I think it would be considerably less effort to negotiate to get some of us to go xxx for you. But have it your way. You try to coerce me and end up having to shoot me. You turn the gun on my neighbor who begins doing xxx for you and after while the neighborhood becomes aware of it and surrounds you and takes away your gun and asks you what the fuck you’re doing.
The trouble is ahistoricity. The thing is, human society arose from something akin to a chimpanzee band. That is, even before there were human beings, we lived in a society. People competed against each other and cooperated with each other, the competed to cooperate and cooperated to compete. The parent-child relationship is our first experience with heirarchy. And our experiences as small children around bigger children is our second. All the stupid office politics that people experience today existed even before people were people. A two year old grabbing a pretty rock from a one year old and then lying about it when mom comes around is the fundamental expression of political hierarchy.
Read some of Jane Goodall’s work on chimpanzees, and realize that chimpanzee society has politics, it has heirarchy, it has alliances, it has dominant members and submissive members. You might argue that we human beings are more advanced than that, but I completely disagree. It seems to me that the main purpose of our swollen brains is to be more effective as we engage in that kind of political maneuvering.
Even if people no longer compete for material goods, they still will compete for status, mating rights, fame, and reputation. If anarchy makes reputation the currency, then we will see the same bullshit political crap as before, except organized for the production and maintence of our own reputation and the destruction of our enemy’s reputation.
Except when they show up, they find that me and my like-minded friends have organized into an army. And we enslave you.
And we have essentially gone, not forward into history, but backwards. This is how things were before the rise of the nation-state.
Forming into hierarchial groups is human nature. Certainly we can wait and see if the human animal changes his essential nature into the peace-loving, freely cooperative being you posit. And if we don’t need to take any action to bring about an anarchic society, well and good, because I doubt very many will do so if they expect to return to a Hobbesian environment.
And I expect the sun to go nova or nuclear war break out or Christ will return long before human nature changes.
My $.02 worth.
Regards,
Shodan
I should add that they do this with no more advance planning and no more structured organization than the campers on the camping trip would need if one camper were to draw a gun on one of the others and demand that he start cleaning his fish for him. The others all watch this happening and at an opportune time jump the fellow with the gun.
So far you have not introduced a hierarchy of authority, a formally structured system of power over other people. All you’ve introduced is one coercive person with a gun. As I said in prior posts on this page, you would always have individual instances of coercive behavior persisting just because people sometimes have bad tempers and get impatient.
Perhaps you’d care to explain how this would morph into a complete social structure of hierarchical nature? I don’t think it would. Even if your answer to “why bother?” is “cuz I don’t wanna clean my own fish and I’ve got a gun”, most people would find it less bother and less personally dangerous to negotiate with others as peaceful equals. Most people would place some value on the status quo system of everyone being free from bosses and tyrants and whatnot and would have a rather macho-survivalist attitude towards anyone trying to coerce others, especially on a regular ongoing basis.
You can’t be a social system unto yourself, mister. Not even with a gun.
It is indeed how things were before the rise of the nation-state. It is how things were for hundreds of thousands of successful and functional years before the rise of the nation-state.
The nation-state arose because in certain intensely settled areas (e.g., the “Fertile Crescent” area surrounding the Tigris-Euphrates river valley) there was originally abundant food but bounded by relatively large areas with scarce resources (deserts etc) and when the human population shot up sufficiently high and wandering out of the area as nomadic hunter-gatherers was blocked by the deserts, people became agricultural. Planting and harvesting is labor-intensive and conditions of scarcity constitute a critical situation. Humans in crisis mode do respond better as a vertical hierarchy because in the short term the more centralized the decision-making the more efficient the group. (Pretty much as an inverse ratio. The more time, the less efficient for centralized dictatorship, the more efficient for decentralized democratic structures).
People doing the agricultural thing also needed something much closer to an army than would have been needed before. The folks still doing the hunter-gatherer thing would not easily internalize the notion that a huge bountiful river valley full of vegetables could not be picked from because the land belonged to someone else who had planted it and tended it, so you’d have to defend and threaten and kill people to protect your garden, right?
