5 ms·

Yeah, it absolutely stuns me these people who dream up of a better world have apparently zero historical insight into how human societies have organized themsel

by fsloth 9y ago

Yeah, it absolutely stuns me these people who dream up of a better world have apparently zero historical insight into how human societies have organized themselves. "We are going to offer all the services the state offers now but only better" is the silliest argument ever. You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later. Hierarchical systems are not enforced on people by malificient power hungry lords. Humans self organize into hierarchical system. If you are planning this "total-decentralization" you better have a plan on how to negate this natural "follow-the-leader" instinct most people have. The second is the historical example. The only time anarchists come to power is in time of great trouble. Mainly because the dominant political force has fallen, and everything is in chaos. Another political force has risen sooner or later, only to install hierarchical power structures. With great misery to most involved. Doing anonymous good deeds is one thing. Speaking of a revolution is another.

jessaustin 9y ago
People used to do lots of things that they don't do anymore. When we look at history, whom do we admire? Those who "dreamed" enough to make improvements, or those who said "slavery, that's just human nature"?
- fsloth 9y ago
  The first problem is that it's not obvious to me what the benefit of an anarchistic society would be. The best rule of figuring out fair playing rules in a society is thinking you are someone else, and what would you like to happen in their shoes. Once you find something that seems more or less fair for all parties it's a good sign it's not obviously bad. Slavery almost immediately fails this test. For example, it's not obvious to me how anarchistic societies will deal with violence and crime. Mob justice? Public opinion is extremely sensitive to mass paranoia. If we apply the test of "stepping into the shoes of someone else" and imagined myself as the suspect of a crime, I would much rather take the process system of a modern state over mob rule to handle my case. Could you offer a counter example, from this fairness point of view, where an anarchistic society would outperform the state as implemented by western democracies?
  - psyc 9y ago
    No software patents.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Less neocolonialist mass murder in foreign lands for the purpose of enriching armaments manufacturers and their agents in government and media.
    - fsloth 9y ago
      It sounds like you are positioning anarchy as a reactionary tool of retribution towards the elites, rather than as a better way to govern.
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        It sounds like you are positioning anarchy as a reactionary tool of retribution towards the elites, rather than as a better way to govern. So much packed into one sentence! If you think of anarchism as ever having been suggested as "a better way to govern", please go back to the beginning and try again. It is instead a better way to live. This thing you think we need, we don't actually need. And what "retribution"? Would it be "retribution" to tell "the elites" sorry you can't continue spending trillions of our public dollars bombing innocents for no discernible reason? Also, I would object to the form of your discourse. You asked for a counterexample, and multiple people have provided those. Please either argue against the counterexamples or concede the point.
        fsloth 9y ago
        A counterexample: I live in Finland, we have no colonialist past or present and our foreign policy is based on not trying to piss anyone too much. We are a parlamentarian democracy, we are among the most egalitarian countries in the world and according to the metrics of a recent UN survey currently 'the happiest'. Like I wrote above, I don't really see 'not being anarchistic' as the root cause of whatever ills anarchism is claimed to cure. Look, if I could choose the psychological characteristics of my species I'd want to live in a communist utopia with actual egalitarianism. But it just does not work. It's been tried with a heavy human toll. Likewise for anarchism. If someone is pedddling a system for you that has no chance of working in the current world we are living in I would really question either the motives or the rationality of the proponent. This is turning rapidly quite political... I think our main difference is in how we believe a large ensemble of human beings is capable of behaving. We both would like that humankind could live as a huge trusting family. I don't see how that could be possible at the present moment.
jrobn 9y ago
> “You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later.” This is spot on. I think we would have to radically change our species behavioral tendencies before anarchy based societies would ever work like they think they should.
- fsloth 9y ago
  Yes, the problem with anarchy is exactly the same problem as with communism. It's principles are not compatible with human nature as it currently is.
nathan_long 9y ago
> You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later. Yes. Volunteers fixing potholes seems fine. But when about when a bridge needs replacing? I want to know that someone is following standard engineering and construction practices and that they're accountable to do so. I don't want to learn about Jimmy's Artisinal Welding by plunging to my death.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Welding? You wish. That bridge will be held together with baling wire and duct tape, just like the buildings in the cityscape scenes from Idiocracy.
