anarchy has to be one of the stupidest ideas I have ever seen. Everytime you remove a government, EVERY SINGLE TIME, something much worse replaces it.
People are evil and greedy for power, the sooner you admit it, the sooner you realise anarchy just does not work at all.
However, slightly less government control would be beneficial.
Now that I remember it, the anarchy signs drawn, etched, sprayed, burned into practically everywhere I go are kinda annoying. OUT WITH ANARCHY!!!
'course, that brings us to a whole 'nother kettle of fish which is beyond the bounds of this topic:
No one can agree on where the government should have “less control”. Everyone has their own little pet issues that they want the government to get out of, and everyone has their own utopian vision of just what a great world it would be if the government just stops doing X and starts doing Y. And every one of those will have someone that says that stopping X and starting Y will be detrimental…
Which is why anarchy will never work, because everyone has their own ideas about how Things Should Be Run.
I am disappoint nietzschesaurus.
The only people I have ever met that believed in anarchy were skater teenagers that were pissed off at the cops and their parents for taking away all their weed and beer.
It’s human nature for the strong to take control of the weak. In our case, the government control the people and the rich control of the government. How could you possibly achieve true anarchy if it’s against basic human nature? If the world did become anarchist, then what’s to stop the rich from just seizing power and manipulating the world even more than they already are?
bscly
Fix’d
I didn’t expect this thread to grow as quickly as it did. I’ll respond to as much as I can muster.
Communication between the needs and desires of your peers, working together, and dealing with social problems can be accomplished without laws, or defined government. Anarchy is existence without defacto government. You can still work with a group of people to accomplish a goal, listen to the advice of others. You don’t need a king or president to be kind to your fellow man.
There will always be conflict. Anarchy is essentially removing the conflict representational politics causes, since everyone will be able to express themselves.
Good luck learning how to use it/get to it/stop anti-nuke groups from dismantling them.
A vigilante is someone who takes the law into their own hands. If there is no law, you can’t be a vigilante.
Same ones we have now, except instead of sending diplomats who’s interests are guided by money, they would be groups who are earnestly interested in the problems that are creating tension betwixt two factions.
As far as I know they were only attacking Chinese and American ships that were destroying the ecosystems they depend on to survive, and reclaiming utilities they needed from those ships as reparations. These pirates were fishermen, not life-long criminals.
That doesn’t sound combative at all. It all depends on what type of libertarianism and what type of anarchism you’re talking about.
I don’t remember what their names are, but the first type of libertarianism was a creation of Europe. It is almost identical and is strongly favored by Naom Chomsky as a sort of “soft word” for Anarchism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8USOAkQWGVY watch this video to understand it better. He explains it far better than I ever could.
Well, he considers himself a libertarian, but it’s more of a semantics thing. I think he’s great, but he shouldn’t be the only material in someone’s diet, so to speak. He shouldn’t be idolized by any means.
Read the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn at some point. It’s not that humans are inherently flawed, it’s more that our culture has told us there are certain walls, limitations, and flaws in ourselves that aren’t really there. We are certainly territorial, but there isn’t an animal alive that isn’t to some extent. If any species was given the ability to create a nigh-limitless food supply the way we are, they’d expand the same way and have similar conflicts.
And allows us to exploit that without remorse until we feel that we can’t help it.
:C i am teh sry
Then you haven’t met any Anarchists over the age of fifteen. Or who have read a book.
What if I told you it wasn’t against human nature? What if I told you that the dominant culture in the world put that idea in your mind, and you were raised to believe it? There would be no real way to know if it were true or not. Luckily enough, there are still societies living just as primitive as they did 10,000 years ago. Hidden societies of pigmies and what not, never touched by the foul hand of capitalism.
They haven’t torched themselves to oblivion.
I don’t believe it’s necessary for the world to become anarchist. Humanity has this mindset that we have to continually consume or some unknown bad will happen. Capitalism has taught us that consumption is good and a necessary part of humanity that we can never fight. Capitalism was started only 10,000 years ago, and before then tribes used both agriculture and foraging with great success.
10,000 years ago people would work for about 4 hours and then dick around for the rest of the day. We had free time because there was abundance.
I’m not saying we need to regress to being cavemen, that would be an impossible suggestion. I’m saying we knock down the walls our culture has had up for the last 10,000 years, free ourselves from this invisible force holding us back, and bolt into the unknown armed with knowledge of our past mistakes and triumphs.
