Anarchists?

[Therumancer]

I laugh at anarchy. It's a contradiction in itself. You can't 'organise' an anarchic takeover without becoming a massive hypocrite. True anarchy is chaos, complete and utter chaos.

Well if you hang out with many hipsters, or have done do, there are differant schools of thought on the subject. You are correct of course about what Anarchy means, and that all of those schools of thought become contridictory, but that doesn't change how people act. This is probably why the poster asked the question the way he did.

In general the most common school of thought seems to be that of the "liberal anarchist", which pretty much takes the attitude that we've gotten to the point where society will continue by inertia even if the goverment was effectively removed. It's of course ignorant of the rest of the world outside of nations like the US and UK and what life is like there, and of course the "everything will take care of itself" attitude has it's obvious flaws when looked at seriously.

The bottom line is that your typical Liberal Anarchist pretty much figures that if there were no police and goverment, nothing would change, except he'd be able to drown himself in drugs and whatever else he likes that is regulated (like certain kinds of porn).

Then of course you have offshoots of this which make the arguement that certain people are 'higher beings' than the masses and that by and large the rules shouldn't apply to them. While superficially hating concepts like royalty and nobility, the idea is pretty much that "lesser" people need rules and regulation, but the intellectual and artistic elite should not have any laws applied to them. Oftentimes people from this school of thought point towards various artists, philsophers, and inventors who were persecuted by society but later worshipped as visionary when they were gone. Their arguement is that such people (which includes them invariably) should be put above and beyond authority to do whatever they want, and that society should provide for them in order to resolve the whole problem with artists changing to do nothing but seek profits when they become successful and destroying the integrity of their work (being provided for, keeps the artistic process "pure").

There are plenty of ways people approach it, truthfully it seems to lead to a lot of discussions about philosophies that are impractical, or simply represent the personal
power fantasies of those discussing them.

Back before The Internet was quite as big a thing as it is now, I remember a decent number of people on BBS systems being bit into the entire "artistic elite" bit, with people doing things like creating ANSI art basically saying that the goverment should not only provide for them, but render them above the law, because "while ANSI art is not appreciated now, today this stuff is going to be the voice of an entire generation!".

"It's not Fascism if the right people are in charge" is one of my favorite lines from the artistic crowd. I heard it said more than once, and I guess Adam Warren must have dealt with some of the same people because in one of his "Dirty Pair" series he had a group of art-terrorists with that slogan.

 

[DieMitternachtFuchs]

But anarchists must be aware that in a overly individualist society we may constantly end up undercutting each others' interests this of course leads to conflict of various kinds including violence and endless revenge cycles. so what defines our interests must also change, so that we no longer become obsessed with monetary and material gain, for such resources are finite in a tremendous way that leads toward neo-liberalism, a kind of capitalism that is taking hold today that leads to the privitization of all resources and utilities and institutions. When things are owned privately as such it means that they may control all access to it in an effort to simply maximize personal profit. In the example of Cochabamba Bolivia, after water was privatized, the corporation Bechtel that won the contract greatly increased the price of access to water in a way the Bolivians simply could not afford, so many resorted to attempting to catch rainwater as an alternative, the corporation controlled government was told to outlaw such a practice. This lead to uprisings across the entire city of the people to oust Bechtel and its control of water. Which was seen as an affront to basic human dignity and the rights of all to essential resources. These are greatly complex times we are living in. The corporations in control of Bolivia were U.S. by the way.

I have to disagree. Today's system is what causes these revenge cycles.
How would we become obsessed with revenge when the person that wronged us is already gone and probably never going to be seen again? How will the "cycle" continue if the person gets his revenge?
We have revenge cycles today because we have things like the news that have to take any violent event and blow it out of proportion, making a small group of our populace pissed off enough to do something violent about it.

Your right that we would have to change to survive but this won't be that hard. Those that choose to wallow in the materialistic lifestyle won't last long or breed much. Natural selection in it's purest form.
Those that choose to accept the new world and love it, will (for the most part) thrive.
Not sure what the corporations owning water have to do with anarchy, seems like more of an argument for anarchy when a powerful group of people are allowed to own water.
Anybody that denies a group of people free water when it's on their own land deserves to die of dehydration.