- kiliantics 9y ago
  Actually there are a lot of problems that anarchists wouldn't run into that the government does. Political corruption - collusion between state and corporations with welfare for the wealthy and prisons and environmental destruction for the poor. Overspending on the military and on wars. A bloated and inefficient healthcare system run more for the benefit of insurance companies than for those requiring medical attention. Etcetera etcetera. There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices. Look at open source software, there's no state in control of practices there yet engineers tend to do just fine. In fact, there are plenty of examples where people cut corners on safety procedures within a capitalist society in order that they can get a competitive advantage in the market. I'd say the incentives of capitalism are more detrimental to good bridges than those of anarchism.
  - hermitdev 9y ago
    > There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices. There's also then no accountability for when it fails. Not that we have that now, necessarily, in software "engineering", but in other engineering disciplines, we do. A licensed engineer can lose their license (a huge professional blow) and be potentially civilly and/or criminally held liable for designs they signed off on that fail or violate appropriate ethical standards of their governing body, e.g. IEEE for electrical engineers.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
> you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later You and others in this thread seem to think that anarchists oppose all forms of authority, social organization and rules. This is not correct. Anarchists oppose only irrational authority as explained in: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anarchist_FAQ/Why_do_anarchists_oppose_the_current_system%3F/1 https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anarchist_FAQ/Why_do_anarchist...
kiliantics 9y ago
> Humans self organize into hierarchical system I never asked for this system, let alone actively tried to organise it
lifeformed 9y ago
Yeah. I find it weird that when people dream up the "best" social structure, it's often explained by a simple overarching philosophy. How convenient would it be that the entire complexity of human society can be ideally governed by a small set of principles? It's always "only capitalism" or "only communism" or "no money" or "no government" or etc etc. It seems pretty obvious to me that the optimal solution isn't based purely on some philosophical idea about how things 'should' be (whatever 'should' even means!), but instead would be a pragmatic, adaptive solution based on what actually happens and works on a case-by-case basis. It would be a patchy, ugly system, compared to the perfect elegant algorithm people want. And indeed that's kind of what we have. We just gotta keep patching and amending. There are a lot of existing problems, but we have the framework for fixing them, and no doubt it is a difficult process. But to insist that the solution is to start over is naive and dismissive of the generations of sacrifice made to get to this point. It's frustrating when people argue that all evil is because of capitalism, or that capitalism is purely good. Can't we just acknowledge that there are good and bad aspects of all systems, and work to boost the good parts and improve or attenuate the bad parts? And work in the good parts of other "competing" systems too? Yes, things don't have to be 100% pure capitalism or not. Hybrid solutions exist! That's basically what is happening, I just wish people would stop arguing by simplifying everything into some catchy moral gimmick.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > I just wish people would stop arguing by simplifying everything into some catchy moral gimmick. Things work well enough that we can afford the luxury of chasing a feeling of moral superiority. Under worse conditions, most people don't have time for that.
- confounded 9y ago
  I agree with your skepticism regarding people who express a lot of certainty about what will work, and what will happen in extreme and untested circumstances. However, I strongly disagree that principles and morality aren’t essential. This is because when figuring out, as you say, ‘what works best’, there is no single definition of ‘best’. In fact, as a general rule, there’s thousands of competing ones. Principles are how you do a reasonable job of making consistent decisions towards meaningful change. In addition to a system working well, it also needs to be understood to be working well by the people that live in it. If some definition of a ‘best’ metric was delivered by a Kafkaesque convoluted system that people found confusing, one which works well-enough on simple principles might be preferable.
st26 9y ago
My favorite recently was the model explained to me where instead of receiving civil services from a single government without a choice, there are multiple corporatist organizations that run business and provide protection/security, a judicial system, enforcers, an executive system, so on and so forth, and you can pick and choose which one you want to be part of, swearing into their system and agreeing to pay your share into their system. Then it hit me- this form of government already exists, and it is called the Mafia.
- mdpopescu 9y ago
  Yep. Going further, you will realize that the government is simply the largest mob organization in the region (you can choose among mobsters but you always have to pay the government's tax in addition to that).