Hierarchical social systems started to change from the old models right around the time that we ceased to exist as essentially agricultural collectivities with civic centers and started to acquire serious mechanical capabilities. After some scuffling around and experimentation with various “isms” that were in come cases more centralized, we’ve pretty much headed in a more democratic direction. Not because human nature changed, but because we had the luxury of slower planning systems that integrate folks in a more fluid, less rigid manner.
Caste and class systems in which power relationships were permanent and one’s position in society was equally so gave way to dynamic systems in which one could “rise” and “better oneself”, and eventually to those in which one has a fairly wide range of options concerning what one may and may not do and has “rights” which protect one from mistreatment by (theoretically) anyone in any position in the system (thereby specifically limiting the range of power over other people), and even conferring “rights” that are the same for everyone (theoretically) rather than being different for people depending on their position in the hierarchy.
You keep saying “but me and my badass brothers will ride over the hills and conquer your peaceful village”, but there’s nothing to prohibit you from doing that now except for people’s reactions to your doing so. Why don’t you go conquer a county or two in Kansas? If the sheriff’s department or the county police come after you, well,
you’re up for that, aren’t you? Oh, but I guess eventually the state of Kansas would call up the National Guard and if that weren’t sufficient the United States Army would land on you with both feet.
But somehow you think that the world surrounding your activities in an anarchist society would not respond to you and your like-minded friends and mobilize to whatever degree is necessary? It might take a different form and have a different objective but i suspect you’d end up being immobilized long enough for us to sort out what the heck we were going to do about you.
And you STILL keep missing the point that Errata made above. We say the world could (for the most part–certainly for a part substantially beyond the current situation) be run and organized anarchically. You keep saying “But I could do something that would inherently impose a power struggle so no you couldn’t”. Look, you silly archist, we could draw straws to select an absolute emperor for the duration of your existence and voluntarily obey the emperor as obedient military personnel until you and your friends were dead, and for that duration and in that localized area and for that singular purpose we would not be living as anarchists. But when we were done we could go back to being anarchists.
We do not need to be able to establish the absolute permanent and pure absence of hierarchical power-over relationships in order to have anarchy. We only need to get an efficient system up and running that allows us to put aside hierarchical power-over relationships in most places most of the time. And even in a few places some of the time is something worth attempting.
Is there a reason you do not wish to participate in the attempt? Do you love your chains so much?
Well if we could return to the comparitively modest level of domination of a chimpanzee band then we would have achieved a much less coercive and hiearchical society than what we now have. I think this actually an argument for how much closer we could come to anarchy.
For most of us, this is also our first experience with love. We were fed, bathed and dressed as completely helpless babies with no expectations of reciprocity from our caretakers. If human kindness had not been as universal as competitiveness, we would have died as a species a long time ago.
hmm…
Part The First
In which jojo, in true anarchist fashion, manages to disagree with everybody in the entire thread.
Can I just call a halt to the proceedings while I remind everybody what the OP was? I reproduce it here for your convenience:
The OP asked for the science behind anarchy to be explained to him not the details. So those people who accuse me of being too fluffy are in the wrong. I’m just trying to answer the OP.
In fact, it is my contention that I am the only person trying to answer the OP.
Part The Second
In which jojo tries once again to explain the science behind anarchy
When you live in the anarchist universe it’s quite hard to communicate with people who live in the non-anarchist universe. But I think I’ve found a way of explaining it in a way you can understand.
Consider democracy. Democracy hasn’t always been around, it was something we had to learn. If you could go to a pre-democratic people and say to them that the best way of organising society would be to have a popular vote to decide the government, you would have been laughed out of town.
People would have said to you that you are crazy, that your democratic notions don’t take into account human nature, that human nature naturally results in the strongest being the leader.
And yet look, here we are in the 21st century with democracy being the predominant system in the world and expanding. Has human nature changed to accomodate democracy - no. It’s just that we have realised that democracy is a better way of organising things than dictatorship is.
In fact, we have reached the point where you would die to defend democracy.
We have come a long way since those pre-democracy days. But no change in human nature has been required.
Anarchy is a bit like democracy in that sense.
There are three ways of governing - dictatorship, democracy and anarchy. People who live under a dictatorship find it hard to conceptualise the idea of democracy (consider the Iraqis). Likewise people who live under democracy find it hard to conceptualise the idea of anarchy.
