“Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.”
My anarchist sympathies want this to be true but this is a demonstrably false fairy tale. Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order. Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
This is where I see one of the most striking arguments for anarchist philosophy. That is: It takes, and it took, an immensurable ammount of violence to make the status quo, 'lawful order' is a very shaky concept there. From this perspective it's way clearer that the unbalances and the unlawlessness of a big chunk of the "order" are themselves the sources of so much messed up stuff we have to deal with and try hopelessly to justify(ending up just evading cowardly). So to me anarchism is much more about recognizing dystopia already here and demistifying and dismantling that than some gaseous utopian end state. The way I see it, platonics are kind of irrelevant in this context.
Maybe if there's one, for me, then it'd be that humans already come from nature with capacity for self-determination, conflict resolution, sociability, organization. All those other structures mostly hijacks that and messes it up with imbalances, most obviously by abuse of power, hierarchy being the main instrument for making that. That power itself depended on (some): trust, sociability, harmony & etc to establish itself. I.e.: there are things which should not be decoupled, decouple it, you'll get dystopia. The more I research and get older(32 now) the clearer it is, IMO. Hardest part is getting past all the noise.
A very good introduction to this kind of radical(literally) perspective to me would be Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
P.s.: by the way don't miss that anarchism in this sense is not the same as 'anarchy' as commonly understood. As Chomsky says in a video(youtube "chomsky anarchism"): anarchism would actually ammount to a highly organized society.
> humans already come from nature with capacity for ... conflict resolution ...
Um, I don't think so. Conflict resolution is the main obstacle to the viability of entirely voluntary ("anarchist") organization. That's why it's the self-defining function of any government, even the most minimal.
How often do you find yourself needing third-parties to arbitrate your interactions?
Because for me, outside some formal processes I do for my job, it has been well over a decade since I needed someone to mediate my interactions with someone else.
People are very good at conflict resolution. They only see the cases where it doesn't work out.
People are very good at conflict resolution because third-party arbitration is available as a last resort. They aren't nearly as good at it in e.g. the average Third-World country, where fair and impartial courts are not generally available.
Do you think Somalia is like some never-ending Stallone movie?
Business still gets done. People work, get paid, buy things without knifing each other. It is true that without recourse to state institutions, there is more non-state-sanctioned violence, which is kind of definitional, but also true in absolute terms.
But enormous amounts of daily interaction goes on with humans demonstrating perfectly normal abilities to compromise without killing each other.
This is another form of 'elite panic' - the belief that The Lord of the Flies is just around the corner if Officer Smiley stands down. People don't behave that way in reality.
Since there are a few places on the planet where anarchy sort of reigns like in Somalia, I would like to challenge my anarchic brethren to go try those places for even just 3 months and come back and tell me about their adventures.
First, you assume I'm an anarchist, simply because I'm trying to describe reality instead of pushing an agenda.
Second, you somehow think "scary place hurrr silly anarchist just doesn't want to admit..." is a killer argument. It is just slightly recast version of the "If you like communism so much then move to Russia" schoolyard silliness.
If you want to discuss how political theory intersects the real world, I love that stuff. If you just want to convince yourself anarchists are dumb, that's boring and I'm out.
Again this is taking the position that anarchism would need it's "government program" to justify itself and then maybe society could see about moving over to that program, I don't think that's the point, as I've argued in my previous comment.
The problem with Chomsky as a resource for anarchism is that 1) his anarchism is sui generis, and he doesn't tend to cite or be in conversation with other anarchist thinkers and 2) his anarchism is utopian, and he doesn't begin to outline a program to accomplish it. In practice he's really more of a social democrat whose vision of anarchism basically resembles a self-organizing social democracy with minimized state coercion.
Again this is taking the position that anarchism would need it's "government program" to justify itself and then maybe society could see about moving over to that program, I don't think that's the point, as I've argued in my previous comment.
I agree somewhat, but sadly I think it's stuff of decades maybe hundreds of years for culture & language to go and take more root, here in Brazil there was already a phenomenon of very close information control, semi-monopolies in communication, so, you know, the instrumentation of ignorance & misinformation here found veeeery fertile soil, people lost their shit.. I'm kinda into stoicism too so it's like "yeah you can't force ppl and getting stuff is complex so it's slow", and yes I'm into "persuading", I'd call it "communication" instead though, add to that you'll probably have less 'communication power' than the opposing forces for long periods if not always.. so, it's an spectacular challenge
> Maybe if there's one, for me, then it'd be that humans already come from nature with capacity for self-determination, conflict resolution, sociability, organization. All those other structures mostly hijacks that and messes it up with imbalances, most obviously by abuse of power, hierarchy being the main instrument for making that
What humans come from nature with doesn’t scale to the world and numbers we have built for ourselves (ie past Dunbar number). You can also train a neural net with pen and paper but can’t really build a product that can function in the real world.
All those structures are attempts at trying to test and train a particular architecture of collective intelligence that can scale to real world problems. Obviously all have failure modes and difficulties in innovating and transitioning, but they also have working proof of some degree of functioning. And the hierarchies they form are not caricatures of a tree data-structure, they are much more complicated topologies, because they are more emergent phenomena than conspiratorial captures.
Chomsky’s anarchism seem to define an end state without any prescription on transitioning or path dependencies in between. It also doesn’t have any demonstration on success with negative edge cases. If anything all utopias so far have devolved into dystopias, hence the hesitation.
Even with the most pleasant things in life we are prone to construal level fallacies. Going to Paris sounds awesome right now but my current excitement doesn’t match the moment to moment reality I will face; every minute of the long haul flight, the jetlag, sore feet from walking etc, I don’t even consider these. Our design documents never match our implementations. That is why I am wary of claims like “I can rewrite this system from scratch”.
The main thing is, anarchism is the only philosophy that it's dead-on clear that the structures can and should be questioned and that it can and should be reconfigurable, refactored and etc if we're going with programming terms. It's just democracy but pushed deeper. Anarchism embodies the liberal democracy & socialist ideals, it is coherent with classical thought & philosophy, as well as enlightenment rationality(in case you haven't noticed the current status quo is absolutely losing coherence and moving further from all that), it has also been paired w/ religious ideals.
The idealized citizen in liberal & classical democracy is an anarchist, a free person participating in the matters of the "polis"(city), the "free" distinctions has plenty of consequences if you really get into it, we're talking about people from antiquity here, what they were saying is that only free people could be trusted to participate, this immediately creates a problem of class distinction i.e.: people who owned land, that were free enough to be able to learn philosophy, etc. So, although implementation was imperfect from the start, the kernel is good.(btw I'm an antiquity geek in case you haven't noticed).
What I'm getting at is: there's no rewrite at all, actually, it would be maintenance, paying the tech debt and sticking to the vision. This hollowed out democracy we're with now is a joke.
> "> Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order"
On the contrary, it' and indictment of the current law system, it has utterally failed to protect the environment and other living things, where-as anacistic organisations, charities and protest movement have done a lot for the environment. In fact they are the only ones that have done anything at all.
If a given CEO damages profits for the sake of environment, he can be removed as he is not fullfilling his legal duty, maximising profits. So even if a hypothetical environmentalist became the chielf of ExxonMobil, he wouldn't be able to do much.
> anacistic organisations, charities and protest movement have done a lot for the environment. In fact they are the only ones that have done anything at all.
