Topic: How to actually start an anarchy? - page 3. (Read 4114 times)

I agree.

For my personal use while talking to people I use the following analogy:

An atheist = a person who does not believe in an existence of the magical object called ''god''. Noone ever proved the existence of the so called god (a piece of paper called bible proves nothing). what are clergy then? - a gang of pedos, idiots, etc. that just use the uneducated masses.

An anarchist = a person who does not believe in an existence of the magical object called ''state''. Noone ever proved the existence of the so called state (a piece of paper called constitution proves nothing). What are governments then? - a gang of thieves, liars, etc that use the uneducated masses.

not gonna happen

Anarchy starts with anarchists. Stop paying taxes, burn your social security card, dump your TV, and take your money out of the banks. If most people were to do that, we would get something close to anarchy.

There are no shortcuts, but I wish you the best of luck with your endeavour.

Point 1: That is one way to do anarchy, not the only way. The way you describe amounts to ignoring national/state law and everyone simply choosing to live a certain way. A cultural revolution type of thing. That fits in with #5 subversive anarchy in the article I mention above.

Point 2: Cultural anarchy is not a very resilient form of anarchy for reasons you mention. Certain people just don't want to engage in it. This usually breaks down the larger system very quickly. I'm interested in resilient, functional anarchy.

Point 3: There are ways to create an anarchy despite bad actors, but unfortunately they are not as simple as "simply refraining from any attempt to rule..." They involve networks of distributed legal and enforcement systems to check bad actors. A bit like traditional government, but decentralized. Like bitcoin is to money. In fact, the bitcoin protocol can be used to create competitive social contracts.

Point 4: "Anarchy" may semantically mean "without rulers," but what is a ruler? Under the DIYL mindset, my mindset, it doesn't matter what a ruler is in theory or by semantics, but in practice. Depending on what you are referring to as a ruler it might be desirable. Managers, judges, even people wielding physical force to enforce a contract can all be economically, socially and otherwise beneficial. They key behind the power of libertarianism and anarchism is, imho, decentralization of power, not absence of power. Opposition to monopolies on power, law, force...Not opposition to power, law, force...

"Anarchy" means "without rulers".

So you can create anarchy by simply refraining from any attempt to rule over other people. Interact with other people via negotiations and mutually beneficial exchanges and you've created anarchy in your personal sphere.

That's all there is to it; it's not hard at all. The problem for most people is they really have problems with consistency. There's some group of people out there they just can't accept not ruling over with threats and/or violence.

While it's true that a good definition of anarchy would be "no centralized government" that hardly means "no government."
Instead it means something like competitive, voluntary, distributed and/or decentralized governance.

Another definition of government of anarchy is a lack of monopoly on the use of force. Does that mean no one has any weapons? No. It means weapons are widespread, competitive, distributed, etc.

Interesting title, how do 'start' nothing? Ok its not exactly nothing but most definitions of anarchy deal primarily with the absence of X,Y and or Z. Starting the absence of things seems a bit contradictory.

I got 5 ways...what did I miss?
http://caeconomics.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/5-routes-to-anarchy/

from the article:
1 seasteading
2 seasteading with docking
3 cryptoanarchy
4 space anarchy
5 subversive anarchy

and here's one not in the article, maybe the best choice yet: competitive and/or voluntary social contracting