My thoughts and questions run along the same line as yours again Elle. If there are, or were, islands of lesser populations that have been able to live peacefully without police or jails, couldn't this be recreated? Were there not tribes of Native Americans that lived this way but got raided by other belligerent tribes? I read some stories of priests of the Catholic Church who encountered tribes that we peaceful. We know little of the Ancestral Pueblos who lived in the cliff dwellings in CO, but hey appeared to have lived this way as did many of the Pueblos. Ever since the time I managed several hundred inner city Detroit apartment units, I have wondered why industry all had to be in one location rather than move into small communities that could be kept small and manageable. The crowding of our cities is abhorrent because crime runs rampant among other social problems. Human ego is probably the one biggest obstacle to creating a community you are talking about. There is always a handful of people who want control over others.
> Human ego is probably the one biggest obstacle to creating a community you are talking about. There is always a handful of people who want control over others.
if a king is unseated another will replace them in pretty short order. its not the person sitting on the throne, its *the throne*.
*positions of power* (and not those currently in them) must be eliminated to incapacitate controlling behavior
I'm not sure the two (the throne, and the person on it) can be separated. Even if there's no throne, there's still someone who wants to take control and create one, no?
creating a throne and sitting on an existing one are very different things.
when the spanish arrived in central america, they found it relatively easy to take over the aztecs and the incas, because the systems of power were already established and all they had to do was depose the current power structures and take their place - the people in these empires already expected centralized control
but in the yucatan penninsula the resistance to colonization continues to this day (in the form of the EZLN or zapatistas) because they had no centralized power structure to take over, it was a diaspora of small groups, meaning conquering them would be subduing hundreds or thousands of peoples rather than one.
Sure, but almost everything has a centralized power structure today. There might be resistance to that, but do you think it would even be possible for any group to actually live apart from that today? (One idea I have for that is autonomous zones, but I'll be talking more about that shortly)
the centralization is in our expectations of a centralized power, look at how many people are taken in by heads of state, beore theres a head of state there needs to be the attitude of "there ought to be a head of state - be that prime minister, or a council, or a president" and the attitude that "some one has to be in charge"
thee attitudes in people create the positions, then power hungry fucktards seize the positions of power.
we must stop expecting someone to be in charge over the behavior of others.
we must abolish centralized power structures in our minds, each one of us, and deny the residual power structures access to our time and energy.
look at your expectations, do you expect some people to have power over others? what if its an employer? what if its a landlord? what if its government officials?
once people are convinced that there should not be a prime minister or president or queen or congress or anyone else pretending to make decisions *on their behalf*
once we stop expecting someone to be in charge - while having to deal with the repercussions of currently having societies based on that principle
we will all be eye to eye, no one above anyone else, no throne to take
Right, there's always that one guy who who ruins it for everyone. (I've written about that guy before: https://www.elysian.press/p/humans-are-good-except-for-that-guy). I think we all want to have a little more autonomy locally, but there will always be people who use that autonomy badly so we will always wind up having to lose a little autonomy in exchange for protecting ourselves against him. It's a balance!
The really interesting question is if there have been cultures that didn’t have “that one guy”, and how they managed to get there. If the culture itself can be structured in a way that prevents the emergence of people that wants to rule over others.
It seems like some native cultures did manage to find this, existing peacefully for long periods of time.
Clearly it didn’t help them when encountering other cultures which did not share these values. But that doesn’t mean that they are not worth studying to learn how they managed to do it. There might be lessons we can apply to ourselves.
Maybe always trying to rule over others is not human nature as such, but more an artifact of specific cultures (especially ours).
That IS a really interesting question. There are certainly cultures with less of that guy. For example, many Scandinavian countries have nearly eliminated crimes of poverty. But yes, it's worth learning what works and what doesn't in that regard!
Shame could work, but I don't think we could build a community with shame. Shame is a byproduct of having one's identity anchored in the Other--quite an ask in our longstanding individualistic culture. Vine Deloria, Jr. points out that indigenous cultures on Turtle Island, which he describes as shame-based, addressed crime quite effectively without stocks, jails, or any punishment. In such a culture, we'd blush with shame whether the offense were ours or another's. Deloria also points out that indigenous thought is flexible and resilient, not about repristenating the continent by pretending that the last 500 years never happened.
