OccultHawk

I think everyone should be able to live without being hassled by the man or anyone else. That's why I try not to hassle people. I admit that government can and does help people who are being hassled unfairly. I don't believe that everything government does is bad. I would still rather live a life ungoverned and fend for myself, even if I couldn't manage. I would like to take my chances in the wild of freedom.

I don't think you should 'own' something just because you paid for it. I think you own it if you have a real connection. I think I own my apartment not my landlord who legally owns it. Nobody owns the **** in a Walmart and that's why taking 'their' stuff for free isn't stealing.

Dotoar

Essentially a libertarian perspective, as I interpret it.

That last conclusion doesn't follow even from your initial premises.

To make things clearer we should perhaps consider what it really means to 'own' something, because that seems somehow bypassed and misinterpreted. Simply put, owning something means that you have the exclusive right to use it. Stealing something is one way of violating that right, simply by taking it away from said owner. To buy something (i.e. exchanging values) is to gain ownership which means that you legally secure your right to use it at any given time.

In a store (like Walmart in your example) the goods on the shelves are owned by either the store owner or by the producer who rents a certain space to put up their goods for sale. The 'use' in such cases is not actually using the goods for what they were made for, eating the bread, brushing your teeth with the toothbrush, wiping your bottom with the toilet paper etc., but the use of it all is to be sale commodities which is just another instance of the ownership. The ultimate value of a given commodity is pending while owned by the store, as is the money we pay for them with to gain ownership, but they are definitely 'owned' and thus it's stealing if you violate the store owner's/the producer's exclusive right to use the commodities (i.e. putting them up for sale).

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Bushidosniper

Its foolish to think that Anarchy should be thrown out the window.

It's the same effect as atheism vs religion, one in which "those who are atheist are lying cheating stealing killing murdering monsters". But the truth is, they're not.

Anarchy is a viable system, but maybe not in the U.S., due to the consumeristic culture and over spoiled residents. Maybe European countries could handle it, idk.

Paedantic Basterd

For anarchy to be successful it would mean giving up every modern comfort from the internet to toiletries to succeed, and I don't think a single anarchist here has considered this or would be willing to go through with it.

The very existence of products and services creates a need for structured trade that can't possibly be waved away with notions like "sharing is caring". There are jobs in our societies which are so difficult, disgusting, or dangerous that nobody would willingly undertake them without a system of compensation. Ask yourself, would you be willing to unblock the sewers of America for the greater good?

I think it was Tore who said complete anarchy isn't even natural in the animal kingdom, which is one of the best points I've seen made. Every animal from horses to baboons has a social structure, a hierarchy with leaders, and followers, and, yes, punishments. Perhaps anarchy had potential back when we were still microbes multiplying in the sea, but I think that anybody who believes it is possible now either hasn't thought it through very well, or is hopelessly quixotic about the human species.

Dotoar

To be fair, I believe that at least anarcho-capitalists and maybe even mutualists are well aware of the necessity of trade.

Actually, the social behavior of animals is probably closer to anarchy than to any other political system. The concept of punishment for wrongdoings is not abolished, only moved from a central insitution with a fixed set of rules down to the civil society which in turn opens for arbitrary jurisdictions based on the preferences of the stronger ones. Animals's reactions to wrongdoings among the colony is purely in instinctive and if you're the weaker individual you're probably doomed, whereas humans have the ability to approach such things in a conceptual way through wich we can base our desicions on reason instead of animal-like instinct. All in all, transcendental darwinism vs. reason.

But if we necessarily have to embrace anarchy, we could at least do it in a cool way.

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Guybrush

If you go by the definition that anarchy means no government, then animal communities that do not govern themselves with a government must be anarchies. But we're mammals and if you look at social mammals like other apes, wolves, elephant seals, giraffes, then you'll see that social hierarchies are common. A pack of chimps or wolves may be led by an alpha male or female and if you do something wrong, you may get ostracized from the community. This behaviour is largely coded for by their genes and animals behave according to their place in the hierarchy instinctively.

