Everybody Should own a Copy of the Anarchist Cookbook

I think you, and everybody you know, should make a point to find and read a recent edition of the Anarchist Cookbook, cover to cover. No, wait, hear me out. I don't say this because I think we should all be prepared at any moment to become violent revolutionaries. I say it because I think it's important to know how easy it is to make a weapon, and then to contemplate a much deeper point that is implied by this fact. Why, exactly, don't people do it?

If you don't know what the Anarchist Cookbook is, it's a collection of recipes for making everything from hacking tools to working guns to bombs out of household items. The original Anarchist Cookbook was a physical book written in 1971 as a protest against the Vietnam War (you can read more about it in the Anarchist Cookbook Wikipedia entry). Sometime in the more recent past it found its way onto bulletin board systems, then to IRC, FTP archives, p2p, and intermittently the world wide web. From there it evolved into a sort of wiki project before there was such a thing as a wiki; contributors added their own recipes and the best made it into highly circulated releases that are still easy to find today. Some, if not most, of the recipes are unreliable or more dangerous to you than they are to your hypothetical victim.

I think it's important for everyone to read this book for a very simple reason. The Anarchist Cookbook illustrates how easy it is to create deadly weapons out of common materials. Your average radio-detonated IED, for instance, carries around a 15 dollar material cost. For less than the price of a ticket and a bag of popcorn anyone could easily kill or harm every attendee in the theater. It doesn't take a genius to make weapons, either. It might require a good high school education to design some of these devices but any literate 5 year old could easily follow the directions. Furthermore it's impossible to prevent or even provide reasonable restrictions on creating them. You'd have to take away people's rights to clean their homes, bleach their laundry, open their garage doors from afar, scrub their dishes, change the oil and break fluid in their cars, fertilize their gardens, etc. without licensing from authorities for the appropriate materials. Obviously that's not a world any of us wants to live in.

Now step back for a moment and consider the view of the world as presented to us by the government and the media. One in which we are surrounded on every side by dangerous criminals and terrorists. People from whom we need protection by paramilitary police forces, no-warrant wiretapping, and restrictions on the purchase of any conventional weapon, not to mention a third of the entire global budget for military spending here in the U.S. The question posed to us then is: why don't massive terrorist attacks happen every day? Why are there not mad bombers slaughtering innocent people in every small town across the world? Why do we not don full body armor and CBRN protection gear every morning before checking the mail? Plainly it is not because it is difficult to cause death and destruction, a skill mankind perfected in the bronze age and hasn't really improved on since.

Could it be, perhaps, that human beings are not as stupid, violent and dangerous as we are lead to believe? Could it be that despite the availability of the raw materials and pertinent information to cause mass murder there are just not that many motivated murderers? Could it be that we are safe not because of massive government intervention, who are powerless to protect us from our own household items and the looming danger of the terrorist weapon warehouse known as "Home Depot", but because there are just very few people who have the desire to hurt others? Maybe we don't need all this "protection", all this anxiety, after all. Maybe safety is impossible but danger is highly improbable and that's the simple equation that describes risk in our daily lives.