
Why I Am An Anarchist - octopus
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/anarchist.html
======
onan_barbarian
ESRs historical analysis is possibly one of the few things less compelling
that the rest of achievements whether coding or writing. I couldn't bring
myself to read his Oral Sex Guide, so perhaps I'm being unfair.

The year before, the Nazi Party couldn't round up more than about 45% of the
vote; it's worth noting that these 90% numbers (both the later 1933 election
after all the other parties were banned, and the referendum) came after the
Nazis controlled pretty much everything. Reporting this as the logical and
inevitable failure of the democratic process is like concluding the same thing
when various pseudo-democracies around the world report 99% YES votes for
their glorious leader ("we can do better"!).

The rest of it then meanders into the weeds of childish libertarian lunacy,
standard territory for ESR.

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maratd
> childish libertarian lunacy

The second amendment is childish lunacy?

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knowtheory
If you've read his other writing, yeah, the way he defends it, it is.

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eevilspock
So governments are dangerous and not to be blindly trusted. Agreed. That does
not mean that we'll be better off with zero government. Human organizations do
not scale beyond tens or hundreds without government. The root problem is the
flawed nature of people, their "short-sightedness and moral blindness" as the
author correctly points out.

Anyway, the author needs a lesson in logic and logical fallacy.

I myself am an anarchist at heart (in the vain of Tolstoy), but a realist in
my brain.

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andrewflnr
Exactly. If you take the official government away, those with the desire and
intelligence will find power, and are likely to do terrible things with it.
Democracy at least delays this a little, if you can say nothing better for it.

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smallblacksun
His argument is basically that all governments can become corrupted, so we
should have no government. The first part of his argument is obviously true,
but is far from sufficient justification for his conclusion. It completely
ignores all the good things that come from government (social services,
police, military defense). It also ignores that the lack of government can
also become corrupted. In places like Somalis, where there was effectively no
government, pseudo-governments form (like the various warlords, the Islamic
Courts Union, and Al-Shabaab).

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ericd
Also, a completely decentralized country is helpless in the face of an
unfriendly organized one. Not sure how he missed that in his years of
pondering.

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Jach
Helpless in which ways? It depends what the unfriendly one's goal is and how
strong-willed the decentralized people are. Anyway, it's fairly easy to
organize (in time though?), the hard part is disorganizing again once the
threat is taken care of. Undoing seems to usually be hard in most cases,
especially when a transfer of power is involved.

I don't think many anarchists are against hierarchies at all, just in the
cases of huge groups and where membership is required. If I don't want to have
the US gov. rule over me, it's kind of hard for me to emigrate etc. and it's
doubtful that somewhere else is all that better. If I don't like my job
because of the manager or CEO, I can quit and get another job or start my own
company.

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ericd
I was thinking mostly militarily - complete decentralization makes it much
easier for a coordinated enemy to pick your organization apart. There are a
bunch of other disadvantages too.

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turbojerry
If that were true then the US military should have easily destroyed Al Qaeda
and the Taliban. There is plenty of information on 4th generation and
asymmetric warfare on the net which will help you understand why.

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ericd
Right, I was thinking about conventional wars and prevention of
occupation/subjugation. They haven't been rooted out and killed, but they
weren't able to stop the US from occupying their country. There are many
things the US is not willing to do which less moral armies have done somewhat
successfully in the past to root out guerillas, but that's all a different
topic.

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Ahmes
This article is riddled with fallacies.

1) Because a government can implement a genocide, a region with no government
won't be subject to genocide. (See historical territorial annexations.)

2) Because the Wiemar Republic's constitution was based on the U.S.
constitution and fell victim to fascism, _all_ nation's whose constitutions
were based on the U.S. constitution may fall victim to fascism.

3) Winston Churchill's defines democracy [as]..eight times better than any
other.

4) Because "democracy" is eight times better than any other government, and
democracy is vulnerable to morph into fascism, any form of government may
morph into fascism.

5) Similarly, because Nazi Germany was fascist and committed genocide, all
fascist governments will commit genocide.

There may be arguments for anarchism, but this one isn't very solid.

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hncommenter13
I am reminded of a quote from an article[1] by Mark Bowden, author of Black
Hawk Down. It's not a nuanced response by any means, but it illustrates the
consequences of a total lack of government authority.

"I spent some time in Somalia in 1997, a country with no government, and
encourage anarchists longing for the experience to check it out. Don't carry
with you anything of value."

[1] <http://www.salon.com/news/politics/feature/2000/08/09/bowden>

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olalonde
I'm personally a minarchist. From Wikipedia
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minarchism>):

> Minarchism (sometimes called minimal statism, small government, or limited-
> government libertarianism) is a libertarian political ideology which
> maintains that the state's only legitimate function is the protection of
> individuals from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud.

~~~
b0sk
I doubt it's going to work. What is going to prevent state from becoming a
totalitarian authority? The state is going to attract sociopaths and power
crazy individuals.

Democracy is probably the system which can do the least damage.

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true_religion
A minarchist government would likely be a democracy.

It's merely that its functions would be constrained by its constitution---i.e.
no socialized benefits apart from security from external threats, and internal
violence.

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theblueadept111
This article explain why the author calls himself an anarchist, but not what
he defines "anarchist" to mean. It is simply someone who opposes any form of
state government? Even if the majority of the people want state government? If
so, by what means would the author seek to impose anarchy against the will of
people, and how would that be better than the problems of democracy that he
rails against?

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knieveltech
Nobody said anything about imposing anarchy on anyone. The author is
postulating that government in all common forms has consistently failed in
it's (implied) responsibility to function without inflicting undue hardship on
the governed and in lieu of acceptably functional structured alternatives, a
switch to pure anarchism may be the only way for the people to avoid said
hardships at the hands of government.

Personally I think ditching a couple hundred years of (largely arbitrary)
legislation, not to mention taxation, is pretty appealing. Admittedly not
everyone in our society is mature enough to cope with a world where nobody's
"in charge" and there are some fairly thorny issues surrounding stuff like
infrastructure and personal security but several sound proposals (on paper
anyway) to deal with these complications have been put forward over the years.

Additional light reading on the subject:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism>
<http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnAnarchistFAQ>

