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by ooobit2 2113 days ago
In less time than it takes to read those papers, a tyranny would rise in place of whatever power it succeeds, and that would be insurmountable monopoly.

Imagine the American government disbanding. The kingpins would be Silicon Valley and other West Coast Tech executives because of the sheer convenience afforded by us depending on their hardware (their ideas too) for most communication. People would adapt over time, but that's the issue: over time, people would adapt, not imminently. And the Tech executives would have far fewer barriers to implementing controls than the people would have the means to obstruct them.

I don't doubt for a second that Jeff Bezos would announce Amazon as a leader in "keeping us united as a society," while implementing a new policy in their warehouses that requires Safety teams to lash employees with a bamboo reed each hour if they have not met their rate.

The problem with anarchy, Libertarianism, socialism, communism, and so many similar-veined structures argued for is that these arguments so deeply idealize the end goal that they almost entirely are void of planned action during the transition.

We are physiologically engineered to take the path of least effort. Whatever minimal effort ensures the most survival. The downside to technology is an exponential drop in effort necessary for survival. We need look no further than how far off Reagan was about giving rich people more money in American capitalism (it worked until it snagged on steadily increased market instability, which has since caused massive crashes in 1987, 1996, 2001, and 2008, each time in different sectors and each time due to extremely risky and obviously absurd liability risks taken by the highest brackets of networth wherein any net loss on those decisions was guaranteed to be distributed, whereas any net benefit was guaranteed to be isolated in impact.) We can see this in social justice as well: Feminist organizers are struggling a lot right now after having envisioned a world where "misogyny" was eradicated, yet numbers across the board are going up... more sexual violence, more abuse, more online bullying, more conflicts with other civil rights' movements. The emphasis on a perfect vision has led some amazing women leading the movement to be targeted with abuse from other intersectional groups.

This is just a cursory perspective, and so much more nuance and detail is necessary to get a clear picture, but it is absolutely not as simple as saying, "Anarchy wants/doesn't want to abolish ___." Anarchy is one of a number of social philosophies that by nature are self-cannibalizing, and thereby illogical.

2 comments

You're forgetting the real kingpins: the (ex?) military members who have the willpower, training and actual hardware to project the ultimate force - actual violence.

Your tech execs with all their modern technology can't do anything against a well trained, well organized group of people who will imprison or kill you if you don't do what they say. Or they can work together for an even worse dystopia.

That's anarchy. A few people will work out any issues with diplomacy, while most will band under some leaders and take what they want by force.

It's the same right now, except groups who have an oligopoly on violence (i.e. governments) are few and really big - everyone does what they say and in turn live in relative peace and decent conditions.

> Imagine the American government disbanding.

What you would get then is not a society that had evolved into anarchy by a natural process, and therefore had institutions appropriate to such a society. (Yes, a society that is a functioning anarchy will still have institutions. But none of them will have a monopoly on violence.)

What you would get instead would be a society that had evolved with a hierarchical set of centralized governments, which was then forcibly deprived of those governments, without restructuring all of the other institutions in the society that only exist in the first place because the society had centralized governments. Obviously this will be worse than either what we have now, or what we would have if we lived in a society that evolved into anarchy by a natural process. But that is irrelevant to the question of whether a society that evolved into anarchy by a natural process could be better than what we have now.