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> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simp

> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. This can sound reasonable when you think of it in terms of, "most people behaving in a reasonable fashion, most of the time". But anarchists don't want to eliminate hierarchical use of force for most cases, but for all of them. Any time I've heard anarchists try to explain how they would deal with the subset of people who are just real shitty in various ways, the responses have been either, a) in our utopia, you wouldn't have those problems, because hierarchy causes all of them, or b) increasingly convoluted and implausible-sounding ways to deal with crazy assholes without using force.

mc32 6y ago
I tend to agree. Psychopaths are an unsolvable problem. People like them is “why we can’t have nice things”. If it weren’t for psychopaths we would not need passwords or encrypted passwords or security protocols, etc, etc., because everyone would behave in good fashion. But we don’t so we can’t.
- jchook 6y ago
  That said, locking people in cages, treating them with inhumanity and violence, then releasing them into a world where they now have a harder time functioning in society and finding legitimate work doesn’t sound like a genius plan to solve psychopaths.
  - jlawson 6y ago
    It's easy to criticize without suggesting any alternative.
    - mhuffman 6y ago
      The typical suggested alternative is "treatment", ie. hospital -jail!
    - wildrhythms 6y ago
      Abolish the archaic punitive prison system. Focus solely on reform and rehabilitation. Return the right to vote to all federal prisoners. Abolish the most common driving force for violent crime: wealth inequality. Abolish the most common driving force for white collar crime: capitalism. Is that what you wanted to hear?
  - SilasX 6y ago
    That's an argument for having more humane prisons, not for abolishing prisons in the sense of "place where you are confined from interaction with the non-sociopaths until you can be less sociopathic".
    - jchook 6y ago
      In an ideal world prisons would look so unlike our prisons that we wouldn’t call them prisons anymore.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    Agreed. Current US prisons are fucking awful. Treating people like animals isn't going to inspire them to be better. Drastic reform is necessary.
- ggggtez 6y ago
  >we would not need passwords Hahahaha. You don't really think that all "hackers" are literally psychopaths do you? That's rather an amazing way to view the world, to be honest. Does it make it easier to go to sleep at night to attribute insanity to everyone who does anything you disagree with?
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  I don't think this is true. I highly doubt I'm a psychopath, but in my life I've still done things that required the threat of violence to stop me. For example, a while ago I was ticketed for speeding. I didn't like getting ticketed, so I am now more careful while driving, and while I like to think I was being safe before, I'm honest enough to admit that it's probably better for society that I drive more slowly. And you know what? If the ticket didn't come with some threat of forceful punishment for no payment, I probably wouldn't have paid it, and I wouldn't be afraid of getting another one. I also wouldn't pay taxes voluntarily, at least not nearly as much as I pay now. I do these things because I am scared of the law. I don't think I'm unusual, and I don't think I'm a psychopath. So unless the threat model is only serious crime, I don't think psychopaths are the only issue. I think most people are not good players once a community grows large enough to afford anonymity.
  - truckerbill 6y ago
    What's your motivation for thinking in that way?
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > while I like to think I was being safe before, I'm honest enough to admit that it's probably better for society that I drive more slowly. Why do you think this? Have you ever actually been in an accident caused by the speed at which you were driving? Have you ever had a close call? If the answer to either of those questions is yes, then you shouldn't have needed the ticket to make you drive more carefully; you already had much better feedback. If the answer to both of those question is no, what makes you think the government bureaucrats who drafted the speeding laws are better than you, the person who is actually driving and seeing the road and whatever hazards are there, at judging a safe speed to drive? > I also wouldn't pay taxes voluntarily, at least not nearly as much as I pay now. Would you pay them if you could link them directly to benefits? Goods and services provided to you by the government? For example, suppose you were told that if you didn't pay taxes, you would not be able to call 911 and have the police or an ambulance come if you were in danger or needed medical assistance? Or that the US military would not protect you if a foreign country tried to invade? I think most people's aversion to paying taxes is because they believe most of that money does not actually provide a net benefit, but gets wasted on things that either benefit no one, or cost more than the benefits they deliver. > I think most people are not good players once a community grows large enough to afford anonymity. You have anonymity right here on HN. You seem to be having a reasonable discussion and being a good player.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  Normal people can be pretty terrible towards each other if they are desperate, for example if there is a famine or natural disaster that no one is responsible for.
- lemmonii 6y ago
  Yes in a sense but ultimately evolutionary equilibriums are the reason why. When everybody is a dove, being a hawk is very good, be it psychopaths, sociopaths or random opportunistic anti-social behavour.
- bserge 6y ago
  It may be hard to believe, but most people only think about themselves and their family. And they'll do anything, with the justification being that "it needed to be done". They can have PTSD and nightmares afterwards, but in the moment they'll do anything. People don't like to sit at a table and talk it out, and if the results are not to their liking, they'll just abandon diplomacy and switch to violence. They're not psychopaths, that's just primal survival instincts. Actual psychopaths and sociopaths are a minority, although a pretty powerful one since they don't care about your unwritten, unenforced social norms.
jchook 6y ago
AFAIK anarchy is not the abolition of the use of force, but rather the lack of a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The federalist papers spend a bit of time debating inevitable rise of factions and pluralism without a dominant faction ordained by the people.
- ooobit2 6y ago
