Topic: How long would it take for Anarchy to start working? - page 5. (Read 16391 times)

What you say looks more like some giant asteroid hitting Earth, not like a technological disaster. And still less a societal collapse. Societies usually either slowly vanish into nonexistence without raising hell or just get conquered by their more agile neighbors (which is right, in my opinion)...

Yes, but sooner or later we will also be back on a level, on which we have been a million or more years ago. A collapse of a society with aqueducts or pyramids is not the same as a collapse of a society with 500 or 5000 burning nuclear reactors. 500 or 5000 Fukushima events, but without cooling. An equivalent of 100 Million Hiroshima Bombs will be blown out into the atmosphere.

That's what qualitative leaps are created for. You squeeze everything from the current system and then you get to the next level. As simple as that. Actually, we've been there before many times in history...

We still advance in technology and therefore in additional complexity. But it generates shrinking marginal returns and shrinking growth.
The required additional debt reached the tipping point already. The private sector can't take additional debt anymore. That's why the state mafia is trying to compensate it by additional state debt.

It is an interesting point that tipping point. I think you could be right but for a possible qualitative leap, i.e. is a major and sudden change in social structure or something related to it (and this definitely won't be towards self-sufficient, egalitarian communities). I am not that much into sociology and that kind of things, but at least I can explain how it happens in economics and why we are still advancing in technology...

Beautifully said And good point in pointing out the difference between human & citizen.


I suppose he is talking about collectivism from the perspective of G. Edward Griffin as explained here


Given that you already know what choices sensible people would make I fear I have nothing more to say to you.

Again those words, they always give people away. "every sensible person knows, that in the real world, human nature works like xy and thus you need xyz". Yes, of course.

Hawker:

Ok so i think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what we advocate. Which is totally ok because there is wide disagreement even amongst ourselves. Mostly anarchists want humans to be as free as possible and we recognize that its not possible to perfectly predict exactly what sorts of systems will manifest in the absence of a state to serve the functions the state serves now. So as an analogy, if this was the year 1800 and i was advocating the abolition of slavery, and you said "but with out slaves how will cotton be picked" it would have been quite a long shot for me to have correctly predicted that the answer would have been the tractor. With that being said i would be happy to give it a shot.

So basically this is how i imagine that it would work: Before engaging in commerce with someone you would want to be able to feel sure that they were not going to cheat you. Recognizing this fact you would realize that, when engaging in commerce, other people would be thinking the exact same thing about you. So what you would do in order to give yourself a competitive advantage in the marketplace is buy insurance against yourself, that way you could show people that you were transacting with that you had insured them against yourself, this is called assurance. If you were well behaved than this assurance would be cheap, if engaged in behavior that would indicate to the insurance company that you were more of a risk than your rate would go up. Things like being cruel to animals would be a huge red flag and would definitely cause your rates to skyrocket. This is a mechanism of internalizing the costs of antisocial behavior, same as the idealized vision of what law is or ought to be in a statist society.

So having assurance would quickly become the societal norm and rather than checking someones reputation yourself, you would just learn the reputation of various assurance providers and do a quick check to make sure that the person you were transaction with was assured by a reputable assurance agency.

This takes care of everything except people with EXTREMELY high time preference and people who are totally out of their minds. For those sorts of people you would just have to take the risk of being attacked by one of them, buy insurance, or keep a fire arm with you at all times. Your choice.

We couldn't keep it. But we can't anyway. A society is something that always disappears by collapse. It is growing rampant endlessly, until the end. Societies are 'problem solving societies' (Tainter) which are permanently investing in additional complexity to solve the problems. The Game is over as soon as the ever shrinking marginal return of additional complexity reaches the tipping point.


http://dieoff.org/page134.htm

If we were to get back to those self-sufficient, egalitarian communities, how on earth could we at least keep that level of technological development we reached today primarily due to division of labor (which is impossible without building social hierarchies)?

As a side note, collectivism, as per Wikipedia, is any philosophic, political, religious, economic, or social outlook that emphasizes the interdependence of every human. Collectivism is a basic cultural element that exists as the reverse of individualism in human nature

Before the humans were collectivized, they lived in self-sufficient, egalitarian communities within Dunbar's Numbers.
Collectivism (state/nation/church) is the perversion of these natural collectivs/communities.

Paleolithic communities were egalitarian; there was no hierarchy (which is translated as „holy reign“), no domination, no rulers, no chiefs and no warfare violence, as archeology revealed and social science explains.
http://gerhardbott.de/das-buch/summary-in-english.html

I always thought that collectivism was another word for social nature of humans, individualism being the opposite. If the ancient man hadn't been a collectivist, he would soon have been eaten by predators. I think it is exactly due to collectivism in the first place that we managed to survive as a specie during those wild times...