by fsloth 9y ago

jessaustin 9y ago

People used to do lots of things that they don't do anymore. When we look at history, whom do we admire? Those who "dreamed" enough to make improvements, or those who said "slavery, that's just human nature"?

fsloth 9y ago
The first problem is that it's not obvious to me what the benefit of an anarchistic society would be. The best rule of figuring out fair playing rules in a society is thinking you are someone else, and what would you like to happen in their shoes. Once you find something that seems more or less fair for all parties it's a good sign it's not obviously bad. Slavery almost immediately fails this test. For example, it's not obvious to me how anarchistic societies will deal with violence and crime. Mob justice? Public opinion is extremely sensitive to mass paranoia. If we apply the test of "stepping into the shoes of someone else" and imagined myself as the suspect of a crime, I would much rather take the process system of a modern state over mob rule to handle my case. Could you offer a counter example, from this fairness point of view, where an anarchistic society would outperform the state as implemented by western democracies?
- psyc 9y ago
  No software patents.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Less neocolonialist mass murder in foreign lands for the purpose of enriching armaments manufacturers and their agents in government and media.
  - fsloth 9y ago
    It sounds like you are positioning anarchy as a reactionary tool of retribution towards the elites, rather than as a better way to govern.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      It sounds like you are positioning anarchy as a reactionary tool of retribution towards the elites, rather than as a better way to govern. So much packed into one sentence! If you think of anarchism as ever having been suggested as "a better way to govern", please go back to the beginning and try again. It is instead a better way to live. This thing you think we need, we don't actually need. And what "retribution"? Would it be "retribution" to tell "the elites" sorry you can't continue spending trillions of our public dollars bombing innocents for no discernible reason? Also, I would object to the form of your discourse. You asked for a counterexample, and multiple people have provided those. Please either argue against the counterexamples or concede the point.
      - fsloth 9y ago
        A counterexample: I live in Finland, we have no colonialist past or present and our foreign policy is based on not trying to piss anyone too much. We are a parlamentarian democracy, we are among the most egalitarian countries in the world and according to the metrics of a recent UN survey currently 'the happiest'. Like I wrote above, I don't really see 'not being anarchistic' as the root cause of whatever ills anarchism is claimed to cure. Look, if I could choose the psychological characteristics of my species I'd want to live in a communist utopia with actual egalitarianism. But it just does not work. It's been tried with a heavy human toll. Likewise for anarchism. If someone is pedddling a system for you that has no chance of working in the current world we are living in I would really question either the motives or the rationality of the proponent. This is turning rapidly quite political... I think our main difference is in how we believe a large ensemble of human beings is capable of behaving. We both would like that humankind could live as a huge trusting family. I don't see how that could be possible at the present moment.

jrobn 9y ago

> “You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later.” This is spot on. I think we would have to radically change our species behavioral tendencies before anarchy based societies would ever work like they think they should.

fsloth 9y ago
Yes, the problem with anarchy is exactly the same problem as with communism. It's principles are not compatible with human nature as it currently is.

nathan_long 9y ago

> You run into the exactly same resource and distribution problems as the government has, and you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later. Yes. Volunteers fixing potholes seems fine. But when about when a bridge needs replacing? I want to know that someone is following standard engineering and construction practices and that they're accountable to do so. I don't want to learn about Jimmy's Artisinal Welding by plunging to my death.

