[pron]

> the possibility for non-coercive collective forms of decision making.

Can you define "non-coercive"? If you want to disallow coercion you must study how coercion actually works on humans rather than decide a priori what constitutes coercion. It is therefore possible that a "non-coercive collective forms of decision making" does not exist (or can only exist under certain unrealistic parameters).

[jessaustin]

Alternatively, one could simply pay attention to how life is lived. Most things humans do are done out of habit. One might suspect that all our beneficial habits would break down if there weren't an almighty parental figure lying in wait to punish us, but that also contradicts lived experience: humans in more permissive societies habitually live in relative harmony even more than those in less permissive ones.

[RodericDay]

Any socialist etc. who studies history will point out that our permissive peaceful society exists with a lot of implied violence that is just made invisible or normalized.

American incarceration rates and health care tied to employer come to mind.

[snrplfth]

Not sure that "too many people in prisons for victimless crimes" and "tax law that makes employer-tied healthcare almost inevitable" are aspects of society's permissiveness.

[AimHere]

His point is that the society might be apparently permissive, at least to those who live in it, but there are parts that aren't (such as those two examples), and people don't generally recognize them as such.

[snrplfth]

But the comment he was responding to said "humans in more permissive societies habitually live in relative harmony even more than those in less permissive ones."

So the fact that, upon trivial examination, a society is revealed to not actually be that permissive, is not evidence against the assertion that permissive societies are harmonious. I mean, I don't think RodericDay was saying that those two examples were impermissiveness that actually increases harmony.

[RodericDay]

Parent post said:

> One might suspect that all our beneficial habits would break down if there weren't an almighty parental figure lying in wait to punish us

I interpreted this in the vein of a libertarian "we don't need a nanny state". And so I assumed that the person was thinking of the USA as a "permissive society in harmony" and of something like North Korea as an "less permissive society in disarray", as opposed to Sweden as a "less permissive society in harmony".

And so I wanted to challenge the notion that the USA is "permissive".

[CaptainSwing]

You're right that it is tricky. Many social anarchists and communists use the phrase 'voluntary cooperation' to describe the social order in a communist society (in the sense of a society without either capitalism or the state).

Whether this is possible or not is beside the point. The argument I was making was simply that the use of the word anarchy in the concept is at odds with its use by most adherents to anarchism