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Consider that your conventions do not require the power of law enforcement to be able to deal with most problems. You can self-organise to set rules, and show away people who refuse to comply.

Anarchists want more of that, and less of power imposed from above.

Proudhon, the father anarchism, was a mutualist - he wanted most functions of society to be contracted between people,the way a convention goer agrees to terms when entering a convention.

It's not no rules and no enforcement, but voluntary association and consent and stripping away coercion wherever possible.

> You can self-organise to set rules, and show away people who refuse to comply.

Aka "we don't need law enforcement, we can become law enforcement ourselves". And then you have law enforcement. Sounds like a reset more than an alternative.

Not quite so simple: this is what "community policing" is all about. Many portland protesters were there because they wanted the national guard out. National guard soldiers who didn't live there, weren't members of the community... Who could act shitty to community members with no consequence.

Sure, but that's a reset. "I don't like the persons who do the law enforcement, I want to become the law enforcement". And then, of course, not be replaced by somebody who doesn't like that style of law enforcement.

That would most likely quickly lead to massive segregation by any major criteria available, as "community policing" essentially means "no written laws, no recourse, we'll apply them as we see fit", ergo if you're not tightly aligned with the majority in your specific area, you're going to have a terrible time - so you leave for a place where they are more like you. Presumably while leaving your stuff behind to provide valuable "community resources".

I'm not saying that that couldn't be a good thing (homogeneity = less conflict), but I always get the feeling that there's a lot of magic involved ("we will find ways to come to consensus", "once we are free, all disagreement vanishes", which often sounds like wink wink and a few mass graves somewhere) and a lot of what is hand-waved away will present extremely large problems that will quickly make most people long for the stable, predictable and relatively tolerant society we have today.

> “I don't like the persons who do the law enforcement, I want to become the law enforcement"

IMO that’s an overly pessimistic view of those who push for community policing. In reality, it’s more like “we want people with stakes in the community’s wellness to police it, not those who see it as their daytime stomping ground.”

> That would most likely quickly lead to massive segregation

Really? Community policing = “no written laws”? You don’t think there’s a middle ground between “friendly neighborhood policemen” and Judge Dredd?

> if you're not tightly aligned with the majority in your specific area, you're going to have a terrible time

Right, because we currently live in a society that’s totally not segregated by wealth, race, culture, religion, sexuality, or political views. And clearly, the police system has been our bulwark against non-aligning minorities being persecuted! That’s what the protests are all about, right?

> Right, because we currently live in a society that’s totally not segregated by wealth, race, culture, religion, sexuality, or political views.

If local majorities set the rules and aren't constrained by the state in what they can do, you'll think back to these days as the glory when everything was (in comparison) diverse and people tolerated each other. Balkanization describes the effect of that kind of community policing. And you better be ready to adjust to local laws when traveling through the different zones.

With the crucial difference of not having the power to set rules for people who instead opt not to engage with you.

The system a convention uses of having volunteers watching for bad behavior is actually already similar to anarchist concepts of community self defense.

Under an anarchist society, the folks tasked with handling these sorts of things would be volunteers elected by the community (in a con they're instead volunteers screened by the con committee). There would also be an expectation that, in public spaces, it's everyone's job to step in and stop a problem like, say, sexual harassment (which some cons also expect).

Having seen these principles in action at CHOP, I think it really does provide a better and more equitable outcome. However, anarchist systems do suffer from moving very slowly at times.

I posted this already to a different question, but tell me: according to what you said, isnt the KKK a good example for this? It came from the community, was supported by the community, also they were very outspoken against (falsely accused) sexual harassment.

Playing the devils advocate here, but I really would like to know why this is not an example of anarchy; of course answers like people will behave differently if there is no capitalism I find hard to accept without evidence.

The KKK enforces law outside of its community. It's not like they're involving black people in the decision of who gets lynched.

Anarchists are on the opposite end of the inclusion spectrum, even including the wrongdoer in the decision process for what the punishment is, when possible.

Thanks for the answer, but what does that mean practically? Anarchy is only for anarchists (which the correct mindset)? What about all the other people?

One of the fundamental ideas behind anarchy is that legitimate authority only comes from the community that authority affects.

So, say you live in an anarchist commune, but do not believe in anarchy yourself. You're still invited to the meetings where policy is decided, and while you're not forced to, there's a lot of peer pressure to attend. You're still subject to the group's decisions.

Say you completely disagree with this and want to go do something else. The commune tries to get you to attend a meeting about how to respect your wishes to be excluded, possibly sends a delegate if you refuse to participate in even that. They do their best to accommodate whatever it is you're trying to do, within reason (and anarchists are usually very accommodating). People who are extremely stubborn and to the point of being borderline hypothetical are a problem for the anarchist system, but in the end the solution is chosen by a bunch of humans thinking about the situation, and it's not like any other system has a better source of reasoning than humans.

And who makes sure that the authority comes only from the community this authority affects?

Everyone else having similar structures.

This is starting to sound less like good-faith questions than it did when it started. Are you trying to poke holes, or are you trying to understand how this is something someone could actually believe would work? Are you asking yourself how your questions are resolved in existing power structures?

I never realised, but I think my trying to understand something works by trying to poke holes.

I generally found the idea of self governance very appealing, and didnt think much about it, since I thought people have figured out some good ideas how to make it work. When I was getting older, I got more doubts. My biggest doubt/worry currently is that these kind of ideas can actually prepare the grounds for (local) genocide. I am trying to figure out if these worries are justified and this concept has to be rejected for the good of minorities, or if the concepts are advanced enough and take human nature into account.

I do not know if this constitutes bad faith questioning.

Consider direct democracy. If the populous directly proposes and votes for explicit genocide.. how is that a failure of the system? That's democracy in action. To believe in Democracy fundamentally is to believe that The Will Of The People should be done, whether it be noble or heinous. You have to trust the people to make their own decisions and to learn from their mistakes after they have borne the consequences of their actions.

If you concentrate power then only a few get to decide on the matter of genocide. Don't you want a direct say against genocide?

Currently the people bear no responsibility for the actions of their government. They can always say "I just voted for him I didn't know he was going to do that." They are never culpable, never responsible. How can society learn under such conditions?

It's easy for many to ask "What if someone does bad?" under a proposed alternate political system while over looking that representative Democracy is just rebranded tyranny.

Instead of one king we have thousands. Kings of law, kings of the court, kings of action. The people who decide the system have no checks on their power. Once elected we have no hold on them, we can only say "Well we won't elect you again." But only after unjust law had been created. How can any person claim to speak for another? Don't you deserve a direct hand in shaping the rules and priorities of the society you live in? Why should you surrender that power to some random person? How much would you pay someone to undertake a complex and critical task for you without a contract? Would you pay them all of your share of power that is rightfully yours to shape the order of the world you live in-- receiving no guarantees in turn?

Taking littering: how littered is your home? Your work place? What about a Comercial Center? In an anarchy society, the littering is limited to your own property. Yes, you can live like a pig, as long as you don't litter properties of others. If you throw trash in other people property, you don't face a fine, but you will be expelled from the property and face a trial.

In our current society, littering is a problem in public spaces: streets, rivers, sea, etc. In other words: is a problem created by the government.

The main mistake of non-anarchist people is to believe that there are no rules in anarchy, or that it equates chaos or extreme individualism. But there are: the rules that people gives to themselves. An example: religions form anarchic structures. You can join and leave a religion at will, but they have a tight set of rules their members should follow. A power structure exists, but you can accept or leave it.

You might argue that a religion has a government, and thus it isn't "anarchy" according to the definition. But as I said, you can accept or reject the rules, and live under other religion rules, create your own religion or without religion at all. Anarchy equates to "stateless society based on voluntary associations".

Could you expand on how one could face a trial for littering in a society that has no government?

There is no reason not to have government, as long as there is no state and no master/slave relation.

So there is a trial, but no punishment?

The problem I’m having with this is that, while yes you don’t have to worry about the tragedy of the commons in your own home or church or place of work...it isn’t feasible to live your entire life outside the commons. How/where would one receive goods & services? How would one travel from A to B, and over whose infrastructure?

Infrastructure would indeed be communally owned, and the tragedy of the commons need not apply on communally owned property. An economist actually won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating actually how that happens :

"Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded 2009's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on the issue, and others revisited Hardin's work in 1999.[45] They found the tragedy of the commons not as prevalent or as difficult to solve as Hardin maintained, since locals have often come up with solutions to the commons problem themselves.[46] For example, it was found that a commons in the Swiss Alps has been run by a collective of farmers there to their mutual and individual benefit since 1517, in spite of the farmers also having access to their own farmland. In general, it is in the interest of the users of a commons to keep them functioning and so complex social schemes are often invented by the users for maintaining them at optimum efficiency.[47][48]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Except infrastructure in most of the US is communally owned, and we had to institute authority and fines for littering.

While it's true that there exists some societies that have been able to overcome the tragedy of the commons (it's usually extremely small homogeneous societies), I don't think we have any evidence to suggest that it can provably be replicated to the rest of the world.

It's like suggesting that there exists some companies that are able to sustain themselves by being 100% WFH/remote, and therefore all companies should be able to sustainably do that.

If authority turns out to be absolutely necessary, that's okay. It just has to be limited and kept in check.

As for the tragedy of the commons being only transcended in small homogenous groups, that's stretching the definition of small and you can still have norms for larger groups without introducing tons of authority.

As for as some companies being able to WFH and others not, there are reasons that can be anaylized and propagated.

> As for the tragedy of the commons being only transcended in small homogenous groups, that's stretching the definition of small and you can still have norms for larger groups without introducing tons of authority.

