Topic: Feeling comfortable with the word "anarchist". - page 3. (Read 2801 times)

Come watch The Purge movie

Actually, criminal gangs and other organised groups with strong hierachy within them will instantly grab the power and soon begin fighting with each other, the winner forming a quasi-state with its laws, law enforcing bodies, penalty and tax systems... 
Still no trace of anarchy

Where did I state that humans are incapable of organizing themselves? Lions make prides, birds flock together, even wolves form packs and, yes, humans organize into societies. But these are hierarchical structures all throughout with those who subdue and those who are subdued. No anarchy, right? It just couldn't be any other way...

Why did you write this? Did you write these lines for yourself?
You appear to have not read closely what I'd written. This scenario is not within anarchism, it just proves why true anarchism is impossible in reality

It seems that you don't understand how human nature actually works. To keep true anarchy going for any significant amount of time you would need an exterior force that would constrain the manifestations of this nature (selfishness, ego-centrism, greed, etc). There's no such force save for the state (which itself is a converted form of the lust for power, another trait of human nature), which excludes anarchism by definition. I wrote about this previously and this is crucial for why true anarchy (universal equality between people) is impossible in principle unless we have aliens ruling among us...

You simply can't define it this way. Defining it in such a manner would require redefinition of both government and business which are hierarchical structures (meaning hierarchical relationships within them) by their own definitions. I thought it was evident...

How are you going to implement this in reality? Read Animal Farm by George Orwell to see how it would turn out in real life, provided we have started from scratch (and first of all excluded inevitable violence out of the equation at that). People punishing themselves or at least agreeing to take punishment or just agreeing upon anything, what? Where do you really come from? 

I had this written as a reply before I read all the comments, but had posted too son to post again so I copied it and decided to read the comments while I waited, I wanted to be the first to say it haha .

I think the word sounds powerful.  It's great when you act using the non-aggression principle as a guide in your behavior because then people can't have a reason to think you are a bad person, although they still may not like you, they just can't say you are bad.  Then they get confused when you say you are an anarchist and I always hope the contradiction between my behavior and their perception of the word anarchy will confuse them enough that they might rethink their ideas about it, even if it's just to the slightest degree.  Maybe if they think about it, I might recruit a few people just because I tell the truth, its has a powerful connotation so I take advantage of it.

The "rings" may punish the person responsible but colleagues of that person would ofcourse not accept that he did something wrong. In their eyes, there is injustice and so they would also retaliate eventually. Anarchy would divide people and create conflict. The winners of which would rule the people and create democracy.

There will always be a difference in power and there will always be people who will try to rule others. Having complete anarchy would just reset our current political system to zero but the end point is the same. The problem in our society now are dictators, lack of transparency, and fiat currency. Slowly as we solve these problems, the shackles of slavery would be removed from the people. When we eliminate dictators, we let the people govern themselves although I do think that the democracy today should have limitations. Elected leaders should always have pemission from the people to do something. The leaders' job is to suggest and only apply what the people want. When we inforce absolute transparency, we could be assured that our tax goes to the right places. When we eliminate fiat currency, we remove the power of the government and banks to inflate our money supply. We prevent them from indirectly robbing us of our wealth from inflation. There is much to done to fix our political system today. What we currently have is a fake democracy where our leaders act as if they are dictators. We only need to fix the 3 things I have stated above. Sorry but going back to scratch is just ridiculous.

I disagree, the very fact that we have a society proofs that groups humans are indeed capable of organizing them self and build structures that enable a society.

Let's go with an extreme example. Say upon tomorrow the state would cancel all laws on murder and from there on killing someone would go completely unpunished. Would we have chaos and random slaughter on the streets?

No, (at least not for long). The solution is simple. People don't want to be killed, so very quickly kinds of retaliation bonds would form. "If someone of us gets killed we strike back".
Soon they would realize that when someone of one ring acts out on someone of another ring they would be stuck in a vicious circle. So rings agree to punish only the first responsible person.

At next there would be rings that offer investigative services (for ease we call the police  ) if a member is accused and the decision of a tribunal of members of the involved rings (lets call them court ). Soon we end up in a system that's not very different from ours today, but people can choose from different sets of protection and judgement or don't have it at all if they choose so.

Basically this works for most crime scenarios and there is no ruling class necessary for it to work.

