I don't see it getting anything like mainstream traction ever, as it's a lifestyle as much as it is a philosophy. I also don't think it's how people naturally behave. People seem to like to be ruled, so long as they have just enough freedom.
I don't see it getting anything like mainstream traction ever, as it's a lifestyle as much as it is a philosophy. I also don't think it's how people naturally behave. People seem to like to be ruled, so long as they have just enough freedom.
Look at Hobbes he lived though the chaos of the interregnum and decided that the state was all that mattered.
Plenty of people demonize capitalism.
Kind of hard to organize when you're whole philosophy is allergic to hierarchical structures.
So you're admitting that it's a losing proposition for getting anything done? The banner of anarchy seems to be good at organizing people into building weapons, collecting fireworks as munitions, and organizing tactics to be able to get away with assault and vandalism. You can see the violence online in videos, and I've personally been to places where those weapons are made and stored.
People seem to like to be ruled, so long as they have just enough freedom.
AFAICT, this is generally how people are put together.
At its core, it's basically everyone doing themselves. I do my thing, you do your thing, it's all good. Until the thing I want to do interferes with your thing. And yes, we could come to some agreement. But there is going to be a certain segment of asshole that will just decide: Me strong, you weak, and just override you.
And that's what you really get, a rule of the weak by the strong. Unless, of course, we gather enough of us to overwhelm the asshole. But what if, in our group, we have conflicts? Well, we have some rules. Yeah, not everyone will get exactly what they want all the time, but a tiny bit of compromise is still better than having the asshole take your stuff for the fifth time this week.
But that's a winning strategy. And don't think the assholes won't notice. Then they get groups. So the groups escalate further and further. And as you bring in more and more people, there are more and more rules. Eventually, what you will have done is simply to have recreated modern governmental structures. We are living in the endgame of anarchy.
So, I don't think it's so much that "people like to be ruled", as much as "people would rather there be a set of standards people are expected to follow". Someone needs to enforce the social contract.
I don't think anarchism is evil, just naive.
No, it isn't. Anarchists can cooperate; in fact, rational anarchists will certainly cooperate with each other, to reap the benefits of specialization and trade and comparative advantage.
What anarchists object to is being forced to cooperate when, if left to themselves, they would choose not to.
> there is going to be a certain segment of asshole that will just decide: Me strong, you weak, and just override you.
These people exist whether society is an anarchy or not. The difference is, in an anarchy, they have no way to capture more resources and power by, for example, becoming politicians or regulators or lobbyists or heads of corporations getting government favors. Whereas, in the system we have now...
In other words, anarchists are basically pointing out that trying to "fix" the problem of assholes by having a government is a "cure" that is worse than the disease.
> Someone needs to enforce the social contract.
You enforce the social contract socially: by refusing to deal with people who do not respect it. In an anarchy, everyone has that option; and therefore people who do not respect the social contract quickly find themselves ostracized and powerless.
Whereas, in the system we have now, people can break the social contract with impunity without losing anything, if they can get themselves into certain privileged positions.
Sure there is: citizens with guns. In an anarchy, there is no centralized power, so thugs have no advantage in that respect over armed law-abiding citizens. And thugs have a big disadvantage: they do not cooperate in productive endeavors, so they don't accumulate wealth.
> ostracism is no response at all to roving pillagers.
Sure, but it's not the only available response either. See above.
I mean, really? Thugs don’t work together? That’s basically the history of humanity in the absence of a state, it’s what knighthood and aristocracies were. Thugs, working together to the bare chaotic minimum required to keep the peasants in line.
Edit: How are you going to get the guns? Remember we're imagining an anarchy, where you can't get guns by taking over the military (there isn't any) or the government (there isn't any). You would have to either make them yourself (a productive endeavor, which thugs don't do--see below) or trade for them (which means you would have to have something worth trading, which again requires productive endeavor) or steal them (but how are you going to steal them when you don't have any weapons to begin with, but the people who make the weapons by productive endeavors do?).
Unless your anarchist society has the tech to make all existing guns and weapons evaporate then they’ll be for the taking. If not, without a government my buddies and I can get a warehouse full of CNC machines and mill assault rifles until the go out of fashion. With no oversight, no need for secrecy, weapons are easy to make. Hell, I’d be shocked if quite a few people here couldn’t make their own nuclear pile if no one was there to stop them, and work their way back to nuclear weapons. Even barring that, again, many people here on HN have the information in their heads to make napalm, explosives, and a variety of poisons including nerve agents. The reason they don’t is sanity, society, and international controls. Take that away and it would be trivial to gas your annoying neighbors.