This is not true at all. Protecting the environment isn’t just about actions like planting trees and buying up the occasional extra property parcel to dedicate as a land reserve. It requires government scale regulation to impose negative consequences on people and companies producing negative externalities.
You can argue that the government hasn’t done enough in this regard, but it’s demonstrably not true to claim that 3rd parties have done more than the government to regulate industry and build national park level land reserves.
This is the problem with most pro-anarchistic stances: They take too much of the current system’s benefits for granted while also assuming that less regulation would somehow produce a more regulated outcome.
I don’t understand the desire to put impossible theories of anarchy on a pedestal instead of simply making incremental improvements to the current systems.
Take the example of pollution. Say you're an employee of a fossil fuel cooperative. Is it in your interest to continue polluting? Yes, because you after all own some of the ressources of that company and control it. So what is the anarchist solution? Well, it's in the interests of everyone to stop pollution, right? So you'd need people to come together, decide that population is a concern, at least a good percentage of people, and offer you to be compensated for your investment in fossil fuels in exchange to stop polluting and find another job or not work in industry at all anymore. You might say that this is unrealistic, but for the government to do anything about pollution we needed hundreds of millions of people to protest and a majority of the people agreeing that pollution is a problem worth fixing. And if that doesn't work either, you elect and randomly chose people to supervise the elected with short term limits in order to have authority against pollution.
This is the anarchist solution to the tragedy of the commons in this case.
As for making incremental change, there are hard limits. There are existing power structures that will hamper you very strongly - the state, private interests, the corporate media, and so on. If you do incremental change that they don't like, they absolutely will use violence to prevent you.
So, the "anarchist solution" to the tragedy of the commons - the avoidance of centralized power - entails a majority of the population banding together and acting as some sort of agent, with the power to set rules and redistribute wealth? I see.
I think that you may be on to something here. It could have limited police powers and perhaps offer up and guarantee, a, I think we'll call it fiat trading systems based on dolloros (we'll call them). Also people can gather in small groups and elect a leader of sorts to travel to the town square and represent them so it won't be so chaotic when making decisions for the group...
No the anarchist solution is to remove the need for that pollution at all. Why frack when wind power works? Sure you don't get as much power but when the whole world isn't spending 1/5 of their day driving from home to office to modify spreadsheets, you'll find some power savings.
I don't think that's a fair characterization at all. To use a network analogy...
Central Planning: [1 Figure 1a]
Functioning Capitalism: [1 Figure 1b]
Anarchy: [1 Figure 1c]
The optimal design lies somewhere between the extremes. 1a seems to be an absorbing boundary condition, so we need stabilization mechanisms to keep the system running near optimal dispersion.
In the past, we had stabilization mechanisms like antitrust law, public jury trials for torts (as opposed to closed-door arbitration), and the tax code. All of these stabilizers have been severely degraded in the neoliberal era.
Elinor Ostrom come up with the 8 design principles[1] for dealing with the tragedy of the commons for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize. She concludes that top-down regulation doesn't work because of complexity and laissez-faire because private companies will try to maximize their profits. So she studied common pools and found out that if they missed these 8 principles between groups involved it would lead to depletion or conflicts. This I think is an anarchist solution to the problem only she called it polycentric governance.
> you might say that this is unrealistic, but for the government to do anything about pollution we needed hundreds of millions of people to protest
Hundreds of millions? The organizers of the biggest climate strikes (September 2019) estimated 7.6 million globally, and that's being generous. It's vastly cheaper, easier and more popular to enforce companies to reduce their pollution from their own funds than to pay to do it for them.
For that to happen though, you need a large portion of people to agree to do so. In an anarchic society where production is essentially communally owned, the cost to stop polluting is the same in the end.
> offer you to be compensated for your investment in fossil fuels in exchange to stop polluting
Do you even think about the obvious problems with this approach? Stick works. Carrot doesn't work, it just encourages more of the same. It's in the interest of everyone to stop shitting in the streets, right? But if I get paid every time I take a shit in the street, then ...
I am just making a narrow argument that the current system is responsible for the environmental damage lock, stock and barrel.
Do a mental experiment - imagine the only form of corporation we had was a cooperative, limited to 10,000 employees. Would you expect environmental damage to increase?
I feel it takes large, hierarchical organisations, where the decision-maker is very removed from the consequences, to create this level of environmental devastation.
Now imagine we went through the 70-year long history of environmental protection and did a score:
Proactive environmental action by the government /proper authority is evidence that the current system is working, 1 point for current system. If a government only acts after mass protests or public outcry, I take that as a point for the anarchic system. If there is mass outcry, and still no action, take it as two point for the anarchic system.
If we did the score we'd have to face the fact that most of environmental laws are only on the books because of some form of public outcry or protest.
You are free to argue that anarchism would be disastrous for our standards of living or crime rates, but specifically on the point of environment, it would probably do a lot better.
What is the basis for your belief that smaller groups of people will intrinsically care more about the environment than larger groups?
In an anarchic society, what mechanism would be limiting these cooperatives to 10,000 employees? How would this be enforced, and what would the consequences be for exceeding 10,000?
> On the contrary, it' and indictment of the current law system, it has utterally failed to protect the environment and other living things.
The fact that our laws have tried to protect the environment and 'utterly failed' is clear evidence that behaviour of individuals and corporations are not, by default, making good environmental decisions.
The idea that these actors, who are bad stewards of the environment when laws are compelling them to be good, would suddenly become good stewards of the environment in an anarchic system, is wishful thinking.
Counterpoint: The legal concept of fiduciary responsibility, and actual de facto laws, legally compel the board of directors and executives of for-profit corporations to produce profit for their shareholders.
There are even special laws for officers of publicly traded companies that make this compulsion even more strict add additional criminal charges for failure.
Now, obviously these laws aren't something most corporate officers think about when they get out of bed. But they absolutely do create powerful incentives and drive the culture of large corporations away from any consideration for ethics.
>absolutely do create powerful incentives and drive the culture of large corporations away from any consideration for ethics.
They absolutely do not. Corporate officers, especially at large corporations, are driven by personal profit, career success, etc. Fiduciary responsibility represents exactly what its name implies: the requirement that you act responsibly on behalf of investors/shareholders. If it was a powerful driver of corporate behavior, then we would expect different behaviors from privately run corporations (I believe that's actually most of them). I do not see that being the case.
> The legal concept of fiduciary responsibility, and actual de facto laws, legally compel the board of directors and executives of for-profit corporations to produce profit for their shareholders.
False. There are no laws that compel a company to produce profits for their shareholders. There is an economic _philosophy_ that argues that since the market economy is the bees knees, it follows that a company that has a higher profit is also 'better', but that does not make it a legal concept. [0]
Fiduciary responsibility in this case simply means that the directors should have the best interest of the company in mind. [1] In most cases shareholders want more money, so making more money is a natural result. But if there is a company whose single mission is to put a colony on Mars, then fiduciary responsibility compels the directors to only focus on that, even if such a colony would be less profitable than setting money on fire.
On the contrary again, look at the death of Lorenzo Anderson at the hands of the Seattle anarchist community.
I’m afraid at the end of everything that happens this year, the data is going to tell us that the only change the anarchists achieved was getting trump re-elected.
Anarchists obviously don’t think this will come about by itself, they simply believe that it is possible to organize society in such a way that the statement above holds true. Anarchists will generally argue that todays society prevents that from being the case (at least to a large enough degree).
