather than naivety) as a deliberate stance rather than ignorance of suffering — citing messages from people whose lives were changed by his advocacy for hope as evidence the stance has real-world value.

Malice discusses his family's history as Soviet/Ukrainian Jews who survived the WWII Nazi invasion and Stalinist famine, framing this generational trauma as central to his interest in North Korea (the subject of his book Dear Reader) — he explicitly frames writing about North Korea as a way to humanize suffering that Western audiences otherwise dismiss through racialized "wacky Asians" stereotyping, and describes his North Korean guide's permanently limited life prospects (relative wealth by local standards, but no access to medicine, travel, or the internet) as illustrative of what his own family narrowly escaped. Reflecting on human nature via North Korea, he argues cruelty is most commonly expressed not through dramatic evil (an SS guard, easily conceptually "contained") but through ordinary, mediocre people newly granted small amounts of power over the powerless — citing Nicolae Ceaușescu (whom he portrays as an intellectually unremarkable figure whose personality cult and forced-birth policies reflected raw, banal cruelty rather than genius) as the paradigmatic case, connecting this to Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil."

Turning explicitly to anarchism, Malice defines it as fundamentally a claim about relationships rather than a governance blueprint: "you do not speak for me; everything else is application." He argues genuine anarchism is compatible with — and in fact requires — natural, voluntary hierarchies (a lawyer's expertise over a client, a show host's authority over their own show), since the defining feature of the state (versus any private organization) is that it extracts resources through coercion (taxation) rather than voluntary exchange, a distinction he traces to Murray Rothbard's essay "Anatomy of the State." He argues markets naturally trend toward decentralization and increased consumer choice over time (citing the shift from a handful of record labels/TV networks to today's near-infinite content platforms), while government involvement tends to entrench concentrated winners (citing pandemic-era wealth transfers to Amazon and Target at small businesses' expense) because large incumbents have far easier access to political influence than small competitors. He proposes replacing single-payer emergency services (911) with a competitive, Uber-like model allowing consumers to choose among competing private security/emergency providers, arguing this concretizes an otherwise abstract preference for private security over police monopolies.

Malice distinguishes taxation from voluntary pricing (a price reflects what a buyer actually chooses to pay; a tax is imposed regardless of consent) and argues government cannot allocate resources as efficiently as markets because it lacks the decentralized price-signal information described in Ludwig von Mises's "economic calculation problem." He acknowledges a strong counter-case for welfare-state programs like child nutrition assistance, conceding that even if privately funded charity would likely be more efficient, avoiding mass starvation matters more to him than efficiency — and provides historical context for early (left) anarchists like Goldman, arguing their radicalism reflected the genuinely desperate conditions of pre-welfare-state industrial poverty (citing child labor and extreme income inequality of the era) rather than naivety. He identifies war as "the state at its worst" and argues war is systematically treated as a first resort rather than the "last resort" it's taught to be in schools, criticizing corporate media coverage for centering domestic costs (soldiers' deaths) while ignoring the suffering inflicted on foreign populations.

On drug policy and criminal justice, Malice argues the people most harmed by criminalized sex work are sex workers themselves, who are denied access to police protection against violence precisely because of their work's illegality, and criticizes the selective enforcement of drug laws — contrasting Hunter Biden's and Kamala Harris's own admitted past drug use (without consequence, given their social position) with the life-altering consequences faced by less privileged people arrested for the same conduct.

On voting, Malice explains his essay "Why I'm Not Going to Vote This Time or Ever" by analogizing electoral representation to hiring a lawyer he can't actually fire, arguing that voting for a single representative across an entire platform of unrelated issues (abortion, taxation, war, immigration) is fundamentally incoherent compared to direct referenda on specific policy questions, which he considers more defensible (though still imperfect, given elite control over how such questions get framed, per James Burnham's "circulation of elites"). Lex pushes back that this describes an improvement to representative democracy rather than its abolition, and the two arrive at partial agreement that voting for debating representatives on specific issues, paired with referenda on final outcomes, would be a meaningful improvement — while Malice maintains this is fundamentally different in kind from the current system, and Lex maintains it converges toward what he'd call "good government."

Discussing his forthcoming anthology The Anarchist Handbook, Malice contrasts Leo Tolstoy's Christian pacifist anarchism (non-violent resistance as a moral strategy that forces oppressors to confront the consequences of their own cruelty, as with the moral impact of footage of civil rights protesters being attacked by police dogs) with Emma Goldman's greater openness to revolutionary violence (tracing this lineage through her mentor Johann Most, who published bomb-making instructions, and the assassination attempt by her partner Alexander Berkman) — while cautioning that romanticizing political violence obscures its real human costs. He notes he considered but excluded Noam Chomsky, Herbert Spencer, and Randolph Bourne from the anthology, and reframes "who counts as an ally" (via a Rothbard essay) as less about ideological purity and more about genuine, motivated opposition to state power, regardless of formal ideological labeling.

The conversation closes on lighter personal territory: Malice's decision to leave New York for Austin (driven primarily by his social circle relocating and lower cost of living, with friends actively helping remove logistical excuses), his approach to hosting/guesting on podcasts (prioritizing making the other person look good and feel safe being playful, illustrated by a recent episode with corporate journalist Elizabeth Spiers that drew audience backlash for not being adversarial), and a recent conversation with Alex Jones, whom Malice describes as a "performative" figure whose claims sound more extreme than they often are once "translated," alongside a broader critique of "conspiracy theory" as a rhetorical device that collapses well-evidenced claims (e.g., Operation Mockingbird, the Tuskegee experiments) and baseless ones into a single dismissive category. He closes with reflections on public recognition, gratitude for friendship and mutual respect, and a stated life goal — shared with Lex — of increasing human kindness.

Excerpts