I’m also a systems guy. It isn’t that people will spontaneously cooperate and just build roads or whatever. It’s about creating systems that can solve these problems, but systems that listen to everyone’s voices. Yes, there will be disagreement on some things, but the solution with the most agreement will be enacted.
Also yes, not everyone can be involved in everything, so you need groups in charge of certain tasks. However, again, this does not need to be hierarchical. It just needs to be cooperative. Those groups will handle those tasks, and they’re accountable to the people. They aren’t above them. They’re just filling a role for now, as everyone is also doing.
I thought the same thing as you about anarchism for a while too. I thought it seemed stupid and that it couldn’t work, and they’re just reinventing the same things with different names. I don’t believe that anymore though. It turns out the structures we have in place lead us to a very poor understanding of alternative systems of governance, for some very mystifying reason.
I’m not even specifically talking about systems of governance, just systems of decision and production.
It’s about creating systems that can solve these problems, but systems that listen to everyone’s voices.
How, tho? Once we get into the nitty gritty of implementation, how do you build that system? How do you defend that system from roving hooligans? From popular tyrants? When the people agree on basic laws, how are they enforced? Are they just supposed to meet in the town square to hunt down thieves and killers?
This is what I’m talking about. You either have to assume that in an anarchist utopia, greed and malice will somehow spontaneously disappear from all humanity, or you have to have to devise a way to handle that.
Logistically, getting the whole town together to make every decision just doesn’t work. There are too many little fiddly conflicts for total democracy, no one would have time to do any of the important stuff, they’d be in councils all day. So we assign representatives (legislators, judges, police, etc) with cumulative referred power to enforce the democratic will of the people. Follow that process a few steps and you wind up right at a modern liberal democracy.
The structures we have in place are flawed, but not by lack of trying. The founding fathers seemed to have made a sincere attempt at developing
systems that can solve these problems, but systems that listen to everyone’s voices. Yes, there will be disagreement on some things, but the solution with the most agreement will be enacted.
It turns out that getting parasocial apex predators to coexist peacefully is actually pretty difficult, and every system has to make compromises. I don’t see anarchism as a mature system that has taken these difficulties seriously. It hand-waves the difficult parts with “We’ll figure it out through cooperation”, without serious consideration given to how that cooperation manifests in implementation.
How, tho?.. How do you defend that system from roving hooligans? From popular tyrants? When the people agree on basic laws, how are they enforced? Are they just supposed to meet in the town square to hunt down thieves and killers?
Have you heard of Community Policing before? That’s an example of non-hierarchical cooperative policing, and it’s effective all over the world. I don’t know if you’re trying to be obtuse or just really haven’t heard or thought about any of this, but it isn’t anything particularly revolutionary.
Logistically, getting the whole town together to make every decision just doesn’t work. There are too many little fiddly conflicts for total democracy, no one would have time to do any of the important stuff, they’d be in councils all day. So we assign representatives (legislators, judges, police, etc) with cumulative referred power to enforce the democratic will of the people. Follow that process a few steps and you wind up right at a modern liberal democracy.
I talked about this above. Yes, not everyone can be involved with everything all the time. The key is accountability and cooperation. Our current democracies are largely missing both of these. In an ideal world, sure they’re accountable to voters, but power in that is unfairly controlled by the owner class.
The structures we have in place are flawed, but not by lack of trying. The founding fathers seemed to have made a sincere attempt at developing
Absolutely, and they should be treated as human as anyone. They weren’t flawless gods. They thought we’d have torn it apart and built something better by now. Hell, they threw out their first attempt in a few years (The Articles of Confederation). We should be inspired by their attempt and actions and try to fix the issues we can see in the current systems. That’s could mean starting over, like they did… twice.
I don’t see anarchism as a mature system that has taken these difficulties seriously. It hand-waves the difficult parts with “We’ll figure it out through cooperation”, without serious consideration given to how that cooperation manifests in implementation.
It does not hand wave it away. You hand wave away the solutions and just say “oh, they haven’t actually considered it.”