A revenge cycle will happen any time the two participants know of each other, and is quite common in tribal regions. People that know each other at least to a limited degree.
But the system we have today of capitalistic exploitation is incredibly destructive to natural ecologies which will make it impossible to live a natural lifestyle.
The thing about Bechtel is about how the property rights of private citizens and organizations are harmful to the whole. this is the problem with libertarianism, which I consider a form of weak anarchy. To much power is given to individuals, which is a tremendous problem when they have no real concern about the whole. And about how the priorities of humanity are being guided to a truly destructive paradigm or ideology.

 

[AngryMongoose]

Personally I've always felt Anarchy to be far to hopeful and idealistic. All it takes is one dick to fuck up an entire community. Given the completely archaic nature in which peoples personalities are formed, and which peoples opinions of each other form, dicks will come up all the time. At the very least, humanity will occasionally spit out a genetic psychopath. An anarchistic society couldn't survival at any significant size.

There are other problems, but that's the major one.

 

[DieMitternachtFuchs]

Any political system can work for a population size that is sufficiently small. The true test of whether a system is practical is how gracefully it handles the population size increasing towards infinity, because that's when you start to see the effects fundamentally inherent in The Bell Curve.
The smaller a population size is, the more plausible it is for you to make statements about everyone having X, Y, and Z in common in their nature, and the larger a population size is, the smaller that commonality list gets. Anarchy apologists call it cynicism to say that there will always be assholes trying to turn the system to their own advantage at the expense of the common advantage. It's not cynicism, it's just statistics. As population size increases towards infinity, the odds of there being someone with any specific nature approach 1. Anarchy advocates make the fallacious assumption that it's still valid to be making assumptions about common nature regardless of the size of the group. (Communism makes the same mistake, and goes on to make the also-fallacious assumption that increasing the power of the state increases the power of the masses.)

True anarchy is a society in which people live in harmony, mutual respect and understanding without needing rules to govern how they interact with one another.

Perfect example. Can only work for a sufficiently small group. Mutual respect and understanding are learned, not innate, and once you enlarge the group enough, you get people who refuse to learn, or who learn but then unlearn for whatever personal reason, or who pay lip-service to the lesson without internalising it. Not cynicism, just The Bell Curve. A robust political system is one that assumes that this kind of thing will inevitably happen even for no reason, and has mechanisms in place to limit the damage.
Communes are great, because any system can work if you select the right members. It's important to step outside your comfort zone and expose yourself to ways of life which contradict your own, so you can identify cultural myopia when you see it; if I were in charge, spending some time on some commune or another would be mandatory before you can be considered an adult. But what works for a commune can't work for an indefinitely large world.

The world isn't filled with serial killers and rapists, most of us are appalled by these acts being committed on helpless people.

Red herring. Two red herrings, actually. 1) The ones we're worried about aren't the ones who want to kill and rape; those chumps are small-time. The ones we're worried about are the ones who want unlimited power over others' ways of life. 2) The world doesn't need to be filled with them, there just needs to be enough. A power-grab is self-amplifying; kind of like a disease.

Believe me, we would keep order.

That's... government. Are you sure about which side you're arguing?

Tribalism? Really? First of all, what's so bad about that? Oh that's right, they didn't have tv and the internet to entertain themselves all day.
I get your point but I would rather live gathering food for my people, a group that I can respect, rather than working every day for a corporation I hate just so I can eventually reach my breaking point and blow my brains out or rot my brain out with idiotic television. Call me crazy, I guess I like tribalism.

1) Straw man. A particularly grotesque one. You must be a hit at parties. 2) Your noble savage fantasy is not universal truth: not all tribes are deserving of respect. 3) Your preference is not universal. I would rather spend my life creating more wealth than a bushman can by standing on the shoulders of giants, even if it's for the sake of strangers, than [strawman of my own redacted].

Of course things can go bad, but things could also go good. We could start from the beginning and rebuild society again, one that values human life over gold and one that doesn't see a slaughter as another statistic or news report to be ignored.
Yes the "sociopaths" of the world could organize (unlikely but it has happened before) and enslave us and force us to follow their rules, but we already have that. It's called a government.

1) False dichotomy. That we are not an anarchy does not mean that we are nothing but the slaves of sociopaths. 2) Your implied belief that all human life is equally valuable is not universally shared (I don't buy it, for example), and it isn't even the majority opinion (war wouldn't exist).

I would rather be killed in my prime in a moment of intense violence than work all my life only to get a break if I make it to 60 (or whatever they're changing it too) so I can slowly die in my own filth.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

We have the right to decide what's best for ourselves. No human has the right to decide what's best for other humans, we are all on the same level. Our current system ignores that and treats people in power as if they are above everyone else.