  In less time than it takes to read those papers, a tyranny would rise in place of whatever power it succeeds, and that would be insurmountable monopoly. Imagine the American government disbanding. The kingpins would be Silicon Valley and other West Coast Tech executives because of the sheer convenience afforded by us depending on their hardware (their ideas too) for most communication. People would adapt over time, but that's the issue: over time, people would adapt, not imminently. And the Tech executives would have far fewer barriers to implementing controls than the people would have the means to obstruct them. I don't doubt for a second that Jeff Bezos would announce Amazon as a leader in "keeping us united as a society," while implementing a new policy in their warehouses that requires Safety teams to lash employees with a bamboo reed each hour if they have not met their rate. The problem with anarchy, Libertarianism, socialism, communism, and so many similar-veined structures argued for is that these arguments so deeply idealize the end goal that they almost entirely are void of planned action during the transition. We are physiologically engineered to take the path of least effort. Whatever minimal effort ensures the most survival. The downside to technology is an exponential drop in effort necessary for survival. We need look no further than how far off Reagan was about giving rich people more money in American capitalism (it worked until it snagged on steadily increased market instability, which has since caused massive crashes in 1987, 1996, 2001, and 2008, each time in different sectors and each time due to extremely risky and obviously absurd liability risks taken by the highest brackets of networth wherein any net loss on those decisions was guaranteed to be distributed, whereas any net benefit was guaranteed to be isolated in impact.) We can see this in social justice as well: Feminist organizers are struggling a lot right now after having envisioned a world where "misogyny" was eradicated, yet numbers across the board are going up... more sexual violence, more abuse, more online bullying, more conflicts with other civil rights' movements. The emphasis on a perfect vision has led some amazing women leading the movement to be targeted with abuse from other intersectional groups. This is just a cursory perspective, and so much more nuance and detail is necessary to get a clear picture, but it is absolutely not as simple as saying, "Anarchy wants/doesn't want to abolish ___." Anarchy is one of a number of social philosophies that by nature are self-cannibalizing, and thereby illogical.
amscanne 6y ago
The other flaw with that example is that there is obvious social pressure. If you try to cut the line, people will likely confront you. Situations where there’s no social pressure are different. During University, I was a believer in co-ops as a form of organization. I lived in and was actively involved in student housing co-ops. During grad school, I lived in a large house with 12 other people. I was the house organizer, and arranged for and paid for our internet service. Everyone else in the house gave me ~$5/mo. Except one person, who opted out. This person was a self-described anarchist activist, and extremely active from what I could see (lots of anarchist events, protests, marches, etc.). Halfway through the year, I discovered they had just “borrowed” the password from someone else in the house almost straight away, and used the connection as much as anyone. So the anarchist activist (who would happily give you an unsolicited lecture on how “self-organizing” works), couldn’t even self-organize with his 12 house mates, and instead let a bunch of broke students cover them. (And this person wasn’t under-privileged or anything. I’m pretty sure their education wasn’t self-funded.) So, yeah — even if you limit an anarchist society to just the true believers, I don’t think it’s gonna work.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  This is much like the theorists on HN who explain how they pirate digital content because the legal providers are too incompetent to make it easy to use. I wonder if your friend is on of the white people getting into gunfights with other white people at BLM protests they crash.
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  > I’m pretty sure their education wasn’t self-funded I would clarify that they have not gotten a studentship either.
- tekkk 6y ago
  That is the failing of any devout believers who walk the line between delusion and reality so much, that they become unable to see their own actions from a critical point of view. Those with more grounded views I'd say tend to drift off from the extremity and channel their energy into something else. It's sometimes a shame when the idea these believers, not just anarchists, present might be plausible yet they can't argument it in such way that would make sense to ordinary people. Often of course it springs from some emotional experience that keeps the whole fervor running. I guess once it has become such a big part of their identity to admit that they are wrong, is an earth-shaking blow to their ego which makes its critical examination especially painful.
deleted 6y ago
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mcv 6y ago
> "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to" I certainly used to believe that, but recent years have damaged my faith.
thomasahle 6y ago
I think lots of anarchists are perfectly fine with putting some people in jail. Chomsky usually defines anarchism [1] by saying powers and hierarchies have to justify themselves. Keeping people safe can be a reasonable such justification. The point is just that such powers should never be taken for natural, and always be questioned. If jailing doesn't probably make people safer, then it loses its justification. [1] https://youtu.be/2G6kf7XM9Nk https://youtu.be/2G6kf7XM9Nk
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  That's sophomoric rhetoric. In USA Hierarchy is justified by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. That's not enough to satisfy anarchists.
- torb-xyz 6y ago
  Anarchists in general are quite negative to the prison system and often believes in alternatives, or at the very least tries to come up with alternatives (hard as that might be). That being said, there are certainly situations where people with anarchism (or anarchism-like) beliefs have essentially jailed people. For example YPG/YPJ forces in Rojava certainly took IS/ISIL forces they won over as prisoners. PS: Never ever heard of an anarchist that thinks the US prison system is anywhere near of justifying itself though, but that's probably something all radical leftists agree on.
  - thomasahle 6y ago
    > Never ever heard of an anarchist that thinks the US prison system is anywhere near of justifying itself though, but that's probably something all radical leftists agree on. I don't think you have to even be left of the centre to realize the US jail system had serious flaws and need major reforms. Just looking at the incarceration rates and the number of reoffences compared to international levels show that something is completely off.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  > I think lots of anarchists are perfectly fine with putting some people in jail. Huh, that's not what I've heard. Anarchists I've seen talking are very strictly against explicit hierarchies, and prison obviously is very much that, since bare minimum you have prisoners at the bottom of the hierarchy there.
dlkf 6y ago
> It is really a very simple notion. Really says it all.
haroldp 6y ago
For what it's worth, anarcho-capitalists substantially agree with this collectivist anarchist, but still consider police worthwhile for your edge cases. They just want to voluntarily pay for private policing instead of having a monopoly impose it.
- username90 6y ago