False; the entire point of anarchism is to completely decentralize lawmakers.  You, and the people you're participating life with, lay down the laws you agree upon, usually involving "don't kill, don't steal, don't rape" et al following the non-aggression principle, and if someone steps out of line, they are punished by the people who have agreed to instill those same punishments upon themselves if they were to break these laws.  Anarchism is clearly defined: non-hierarchical relationships in government and business.  At any point in time that you present a scenario within anarchism that requires a ruling class and a ruled class, follow these steps:

1. Stop
2. Take a breath
3. Discard the idea

It will save you and I a lot of time.

It may look very appealing indeed at first sight, but there're still a lot of hard questions, especially the questions regarding who will keep people accountable for their alleged wrongdoings ("they must be held accountable somehow"), who will in practice set the rules ("they say there should be rules") and so forth and so on... You will always end up facing the necessity of giving priviliges/power to one group of people before/over another. This will not be anarchy, anarchy in its true form means "each for himself and devil take the hindmost", which is self-destructive and thus not viable in any human society...

For those who are not quite content with the proverb, there's an ending to it, i.e. "but satisfaction brought it back". Apparently, it is still a matter of much debate what this ending actually means for the cat in question... 

Indeed I don't. People should show skepticism and care when approaching something they don't know..though I don't like that saying "curiosity killed the cat". Curiosity can lead to experimentation, which can be very rewarding at times, though of course that depends on the context..clearly being curious about what your own poop tastes like isn't gonna turn out well for you.

As far as anarchy goes, though, I do see a new form of order coming from it in the sense of people being held accountable. I think that's what people think of when they say there should be rules, because if someone does something wrong, they must be held accountable somehow. The way I imagine anarchy would be a society that creates a form of accountability and order without the need of what we know as a government, which we know is a group of people who are placed in some moral echelon above everybody else (legal monopoly over force, etc, etc).

At least you don't deny the fact that if something stinks we should be very careful about touching it (remember, curiosity killed the cat ). To keep some form of true anarchy you would inevitably need to impose some rules over it, which in effect would make it just another form of order

Good points indeed. Whenever I think of the word "anarchist" I think of how others perceive it moreso than how I feel about it. Also I found myself aligning with anarchist ideals shortly after calling myself a libertarian (Ron Paul anyone?). Though with your last point..I dont really feel it's so "natural". If it were this way, then why do we have so many people, even today, advocating for strong, central rule? Even when the US was founded on tiny govt principals, there were people in the US who wanted a king. Sure we've come a long way from outright monarchies, but perhaps what we have now won't result in anything much better later on. Maybe its fairest to say that people inherently seek some sort of organization, and that the only way to achieve such organization is with a central authority with such massive scale and power?


Remember, though, that most little kids have this curiosity to at least touch their own poop but parents disallow that. I'm not saying they should allow their children to do that stuff, but what I am saying is that the only reason we "know" shit tastes bad is because we were told this by our parents and strictly prohibited from experimenting. That and well..shit stinks and you can smell it..you can't smell anarchy


Wouldn't most people create their own "-ism" to reflect this combination, though? lol

Once you learn it means freedom.

I don't align myself with any political ideology, and I suggest that none of you people should either.
Take the good parts from each *-ism and mix it together.

I don't mind calling myself an anarchist, because I look, think and act very differently from how popular culture describes anarchists. This might cause people to stop and think again

At that point I'm ready to explain the etymology of the word, how it means the idea of not having a single ruler/governor and doesn't have anything to do with chaos.

I would consider myself a small government person.  I think I might do a little research on the subject, good talking to you.

I would encourage you to do some research on it.  Would you class yourself as a big or small government person?

Much of the market is anarchy in action.  There is no government required to get us the goods and services that we need.  In fact, the more government interferes the worse these services usually become.  Look how bad banking is for example where the government is heavily involved.

Anarchy is saying you can't use force to get people to do what you want.  It is saying that people trading voluntarily in a free market system provide goods and services to others.

Yes, for a significant amount of time I had a certain amount of discomfort using the word anarchist.

I think I just reached a point where I stopped caring.  Labels are just labels at the end of the day and are there for convenience in conversation.  It's the ideas we have that matters, not so much the label.   But anarchist was the label used initially for this idea so I'll stick with that one for now.  If it turns out that one of the other labels ends up catching on more, a rebranding essentially, I will be fine with calling myself that as well.   A lot of the most prominent anarchists out there who I like and respect use the anarchist label to describe themselves so I figured there was no reason why I shouldn't either.

EDIT:  I also think it helps having a firm grasp of the ideas and ways to talk to people.  Nobody likes getting the question "but how would x work?" and not being able to answer it.  That creates discomfort and people can then imply that you really haven't thought your position through.  It takes a bit of this and talking to other anarchists and reading things before you feel like you won't get caught out by this line of questioning.