The break around, "but what if inaccurate models make me happy?!" I think highlights the difference between "anarchy as instrumental value" and "anarchy as terminal value."

I'm not an anarchist to make people happy, but to increase freedom (which will make many unhappy).

There are a number of people who identify as anarchists because they believe anarchist struggle or modes of society will achieve some sort of OTHER more ultimate goal, like saving the environment or increasing happiness.

This makes them *contingent* anarchists.

I often find these values to come in a vague cluster with contradictory & conflictual relations. This is, after all, the default state of humans. We often treat desires as random happenstance emergence in chaotic conflict, so why not continue to leave deeper values in such state?

Many people treat for example "love" as a kind of external input that either springs into existence for them or doesn't. They'll follow its urges for as long as they happen to arrive as inputs, but they never think to trace or shape the origin of such feeling.

But of course many more people recognize that love contains within itself *implications* on its own persistence. To love someone often implies an obligation to continue loving them, to examine, affirm, and reinforce that love.

If a mind has even minute levels of self-reflectiveness and attention desires/values have consequences on their own existence. Desires conflict with one another and increases to self-awareness begin to *order* desires in relation to one another.

This ordering process is never finished, but it congeals certain hierarchies or loci of values. Some desires become ordered into being always ignored/trumped by other desires. Some desires are treated like background static that can fill space when not conflicting w others.

Some more persistently emergent desires/values become put firmly under the boot of other desires/values, left as *instrumental.*

You desire to do X, but only to ultimately accomplish Y.

Most modern human beings end up only somewhat sorting desires/values, even the biggest, most powerful ones.

This leads to a state of affairs mostly described in terms of competing virtues. One might even make a list of things one's generally arrived at strongly/rootedly valuing.

But there the contradictions and tensions remain. How much does one value "preserving all ecosystems as untouched" versus "harvesting resources to improve some people's lives"?

Either one wins out entirely or there is some deeper metric or value resolving the tension.

The problem with leaving these values unexamined and thus unordered is that the values you end up with in the future may not align with the ones driving your actions today. A failure to diligently reflect on values inevitably creates harm as judged by emergent values.

More basically *if you at all have empathy for your future self* you are obliged to examine and sort your values today so as to not fuck over your future self.

Speed up on your abandoning of the "woooo booze!" value and stop drinking yourself into blood alcohol poisoning, etc.

For reasons too involved for this thread I've sorted out my values as best I can, and take "maximize positive freedom" as the deepest rooted value. This in a strong sense makes me an anarchist directly by valuing anarchy rather than instrumentally in pursuit of other values.