  I can't see private police existing as the main source of violence without the different private police forces waging wars over each other to determine who gets to police what district. I mean, in what way would private police be different from a Mafia?
  - haroldp 6y ago
    Ancaps believe that street wars would be notably unprofitable, and competing "rights enforcement agencies" would quickly normalize their relations with one another, in the same way that we don't see Uber and Lyft shooting each other up. > in what way would private police be different from a Mafia? If you didn't like the service you were getting, you could stop paying for it.
    - joseluis 6y ago
      Sorry Mr. Gangster we are not gonna need your business protection services any more... Yes, I can see it now. What could even go wrong with the privatization of violence?
      - haroldp 6y ago
        I mean... what you are describing as a worst case is actually the current system.
        joseluis 6y ago
        I disagree. We currently have a system of law, and despite it not being perfect by any stretch of the imagination, at least governments ar subject to it and are incentivied to adhere to it in form and in principle for the most part. That would not be the case with a free market of private violence for-hire...
daxfohl 6y ago
I'd be interested to see an application of sortition as a government principle. It's government by random selection, similar to jury duty, and was used by ancient Athens. Wikipedia lists out the disadvantages, so nobody is claiming it's a perfect system. But I think it could eliminate many of the problems with modern "democracy", including gerrymandering, lack of diversity, distrust of "deep state", lobbying. Everyone would feel included, and I think that's important. A big part of our modern problems are due to the feeling of being left out: racial and religious minorities on one side, less-educated on the other, which creates the huge chasm of us-vs-them that shouldn't exist. Plus it would make government boring again, so we wouldn't have this widening gulf between citizens on party lines and 24/7 smear campaigns on the national news. News would actually report news, imagine that!
- berdario 6y ago
  Yeah, sortition looks very promising, I recently read this article describing it: https://newpol.org/issue_post/the-return-of-democracy-by-lottery/ https://newpol.org/issue_post/the-return-of-democracy-by-lot... My main concern with it, is that black people (and BLM supporters in general) are routinely excluded from jury duty in the US, so if there's a system in place that could exclude people from sortition, that would be ripe for abuse
jokethrowaway 6y ago
Funnily enough, as an anarchist, I never heard before that removing the government (or hierarchical use of violence) would remove violence from the world. There are plenty of ideas on how to keep law and order in an anarchic society. I recommend you to read The Machinery of Freedom (by David Friedman) or check out a summary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o TLDR: One way to keep order is having private law enforcement / private insurance you voluntarily subscribe to. This can be provided by multiple companies competing on the market. These entities can agree between each other on how to settle disputes, use a third party private arbitration system or physically fight against each other. A war between law enforcement agencies would be expensive and hard to predict, so I think these businesses would pick peaceful resolution over war. How contracts are resolved by law enforcement agencies can become a selling point, letting consumers decide with their wallet what kind of laws they agree with. Charities can collect money, voluntarily provided by citizens, and pay the fee required to protect people without money.
- jlawson 6y ago
  If you're an anarcho-capitalist, that's cool and interesting, but I think it's quite distinct from the more left-wing forms of anarchism people usually talk about (that revolve around self-organizing democratic cooperatives). I actually like a lot of things about Freidman's work, but I don't think it would actually function. The issue is that at the end of the day it's still just armed gangs living in tension with each other. Peace is retained as long as it's more profitable than war, but that's no longer the case when one gang is stronger than the others. In our world, I think you'd pretty much immediately see Amazon Security Forces start annexing all their smaller neighbors, thus making ASF stronger so they can annex more and more. This scales up until there are just a few large organizations (ASF, Google Army, Exxon Defense Group, etc) who are equally enough balanced - or until there is only one. These large organizations have contiguous territories, borders, and monopolies on violence. Anarchist just can't last. It's like try to make a sculpture of water. Even if you could shape it, it'll immediately move towards the lowest-energy state. Without something to stop them, the strong will immediately begin seizing power from the weak and ultimately culimnate straight back to governmental entities with monopolies on violence. Which is how we live now.
marricks 6y ago
I find it hard to believe you've talked to any real anarchists, or at least listened to them. People like Noam Chomsky deal with that question extremely head on. Below is what I said on another comment... > Absolutely no form of government or system (anarchist 1000% included) will solve the problem of people being selfish or bad, all that anarchists contend (that I have seen) is that when there isn't those built hierarchies bad/selfish people don't amass power so everyone else can actually handle them on equal terms. > Considering how Epstein was able to morph the whole political landscape to defend himself for over a decade, uh, any alternative can seem pretty reasonable. Like half the comments on this thread are variations of "well bad people exist" and it's maddening because bad people exist in this system! And they're extremely powerful! We 100% do not deal with them largely because of the systems that are in place.
- graeme 6y ago
  > is that when there isn't those built hierarchies bad/selfish people don't amass power so everyone else can actually handle them on equal terms But how do you stop a bad person from amassing power in an anarchist system? As a simple example, how would you deal with highway robbers? Those were omnipresent in societies before states gained strength.
  - marricks 6y ago
    I mean, did they rob peasants or the lords of the land with their amassed stolen wealth...? A community can decide to cast someone out, reprimand them, imprison them, etc. The whole idea of restorative justice can actually exist when a community is able to address it.
    - crowbahr 6y ago
      They robbed anyone and everyone. Some people just give 0 fucks about anyone besides themselves. Most people give 0 fucks about anyone outside of a moderate group of acquaintances and friends.
    - graeme 6y ago
mwfunk 6y ago