Nietzschesaurus’s head is so far up his ass it amazes me.
The biggest problem with anarchy is the “redress of grievances” thing that would be nonexistent in an anarchic system.
It’s quite simple, if you think about it: You and another adult agree to a contract: He mows your lawn, you pay him a set amount of money. However, in an anarchic society, how would you recoup your losses if, say, this person, instead, kills all your grass and poisons your dog? There’s no government to punish him. You could tell your neighbors to not do business with him, but how would they believe you? If the person changes their appearance, for example, how would they know?
And, on a larger scale, if a corporation does dirty and cooks the books to make their bottom line look more attractive to investors, where is the government to slap them down?
Plain and simple: How do you maintain a certain modicum of civility, decency, and, dare I say, “order”, in an anarchic society?
But anarchy is against basic human nature. It’s not something put into our heads by capitalism, but something hammered into our brains by millions of years of evolution. Imagine two monkeys being chased by a tiger. One monkey trips and falls. This monkey is inferior and is slower and less athletic, he has bad genes. The other monkey however, is very strong and has good genes. So, lets say monkey two runs back and helps up the other monkey, they both get eaten by the lion and neither’s genes get passed on and the genes that made that monkey selfless are lost. Now lets say monkey two is selfish, he laughs at the other monkey and keeps running. The tiger eats the weak monkey eliminating the bad genes and the selfish stronger monkey survives and passes on his superior selfish genes. Selfish organisms survive and selfless organisms die until all that’s left is the selfish ones.
It still goes on today; there’s a selfish couple and a selfless couple. The selfless couple understands that having too many children causes over population and hurts the world, so they only have 2 children. The selfish couple don’t give a shit about overpopulation and have 14 children. Now that’s 2 selfless children versus 14 selfish ones. The selfless children marry and don’t have many kids. The selfish children all have at least 3 children each. Which gene do you think is now more prominent? The selfless one or the selfish one?
one could just as easily turn the argument around and say that a species who’s members put the survival of their mates above themselves is more likely to thrive than a species who are only concerned with individual survival. Using your example, altruistic monkeys would be more likely to i.e. save a pregnant bitch monkey from a flood even though this put their own lives at risk, and the net result would be the altruistic species passing on their genes, even though one or two individuals died, whereas a more selfish species would let their progeny drown and become extinct.
On the other hand, learned behaviors like selfishness and altruism aren’t passed on genetically.
Many years ago, it was acceptable to own slaves in America. Millions of them worked all over the country, they were a part of life, invisible in their ubiquity. They affected commerce and society enormously, and were regarded as essential.
Over a long period of time, those more empathic in nature observed the deplorable plight of slaves and took up a great campaign of consciousness raising, creating works of literature, posters, speeches, crying out against slavery. For a long time, their efforts had minor results-the slaves were an enormous part of the life of the country, and though many would nod that slavery was ugly, they viewed it as necessary. They suffer that we might live so well, their blood brings us cheap cloth and cheap labor.
But over time the drive to destroy the practice picked up force, picked up steam. People, average people, were learning the truth, letting it sink in, and starting to join in, to create Underground Railroads and attend demonstrations, swept up as the attitude of a nation shifted radically.
In the end, their was bloodshed, and lots of it. The chains of steel were ultimately replaced with more insidious chains of the law, of segregation and Jim Crow, but after another hundred years, this too withered away in its strongholds of the deep South.
That is how it will happen. From being viewed as a necessary evil by most, ugly but essential to the way of things, the state will become more and more abhorrent to us as time passes, its usurpation of our rights more unacceptable. People will call out against it as the number of those against it swell, and in the end there very well may be blood, but we will move on, and the memory of that vast, insane thing that ruled man in all its forms for thousands of years will be only another paper monster to menace us from the pages of books, incapable of doing anything but causing distaste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_attacked_by_Somali_pirates
That ain’t “mainly” American and Chinese ships that have a huge impact on their precious ecosystem, that’s pretty much every kind of ship of any country.
In theory, anarchy could work, were it not for human nature. Our primal instincts still linger, and the moment we taste a bit of power in any shape or form, we want more. Those Somalis tasted power, they saw what they could do in numbers, so they wanted more and more.
Humans are social animals. We live in packs and we need a leader and high-ranking individuals to lead the masses, just like any other social animal. Don’t let the idea of having a highly developed brain fool you, when it comes to living, humans are some of the dumbest animals on this earth. No amount of science and technology will cover up for that.