I'm not sure what's more of a stretch: defining "farmers in the Swiss Alps" as as "small" community, or suggesting that what works for farmers in the remote Swiss Alps necessarily works for New York City or London or Amsterdam. What happens when people leave their cars parked on the sidewalk? What happens when people litter their dockless bike/scooter-share wherever they please, with no repercussions? What happens when a bicyclist in Brooklyn gets run over by an SUV? What happens if I decide that I like your house, and take it from you by force with my big gun along with my big goon friends, or perhaps even kill you for it? Hell, I live in Brooklyn where there are actual laws and policing RIGHT NOW, and there's still trash littered on the ground, dog walkers occasionally leaving their poop un-picked, and cars sometimes parked on the sidewalk: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.681231,-73.974329,3a,75y,334...

The devil is in the details, and the circumstances that make something work in the Swiss Alps are important, confounding variables. At best, the evidence suggests that minimal order can work in rural agrarian communities, and we see a lot of that play out in rural parts of the US and the EU already.

> If authority turns out to be absolutely necessary, that's okay. It just has to be limited and kept in check.

The vast majority of people agree with this. The contention is at what point this actually turns out to be "absolutely necessary", that's where reasonable people disagree. In an increasingly urbanized and globalized world, the point at which that happens has long since passed. The argument that the GP commenter made can probably rephrased as "anarchy doesn't scale".

> the littering is limited to your own property

The very idea of "property" assumes a government, along with property laws, courts and police to enforce those laws, taxes to fund them, and so on.

I sincerely thought the author was joking at first. My lived experience is similar - some folks just genuinely act crappy just because they can, not because of "is actually caused by the systematic inequalities and injustice those armies, police, prisons and governments make possible."

Ironically, the more well-off are more likely to engage in explicitly anti-social behavior[1]...I'd hate to live in a world of anarchist Gordon Gekkos without an SEC.

[1] A quick article with various linked studies: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/wealth-can-make-us-se...

Gordon Gekkos under Anarchy wouldn't be rich (because significant material accumulation is impossible without private property), so that wouldn't be a problem.

As for a tiny minority of assholes, they have been dealt with for millions of years using social norms and communal existence.

> I regularly volunteer at conventions. Somewhere between 90 and 95% of people follow the rules without much prompting. 5-10% of people don't...

This was my problem with the article. Yes, most people do act exactly as you say. But what if you get that entitled asshole who does actually cut in line? Because there are people out there who will do that. Now what do you do? Resort to mob justice?

There's a segment of the population that won't act that way towards others, and that segment is WHY we have those laws in place.

This happens today, what do we do about it today?

Are laws preventing mass shooters? Sociopathic killers?

The answer is yes.

I'll never understand why so many people believe that if something isn't perfect, it's broken.

All one has to do is read a single article discussing law enforcement finding and preventing a bomb or a shooter to know that our laws are, in fact, preventing these scenarios. They're just not preventing all of the them.

And you know what? That's good. Freedom has inherent risk. I don't want to live in a society where we're so unfree that our laws are able to prevent all crime.

> All one has to do is read a single article discussing law enforcement finding and preventing a bomb or a shooter to know that our laws are, in fact, preventing these scenarios

I don't find articles like this very often. I do find many articles of cia and fbi failure, of the nsa trampling constitutional freedoms, of tsa failing 98% of audits though.

that you've found even a single one means the laws do, in fact, prevent these things from happening.

That's just how logic works.

Okay but at what cost? Perhaps they're creating far more problems than they solve? To take from your argument, freedom comes with risks. If we have to risk the occasional sociopathic murderer and in return not have to worry about being shot by the national guard for the crime of standing on our porch, maybe that's a valid trade off.

You asked a question, I answered it.

I'm not interested in going on a tangent because you had a political agenda behind your question.

The question has been answered.

A political agenda? We're here discussing politics. The bad faith version of what just happened is "look, slavery just works, ok? Is it cheap labor? Yes. Question answered."

To try to wade into this discussion with an absolute refusal to look at a broad picture of small pieces is nonsensical. How can you talk about preventing mass shootings with a simple statement of "yes, obviously laws and police prevent mass shootings?" You know what else does? A lack of guns. Or, maybe, really good mental health care and social welfare. Or, common sense gun control laws. Or... Etc.

By the way, I reject the notion that the FBI actually prevents these things. You look into the story and it's like, they found some vet with PTSD ranting about Jewish conspiracy theories on obscure web forums, then they reach out to the guy and foment him into a terrorist, then arrest him when he tries to buy a gun. Meanwhile 3 schools have been shot up by kids with guns.

Political agenda, come on. What an obnoxious thing to have said to me on this forum.

We went from an article about the philosophy of anarchism to a question of how laws prevent crimes, then onto slavery I guess?

I would almost bet your next post will include a comparison to either hitler or nazi's.

Either way, I'm certainly done engaging. Not of fan of escalation because you lost the point.

What was even the point of replying? Did you just engage to say "uh, DUH laws do things!" Come on.

Obviously.

How many mass shooters are there in the US? How many in the UK? Much less (there are mass murders, terrorist attacks etc. but not very many mass shooters). The difference? Gun laws.