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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

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.

zozbot234 6y ago
> 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.
- _jal 6y ago
  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.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    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.
    - _jal 6y ago
      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.
      - tomp 6y ago
        > It is true that without recourse to state institutions, there is more non-state-sanctioned violence You're not really selling your case very well here...
        totony 6y ago
        I think he meant more non-state-sanctioned violence, because there is no state to do it for you
      - stjohnswarts 6y ago
        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.
        _jal 6y ago
- brbrodude 6y ago
  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.
djur 6y ago
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.
- brbrodude 6y ago
  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.
  - djur 6y ago
    Unless you see anarchism as inevitable, you need to persuade people that it's superior to statism, or else people will keep on creating states.
    - brbrodude 6y ago
      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
acituan 6y ago
> 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”.
- brbrodude 6y ago
  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.

zozbot234 6y ago

> 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.

_jal 6y ago
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.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  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.
  - _jal 6y ago
    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.
    - tomp 6y ago
      > It is true that without recourse to state institutions, there is more non-state-sanctioned violence You're not really selling your case very well here...
      - totony 6y ago
        I think he meant more non-state-sanctioned violence, because there is no state to do it for you
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      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.
      - _jal 6y ago
brbrodude 6y ago
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.

djur 6y ago

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.

brbrodude 6y ago
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.
- djur 6y ago
  Unless you see anarchism as inevitable, you need to persuade people that it's superior to statism, or else people will keep on creating states.
  - brbrodude 6y ago
    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

acituan 6y ago

> 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”.

brbrodude 6y ago
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.