I'm fascinated by that 150-person figure. The historian Lewis Mumford points out that a New England township would split in two if it got too large for self-government. Jefferson, late in life, pointed to the New England township's size and civic life as arguments for his "little republics" of no more than 100 citizens who would do all civic work directly. These republics (beginning in Virginia) would relate federally to larger regions via representatives. Hannah Arendt, whom I sometimes think is an anarchist (she celebrates "isonomy," Athens's self-understanding in which no one ruled), supports Jefferson's idea in her book On Revolution. Arendt calls small groups of "no rule" the institution that is missing from the American Constitution. Without such "institutions," she believed, the spirit of a revolution cannot be maintained.
I’m a huge fan of small self government, and I had no idea Hannah Arendt was a proponent! Thank you so much for directing me to her and Jefferson’s ideas. I really think our cities could have more capability for self-government if given the chance and I’m interested in exploring this idea more!
The bit about blushing with shame is lovely, and exactly what I was getting at. I'm not as familiar with primary sources on this topic as I hope to be, so thanks for sharing some references!
Love this series, but I can't help but find myself making the exact same arguments you are and kinda sadly shaking my head at the counters by Peter and other anarchists. I think they're longing simultaneously for a past that never really existed and a future that can never come to be. We have to make peace and utopia another way, anarchy is not the answer.
Idk, I don't think we need to give up hope yet! I'm ever-optimistic about humanity's potential, however egregious the situation seems now. It's easy to look at everything around us and despair, and who knows we might not make it through the bottleneck, but I still think we have what it takes.
I'm also very optimistic for humanity, but on the other side I just doubt it will be an anarchy revolution that gets us there. Anarchy is not the only way to get to post capitalism, and probably the least likely.
This is a great series. I agree with you our world has become to complex to fully self govern. More important is what anarchist principles can we implement into our modern world to make life better.
More power to local governments and cities is also what Nassim Taleb is advocating for in Antifragile or Skin in the game. I don’t remember which.
“What anarchist principles can we implement into our modern world to make life better?” Is exactly the right question in my mind, and something I definitely explore in my work!
I’m a fan of direct democracy as it’s implemented in Singapore, and I’m very interested in exploring how that could work elsewhere! (I’m writing a post for January that goes more into this!)
anarchy is built on different principles than modern civilization, it very unlikely that any of the concepts found within anarchy can even be applied to civilization, and many anarchists hold the perspective that anarchy cannot exist in this context.
anarchy is not a reformist position, and in the current social milieu it would have to be carefully built from the ground up, preventing civilized principles from corrupting its incubation.
modern civilization is how it is because its build on principles of coercion and widespread violence. it can not exist without these aspects
without coercion, everyone is able to opt out, and many will, and the weight of civilization will cause its collapse.
without widespread violence, against humans and non-humans, civilization will not be able to secure the resources it uses
gotta start from scratch, and be real careful to not let the principles of civilization corrupt the process.
From Claude.ai I got many kinds of anarchism. Which one are we talking about? Claude: I'll provide a balanced explanation of anarchism and its various schools of thought.
Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates for the abolition of hierarchical authority and involuntary, coercive institutions - particularly the state. At its core, anarchism emphasizes:
- Individual and collective freedom
- Voluntary association
- Mutual aid
- Self-governance
- Opposition to hierarchy and domination
Here are some major anarchist perspectives:
Individualist Anarchism
- Emphasizes personal autonomy and individual liberty above all
- Often supports market exchange between individuals
- Key thinkers: Max Stirner, Benjamin Tucker
- Views collective organization with skepticism unless fully voluntary
Anarcho-Communism
- Advocates abolition of both state and private property
- Supports collective ownership of means of production
- Emphasizes "from each according to ability, to each according to need"
- Key thinkers: Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman
- Envisions decentralized communes coordinating through federation
Anarcho-Syndicalism
- Focuses on labor organizing and worker control
- Sees trade unions as the basis for a new society
- Advocates general strikes as a revolutionary tool
- Key figures: Rudolf Rocker, Noam Chomsky
- Popular during Spanish Civil War
Green/Eco-Anarchism
- