Exactly this. It's a lovely dream, but humans are lazy, aquisitive, and many would sell their own grandmother to gain a perceived advantage.
Instead of examples of peaceful anarchism, the history of the world is full of examples showing that those with the will to use violence use it for their own ends, form gangs, and militias, become warlords...
Forming gangs and militias is difficult when the status quo is good for most people resulting the majority being willing to use violence to avoid being ruled by gangs and warlords.
The body of your post there seems effectively to be historically illiterate.
And they aren't just militias, they also run civil society.
The written history, the recent past. We can observe settlements from the past but know very little about the time before farming because there were few or no settlements, which is not actually that long ago. This "will to use violence use it for their own ends, form gangs, and militias" might only be because we ran out of resources and space and shifted from "mother earth provides" to "this is mine". At least, that's what a book I'm reading hints at, but again, it acknowledges very strongly just how little we know.
There isn't a going back to before possessions, obviously, but I'm also not convinced that a majority of us are dishonest by nature. Certainly enough that we need laws and enforcement, but what would happen if we manage to get to a point where there are enough resources for everyone and automatic systems do most of the necessary work like making food? Do we still need the same level of security just to protect ourselves from a few sadists or could we have a more anarchistic society? Can we embrace some of the ideas that those unhappy with our current society propose?
Honestly I feel like most of this discussion is a definition issue. One person will say "anarchism is great" or "that isn't what anarchism is, you have to picture it this other great way" whereas another will make different assumptions and conclude it's ridiculous. It's a bit like being in a communistic country talking about switching to capitalism and arguing that human nature's greed can't be trusted or something. Rather, it might make more sense to propose incremental changes rather than talk about a completely different society where (if we're all being honest) nobody really has any friggin' clue if it'll increase median happiness.
One thing that is clear from history is that forming groups is bad. Making this about us vs them (anarchists vs <insert other group>), left versus right, etc.) inherently causes disagreement when I think most everyone's goal is increasing the common good.
Dividing groups and pitting them against each other is bad. Forming groups was the innovation that set our primate ancestors apart from their solitary mammal peers. None of us are as strong as all of us.
It's like all other revolutions having failed the revolution has now been outsourced to hurricanes and floods. if you want to argue that capitalism or the status quo or whatever is bad, make the case how anarchism functions on an ordinary, boring day, that is to say how it organises regular life, that is the relevant question.
2020 being a great example.
Jesus, this whole discussion is such a shitshow. Every time I hear about anarchism I keep wishing someone would explain to me how it all works, I expected a lot from HN users, but all I keep reading is fairy tails with obvious holes the size of Mount Everest. Like, did anyone even consider to think how you'd resolve the obvious market fallacies (which, despite the name, have nothing to do with capitalist markets, but simply with humans / rational self-interested agents).
As long as the concentration of power in the hands of nation states have been the foundation for most of the worst mass murders in human history, it seems quaint to worry that people arguing for making power shared and collective rather than allowing it to be concentrated will do worse.
They will do worse, look around you at wherever there is a power vacuum. What follows? Violence.
So the problem is that the power is not collective other than the power to vote for who the power will be concentrated with. There's a massive disconnect there where, e.g. if we go by US elections, about half the population at any point are ruled by a system they have not consented to.
That is not collective power, at least not collective and shared power of the people, but of a majority at most (even assuming representatives do what their voters want them to, which is also a dicey proposition). Nearly every government in the world tries to limit this tyranny of the majority by legally protected rights to secure the minority against government overreach too, but the fact that they need to demonstrates how flawed this model is.
You assume a power vacuum, but nobody is suggesting a power vacuum, but power mediated by consent, negotiation and bottom up delegation rather than top down coercion.
As long as you're assuming a power vacuum, you're arguing against a strawman.
> If I want to withhold consent to be policed a certain way, I can't, even if I only e.g. live and interact with people who similarly want to withhold consent
What do you think countries are?
Your example of murderers just reinforce that you don't understand the ideology you're arguing against, and opt for arguing against strawmen instead.
You can have people opting out easily without the extremes you suggest. E.g. a murderer can not reasonably "opt out" because they "opted in" the moment they engaged with someone else without their consent.
Again the key is consent, bottom up organisation and voluntary association, not relinquishing all means of protection.
A more reasonable example would be that it is coercive to deny others the freedom to choose what they ingest. Even if it's drugs you don't like. If you want to organise on a small scale a drug free commune, that'd be reasonable. If you try to expand that to a country, it becomes coercive and unjust be nature of forcing massive upheavals of peoples lives, and enforced monopolies over large swathes of land if they don't want to live like that.
Which brings us to this:
> What do you think countries are?
Structures I have no ability to withhold consent from without uprooting my life and/or subjecting myself to another, which unjustly claim monopoly on power over large parts of land. Reject property rights, and by extension territorial claims of states comes part and parcel with all left-libertarian ideologies.
The coercive nature of the relationship means there's a power balance that precludes any reasonable claim of consent.
This highlights the typical left/right view of de facto rights vs. de jure rights. The ability to leave a country confers me de jure rights to extricate myself from the rule of a given state. But de facto I have no ability to find anywhere that provides the freedoms I want, because nowhere exist where they are available. A right wing view is that the existence of the de jure right means I am free. The left wing view is that the de facto barriers to achieving the goal means that I am oppressed, because real world abilities trump theoretical possibilities any day.
It's an excellent example to consider, since vaccines are in that category and some people's free choice to not take vaccines impacts the health of people who cannot take them for reasons of medical complication and now cannot rely on herd immunity to keep them safe.
> Reject property rights, and by extension territorial claims of states comes part and parcel with all left-libertarian ideologies.
While I like those ideologies for their moral purity, I think they fail in practicality for the reason you've just described: they're unstable. Another group with organized use of force and a willingness to take and hold territory displaces them, and then they get to define their actions as just in their moral framework, regardless of what the libertarians think.
The amount he hasn't been able to do in that position is testament to that. Imagine if the US had been an anarchy instead and he'd amassed enough same-thinking folk to take it over?