Also, haven’t we already established that thugs can work together? See: all of human history. They just need aligned goals for however long it takes to crush dissent, then turn on each other. Even the Middle Ages has craftsmen and smiths, and they were essentially owned by thugs who used them like a resource.
Basically, as I said in response to another poster downthread, you are imagining an anarchy as just like our society, but with government and governmental law enforcement suddenly removed.
Unless you’re just entertaining a fantasy with no basis in reality and our lives, I’m thinking of anarchy at some time in the future, which means guns, bombs, aircraft carriers, ICBM’s already exist and can’t be wished away. If you propose a gradual turnover then you need every government and member of those governments to agree, sat which point you don’t actually need anarchy anymore, because you’ve already united the world. If you can conjure an anarchistic future not base on absolute fantasy, which doesn’t turn out horribly I’d be amazed.
How are you going to get the guns? Remember we're imagining an anarchy, where you can't get guns by taking over the military (there isn't any) or the government (there isn't any). You would have to either make them yourself (a productive endeavor, which thugs don't do--see below) or trade for them (which means you would have to have something worth trading, which again requires productive endeavor) or steal them (but how are you going to steal them when you don't have any weapons to begin with, but the people who make the weapons by productive endeavors do?).
> Thugs don’t work together?
They work together at being thugs (though even that tends to be limited). They don't work together in productive endeavors, which is what I said.
Basically, as I said in response to another poster downthread, you are imagining an anarchy as just like our society, but with government and governmental law enforcement suddenly removed. That's how you can imagine, for example, that there are all these guns lying around that you can just take (because previously government and law enforcement was preventing you from taking them, but that's gone now, and since government has largely disarmed citizens, they won't be able to resist you). But that's not what a functioning anarchy, in a society that had evolved to be an anarchy (as our current society has evolved to have governments doing lots and lots of things and micromanaging our lives) would be like.
You're the one basically imagining our society but with government and "governmental law enforcement" suddenly removed. Everyone will just behave because we don't have police, but for some reason we all have laws we all agree on.
But you coincidentally don't remove "laws", because those are important to keep. But we all enforce the laws because of reasons...
Assuming your opponents are weaker, less intelligent, less organized, or less determined is how you end up with your back against the wall then the time comes.
It doesn't take a group of "thugs", just a group of people with the means and motive to do it. And with nothing stopping them, they will.
Government is the enforcement of the social contract on a large scale. At some point, we agree to follow certain rules in order to ensure others also follow those rules.
It's funny, the people who most clamor for anarchy would be the ones most disadvantaged by it.
And yes, certain communes "work", but they work by extension of being a part of a larger entity that does have a government.
And you can talk all you want about "past societies", but unless you skipped half the words being said, those past societies are necessary stepping stones to what we get today. Those Icelandic villages are small-scale governments. The minute someone isn't allowed to do something, you've lost anarchy, you're building to modern government. Absolute freedom is absolute. There is no "anarchy but don't kill anyone".
I don't know where you're getting that from. I have not only not imagined any such thing, I have explicitly said several times in this overall thread that that's not the way to imagine a functioning anarchy.
If your argument is that "we can't get there from here", I have already agreed, in response to another poster downthread (PeterisP), that this is a valid point. But that is not a criticism of anarchy; it's a criticism of us humans, who have painted ourselves into this corner where we can't trust governments to uphold our rights but can't get rid of them either.
No, they aren't. They are arrangements of mutual cooperation that are voluntary on the part of all parties. Nobody has the authority to force anyone else to participate. Nobody has the authority to make laws that everyone must obey on pain of punishment. Nobody has the authority to "not allow" someone else to do something.
You have a very naïve view of government:
> Government is the enforcement of the social contract on a large scale.
Government is supposed to be this, yes. But that's not how it actually works out in practice.
I don’t think he does, he’s just not sold on your alternative based on childlike assumptions such as They work together at being thugs (though even that tends to be limited). They don't work together in productive endeavors, which is what I said. You keep alluding to your perfect vision of anarchy, and when people point out how impossible it is in the world we already live in you either pivot to “government is bad,” or “that’s not what I mean by anarchy.”
