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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly this. It's a lovely dream, but humans are lazy, aquisitive, and many would sell their own grandmother to gain a perceived advantage.
Nobody aside from hardened sociopaths would do that.
“Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.” My anarchist sympathies want this to be true but this is a demonstrably false fairy tale. Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order. Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious th…
The interesting (and massive) problem is figuring out why some people act unreasonably in the same situation as someone else who doesn't. If it's something that can be addressed through mechanisms like the provision of healthcare, UBI, equality, or addressing inequality then perhaps society can be structured to have a very minimal government without the need for so many laws simply by making sure everyone is treated fairly and not left in a position where unreasonable actions are a solution to their immediate problems.
I wonder how a similar essay for other ideologies would look like. Do you buy things? You're a capitalist. Do you keep some things the way they are? You're a conservative. Do you clean your room? You're a fascist. But I doubt someone would bother writing such essays, and if someone did, I doubt it would get upvoted to the HN frontpage. What is it about this that appeals to people? An ideology that feels edgy, but doe…
But it's also interesting on hacker news because of the popularity of libertarianism amongst some here. It must be obvious how close anarchism and libertarianism are. In fact when I was first made aware of libertarianism many years ago it was regarded as a branch of anarchist thought.
Consider the difference between a faceless government and something with a face.
Faceless means impartial, once removed, not having skin in the game. Faceless means not having to take aside. Faceless allows more formality.
Face means somebody who knows you personally. Anarchism means a governing body with a face. People close to you. Society 'freely organizing itself' means politics and people gaining power with social influence. Instead of visible hierarchies, it means invisible hierarchies build from personal relationships.
I want more participatory democracy, more deliberative democracy, not anarchism. Modern liberal democracy with laws and principles and visible hierarchies allows individuals to separate themselves from the village, the mob and the social games involved.
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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.” My anarchist sympathies want this to be true but this is a demonstrably false fairy tale. Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order. Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious th…
Anarchy is more about you and your community having the autonomy to decide your own rules, not a central authority. I believe "autonomy" is the key word here, not "law".
Most people do behave "decently" in this sense. However some do not. Under an open system, these outliers will eventually eat the decent. It strikes me this is likely the exact journey we have come on to arrive where we are. We have created a structure in which the monsters can eat a certain proportion of us in order that we may not be eaten.
the most intolerant wins :
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Is it just me, or does this text seems to pretend as if anarcho-communists are the only kind of anarchists and anarcho-capitalist don't exist? It doesn't seem to talk a lot about property rights, but some phrases about "the way society is organized right now" and "useless professions" are not what all anarchists believe.
Furthermore anarcho-capitalism has no connection to the wider anarchist movement (and is quite recent) and did not grew out of the anarchist tradition.
“Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.” My anarchist sympathies want this to be true but this is a demonstrably false fairy tale. Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order. Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious th…
> this is a demonstrably false fairy tale Demonstrably how? > Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? What is a demonstrably false fairy tale is that we don't act righteously when law enforcement is present. So asking what would happen in its absence seems irrelevant. > It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy. Above you said it was "demonstrable" but now se…
Tens of thousands of years of human history. Feuding warlords, and slaves, rather than everyone acting together in unity.
> What is a demonstrably false fairy tale is that we don't act righteously when law enforcement is present. So asking what would happen in its absence seems irrelevant.
Well, we don't have mass rape, looting, or murder. One really needs to compare scale. Democracy seems to be a horrible system, and indeed the worst system, except for all the others (paraphrasing Churchill).
> Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.
You're missing scale. SMALL self-regulating organizations do very well. The key condition isn't just about removing external incentives, but also about scale.
Once you're at some scale, you're guaranteed to have a few psychopaths who work to game the system to personal benefit. A key thing about small-scale is everyone can say "Adolf is a jerk. Let's swing clear of him." Large scale, he takes over Germany, and onto the world!
Likewise, large-scale, you're missing social incentives. Small scale, I can say "I won't steal from you, because you'll think I'm a jerk." Large-scale, try leaving your wallet in the train in almost any major city for 10 minutes.
Tribal culture was pretty good on isolated islands. It didn't go Lord of the Flies. That only happened at scale.
I've seen largish organizations sustain this for maybe a half-decade or decade, but never longer. At some point, game-theoretical organizational models take over, and things never go back.