I find this is the case pretty much anytime leads with, “As a <whatever>, I believe that...” Like they make it sound like because they identify as an anarchist or a libertarian or a Christian or a mom or whatever <blank> is, that that determines their big picture view of everything, and they have to contextualize everything in terms of that thing. They want to have something to point at and tell them what they should think about, and that because their view comes from their personal identity, rejecting the view means rejecting them on a personal level somehow. Like, an actual libertarian (for example) should be able to make a good case for their perspective without making it sound like their chosen personal identity is somehow forcing them to see things in a particular way. People should think things because they are rational, not because they identify with an ideology that they allow to dictate their beliefs on the stuff that they haven’t done their homework on. TL;DR you can identify a lot of bullshit and sloppy thinking if you listen to what someone says after they invoke the dreaded, “as a <blank>, I think that...” and anarchists are no exception.
twblalock 6y ago
> Any time I've heard anarchists try to explain how they would deal with the subset of people who are just real shitty in various ways, the responses have been either, a) in our utopia, you wouldn't have those problems, because hierarchy causes all of them, or b) increasingly convoluted and implausible-sounding ways to deal with crazy assholes without using force. I see similar bad/evasive arguments from prison abolitionists, who have recently been given a higher profile as part of the push to defund the police. What are you going to do with criminals, ask them to please stop victimizing others? No prisons? Not even for murderers? Really? Looking back through human history, at all forms of tribal and political organization at all levels of complexity, you will always find violence and war. Those are not consequences of modern society or government.
- mhuffman 6y ago
  > Those are not consequences of modern society or government. In fact, the fear of those are the reason for government!
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  That feels like a non sequitur argument, we should strive to reduce prison populations without worrying about absolutist. We could drastically reduce the prison population and list of crimes without hurting anything, first thing is stop prosecuting victimless crimes like pot smoking. Release the people convicted of non-violent drug crimes. Release the people who were convicted of stealing 25$ from the quickimart. Give people post prison treatment, get them a starter job. Don't just look to penalize them again. Just like saying we can't reduce nuclear weapon counts in the us because russia and china are scary and we need them to stop them, we could still drastically reduce the count of them by about 100 without changing that.
mempko 6y ago
Most people arguing with anarchists don't have the imagination to see an alternative world.
praptak 6y ago
I'd say that the minority of assholes is less of a problem. The big problems are variations on the tragedy of the commons where the reality itself creates incentives for reasonable people to behave badly.
yosamino 6y ago
The interesting part is the reverse: If you believe that most humans aren't capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion, why would have a system were these people can be set up into a position of power over other people ? Which seems contrieved, but ... gestures broadly at everything, everytime, everywhere.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  > why would have a system were these people can be set up into a position of power over other people ? Social power isn't something that can be created or destroyed, only redistributed and restructured. The point of government is to hopefully structure it in a way that funnels people's collective and individual desires towards useful efforts and impulses. In any case, I think that most people have a baseline level of reasonableness for most situations. But it's useful to have government to handle the various edge cases, and define certain expectations. More cynically, if some assholes are gonna have power over others one way or another, it's better if said assholes are in a relatively transparent democratic system, rather than just, like, warlords. Really, the most basic criticism I have of anarchism is that it doesn't seem capable of meaningfully sustaining itself in the long term as a larger state-equivalent community. The most famous example anarchists seem to bring up is anarchist Spain, which doesn't inspire confidence in the ideology's ability to last more than a year or two if other state actors look at it the wrong way.
374yruruuru 6y ago
My issue with passionate anarchists is that I've never heard a compelling argument for why the situation won't develop into a government anyway. Without an uber entity there's all the incentive in the world to form an uber entity.
- deleted 6y ago
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perl4ever 6y ago
>This can sound reasonable when you think of it in terms of, "most people behaving in a reasonable fashion, most of the time". But anarchists don't want to eliminate hierarchical use of force for most cases, but for all of them. As a card carrying -archist, I think it should be pointed out that no -archy can be maintained unless most people behave reasonably most of the time, either. I'm not sure what my point is, just that most people are reasonable, even government employees.
- natmaka 6y ago
  For a gov employee "being reasonable" may mean "respect the chain of command, obey, apply the orders", and when the Great Leader isn't "reasonable" this may quickly and massively lead to Bad Things, as seen for example in the USSR, in Nazi Germany, Cambodia... Befehl ist Befehl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    Being reasonable may mean following rules when contrary and/or corrupt orders are given. That is something that happens that has enormous value.
    - natmaka 6y ago
      When there isn't any fixed hierarchy (governments...), bad/selfish people don't amass power (counting on non-reasonable people who will blindly follow their orders) so everyone else can actually handle them on equal terms.
bassrattle 6y ago
Market For Liberty is an audiobook you can find on YouTube that answers this question better than anywhere else I've seen
deleted 6y ago
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likeclockwork 6y ago
Hierarchical use of force is replaced with community use of force. In anarchism people have to take individual responsibility. There's no point saying "someone should do something about this", you're someone, do what needs to be done.
- natmaka 6y ago
  Indeed. However it works better in a small community, small enough to offer no real anonymity. Wherever something is wrong, something is too big.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Anarchists that I have met are either daydreamers or deluded. It only takes 1% to ruin the whole thing for everyone. And likely they won't change, so you either have to murder them, imprison them, or let them become your leaders, otherwise your anarchic utopia won't exist for long. This is all starting to sound like how the 1% currently run the world, --sigh--
m0zg 6y ago
> capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. That "notion" also goes against all available evidence.
xupybd 6y ago
> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. I just don't think this is true of humans. The good of is treat the ones close well but really don't treat distant people well. We are tribal by nature. Modern governments help restrain us from forming tribal lines and going to war with each other.