So maybe it’s time you lay out in detail how you get from Earth 2018 to pdonis’ anarchy at some point in the future. Remember to avoid magic, changing human nature, and all of the criticisms levied so far. You don’t get to handwave away any parts, you don’t get to assume things like worldwide cooperation or “peace already broke out in the Middle East” and you have to account for all of the world’s tech, armaments, etc.
Convince us.
You don't think "Government is the eoforcement of the social contract on a large scale" is a naïve view of government?
> your alternative based on childlike assumptions
So you think thugs actually do work together in productive endeavors? Isn't not doing that the definition of a "thug"? Thugs might make use of things that others have already produced, but they don't produce anything themselves; if they do, we don't call them thugs.
> maybe it’s time you lay out in detail how you get from Earth 2018 to pdonis’ anarchy at some point in the future
I have already said, in response to several other posters in this overall thread, that it's quite possible that we can't get there from here. But, as I said to those posters, that's a problem with us, not with anarchy.
> Convince us.
I can't convince you if you refuse to even try to imagine what an actual functioning anarchy--a society with no government, no entity with a monopoly on the use of force or the right to make rules that everyone must follow whether they want to or not, but which still is populated by citizens who understand the benefits of social cooperation and are willing to regulate their own behavior to achieve those benefits--would be like. I agree this task of imagination is a very hard one, because all of us have grown up in a society which has evolved for centuries, if not millennia, under the assumption that a society has to have a government, and in which over time governments accrete more and more functions and people come to think of them as having to be done by governments, even if they could be done better by private entities. That's why I have several times referenced David Friedman's The Machinery Of Freedom, which is a serious attempt to undertake this task of imagination in some detail. It's not something that can be done within the scope of a HN comment.
I said assholes.
Plus, you have defined "thug" as "people who cannot produce anything themselves" and are holding everyone to that definition even though no one else has agreed that that is an acceptable definition of thug.
Which is kind of funny considering the root of the word thug traces its roots to an order of thieves and assassins in India.
So stop focusing on the word "thug", it's a pointless diversion and doesn't really answer the question: What do you do when a stronger, organized force decides that it wants what you have?
Saying "It won't happen because thugs don't join gangs and we'll have all the guns because only good people make shit" is Platonic ideal of naivety.
I never said you did. The post of mine that you were responding to here was not in response to you; it was in response to GW150914.
> What do you do when a stronger, organized force decides that it wants what you have?
What do you do in this case in our current society? If you think the government is always protecting you from this, you need to think again.
Government is that. When you have something that is enforcing a social contract, that is government. Not every government requires a building, elected officials, etc. It is simply the means organizational policies are enforced. And your village is an organization. It has policies. Your system of ostracizing is the mechanism by which you punish citizens who don't follow the rules of anarchy.
So, if someone in one of those villages murdered someone else, nothing would happen? Nothing would stop them? If I want your stuff, I can just take it. Nothing will happen? Or will the entire village exact punishment? How is that any different to what we have?
Your problem is that you don't agree with all of the rules we do have. You want those rules gone. And you think that everyone thinks like you so that if we had "no rules" (aka just the rules you like), we'd all be happy.
And I never said my argument is "we can't get there from here". I never even suggested that in the slightest. Bringing it up again and again is arguing against someone who isn't here. So I don't care what you think about that one way or the other.
My point is that anarchy leads to government. Always. Because there will be rules some people want enforced and they will accept rules they're not thrilled with if it means they get most of the rules they do want.
Also. This is just straight up government. If that's your idea of the ideal anarchy, then your ideal anarchy is government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth
Where did I say that?
At least as far as the major rules (don't murder, don't steal, don't cheat, etc.), I have no problem with those at all. I'm sure we could find disagreements over minor rules (for example, I don't think laws that impose penalties when no harm has been done, such as most traffic laws, should exist), but those aren't what I'm talking about in this discussion. What I'm talking about in this discussion is the fact that governments (a) don't actually uphold the rules that the vast majority of us agree on, and (b) impose lots of other rules that the majority of us don't even want, but get put in place because some special interest group grabs enough attention to get them on politicians' radar, even though the proposed rules don't even fix the "problem" that triggered them in the first place.