1) I decide that acting as though we are not all on the same level and that I do have the right to decide what's best for others is what's best for myself. 2) Our current system treats people in power the least like they are above everyone else out of all the systems we've tried. Ignoring that difference is nothing more than a perfect solution fallacy. 3) Anarchy inherently treats people with the will to power as if they are above everyone else.

People don't need rules. There's morality for that. People don't go around killing people because it's against the law, but rather because they feel that it is not right. Well, the majority anyway.

The problem is that there is no universally-shared morality. Indefinitely large group, and all that. (I'm not a moral relativist; I'm just observing that there is no moral precept that the entire world shares.)

By the way, it's funny how killing for personal reasons (not that I would condone it) is seen as wrong and society will call you evil. But work for the government, you're given a gun, told where to point it and kill as many people as you want and society will call you a fucking hero. Morality changes when it suits the government.

Or, rather, whether something is evil or good depends on mitigating circumstances. Did you kill that man because you wanted to hear the funny noises he made, or did you kill him because he was gassing civilians en masse? Also, I'm not familiar with the "kill as many people as you want" policy; even in war, there are rules about who you should and shouldn't kill.

Except killing other humans is not natural for us. It's a perversion of human nature that becomes more and more popular when there is more to gain.
If we didn't rely on rare resources to survive, we would have no reason to kill each other.

Aaaaaaahahahaha. I can't think of anything more counterfactual — II2 argued this more lucidly than I could. Competition for resources is not the only (or even the main) reason we kill each other — it's because very little of humanity shares your unnatural view that all human life is equally valuable. Also, are you trying to apply post-scarcity economics to tribes?

So the average american is unfit to run their own lives but a select group of Americans are fit to run everybody's lives?

Straw man.

We only want to be better than everyone else because we are trained from a young age that we need to be better than everyone else. [snip] When missiles are used on schools and hospitals in developing nations because some guy in a comfy chair who has never seen death in his life ordered it, something is horribly wrong with the world.

You know, the way you argue has a lot in common with the way Karl Marx argued. He, too, would present a distorted caricature of the position he opposed, then make a flying leap to his own stance and say, "There, isn't that better?" without critical examination of whether his plan would actually reduce those ills.

As silly as it may sound, I believe we will evolve from this tribalism stage. The groups that believe in peace (but not pacifism) will form together gradually and become stronger while those that prefer senseless violence will rarely ally with a fellow war tribe because they probably wouldn't even give them the chance to share ideas.
In some weird way, order will prevail and maybe, just maybe we will create a system of government that truly values all human life.

1) That describes the opposite of evolution. 2) ANOTHER false dichotomy. 3) There will never be a system of government that truly values all human life, because not all human life is truly valuable. Bell Curve.

That's another reason I want anarchy, so we can freely pursue our own spiritual truths. If you do that today, your insane. Schizophrenic, need medication and place full of nice doctors to help you be normal again.
Sick place we live in.

Where the hell do you live?!

Most rational people are able to get over themselves enought to understand that effort put towards the betterment of society is it's own reward.

People are not governed by rational choice theory.

Y'all keep decrying how impersonal and greedy our modern age is (and how tasteless and ill-bred!), but I've yet to be convinced that those are bad things. Why the hell should I feel better if I know that strangers have feelings about me? Who the hell do you think you are? Why is greed a vice? The profit motive is the only reason that new wealth is ever created. (Money and wealth are not the same thing. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html)
The ultimate argument against practical anarchy is this: we had anarchy. That's how we existed in nature. What did we do with it? We used it to create governments. What makes you think a repeat attempt would have different results?

The profit motive is nothing but destructive, and your wealth is stolen from people elsewhere through various kinds of imperialism or colonialism. Why is modern europe wealthy? Because the empires of old raped the shit out of the rest of the world. And it's a practice that is still alive and well, it's why the third world still exists in poverty, because the "west" uses neo-liberalism as a form of ad hoc colonialism, stealing the natural wealth of the third world and not letting the people who live there reap any benefit other than the few government officials they keep in there pockets. Greed is the only true sin. all it involves is the taking of what others have and keeping it for yourself. trickle down economics is a lie, the money or wealth never trickles down any where, it sits in private offshore untaxable bank accounts. and in large part it is more money than could be spent by the owners in hundreds even thousands of lifetimes. Capitalism is the new feudalism, and is just as unequal and unjust. Don't give me horse shit about people being able to start there own businesses and becoming rich as well, after a point it becomes impossible to compete. Greed is not good Mr. Gecko, only destructive. To both people and ecology.