Anarchism has been a philosophy for hundreds of years. There’s solutions to everything you’ve presented, and probably anything you could think of. Being ignorant of something isn’t the same thing as it not existing. It just means you don’t know about it yet. If you made a sincere attempt to understand Anarchist philosophy and though, and different forms of Anarchism, and they’re solutions, you wouldn’t be so confused. You don’t have to do this, but if you’re actually curious you should.
I have. In actual implementation, it’s still hierarchical, it just encourages outreach and communication between law enforcement and the communities they serve.
Yes, not everyone can be involved with everything all the time. The key is accountability and cooperation. Our current democracies are largely missing both of these. In an ideal world, sure they’re accountable to voters, but power in that is unfairly controlled by the owner class.
We already have accountability and cooperation through democratic elections. If you think that’s insufficient, that’s a valid critique, but not in itself a replacement. That’s the sticking point, developing a replacement that doesn’t fall to the same problems of the current system.
You said you’re a systems person. Have you ever actually implemented a system that replaces an existing one? So very frequently, the replacement is ambitious and idealistic, but it’s not until implementation that the flaws become apparent. Building a stable system with effective checks and balances is much more difficult than anarchist literature suggests. And even if you do make a system that starts off stable, it’s only a matter of time before people figure out a way to exploit the system.
You can have a system that’s democratic, responsive, or just. But you can’t have all three, they are functionally at odds with one another. You can design a system that appears to be all three, but implementation will expose the design flaws sooner or later.
They thought we’d have torn it apart and built something better by now
I doubt it. I believe they expected we’d change the system they built, and I agree that we should, but the foundation is pretty difficult to improve upon. Not saying it’s perfect, but pragmatically it’s fairly practical. If anything, it suffers mostly from the charges we’ve made to it; capping the House and Citizens United have been particularly damaging changes.
It does not hand wave it away. You hand wave away the solutions and just say “oh, they haven’t actually considered it.”
I respectfully disagree. Sure, solutions are considered, but not really the implementation of those solutions, which is my contention. The solutions exist, but they’re not well developed. Again, they either assume greed and malice will spontaneously disappear, or kick the can down the road under the banner of “cooperation”.
I am not ignorant of the solutions, I’ve read a great deal of theory. I just didn’t find them compelling. I have made a sincere attempt, I am not confused. I just have too much experience implementing human systems to be convinced by the solutions provided.
We already have accountability and cooperation through democratic elections. If you think that’s insufficient, that’s a valid critique, but not in itself a replacement. That’s the sticking point, developing a replacement that doesn’t fall to the same problems of the current system.
Nothing ever completely replaces everything. Yes, it shares components of democracies. Should the US have not tried to do what it did because, for example, taxes are still collected like a monarchy and they didn’t totally remove it for something new? Some systems work well and should still be used. This isn’t a criticism. You’re just being obtuse.
You said you’re a systems person. Have you ever actually implemented a system that replaces an existing one?
A government? No. Only a handful of people in human history have. What kind of a question is that? Should this never be done because those people hadn’t done it before? I guess we should just let the status quo remain, because no one has the experience to change it.
So very frequently, the replacement is ambitious and idealistic, but it’s not until implementation that the flaws become apparent.
Which is why you need to build it. This isn’t an argument against doing it. It’s an argument for it. You can think about the issues all day, but you won’t find them all until you try it. Again, the founding fathers of the US tried once and utterly failed, because they didn’t forsee the issues. They then tried again and did much better, though still flawed. You can’t succeed by doing nothing. You have to try, fail, and adapt.
They thought we’d have torn it apart and built something better by now
I respectfully disagree. Sure, solutions are considered, but not really the implementation of those solutions, which is my contention.
Are you kidding me? The implementation is probably the thing that’s debated most. The thing about the left is they mostly all agree on what they want, but they don’t agree on how. Some want a revolution, because they think that’ll create a better foundation. Some want gradual change to existing systems. Etc. You have an idea in your head that you want to be true, and you assume it must be true, but you don’t actually want to find any knowledge to (dis)prove it.
