17 ms·

Why Hierarchy Is Fragile and Anarchy Is Antifragile

16 points by TotalCrackpot 3y ago

shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
Thanks for sharing. Interesting channel
varjag 3y ago
One good uni friend of mine was an avid anarchist. We spent countless hours with him pitching Kropotkin and texts like the above (this was pre-Youtube). Then I had a chance to work for him: he still had anarchism thing going but was ruling his subordinates with steel grip and very much hierarchical way. Much later when I checked him on LinkedIn he was rising through Product Manager ranks on FB.
- aloisdg 3y ago
  He should have read Bakunin too: > Nothing is more dangerous for man's private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one's own merits. From _Power corrupts the best_
  - varjag 3y ago
    Oh yes that was on the list too. I guess my point is that if you have beliefs like this, following up on them is the path of personal martyrdom. This is very much at odds with mundane things like having a family or a stable comfortable lifestyle. Few people (including those writing these texts and filming these videos) are ready to stick to that.
    - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
      I think this becomes less and less true given how ridiculous are the social inequalities and how much are they a result of internal contradictions of capitalism and artificial scarcity that is an inherent part of this system.
    - Ancapistani 3y ago
      I consider myself an anarchist - an anarcho-capitalist specifically. Hence the username. I do my best to live by my values, but there was an inflection point for me where things fell into place and allowed me to live a "normal" life in society without compromising my values. I realized that the whole point of anarchism is that order is emergent. We already live under an anarchic system; it's just that the order that has emerged is one based on coercion. If I could wave a magic wand and all of the governments in the world disappeared, I wouldn't. Nothing of substance would change. A power vacuum would exist, which would be filled extremely quickly. While in a few cases we'd probably see communities coming together in a non-coercive way, in most cases it would be filled by the people most willing and able to use violence. Historically, coercive systems have scaled more readily than non-coercive systems, so the only reasonable thing to expect would be for these new proto-states to annex the non-coercive communities. Through military force if cultural forces are too slow to satisfy the ruling class. In other words, trying to change the system is a fool's errand. The system we have today is a consequence of our society's culture. I still believe in the NAP (Non-Aggression Principle), and that humanity would be much better living in a non-coercive and morally consistent way - but I recognize that our culture as it is today will not only never lead to that, but would not tolerate it. So I do my best to limit my interactions with the state, and instead of trying to tear it down I spend my energy on changing society. I believe that introducing the concept of mutual consent to a single person is more impactful in the long run than directly attacking the state - even if by some miracle that attack "succeeded". Every example that I can recall of successful anarchist or "anarchy-adjacent" societies arose organically from a small communities of like-minded people. With that in mind, if I want my descendants to live without the shackles of a coercive state, I must help mold the direction of society down a path that will ultimately lead to the conditions necessary for non-coercive governance to emerge. To put it another way: the majority of the dyed-in-the-wool anarchists in America today are too busy writing F/OSS software and homeschooling their children to bother with anything as pointless as revolution.
  - readthenotes1 3y ago
    Yet another person who did not have the insight (or honesty?) to realize what Robert Caro did: Power does not corrupt, it reveals.
    - Ancapistani 3y ago
      > Power does not corrupt, it reveals. Hmm. It seems I have yet more reading to do. Thank you! :)
    - hnbad 3y ago
      There have been literally studies that demonstrate that yes, not only does power corrupt but it literally makes you dumber (i.e. it reduces your ability to feel empathy for others). The problem with hierarchies of domination is not that the wrong people are in charge, the problem is that there is a hiearchy and there are people in charge over others. You'd think after a century that saw the same process of hiearchies being overthrown only to be replaced with "socialists" trying to use the same hierarchies that immediately restored the authoritarian domination of the previous hierarchy (or even extended it) people would have come to understand this. Anark actually has a series of videos on this exact problem: The State is Counter-Revolutionary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTwxpTyGUOI&list=PLvwoHdNGq9wVy-iR1oHJKoJY2lh6ypXKZ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTwxpTyGUOI&list=PLvwoHdNGq9...
      - readthenotes1 3y ago
        These studies, were they like the Stanford Prison Experiment? "Study" in sociology is, as far as I can tell, synonymous with "bed time story".
        hnbad 3y ago
        The replication problem does not mean your gut feeling or pre-existing biases are more reliable than potentially flawed or invalid studies.
- prepend 3y ago
  Different organization types can have different political systems so it doesn’t surprise me that a government or community anarchist would be hierarchical with their team. I’m a communist when it comes to my family and an evidence-driven meritist when it comes to my scientific org, but democratic when it comes to my state. I think all these things are in philosophical harmony.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  When somebody's ideology says that people in power always behave poorly, that effectively gives them license to behave poorly when they find themselves with power. It's no longer their responsibility to handle their power well because in their ideology, good behavior when in a position of power doesn't exist. Anything they do wrong is blamed on the circumstance; it's societies fault for having hierarchy still, not their fault for abusing their power.