But people can make the transition from dictatorship to democracy. It doesn’t require any change in human nature just a conceptual change. Likewise people can make the tranistion from democracy to anarchy - no change in human nature is required just a conceptual change.
However the jump from democracy to anarchy is bigger than the jump from dictatorship to democracy. This is because anarchy is more than just a change in the way we organise government. Anarchy is also a change in the way we view ourselves. It is as much an internal thing as it is an external thing.
Democracy is also to some extent an internal thing but not as much as anarchy is. Democracy is a kind of halfway house between dictatorship and anarchy.
People will nowadays die to defend democracy and yet democracy was a learned thing. It wasn’t our “natural state”. How do you explain this?
How do you explain the fact that humans are willing to die for something as insubstantial as an idea?
The answer is that we are all democrats nowadays. We may be left wing or we may be right wing but we are all democrats. Dictatorship is a primitive form of government but you can still get left wing dictatorships or right wing dictatorships.
Likewise with anarchy. Anarchy is the third and best form of governance.
All that is required to achieve anarchy is a conceptual change similar to the change which lead from dictatorship to democracy. Personally, I don’t think this change will happen until democracy, the second stage of governance, is widespread - probably covering the whole world.
Once we feel that democracy is secure and is no longer under threat from dictatorship then we can start to think about making the move to anarchy. But this may take hundreds of years.
Anarchists have already made this conceptual jump, we are just waiting for the rest of society to catch up with us. Once they have caught up, once everybody thinks of anarchy like they currently think of democracy, then the rest is easy.
The actual mechanics of anarchy are easy, it’s the conceptual jump that’s hard. My prediction is that, once anarchy has been established and everyone is an anarchist, we will kick ourselves that we didn’t think of it sooner. It will seem so obvious.
The future anarchist society will look back with disbelief at how we managed to avoid setting up anarchy for so long when anarchy is so obvious and so easy.
Becoming an anarchist is quite easy - all you have to do is take on board a couple of simple, self-evident concepts:
-
that one human equals one unit and all units are equal
-
that I do not wish to lead anybody and nor will I be lead
I’m sorry if this post has been too “fluffy” again but I am honestly trying to explain anarchy as best I can.
Right - that’s the first problem. The second is how to defend it.
And I honestly don’t see any difference between having “the US Army land on me with both feet” and what we have now, where our society is hierarchial. You have to have some organization to enforce the moral consensus.
Unless you are arguing that future anarchic societies will be just like today, with an army and laws and police and people holding authority over each other. In which case, I don’t see the difference.
The eternal problem of the anarchist.
Regards,
Shodan
Modern “Anarchists” have the luxary of living in a society where they have the freedom and resources to either not participate in the conventional social structure (ie a job) or participate in a manner they choose. If all of a sudden, all 280 million people in this country decided they wanted to be Anarchists, you would see a fundamental breakdown in societies infrastructure. Your Anarchist “universe” is an artificial one that is only able to exist because it is a self-selected group under the protection of the “hierarchial universe” outside.
“Democracy” is not a way of organizing things, nor is it the method we use to guarantee our freedoms in the US. It is a method of selecting our leaders that 1) gives every person an equal say and 2) allows for a change in leadership without resorting to violent revolution. While it attempts to maximize the role of the people in influencing their government, it does not ensure freedom. Freedom is ensured by splitting power among the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative, Judicial) and creating checks and ballances so that no branch is too powerful.
Anarchy esentially splits power equally over an entire population. A funny thing happens though when power is too distributed. Nothing. Nothing gets done. Or individuals do what they think needs to get done which is generally what they want to do. As anyone who has ever servered on a class project knows - there’s always at least one person who wants to be the boss, there’s a couple of people who do all the work, and there are a few slackers who just skate by. Is this how an Anarchist society would work? Decisions being made arbitrarily by those best able to incite the mob? Work being done by only those with the maturity and responsibility to actually do it?
The role of “government” and “hierarchy” since the beginning of time has been to create and enforce the rules and laws by which society runs. That we we do not have mob rule or arbitrary rules that no one is aware of until they violate them. The more complex our society becomes, the more rules we need. Anarchy may work fine for an Amish barnraising but I don’t believe it’s compatible with modern society.
