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I would that there were time travel available. Then we could send the Noble Savage Myth[1] peddlers back to their Edenic antiquity of choice.
Perhaps they'd discover that their purported paradises were as friction-laden as the present, albeit without all the bad, bad technology that ehances our Tartaran present.
In the second chapter of his book the writers already discuss heavily this noble savage myth and deconstruct it. I really recommend the book, it's an amazing read.
“The racist denigration of the savage, and naive celebration of savage innocence, are always treated as two sides of the same imperialist coin.56 Yet originally this was an explicitly right-wing position, as explained by Ter Ellingson, the contemporary anthropologist who has reviewed the subject most comprehensively. Ellingson concluded there never was a ‘noble savage’ myth; at least not in the sense of a stereotype of simple societies living in an age of happy primordial innocence. Rather, travellers’ accounts tend to supply a much more ambivalent picture, describing alien societies as a complicated, sometimes (to them) incoherent, mix of virtues and vices. What needs to be investigated, instead, might better be called the ‘myth of the myth of the noble savage’: why is it that certain Europeans began attributing such a naive position to others?”
From the Wikipedia page:
> The phrase later became identified with the idealized picture of "nature's gentleman", which was an aspect of 18th-century sentimentalism.
These days the sentiment seems more associated with people expressing unhappiness with complexity.
Anarchy scales so long as there are no bad actors.
"If all men were angels, no government would be necessary." - James Madison
It highlights the flaws of utopian thinking. Since this isn't the case, government is necessary beyond a certain scale.
Let me amend that: anarchies cannot deal with external threats when hierarchies have the military edge. I don't think the bit about angels has much to do with it.
Cf. Orwell, "The Atom Bomb and You"
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb
> It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.
And I would think that bad actors scale exponentially. It seems like it would be morally easy to steal from someone you have never met and will likely never see again. Much harder to steal from someone in a small community where everyone knows everyone.
This is just my conjecture, no real world experience or data. Would be interested in seeing if anyone had any.
That's wishful thinking, sadly. Domestic abuse was rampant throughout history, and small communities, rather than correcting them within couples/family units, more often normalised/hushed these because of the abuser's role within the group. Dominant/subservient dynamics, source of most of bad actions, are not related to scale.
> … morally easy…
Maybe it's not about morality; maybe it's about getting caught.
1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.
I haven't read any classics from anarchism but the notion I got from Noam Chomsky is that anarchism isn't about a complete lack of power structures, it's about demanding that there are adequate reasons for them to exist. So government wouldn't necessarily be gone under an anarchist system, it would only disappear if the collective decides that it is unnecessary.
Ah yes, it reminds of the form of government I created - "goodocracy". We're against bad things but for good things.
It doesn't make much sense to say things like "we demand there are adaquate reasons for the existence of power structures" because there's nobody on the opposite side asking for unreasonable power structures. Everyone wants good/reasonable things and doesn't want the unreasonable. Problem is, people disagree about what is what.
A group definition is meaningless if it doesn't specify a group. As is, every major political ideology would be anarchist by this definition.
This strongly depends on your definition of "adequate", "reasonable", etc.
When Noam Chomsky wrote this, I'm fairly certain his definition of "adequate" included things like "the power structure does not exist to serve itself or the people in it, but to serve the larger society around it".
And there are definitely people asking for power structures whose purpose is to be self-serving and/or enrich those in it. Obviously they don't come right out and say that, but come on...
> anarchism isn't about a complete lack of power structures, it's about demanding that there are adequate reasons for them to exist.
Power structures will appear no matter what you do, the only question is if the system you have is powerful enough to fight power structures. If a guy who promises free virgin slaves to every soldier who fights for him can take over your anarchist state then it is too weak to exist and will disappear almost immediately. So someone with at least that much power must be present. It can take the form of a king, a president, a general, a dictator, or even a council of many people, but the power has to be held by someone or someone else will take that power and become that person themselves.
It also is about decentralizing power. There would be no one executive being who decides something is or is not legal. But the collective would be able to vote directly on how things should operate. And that includes the ability to punish / exile / whatever bad actors.