thriftwy 3y ago
Anarchy also has much lower baseline density. You can have anarchy between tribes in the Amazon or Far North, but not in a metropolis. Be wary that many proponents of Anarchy may be the criminally inclined types, so they don't actually have any magical trick to make anarchy non-violent - it's just OK for them to live in violent society because they'll be on top. Think Makhno band.
- psychoslave 3y ago
  >Be wary that many proponents of Anarchy may be the criminally inclined types, so they don't actually have any magical trick to make anarchy non-violent - it's just OK for them to live in violent society because they'll be on top. Think Makhno band. I doubt that putting apart sincere pragmatic¹ pacifism, any system would be exempt of these traits in its proponents. ¹ That is using concrete non-violent methods to handle discord, like say Marshall Bertram Rosenberg proposals
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    They can use non-violent methods all right when both sides are armed, but when one is not, anarchy says that it will do what the armed one wants.
    - psychoslave 3y ago
      Hmm, that’s probably true for some form of anarchy, more in the flavour of an individualist like Max Stirner than a socialist like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or a communist one like Peter Kropotkin. Which enlighten the fact that probably anarchism is a far too large umbrella to say very specific things about it without giving more details about it. Which is also certainly about most political system that was ever proposed out there.
    - Ancapistani 3y ago
      Interesting. In addition to describing myself as an anarchist, I'm also a strident proponent of the individual's right to own and carry weapons. I wonder just how much of my stance on that topic are a natural outgrowth of my belief in non-coercion. I have some thinking to do :)
lupusreal 3y ago
In human groups, hierarchy is inevitable due to human nature (we're social apes). Attempts to create hierarchy-free social settings only result in creating systems in which the dominant social hierarchy is implicit, unstated, officially unrecognized... and therefore impossible to regulate. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
- portaouflop 3y ago
  I don’t know about the hierarchy thing but humans are very different from apes.
  - M2Ys4U 3y ago
    Humans are apes, we're members of the hominidae family along with gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      big talking apes in shoes. and much of this hierarchical BS we play is basically chimp behavior, but with cars and overdraft fees.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    We're not just apes, we're great apes!
  - yabbs 3y ago
    Tell my kids that
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  You can watch this video to learn something today! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e27RVFxNOcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e27RVFxNOcc
  - lupusreal 3y ago
username332211 3y ago
I find very confusing to discuss anarchy as the opposite of hierarchy, since political Anarchy is an extremely hierarchical system of government. For example, here is a description of the social organization of CNT-ruled Catalonian villages: > "The committee is the paterfamilias. It owns everything; it directs everything. Every special desire has to be submitted to it for consideration; it alone has the final say." > "With the abolition of money, the collective held the upper hand since anyone wishing to travel had to get 'republican' money from the committee." Hierarchy is not the opposite of anarchy, but of self-organization. To reject hierarchy is to be able to act independently, not to replace the manager with a committee.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  Hierarchy could result from self-organization, too. How many small, informal groups have you been in that have done just that? The opposite of hierarchy is flat organization. Anarchy's opposite is authoritarianism.
xnx 3y ago
"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear." Excerpt from Nemik's manifesto from the excellent Andor https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Trail_of_Political_Consciousness https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Trail_of_Political_Cons...
- YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
  Authority may be brittle, but the shards of a broken authority are still authority, even if you try and grind them into dust. When tyrants fail, they're not generally followed by everyone joining hands and selflessly working together towards the common good; they're replaced by other tyrants.
YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
Ironically, but not surprisingly, in describing his alternative to hierarchy, the video essentially re-invents hierarchy. Anarchy is so fragile that even in a thought experiment by an anarchist, it can't even last 20 minutes.
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  Why? Maybe something heavy landed on your heard and you are dizzy? I think he explained it very elementally.
  - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
    Resorting to petty name-calling this early doesn't make me /more/ inclined to take your ideology seriously, you know.
    - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
      Maybe you are right here, but you didn't really seem interest in even trying to understand it. Unfortunate, maybe I am wrong and some day in the future some more convincing argumentation will change your opinion towards considering at least some anarchistic arguments. And maybe you are right that I was rude for no good reason.