The details of all this (strategies, how to make it work, etc) is at the core of a lot of anarchist theory.
That's what I find so weird about most criticisms of Anarchism. Anarchists like nothing more than building systems and methods, then seeing how they work or could be improved. The only way to differentiate different forms of anarchism is through the systems they think would be most effective, and the methods they think would be most effective to bring them about.
It's just a lot harder to build peer-to-peer systems than centralized ones, although peer-to-peer systems are ultimately the most resilient.
Yeah, it's really funny how anarchism has this reputation for disorganisation. The anarchists I've met are super nerds about what is good democratic process going down to intricate details of how it all should be organised.
I guess there is probably also a big difference here between actual anarchists and people who merely sympathise with anarchism (like myself), possibly mainly because they have an anti-authoritarian inclination (which alone, an anarchist does not make).
I see this when dispersed camping, simple things like cleaning up at the campsite before leaving. Most people don’t have a problem with it but there are small groups who don’t care about anything. Those small groups tend to ruin it for everyone.
You don’t see that at managed campgrounds because you will be fined.
State Parks and National Parks usually have zero tolerance for unwieldy behavior. National Forests are where you’ll see gunshot holes in signs and occasionally trash. I’ve seen entire burnt out vehicles in CA National Forests, it’s a little more wild west.
If the cleaners decide to 'educate' the non cleaners, would they be seen has (hier)archists now ?
The small group ruining things is akin to the broken window. It requires some kind of regular process / hygiene to maintain the system in a good enough condition.
>I see this when dispersed camping, simple things like cleaning up at the campsite before leaving. Most people don’t have a problem with it but there are small groups who don’t care about anything. Those small groups tend to ruin it for everyone.
As I understand it, an anarchist camping group (for lack of a better name) could still collectively agree on and enforce rules - in many ways still a "managed" campground, just with more shared ownership
Yes! But in a way that works via consensus and that doesn't establish unnecessary hierarchies. For example, you could have people coming in voluntarily agree to the penalties and have the primary stakeholders vote on penalties.
It often seems to me that when talking to people about alternative mechanisms for organizing society we end up just rediscovering our current systems from first principles. At times it feels silly but I think it's a great technique for educating.
I try to do this at work when a new engineer tries to argue that the current system is overcomplicated and there is an easier alternative. Just ask questions, point out edge cases and watch them gradually rebuild the current solution.
Doesn't always work, sometimes the current solution actually sucks. But more often than not they come to understand that by the time they're finished ironing it the details, their proposal is not meaningfully different from what we have.
Yes, in fact a managed private campground with fines is compatible with anarchy provided the owner doesn't have an effective monopoly on places to pitch a tent outside of their campground.
Even if they do have a monopoly, a large group with an effective monopoly on paying campers over some timeframe can negotiate an agreement for reduced or no fines.
Anarchy is about power relations. If they're relatively equal, it's anarchy.
Your assumption that people must behave better in the presence of authority - and therefore worse in the absence of it - is exactly the assumption that is under question.
True, but the real world is about compromises and lesser evils.
Formal authority is quite often better than arbitrary, informal authority. And make no mistake, humans are social, their natural congregations are hierarchical.
I'm not sure this is true. Not only were humans very loosely hierarchical essentially until the invention of agriculture, but anarchism doesn't advocate for arbitrary and informal authority, but for limited in any authority at all unless absolutely necessary, in which case it must be directly kept in check.
> Not only were humans very loosely hierarchical essentially until the invention of agricultur
Even if they were both this and peaceful then, this would only imply that we merely need to dismantle agriculture and the civilization dependent on it to return to that state, which I submit is an unacceptable trade-off to most people.
And even if it was acceptable to most people, it would take only a small minority opting out to retain the power to subjugate everyone opting-in and ruin the whole effort.
That doesn't follow from the principle. We don't need to dismantle agriculture or anything else, you can also have technological anarchic societies and indeed they exist.
What it means is that hierarchies are not necessary for human organization.
The Zapatista-governed area is at best parasitically technological (it uses imported technology, but neither creates nor maintains much of a technical base).
It certainly might be legitimately viewed as a step up for the most systemically disenfranchised, exploited, impoverished communities, but it's not a demonstration of a way that a technological society can be maintained.
That hierarchical structures became dominant after the invention of agriculture does not imply that agriculture necessitates hierarchical structures.
> And even if it was acceptable to most people, it would take only a small minority opting out to retain the power to subjugate everyone opting-in and ruin the whole effort.
Regarding humans being organized very loosely until agriculture personally I wouldn't consider that as a plus.
We're on HN, just think about the pace of human development before agriculture and after. We were pretty much doing the same thing for half a million years and then in 10000 years: rockets in space! ;-)
> And there are ways to have agriculture and industry and compounding scientific advancements without having rigid hierarchies, are there not?
Sure, the absence of rigid heirarchies with strictly top-down authority in favor of fairly fluid ones with something like circular authority where the top of heirarchy is selected and changeable by the people subject to it is a hallmark of liberal society, realized to varying degrees throughout much of the world.
They are hierarchical. All primates are. Agriculture just revealed the need for a level of social structure no other species on Earth could achieve before.
Regarding your follow-up question, maybe there are ways to achieve the same thing with a radically different social structure. The problem with social changes on this scale is that they are extremely disruptive. I'd rather reform and improve iteratively than rewrite the whole code base ;-)
You should consider the issues of iteratively improving the same code base, pushing to prod for hundreds of years!
Primate dominance hierarchies are weak, accountable, and constantly challenged, and not even necessary in humans which exhibit other behaviors depending on nature. As a consequences, hierarchy is not necessary in humans and not inherent.
That being said, there are ways to move into anarchism that aren't that disruptive as long as the dominant power structure doesn't decide to violently repress it. Syndicalism into market socialism into anarchism is a common one.
But as I said, it's possible to transition to anarchy. You don't need to do it in one bit push. The issue is when the underlying code base is so bad that there is nothing else, but we can certainly try incrementalism.
In theory, there's no reason you couldn't go towards and anarchic society via a million small reforms, but in practice you get executed for using your already existing rights if you state that your goal is to do such reforms.
Is it possible to transition to anarchy in a geopolitical environment of competing nation-states? How would an anarchizing state in the process of gradual self-dismantlement outcompete more centralized states in economic and military terms?
The way most small countries have survived in the past century is to rely on the protection of a larger state with a powerful military and/or on international treaty organizations (UN, NATO, OAS, etc.) which derive their influence from those state militaries.
Actually it does, just better training required. I believe the police in Germany is pretty good, but you need at least 3 years (not month) of training.
That's funny, I see people behave badly even with the authority all the time.
In general though, most people behave mostly good. The ones that behave badly probably would under any social construct. The people I know that got into trouble with the law were the same ones with antisocial tendencies in grade school.
I don't believe that the threat of government enforcement really encourages a significant proportion of edge cases to behave better.
Due to some unique circumstances, I actually have had the opportunity to see what a relatively anarchist society looks like in low-density areas. It honestly works about the same as it does under more supervision. When the occasional real problems develop, people band together and act as their own police force. What there isn't is a bunch of technicality type laws banning you from doing things that don't affect others.
This is all about Dunbar's Number; the number of people you can "know" in the sense of having stable social relations with. Its about 150 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number).
