Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

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How do you enforce rules without hierarchy?

How do you make efficient decisions and coordinate actions against an enemy who has decided that hierarchy allows them to wage war more efficiently and effectively.

Anarchy hand waives away so many critical problems. It seems like a different flavor of libertarianism.

I have a casual belief that anarchy is an ideology pushed by foreign interests (Russia in particular) namely to cause chaos and prevent institutional investment from otherwise liberal people. Institutions build power and power can be used for good or bad. Societies operations depends on good people getting into positions of power out of a sense of responsibility, rather than bad people getting into power out of a sense of ambition.

Politics is largely an idea of how the game prisoners dilemma should be played. Libertarians and anarchists alike believe in an "always cooperate" strategy because "defection" is not a wildly different concept than domination. To defect against someone who cooperates is to dominate them. These ideologies take the stance that no one should be able to dominate, but fail to properly account for those who will choose to try to dominate anyway. These ideologies fail because no matter how much anyone wishes otherwise, might is the ultimate arbiter of disputes and participating in a hierarchy makes you, in the aggregate sense, stronger.

This means it is a somewhat a fools errand to fight oppression because it assumes a position of less power. One must be able to oppress and then choose not to. Then you run into the greater problem of if there are no consequences for you because you are able to oppress, why should you be bound by an ideology that inhibits you?

The biggest problem any anarchist faces is that they think they need to fight the police rather than become the police. An ideologically consistent anarchist should be on the police force exercising their individual power against those who try to dominate others and changing the culture of societies enforcers from within rather than thinking they can fight it from outside.

>How do you enforce rules without hierarchy

I find it interesting that people think rules can only be enforced by a position of power above the offender, rather than a consensus of their peers and equals.

Historical anarchists enforced their rules through a state apparatus that organized mob lynchings and targeted killings. The CNT-FAI and Ukrainian Free State both had secret police organizations, and the former was no stranger to political terror.

Indeed, all successful (even temporarily) anarchist groups grow a state apparatus.

Which is inherently fine, states are a tool of class warfare. The capitalist ruling class uses state power for its own ends, a successful worker ruling class needs to do the same.

I just wish the anarchists were honest about it.

If anarchists read state and rev + on authority they'd understand. But afaik they just like to avoid reading at all.

Ime Anarchist ideology can be summed up as:

Fuck You Everything is Mine

They use a lot of words and games to deflect from it but in the end that's it in a single short sentence.

Walk me through it. Let's say a dead body was found with a gun shot wound.

What happens? Tell me a detailed compelling story of a consensus of peers and equals investigating and resolving the murder.

Alabama used to love that method of justice. It was not a very good idea

By this metric, stoning is anarchist in nature.

In the end there is still jus the singular Jailer or Executioner, right?

There is always https://audioanarchy.org/emma.html ep1 https://audioanarchy.org/emma/01-Anarchism.mp3 narrated by Moxie Marlinspike of Singal fame.

No anarchism (not anarchy) is not ideology pushed by foreign interests. Lack of institutional investment in US isn't caused by few people believing in anarchism.

> How do you enforce rules without hierarchy?

I am curious too. I can see a few problems.

1. Deciding what the rules should be. How rules are generated to start with. (Meta rules).

2. Decide when the rules are broken. Human affairs are messy. So there should be an arbitration process to say “yes rule 1, 4 and 5” were broken by members x, and y.

3. How rules are enforced. To punish someone you may need some real power over them. Throw them out of a meeting. Impose a fine. Jail them in the basement?

Speaking as a computer nerd would a distributed consensus like Multipaxos or Raft but for anarchists work?

They can send messages between each other with increasing epoch numbers and everything.

The problem are the Byzantine failures. Members colluding with each others to take over and not replying truthfully. Also how to accept new members who are not FBI informants.

What do you do if everyone decides Joana has to go sit in the basement as punishment and reflect on her behavior, but she doesn’t want to. Need an new ballot to decide who the group of enforcers will be. Start a new Raft proposal round…

(This is all sarcasm in case it wasn’t clear).

> Members colluding with each other

This is it in a nutshell.

The main primitive a government deals with is disputes. The main unit of corruption is loyalty.

Conservative spectrum ideologies are about systems of loyalty and therefore concern a dominance hierarchy.

Liberal spectrum ideologies are about choosing a set of values that are more important than loyalty including loyalty to oneself. Liberal spectrum ideologies require dominance of values, which requires making responsible (another word for self-sacrificial) choices and "cancelling" those who violate core values.

Most people who believe in human rights don't know they are dirty globalists. To believe in human rights is to believe human rights should be protected, which implies an entity capable of protecting those rights or solving disputes about those rights. Most people who are anti-"being the world police", haven't fully contemplated what it means if we leave a vacuum and China decides they are the world police.

War, more than anything else, is about choosing which legal framework governs a given territory. The Ukraine war is about whether Russian law or Ukrainian law binds the territory of Ukraine. War determines who's police have authority. War determines who's system of justice provides it.

People that want freedom need to stop thinking about fighting power, and think about becoming power. Power is amoral, it is neither good nor bad, it is a tool to be used for good or for bad. Anarchists should focus on tools of power, which are institutions. Unions are this institution, becoming a police officer and providing a counter balance to "those who burn crosses who join forces" does more to further anarchy's goals than anything else.

One has a very simple choice. Wield power or be subject to it.

> How do you enforce rules without hierarchy?

This is why I'm more of a pragmatic minarchist.

People will continue to keep forming groups and multiplying their efforts and that creates power imbalances, and people will continue to keep seeking to try to wield that power.

So what needs to happen is that the government, corporations, unions, and organized religion need to be set against each other and kept in balance. That only happens through the people being educated though and being involved and able to restrict what they can do. Although corporations themselves are formed like dictatorships and that needs to fundamentally change so that they're at least more like representative democracy.

There's still going to be power hierarchies, though, but the point is to minimize them.

Of all the different philosophies, though, anarchism is at least solidly in the right direction, even if the end goals are impossible. But I think its a lot like the "paradox" of intolerance, where the naively perfect world isn't a stable optimum, but that doesn't invalidate getting closer to that being better.

All of this hinges on human being willing to do more than the bare minimum and avoid willful ignorance...

Have you met humanity?

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