So.... you're saying Anarchists really just want to have Athenian Democracy?
Direct democracy might work well for a city state where even poor citizens are independent land owners, but I'm not convinced it would work for a large nation where there are enough powerful bad actors that they can use marketing and patronage to get control of the political process.
It is much easier to parse this by unpacking the word anarchism itself through its root terms 'an' (without) 'arch' (ruler). So anarchism means "without rulers" (not without governance or without coordination). Anarchists strive to organize small group, workplace, community and broader geographic decision making as horizontally as possible so that each individual has equal input - with small groups and workplaces making decisions by Consensus - and with larger groups, companies, or broader regions using Consensus in Spokescouncils.(Spokescouncil Examples: A Spokescouncil was used to successfully coordinate the 1999 anti WTO protests in Seattle, and The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) uses a spokescouncil structure.)
(NOTE: Consensus works much better when it is 'Modified Consensus' in which, as a last resort, decisions that must be made soon but are contentious and aren't reaching consensus, can be made by a supermajority vote of 2/3rds or higher.)
Here are some resources to examine these basics:
CONSENSUS:
- Consensus: http://www.actupny.org/documents/CDdocuments/Consensus.html - Consensus Decision Making: http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/consensus - Consensus in Large Groups: http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/conslarge.pdf - Affinity Groups & Spokescouncils: http://www.reclaimingquarterly.org/web/resources/DA-Process-...
EXAMPLES OF ANARCHISM IN PRACTICE:
- The Zapatistas (EZLN) Chiapas, Mexico: https://nacla.org/news/2019/01/18/spark-hope-ongoing-lessons... - The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landless_Workers%27_Movement - The Rojava (Syria): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava - The Mondragon Corporation (Spain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation - The National Confederation of Labour (CNT) - Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederaci%C3%B3n_Nacional_de... - The Evergreen Cooperatives (Cleveland, Ohio): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Cooperatives - The US Federation of Worker Cooperatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federation_of_Wo...
Also, for a vast body of discussions on, and descriptions of, modern anarchism, search the phrase ‘Renewing The Anarchist Tradition’ at: http://radio4all.net
Depends on how you define "government". I think that with a little imagination you could figure out how to set up some system of mutual rules and decision making that didn't involve dramatic imbalances of power. After all "anarchy" means "no rulers" not "no rules".
Democracy has the exact same problem. But only one of these two is a centralized, single point of failure that distributes its mistakes civilization-wide.
Anarchy scales despite bad actors. It's hard to be the big boss hog when more than half the town refuses to sell to you or buy from you. How are you going to manage that? Go betweens? Good luck, you'll have to pay more. A gang of confederates? It's the few against the many. Anarchy in my opinion works because it doesn't have a central command structure, so it's hard to destroy the social order. It also means societies throughout it will radically diverge beyond their initial premise in many ways. The down side is obvious: it's slow as hell. But I'd rather have sluggish but resilient anarchy than the current state of things where we have social norms that justify a handful of people having a title claim to trillions of dollars worth of assets that they themselves can never direct nor consume.
I don't think that is the case. The wild-west, Russia during Yeltsin, China in the 1900s, Somalian warlords. People would have no choice. They have to submit or else they may "rebel" and they may win, or they may lose but it will be a violent battle.
Every kingdom was started by a bad actor who did exactly what you say is too improbable to worry about. Anarchy is so unstable that we don't even notice them before they devolve into some form of authoritarianism.
As a great philosopher once said, "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
This assumes enough people don't gravitate to strong charismatic leaders who turn into big bosses. That's happened plenty of times in history.
You seem confident that society can survive bad actors. Would you like to post your home address right now, to test that theory?
Wow that's the silliest argument you can propose? Also, mailing addresses are easily bought from the USPS for junk mail purposes and yet no one is going around using them to go murder people en masse. So your theory is already invalidated by that fact. Please stop being such a Hobbesian pessimist. I mean I've seen far worse in my life than I'd like to admit just within my family but even that is still vanishingly rare in terms of occurrences. So keep on with your own pessimism but as someone who's literally survived decades of abuse I'll be a happy anarchist instead, it's much better than the alternative of constant paranoia and cynicism.