A society smaller than this can be effectively self-policing because everyone keeps track of how everyone else behaves. No money, police, laws or prisons are required because everyone knows what everyone else thinks of their behaviour and wants to stay on the good side of the community that they depend on. So its not a problem.
Once a society grows past Dunbar's number this system breaks down. You see people you don't know misbehaving, but they don't suffer any downside because nobody knows who they are. When you have to deal with people you don't know if you can trust them, but you do know that if they rip you off you won't have any comeback. So the communal trust breaks down and you start needing police, courts, laws and prisons.
In short, anarchism and "primitive socialism" are nice, but they don't scale.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes - who polieces the authority? Mind you an authority includes medieval kings and cobstantly warrrying feudal lords - they were legitimate authority of their time.
I would argue thay society today involve s less tyrany, less authority, and is more peacefull.
How do you behave when you yourself have authority? Would you stop respecting social norms and expectations if you did, and go on an egomaniacal power trip?
Currently I behave because it's in my interest to abide by laws, even those I don't agree with. If all authority disappeared overnight, I believe my best course of action would be to immediately assemble an armed militia so we could enforce a set of rules within a community that we believe are the best. I would still respect many social norms, but definitely not all of them. One thing that comes to mind is that "innocent until proven guilty" goes out the window. If I perceive someone to be a threat then I will use whatever means I have to neutralize them, rather than waiting for some kind of arbitration.
And this is why anarchy can’t and dosen’t work. 10 minutes later it will be replaced by a new feudalism led by people trying to make themselves king to protect their own best interests.
Right, so you agree that it's better for you to have very limited power and exist without authority, in which case you'd have to confirm to most social norms or suffer consequences, than for authority to exist and for people like you to accede to it?
Because in our system, if you were to accumulate enough authority it wouldn't be in your interest anymore to follow laws.
It's only better for me in an idealistic scenario where my local militia succeeds. If a bigger and stronger one comes around then my life could quickly become horrible.
It matters a lot if the authority is big enough that a random militia cannot topple them. A lone village can be raided with impunity, id the village is a part of a big country then soldiers will move in to protect them.
There is no reason to have such a small authorities. Anarchic societies managed to maintain armies strong enough to deter state actors. It comes with some small sacrifices, but it's still much better than otherwise.
In practice, your village can come to an agreement with other small villages and do military exercises together while still maintaining autonomy, and you can then maintain complex weapon systems and large armies.
I think it's very naive to think a local militia system of government would work like the game Top Trumps.
You'd still have a bunch of people thinking you are a jerk - the reason your life might quickly become horrible is because you've been a jerk to pretty much everyone by claiming that you need to rule them by force.
I'm shocked at how nicely this is wired into our brains. The slightest sight of a cop car in my surroundings cuts all desire to drive even near the speed limits.
I'd argue this shows that you are responding to the punishment, and have complete disregard for the authority (since you don't care to obey the rule when punishment is unlikely).
> Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law?
What is a demonstrably false fairy tale is that we don't act righteously when law enforcement is present. So asking what would happen in its absence seems irrelevant.
> It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
Above you said it was "demonstrable" but now seem to be settling for saying it's somehow self-evident.
...
Fwiw I don't personally agree with the quoted statement, or rather I agree with only a narrow interpretation of it.
I don't think individuals are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion in all situations without having to be forced to. I do think groups are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without external force, given certain conditions: anarchism in my mind is about local* law enforcement rather than external.
Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.
*By "local" I just mean internal/within proximity to the individual
Tens of thousands of years of human history. Feuding warlords, and slaves, rather than everyone acting together in unity.
> What is a demonstrably false fairy tale is that we don't act righteously when law enforcement is present. So asking what would happen in its absence seems irrelevant.
Well, we don't have mass rape, looting, or murder. One really needs to compare scale. Democracy seems to be a horrible system, and indeed the worst system, except for all the others (paraphrasing Churchill).
> Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.
You're missing scale. SMALL self-regulating organizations do very well. The key condition isn't just about removing external incentives, but also about scale.
Once you're at some scale, you're guaranteed to have a few psychopaths who work to game the system to personal benefit. A key thing about small-scale is everyone can say "Adolf is a jerk. Let's swing clear of him." Large scale, he takes over Germany, and onto the world!
Likewise, large-scale, you're missing social incentives. Small scale, I can say "I won't steal from you, because you'll think I'm a jerk." Large-scale, try leaving your wallet in the train in almost any major city for 10 minutes.
Tribal culture was pretty good on isolated islands. It didn't go Lord of the Flies. That only happened at scale.
I've seen largish organizations sustain this for maybe a half-decade or decade, but never longer. At some point, game-theoretical organizational models take over, and things never go back.
> Tens of thousands of years of human history. Feuding warlords, and slaves, rather than everyone acting together in unity.
ummm, both of your specific examples are actually examples of those with power abusing it.
> ummm, both of your specific examples are actually examples of those with power abusing it
Precisely. Those are examples of how, unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.
The whole history of progress in political systems could be oversimplified as a search for laws, structures, checks, and balances to prevent this from happening. In the absence of engineered ones, you revert into anarchy, which leads to individuals amassing power and abusing it.
Things like Democratic Structures, the Magna Carta, and the US Constitution were steps forward to prevent that. Heck, the rigid hierarchy of Ancient Egypt did better than the anarchy which came before. As a primitive form of government, it was incredibly inequitable, but you had far less theft and violence than before. That invention -- explicit governance structures and codified laws -- even in that form, allowed modern civilization.
If someone is allowed to amass power to to abuse others, it is not anarchy.
You seem to assume anarchy implies no rules, but fundamentally to ensure minimal rules the bare minimum is to shut down any attempt at aggression against others.
An anarchist would argue, however, that protecting society against aggression does not require a top down state.
There was a recent attempt in Capital Hill at creating an area where everyone was equal, and as I recall a bunch of people seized power and went on to cause havoc and violence...
How do you prevent someone from building too much power? Well, you need to cap their reserves of soldiers/hardware/supplies. In order to do that you inherently need a stronger entity to enforce those caps...
An early premise of anarchist movements was that there are already someone trying to grab too much power, namely nation states. As such a large proportion of anarchist thought is down to how to organise and build bottom up structures with the intent of matching and being able to counter and destroy the power structures of nation states.
Now ask yourself why you assume they'd be unwilling to build structures capable of resisting attempts to take power, when that is basically the raison d'etre for these groups.
> Now ask yourself why you assume they'd be unwilling to build structures capable of resisting attempts to take power, when that is basically the raison d'etre for these groups.
Not unwilling. Unable. Fighting against something rarely works to bring about productive change. Fighting for something is harder, but often does.
The French revolution brought about sweeping change across Europe in its aftermath. That the changes it brought were unpredictable is true, and that it took an aftermath that lasted for a long time to resolve the fallout too. But to suggest it didn't bring productive change is ludicrous.
And Animal Farm is fiction.
But if you're so sure it is unable, then it doesn't matter then - in that case these systems will never come to fruition, and so debating them is pointless.
Your history is confused. You're confusing the French Revolution and the American Revolution. Change in Europe came primarily due to a working example in America. America was, in a very real sense, a beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of the world.
The French Revolution in isolation was entirely regressive. It led to a lot of unpredictable chaos AND it slowed productive change. An ill-executed plan is a setback. You can see what the example of the USSR did to Communism.
