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If someone comes and robs you in and anarco-* society what remedy do you have. Not doing business with them in the future seems mild. Getting others to ostrac

If someone comes and robs you in and anarco-* society what remedy do you have. Not doing business with them in the future seems mild. Getting others to ostracize them will basically become a game of who has better social connections or the larger family. If I go and steal back my property am I subject to his retaliation. Can I murder his relative in retaliation. The reason I ask these questions is we have a lot of evidence of what happens in societies with out 3rd party enforcement and it usually doesn't tend toward individual safety or security.

pdonis 8y ago
David Friedman's The Machinery Of Freedom goes into detail about these kinds of scenarios. There is far too much there to summarize here. The one point I will make is that, when people imagine anarchy, they imagine the society we have now, and then just take away government and all its functions, such as police. Of course what you get when you imagine that is terrible. But it's terrible not because anarchy is terrible, but because our society has evolved for centuries to (a) assume that government will always be there, and (b) gradually put more and more functions on government, even if they would actually be better done privately. Of course what you get if you take a society like that and just remove government will be bad; but that's not a fair picture of what a society that had evolved for a long time as an anarchy--i.e., in which people understood that there was no government to "fix" all their problems, so they need to come up with workable solutions themselves--would look like. Friedman's book is an attempt to imagine that, in detail. > we have a lot of evidence of what happens in societies with out 3rd party enforcement No, we don't. We have a few failed states like Somalia today, but they are few; almost all societies on the planet today have governments. However, when you start looking back at historical examples, you find much more promising cases. One that Friedman discusses in his book is saga period Iceland, which did quite well for centuries with no government. Other examples are some of the American colonies--Pennsylvania up until the 1750s or so is a good case--which, while they had entities they called governments, used them for nothing except to represent them in negotiations with other colonies and with the British government. These "governments" had no law enforcement powers and no powers of taxation, and people came up with various private means of working together and enforcing what we would call "laws" (but which were not brought into being by legislative fiat, but by contractual agreements between individuals).
- byproxy 8y ago
  Wouldn't you say humanity started out in an anarchistic state? It seems that the "workable solutions" tended towards more and more governing until we ended up where we're at. Sure, there were imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions, but those powers were still a product of the same initial government-deficient base state. If we we were to start tabula rasa why wouldn't we end up as we are now? Maybe by crafting stories of how bad things are now as some sort of morality tales/warning (religion?), though that'd require hindsight of humanity as a bureaucratic mess which means we'd have to go through this current state anyway. I hope I made a bit of sense.
  - sabarn01 8y ago
    Societies have always competed in there own right. The state is a more effective way to organize groups of people than the chiefdom which is more effective than the tribe.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > Wouldn't you say humanity started out in an anarchistic state? Back when all humans were hunter-gatherers, this was probably true, yes, given what we know. > It seems that the "workable solutions" tended towards more and more governing until we ended up where we're at. Only after the invention of agriculture. But the period since that invention (about 10,000 years ago) is somewhere between 10 percent and 1 percent of the time humans have existed. So for most of the time humans have existed, the "workable solution" was (most likely--see above) anarchy. The invention of agriculture had two key effects: it allowed the human population to grow dramatically, and it caused the population density to grow dramatically since agriculture requires fixed dwellings and more concentration of people into towns and cities. These two changes drastically increased the need for mechanisms to regulate social cooperation, which became what we know as governments. Since the conditions that created governments in the first place (large human population and high population densities) are still present, we might be stuck with government even with all its downsides. However, advancing technology might open up possibilities that were not there before. > Sure, there were imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions, but those powers were still a product of the same initial government-deficient base state. No, they weren't. While there were inter-tribal conflicts during humanity's hunter-gatherer period, those were nothing like "imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions". Those powers were the product of governments, which were in turn, as above, the product of agriculture and the growth of towns and cities.

pdonis 8y ago

David Friedman's The Machinery Of Freedom goes into detail about these kinds of scenarios. There is far too much there to summarize here. The one point I will make is that, when people imagine anarchy, they imagine the society we have now, and then just take away government and all its functions, such as police. Of course what you get when you imagine that is terrible. But it's terrible not because anarchy is terrible, but because our society has evolved for centuries to (a) assume that government will always be there, and (b) gradually put more and more functions on government, even if they would actually be better done privately. Of course what you get if you take a society like that and just remove government will be bad; but that's not a fair picture of what a society that had evolved for a long time as an anarchy--i.e., in which people understood that there was no government to "fix" all their problems, so they need to come up with workable solutions themselves--would look like. Friedman's book is an attempt to imagine that, in detail. > we have a lot of evidence of what happens in societies with out 3rd party enforcement No, we don't. We have a few failed states like Somalia today, but they are few; almost all societies on the planet today have governments. However, when you start looking back at historical examples, you find much more promising cases. One that Friedman discusses in his book is saga period Iceland, which did quite well for centuries with no government. Other examples are some of the American colonies--Pennsylvania up until the 1750s or so is a good case--which, while they had entities they called governments, used them for nothing except to represent them in negotiations with other colonies and with the British government. These "governments" had no law enforcement powers and no powers of taxation, and people came up with various private means of working together and enforcing what we would call "laws" (but which were not brought into being by legislative fiat, but by contractual agreements between individuals).

byproxy 8y ago
Wouldn't you say humanity started out in an anarchistic state? It seems that the "workable solutions" tended towards more and more governing until we ended up where we're at. Sure, there were imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions, but those powers were still a product of the same initial government-deficient base state. If we we were to start tabula rasa why wouldn't we end up as we are now? Maybe by crafting stories of how bad things are now as some sort of morality tales/warning (religion?), though that'd require hindsight of humanity as a bureaucratic mess which means we'd have to go through this current state anyway. I hope I made a bit of sense.
- sabarn01 8y ago
  Societies have always competed in there own right. The state is a more effective way to organize groups of people than the chiefdom which is more effective than the tribe.
- pdonis 8y ago
  > Wouldn't you say humanity started out in an anarchistic state? Back when all humans were hunter-gatherers, this was probably true, yes, given what we know. > It seems that the "workable solutions" tended towards more and more governing until we ended up where we're at. Only after the invention of agriculture. But the period since that invention (about 10,000 years ago) is somewhere between 10 percent and 1 percent of the time humans have existed. So for most of the time humans have existed, the "workable solution" was (most likely--see above) anarchy. The invention of agriculture had two key effects: it allowed the human population to grow dramatically, and it caused the population density to grow dramatically since agriculture requires fixed dwellings and more concentration of people into towns and cities. These two changes drastically increased the need for mechanisms to regulate social cooperation, which became what we know as governments. Since the conditions that created governments in the first place (large human population and high population densities) are still present, we might be stuck with government even with all its downsides. However, advancing technology might open up possibilities that were not there before. > Sure, there were imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions, but those powers were still a product of the same initial government-deficient base state. No, they weren't. While there were inter-tribal conflicts during humanity's hunter-gatherer period, those were nothing like "imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions". Those powers were the product of governments, which were in turn, as above, the product of agriculture and the growth of towns and cities.