mc32 6y ago

I tend to agree. Psychopaths are an unsolvable problem. People like them is “why we can’t have nice things”. If it weren’t for psychopaths we would not need passwords or encrypted passwords or security protocols, etc, etc., because everyone would behave in good fashion. But we don’t so we can’t.

jchook 6y ago
That said, locking people in cages, treating them with inhumanity and violence, then releasing them into a world where they now have a harder time functioning in society and finding legitimate work doesn’t sound like a genius plan to solve psychopaths.
- jlawson 6y ago
  It's easy to criticize without suggesting any alternative.
  - mhuffman 6y ago
    The typical suggested alternative is "treatment", ie. hospital -jail!
  - wildrhythms 6y ago
    Abolish the archaic punitive prison system. Focus solely on reform and rehabilitation. Return the right to vote to all federal prisoners. Abolish the most common driving force for violent crime: wealth inequality. Abolish the most common driving force for white collar crime: capitalism. Is that what you wanted to hear?
- SilasX 6y ago
  That's an argument for having more humane prisons, not for abolishing prisons in the sense of "place where you are confined from interaction with the non-sociopaths until you can be less sociopathic".
  - jchook 6y ago
    In an ideal world prisons would look so unlike our prisons that we wouldn’t call them prisons anymore.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Agreed. Current US prisons are fucking awful. Treating people like animals isn't going to inspire them to be better. Drastic reform is necessary.
ggggtez 6y ago
>we would not need passwords Hahahaha. You don't really think that all "hackers" are literally psychopaths do you? That's rather an amazing way to view the world, to be honest. Does it make it easier to go to sleep at night to attribute insanity to everyone who does anything you disagree with?
names_are_hard 6y ago
I don't think this is true. I highly doubt I'm a psychopath, but in my life I've still done things that required the threat of violence to stop me. For example, a while ago I was ticketed for speeding. I didn't like getting ticketed, so I am now more careful while driving, and while I like to think I was being safe before, I'm honest enough to admit that it's probably better for society that I drive more slowly. And you know what? If the ticket didn't come with some threat of forceful punishment for no payment, I probably wouldn't have paid it, and I wouldn't be afraid of getting another one. I also wouldn't pay taxes voluntarily, at least not nearly as much as I pay now. I do these things because I am scared of the law. I don't think I'm unusual, and I don't think I'm a psychopath. So unless the threat model is only serious crime, I don't think psychopaths are the only issue. I think most people are not good players once a community grows large enough to afford anonymity.
- truckerbill 6y ago
  What's your motivation for thinking in that way?
- pdonis 6y ago
  > while I like to think I was being safe before, I'm honest enough to admit that it's probably better for society that I drive more slowly. Why do you think this? Have you ever actually been in an accident caused by the speed at which you were driving? Have you ever had a close call? If the answer to either of those questions is yes, then you shouldn't have needed the ticket to make you drive more carefully; you already had much better feedback. If the answer to both of those question is no, what makes you think the government bureaucrats who drafted the speeding laws are better than you, the person who is actually driving and seeing the road and whatever hazards are there, at judging a safe speed to drive? > I also wouldn't pay taxes voluntarily, at least not nearly as much as I pay now. Would you pay them if you could link them directly to benefits? Goods and services provided to you by the government? For example, suppose you were told that if you didn't pay taxes, you would not be able to call 911 and have the police or an ambulance come if you were in danger or needed medical assistance? Or that the US military would not protect you if a foreign country tried to invade? I think most people's aversion to paying taxes is because they believe most of that money does not actually provide a net benefit, but gets wasted on things that either benefit no one, or cost more than the benefits they deliver. > I think most people are not good players once a community grows large enough to afford anonymity. You have anonymity right here on HN. You seem to be having a reasonable discussion and being a good player.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
Normal people can be pretty terrible towards each other if they are desperate, for example if there is a famine or natural disaster that no one is responsible for.
lemmonii 6y ago
Yes in a sense but ultimately evolutionary equilibriums are the reason why. When everybody is a dove, being a hawk is very good, be it psychopaths, sociopaths or random opportunistic anti-social behavour.
bserge 6y ago
It may be hard to believe, but most people only think about themselves and their family. And they'll do anything, with the justification being that "it needed to be done". They can have PTSD and nightmares afterwards, but in the moment they'll do anything. People don't like to sit at a table and talk it out, and if the results are not to their liking, they'll just abandon diplomacy and switch to violence. They're not psychopaths, that's just primal survival instincts. Actual psychopaths and sociopaths are a minority, although a pretty powerful one since they don't care about your unwritten, unenforced social norms.

jchook 6y ago

AFAIK anarchy is not the abolition of the use of force, but rather the lack of a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The federalist papers spend a bit of time debating inevitable rise of factions and pluralism without a dominant faction ordained by the people.