Only if the enforcement is coercive. Otherwise the term "government" is meaningless, since every social interaction can be viewed as some kind of "enforcement" of some "social contract". Enforcement by the voluntary choices of other people not to associate with you if you do things they don't like is not government.
> So, if someone in one of those villages murdered someone else, nothing would happen?
Not at all. Instead of concocting straw men, you should go read Friedman's treatment of saga period Iceland.
> I never said my argument is "we can't get there from here".
Fine. Other people have made that kind of argument, so I'll just respond to them on it from now on.
That's another definition you're trying to overload.
Also, what happens if I don't agree with a rule. And then I break it? If there is some sort of punishment, then there is coercion. Fear of punishment is a coercive device.
Then what happens. Tell us that. "Nuh uh" is not a coherent defense. The period of Iceland mentioned in that book was a federation headed by a monarchy. That's a government.
Then you and I are defining the word "government" differently. What I am arguing against is coercive enforcement of rules. You can call it whatever you want; if you don't want to call it "government", then let's just avoid using that word at all so we at least know what we're talking about.
> what happens if I don't agree with a rule. And then I break it? If there is some sort of punishment, then there is coercion
Then, once again, you are giving different meanings to words than I am. "Coercion" as I am using the term means forcing people to do things they would not voluntarily choose to do. Letting people voluntarily choose to do something, in the full knowledge that they will suffer consequences, and then imposing those consequences, is not coercion.
Also, you use the word "punishment", but I haven't used that word. I have not talked about throwing people in jail. I have only talked about things like refusing to interact with someone. Unless you are going to claim that you have a right to have other people interact with you, no matter how much of an asshole you are, then I don't see how you can call it "coercion" when people refuse to interact with you because you refuse to regulate your behavior in order to facilitate cooperation.
Violent consequences are a more complicated matter, yes, but (as is discussed, for example, in Friedman's book) there is still a key difference between violent consequences from private entities (who have to weigh the possibility that they will in turn be targeted by violent consequences from other private entities) and violent consequences from governments (which do not suffer any consequences in turn, because they are allowed to do things that would be considered crimes, at least on their face, if private entities did them--in fact, this is how Friedman defines a government).
As I've already said, that's way too complicated for an HN comment. Which is why I've referred, multiple times now, to a book-length treatment of the subject.
See my responses to bena and PeterisP downthread.
The reason I ask these questions is we have a lot of evidence of what happens in societies with out 3rd party enforcement and it usually doesn't tend toward individual safety or security.
The one point I will make is that, when people imagine anarchy, they imagine the society we have now, and then just take away government and all its functions, such as police. Of course what you get when you imagine that is terrible. But it's terrible not because anarchy is terrible, but because our society has evolved for centuries to (a) assume that government will always be there, and (b) gradually put more and more functions on government, even if they would actually be better done privately.
Of course what you get if you take a society like that and just remove government will be bad; but that's not a fair picture of what a society that had evolved for a long time as an anarchy--i.e., in which people understood that there was no government to "fix" all their problems, so they need to come up with workable solutions themselves--would look like. Friedman's book is an attempt to imagine that, in detail.
> we have a lot of evidence of what happens in societies with out 3rd party enforcement
No, we don't. We have a few failed states like Somalia today, but they are few; almost all societies on the planet today have governments.
However, when you start looking back at historical examples, you find much more promising cases. One that Friedman discusses in his book is saga period Iceland, which did quite well for centuries with no government. Other examples are some of the American colonies--Pennsylvania up until the 1750s or so is a good case--which, while they had entities they called governments, used them for nothing except to represent them in negotiations with other colonies and with the British government. These "governments" had no law enforcement powers and no powers of taxation, and people came up with various private means of working together and enforcing what we would call "laws" (but which were not brought into being by legislative fiat, but by contractual agreements between individuals).
You wouldn't call all the human societies that existed prior to the modern nation state version of this experiment If the colonies count we have enumerable examples and in all cases at a certain point of density people took it upon themselves to form governments and delegate punishment to an other power. All forms of the anarchist argument ignore the fact that governments grew out of necessity and need. weather for internal control or to protect against an external force. I view human nature as unchaining so I doubt that any theory can hold sway over it.
Pinker has this in his book but its good to reference. Also Fukiama https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Political-Order-Prehuman-Revo...
https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...