      - Ancapistani 3y ago
        > maybe I am wrong and some day in the future some more convincing argumentation will change your opinion Possibly. I've changed some minds in the past. I don't have it handy right now, but one of my most cherished results of discussing this stuff online is a Reddit message I got from someone years ago. I was arguing against compulsory taxation. The person I was arguing with didn't agree with me in the least, but that's OK; I just continued to share my views and was clear that sharing was my only goal. I didn't expect them to "convert" and see things my way. Many months later they sent me a DM to let me know that they had in fact come to see things the way I'd described, and credited that conversation as the beginning of that transformation. To be blunt: hostility and name-calling is no way to change someone's mind. It's counterproductive, and I wish people who call themselves anarchists would stop doing it. It makes my approach more difficult.
dauertewigkeit 3y ago
This is a just-so story without any empirical evidence. The model of hierarchy is too simplistic. If you zoom in on the nodes you will see a more complex structure. It's not just one person but a host of people, operating in a semi-formal somewhat also anarchic structure. At every level of the hierarchy there is ample backup that will keep the system from collapsing. Then there is also the dimension of efficiency that is completely missing from the discussion. Hierarchical systems might be more fragile but also much more efficient.
incomingpain 3y ago
Anarchy no matter what seems to still lead into hierarchy. Even if it ends up wherein land owners are top of hierarchy and everyone else is below. But then there's the land owners who own enough land that they become the government. They have a security force. They have a sheriff. I think this is what people are dreaming about being when they want anarchy.
- FireInsight 3y ago
  Most anarchists are against private land ownership.
- hnbad 3y ago
  What does it mean to "own land" when there is no state or private army to manifest that claim? It sounds like you're thinking in terms of "anarcho-capitalism" which tries to maintain the idea of private property without a state. That is, by the way, why anarchists don't consider "anarcho-capitalism" a form of anarchism. Its founder primarily chose the label because they liked the sound of it, not because the idea had any but the most superficial ties to prior anarchist thought. At best you can make a claim for land ownership through land use and even that is contingent on the consent of others. Humans are social animals. We may have created various fictions to justify hierarchies between us (e.g. divine right, private property, legal contracts) but at the end of the day the only thing enforcing them is the threat of physical violence at the hands of the state (i.e. police or military) or the ruler's private army (as in a monarchy). Without those, those fictions are only contingent on each individual's willingness to maintain them. Arguably the only function of the state is to manifest private property in the first place (whether to protect pre-existing claims or to allow the creation of new ones such as through intellectual property laws).
readthenotes1 3y ago
I guess I don't know what antifragile means since Chaz took just a few minutes to descend into murderous chaos ruled by the guy with the biggest gun
- hnbad 3y ago
  This is why most anarchists are heavily invested in the idea of prefiguration, i.e. forming horizontal structures and support networks BEFORE trying to overthrow the state or creating autonomous zones etc. Because otherwise you just create a power vaccuum for other organized groups to move in and take over. In other words, when anarchists say they want to "abolish the police" they don't mean just deleting the police and crossing their fingers because that's how you get organized crime taking over instead. What they mean is creating alternative systems at the same time as dismantling the police system (e.g. in the context of the state this could mean incrementally reinvesting police funds in social services, emergency health services, mental health crisis services, or even self-defense training programs; outside that context it could mean various forms of communal support networks and mutual aid). CHAZ, to the extent it can be considered an anarchist project, was a hot mess from day zero. Instead of having pre-existing structures, it tried to build those structures on the spot. If you want to see successful anarchist projects the clue is generally that they don't try hard to label themselves as anarchist because the label provides no additional value. Instead you often find labels such as "radical democracy". Two major example are the Zapatistas and Rojava. You'll also note that these examples always run into natural contradictions because of the environment they exist in. But ideologically, whether stated explicitly or not, the ideal they strive for is anarchist and their means to accomplish that ideal are measured by it rather than being allowed to contradict it as in vanguardist socialist projects (which historically always manifest as authoritarian hierarchical systems instead).
lurking15 3y ago
For whatever reason, the anarchists I've known are generally all "anarcho-communists" and trans or trans-adjacent. Weird situation cause they'll say how they hate rulers but what they propose seems to be where they don't really get rid of "bosses", but instead empower every busybody around you to treat you like they were your boss. The hierarchy is much more insidious than any capitalist dystopia they describe, in my opinion.
- qnqrchrq 3y ago
  Reminds me of https://www.theturfwarzone.com/newoffensive/shitwigshtmlversion/shitwigs.html https://www.theturfwarzone.com/newoffensive/shitwigshtmlvers...