I think I started this thread by saying we need to push FOR something positive, rather than AGAINST something. That's prerequisite to positive change. Pushing for something requires a plan. That requires discussion, debate, open-mindedness, and a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. Mostly, it requires a lot of deep conversation and thoughtfulness.
No, I'm not at all confusing the French Revolution and the American "revolution" (I always find it funny Americans consider it a revolution in the first place - it was nothing of the sort, it was a secession war that did nothing to upset the economic or class balance within American society).
While the American revolutionary war provided some inspiration, the path towards revolution in France involved political changes that had been brewing for a century, and its historically illiterate to suggest it was all, or mostly, a result of a "working example".
It also happened on the backdrop of the dissemination of enlightenment ideas from writers like the Genevan Rosseau, the French Voltaire, and English writers like Locke, who equally were an inspiration in America.
1789 also happened to a backdrop of some of the most severe inflation France had seen, after decades of social upheaval, for example. The revolution was a matter of survival for a lot of people, not middle classes upset over minor taxation, and it changed not just France, but Europe and large parts of the world.
Numerous countries, far outside Europe, still have legal codes incorporating large aspects of the Napeolonic Code that codified a large amount of the principles coming from the revolution, for example [1].
> The French Revolution in isolation was entirely regressive.
This is just pure fiction.
It's clear there's no point in debating this.
> I think I started this thread by saying we need to push FOR something positive, rather than AGAINST something. That's prerequisite to positive change. Pushing for something requires a plan. That requires discussion, debate, open-mindedness, and a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. Mostly, it requires a lot of deep conversation and thoughtfulness.
Most major change has come through protest and people rising up, nothing as naive as what you suggest here.
I really think you need to do some reading on what anarchism actually is before writing criticisms. It really isn't the thing you think it is.
> unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.
Yes. Anarchism is about putting in place those constraints (via systems design rather than external enforcement since the latter requires amassing power in order to act as enforcer).
> Things like Democratic Structures...
You lost me here. Anarchism is democratic.
You seem to think anarchism is something emergent that existed before rules. It isn't. Anarchism is rules without centralising enforcement, not absence of rules. Feudalism in particular is the direct opposite of anarchism.
Please at least Google the term before you go and further.
Well, before my first post I reread the Wikipedia article.
I will mention there's a bit of a dance with definitions with some ideologies which I find irksome. This is true here. Yes, there is some definition which can dodge any specific criticism, but those definitions aren't mutually coherent or consistent. You either get problem A or problem B. You can't use one definition to address one and another definition for the other.
This is common of many ideologies. I've found this to be especially true when talking with feminists. They bounce between a push for equality (for example, abolishing employment structures which favor men), and a push for changes which favor women (for example, feminists in divorce law push for policies which favor the mother). When they get caught in a contradiction, the definition changes like a squiggly fish. That lack of rational, critical conversation translates into ineffective tactics, and a failure to achieve change.
Ya' gotta pick one definition. Then we can talk about it.
Since, ironically, you'd like me to find authoritative references before I talk more, here's one I found on Google:
anarchy
1a : absence of government
b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority the city's descent into anarchy
c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
2a : absence or denial of any authority or established order anarchy prevailed in the war zone
b : absence of order : disorder not manicured plots but a wild anarchy of nature— Israel Shenker
> Those are examples of how, unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.
They will always do this? What is the source of this knowledge? And I ask that in the literal sense, not rhetorically.
I would say it's the fact that despite humanity's initial state being anarchy, all over the world human society has developed along basically these same patterns.
I think it is more complicated than that, although I agree in some circumstances laws deter bad behavior. However many laws are passed to protect the bad behavior of the powerful. Moreover, under better environments people may organize themselves effectively with only cultural norms - not laws. Think happy families living together without any laws governing their behavior or tribes with cultural norms protecting a common grazing area.
As mentioned upthread though, there's a lot of reason to believe these self-regulating small societies work specifically when they're small - once you get to the point where you don't have a personal connection with everyone in your tribe, the social cost of acting out of the established norm decreases - instead of your close friends shunning you, maybe a few strangers think you're an asshole.
Anarchy doesn't mean "absence of law". Absence of law is anomie. One is often confused for the other, but there is a slight difference.
Anarchy is more about you and your community having the autonomy to decide your own rules, not a central authority. I believe "autonomy" is the key word here, not "law".
So I am playing a bit of devils advocate here, but then isnt the KKK a good example of Anarchy? The community agreed that part of the residents should not live there anymore, they made there own laws and tried to enforce them.
No, because the KKK itself represents a coercive power structure acting without the consent of those it attempt to enforce power over, which is inherently not anarchist.
If the KKK only tried to harass or harm people who had consented to be subject to them, then you'd have an argument.
This doesnt tally with the previous comment. Then you are saying anarchy has laws, but they cannot be enforced.
So your interpretation is no laws (which can be enforced): then how would you prevent the KKK in forming (violating your rule) without a government to enforce "no minority killings, please"
To call the KKK anarchist is to ignore that they had the tacit approval of the state and contained within their ranks many state actors. It seems odd to me to ask how Anarchism would prevent the rise of the KKK when the state permitted the creation of the KKK.
One view is to see the KKK as basically raiders/marauders who left their own communities to terrorize other communities. Without a state to intervene on their behalf obviously the affected communities would have to rise up in self-defense. So, what really happened? The state didn't intervene on the behalf of black communities. The state would've brutally put down any attempt to resist the KKK with force, black communities were not permitted to use force. The KKK were a state sanctioned paramilitary group carrying out a mission of terror with the aim of preserving the racial hierarchy at the center of the south's the social order.
You might ask "How would this be better with Anarchism?" but I find myself asking "How could it be any worse?"
No, I'm saying anarchy implies laws arranged by consent.
The existence of the KKK is not in violation of anything I suggested. If they want to be an abhorrent debating club, they should be free to.
But the moment they try to initiate aggression, it is justified for anyone to defend themselves, an anarchism would generally consider it justified for anyone to band together to defend themselves, against that aggression, up to and including e.g. creating militias or a standing police force.
The key points throughout are consent and voluntary association, and the ability to withdraw that consent at any time. Not absence of structure, but the minimal structure needed at any time, arranged by consent.
If anything, anarchists are obsessed with structure of society - that is why there are so incredibly many different anarchist ideologies.
I frankly find it bizarre that this is a difficult concept to understand, because conceptually it is very simple: Consider what happens if we delegate power bottom up, instead of appointing representatives who delegate power top to bottom.
In theory nothing needs to change other than that, if we believe that current systems accurately reflects the will of the people.
The reason we're even discussing this is that nobody - not supporters of anarchism or its detractors actually believe that current societies accurately reflects the will of the people.
But detractors assume that people will withhold consent to every structure they believe are needed to maintain a functioning society.
Ultimately it reflects a fear of democracy - a fear that most people will opt to let society collapse, and it's really quite odd to behold these arguments.
Consider that people are in charge no matter what. In the current system, you simply decide to trust others using coercion over the ability of negotiating voluntary agreements for acceptable behaviour.
If people can't be trusted, the current system is also flawed, and has far more severe failure points: get a bad leader, and bad behaviours gets enforced with the power of a nation state.
Anarchy is not absence of law, but presence of consent and negotiation at every level.
I don't even think many would, the problem is that it only takes a few. The damage that a dedicated antisocial hyperminority can do to a society that lacks rules and enforcement of said is significant... Even more so in an age where technology acts as a force multiplier.