 

[Dys]

I laugh at anarchy. It's a contradiction in itself. You can't 'organise' an anarchic takeover without becoming a massive hypocrite. True anarchy is chaos, complete and utter chaos.

You don't understand, humans are naturally brotherly to one another and so society is unnecessary and thus any control it exerts is unwarranted.

That's why we have so much crime. There was no crime before society.

/sarcasm

Hehe, indeed. Anarchy is trusting every individual to use 'common sense' to live happy lives without the need for government. Too bad around half of the people I ever meet are fucking morons.

Would so many be though, if their survival depended on them being intelligent?

Once, last year, all the traffic lights in the eastern side of Melbourne cut out for a few hours, and for the first time in my life[footnote]I drive there every day[/footnote] I drove to uni without nearly having someone kill me. I did not witness any feats of stupidity on the road, nor were there any crashes (or near crashes). People used their indicators, gave way when applicable, kept to reasonable speeds....I did not believe that such mass sensible behavior was possible... It was rather unbelievable, and all I can possibly conclude from the experience is that forcing people to act for themselves, and removing the safety boundary of the rules and regulations forces people to act and think based on what's around them, which makes for a considerably better experience for all.

That's not to say there's no hypocrisy in organizing a large group to overthrow a government, just that this need to control people because they're stupid only makes them more stupid.

Anarchy is not chaos and its not always anti-government Anarchy is simply in support of having no leaders, so you could have a government, but it truely would be a government for the people RUN by the people, because everyone would be an equal part of the system.

That's what a democracy is, Anarchy is kind of defined by a lack of "leadership or enforced values". In a democratic (ie peoples government, everyone has equal vote) or communist (not only does everyone have equal say over the laws, everyone has equal wealth) society everyone has equal say, can vote on a law and then everyone must conform to those laws until such a time as the majority decides to remove said law. Note: There has never been an actual communist state, and there hasn't been a true democratic state for hundreds of years

 

[Zhukov]

You want anarchy? Go to Somalia. They got all the anarchy you could possibly want.

 

[Romidude]

In a perfect world anarchy would be the perfect system of government.
The reason it doesn't work is the same reason communism doesn't work, because you always have some corrupt ass hat minority who take advantage of it for personal gain, forsaking the good of society.

You are so completely right.

 

[The Stonker]

Why abolish order?
Since most of the time today it's order and law which protects the weak.
Would you like to revert back?
I didn't think so.

Anarchy is for people who don't quite understand politics.

 

[munsterman]

In a political science class I once took we had to fill out a survey that would give us a general idea of what our political bias was.

According to the survey I was a hard-core anarchist. Needless to say the next class when we shared our results was fun if not a little awkward.

Liberal, Conservative, Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative, Libertarian, Conservative, Conservative, Conservative, Anarchist .... what what?

 

[OneOfTheMichael's]

Well me and my friend like to tease about anarchy.
For example he likes to spell his name with the anarchist A in the middle (Sam).
And this one guy drew the A on the side of the shcool in the courtyard at my school, funny thing is, its a K-12 school.
But anyways i have no opinion or judges on anarchy at all.

 

[daltonlaffs]

Ooh, a thread about anarchy. I suppose I'll throw my two cents in.

Now, I respect the idea: Governments always become corrupt in one way or another, and doing without seems like a good prospect. We wouldn't have the exploitation and such that we deal with today.

However, something is missing from this line of logic. Laws create a barrier to prevent terrible things from happening. (Granted, there are bad laws, like the upcoming ACTA, but I'm talking in general.) Has anyone seen or read Death Note? For those that are unfamiliar, the basic premise is that a high school student finds a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it. He uses this power to become Kira, a self-proclaimed god who disposes of criminals en masse, and because of the supernatural nature of the killings, nothing short of a particularly strange detective will stop him.

Whether or not you agree with Kira isn't my concern. My concern is that in an anarchy, it wouldn't just be people with morals and illusions of godhood that have the power to kill without consequence. If someone disagrees with you, what's stopping you from pulling out your favorite hunting rifle and murdering the guy in his sleep? Without laws, nobody's going to be investigating, so what is there to fear? The guy you hate is dead, and all you lost was a bullet from the chamber.