There’s a metaphor for how capitalism was created, it’s simplistic but effective in explaining how it came to be. This metaphor can be used, also, to explain any wall built inside the human psyche.
Imagine three monkeys in an experiment. They’re put inside a large glass container. Inside the container is a ladder, and above the ladder is a cluster of bananas hanging from the string. One by one the monkeys climb the ladder to get to the bananas, and just as they are about to receive its sweet reward, they are given a small electric shock.
Eventually the monkeys realize the relationship between the bananas and the shock, so they stop going for the bananas. Another monkey is added to the group. This monkey, being new, doesn’t know about the electric bananas, so it goes for it. The other monkeys beat him up. He knows there’s something about the bananas and decides against trying it again. The researches add another monkey. Just as its predecessor, it goes for the banana and gets beat up, but this time it’s predecessor joins in on the action; though it does not know of the electric shock, it believes that this is the way it is.
In time the original three monkeys are removed, and another monkey is added. The researchers also turn off the electric shocks. The monkeys could go for the bananas if they wanted, but they don’t. Instead, they beat up any new monkey who tries to go for them.
These monkeys never experienced the electric shocks.
They don’t know they ever had them.
They just know that this is the way things are, and this is the way they always have been.
So they continue to beat up any monkey who tries to go for the bananas, though there would be no reprimand if they were to succeed.
That’s the metaphor. Now, I’ll explain another one, more related to humans and the birth of government/capitalism. The two, in many ways, go hand in hand.
10,000 years ago humanity existed in what is called a hunter/gatherer society. Eventually, humans discovered that you could also plant seeds and vegetation would grow. This is the birth of agriculture. Now, these human tribes didn’t stop hunting and gathering. They just used agriculture to supplement it. Some more than others, but the hunting and gathering didn’t end.
This allowed them much extra time on their hands. A tribe would gather food for a while, end up with enough to last them a while, and then spend the rest of their time doing whatever. Carving wood, making cave paintings, whatever. Until their supply began to run dry and they decided it was time to hunt again.
But there was a society in the fertile valley who decided that they should rely completely upon agriculture and animal husbandry, forgo hunting and gathering all together. This began to work well. With their whole tribe focusing completely on the growing of crops and livestock, they found they could produce much more than they could previously. Indeed, they even had enough left over at harvest to stock up over the winter.
With this extra food, they could produce more children, thus more workers. Thus more children, and so forth. Eventually, someone got the idea along the lines of “hey, some people don’t work as much as others, this isn’t fair. Maybe there should be something in place to entice them to work equal amounts?” he devised a plan, shared the idea with some of his friends, and together they locked up the food supply.
In the morning, needless to say, the other villagers were pissed. He explained himself.
“Some of you don’t work as hard as the others, so I locked up the supply. Each of you will work shifts, and will be given food relative to that amount. If you don’t want to work as hard, you won’t get as much food. It will be hard to sustain your families if you want to be lazy.”
Some of the villagers were convinced, but not all. One spoke up, “Well then, I’ll just break the lock and everybody can share in the work of the whole, just as before. We have enough food for everybody.”
The man who locked up the supply replied; “Then my friends and I will guard the supply. The supply can’t last forever, and those who don’t work are detrimental to our growth as a society, more people means we can grow more! What if everybody got lazy? We’d run out of the food and we’d all die.”
“If you’re guarding the supply, then how will you have time to tend the fields?”
“That’s just it. Since I’m working so hard at guarding the supply and keeping track of the food, I should deserve a certain amount of the food. My friends should too. It was my idea after all, and trust me, this will work out for the best. It’s what is fair.”
The man who spoke up fell silent. He had no retort.
In time, this seemed to work fairly well. Some of the people worked, and received an amount of food decided by the man who kept it. The man who kept it was able to take however much food he wanted, since he had authority over it. He found he could even keep food from those he didn’t like.
This was the birth of both capitalism, and government. In one fell swoop.
Their food supply continued to grow, just as it had before, and so did their population. Eventually they began spreading far beyond their boundaries and into the boundaries of neighboring tribes.
These tribes were hunter/gatherers, just as most other societies at the time. The capitalists encroached on their land, tilling it, thus driving off animals, and reducing the amount of food they could collect. This, of course, angered them. They sent a runner out to speak with the leader of the Capitalist society.