That’s kind of my point. Anarchy is more an idealistic aspiration than a practical system. We’ll get to anarcho-communism eventually, it’s practically a certainty, but that’s probably a century or two in the future. We need a lot of fundamental cultural and material shifts before the average individual will embrace the concepts, and there aren’t any shortcuts in geopolitics.
Have you ever actually implemented a system that replaces an existing one?
A government? No.
I didn’t say a government, that was not the question I asked: a club function, a group project, a large event, a project team; any coordination of people for the purpose of performing some task or making some decision. The basic principles are similar to a government, though difficulties multiply with scale. But the difficulties intrinsic to organizing humans are present in some form at every scale. If you’ve ever organized humans, you’ll understand the difficulties I’m referring to. If you haven’t, this topic might be beyond your expertise.
So very frequently, the replacement is ambitious and idealistic, but it’s not until implementation that the flaws become apparent.
Which is why you need to build it.
Again, the hand-waving. “The answer is to just give it a shot!” That completely ignores the fact that politics is inherently social and emotional. A poorly implemented experiment will sour the public on the concept, and ultimately do more harm than good.
Any political strategy without an eye for optics and effective persuasion is useless. Action for action’s sake is literally one of Eco’s features of fascism. We didn’t need to fall for that trap. We are an experiment, we need a carefully constructed, detailed, tested plan to generate buy-in. Politics without buy-in is nothing but theory.
A new charter, a new direction for the system, a new iteration of the system with revised mandates. I don’t think he would have anticipated total rejection of the basic model.
The implementation is probably the thing that’s debated most. The thing about the left is they mostly all agree on what they want, but they don’t agree on how. Some want a revolution, because they think that’ll create a better foundation. Some want gradual change to existing systems. Etc. You have an idea in your head that you want to be true, and you assume it must be true, but you don’t actually want to find any knowledge to (dis)prove it.
I agree that this is the general condition of the left, and a tad ironic for you to say. I’ve explored most of the clades of political theory, particularly on the left. I’ve read a lot, and agreed with a lot, but I have too much experience organizing people to accept the rose-colored glasses endemic to anarchist theory. Again, maybe in a century or two, but there’s too much intermediate growth as a species necessary to actually operate that way.
It just doesn’t offer much of substance which isn’t addressed more thoroughly elsewhere. Even the central concept of “hierarchy” is difficult to pin down. I’ve heard definitions so liberal that modern western democracies technically count as anarchic since representatives are voted in, and definitions so conservative that they couldn’t even convene a public works task force.
And that’s really the central point. With every logistical difficulty, anarchism either hand-waves “The people will agree cooperatively”, or introduces a provisional acceptable hierarchy that looks an awful lot like existing structures at scale. It’s just not a strong foundation at this stage of human civilization.
I didn’t say a government, that was not the question I asked: a club function, a group project, a large event, a project team; any coordination of people for the purpose of performing some task or making some decision.
Ah, then yes I’m an eagle scout, so I did a lot of that then. I was also an officer in a game development club in college with about 100 members. Yes, organizing is challenging. That’s what rules are for. Robert’s rules of order is a good point of reference for it for meetings, and does not require hierarchy.
I’m finished with this conversation I think. You don’t want to discuss in good faith. You just want to say “it can’t work” and then ignore anything else. “You shouldn’t implement it, because if it goes wrong people will be upset, but you can’t improve it because it hasn’t been done before, and you can’t use existing ideas because then it isn’t totally revolutionary.” Very productive.
That’s what rules are for. Robert’s rules of order is a good point of reference for it for meetings, and does not require hierarchy.
That’s what I mean when I say “hierarchy” is a slippery term. Robert’s rules don’t function without a president authorized to adjudicate.
You just want to say “it can’t work” and then ignore anything else.
My experience has been exactly the opposite. You just want to say “it can work” and then ignore anything else. You completely ignored my points about popular tyrants, that was a pretty significant and topical concern to disregard.