Hmm. It's not?
I mean your original sentence still stands...
> As they put it, “Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.”
When weapons that anyone could make from everyday materials became wildly insufficient against bronze weapons made by magic and hoarded by kings.
"A Short History of Humanity: A New History of Old Europe"
https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Short_History_of_Huma...
I like this answer, and Krause's on my reading list now. I have to speculate that the development of the organizational/institutional capabilities to produce bronze on a large scale (especially the need for reliable long-distance trade networks needed to acquire tin (or pre-made bronze) en masse), and not just the effectiveness of the material as an arm (and the feedback between these two factors), was a very important change. 'Suddenly', you have a whole part of society whose livelihoods are dependent on the bronze industry and who would seemingly be willing to fight to keep their potentate(s) in power if it meant keeping their trade afloat (were the original nobles just the members of the local bronze 'guild'?). And of course an even larger segment of the population willing to go along with it for their own safety.
Alternately: when we developed warehousing. Grain houses, meat salting, anything that allowed long-term storage allowed hoarding. Manual labour then shifted from subsistence-related activities to protecting the stash, and that means you need a power structure to decide who gets access to what part of the riches.
> … protecting the stash…
"… wildly insufficient against bronze weapons…"
Just looking at the title I knew this was about recently released book The Dawn of Everything[1].
I'm about 30% in and it's been a while since I have read a book this good; full of insights, backed with evidence and bibliography that in itself is a rabbit hole. I can't recommend it enough.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-eve...
This article left me wondering.
What happens if you put a small group of modern people in relative isolation outside any legal jurisdiction, and ask them to create their own legality? Also you tell them to check their references and their books, even read the New Yorker; it's not a Lord of the Flies scenario. Would they be able to revert to "cavorting", or will they immediately elect a major and build an office complex so that they can toil from 9:00 to 5:00 in some deeply civilized paperwork?
In a sense you can see that in some online servers. For example, here in my country, a few months ago a group of streamers started a Minecraft server where they all play.
They are divided in 3 towns of around 10 people each. What is funny is that in one of the towns, one of the first they created was a "god" that they worship. Then they created boundaries with other towns and a "customs" at the border. They later elected a mayor for each town...
It's interesting to see how they mimic and create these structures when they're not actually needed.
They're going to want clean water, and a reliable food supply, and mosquito abatement. "Cavorting" isn't going to get them that.
I don't buy it at all that just because the archeologists didn't find evidence of a throne room, there wasn't a ruling class or group of elders deciding on important matters and judging on crimes and punishment.
“Despite the considerable size and density of the built-up area, there is no evidence for central authority,”´
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
"City without rulers.." like Mogadishu in the early 90s?
I stopped reading. Anarchism without considering the legacy humanity instincts inherited is not realistic and not worth considering.
Anarchy has no buying and selling. The strong just take. Without a non-violence consent aka state, there are no rules and no syndicalism survives that. There is not way around this once the monopoly on violence is gone.
No clever trickery. So you hide your money in crypto?
They beat you with a 5 $ wrench, until you give all you can give.
>Anarchism without considering the legacy humanity instincts inherited is not realistic and not worth considering.
Man, if only in the last 200 years of philosophical work done on Anarchism one of the anarchist philosophers would have stopped and considered human nature and history. Thanks random HN poster for completely dismantling the entire field by bringing up this one point that no one has ever thought of before!
>Anarchy has no buying and selling. The strong just take. Without a non-violence consent aka state, there are no rules and no syncdicalism survives that.
Man, if only there were like ways that Anarchists could organize and fight that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Insurrectionary_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Lib...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederaci%C3%B3n_Nacional_de...
What makes you think everyone would just sit by and let people just steal from them? It's almost like you aren't considering the legacy humanity instincts and history of the planet if you think that's how people would react.
edit: Also, warlords are absolutely rulers, so no. Not like mogadishu in the 90's.
> Man, if only there were like ways that Anarchists could organize and fight that.