logfromblammo 9y ago
Welding? You wish. That bridge will be held together with baling wire and duct tape, just like the buildings in the cityscape scenes from Idiocracy.
kiliantics 9y ago
Actually there are a lot of problems that anarchists wouldn't run into that the government does. Political corruption - collusion between state and corporations with welfare for the wealthy and prisons and environmental destruction for the poor. Overspending on the military and on wars. A bloated and inefficient healthcare system run more for the benefit of insurance companies than for those requiring medical attention. Etcetera etcetera. There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices. Look at open source software, there's no state in control of practices there yet engineers tend to do just fine. In fact, there are plenty of examples where people cut corners on safety procedures within a capitalist society in order that they can get a competitive advantage in the market. I'd say the incentives of capitalism are more detrimental to good bridges than those of anarchism.
- hermitdev 9y ago
  > There's also no good reason to believe that anarchists wouldn't follow standard engineering and construction practices. There's also then no accountability for when it fails. Not that we have that now, necessarily, in software "engineering", but in other engineering disciplines, we do. A licensed engineer can lose their license (a huge professional blow) and be potentially civilly and/or criminally held liable for designs they signed off on that fail or violate appropriate ethical standards of their governing body, e.g. IEEE for electrical engineers.

eeZah7Ux 9y ago

> you are going to start instituting the same sort of structures sooner or later You and others in this thread seem to think that anarchists oppose all forms of authority, social organization and rules. This is not correct. Anarchists oppose only irrational authority as explained in: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anarchist_FAQ/Why_do_anarchists_oppose_the_current_system%3F/1 https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anarchist_FAQ/Why_do_anarchist...

kiliantics 9y ago

> Humans self organize into hierarchical system I never asked for this system, let alone actively tried to organise it

lifeformed 9y ago

Yeah. I find it weird that when people dream up the "best" social structure, it's often explained by a simple overarching philosophy. How convenient would it be that the entire complexity of human society can be ideally governed by a small set of principles? It's always "only capitalism" or "only communism" or "no money" or "no government" or etc etc. It seems pretty obvious to me that the optimal solution isn't based purely on some philosophical idea about how things 'should' be (whatever 'should' even means!), but instead would be a pragmatic, adaptive solution based on what actually happens and works on a case-by-case basis. It would be a patchy, ugly system, compared to the perfect elegant algorithm people want. And indeed that's kind of what we have. We just gotta keep patching and amending. There are a lot of existing problems, but we have the framework for fixing them, and no doubt it is a difficult process. But to insist that the solution is to start over is naive and dismissive of the generations of sacrifice made to get to this point. It's frustrating when people argue that all evil is because of capitalism, or that capitalism is purely good. Can't we just acknowledge that there are good and bad aspects of all systems, and work to boost the good parts and improve or attenuate the bad parts? And work in the good parts of other "competing" systems too? Yes, things don't have to be 100% pure capitalism or not. Hybrid solutions exist! That's basically what is happening, I just wish people would stop arguing by simplifying everything into some catchy moral gimmick.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> I just wish people would stop arguing by simplifying everything into some catchy moral gimmick. Things work well enough that we can afford the luxury of chasing a feeling of moral superiority. Under worse conditions, most people don't have time for that.
confounded 9y ago
I agree with your skepticism regarding people who express a lot of certainty about what will work, and what will happen in extreme and untested circumstances. However, I strongly disagree that principles and morality aren’t essential. This is because when figuring out, as you say, ‘what works best’, there is no single definition of ‘best’. In fact, as a general rule, there’s thousands of competing ones. Principles are how you do a reasonable job of making consistent decisions towards meaningful change. In addition to a system working well, it also needs to be understood to be working well by the people that live in it. If some definition of a ‘best’ metric was delivered by a Kafkaesque convoluted system that people found confusing, one which works well-enough on simple principles might be preferable.

st26 9y ago

My favorite recently was the model explained to me where instead of receiving civil services from a single government without a choice, there are multiple corporatist organizations that run business and provide protection/security, a judicial system, enforcers, an executive system, so on and so forth, and you can pick and choose which one you want to be part of, swearing into their system and agreeing to pay your share into their system. Then it hit me- this form of government already exists, and it is called the Mafia.

mdpopescu 9y ago
Yep. Going further, you will realize that the government is simply the largest mob organization in the region (you can choose among mobsters but you always have to pay the government's tax in addition to that).