16 points by TotalCrackpot 3y ago

Thanks for sharing. Interesting channel

One good uni friend of mine was an avid anarchist. We spent countless hours with him pitching Kropotkin and texts like the above (this was pre-Youtube). Then I had a chance to work for him: he still had anarchism thing going but was ruling his subordinates with steel grip and very much hierarchical way. Much later when I checked him on LinkedIn he was rising through Product Manager ranks on FB.

aloisdg 3y ago
He should have read Bakunin too: > Nothing is more dangerous for man's private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one's own merits. From _Power corrupts the best_
- varjag 3y ago
  Oh yes that was on the list too. I guess my point is that if you have beliefs like this, following up on them is the path of personal martyrdom. This is very much at odds with mundane things like having a family or a stable comfortable lifestyle. Few people (including those writing these texts and filming these videos) are ready to stick to that.
  - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
    I think this becomes less and less true given how ridiculous are the social inequalities and how much are they a result of internal contradictions of capitalism and artificial scarcity that is an inherent part of this system.
  - Ancapistani 3y ago
    I consider myself an anarchist - an anarcho-capitalist specifically. Hence the username. I do my best to live by my values, but there was an inflection point for me where things fell into place and allowed me to live a "normal" life in society without compromising my values. I realized that the whole point of anarchism is that order is emergent. We already live under an anarchic system; it's just that the order that has emerged is one based on coercion. If I could wave a magic wand and all of the governments in the world disappeared, I wouldn't. Nothing of substance would change. A power vacuum would exist, which would be filled extremely quickly. While in a few cases we'd probably see communities coming together in a non-coercive way, in most cases it would be filled by the people most willing and able to use violence. Historically, coercive systems have scaled more readily than non-coercive systems, so the only reasonable thing to expect would be for these new proto-states to annex the non-coercive communities. Through military force if cultural forces are too slow to satisfy the ruling class. In other words, trying to change the system is a fool's errand. The system we have today is a consequence of our society's culture. I still believe in the NAP (Non-Aggression Principle), and that humanity would be much better living in a non-coercive and morally consistent way - but I recognize that our culture as it is today will not only never lead to that, but would not tolerate it. So I do my best to limit my interactions with the state, and instead of trying to tear it down I spend my energy on changing society. I believe that introducing the concept of mutual consent to a single person is more impactful in the long run than directly attacking the state - even if by some miracle that attack "succeeded". Every example that I can recall of successful anarchist or "anarchy-adjacent" societies arose organically from a small communities of like-minded people. With that in mind, if I want my descendants to live without the shackles of a coercive state, I must help mold the direction of society down a path that will ultimately lead to the conditions necessary for non-coercive governance to emerge. To put it another way: the majority of the dyed-in-the-wool anarchists in America today are too busy writing F/OSS software and homeschooling their children to bother with anything as pointless as revolution.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Yet another person who did not have the insight (or honesty?) to realize what Robert Caro did: Power does not corrupt, it reveals.
  - Ancapistani 3y ago
    > Power does not corrupt, it reveals. Hmm. It seems I have yet more reading to do. Thank you! :)