If an anarchist state can organize and fight, why wouldn't they organize and enslave/steal from neighbors? Then that escalates and creates a country where the ruling anarchists steals and enslaves from the rest. The other anarchies doesn't put up a fight since fighting costs more than just giving the ruler anarchists what they want, and here the ruler anarchist state also protects the peaceful anarchists from other ruler anarchists. Can you explain how anarchies would stop this sort of hierarchy of anarchies from happening?
Anarchist State.
Ruler Anarchist.
I don't think you quite grasp what Anarchism is.
Anarchism isn't simply the removal of rules and calling it a day. It's about decolonizing our minds and ideologies. It's about restructuring our societies so that would be rulers can't gain power in the first place. It's about cooperation over competition.
INB4 ten hours of bakunin posts and links leading to failed projects with hour long reviews of why external factors are to blame.
Re-Education will patch all the brain-bugs.
And if it does not, we fall back to individualism and shoot them as counter-revolutionarys. The education that the education does nothing, seems to stick.
I refuse to have my lifetime wasted by political philosophy without one single longterm surviving project.
And yes, lets take Mogadischu. A prime example that when the state breaks down, people fall back to family ties, aka clans, aka feudalism with grandpa as the default model.
Edit: As a individual mindset, anarchism is incredible liberating and i can recommend it as a thought approach, that takes nearly nothing as "given". But for a "given" like oneself and ones fellow men, it does not work out to design proper stress surviving societal structures.
The state collapsing does not mean Anarchism is here. Anarchism is more than just no governments. That's what you are either failing to understand or purposely ignoring. Anarchism is itself a style of organization and ideology. Mogadishu did not have any serious Anarchist organization or Anarchist revolution. It was the result of civil war and a collapsing government. And yes, when chaos reigns warlords take over. But that is not Anarchism.
In the scope of things, capitalist republics hardly qualify for long term survival either, having practically just showed up. It sure doesn't look like it's headed for stability, either.
Anarchist thought on hacker news from the New Yorker? I'm here for it. David Graeber (rest in power comrade) was a fantastic writer and his book Debt the first 5000 years was absolutely fascinating. Really exposes the absurdity of the econ 101 barter argument as well as provides a great look at how debt and forgiveness of debt is fundamental to human society
The history part of that book was really good, but when he starts talking about economics it quickly becomes clear he is confused about even the most simple concepts. He tries to critique economics without knowing anything about economics.
What one really gets from this book is an understanding of where the human 'crabs in bucket' attitude comes from and how it is deep within our natural instincts. Having spent a lot of time in 3rd world countries, I can say that his description of debt and how things work through guilt and people manipulating each other is exactly how things still work. He actually treats it like it is a good thing though, but once you see it for yourself it is clear that this is has a lot to do with why these places are still poor. Breaking free from that, and inventing objective measures of credit and laws for proper debt accounting and repayment, has a lot to do with why we are so happy and rich in the modern world, I think.
>He actually treats it like it is a good thing though, but once you see it for yourself it is clear that this is has a lot to do with why these places are still poor
Really? It's that and not the imperialist systems that have oppressed and colonized them that are the reason they are poor? Fascinating.
Weird how the people in the imperial core never want to admit its not their economics or their political model that made them rich in the first place.
It was the over exploitation of the rest of the world once the imperialist countries got the overhand.
They made the number 1 and number 2 economy for most of history become backwaters.
Funny thing is where I'm from the Netherlands we even called it our golden century and still people can't connect the dots between our economic wealth and the plundering of the world. But I have already seen the break down of our institutions from 2008 till now, the shock of 2008 was so big that the dividend from western exploitation is not enough anymore to cover up bad leadership.
As long as there is generational poverty people from the imperial core will also carry generational guilt. The wrongs need to be corrected before westerners can talk about how to run things properly. But I don't see that happening until the western imperial empire breaks up into many pieces.
> Really? It's that and not the imperialist systems that have oppressed and colonized them that are the reason they are poor?
Yes. It is really that and not the imperialist systems that have oppressed and colonized them.