And even what you do address, is obtusely vague. “Have rules”, not what those rules are or how you enforce them. “Cooperate and make decisions by consensus”, not how that cooperative structure is organized, how it obstructs exploitation, or how such a functional structure differs substantially from existing “hierarchical” structures.
Again, you need councils and stuff, but those can be done without hierarchy. Sure, someone temporarily presides over functions, but that position can rotate and not give anyone real power. That’s all been considered and there are solutions. It’s nothing complicated.
My experience has been exactly the opposite. You just want to say “it can work” and then ignore anything else. You completely ignored my points about popular tyrants, that was a pretty significant and topical concern to disregard.
Popular tyrants can happen anywhere. It isn’t an argument against anything other than humanity. I’d argue that anarchism makes it harder for them to establish power, not easier. Trump can just walk in and take power, because we already set it up for him, for example.
And even what you do address, is obtusely vague.
No shit it’s obtuse and vague. I’m not writing a constitution here. What do you expect. Hell, even constitutions are obtuse and vague. That’s why the Supreme Court ended up with the power to interpret laws, and why they sometimes disagree. You can never address everything, even when you’re trying to, which I’m not.
You’re arguing with me and asking for ridiculous degrees of information, yet you aren’t trying to figure anything out for yourself. There are dozens of competing anarchist views, each with different solutions to different problems. You aren’t so smart you thought of issues 200+ years of incredible thinkers haven’t considered.
I’m also a systems guy. It isn’t that people will spontaneously cooperate and just build roads or whatever. It’s about creating systems that can solve these problems, but systems that listen to everyone’s voices. Yes, there will be disagreement on some things, but the solution with the most agreement will be enacted.
Also yes, not everyone can be involved in everything, so you need groups in charge of certain tasks. However, again, this does not need to be hierarchical. It just needs to be cooperative. Those groups will handle those tasks, and they’re accountable to the people. They aren’t above them. They’re just filling a role for now, as everyone is also doing.
I thought the same thing as you about anarchism for a while too. I thought it seemed stupid and that it couldn’t work, and they’re just reinventing the same things with different names. I don’t believe that anymore though. It turns out the structures we have in place lead us to a very poor understanding of alternative systems of governance, for some very mystifying reason.
I’m not even specifically talking about systems of governance, just systems of decision and production.
How, tho? Once we get into the nitty gritty of implementation, how do you build that system? How do you defend that system from roving hooligans? From popular tyrants? When the people agree on basic laws, how are they enforced? Are they just supposed to meet in the town square to hunt down thieves and killers?
This is what I’m talking about. You either have to assume that in an anarchist utopia, greed and malice will somehow spontaneously disappear from all humanity, or you have to have to devise a way to handle that.
Logistically, getting the whole town together to make every decision just doesn’t work. There are too many little fiddly conflicts for total democracy, no one would have time to do any of the important stuff, they’d be in councils all day. So we assign representatives (legislators, judges, police, etc) with cumulative referred power to enforce the democratic will of the people. Follow that process a few steps and you wind up right at a modern liberal democracy.
The structures we have in place are flawed, but not by lack of trying. The founding fathers seemed to have made a sincere attempt at developing
It turns out that getting parasocial apex predators to coexist peacefully is actually pretty difficult, and every system has to make compromises. I don’t see anarchism as a mature system that has taken these difficulties seriously. It hand-waves the difficult parts with “We’ll figure it out through cooperation”, without serious consideration given to how that cooperation manifests in implementation.
Have you heard of Community Policing before? That’s an example of non-hierarchical cooperative policing, and it’s effective all over the world. I don’t know if you’re trying to be obtuse or just really haven’t heard or thought about any of this, but it isn’t anything particularly revolutionary.
I talked about this above. Yes, not everyone can be involved with everything all the time. The key is accountability and cooperation. Our current democracies are largely missing both of these. In an ideal world, sure they’re accountable to voters, but power in that is unfairly controlled by the owner class.