  - hnbad 3y ago
    There have been literally studies that demonstrate that yes, not only does power corrupt but it literally makes you dumber (i.e. it reduces your ability to feel empathy for others). The problem with hierarchies of domination is not that the wrong people are in charge, the problem is that there is a hiearchy and there are people in charge over others. You'd think after a century that saw the same process of hiearchies being overthrown only to be replaced with "socialists" trying to use the same hierarchies that immediately restored the authoritarian domination of the previous hierarchy (or even extended it) people would have come to understand this. Anark actually has a series of videos on this exact problem: The State is Counter-Revolutionary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTwxpTyGUOI&list=PLvwoHdNGq9wVy-iR1oHJKoJY2lh6ypXKZ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTwxpTyGUOI&list=PLvwoHdNGq9...
    - readthenotes1 3y ago
      These studies, were they like the Stanford Prison Experiment? "Study" in sociology is, as far as I can tell, synonymous with "bed time story".
      - hnbad 3y ago
        The replication problem does not mean your gut feeling or pre-existing biases are more reliable than potentially flawed or invalid studies.
prepend 3y ago
Different organization types can have different political systems so it doesn’t surprise me that a government or community anarchist would be hierarchical with their team. I’m a communist when it comes to my family and an evidence-driven meritist when it comes to my scientific org, but democratic when it comes to my state. I think all these things are in philosophical harmony.
lupusreal 3y ago
When somebody's ideology says that people in power always behave poorly, that effectively gives them license to behave poorly when they find themselves with power. It's no longer their responsibility to handle their power well because in their ideology, good behavior when in a position of power doesn't exist. Anything they do wrong is blamed on the circumstance; it's societies fault for having hierarchy still, not their fault for abusing their power.

thriftwy 3y ago

Anarchy also has much lower baseline density. You can have anarchy between tribes in the Amazon or Far North, but not in a metropolis. Be wary that many proponents of Anarchy may be the criminally inclined types, so they don't actually have any magical trick to make anarchy non-violent - it's just OK for them to live in violent society because they'll be on top. Think Makhno band.

psychoslave 3y ago
>Be wary that many proponents of Anarchy may be the criminally inclined types, so they don't actually have any magical trick to make anarchy non-violent - it's just OK for them to live in violent society because they'll be on top. Think Makhno band. I doubt that putting apart sincere pragmatic¹ pacifism, any system would be exempt of these traits in its proponents. ¹ That is using concrete non-violent methods to handle discord, like say Marshall Bertram Rosenberg proposals
- thriftwy 3y ago
  They can use non-violent methods all right when both sides are armed, but when one is not, anarchy says that it will do what the armed one wants.
  - psychoslave 3y ago
    Hmm, that’s probably true for some form of anarchy, more in the flavour of an individualist like Max Stirner than a socialist like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or a communist one like Peter Kropotkin. Which enlighten the fact that probably anarchism is a far too large umbrella to say very specific things about it without giving more details about it. Which is also certainly about most political system that was ever proposed out there.
  - Ancapistani 3y ago
    Interesting. In addition to describing myself as an anarchist, I'm also a strident proponent of the individual's right to own and carry weapons. I wonder just how much of my stance on that topic are a natural outgrowth of my belief in non-coercion. I have some thinking to do :)

