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Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs).
> Unlike some other ideologies they will happily answer any questions about it, it's just that the answers are extremely bad, whether it's "how would you make insulin" (you won't) or "how does criminal justice work" (sometimes meetings, sometimes lynch mobs).
That's precisely what I meant by pop culture/mass media. At this stage, this is more of a meme regarding anarchy than reality and this couldn't be farther from truth. (and it's quite an old one, think: French enlightenment era philosophers using pre-partition Poland as an example of anarchy).
To be fair, every ideology and/or mode of societal organization sucks at handling the nasty edge cases (even the best organizational mode we've found has a saying encapsulating this fact: "hard cases make bad law"), but yeah, anarchists mainly thrive in places where they aren't subject to the consequences of bad answers (e.g. twitter, reddit, bluesky, etc).
Communism works. In a small communjty/village. Same with anarchism. Because that's basically how small villages work. You can adjust as needed in the moment without too much effort.
The problem happens when you grow. What happens when people you are governing you will never meet? What happens when you're busy and can't research all the complexities of local politics and some old person is stirring up trouble with yells for not in my backyard stuff... And one person starts bribing and so on.
I think the secret is to make the state smaller, not in the libertarian sense, but in actual geography and number of "subjects". No organisation has any business deciding the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of people. The trend is for governments to become larger and larger, just like any other empire. A one-world government, for example, would not be a utopia, it would be a veritable hell on earth.
(Disclaimer: I'm an anarchist, and as you say, anarchism works only at smaller scales, so I'm biased)
You can't fuck with the US/China, even if nukes were removed, because they are a massive force that will crush you beneath their heel. So there is mass power in unity. However you look at europe, and you see a lot of gains as well, where multiple smaller governments exist, and a unifying body was created to compete with the likes of the US without giving up their individuality. But also the US is distributed since states govern themselves with overarching federal oversight.
It is massively complex. At the end of the day we need not only a small anarchistic state, we also need reasons why some cult of personality won't be able to rally his million followers and start guns blazing taking over neighbors. Unfortunately I feel like democracy is the least bad system we got.
Until then, we're in kind of a political limbo of mediocrity.
The image I have of anarchism is not the mainstream one of "million of people doing whatever they want"; organisation and hierarchy are not in conflict with anarchism, as long as you are free to leave and form your own. So, under that point of view, anarchism-as-political-force is little more than a multitude of small heterogeneous communities collaborating and trading with each other. Maybe the secret is to embrace our tribal nature, but avoiding the issue of cult of personality—this is an interesting dilemma to which I don't have a good answer for, so thank you for the food for thought.
Being altruistic is great, but at some point you run out of necessary resources. And altruism dies at scale when resources dry up.