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Comment by sabarn01 | Hacker News Reader

If someone comes and robs you in and anarco-* society what remedy do you have. Not doing business with them in the future seems mild. Getting others to ostracize them will basically become a game of who has better social connections or the larger family. If I go and steal back my property am I subject to his retaliation. Can I murder his relative in retaliation.

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.

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David Friedman's The Machinery Of Freedom goes into detail about these kinds of scenarios. There is far too much there to summarize here.

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).

Wouldn't you say humanity started out in an anarchistic state? It seems that the "workable solutions" tended towards more and more governing until we ended up where we're at. 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. If we we were to start tabula rasa why wouldn't we end up as we are now? Maybe by crafting stories of how bad things are now as some sort of morality tales/warning (religion?), though that'd require hindsight of humanity as a bureaucratic mess which means we'd have to go through this current state anyway.

I hope I made a bit of sense.

Societies have always competed in there own right. The state is a more effective way to organize groups of people than the chiefdom which is more effective than the tribe.

> Wouldn't you say humanity started out in an anarchistic state?

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.

Right, but when I say 'base state' I'm referring to the big-bang of humanity. Those world powers that were able to impose their will evolved out of the same 'base state' as those who had that will imposed upon them. That is to say, Western imperialist powers weren't extraterrestrials that came from other worlds to spread capitalism (although it may have seemed that way to the colonized).

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.

> Those world powers that were able to impose their will evolved out of the same 'base state' as those who had that will imposed upon them.

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.

So, kinda going back to what I initially said, an ideal anarchistic state would require the hindsight of government gone awry, which means that enforcing government at some point would be a necessary step towards ideal anarchy? I wonder how long the lessons of past mistakes would stick before they start being forgotten and start to be made once more. Maybe something like Roberto Unger's "religion of the future" (which also relies on automation to enable 'deep freedom') would have to spring up to soft-enforce a global set of values that would quell the rise of any oppressive government thinkers. Not sure, just spitballing.

> 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.

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...

> All forms of the anarchist argument ignore the fact that governments grew out of necessity and need.

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.

I just can't shake the notion that this is based upon Utopian concepts. The cost in terms of lives attempting to implement Utopian visions in the 20th century can be measured in the 10s of millions. Even if we could pay the upfront cost there is zero assurance that it would be stable or that it would produce better outcomes then what we have now.

> I just can't shake the notion that this is based upon Utopian concepts.

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 don't think governments can solve all problems they can only solve cretin categories of problems.

That doesn't change the substance of what I said. All of those 20th-century Utopian visions that killed so many people were of government solving problems that it can't solve. Even if there are some problems governments can solve (one example David Friedman gives as a possibility in his book is national defense), trying to keep governments limited to just solving those problems has never worked.

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