The idea of how an anarchic society would be run is that you would need strong social norms, and people willing to use violence in order to prevent authority from rising, which effectively deals with small antisocial minorities.
And where in the world has it played out like this?
Instead of examples of peaceful anarchism, the history of the world is full of examples showing that those with the will to use violence use it for their own ends, form gangs, and militias, become warlords...
Sure, the Zapatistas, the Apoists, and a few indigenous anarchist groups.
Forming gangs and militias is difficult when the status quo is good for most people resulting the majority being willing to use violence to avoid being ruled by gangs and warlords.
The written history, the recent past. We can observe settlements from the past but know very little about the time before farming because there were few or no settlements, which is not actually that long ago. This "will to use violence use it for their own ends, form gangs, and militias" might only be because we ran out of resources and space and shifted from "mother earth provides" to "this is mine". At least, that's what a book I'm reading hints at, but again, it acknowledges very strongly just how little we know.
There isn't a going back to before possessions, obviously, but I'm also not convinced that a majority of us are dishonest by nature. Certainly enough that we need laws and enforcement, but what would happen if we manage to get to a point where there are enough resources for everyone and automatic systems do most of the necessary work like making food? Do we still need the same level of security just to protect ourselves from a few sadists or could we have a more anarchistic society? Can we embrace some of the ideas that those unhappy with our current society propose?
Honestly I feel like most of this discussion is a definition issue. One person will say "anarchism is great" or "that isn't what anarchism is, you have to picture it this other great way" whereas another will make different assumptions and conclude it's ridiculous. It's a bit like being in a communistic country talking about switching to capitalism and arguing that human nature's greed can't be trusted or something. Rather, it might make more sense to propose incremental changes rather than talk about a completely different society where (if we're all being honest) nobody really has any friggin' clue if it'll increase median happiness.
One thing that is clear from history is that forming groups is bad. Making this about us vs them (anarchists vs <insert other group>), left versus right, etc.) inherently causes disagreement when I think most everyone's goal is increasing the common good.
> One thing that is clear from history is that forming groups is bad.
Dividing groups and pitting them against each other is bad. Forming groups was the innovation that set our primate ancestors apart from their solitary mammal peers. None of us are as strong as all of us.
Humans vs competing species is different from humans vs humans, though. I think it's within our capacity to learn to do only the latter, provided there are enough resources to at least have a reasonable living. We'll need to make the 'western' lifestyle require only one earth for everyone.
This behaviour is most definitely promoted by capitalism, so I wouldn't be so fast to make it a general principle. In fact, all proof shows that humans are extremely cooperative and social when the going gets tough or disaster strikes.
I think it's really telling that this disaster-anarchism argument comes up so regularly. The question isn't how society functions during a state of exception, it's how it functions on day 2 after the excitement is over when things go back to normal.
It's like all other revolutions having failed the revolution has now been outsourced to hurricanes and floods. if you want to argue that capitalism or the status quo or whatever is bad, make the case how anarchism functions on an ordinary, boring day, that is to say how it organises regular life, that is the relevant question.
> humans are extremely cooperative and social when the going gets tough or disaster strikes.
2020 being a great example.
Jesus, this whole discussion is such a shitshow. Every time I hear about anarchism I keep wishing someone would explain to me how it all works, I expected a lot from HN users, but all I keep reading is fairy tails with obvious holes the size of Mount Everest. Like, did anyone even consider to think how you'd resolve the obvious market fallacies (which, despite the name, have nothing to do with capitalist markets, but simply with humans / rational self-interested agents).
It was an exaggeration. But there are enough humans who are not interested in fair behaviour, but only getting ahead at almost any cost, that the idea of an unregulated world is laughable.
How many hardened sociopaths can an anarchy sustain before it either collapses or becomes a mockery of its own self-direction and mutualism principles?
Is it not a good thing if there are no structures in place for those people to abuse to oppress others? We've seen states captured by murderous lunatics time and time again. It seems having structures in place for those kinds of people to abuse has worked very poorly.
As long as the concentration of power in the hands of nation states have been the foundation for most of the worst mass murders in human history, it seems quaint to worry that people arguing for making power shared and collective rather than allowing it to be concentrated will do worse.
Power is concentrated and delegated top down. That's the point. If I want to withhold consent to be policed a certain way, I can't, even if I only e.g. live and interact with people who similarly want to withhold consent (nobody would suggest that I would have the right to unilaterally dictate the rules if I interact with others who don't share my views).
So the problem is that the power is not collective other than the power to vote for who the power will be concentrated with. There's a massive disconnect there where, e.g. if we go by US elections, about half the population at any point are ruled by a system they have not consented to.
That is not collective power, at least not collective and shared power of the people, but of a majority at most (even assuming representatives do what their voters want them to, which is also a dicey proposition). Nearly every government in the world tries to limit this tyranny of the majority by legally protected rights to secure the minority against government overreach too, but the fact that they need to demonstrates how flawed this model is.
You assume a power vacuum, but nobody is suggesting a power vacuum, but power mediated by consent, negotiation and bottom up delegation rather than top down coercion.
As long as you're assuming a power vacuum, you're arguing against a strawman.
We have power mediated by consent. You cannot have individuals opting out of a societal system of laws or murderers will do just that.
> If I want to withhold consent to be policed a certain way, I can't, even if I only e.g. live and interact with people who similarly want to withhold consent
We have power enforced without any of kind of consent. We get to vote for our rulers, and ~half of us get ignored any given period. There's no consent there.
Your example of murderers just reinforce that you don't understand the ideology you're arguing against, and opt for arguing against strawmen instead.
You can have people opting out easily without the extremes you suggest. E.g. a murderer can not reasonably "opt out" because they "opted in" the moment they engaged with someone else without their consent.
Again the key is consent, bottom up organisation and voluntary association, not relinquishing all means of protection.
A more reasonable example would be that it is coercive to deny others the freedom to choose what they ingest. Even if it's drugs you don't like. If you want to organise on a small scale a drug free commune, that'd be reasonable. If you try to expand that to a country, it becomes coercive and unjust be nature of forcing massive upheavals of peoples lives, and enforced monopolies over large swathes of land if they don't want to live like that.
Which brings us to this:
> What do you think countries are?
Structures I have no ability to withhold consent from without uprooting my life and/or subjecting myself to another, which unjustly claim monopoly on power over large parts of land. Reject property rights, and by extension territorial claims of states comes part and parcel with all left-libertarian ideologies.
The coercive nature of the relationship means there's a power balance that precludes any reasonable claim of consent.
This highlights the typical left/right view of de facto rights vs. de jure rights. The ability to leave a country confers me de jure rights to extricate myself from the rule of a given state. But de facto I have no ability to find anywhere that provides the freedoms I want, because nowhere exist where they are available. A right wing view is that the existence of the de jure right means I am free. The left wing view is that the de facto barriers to achieving the goal means that I am oppressed, because real world abilities trump theoretical possibilities any day.
> A more reasonable example would be that it is coercive to deny others the freedom to choose what they ingest.
It's an excellent example to consider, since vaccines are in that category and some people's free choice to not take vaccines impacts the health of people who cannot take them for reasons of medical complication and now cannot rely on herd immunity to keep them safe.
> Reject property rights, and by extension territorial claims of states comes part and parcel with all left-libertarian ideologies.