~~~
theblueadept111
To my mind, there is nothing such as "anarchism" except what you see when you
look around you, wherever you are. The strong dominate the weak, and when
sufficiently organized, they are called "the government". You can't "switch"
to anarchy because you can't escape it in the first place. Government is an
emergent property of a self-organizing society.

~~~
knieveltech
Certainly you aren't the first person to postulate that and it's a very valid
point, but what if you could get people to organize without coercion? Doesn't
that at least sound appealing? Like something worth striving for?

~~~
theblueadept111
I think the humans are hard-wired to view/organize each other into
hierarchies. All social interaction is based on the currency of hierarchical
standing to some degree. You can't even have a disagreement with someone
without it being interpreted as a 'challenge' to their standing. So coercion
isn't really the best way to explain why one person (strong) dominates another
(weak). Yes, strength determines the outcome, but the reason for the entire
dance is to establish the hierarchy.

I don't believe you can have any form of "anarchy" (or any other social
system) where people do not struggle to form a hierarchy, because that's what
it means to be human, for better or worse.

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tmvphil
I've never understood anarchism. As long as there are weapons capable of
coercion, and groups of people willing to work together to coerce there will
be 'government' of some sort or another. Well, at least in the long term.
There could be several groups, without monopoly control (otherwise known as
'war'), but this isn't a stable state.

So as I see it, anarchism is only possible if everyone's an anarchist.

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EGreg
I see this kind of position as just another reactionary form of idealism. Just
like Karl Marx reacted against class inequality, just as Ayn Rand reacted
against communism, so anarchists react against bad things that happen under
governments.

But if there is no central authority, who is to say that society won't
degenerate into something worse? Left to its own devices, society is a system
that makes no guarantees. It may cause an oligarchy of bloodthirsty warlords
to arise, or worse. Ultimately forms of government will form one way or
another. The only question is, what can we do to stop atrocities and increase
welfare for everyone?

There are lots of conservatives and libertarians calling for smaller
government. I can appreciate their point of view. I personally think that
government has one role: to ensure the minimum expectations of its citizens.
We want clean water, healthy food, functioning roads, safe infrastructure, a
thriving economy, and so on. On a local level, we have zoning laws, licenses
and other regulations. The idea is, if a group of intelligent citizens were
exposed to the information, they would see why the decisions are made the way
they were made. The government actions which should be checked are those that
wouldn't pass this test. Thus, greater transparency and feedback is needed.

A representative democracy is slow to change and fix its problems. We elect
some people and then regret it when they can't do everything they promised.
Still, I am happy that Obama started <http://data.gov> and
<http://recovery.gov> and published
[http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment/)

I think that among the steps we can take are to increase the efficiency of the
feedback loop between the government, and websites publishing the data,
experts analyzing the data and blogging, journalists publicizing the data, and
the government understanding the public reaction directly or indirectly, more
often than once every 4 years.

But what is going to keep us safe? Why do I feel safer in the United States
today than I would have felt in the past? CULTURE. No matter how powerful the
government is, it's only one part of the larger picture. The overall culture
of the society is what causes it to be prone to one thing or another. It is
far stronger than any government.

Our culture today is one that points out racism and discrimination where it
exists, and tries to shame it out of the public policy. It is one that is
permeated by greater knowledge and understanding, thanks to the internet, than
any previous generation has had. I am a big believer in the power of tools to
shape culture. (Look at facebook, etc.) And ultimately that is what causes
real change (look at the middle east revolutions thanks to the new tools on
the internet).

Finally, I would encourage everyone to watch the BBC documentary "A Century of
the Self". It speaks about the PR industry and one Edward Burnays, nephew of
Sigmund Freud, who ironically we know today thanks to Burnays. Propaganda, the
tool of governments, was turned into an industry that helps corporations
influence the public via images that appeal to our psychology. Commercials
started to appeal to our inner drives. For Freud, the collective expression of
our unconscious desires (for sex, power, etc.) was a dangerous thing. It would
cause mass revolutions, mass violence. In today's United States, if we feel
anger at something we go buy an ikea set or a new Nintendo Wii and feel much
better. Video games, social media, and even the entire internet satisfies our
desires for sex, information, and socializing without ever picking up a gun.
It's a new world, but it's a safer world.

I view social media as an extension of PR, taking its first steps trying to
insert itself into conversations. Personally I'm working on tools that I hope
will help the world communicate in more authentic ways than they do today
using Facebook, etc. And I think it will ultimately make a difference in the
social lives of many people, and probably will make a positive difference for
society as well. If I make it, I will honestly be very proud of having played
a part in helping people live happier lives.

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kentrado
Shoes are bad, you know who wore shoes? Nazis!