So let’s try it anyway. What can it hurt?
I think we’ll prove you wrong, but that’s almost irrelevant, isn’t it?
Or do you thing no good (or even some bad) would come of even making the attempt?
Errr… yes he does think some bad things will happen. Mainly what he talked about that whole downfall of civilization as we know it with deranged mad men running around murdering and people enslaving. I think that quallifies as hurting.
I strongly suggest that you all read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, if you haven’t already- I’m big on utopia/dysutopia these days, and I’ve never seen a more realistic representation.
Not really anarchy, per se, more nonauthoritarianism without the concept of private property, but fascinating either way.
dutchboy208 -
I have read it - several times. It is one of my favorite novels. It is, however, a work of fiction.
AHunter3 - Sure, go ahead and try it. In order to make it a fair test, you will have to do without any outside assistance.
So if you secede, and the US government steps in and re-establishes control over your territory, your experiment will have failed. Since you thought that democracy was the last step before anarchy.
And by the way, the next time you want to refer to me as a “silly archist”, do it in the Pit where I can respond. The SDMB is still subject to rules, and the mods are higher in the repressive, archist power structure than either you or I.
Regards,
Shodan
Parody:
OK, Shodan, I’m sorry I called you a “silly archist”. ::giggle:: I have no idea what prompted me to do that. It was inappropriate, it was an argument ad hominem, and it was an insult and will not do it again.
We don’t seem to be communicating though.
a) Shodan (this page, replying to me):
b) Shodan (quoting someone, I can’t figure out who):
You keep bringing this possibility up as if it were self-evident that this not only could happen but inevitably would.
Why do you think an anarchist social system would be unable to defend itself from aggessive violent people, from inside or outside?
I laid out, in a long post on page 2, one example of a decision-making apparatus. Questions of how to respond to violent, disruptive people in our midst would be handled by that just as questions of manufacture and distribution and questions of regional facility-building and debates as to whether midnight or 1 AM is the recommended time for loud music go cut back to quiet. Legislative, judicial, political, economic, forensic, military, civic…it’s all decision-making.
Given an ability to arrive at decisions and refer back to what they are and how permanent and binding they are, from whence do you arrive at the as-of-yet undefended conclusion that anarchy could not exist because someone could invade or enslave?
I am aware that people of certain militaristic societies organized as dictatorships viewed America as weak and thought it to lack the discipline of a war-machine nation. Is it the case that you are making a simliar allegation regarding an anarchy, i.e., that it would be weak and undisciplined and inefficient and would fall to a more centralized force? Or are you failing to comprehend than an anarchy could and presumably would respond to violent aggression with planned defensive violence of its own?
Oh, and:
Why would we secede? We will use anarchic communications and decision-making processes to accomplish what they can. We aren’t going to overthrow the existing system and then try to build a functioning anarchy (which would indeed result in chaos and broken windows and the fall of civilization, not anarchy). We aren’t going to call up the leaders and police officers of the existing nations and say “fuck you. we opt out. come and get us”. That would indeed work no better for us than it did for the folks at Waco.
We’ll take over (if our systems prove to be a superior product, as we think they will) the way email is taking over. Peacefully. Conservatively, only replacing the existing systems in places where our way is more efficient and convenient. And if we do not turn out to be more efficient and convenient, no damage done, yes? I am not a frothing-at-the-mouth black-clad bomb-tossing saboteur, ok?
Now, to repeat myself (with clarification), do you “anarchy can’t work” folks think no good (or even some bad) would come of making such an attempt, given the above disclaimers and whatnot? Do you not agree that some good and at worse no meaningful harm would come of such an experiment? And, if so, why are you folks peeing on the idea with such fervent disdain?
AHunter3 -
The quote is from one of the great thinkers of our time, Jack Handey.
What I don’t understand is how your anarchic society, where nothing is hierarchical until you need it to stop the bad guys, is any different from now. You have (presumably) an army and a police force and laws, and the ability to use coercion to enforce a moral consensus (and I expect to enforce contracts as well). How is this different from now?