No, that's not human nature that is hierarchical (patriarchical). This is the nature of the citizen, but a citizen is not a human. A citizen is a collectivist. A human lived in a stateless non-patriarchal community, for several hundred thousand years. The last 10'000 years only were the epoche of the citizen, the hierarchist, the collectivist, the idiot.

That is a logic error.  All forms of society, including anarchy, involve forcing your moral standards onto other people.  I am opposed to female genital mutilation and I am happy with the present system where people who do that to a girl are named and shamed in court proceedings and their children can be taken into care.  Anarchists say that female genital mutilation is a personal moral choice of the parents and that they should be left get on with it.  So no matter what you do, you are imposing your moral choices on other people.

Once you accept that logic, you have a decision to make.  Do you want everyone to face the risk of mob law?  That often misfires.  For example, in Wales, a paediatrician was driven out of her home because the locals thought paediatrician is a synonym for paedophile.  Or do you want a system of courts whose approval is required for any violent acts and a system of police who are trained to use violence in a minimal way.

Given that choice, any sensible person will choose to have police.  Its not hypocrisy - its a sensible way to deal with a real problem.

I'm almost ashamed to do this, because it is such an obvious retort:


The nature of the job remains: forcing your moral standards on other people with violence. I find it hypocritical enough to force someone into your moral standard, not even doing it yourself, but delegating others to do it for you just brings it to the next level.

Note: I am not judging whether animal cruelty or any other such thing is OK with me or not, that is besides my point here. My point is (as it always has been in this thread) to get people to take personal responsibility for their beliefs and values. A tall order in a culture where it's standard to just adopt standards from figures and institutions of authority. We are a sad, sad culture of people, who would trust the word of "experts" more than their own judgement

So your ideal society is one in which people get killed by "Professionals with black clothing and silenced weapons" hired by anyone who thinks they are cruel to animals.

And you think killing someone is no different from a jail sentence.

A lot of anarchists come across as morally confused.  They talk about freedom but want to impose their own views on other people in a totally undemocratic way.  Your idea of being able to have people killed without trial if they are suspected of being cruel to animals is an extremely good example of this moral confusion.

Or you teach them empathy by explaining how it is wrong to induce pain on another living being, for it is your being.

Professionals with black clothing and silenced weapons, I hope...

There are private charities that check on animals and secretly confiscate ones that they see are abused, providing them with sanctuary, rehabilitation, and new homes. They publicly document their animal's abused state online to show everyone that animals they take were abused, and they had right to save them. When old owners try to sue them, they show pictures to public and to court to prove they are right to save these animals, and win cases every time. I know of one that does this for livestock, and one that does this with ferrets. This could be done with private courts, too. This needs no law, this only needs people's popular opinion. Opinions change, and ethics evolve. I hope they will continue to evolve for better.


We have people all over the world jailed for paedophilia, who are just some people the neighbors or police did not like. So what is different?

Orders prohibiting people owning animals prevent those people abusing further animals.  The system isn't perfect but its a lot better than nothing. 

Your fundamental problem is that as long as you are ok, you don't care what happens on someone else's property.  That's fine.  Just be aware that you do not have to right to impose your rules on other people.  If we vote to prevent an abuser from owning animals, then that person has no right to own animals.

This is of extreme importance to understand.  Point being, the law makes no difference; if you have a principle against animal cruelty, you are not cruel to animals.  If you do not have this principle, you don't care.  Either way, there have been laws against animal cruelty for a long time now, and the animals are still treated cruelly.  The fact that PETA exists at all is enough evidence that the law is meaningless; nothing can replace knowledge and empathy, which is the only way animal cruelty can ever be resolved.  If the state is the sole, or among, the solutions to animal cruelty...what are they waiting for?

Hawker doesn't want to prevent animal cruelty, he wants to harm the people who are cruel to animals; little does he know, this is the societal behavior that contributes to producing the people who are cruel to animals in the first place.  It's a horrendously vicious cycle that can only be brought to an end with knowledge and, for our less-empathetic friends, abstinence from the use of violence.

If we take such a position as a starting point, couldn't we come to what we already have there, i.e. state? I mean that we delegate some functions to someone or to some entity, and thus we are laying a basis for building a hierarchy here. Isn't it what state is all about and could there be such functions which are best served when they are at the top of the hierarchy ("the only true provider")?