The fact that governments grew out of a need to regulate social cooperation does not mean that governments are the only, or even the best, method of meeting that need. We have learned a lot in the past 10,000 years about the downsides of using governments to fill this need; that experience means we are not in the same position as the people 10,000 years ago who first formed governments. Governments exist today mostly out of inertia; that's how we've always done it. Maybe it's time to re-examine that belief.
So is the idea that governments can solve all problems. And all of the Utopian visions you speak of that cost upwards of 100 million lives in the 20th century were visions of government solving all problems, not of abolishing government.
I hope I made a bit of sense.
Back when all humans were hunter-gatherers, this was probably true, yes, given what we know.
> It seems that the "workable solutions" tended towards more and more governing until we ended up where we're at.
Only after the invention of agriculture. But the period since that invention (about 10,000 years ago) is somewhere between 10 percent and 1 percent of the time humans have existed. So for most of the time humans have existed, the "workable solution" was (most likely--see above) anarchy.
The invention of agriculture had two key effects: it allowed the human population to grow dramatically, and it caused the population density to grow dramatically since agriculture requires fixed dwellings and more concentration of people into towns and cities. These two changes drastically increased the need for mechanisms to regulate social cooperation, which became what we know as governments.
Since the conditions that created governments in the first place (large human population and high population densities) are still present, we might be stuck with government even with all its downsides. However, advancing technology might open up possibilities that were not there before.
> Sure, there were imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions, but those powers were still a product of the same initial government-deficient base state.
No, they weren't. While there were inter-tribal conflicts during humanity's hunter-gatherer period, those were nothing like "imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions". Those powers were the product of governments, which were in turn, as above, the product of agriculture and the growth of towns and cities.
I guess ultimately what I'm trying to say is that the anarchist experiment has been run (and, as you say, had been the norm for plenty of time), yet here we are. And if we were to run the experiment again, after a sufficient amount of time, I think here we'd be again.
Though, I'm curious as to how you think advancing technology would navigate around the issues of humans generally coalescing into a government-ruled state.
They were all humans, yes, and they all evolved ultimately from hunter-gatherers, yes. That doesn't change the fact that the "world powers" were societies that had had governments for centuries, if not millennia, and were only able to be imperialists because they could use the coercive power of those governments to appropriate the resources they needed to be imperialists.
> the anarchist experiment has been run
Starting with hunter-gatherer humans, who then invented agriculture, formed governments to address the issues that arose, and had no idea what they were letting themselves in for.
If we were to run the experiment again, it would be with humans who now have 10,000 years of experience with all of the problems that governments create. That experience puts us in a very different position from the humans who first formed governments. So the experiment would have very different initial conditions, which could produce different results.
> I'm curious as to how you think advancing technology would navigate around the issues of humans generally coalescing into a government-ruled state.
By providing alternate means of regulating social cooperation that do not require coercion. The Internet is, of course, the outstanding example of this; it facilitates all kinds of cooperation among large numbers of people that would have been unthinkable before it existed.
Automation is another example: much of the drudge work of society that had to be done by humans for most of human history can now be done by machines. That reduces the amount of human labor that is needed to provide necessities for everyone, and therefore improves the average bargaining position of people when they engage in voluntary cooperation and trade to obtain the things they need.
What if people don't want your particular kind of social contract? What one sees of anarchists on the street in 2018, is that they not only ostracize, they do much worse. They enact power over those they disagree with using vandalism and violence. Over social media, they engage in toxic speculations and lies. As it plays out today, it seems to be a philosophy indistinguishable in its effects from, "Two wrongs make a right, so long as it's for us, the chosen people."
That's what having many different communities, each of which can choose its own particular social contract, is for.
> What one sees of anarchists on the street in 2018, is that they not only ostracize, they do much worse.
I'm not sure I would call such people "anarchists" in the sense that, for example, David Friedman is an "anarchist" (at least in books like The Machinery Of Freedom). If "anarchist" just means somebody who claims they should be able to do whatever they want, then that's not the kind of anarchist I'm talking about. I'm talking about someone who understands that, even in the absence of government, there are still huge benefits to be gained from social cooperation, and that people therefore have strong incentives to regulate their own actions to facilitate social cooperation. The only real difference is that, in the absence of government, all such cooperation is voluntary; nobody can be forced to cooperate with someone else if they don't want to. Which, note carefully, means that just taking someone's stuff without their consent, the vandalism and violence you describe, is not voluntary social cooperation. And citizens of a functioning anarchy will resist it, with force if necessary.