lupusreal 3y ago

In human groups, hierarchy is inevitable due to human nature (we're social apes). Attempts to create hierarchy-free social settings only result in creating systems in which the dominant social hierarchy is implicit, unstated, officially unrecognized... and therefore impossible to regulate. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

portaouflop 3y ago
I don’t know about the hierarchy thing but humans are very different from apes.
- M2Ys4U 3y ago
  Humans are apes, we're members of the hominidae family along with gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    big talking apes in shoes. and much of this hierarchical BS we play is basically chimp behavior, but with cars and overdraft fees.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  We're not just apes, we're great apes!
- yabbs 3y ago
  Tell my kids that
TotalCrackpot 3y ago
You can watch this video to learn something today! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e27RVFxNOcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e27RVFxNOcc
- lupusreal 3y ago

username332211 3y ago

I find very confusing to discuss anarchy as the opposite of hierarchy, since political Anarchy is an extremely hierarchical system of government. For example, here is a description of the social organization of CNT-ruled Catalonian villages: > "The committee is the paterfamilias. It owns everything; it directs everything. Every special desire has to be submitted to it for consideration; it alone has the final say." > "With the abolition of money, the collective held the upper hand since anyone wishing to travel had to get 'republican' money from the committee." Hierarchy is not the opposite of anarchy, but of self-organization. To reject hierarchy is to be able to act independently, not to replace the manager with a committee.

drewcoo 3y ago
Hierarchy could result from self-organization, too. How many small, informal groups have you been in that have done just that? The opposite of hierarchy is flat organization. Anarchy's opposite is authoritarianism.

xnx 3y ago

"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear." Excerpt from Nemik's manifesto from the excellent Andor https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Trail_of_Political_Consciousness https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Trail_of_Political_Cons...

YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
Authority may be brittle, but the shards of a broken authority are still authority, even if you try and grind them into dust. When tyrants fail, they're not generally followed by everyone joining hands and selflessly working together towards the common good; they're replaced by other tyrants.

YurgenJurgensen 3y ago

Ironically, but not surprisingly, in describing his alternative to hierarchy, the video essentially re-invents hierarchy. Anarchy is so fragile that even in a thought experiment by an anarchist, it can't even last 20 minutes.

TotalCrackpot 3y ago
Why? Maybe something heavy landed on your heard and you are dizzy? I think he explained it very elementally.
- YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
  Resorting to petty name-calling this early doesn't make me /more/ inclined to take your ideology seriously, you know.
  - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
    Maybe you are right here, but you didn't really seem interest in even trying to understand it. Unfortunate, maybe I am wrong and some day in the future some more convincing argumentation will change your opinion towards considering at least some anarchistic arguments. And maybe you are right that I was rude for no good reason.
    - Ancapistani 3y ago
      > maybe I am wrong and some day in the future some more convincing argumentation will change your opinion Possibly. I've changed some minds in the past. I don't have it handy right now, but one of my most cherished results of discussing this stuff online is a Reddit message I got from someone years ago. I was arguing against compulsory taxation. The person I was arguing with didn't agree with me in the least, but that's OK; I just continued to share my views and was clear that sharing was my only goal. I didn't expect them to "convert" and see things my way. Many months later they sent me a DM to let me know that they had in fact come to see things the way I'd described, and credited that conversation as the beginning of that transformation. To be blunt: hostility and name-calling is no way to change someone's mind. It's counterproductive, and I wish people who call themselves anarchists would stop doing it. It makes my approach more difficult.