Absolutely, and they should be treated as human as anyone. They weren’t flawless gods. They thought we’d have torn it apart and built something better by now. Hell, they threw out their first attempt in a few years (The Articles of Confederation). We should be inspired by their attempt and actions and try to fix the issues we can see in the current systems. That’s could mean starting over, like they did… twice.
It does not hand wave it away. You hand wave away the solutions and just say “oh, they haven’t actually considered it.”
Anarchism has been a philosophy for hundreds of years. There’s solutions to everything you’ve presented, and probably anything you could think of. Being ignorant of something isn’t the same thing as it not existing. It just means you don’t know about it yet. If you made a sincere attempt to understand Anarchist philosophy and though, and different forms of Anarchism, and they’re solutions, you wouldn’t be so confused. You don’t have to do this, but if you’re actually curious you should.
I have. In actual implementation, it’s still hierarchical, it just encourages outreach and communication between law enforcement and the communities they serve.
We already have accountability and cooperation through democratic elections. If you think that’s insufficient, that’s a valid critique, but not in itself a replacement. That’s the sticking point, developing a replacement that doesn’t fall to the same problems of the current system.
You said you’re a systems person. Have you ever actually implemented a system that replaces an existing one? So very frequently, the replacement is ambitious and idealistic, but it’s not until implementation that the flaws become apparent. Building a stable system with effective checks and balances is much more difficult than anarchist literature suggests. And even if you do make a system that starts off stable, it’s only a matter of time before people figure out a way to exploit the system.
You can have a system that’s democratic, responsive, or just. But you can’t have all three, they are functionally at odds with one another. You can design a system that appears to be all three, but implementation will expose the design flaws sooner or later.
I doubt it. I believe they expected we’d change the system they built, and I agree that we should, but the foundation is pretty difficult to improve upon. Not saying it’s perfect, but pragmatically it’s fairly practical. If anything, it suffers mostly from the charges we’ve made to it; capping the House and Citizens United have been particularly damaging changes.
I respectfully disagree. Sure, solutions are considered, but not really the implementation of those solutions, which is my contention. The solutions exist, but they’re not well developed. Again, they either assume greed and malice will spontaneously disappear, or kick the can down the road under the banner of “cooperation”.
I am not ignorant of the solutions, I’ve read a great deal of theory. I just didn’t find them compelling. I have made a sincere attempt, I am not confused. I just have too much experience implementing human systems to be convinced by the solutions provided.
Nothing ever completely replaces everything. Yes, it shares components of democracies. Should the US have not tried to do what it did because, for example, taxes are still collected like a monarchy and they didn’t totally remove it for something new? Some systems work well and should still be used. This isn’t a criticism. You’re just being obtuse.
A government? No. Only a handful of people in human history have. What kind of a question is that? Should this never be done because those people hadn’t done it before? I guess we should just let the status quo remain, because no one has the experience to change it.
Which is why you need to build it. This isn’t an argument against doing it. It’s an argument for it. You can think about the issues all day, but you won’t find them all until you try it. Again, the founding fathers of the US tried once and utterly failed, because they didn’t forsee the issues. They then tried again and did much better, though still flawed. You can’t succeed by doing nothing. You have to try, fail, and adapt.
‘Jefferson went further, proposing that the nation adopt an entirely new charter every two decades. A constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years,” he wrote to James Madison in 1789. “If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”’
Are you kidding me? The implementation is probably the thing that’s debated most. The thing about the left is they mostly all agree on what they want, but they don’t agree on how. Some want a revolution, because they think that’ll create a better foundation. Some want gradual change to existing systems. Etc. You have an idea in your head that you want to be true, and you assume it must be true, but you don’t actually want to find any knowledge to (dis)prove it.
That’s kind of my point. Anarchy is more an idealistic aspiration than a practical system. We’ll get to anarcho-communism eventually, it’s practically a certainty, but that’s probably a century or two in the future. We need a lot of fundamental cultural and material shifts before the average individual will embrace the concepts, and there aren’t any shortcuts in geopolitics.