I've already said, in response to other posters, that a functioning anarchy of this sort would be very, very difficult to get to from our current state. But that's not a criticism of anarchy; it's a criticism of our current state, and of us humans for letting ourselves get into this state, where we have all kinds of problems with governments violating our rights but we can't just stop having them because nobody really understands how to do voluntary social cooperation without a government.
Does the same apply to your vision of anarchy? Is your proposed method of enforcing the social contract stable in the face of adversity (a Nash equilibrium of sorts)? I.e. for a non-anarchist participant, is it really in their own best selfish interest to participate in that enforcement instead of defecting, and not refusing to deal with people who don't respect the anarchist social contract because it's good for them at that point of time? In an anarchy, everyone has that option as well, and if the boycott isn't sufficiently strong (which IMHO requires it to be organized, monitored and enforced to work in any community much larger than Dunbar's number), then people who do not respect that social contract do not find themselves ostracized and powerless; especially since they'll be dealing between themselves if the anarchist community does not. Are there sufficiently strong incentives for people to actually 'keep to the plan' and fully ostracize the others? There will be some misdeeds done by well-loved, respected members of the community against someone that's not liked - will those misdeeds be punished at all? It's not sufficient to try to ostracize them if there's enough critical mass (which is quite small) for them to be somewhat self-sufficient; there certainly will be both individual maniacs and random gangs and extended family clans that will laugh at such ostracism, in which case you need to be able to reliably organize enough violence to physically prevent them from breaking the social contract and getting away with it; and you need to be able to get everyone to agree that this person or group has broken the social contract, instead of you just wanting to remove a competitor.
My core point is probably the following:
1. there would inevitably be certain sub-groups run by decidedly non-anarchistic principles, obtaining strong cohesion by whatever means. Cliques, family units/clans, groups of friends, etc - the concept and benefits of cooperation can't be eliminated.
2. at least some of these groups (or their leaders) would have a way to capture more resources and power by easily taking them from any disorganized groups or disjoint individuals, so either:
3a. the surrounding anarchists would be forced to cooperate in a sufficiently organized manner, to become a larger and more organized group than the local strongman/warlord/whatever, and enforce that social contract on them; and be prepared to do it permanently, as otherwise the threat would re-appear - in which case that organizational structure and its decisionmaking process, whatever it may be, is a de-facto non-anarchistic ruler of that area.
3b. the surrounding anarchists do not manage to cooperate in a way that results in them being the largest/most organized group in the area, in which case, their communities are eventually 'eaten up' by the larger non-anarchistic groups/organizations that force their will on them, and eliminate anarchy in that area.
Can you imagine (and describe) how would an anarchistic community operate sustainably next to a miniature equivalent of North Korea, a plantation using slaves, or a religious cult that's eager to push their rules onto everybody they can? How would many village-sized anarchistic communities cooperate to unify against a common threat that one or two villages can't handle on their own? For a social system to be possible, it has to be somewhat stable, it has to be able to overcome competing systems (both from within and from outside); both dictatorships and democracies have shown themselves to be capable of resisting/suppressing at least a certain size of revolution attempts; if a system can be overthrown or overtaken by a reasonably organized band of men, then it will be overthrown, and if such threats force a system to change, then the system will change and the unchanged system can't exist.
All competing systems have processes to eliminate other systems (i.e. enforce their rule) within their 'zone of control' - if anarchy has no plausible process to enforce 'rule of anarchy' i.e. prevent pockets of democracy or dictatorship or theocracy or whatever from rising, thriving and expanding within its zone of control, that's what will happen and the anarchy will cease.
Yes, this is a fair point, and is probably the main reason anarchic societies have not been more common historically. It also doesn't help that pretty much all humans on the planet have now been conditioned for at least some centuries now, if not longer, that a society has to have a government to function, so they can't even conceive the alternative.
Even the "ideal" he is putting forth isn't really anarchy. Because anarchy means absolute freedom and the minute you don't allow someone something, freedom isn't absolute. And the minute you get two people living as some sort of unit, you have compromise.