In theory, I can do whatever I like in the USA unless I interfere with someone else’s right to do what they want. I can even form companies where no one is in charge (I guess). If you did form such a company, and it was obviously superior to all other forms of management, I expect the idea would spread rapidly. In fact, some companies are run that way, but I don’t think the business model that cooperatives use is exactly taking the world by storm.
I am assuming that there are some kind of basic rights enforceable in your anarchic society. Even if there is a strong consensus in your neighborhood that you don’t want blacks to move in, I assume the rest of the society would not allow you to drive them out. So do you have some equivalent to the Constitution that is enforceable, even against the consensus?
In answer to your question, “would it do any harm to try an experiment in anarchy?”, no, I have no objection so long as you don’t enforce any coercion on others, keep your contracts, and so forth. But, as I said before, I don’t really see how you could tell the difference between your society and mine.
Regards,
Shodan
I suppose that this is where the two sides disagree most. I do not share your belief ‘no meaningful harm’ can come from anarchy. Quite often, in discussion of theory, and the postulation of reasonable, peaceful people, there is a lack of understanding of our main objection: what happens when people are neither reasonable, rational, or peaceful? You don’t seem to even take the idea seriously, and that is perhaps why you are greeted by a less than enthusiastic response from some of us.
You have complained that dissenters with your position show their objections are ‘self-evident’- do you not do the same? But the burden is on you, as agitator for change, to show me how your system will work. As many have told Libertarian- we don’t need a complete blueprint, just answers to basic concerns such as public safety. As a classic liberal, I am also concerned about issues like a social safety net, health and welfare. Your plan is high on ‘freedom’ but low on the others.
For that matter, you have stated several times that we are patently unfree now, even advocating the 'mild. What freedoms are you denied now that you feel that not only you, but everyone else, should be allowed to enjoy?
As for the issue of common defense- even in our fairly democratic society, those that enter the military subject themselves to a rigid hierarchy. That is how every army in history has functioned.
In our fairly democratic society, where outside of conscripted military service, emergencies, police investigations in the immediate present-tense, situations involving someone else’s private property, and situations involving employment and the workplace, you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want to do unless specifically prohibited by law, and take orders from no one.
That is simultaneously way short of anarchy and also a long long way towards it from the perspective of someone in an absolute centralized dictatorship.
Within our relatively democratic society, people get together for organized activities called “sports”, doing so of their own free will and, in the more informal weekend-for-fun variants of it, pick who is going to be team captain or quarterback using fairly democratic decision-making processes. Following which they voluntarily participate in a short-term activity characterized by very centralized leadership and bossy decision-making. Because reaching a consensus in the huddle doesn’t appear to be the most effective way of making touchdowns.
Presumably you do not think this means that our “democratic society” is a lie, or that because we let the quarterback call the shots on Sunday it is unimportant that I have the right to disagree in public with Mayor Bloomberg or President Bush, and to run against either of them if I choose? Or that neither of them can compel me to go to church on Sunday or prevent me from having a meeting in my living room with other anarchists to discuss social transition?
Ahunter3 -
What question was this meant to address?
You claim that our society is “a long way from anarchy”. OK - how would it be different if we were a completely anarchic society?
Please be specific, if possible. If you are just going to say, “Once the New Anarchist Man emerges, nobody will worry about any of that”, you will not have convinced me that there is any difference.
Regards,
Shodan
=
(are you reading?)
Actually, this is getting boring as well as frustrating. I don’t seem to be making sense to you, and you aren’t making sense to me. And I hadn’t intended on getting immersed in yet another pointless endless “anarchy could work and would be cool” / “anarchy could never work and here’s why” round and round. We aren’t going to convince each other, any more than the prochoice/prolife people, and the anarchy pro/con argument threads on this board have been equally redundant and repetitive.
I was hoping to have more of a “which way is the best way to implement anarchy” flavored discussion but this thread didn’t go that direction and I’ve foolishly gone into verbal combat because of my fervor on the subject, despite knowing better.
My absence from this thread from this point onward (which I shall not promise but probably should effect) shouldn’t be construed as an inability to formulate a response to additional arguments posted. Frankly, I think anyone who has read this far can probably write lines for both sides, having picked up on the rhythm by now.