ThePhanastasio

I'm not wholly into a large amount of structure, to be honest. I don't think everything should be controlled, and I'm all for social freedom.

With that said, I am going to share a tale with you about a girl I knew. She went to my high school for a year or two (tiny high school: 45-55 people per grade level) and was a grade ahead of me. I really didn't talk to her all that much, but she was strange. Just not my kind of strange, I suppose, which is why we weren't really in the same circles.

She transferred to a high school the next city over, and attempted to start an Anarchy Club. She got a lot of media for this, (she was even in Bowling For Columbine) but the idea was completely dumb to me, in the way she approached it.

First of all, she intended to proclaim herself the "President" of the Anarchy Club, and attempted to do organized recruitment. When she was denied the "right" to start the club at the school (this was in West Virginia), she pursued legal action, appealed to the school board, and did all sorts of things to take advantage of the "structure" she was apparently fighting against. It wasn't deliberate or even blatant hypocrisy, but it just didn't seem quite right to me. I'm all about practicing what you preach, and she kind of turned me off of the whole idea.

Sansa Stark

^ lmao

Freebase Dali

I doubt it would be a world of no consequence. Assuming we all had the means to protect ourselves, the consequence of infringing on someone else's basic human rights would be more deadly and feared than any currently instituted legal policy. I think that instead of worrying about individual ass holes, the real concern should be of another large force of people rising to power with enough influence and support to enable them to call the shots without you being able to do anything about it at all.

I'm not saying the current system isn't a stable one... I'm just saying that if you think you're better off letting someone else dictate the terms of our own security, then you're going to accept whatever those terms may be or may become. I just think that's a dangerous road to be comfortable traveling on. Sadly, we can't really do much about it... and that's kinda the entire point.

Paedantic Basterd

I was just being a misanthrope before, but in all seriousness, I don't think that anarchy could be maintained amongst the human race, and the very need to maintain such a thing defeats the point in and of itself. Socially and mentally, we're incapable of living as simply as the animal kingdom does.

bannister

LMFAO, that's hilarious.

About anarchy...I don't know, if you were to pick a whole boatload of "anarchists" and dump them off somewhere with no actual government (let's say parts of Somalia) and expect them to be self sufficient, the first thing they'd probably do is **** themselves.

"Mom! An eight-year-old with a shotgun just stole my sixty dollar bondage pants! "

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"Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day.

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- Terry Pratchett

Dirty

If there is no government that punishes people for crimes, you can guarantee that this world would turn to hell. Inner city areas and ghettos are bad enough, i can only imagine if there was no consequence for their actions. Gangs would be even more prevalent and be more disruptive to society.

Freebase Dali

Well, I don't think we're incapable of living outside of a civilized construct. I mean, we created it to begin with. We had to have existed quite well outside it to have even arrived at that point.

But I do agree that we're currently socially/mentally dependent on civilization. But obviously I don't think that's a state of mind relevant to anything but our current way of life, which is pretty much completely dictated by the societies we've constructed.

CanwllCorfe

I think we'd be fine without a government, I just think it'd be easier to maintain a stable society with one.

I don't think we're "slaves" to anyone. We may not be completely free, but I don't feel as if I'm held back by the government or anything. When I get into that mindset, I can't help but think back to middle school when everyone was writing the anarchy symbol on desks and lunch tables.

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Your eyes were never yet let in to see the majesty and riches of the mind, but dwell in darkness; for your God is blind.

Paedantic Basterd

Physically, I'm sure we could still hunt, gather, make fire with sticks and all that great stuff, but I think it's impossible to take what we've become socially and mentally, and say to that "Let's go live off the land" and have anybody follow.

(And now follows a tangent not directly addressed to your post).

I'm always curious to know what anarchists actually imagine anarchy to be like. Do they imagine it to be abandoning our higher level of thinking, and returning to the basic animal instincts and processes? Is ingenuity not a human instinct then? How could we stagnate without losing the qualities that make us such a distinct species? Or are anarchists really just teenagers who want to be allowed to quit school and do drugs and vandalize **** all day?

The very fact that we have inventions and services in our society, from how I see it, renders anarchy implausible without reverting to animal behaviour and abandoning civilization. These services and items required to sustain our current society don't come out of thin air and can't be created by just anybody, so there is a need to make exchanges for goods and services, and already the barter system is social structure that anarchy aims to eliminate.

That's why anarchy seems so foolish to me. There's no way to de-evolve, and in our present state of species, we can't function without structure. I imagine that even if some event rendered humanity extinct save for a colony of people untouched by civilization, things would pan out the exact same way, because invention and curiosity is inherent in our species.

cardboard adolescent

I've heard Anarchism argued as a higher form of evolution, along the same lines as what Christ's early followers practiced. Basically, nobody stops doing what they're doing, anyone who is interested in a specialized skillset can still develop that skill, but rather than exchange goods we would just give them away. All software would be open source, all music and art would be freely available, lots of people would work on farms or have gardens and they would feed their local communities, people would spread good will and function as peace-keepers because they would feel it in their nature to do so, people would clean up others' messes and such because they liked to make things look nice, etc. And without the stress of having to compete or worry about being told you can't do what you're doing people would be much less likely to become violent or hold negative feelings toward others.

Now, the argument goes, the reason this is so hard to imagine is because we have mistaken ideas about human nature. For one, we think humans are naturally competitive, and if there is no incentive to innovate (ie, being better than someone else), then people will get lazy and just try to live off other people. I think the real lesson of human nature is not that people are competitive, but that people like attention. They don't necessarily care if somebody else is getting attention too, so long as they're getting some. And what better attention but what you get from giving someone a gift? Secondly, there's the idea that people are selfish, or that certain people would become extremely exploitative if things functioned this way. I think that ignores the tremendous social pressure that would exist to contribute in some way. And that social pressure wouldn't be the negative, judgmental pressure that exists in our current lives (get a job, deadbeat!) but rather a positive, uplifting pull that would be more along the lines of "don't you want to express yourself too?!" That in fact, many if not most if not all of the problems we face from disenfranchised individuals are a result of the pressure of operating in a competitive system, which simply isn't natural.

If we truly believe that human nature is a social construct, then we should be all for the idea of a society based around the idea of "creative sharing." If, on the other hand, we believe that human nature is ingrained and selfish/sinful, then we will have to do some more debating, and figure out what exactly that means.

The more I made that argument the more I started to like it. All that really stands in our way is fear, and the belief that it just couldn't work, which isn't really grounded in anything except shame that we've never tried it.

Maybe if we could just put LSD in the water supply and convince everyone the world was ending...