Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

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> this is a demonstrably false fairy tale

Demonstrably how?

> Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law?

What is a demonstrably false fairy tale is that we don't act righteously when law enforcement is present. So asking what would happen in its absence seems irrelevant.

> It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.

Above you said it was "demonstrable" but now seem to be settling for saying it's somehow self-evident.

...

Fwiw I don't personally agree with the quoted statement, or rather I agree with only a narrow interpretation of it.

I don't think individuals are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion in all situations without having to be forced to. I do think groups are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without external force, given certain conditions: anarchism in my mind is about local* law enforcement rather than external.

Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.

*By "local" I just mean internal/within proximity to the individual

> Demonstrably how?

Tens of thousands of years of human history. Feuding warlords, and slaves, rather than everyone acting together in unity.

> What is a demonstrably false fairy tale is that we don't act righteously when law enforcement is present. So asking what would happen in its absence seems irrelevant.

Well, we don't have mass rape, looting, or murder. One really needs to compare scale. Democracy seems to be a horrible system, and indeed the worst system, except for all the others (paraphrasing Churchill).

> Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.

You're missing scale. SMALL self-regulating organizations do very well. The key condition isn't just about removing external incentives, but also about scale.

Once you're at some scale, you're guaranteed to have a few psychopaths who work to game the system to personal benefit. A key thing about small-scale is everyone can say "Adolf is a jerk. Let's swing clear of him." Large scale, he takes over Germany, and onto the world!

Likewise, large-scale, you're missing social incentives. Small scale, I can say "I won't steal from you, because you'll think I'm a jerk." Large-scale, try leaving your wallet in the train in almost any major city for 10 minutes.

Tribal culture was pretty good on isolated islands. It didn't go Lord of the Flies. That only happened at scale.

I've seen largish organizations sustain this for maybe a half-decade or decade, but never longer. At some point, game-theoretical organizational models take over, and things never go back.

> Tens of thousands of years of human history. Feuding warlords, and slaves, rather than everyone acting together in unity.

More generally: negative externalities / tragedy of the commons / prisoner's dilemma.

> Tens of thousands of years of human history. Feuding warlords, and slaves, rather than everyone acting together in unity. ummm, both of your specific examples are actually examples of those with power abusing it.

> ummm, both of your specific examples are actually examples of those with power abusing it

Precisely. Those are examples of how, unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.

The whole history of progress in political systems could be oversimplified as a search for laws, structures, checks, and balances to prevent this from happening. In the absence of engineered ones, you revert into anarchy, which leads to individuals amassing power and abusing it.

Things like Democratic Structures, the Magna Carta, and the US Constitution were steps forward to prevent that. Heck, the rigid hierarchy of Ancient Egypt did better than the anarchy which came before. As a primitive form of government, it was incredibly inequitable, but you had far less theft and violence than before. That invention -- explicit governance structures and codified laws -- even in that form, allowed modern civilization.

> Those are examples of how, unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.

They will always do this? What is the source of this knowledge? And I ask that in the literal sense, not rhetorically.

I would say it's the fact that despite humanity's initial state being anarchy, all over the world human society has developed along basically these same patterns.

If someone is allowed to amass power to to abuse others, it is not anarchy.

You seem to assume anarchy implies no rules, but fundamentally to ensure minimal rules the bare minimum is to shut down any attempt at aggression against others.

An anarchist would argue, however, that protecting society against aggression does not require a top down state.

There was a recent attempt in Capital Hill at creating an area where everyone was equal, and as I recall a bunch of people seized power and went on to cause havoc and violence...

How do you prevent someone from building too much power? Well, you need to cap their reserves of soldiers/hardware/supplies. In order to do that you inherently need a stronger entity to enforce those caps...

An early premise of anarchist movements was that there are already someone trying to grab too much power, namely nation states. As such a large proportion of anarchist thought is down to how to organise and build bottom up structures with the intent of matching and being able to counter and destroy the power structures of nation states.

Now ask yourself why you assume they'd be unwilling to build structures capable of resisting attempts to take power, when that is basically the raison d'etre for these groups.

> Now ask yourself why you assume they'd be unwilling to build structures capable of resisting attempts to take power, when that is basically the raison d'etre for these groups.

Not unwilling. Unable. Fighting against something rarely works to bring about productive change. Fighting for something is harder, but often does.

refs: French Revolution. Animal Farm. Etc.

The French revolution brought about sweeping change across Europe in its aftermath. That the changes it brought were unpredictable is true, and that it took an aftermath that lasted for a long time to resolve the fallout too. But to suggest it didn't bring productive change is ludicrous.

And Animal Farm is fiction.

But if you're so sure it is unable, then it doesn't matter then - in that case these systems will never come to fruition, and so debating them is pointless.

Your history is confused. You're confusing the French Revolution and the American Revolution. Change in Europe came primarily due to a working example in America. America was, in a very real sense, a beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of the world.