By contrast, would you kill someone over a disagreement where you live right now? I don't care about your morality, because I guarantee you that before you thought about the ethics of murder, you thought "fuck no, I would be in jail for the rest of my life!". The risk of punishment keeps your average asshole from pulling a gun on everyone who so much as looks at him funny.

My personal opinion on the matter is that government is the way to go, but we haven't found a good system yet. What I personally believe we should do is take the current American system, but add an "honesty policy" -- if any elected official gains office on a promise and then does something in contradiction with that promise, they're immediately removed from office. This would allow people to elect those that would truly please them, not just the lesser of two evils who are almost certainly lying through their teeth during election to win the majority. (I'm looking at you, Bush, you and all your warmongering.)

 

[DaJoW]

Are the forms anything specific or just varying levels of senseless?

There are several different kinds, most of them contradictory. They want to remove any government and authority, and then have a structured system, many of them with laws. Anarcho-capitalism, for example, want the removal of the state and then an anarchic society living in the free market, but still have private law. They want laws with either no authority to back it up, making it de facto more of a wish than a law, or upheld by individuals and/or corporations, making it not a system at all since different individuals and/or corporations may have different "laws" they uphold and recognize.

 

[The Stonker]

Why abolish order?
Since most of the time today it's order and law which protects the weak.
Would you like to revert back?
I didn't think so.

Anarchy is for people who don't quite understand politics.

can we please stop making assumptions like this? It would be real easy for me to say that supporting the government is for people afraid of living in the real world.
Anarchy is for me, and I do understand politics. Maybe your the one that doesn't. We do not pick our leaders, corporations do. We get to vote and when those votes do count, it's pointless because everyone you are allowed to vote for is always a liar. We have come to learn this by now, they are all liars.

Our system does not protect the weak. If you really believe that, get your head out of the TV and go out in the real world.
More goes on in the world than what you see on tv. People pulled over for no reason and being randomly searched for anything suspicious (such as books that seem slightly unpatriotic but not quite violent) and god help you if you so much as ask for a reason or tell them they need a warrant to search your vehicle.


Every day the walls are closing in around us, with every pointless law passed another freedom taken away and people like you want to mock anybody that thinks there's a problem.
I'm willing to respect your opinion, I was anyways but clearly people like you are unwilling to respect anyone elses so why should I even bother?

Oh! I can't stand democracy.
I know that I'm quite of a hippocrit for wanting freedom of speech and equal rights for all when I want to abolish your right to vote for people to rule the country.
I'm quite like Plato.
But the thing is that if you've noticed then people most of the time pick their leaders of values such as "I would drink a beer with this guy" and "he looks like a nice fella'".
But why not choose the people that have the knowledge to lead a country and are natural born leaders who have good hearts?
But on the other side you have freedom and all that, so how can we fix this?
How can we get the people that know what they're doing into control and aren't corrupted?

 

[TheHecatomb]

No, it would be tribalism.
Ok yes, tribalism is government on a very small scale.

Exactly.

It's still anarchy. Total freedom doesn't mean you can do whatever you want without consequences, that's just plain impossible. It just means you don't have a select group deciding whats best for people they have never met.
What do you think anarchy would be? One big deathmatch? Of course there would be communities, as long as there are humans there will be tribes or communities.

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by that first point, as I don't think anyone in this thread believes or has claimed that anarchy or any other system would involve people taking actions without them having consequences. There are always consequences, regardless of what system you would live in.

Having said that, I do think you're undermining your own point a bit here. You're saying that as soon as anarchy is introduced, people will start forming tribes or communities, and figure up some sort of system that works for them. Isn't that exactly what we have now? What would happen if a certain tribe gained it's 1000th member, and they collectively decide to choose 10 elder tribesmen to make the decisions for them? Is that still anarchy because they only rule that specific community? If that's the case, what's the difference between this 'community' of yours and, say, a democratic country? The contradiction in your point is that you're saying that as long as there are humans, anarchy will automatically evolve into either democracy in the case of elected leaders, or dictatorship.

Where do you draw the line between a 'tribe' and a nation? Is it in numbers, and if so, wouldn't it be enormously hypocritical to say that for instance 15,999,999 people are an anarchistic tribe and 16,000,000 are a democratic nation? It's a slippy slope you're on, and it has absolutely nothing to do with anarchy. Just basic social evolution.