“You’re driving off the wildlife with the amount of space you take up for your farms, you must move elsewhere.”
The leader chortled, “that is ridiculous. You are dwindling because your way of life is futile, fighting against the elements, hunting all day, wasting your lives. Join our society and help work the farms and you can grow as we do.”
The runner knew this wouldn’t go over well with his tribe. They followed the way of hunting and gathering as they always had. It worked just fine for them, and they wanted nothing more. If they denied, they would die of starvation or be forced into battle. If they accepted it would mean becoming something something so completely different from what they were used to.
He returned to his village, and told them. They decided to go to war to protect their way of life, as it was acceptable when tribes unforgivingly encroached on each others land.
They were demolished, of course. The Capitalist society had grown to enormous proportions. The survivors of the raid were taken as slaves to help till the fields. Expansion continued.
No tribe the Capitalists spread through could stop them, even through banding together. This ideology of working for a wage of bread to expand society seemingly infinitely couldn’t be stopped.
Eventually it became what we know today. Working for a value-less paper you use to get food.
That relates back to the monkeys who beat each other up, thinking there would be an electric shock of the bananas were taken. We don’t know there would be danger in doing something outside of the capitalist culture, we don’t know any different. It’s taught us that this is the best way. Sustaining yourself isn’t acceptable, the only thing worthwhile is spreading uncontrollably.
But this way of life comes at a price. Overpopulation, evaporation of natural resources, political and religious conflict, starvation, pollution. Eventually we’ll reach the climax of expansion and collapse, just as any species that obliterates its habitat. People avoid these problems by slathering them with political propaganda. Politician A has the knowledge needed to change all this, fix it so we can continue living our capitalist dream land, continue this growth and live forever. No, Politician B does.
It’s all nonsense. Capitalism and the government that enforces it, does nothing but power us on into our inevitable demise.
tl;dr, you’re not going to read this because you just don’t care.
Thank you for elaborating, nietzschesaurus. That was very interesting to read. Its good that there are people like you who, despite destructive comments from others, make the effort to explain something, instead of attempting futile resistance to other peoples hostility.
So in an anarchy, with nobody to keep others in check, things will be so much better? Seeing as we’re humans (and you seem to forget that, or just look past it), there’ll be individuals abusing the situation of free food for everyone. They’ll start taking more than what they basically need, leaving less for those that want to live fair… just because they can.
People will grow unruly and get angry, riots will happen and those that started the anarchy will have to do something about it, if they want the tribe to keep existing in a peaceful commune. So they appoint peacekeepers, leaders, “officers”, and there you have the first thing that breaks the entire foundation of an anarchy.
Communism, marxism, anarchy… They’re all great ideas for a better world… but so is capitalism. But if you look past the idea, and consider human nature, you’ll see that out of every possible institution, capitalism is by far the best. It’s still unfair, but it keeps human nature in check.
Anarchism doesn’t work because if there is no law people will make it. Anarchy automatically turns into Autocracy and war.
The only way to keep anarchy is to have a group of people making sure the Anarchy survives, which is against the idea of Anarchy. This shows that it is a flawed idea.
Also @ the huge last post Nietzchesaurus made, hunter-gatherer societies are doomed to failure because they do not grow(unless they become farming societies). This is because everything in the universe evolves, and if something doesn’t evolve with it it dies. Of all socio-economical systems humanity has ever used Capitalism is the one which lets us evolve the fastest, and the states that embrace it are the most succesfull ones.
Ofcourse capitalism has its problems of overgrowth and the like, but because it still evolves, it also has a big chance of overcoming these problems in the future.
Hunter/gatherer societies don’t grow uncontrollably, as our current system has done.
Given the converging shortages of fuel and resources and the destabilization of the climate by our greed and arrogance, we or our descendants could see a disintegration of the whole construct of multinational capitalism into authoritarian corporate oligarchy in a depleted world, the vast bounty of this planet squandered for the most selfish and stupid of reasons.
Only be growing up, by learning to listen to each other and be vigilant and be disciplined in the face of challenges rather than acting like a herd of panicked cows can we hope to arrest our slouch into ruin. Anarchism in all its flavors can liberate us from insanity, give us the perspective to live with nature rather than raping and pillaging it.