While I like those ideologies for their moral purity, I think they fail in practicality for the reason you've just described: they're unstable. Another group with organized use of force and a willingness to take and hold territory displaces them, and then they get to define their actions as just in their moral framework, regardless of what the libertarians think.
How many hardened sociopaths can any system take before the same? Look at America right now, with a narcissistic psychopath installed at the highest level of a supposed democracy.
Systems built on mistrust of human nature (i.e. checks and balances) can take more.
The amount he hasn't been able to do in that position is testament to that. Imagine if the US had been an anarchy instead and he'd amassed enough same-thinking folk to take it over?
You should read about how Anarchy treats it's mentally ill before you decide they don't have a solution to that simple problem. The way we treat mentally ill in Capitalism is a crime.
The line you quoted doesn't say that people will act reasonably, but rather that they are capable of acting reasonably.
The interesting (and massive) problem is figuring out why some people act unreasonably in the same situation as someone else who doesn't. If it's something that can be addressed through mechanisms like the provision of healthcare, UBI, equality, or addressing inequality then perhaps society can be structured to have a very minimal government without the need for so many laws simply by making sure everyone is treated fairly and not left in a position where unreasonable actions are a solution to their immediate problems.
> addressed through mechanisms like the provision of healthcare, UBI, equality, or addressing inequality then perhaps society can be structured to have a very minimal government
The (most likely/obvious implementation of the) first half of that seems diametrically opposite of “very minimal government”.
Having a government that's there to do no more than take in tax receipts and spend the money on essentials would be minimal compared to what we have at the moment. Right now the government involves itself in practically every aspect of people's lives. It doesn't have to be that way.
But your minimal government wouldn't work. If you have taxes then you need a justice system to enforce collection of taxes. You'll also need a military to prevent outsiders from taking your treasury.
The provision of healthcare, UBI and the like is itself incompatible with "very minimal" government - each of those would involve government control over a non-trivial fraction of GDP. I'm not saying that these things aren't worth doing; some of them may well be. We should be mindful of the costs, however.
For that matter, anarchist thought hasn't historically shown much awareness wrt. the importance of, e.g. social capital provision, as enabled by voluntary "grassroots" institutions like churches and community clubs, as something that's incredibly effective at promoting reasonable, pro-social values and behaviors. (Some of these institutions necessarily involve various sorts of hierarchy and ranking, such that, e.g. a Scout Guide would rank higher than a newcomer Scout. Many anarchists would intuitively dismiss any such hierarchy as inherently coercive - despite the entirely voluntary character of these organizations.)
There has actually been a great deal of thought (and some practice) on provision of services and community grassroots organizations by some strains of anarchism. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
However whether a bottom up, decentralized, participatory democracy still counts as government... I will leave up to the reader.
Tragedy of the commons, and the laziness of a false sense of security railings.
Basically; I agree with you, and I think it is because of the way people act in a society that seems structured.
People seem to think that if there is a crowd of people, then they are part of the crowd. If a crowd sees someone in trouble, then the people are generally found to be more reluctant to step up and offer help, compared to when they are alone (plenty of research seems to show this.)
I suspect this is a sort of commons tragedy, where we assume that a crowd must hold structure with “people who take care of that sort of thing”, or that someone who feels qualified will somehow step up.
From my own experience it also seems like people tend to relegate any issues to whosoever looks like they have any kind of uniform. (Even employees at shops, etc.)
Were it not the case, we can speculate that people who are forced to bear their own actions would be more inclined to act out their own moral and ethical leanings... rather than the implied relation that illegal = bad, and legal/not-illegal= good (or acceptable).
In a sense then, anarchy is when all that is legal encompasses everything that falls under a sort of Kantian categorical principle. While everything illegal is the universally opposite. (Basically where the extrinsic laws of society match the intrinsic moral values of all citizens.)
Consider there is how you want people to act and how you don't want people to act, to say that you are also reasonable implies that society collectively agrees with you, which would mean you are making a rule that everyone follows anyway. IF this isn't the case and you want people to act differently than they currently act then this is a social problem that can only be solved by engineering society to adopt your values. It just can't be done by dictating legally what people should do, some examples..
Prohibition; it works fine in countries that largely adopt religious values forbidding drinking.. but is impossible to be successful in countries who's society has not been engineered to accept it.
Woman's suffrage; laws banning women voting work fine in countries where the society already feel this way, in most western countries there would be outright revolt.
Even slavery can be legally enforced only to the degree society accepts it, from indentured servitude in societies that embraced laissez faire, to chain-gangs in societies that embraced philosophies of penance and damnation.
Rules and laws are only afterthoughts, put in place after society decides collectively how people should function. Because of this laws are largely superfluous to how individuals act.
I believe that the core issue is the size of the group. That small groups up to 100-150 people (where everybody knows each other personally) would be able to self-organize in an anarchist fashion. Going above that the us/them issues will increase, leading to a need for some type of government.
I think it's inability to work on large numbers of people is due to an even simpler explanation: the law of large numbers. One giant asshole can do a lot of damage, and with 1000 or more people, you can guarantee there are going to be at least a few.
Thomas Paine touches on this in his works. Every group past about 10 has a government even if it's just a patriarch figure. As the group grows, the government gets more complex and usually it's harder to represent everyone.
As Thomas Hobbes beautifully described what in his understanding would be the natural condition of mankind:
"In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."[1]
Societies exist as a natural evolution of human connectedness and dependence on each other. Laws as a natural evolution of complex societies attempting to find fair ways to settle disputes. Law enforcement as a natural evolution of societes that come up with laws that not everyone agrees to abide by. The idea that, were we to be left to our own devices would be model citizens is, as you very well put, "demonstrably false fairy tale". The fact that we have laws and law enforcement in the first place is evidence of that.
That being said, ever since I came across the works of Bakunin, Berkman, Goldman, Tolstoy, Camus, etc. as a teenager, I've considered myself very much an anarchist in the traditional and philosophical sense, but definitely not in the cultural sense. That is to say I don't believe that law and law enforcement are incompatible with anarchy: I do share the fundamental believe that all humans are created equal, and that there should be no hierarchies besides those that are natural and organic (e.g. my parents have certain authority over me in the family context, but my parents could equally become my students and I would have some academic authority over them in terms of mentorship, in my field of expertise). Organic hierarchies are the fabric of society and being human. We're not solitary animals, and hierarchies will always form in groups. We can agree that nobody should have any more rights and privileges than others based on claims of nobility, birth, ethnicity, gender, or any sort of social or cultural position, whilst at the same time accepting that in all human gatherings, certain group dynamics will emerge and that's okay as long as we respect each other as individuals and agree to abide by a common set of rules. But I definitely don't believe that humans are good by nature and that society corrupts us -- we are selfish by nature, self preservation has got us here. We're perfect at survival, even if that may mean taking another life, human or otherwise.
I read somewhere that mankind's success is as a result of our capacity for violence. Unfortunately it feels very accurate.
I think the whole point of the article is not insist that anarchy is a suitable organizing principle for society as a whole, but that pockets of anarchy already exist and perhaps we should consider allowing a bit more anarchy before we smother everything in heavy-handed power structures and legislation.
> Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order.
Law isn't a basis for morality, and there's a lot to be said for how present (capitalist, consumerist) systems promote un-sustainability, despite many on an individual level rejecting those systems.
> Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
You seem to be conflating anarchy with chaos (to be fair most people do, the word "anarchy" itself was probably used as an insult before it was even picked up by anti-authoritarian communists).
The weight of laws in our societies is so big that and it's meaning so large that it's probably more understandable if we say that anarchism doesn't want to supress laws [#]. One particularly good example of law system that couldn't be more anarchist is international law, the main point being that it's normative and not coercive. That's not saying it's not respected, indeed you may suffer consequent actions from some countries if you don't: from diplomatic troubles (moral judgments) to degraded economic relationship (exclusions) and ultimately war (use of force). The basic assumption is that every subject of international law recognizes that the other subject are sovereign entities.
International law is for me the proof that such organizational principles do work in practice, and it's a source of inspiration for thinking about anarchistic organization. Quoting wikipedia, all the right keywords are in there:
> [international law] is the set of rules, norms, and standards generally accepted in relations between [subjects]. [..] It establishes normative guidelines [..].
> The sources [..] include [..] custom [..], treaties, and general principles of law recognized by most [..] legal systems.
> [It] operates largely through consent, since there is no universally accepted authority [..].
The conclusion i'm hitting is that at the planetary level, we do live in some kind of anarchist system. For me it's the biggest lesson of anarchism: the main goal is to conquer the level of states, extending down from the international level and up from the inter-individual cooperative level. I could continue with the fact that this level of states is also the realm of private corporations, which then bridges with usual marxist cooperative production systems rethoric.
[#] The more precise statement would be that anarchistic principles refuse "the singleton" judiciary institution (one that assumes monopoly of justice, has jurisdiction over everything). Judges and courts may still exist, for example contracts could specify under which jurisdiction they may be disputed/upheld.
ps: don't criticize saying that international law is dominated by usa/western countries, that's another debate.
pps: I thought about this international-law example while i was reading Bolo'Bolo (by PM, free access). It's a really funny and thought inspiring short book. Its development on productive and economic relationships is really nice.
> Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
Indeed, we know that (pace Rousseauian claims) man misbehaves not because some "system" has made him do so, but because he chooses to behave in such a manner, often knowing fully well he is choosing misbehavior. I think most of us, if we're honest, even if our moral understanding is variable, admit that we have acted in ways we knew were unjust before we acted.
To take this discussion further, government is a natural institution, i.e., one which follows from human nature and is natural to human societies for the sake of the common good (whether at the level of the family, the community, nation, the world, etc.). Part of what the common good entails is the administration of justice which requires an authority to administer that justice. In your example, if the problem is, say, industrial destruction of the common good that is our environment which we need to live (provided there exist better ways to secure the good produced by legitimate industry or legitimately permissible industry without that destruction), then the problem is a deficient law that fails to guard the common good.
Healthy criticism of authority is important because we know that those in authority are capable of choosing badly either through malice or incompetence. However, just at there is an excessive deferral and submissiveness some show toward authority that subordinates evidence and reason to authority, there is also a hostility to the very idea of authority. The latter is what rests at the bottom of anarchism. Anarchism in practice devolves into the rule of the powerful because no authority acts as a bulwark against power for the sake of the common good.
So on the one hand we have unbridled capitalism wherein the powerful dominate and exploit the weak, and on the other we have socialism which is the tyranny of government. Both converge at essentially the same point. In both cases, the powerful impose their "laws" on the populace for their own benefit. The empirical evidence corroborates as much and there is no sense in placing one's hope in either. The meat grinder of human existence on this earth is not to be abolished and the solution is not revolution. All revolutionaries are opportunists that prey on resentment, whether it is the product of envy or righteous anger, and parlay it into their own power. It also results in orgies of violence, dead bodies, and rivers of blood.
We are much better off engaging in good actions in our daily lives, many which may require pain, suffering, and sacrifice. All social action is the action of individuals for individuals. A society is only as good as its members. To many, that message isn't sexy. It lack the ecstatic grandeur or the messianic and eschatological satisfaction of what revolution seems to promise. They are like the woman at the well. There is a lesson to be learned here.
How do rules get enforced?
Who enforces them?
Who decides who enforces?
Do rule enforcers therefore have power over other people?
What if people, or large groups of people don't like the rules and refuse to follow them?
Everyone, and as the community grows they'll likely go form volunteer policing to some dedicated people paid via contract, as they used to be historically.
I think what you meant to say is that sounds like its just tweaks to the existing system
The antonim of reform is revolution.
It does not matter what you reform towars: You could reform democracy to nazism, or communism to market capitalism. In fact such reforms have happened before.
You could peaceeacefull and managed change of existing system is called
> It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
You're rankly speculating, and that puts me in control of the board.
I choose Barcelona, 1936.
Now is the part where you read the relevant Wikipedia entry and attempt to find the intersection between the facts there and what I quoted from you above.
And just to keep the conversation focused: the inability to defend a city against an impending attack from fascists and communists is a completely different problem than the people in the city "acting much worse under anarchy."
That assumes that the presence of lawful order makes things better, which is sort of the whole question this article is about.
You can construct a pretty good argument that, say, absent the structures of "lawful order" around which large corporations grow, fewer people would be driving hours to work each day, drinking water out of plastic bottles, flying across the country on business trips, producing pesticides in Bhopal, piling up ammonium nitrate in Beirut, etc. I think most of us as individuals could lead happy and fulfilling lives and contributing to the advancement of humanity without any of that.
"I think most of us as individuals could lead happy and fulfilling lives and contributing to the advancement of humanity without any of that."
Your assumption is that we led happy and fulfilling lives before what we now call society, which is false. Bad harvest years would routinely decimate communities. Hunger also drove people to steal from others, many times violently (kill, rape, and ransack), and in the best case where they only stole your food, you were now left to starve because a famine affects everyone, and the victims were already on rations as it were.
Local spots of violence in the struggle for the very few resources that we had were very common place. As societies evolved, such conflicts for resources became more necessarily more complex (think bands, think small militias, think city-state armies, think all out war).
The main misconception I tend to see people have is that they somehow believe that our current condition is somehow different from the condition we were in. As if society was imposed on us and we became bad. We are society. Be it a community of ten or a community of a thousand. Good an evil are both sides of the same coin, it's just our nature.
> Your assumption is that we led happy and fulfilling lives before what we now call society, which is false.
No, that's not my assumption, and I'm confused why you think it is. I'm simply saying that I, right now, in our current state of society, am not driving a car to work or buying water bottles in my current happy and fulfilling life, and the only reason I did that previously (and might do so in the future) is because a corporation backed by our current form of government made it so that I needed to do that to have a happy and fulfilling life.
I didn't say anything about the state of humanity before modern society. You make some good points, but I don't think they have much to do with this particular discussion. You may well be raising a different good objection to anarchism, but it's not the objection I'm responding to.
But laws also enable rights for minorities, which the majority isn't free to trample over or ignore. To take one example that's particularly close to my heart, laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act can compel corporations to make their products and services accessible even if they'd rather not. I think I and many of my friends wouldn't have nearly as happy and fulfilling lives if not for that.
Maybe. Or maybe a band of like-minded people get together, arm themselves and take over the "individuals leading happy and fulfilling lives", declaring themselves monarchs and killing all those who oppose them.
Sure, that's a reasonable objection to anarchism, but that's also not particularly relevant to the question of whether individuals on their own will harm our planet, I think?
My anarchist sympathies want this to be true but this is a demonstrably false fairy tale. Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order. Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.