Taking littering: how littered is your home? Your work place? What about a Comercial Center? In an anarchy society, the littering is limited to your own property. Yes, you can live like a pig, as long as you don't litter properties of others. If you throw trash in other people property, you don't face a fine, but you will be expelled from the property and face a trial.
In our current society, littering is a problem in public spaces: streets, rivers, sea, etc. In other words: is a problem created by the government.
The main mistake of non-anarchist people is to believe that there are no rules in anarchy, or that it equates chaos or extreme individualism. But there are: the rules that people gives to themselves. An example: religions form anarchic structures. You can join and leave a religion at will, but they have a tight set of rules their members should follow. A power structure exists, but you can accept or leave it.
You might argue that a religion has a government, and thus it isn't "anarchy" according to the definition. But as I said, you can accept or reject the rules, and live under other religion rules, create your own religion or without religion at all. Anarchy equates to "stateless society based on voluntary associations".
The problem I’m having with this is that, while yes you don’t have to worry about the tragedy of the commons in your own home or church or place of work...it isn’t feasible to live your entire life outside the commons. How/where would one receive goods & services? How would one travel from A to B, and over whose infrastructure?
Infrastructure would indeed be communally owned, and the tragedy of the commons need not apply on communally owned property. An economist actually won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating actually how that happens :
"Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded 2009's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on the issue, and others revisited Hardin's work in 1999.[45] They found the tragedy of the commons not as prevalent or as difficult to solve as Hardin maintained, since locals have often come up with solutions to the commons problem themselves.[46] For example, it was found that a commons in the Swiss Alps has been run by a collective of farmers there to their mutual and individual benefit since 1517, in spite of the farmers also having access to their own farmland. In general, it is in the interest of the users of a commons to keep them functioning and so complex social schemes are often invented by the users for maintaining them at optimum efficiency.[47][48]"
Except infrastructure in most of the US is communally owned, and we had to institute authority and fines for littering.
While it's true that there exists some societies that have been able to overcome the tragedy of the commons (it's usually extremely small homogeneous societies), I don't think we have any evidence to suggest that it can provably be replicated to the rest of the world.
It's like suggesting that there exists some companies that are able to sustain themselves by being 100% WFH/remote, and therefore all companies should be able to sustainably do that.
If authority turns out to be absolutely necessary, that's okay. It just has to be limited and kept in check.
As for the tragedy of the commons being only transcended in small homogenous groups, that's stretching the definition of small and you can still have norms for larger groups without introducing tons of authority.
As for as some companies being able to WFH and others not, there are reasons that can be anaylized and propagated.
> As for the tragedy of the commons being only transcended in small homogenous groups, that's stretching the definition of small and you can still have norms for larger groups without introducing tons of authority.
I'm not sure what's more of a stretch: defining "farmers in the Swiss Alps" as as "small" community, or suggesting that what works for farmers in the remote Swiss Alps necessarily works for New York City or London or Amsterdam. What happens when people leave their cars parked on the sidewalk? What happens when people litter their dockless bike/scooter-share wherever they please, with no repercussions? What happens when a bicyclist in Brooklyn gets run over by an SUV? What happens if I decide that I like your house, and take it from you by force with my big gun along with my big goon friends, or perhaps even kill you for it? Hell, I live in Brooklyn where there are actual laws and policing RIGHT NOW, and there's still trash littered on the ground, dog walkers occasionally leaving their poop un-picked, and cars sometimes parked on the sidewalk: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.681231,-73.974329,3a,75y,334...
The devil is in the details, and the circumstances that make something work in the Swiss Alps are important, confounding variables. At best, the evidence suggests that minimal order can work in rural agrarian communities, and we see a lot of that play out in rural parts of the US and the EU already.
> If authority turns out to be absolutely necessary, that's okay. It just has to be limited and kept in check.
The vast majority of people agree with this. The contention is at what point this actually turns out to be "absolutely necessary", that's where reasonable people disagree. In an increasingly urbanized and globalized world, the point at which that happens has long since passed. The argument that the GP commenter made can probably rephrased as "anarchy doesn't scale".
In our current society, littering is a problem in public spaces: streets, rivers, sea, etc. In other words: is a problem created by the government.
The main mistake of non-anarchist people is to believe that there are no rules in anarchy, or that it equates chaos or extreme individualism. But there are: the rules that people gives to themselves. An example: religions form anarchic structures. You can join and leave a religion at will, but they have a tight set of rules their members should follow. A power structure exists, but you can accept or leave it.
You might argue that a religion has a government, and thus it isn't "anarchy" according to the definition. But as I said, you can accept or reject the rules, and live under other religion rules, create your own religion or without religion at all. Anarchy equates to "stateless society based on voluntary associations".