ooobit2 6y ago
In less time than it takes to read those papers, a tyranny would rise in place of whatever power it succeeds, and that would be insurmountable monopoly. Imagine the American government disbanding. The kingpins would be Silicon Valley and other West Coast Tech executives because of the sheer convenience afforded by us depending on their hardware (their ideas too) for most communication. People would adapt over time, but that's the issue: over time, people would adapt, not imminently. And the Tech executives would have far fewer barriers to implementing controls than the people would have the means to obstruct them. I don't doubt for a second that Jeff Bezos would announce Amazon as a leader in "keeping us united as a society," while implementing a new policy in their warehouses that requires Safety teams to lash employees with a bamboo reed each hour if they have not met their rate. The problem with anarchy, Libertarianism, socialism, communism, and so many similar-veined structures argued for is that these arguments so deeply idealize the end goal that they almost entirely are void of planned action during the transition. We are physiologically engineered to take the path of least effort. Whatever minimal effort ensures the most survival. The downside to technology is an exponential drop in effort necessary for survival. We need look no further than how far off Reagan was about giving rich people more money in American capitalism (it worked until it snagged on steadily increased market instability, which has since caused massive crashes in 1987, 1996, 2001, and 2008, each time in different sectors and each time due to extremely risky and obviously absurd liability risks taken by the highest brackets of networth wherein any net loss on those decisions was guaranteed to be distributed, whereas any net benefit was guaranteed to be isolated in impact.) We can see this in social justice as well: Feminist organizers are struggling a lot right now after having envisioned a world where "misogyny" was eradicated, yet numbers across the board are going up... more sexual violence, more abuse, more online bullying, more conflicts with other civil rights' movements. The emphasis on a perfect vision has led some amazing women leading the movement to be targeted with abuse from other intersectional groups. This is just a cursory perspective, and so much more nuance and detail is necessary to get a clear picture, but it is absolutely not as simple as saying, "Anarchy wants/doesn't want to abolish ___." Anarchy is one of a number of social philosophies that by nature are self-cannibalizing, and thereby illogical.

amscanne 6y ago

The other flaw with that example is that there is obvious social pressure. If you try to cut the line, people will likely confront you. Situations where there’s no social pressure are different. During University, I was a believer in co-ops as a form of organization. I lived in and was actively involved in student housing co-ops. During grad school, I lived in a large house with 12 other people. I was the house organizer, and arranged for and paid for our internet service. Everyone else in the house gave me ~$5/mo. Except one person, who opted out. This person was a self-described anarchist activist, and extremely active from what I could see (lots of anarchist events, protests, marches, etc.). Halfway through the year, I discovered they had just “borrowed” the password from someone else in the house almost straight away, and used the connection as much as anyone. So the anarchist activist (who would happily give you an unsolicited lecture on how “self-organizing” works), couldn’t even self-organize with his 12 house mates, and instead let a bunch of broke students cover them. (And this person wasn’t under-privileged or anything. I’m pretty sure their education wasn’t self-funded.) So, yeah — even if you limit an anarchist society to just the true believers, I don’t think it’s gonna work.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
This is much like the theorists on HN who explain how they pirate digital content because the legal providers are too incompetent to make it easy to use. I wonder if your friend is on of the white people getting into gunfights with other white people at BLM protests they crash.
heavenlyblue 6y ago
> I’m pretty sure their education wasn’t self-funded I would clarify that they have not gotten a studentship either.
tekkk 6y ago
That is the failing of any devout believers who walk the line between delusion and reality so much, that they become unable to see their own actions from a critical point of view. Those with more grounded views I'd say tend to drift off from the extremity and channel their energy into something else. It's sometimes a shame when the idea these believers, not just anarchists, present might be plausible yet they can't argument it in such way that would make sense to ordinary people. Often of course it springs from some emotional experience that keeps the whole fervor running. I guess once it has become such a big part of their identity to admit that they are wrong, is an earth-shaking blow to their ego which makes its critical examination especially painful.

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mcv 6y ago

> "Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to" I certainly used to believe that, but recent years have damaged my faith.

thomasahle 6y ago

I think lots of anarchists are perfectly fine with putting some people in jail. Chomsky usually defines anarchism [1] by saying powers and hierarchies have to justify themselves. Keeping people safe can be a reasonable such justification. The point is just that such powers should never be taken for natural, and always be questioned. If jailing doesn't probably make people safer, then it loses its justification. [1] https://youtu.be/2G6kf7XM9Nk https://youtu.be/2G6kf7XM9Nk

srtjstjsj 6y ago
That's sophomoric rhetoric. In USA Hierarchy is justified by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. That's not enough to satisfy anarchists.
torb-xyz 6y ago
Anarchists in general are quite negative to the prison system and often believes in alternatives, or at the very least tries to come up with alternatives (hard as that might be). That being said, there are certainly situations where people with anarchism (or anarchism-like) beliefs have essentially jailed people. For example YPG/YPJ forces in Rojava certainly took IS/ISIL forces they won over as prisoners. PS: Never ever heard of an anarchist that thinks the US prison system is anywhere near of justifying itself though, but that's probably something all radical leftists agree on.
- thomasahle 6y ago
  > Never ever heard of an anarchist that thinks the US prison system is anywhere near of justifying itself though, but that's probably something all radical leftists agree on. I don't think you have to even be left of the centre to realize the US jail system had serious flaws and need major reforms. Just looking at the incarceration rates and the number of reoffences compared to international levels show that something is completely off.
TulliusCicero 6y ago
> I think lots of anarchists are perfectly fine with putting some people in jail. Huh, that's not what I've heard. Anarchists I've seen talking are very strictly against explicit hierarchies, and prison obviously is very much that, since bare minimum you have prisoners at the bottom of the hierarchy there.

dlkf 6y ago

> It is really a very simple notion. Really says it all.

haroldp 6y ago

For what it's worth, anarcho-capitalists substantially agree with this collectivist anarchist, but still consider police worthwhile for your edge cases. They just want to voluntarily pay for private policing instead of having a monopoly impose it.

