Utopia is impossible but...

[pintle]

anarchism is neither feasible nor possible, it requires smaller people groups

anarchism is, imo, the current state of global politics. There is no governing body which actually has legislative and executive power over the myriad powerful entities which functionally rule our world. Violent governments (both internally and externally), criminal organisations, and to a lesser degree the larger multinational corporations, brazenly ignore international law, and do not hold themselves accountable to the rules they set for others.

When the most vocal advocates of due process repeatedly ignore it, i find it hard to perceive the current system as anything other than the rule of the powerful, ergo anarchism. Within this wider context other systems operate, such as the western capitalist democracies, but the extent of their political influence is defined by their ability to defend against the machinations of other parties within the wider anarchy.

I appreciate a certain amount of extrapolation is required to make the leap from a corrupt and broken system of "democracy" to that of a self-moderating cabinet of power brokers negotiating a mutually beneficial course of action.

[SinbadEV]

Japan has a pretty good "shame based" culture that causes people to fall in line without legal repercussions... and there are very few people immune to the "do this or no one will look you in the eyes and not even you family will talk to you"... I don't like that system either.

The one idea I had was micro societies, people would be organized into groups of 500-3000 marginally self governing communities each electing one representative to a local council which would elect a governor to represent them at the federal level.

Within a community you could share all resources but between communities there would be trade and competition to encourage development.

[PicassoCT]

As somebody who has seen local politics first hand- i think microsocietys would need a force having them together, otherwise everyone would run over to the suckxes full ones. And all of the sudden you have funy little states who armed & ready to shoot at each other.

politicians who really fear the end of there power tend to go to the extremes.. sorry to needle that bubble

[Neddie]

Global politics is only anarchic if you conceive of each nation and organization involved as a singular entity, which I do not. You have factions and relations, but indeed little more.

Anarchy is not the rule of the powerful. It is the rule of those who survive, without pretense of government or limitation. Without the lower level systems which lend value to money, which create chains of allegiance, and which allow abstracted talents or abilities some relevance, the people who "rule" our global system would not survive as such. This cannot be anarchy in a pure form if the victors draw power from political and social constructs.

[SwiftSpear]

Global politics is completely anarchic right now. That's a huge part of the reason why global affairs are such a huge mess right now.

Nations of the world need to adhere to social contract with eachother just as badly as individuals need to adhere to social contracts. Whenever 2 parties must agree on something, if neither party can trust the other the result will never be satisfactory. It's ok living this way, acctually probably best, if you never have to deal with anyone else for the most part... hunter gatherer sociaty for example, but in community it's impossible. Simply put, the global population is too large, and the communication tools are too advanced to pretend that global separatism or anarchism is plausible.

Now I know there is probably some American out there who wants to argue this point with me... please do, I have yet to hear a valid argument and I'd really rather believe pure libritarianism is plausible since it would make reality so much simpler... Frankly I don't because as far as I can see the evidence is pretty clear that it's the stuff of fiction.

[SinbadEV]

...stuff of fiction.

Hence why Robots doing all the work that people don't want to do is such an important factor in my plans...


So, from one perspective anarchy is currently the state of international affairs while from another perspective, because they derive their power from an external source it is not considered anarchy.

I have two basic opinions on the anarchist movement:
One, I don't want might to make right, I don't want there be no-one to protect me and prevent people from stealing and/or breaking my stuff, I don't want to have to start carrying a gun to protect myself from people physically stronger then me forcing me to do things I don't want to do. On a similar note their is no guarantee that people who are not able to support themselves and would have to rely on the good-will of others... and I don't trust other humans to do this even as reliably as our current (obviously flawed) system.

Two, according to my sociology 101 professor, anomie cannot exist indefinitely so in order for "Anarchy" to be preserved you would need some kind of enforcement to ensure that rules and power structures didn't form on their own. Which by most definitions of anarchy wouldn't count anymore.

Now, libertarianism, as I understand it, is basically minimalistic enforcement of minimalistic laws and administration of minimalistic social services. People who call themselves "anarchists" in my city have been spray-painting slogans and symbols, on walls and roads around my city and this exemplifies what happens when people don't respect the government or the rule of law.

