4 ms·

The pop culture/mass media portrayal of anarchism vs. the movement/anarchist communities themselves have almost nothing to do with each other.

astrange 2y ago
Anarchists' portrayal of themselves is actually much more discrediting than the pop culture version; it's basically an ideology about everyone being in meetings all day. Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs).
- rpastuszak 2y ago
  Not my experience at all, esp. in terms of the people/communities I've met or the books I've read. > Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs). That's precisely what I meant by pop culture/mass media. At this stage, this is more of a meme regarding anarchy than reality and this couldn't be farther from truth. (and it's quite an old one, think: French enlightenment era philosophers using pre-partition Poland as an example of anarchy).
  - astrange 2y ago
    How will you make insulin?
- modriano 2y ago
  > Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs). To be fair, every ideology and/or mode of societal organization sucks at handling the nasty edge cases (even the best organizational mode we've found has a saying encapsulating this fact: "hard cases make bad law"), but yeah, anarchists mainly thrive in places where they aren't subject to the consequences of bad answers (e.g. twitter, reddit, bluesky, etc).
  - Justsignedup 2y ago
    The problem with ideologies is that they work really well in small communities. Communism works. In a small communjty/village. Same with anarchism. Because that's basically how small villages work. You can adjust as needed in the moment without too much effort. The problem happens when you grow. What happens when people you are governing you will never meet? What happens when you're busy and can't research all the complexities of local politics and some old person is stirring up trouble with yells for not in my backyard stuff... And one person starts bribing and so on.
    - sph 2y ago
      The problem is that we want to find ideologies that work across millions of people. Even democracy is pretty terrible in modern countries because of how large they are, so it creates a lot of inequality and centralisation of expenditure. I think the secret is to make the state smaller, not in the libertarian sense, but in actual geography and number of "subjects". No organisation has any business deciding the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of people. The trend is for governments to become larger and larger, just like any other empire. A one-world government, for example, would not be a utopia, it would be a veritable hell on earth. (Disclaimer: I'm an anarchist, and as you say, anarchism works only at smaller scales, so I'm biased)
      - Justsignedup 2y ago
        You're probably onto something. Being too big leads to problems. But also leads to power. You can't fuck with the US/China, even if nukes were removed, because they are a massive force that will crush you beneath their heel. So there is mass power in unity. However you look at europe, and you see a lot of gains as well, where multiple smaller governments exist, and a unifying body was created to compete with the likes of the US without giving up their individuality. But also the US is distributed since states govern themselves with overarching federal oversight. It is massively complex. At the end of the day we need not only a small anarchistic state, we also need reasons why some cult of personality won't be able to rally his million followers and start guns blazing taking over neighbors. Unfortunately I feel like democracy is the least bad system we got.

astrange 2y ago

Anarchists' portrayal of themselves is actually much more discrediting than the pop culture version; it's basically an ideology about everyone being in meetings all day. Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs).

rpastuszak 2y ago
Not my experience at all, esp. in terms of the people/communities I've met or the books I've read. > Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs). That's precisely what I meant by pop culture/mass media. At this stage, this is more of a meme regarding anarchy than reality and this couldn't be farther from truth. (and it's quite an old one, think: French enlightenment era philosophers using pre-partition Poland as an example of anarchy).
- astrange 2y ago
  How will you make insulin?
modriano 2y ago
> Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs). To be fair, every ideology and/or mode of societal organization sucks at handling the nasty edge cases (even the best organizational mode we've found has a saying encapsulating this fact: "hard cases make bad law"), but yeah, anarchists mainly thrive in places where they aren't subject to the consequences of bad answers (e.g. twitter, reddit, bluesky, etc).
- Justsignedup 2y ago
  The problem with ideologies is that they work really well in small communities. Communism works. In a small communjty/village. Same with anarchism. Because that's basically how small villages work. You can adjust as needed in the moment without too much effort. The problem happens when you grow. What happens when people you are governing you will never meet? What happens when you're busy and can't research all the complexities of local politics and some old person is stirring up trouble with yells for not in my backyard stuff... And one person starts bribing and so on.
  - sph 2y ago
    The problem is that we want to find ideologies that work across millions of people. Even democracy is pretty terrible in modern countries because of how large they are, so it creates a lot of inequality and centralisation of expenditure. I think the secret is to make the state smaller, not in the libertarian sense, but in actual geography and number of "subjects". No organisation has any business deciding the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of people. The trend is for governments to become larger and larger, just like any other empire. A one-world government, for example, would not be a utopia, it would be a veritable hell on earth. (Disclaimer: I'm an anarchist, and as you say, anarchism works only at smaller scales, so I'm biased)
    - Justsignedup 2y ago
      You're probably onto something. Being too big leads to problems. But also leads to power. You can't fuck with the US/China, even if nukes were removed, because they are a massive force that will crush you beneath their heel. So there is mass power in unity. However you look at europe, and you see a lot of gains as well, where multiple smaller governments exist, and a unifying body was created to compete with the likes of the US without giving up their individuality. But also the US is distributed since states govern themselves with overarching federal oversight. It is massively complex. At the end of the day we need not only a small anarchistic state, we also need reasons why some cult of personality won't be able to rally his million followers and start guns blazing taking over neighbors. Unfortunately I feel like democracy is the least bad system we got.