username90 6y ago
I can't see private police existing as the main source of violence without the different private police forces waging wars over each other to determine who gets to police what district. I mean, in what way would private police be different from a Mafia?
- haroldp 6y ago
  Ancaps believe that street wars would be notably unprofitable, and competing "rights enforcement agencies" would quickly normalize their relations with one another, in the same way that we don't see Uber and Lyft shooting each other up. > in what way would private police be different from a Mafia? If you didn't like the service you were getting, you could stop paying for it.
  - joseluis 6y ago
    Sorry Mr. Gangster we are not gonna need your business protection services any more... Yes, I can see it now. What could even go wrong with the privatization of violence?
    - haroldp 6y ago
      I mean... what you are describing as a worst case is actually the current system.
      - joseluis 6y ago
        I disagree. We currently have a system of law, and despite it not being perfect by any stretch of the imagination, at least governments ar subject to it and are incentivied to adhere to it in form and in principle for the most part. That would not be the case with a free market of private violence for-hire...

daxfohl 6y ago

I'd be interested to see an application of sortition as a government principle. It's government by random selection, similar to jury duty, and was used by ancient Athens. Wikipedia lists out the disadvantages, so nobody is claiming it's a perfect system. But I think it could eliminate many of the problems with modern "democracy", including gerrymandering, lack of diversity, distrust of "deep state", lobbying. Everyone would feel included, and I think that's important. A big part of our modern problems are due to the feeling of being left out: racial and religious minorities on one side, less-educated on the other, which creates the huge chasm of us-vs-them that shouldn't exist. Plus it would make government boring again, so we wouldn't have this widening gulf between citizens on party lines and 24/7 smear campaigns on the national news. News would actually report news, imagine that!

berdario 6y ago
Yeah, sortition looks very promising, I recently read this article describing it: https://newpol.org/issue_post/the-return-of-democracy-by-lottery/ https://newpol.org/issue_post/the-return-of-democracy-by-lot... My main concern with it, is that black people (and BLM supporters in general) are routinely excluded from jury duty in the US, so if there's a system in place that could exclude people from sortition, that would be ripe for abuse

jokethrowaway 6y ago

Funnily enough, as an anarchist, I never heard before that removing the government (or hierarchical use of violence) would remove violence from the world. There are plenty of ideas on how to keep law and order in an anarchic society. I recommend you to read The Machinery of Freedom (by David Friedman) or check out a summary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o TLDR: One way to keep order is having private law enforcement / private insurance you voluntarily subscribe to. This can be provided by multiple companies competing on the market. These entities can agree between each other on how to settle disputes, use a third party private arbitration system or physically fight against each other. A war between law enforcement agencies would be expensive and hard to predict, so I think these businesses would pick peaceful resolution over war. How contracts are resolved by law enforcement agencies can become a selling point, letting consumers decide with their wallet what kind of laws they agree with. Charities can collect money, voluntarily provided by citizens, and pay the fee required to protect people without money.

jlawson 6y ago
If you're an anarcho-capitalist, that's cool and interesting, but I think it's quite distinct from the more left-wing forms of anarchism people usually talk about (that revolve around self-organizing democratic cooperatives). I actually like a lot of things about Freidman's work, but I don't think it would actually function. The issue is that at the end of the day it's still just armed gangs living in tension with each other. Peace is retained as long as it's more profitable than war, but that's no longer the case when one gang is stronger than the others. In our world, I think you'd pretty much immediately see Amazon Security Forces start annexing all their smaller neighbors, thus making ASF stronger so they can annex more and more. This scales up until there are just a few large organizations (ASF, Google Army, Exxon Defense Group, etc) who are equally enough balanced - or until there is only one. These large organizations have contiguous territories, borders, and monopolies on violence. Anarchist just can't last. It's like try to make a sculpture of water. Even if you could shape it, it'll immediately move towards the lowest-energy state. Without something to stop them, the strong will immediately begin seizing power from the weak and ultimately culimnate straight back to governmental entities with monopolies on violence. Which is how we live now.

marricks 6y ago

I find it hard to believe you've talked to any real anarchists, or at least listened to them. People like Noam Chomsky deal with that question extremely head on. Below is what I said on another comment... > Absolutely no form of government or system (anarchist 1000% included) will solve the problem of people being selfish or bad, all that anarchists contend (that I have seen) is that when there isn't those built hierarchies bad/selfish people don't amass power so everyone else can actually handle them on equal terms. > Considering how Epstein was able to morph the whole political landscape to defend himself for over a decade, uh, any alternative can seem pretty reasonable. Like half the comments on this thread are variations of "well bad people exist" and it's maddening because bad people exist in this system! And they're extremely powerful! We 100% do not deal with them largely because of the systems that are in place.

graeme 6y ago
> is that when there isn't those built hierarchies bad/selfish people don't amass power so everyone else can actually handle them on equal terms But how do you stop a bad person from amassing power in an anarchist system? As a simple example, how would you deal with highway robbers? Those were omnipresent in societies before states gained strength.
- marricks 6y ago
  I mean, did they rob peasants or the lords of the land with their amassed stolen wealth...? A community can decide to cast someone out, reprimand them, imprison them, etc. The whole idea of restorative justice can actually exist when a community is able to address it.
  - crowbahr 6y ago
    They robbed anyone and everyone. Some people just give 0 fucks about anyone besides themselves. Most people give 0 fucks about anyone outside of a moderate group of acquaintances and friends.
  - graeme 6y ago

mwfunk 6y ago

I find this is the case pretty much anytime leads with, “As a <whatever>, I believe that...” Like they make it sound like because they identify as an anarchist or a libertarian or a Christian or a mom or whatever <blank> is, that that determines their big picture view of everything, and they have to contextualize everything in terms of that thing. They want to have something to point at and tell them what they should think about, and that because their view comes from their personal identity, rejecting the view means rejecting them on a personal level somehow. Like, an actual libertarian (for example) should be able to make a good case for their perspective without making it sound like their chosen personal identity is somehow forcing them to see things in a particular way. People should think things because they are rational, not because they identify with an ideology that they allow to dictate their beliefs on the stuff that they haven’t done their homework on. TL;DR you can identify a lot of bullshit and sloppy thinking if you listen to what someone says after they invoke the dreaded, “as a <blank>, I think that...” and anarchists are no exception.