I didn’t say a government, that was not the question I asked: a club function, a group project, a large event, a project team; any coordination of people for the purpose of performing some task or making some decision. The basic principles are similar to a government, though difficulties multiply with scale. But the difficulties intrinsic to organizing humans are present in some form at every scale. If you’ve ever organized humans, you’ll understand the difficulties I’m referring to. If you haven’t, this topic might be beyond your expertise.
Again, the hand-waving. “The answer is to just give it a shot!” That completely ignores the fact that politics is inherently social and emotional. A poorly implemented experiment will sour the public on the concept, and ultimately do more harm than good.
Any political strategy without an eye for optics and effective persuasion is useless. Action for action’s sake is literally one of Eco’s features of fascism. We didn’t need to fall for that trap. We are an experiment, we need a carefully constructed, detailed, tested plan to generate buy-in. Politics without buy-in is nothing but theory.
A new charter, a new direction for the system, a new iteration of the system with revised mandates. I don’t think he would have anticipated total rejection of the basic model.
I agree that this is the general condition of the left, and a tad ironic for you to say. I’ve explored most of the clades of political theory, particularly on the left. I’ve read a lot, and agreed with a lot, but I have too much experience organizing people to accept the rose-colored glasses endemic to anarchist theory. Again, maybe in a century or two, but there’s too much intermediate growth as a species necessary to actually operate that way.
It just doesn’t offer much of substance which isn’t addressed more thoroughly elsewhere. Even the central concept of “hierarchy” is difficult to pin down. I’ve heard definitions so liberal that modern western democracies technically count as anarchic since representatives are voted in, and definitions so conservative that they couldn’t even convene a public works task force.
And that’s really the central point. With every logistical difficulty, anarchism either hand-waves “The people will agree cooperatively”, or introduces a provisional acceptable hierarchy that looks an awful lot like existing structures at scale. It’s just not a strong foundation at this stage of human civilization.
Ah, then yes I’m an eagle scout, so I did a lot of that then. I was also an officer in a game development club in college with about 100 members. Yes, organizing is challenging. That’s what rules are for. Robert’s rules of order is a good point of reference for it for meetings, and does not require hierarchy.
I’m finished with this conversation I think. You don’t want to discuss in good faith. You just want to say “it can’t work” and then ignore anything else. “You shouldn’t implement it, because if it goes wrong people will be upset, but you can’t improve it because it hasn’t been done before, and you can’t use existing ideas because then it isn’t totally revolutionary.” Very productive.
That’s what I mean when I say “hierarchy” is a slippery term. Robert’s rules don’t function without a president authorized to adjudicate.
My experience has been exactly the opposite. You just want to say “it can work” and then ignore anything else. You completely ignored my points about popular tyrants, that was a pretty significant and topical concern to disregard.
And even what you do address, is obtusely vague. “Have rules”, not what those rules are or how you enforce them. “Cooperate and make decisions by consensus”, not how that cooperative structure is organized, how it obstructs exploitation, or how such a functional structure differs substantially from existing “hierarchical” structures.
Again, you need councils and stuff, but those can be done without hierarchy. Sure, someone temporarily presides over functions, but that position can rotate and not give anyone real power. That’s all been considered and there are solutions. It’s nothing complicated.
Popular tyrants can happen anywhere. It isn’t an argument against anything other than humanity. I’d argue that anarchism makes it harder for them to establish power, not easier. Trump can just walk in and take power, because we already set it up for him, for example.
No shit it’s obtuse and vague. I’m not writing a constitution here. What do you expect. Hell, even constitutions are obtuse and vague. That’s why the Supreme Court ended up with the power to interpret laws, and why they sometimes disagree. You can never address everything, even when you’re trying to, which I’m not.
You’re arguing with me and asking for ridiculous degrees of information, yet you aren’t trying to figure anything out for yourself. There are dozens of competing anarchist views, each with different solutions to different problems. You aren’t so smart you thought of issues 200+ years of incredible thinkers haven’t considered.