How common this is is not really the point. The point is that this is also part of our evolutionary past. Society and culture are not exclusively products of ideas that only exists in our thoughts. They are part expressions of our nature and biology as social mammals. This is just yet another level to debate against anarchy from. We have an instinct for cooperation and that's part of what's made our species so phenomenally successful. Put jokingly, if we wipe the civilized slate clean and start fresh and watch societies build from scratch, perhaps less social animals like tigers could form stable anarchies, but I believe humans wouldn't. Our willingness for cooperation would eventually lead to the formation of some sort of government.

This point was meant as a rebuttal to the notion that anarchy is more "natural" than to be ruled by a government, but in a world inhabited by billions of people, is that really true?

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Dotoar

We may or may not have an inborn instinct to cooperate, that's not really the point. What is the point however is that cooperation has proven to be a successful way to create wealth and thus it's the rational thing to behave in a society (generally speaking). That however, does not imply compulsory cooperation, partly because in that case the evaluation of every given social interaction (e.g. trade of values) would not be in the hands of the participants for whom it concerns, but in the hands of the government.

As for the animals, I'm no zoologist or anything and I don't claim to know wether or not other species are able to reason their way to a certain social system, but that's not the point either. Analogies to the domain of other animals are not very helpful in debating about how humans should interact with each other, simply because the one thing that puts us apart from other species is that we are able to reason, to separate right from wrong, to conceptualize our environment, to think ahead before acting. It's part of our nature to reason, thus debating wether or not it's 'natural' to form social rules among human beings is to bypass the human nature itself.

So there, I was not justified either in continuing the comparisons between humans and animals regarding the social behaviour. My mistake.

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Guybrush

As a biologist, I don't think it is irrelevant. As far as we know, your thoughts and rationality do not have an independent existence. They are, generally speaking, the products of your physical body which is built from a blueprint, your DNA. This blueprint has been naturally selected for and is a product of billions of years of evolution. Your sense of morale, your fondness or not for cooperation, how easily you anger when someone steals from you, what you want for dinner, all that and more is flavoured by your biology. You say we're rational. I agree, but to understand how rational we are, you have to understand where that rationality comes from. Is it rational to send money to a charity supporting starving children in Africa after watching a moving infomercial on the telly? Is it rational to get jealous if your girlfriend flirts with another guy? To make fully sense of that and more, you have to include knowledge of human biology in past and present.

Furthermore, we have learned stuff from watching animals which is or should be relevant to discussions on anarchy. This is something I posted earlier :

The point here was that although anarchy might sound good to an idealist (like everyone sharing food might), I believe it would be likely to create an environment which would reward exploiters.

Animals evolve in ways that create instinctive behaviours that create social environments where exploitation may get punished (see for example reciprocal altruism). They do so through natural selection. We have the luxury to do so also through politics and how we choose to construct our societies. Those may look like completely different solutions, but the problem may be the same, generally speaking.

As I wrote earlier, what I presented was a point made against a very specific argument, one which did not come from you. If I was to argue a case against anarchy in general, then I wouldn't start with the social mammal argument. However, it is, as I mentioned, just another level from which you can debate (against) anarchy.

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Dotoar

You're obviously well-read in the biology field, so I won't argue with you there. I too believe that we can make certain assumptions based on biological/psychological traits in the human species, and the ability to reason is one of them. I also believe that such discussions are not restricted just to anarchy, but rather a more fundamental level like, say, metaphysics.

We mustn't forget that when we're discussing certain idelogies, there are always some assumptions that tend to be overlooked. No ideology is good/bad in itself, not even anarchy. We have to look at for what ends it is evaluated. Otherwise it's like saying that a drill is better than a hammer.

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Guybrush

Yes, I agree I noticed I wrote something wrong in my post on stable states. I wrote that I think a society should raise living standards. What I really meant is that a society should increase the quality of life for the people living in it. For me sitting here in Norway, that's not a goal I think is best achieved by an anarchy, so my general stance is that I'm against it.

Also, every time I think about anarchy, it just seems more problems arise.

Another potential problem with anarchy is that it would be more vulnerable to tragedy of the commons, a term for when a common resource is depleted even though that depletion is not be in the interest of the people using that resource. If you tax a resource too much, that resource disappears. If you stop taxing it for the common good, then the people who are not as community minded and altruistic as you are get your piece of the cake. Without some authority to protect and divide common resources, it creates (yet again) an environment where exploiters and overtaxing is rewarded until there's nothing left.

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