The French Revolution in isolation was entirely regressive. It led to a lot of unpredictable chaos AND it slowed productive change. An ill-executed plan is a setback. You can see what the example of the USSR did to Communism.

I think I started this thread by saying we need to push FOR something positive, rather than AGAINST something. That's prerequisite to positive change. Pushing for something requires a plan. That requires discussion, debate, open-mindedness, and a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. Mostly, it requires a lot of deep conversation and thoughtfulness.

No, I'm not at all confusing the French Revolution and the American "revolution" (I always find it funny Americans consider it a revolution in the first place - it was nothing of the sort, it was a secession war that did nothing to upset the economic or class balance within American society).

While the American revolutionary war provided some inspiration, the path towards revolution in France involved political changes that had been brewing for a century, and its historically illiterate to suggest it was all, or mostly, a result of a "working example".

It also happened on the backdrop of the dissemination of enlightenment ideas from writers like the Genevan Rosseau, the French Voltaire, and English writers like Locke, who equally were an inspiration in America.

1789 also happened to a backdrop of some of the most severe inflation France had seen, after decades of social upheaval, for example. The revolution was a matter of survival for a lot of people, not middle classes upset over minor taxation, and it changed not just France, but Europe and large parts of the world.

Numerous countries, far outside Europe, still have legal codes incorporating large aspects of the Napeolonic Code that codified a large amount of the principles coming from the revolution, for example [1].

> The French Revolution in isolation was entirely regressive.

This is just pure fiction.

It's clear there's no point in debating this.

> I think I started this thread by saying we need to push FOR something positive, rather than AGAINST something. That's prerequisite to positive change. Pushing for something requires a plan. That requires discussion, debate, open-mindedness, and a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. Mostly, it requires a lot of deep conversation and thoughtfulness.

Most major change has come through protest and people rising up, nothing as naive as what you suggest here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Code

> It's clear there's no point in debating this.

Well, if it's not worth discussing, I'll leave you to wallow in your ignorance. It's clear your mind is made up.

> Most major change has come through protest and people rising up, nothing as naive as what you suggest here.

Perhaps, but the converse isn't true, and the converse is what's more relevant to this discussion.

...you had far less theft and violence than before.

Who kept these statistics?

I really think you need to do some reading on what anarchism actually is before writing criticisms. It really isn't the thing you think it is.

> unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.

Yes. Anarchism is about putting in place those constraints (via systems design rather than external enforcement since the latter requires amassing power in order to act as enforcer).

> Things like Democratic Structures...

You lost me here. Anarchism is democratic.

You seem to think anarchism is something emergent that existed before rules. It isn't. Anarchism is rules without centralising enforcement, not absence of rules. Feudalism in particular is the direct opposite of anarchism.

Please at least Google the term before you go and further.

Well, before my first post I reread the Wikipedia article.

I will mention there's a bit of a dance with definitions with some ideologies which I find irksome. This is true here. Yes, there is some definition which can dodge any specific criticism, but those definitions aren't mutually coherent or consistent. You either get problem A or problem B. You can't use one definition to address one and another definition for the other.

This is common of many ideologies. I've found this to be especially true when talking with feminists. They bounce between a push for equality (for example, abolishing employment structures which favor men), and a push for changes which favor women (for example, feminists in divorce law push for policies which favor the mother). When they get caught in a contradiction, the definition changes like a squiggly fish. That lack of rational, critical conversation translates into ineffective tactics, and a failure to achieve change.

Ya' gotta pick one definition. Then we can talk about it.

Since, ironically, you'd like me to find authoritative references before I talk more, here's one I found on Google:

anarchy

1a : absence of government

b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority the city's descent into anarchy

c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government

2a : absence or denial of any authority or established order anarchy prevailed in the war zone

b : absence of order : disorder not manicured plots but a wild anarchy of nature— Israel Shenker

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchy

> Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.

And how do you remove those incentives?

Of course such things are possible! All we have to do is <something realistically impossible>.

> Demonstrably how?

The existence/necessity of laws to deter bad behaviour.

I think it is more complicated than that, although I agree in some circumstances laws deter bad behavior. However many laws are passed to protect the bad behavior of the powerful. Moreover, under better environments people may organize themselves effectively with only cultural norms - not laws. Think happy families living together without any laws governing their behavior or tribes with cultural norms protecting a common grazing area.

As mentioned upthread though, there's a lot of reason to believe these self-regulating small societies work specifically when they're small - once you get to the point where you don't have a personal connection with everyone in your tribe, the social cost of acting out of the established norm decreases - instead of your close friends shunning you, maybe a few strangers think you're an asshole.

But families also suffer spousal abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse.

That in and of itself should make it clear that anarchism is a fairy tale.

Sure, I'm a good person that wants to do good by society, you probably are too. Nonetheless there are rapists.

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