twblalock 6y ago

> Any time I've heard anarchists try to explain how they would deal with the subset of people who are just real shitty in various ways, the responses have been either, a) in our utopia, you wouldn't have those problems, because hierarchy causes all of them, or b) increasingly convoluted and implausible-sounding ways to deal with crazy assholes without using force. I see similar bad/evasive arguments from prison abolitionists, who have recently been given a higher profile as part of the push to defund the police. What are you going to do with criminals, ask them to please stop victimizing others? No prisons? Not even for murderers? Really? Looking back through human history, at all forms of tribal and political organization at all levels of complexity, you will always find violence and war. Those are not consequences of modern society or government.

mhuffman 6y ago
> Those are not consequences of modern society or government. In fact, the fear of those are the reason for government!
NotSammyHagar 6y ago
That feels like a non sequitur argument, we should strive to reduce prison populations without worrying about absolutist. We could drastically reduce the prison population and list of crimes without hurting anything, first thing is stop prosecuting victimless crimes like pot smoking. Release the people convicted of non-violent drug crimes. Release the people who were convicted of stealing 25$ from the quickimart. Give people post prison treatment, get them a starter job. Don't just look to penalize them again. Just like saying we can't reduce nuclear weapon counts in the us because russia and china are scary and we need them to stop them, we could still drastically reduce the count of them by about 100 without changing that.

mempko 6y ago

Most people arguing with anarchists don't have the imagination to see an alternative world.

praptak 6y ago

I'd say that the minority of assholes is less of a problem. The big problems are variations on the tragedy of the commons where the reality itself creates incentives for reasonable people to behave badly.

yosamino 6y ago

The interesting part is the reverse: If you believe that most humans aren't capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion, why would have a system were these people can be set up into a position of power over other people ? Which seems contrieved, but ... gestures broadly at everything, everytime, everywhere.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
> why would have a system were these people can be set up into a position of power over other people ? Social power isn't something that can be created or destroyed, only redistributed and restructured. The point of government is to hopefully structure it in a way that funnels people's collective and individual desires towards useful efforts and impulses. In any case, I think that most people have a baseline level of reasonableness for most situations. But it's useful to have government to handle the various edge cases, and define certain expectations. More cynically, if some assholes are gonna have power over others one way or another, it's better if said assholes are in a relatively transparent democratic system, rather than just, like, warlords. Really, the most basic criticism I have of anarchism is that it doesn't seem capable of meaningfully sustaining itself in the long term as a larger state-equivalent community. The most famous example anarchists seem to bring up is anarchist Spain, which doesn't inspire confidence in the ideology's ability to last more than a year or two if other state actors look at it the wrong way.

374yruruuru 6y ago

My issue with passionate anarchists is that I've never heard a compelling argument for why the situation won't develop into a government anyway. Without an uber entity there's all the incentive in the world to form an uber entity.

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perl4ever 6y ago

>This can sound reasonable when you think of it in terms of, "most people behaving in a reasonable fashion, most of the time". But anarchists don't want to eliminate hierarchical use of force for most cases, but for all of them. As a card carrying -archist, I think it should be pointed out that no -archy can be maintained unless most people behave reasonably most of the time, either. I'm not sure what my point is, just that most people are reasonable, even government employees.

natmaka 6y ago
For a gov employee "being reasonable" may mean "respect the chain of command, obey, apply the orders", and when the Great Leader isn't "reasonable" this may quickly and massively lead to Bad Things, as seen for example in the USSR, in Nazi Germany, Cambodia... Befehl ist Befehl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
- perl4ever 6y ago
  Being reasonable may mean following rules when contrary and/or corrupt orders are given. That is something that happens that has enormous value.
  - natmaka 6y ago
    When there isn't any fixed hierarchy (governments...), bad/selfish people don't amass power (counting on non-reasonable people who will blindly follow their orders) so everyone else can actually handle them on equal terms.

bassrattle 6y ago

Market For Liberty is an audiobook you can find on YouTube that answers this question better than anywhere else I've seen

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likeclockwork 6y ago

Hierarchical use of force is replaced with community use of force. In anarchism people have to take individual responsibility. There's no point saying "someone should do something about this", you're someone, do what needs to be done.

natmaka 6y ago
Indeed. However it works better in a small community, small enough to offer no real anonymity. Wherever something is wrong, something is too big.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Anarchists that I have met are either daydreamers or deluded. It only takes 1% to ruin the whole thing for everyone. And likely they won't change, so you either have to murder them, imprison them, or let them become your leaders, otherwise your anarchic utopia won't exist for long. This is all starting to sound like how the 1% currently run the world, --sigh--

m0zg 6y ago

> capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. That "notion" also goes against all available evidence.

xupybd 6y ago

> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. I just don't think this is true of humans. The good of is treat the ones close well but really don't treat distant people well. We are tribal by nature. Modern governments help restrain us from forming tribal lines and going to war with each other.