Personally I think instead of abolishing authority we should "fix" the authority, if this means FIRST taking it down then I feel that THAT is the purpose of anarchy... with all that we currently know a brief period of anarchy to break down the current power-structures should allow a new system of power-structures, more in line with current understanding of human nature and modern technologies.

I believe there was a chinese emperor who tried it and it's worked out pretty good for them. However it really didn't work out at all for Russia so... not entirely sure it's right.

The micro-community idea would suffer from people wanting to be in the better communities. There would need to be some kind of over-arching power structure to prevent this, or cause groups reaching to large a size to separate (like Hutterites).

One system that has worked in the past would be for a community to form around a common creed. Because people are making an active choice to follow this creed in joining the community they have a built in set of rules that they will willingly follow, allowing the communities to work under this set of rules without an authority to enforce them. It is then the responsibility of the entire community to encourage others to do what is required of them or force them to leave the community. This model however relies on there being an "outside world" to send people out into if they no longer want to agree to the terms of the creed. This is the model is used by overtly christian groups like Mennonites, 12 Tribes, or Monestaries have used for a while.

This might work for our purposes if we could come up with a common creed that people of various beliefs could ascribe to (for example All Christians and Atheists might not agree on the Origin of the species but they could all agree that murder and stealing is wrong) you could organize a Hutterite-like community around these types of things and trade what you are able to gain for things from the outside world.

[SpikedHelmet]

Democracy is by and large the right way to go; how its going now, however, isn't democracy - being given the choice every few years to elect from a small group of people, all of whom are rich, priviledged assholes who're only there to continue a long lineage of monopolization, isn't the pinnacle of freedom. The pinnacle of freedom would be removing the ability of some to monopolize and exploit others, and enstating the ability for all functions of society to be decided from the bottom up and not from the top down.

[SwiftSpear]

Sinbad: The people you know who call themselfs "anarchists" are not anarchists, they are anti-establishmentists. Anarchy is simply a philosophical theory stating that the best way of doing things is to not have any governmental power at all, and enforce no laws explicately. I equate it to libertarianism, because current libertarianism is very anarchic, many libertarians believe that global government/active government is generally a bad thing. There's a general libertarian conception that if we break down laws and governmental powers into their smallest basic parts all of a sudden, by magic, sociaty will start running infinitely better (ok, not magic, but it's never explained anyways). Once again, in small sociaty, or separated societies, this system works exceedingly well, if people have a problem with eachother they just avoid eachother and still promote their individual agendas to the best of their ability. Everyone is responsible for their own well being.

The problem is that in close and large sociaty, your well being often and always conflicts with the well being of many other people, so you have to ceed certain personal luxuries for the great of the all, and you must agree to those terms explicately so that you can be trusted by others to ceed your luxuries for their survival, so they might in turn do the same for you. This is not comunism, this is the basis on which sociaty runs. You probably work a 40 hour week, and you probably don't feel as if you're having the best life experience possible right now. Basically what is going on is you have explicately agreed to be a necessary cog in the wheel for sociaty. Your contribution allows someone else's, or many other people's, lifes to be a little bit easier, and in turn they effectively do the same for you. You can't survive off of whatever your job is... maby a farmer could, but what good would sociaty be to you if all the farmers kept all their food for themselfs? The basis of sociaty is that farmers DON'T keep all their food to themselfs, they can be trusted to sell their food to you at a fair price, and in turn you can be trusted to fix thier computer, and everyone else's computer, or whatever small contribution you make, because it's your JOB, and that's just the way sociaty works. We all basically agree to this or we go to jail.

What's happening now on a global scale is exactly the same thing. We are overpopulated and we're infringing on everyone else's territory all over the globe, but because most countries aren't explicately willing to trust eachother, mostly due to the fact that their IS no social contract they have bound eachother into (no global government) we have countless ridiculous human rights violations and economic travesties going on all over the place because at the end of the day, people groups are choosing to take their piece of the pie even at someone else's expense.

Spiked: Democracy is not the best system for handling things. The analogy I like is "three wolfs and a lamb deciding what's for dinner". Any way you look at it democracy is an unideal system for determining the best path of action for a group. To be fair we really don't see many better proposals for governmental models... I mean, everyone knows that good dictatorship is better than good democracy, but how do you enforce good dictatorship? Fundamentally however, I refuse to believe that broken systems are unfixable. There is always a better way of doing things.