Cooperation is good, systems of cooperation are better. Government is a solution to the problem of individual trust. In a completely anarchistic system, I can't trust you and you can't trust me. Either of us are allowed to break our bond at any time. We need an impartial third party to manage our interactions so that if one of us decides to screw the other, that person is appropriately admonished. Something to govern interactions of citizens, if you will. So whatever system you've set up to govern the interactions of your citizens is de facto a government. Even if you don't explicitly call it that.
No, it doesn't. It means the absence of government. Nobody has absolute freedom; even in the absence of government, everyone has to deal with other people in some ways.
> In a completely anarchistic system, I can't trust you and you can't trust me.
This is simply false. Do you trust your friends? If so, would you stop trusting them if there were no government?
There are plenty of ways for people in the absence of government to build trust relationships with each other.
> We need an impartial third party to manage our interactions so that if one of us decides to screw the other, that person is appropriately admonished.
And you think government, as it actually is instead of as it might be in somebody's idealized model, is such an impartial third party? Surely you jest.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/anarchy
Absolute freedom.
You do understand I'm talking about two strangers. Of course, you can build trust between people over time. But no one comes into a situation with trust. And if we can't start on a basis of trust, then we can't start. Knowing there are repercussions for breaking that trust allows us to treat.
You're the one peddling a libertarian fiction novel as the-one-true-way and not even taking half a second to consider the actual ramifications. Or if "anarchy" is what you actually want. (Hint: it isn't)
You can't make reality be the way you want it to be by defining words. Nobody has absolute freedom in reality.
> Knowing there are repercussions for breaking that trust allows us to treat.
There are repercussions for breaking trust whether there is government or not.
If your claim is that governments do better at enabling trust relationships to develop than a society without government (I'll stop saying "anarchy" since you keep quibbling about the definition of that term) would, then please show your work. From where I sit, governments have possibly done better in some respects, but those benefits, on net, are more than outweighed by the ways in which governments allow people in positions of power to abuse trust without paying any price.
I'm using the common, accepted definitions. You're trying to define "thug" to mean "can't engage in productive endeavors" and "government" to include a coercive element. Neither is commonly accepted.
I nobody has absolute freedom in reality, then by your admission, anarchy is impossible and what you want isn't anarchy.
Yeah, if we agree on something and I break that agreement, the repercussion is you don't like me. Whoop de shit. I can fleece you as hard as I want until that point.
Once you envision a body that will recover your property, you have envisioned a type of government. The problem is you have a very narrow definition of "government". You only see it as a bunch of people "in charge" in a central building making laws by fiat (even though that's pretty reductionist, but then again, you are). It's not always that.
Even an ad hoc, informal system of rules and enforcement is a government.
I strongly disagree, but at this point I don't think further argument will help. You and I are simply speaking different languages, and I don't have the time or the inclination to try to learn yours, and I get the idea you feel the same about mine.
Anarchism is an ideology that has been formalized over 150 years ago, with numerous books and treatises on the subject. I'm not an anarchist, and not particularly sympathetic to them, but to claim that "they haven't really thought trough their position" is more than a tad condescending.
BTW, if you want a not-so-dry treatment of how an anarchist society might work, read Le Guin's "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia". It specifically answers your questions about conflicts. Maybe not the way you like - not even the way some anarchists in the story like - but it's an answer.
I'd bet good money psychopaths and sociopaths absolutely thrive in anarchies which are engaged in "action" which includes violence.
There is a brand of "anarchist" which is doing just this in 2018.
But that's a winning strategy. And don't think the assholes won't notice. Then they get groups.
The history of scenes, groups, and movements of all kinds tells us that such things are started by idealists, but eventually get suborned by sociopaths. So quite often, the assholes will come over and take over your group as well.
I don't think anarchism is evil, just naive.
What's metaphorical and paved with best intentions?
But I'm not an advocate for anarchy in any fashion. It's a situation where I can respect (some of) their desires, but don't think they've chosen the proper way to achieve those desires.
And I think it's important to clarify that I don't think anarchy is inherently evil when I'm responding to someone who is trying to say that anarchy is generally thought of as "evil". (Which to be honest I don't think it is, I think it is mostly seen as juvenile.)
But we can also say they weren't exactly anarchists. They've developed a system of government, leaders, factions, etc.
Bread and circuses.