@Bolteh; Anarchy can’t be achieved unless the people taking part volunteer, and understand the consequences of selfish actions like that. If people who are used to living in a wage society, with structure enforced by police and politicians, are suddenly taken from that system and put into a stateless society, of course they will take advantage of it.
This is because we are taught from an early age to take what we can. The best example of this is venture capitalists; their only thought is the increase of their own wealth and power, with nary a thought as to its effect on their fellow man. They’ll use people for their own gain. Most people in our society have the same idea to varying effects.
In many ways, wage work is thievery. It is stealing the contributions of the many and dolling it to the few. The people who do the littlest work, i.e. managers and CEOs, gain the largest profit, because they’re the ones in control of the “food supply” so to speak.
In an anarchist society people would work together because it benefits the society. The anarchist does not think “how can I do the smallest amount of work possible for the biggest gain?” but rather “how can I contribute to make the work of my fellows as little as possible?”
You are correct in your assumption that an anarchist society cannot exist if it is made up of non-anarchists, just as a wall cannot exist if it is made up of jello.
Anarchism is an agreement. An understanding that in order to better society, you must want to help it. You want freedom, sustainability, and autonomy. If 100 people work together and grow enough food to feed 100 people, plus a little extra to store for a rainy day, and all the food is free to use for all, then what would the point of stealing it be? If you have all you need, why would you need more? Ideas like “wealth” are creations of capitalist society; things that aren’t needed in an Anarchist one.
You mention how an anarchist society would govern itself, in terms of police and restrictions.
Imagine yourself and a group of your closest friends/family living together on a farm. You have the tools and necessities needed to grow and manage crops to feed all of you. Not just that, but there is also a nearby forest with deer, pheasants, fruits, and berries. This place is in the middle of no where, with no way to get to town.
How would you handle this? Would you work together with these others to sustain yourselves? Would you grab a knife and start killing everybody and squabbling over who has what? What if those friends/family are replaced with strangers? Would you still try to work together?
When Anarchy is mentioned people tend to forget that other people are also human. Sure, we are often base and scary, but it would be incorrect to look at murderers, thieves, venture capitalists, and politicians and say “that’s how we all are.”
Now, on this commune, imagine one of the people, friend or stranger, got into an argument with another, and killed them. There are no police to help.
How would you handle it? Would you kill them out of vengeance? Would you try to figure out what happened? Would you try to punish them?
If you killed them, you’d be TWO people short to work the farm. Less food could be grown.
If you punished them, they may grow jaded and angry. They may not want to help, or they may become violent.
Whatever answer you come up with, is what could possibly happen in an anarchist society. The sustainability of this farm rests upon the decision, the livelihood of the group. Personally, if it were me, I would bring the group together to discuss it, to make sure something like that doesn’t happen in the future. There’s really no more you can do. What’s done is done and you can’t change the past, only the future.
@Doom; Anarchy can’t happen without people volunteering to do it. I understand that. The only way Anarchy could happen successfully is the way Obelisk said it. A small group of dedicated individuals would do it themselves, maybe on a small farm or a squat or whatever. Over time information would spread and hopefully people would become more knowledgeable on it until most were Anarchists.
On your comment about hunter-gatherer societies. They’re actually doomed to sustainability. Growth isn’t as necessary as you think. Capitalism gives us the ability to grow beyond our britches, but what good has it done us? Animals aren’t worried about growth, just sustaining themselves and their children. Animals won’t extend their territory beyond what is necessary. They won’t have more children than they can sustain, they won’t go beyond what is sustainability.
So, in reality, sustainability, not unbarred growth, is what is natural.
Another thing, what gives you the idea that capitalism has a chance of overcoming our problems? Hunter-gatherer society poses no more problems than what is unavoidable. Capitalism creates its own problems. With a hunter-gatherer society, those who refuse to work together, those who are weak or especially cruel die out. Capitalism encourages those things.
Hunter-Gatherer society existed for a long, long time, sustained, until the creation of capitalism, which grew out of control due to its abuse of resources and life, now look at us! We’re driving ourselves into the ground.
You can’t say “hey, let’s stop growing!” that is never going to happen, for the same reason massive groups of people can’t work together. Growth is depended on resources, and until we run out of resources, we’re going to continue growing.
When I suggest Anarchy I don’t mean a massive society of millions of people working together. I mean autonomous micro-societies. Anarchy won’t work on a massive scale without 100% understanding and coalescence between all, because that works against what is natural for us.
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