dauertewigkeit 3y ago

This is a just-so story without any empirical evidence. The model of hierarchy is too simplistic. If you zoom in on the nodes you will see a more complex structure. It's not just one person but a host of people, operating in a semi-formal somewhat also anarchic structure. At every level of the hierarchy there is ample backup that will keep the system from collapsing. Then there is also the dimension of efficiency that is completely missing from the discussion. Hierarchical systems might be more fragile but also much more efficient.

incomingpain 3y ago

Anarchy no matter what seems to still lead into hierarchy. Even if it ends up wherein land owners are top of hierarchy and everyone else is below. But then there's the land owners who own enough land that they become the government. They have a security force. They have a sheriff. I think this is what people are dreaming about being when they want anarchy.

FireInsight 3y ago
Most anarchists are against private land ownership.
hnbad 3y ago
What does it mean to "own land" when there is no state or private army to manifest that claim? It sounds like you're thinking in terms of "anarcho-capitalism" which tries to maintain the idea of private property without a state. That is, by the way, why anarchists don't consider "anarcho-capitalism" a form of anarchism. Its founder primarily chose the label because they liked the sound of it, not because the idea had any but the most superficial ties to prior anarchist thought. At best you can make a claim for land ownership through land use and even that is contingent on the consent of others. Humans are social animals. We may have created various fictions to justify hierarchies between us (e.g. divine right, private property, legal contracts) but at the end of the day the only thing enforcing them is the threat of physical violence at the hands of the state (i.e. police or military) or the ruler's private army (as in a monarchy). Without those, those fictions are only contingent on each individual's willingness to maintain them. Arguably the only function of the state is to manifest private property in the first place (whether to protect pre-existing claims or to allow the creation of new ones such as through intellectual property laws).

readthenotes1 3y ago

I guess I don't know what antifragile means since Chaz took just a few minutes to descend into murderous chaos ruled by the guy with the biggest gun

hnbad 3y ago
This is why most anarchists are heavily invested in the idea of prefiguration, i.e. forming horizontal structures and support networks BEFORE trying to overthrow the state or creating autonomous zones etc. Because otherwise you just create a power vaccuum for other organized groups to move in and take over. In other words, when anarchists say they want to "abolish the police" they don't mean just deleting the police and crossing their fingers because that's how you get organized crime taking over instead. What they mean is creating alternative systems at the same time as dismantling the police system (e.g. in the context of the state this could mean incrementally reinvesting police funds in social services, emergency health services, mental health crisis services, or even self-defense training programs; outside that context it could mean various forms of communal support networks and mutual aid). CHAZ, to the extent it can be considered an anarchist project, was a hot mess from day zero. Instead of having pre-existing structures, it tried to build those structures on the spot. If you want to see successful anarchist projects the clue is generally that they don't try hard to label themselves as anarchist because the label provides no additional value. Instead you often find labels such as "radical democracy". Two major example are the Zapatistas and Rojava. You'll also note that these examples always run into natural contradictions because of the environment they exist in. But ideologically, whether stated explicitly or not, the ideal they strive for is anarchist and their means to accomplish that ideal are measured by it rather than being allowed to contradict it as in vanguardist socialist projects (which historically always manifest as authoritarian hierarchical systems instead).

lurking15 3y ago

For whatever reason, the anarchists I've known are generally all "anarcho-communists" and trans or trans-adjacent. Weird situation cause they'll say how they hate rulers but what they propose seems to be where they don't really get rid of "bosses", but instead empower every busybody around you to treat you like they were your boss. The hierarchy is much more insidious than any capitalist dystopia they describe, in my opinion.

qnqrchrq 3y ago
Reminds me of https://www.theturfwarzone.com/newoffensive/shitwigshtmlversion/shitwigs.html https://www.theturfwarzone.com/newoffensive/shitwigshtmlvers...