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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 peop

• 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.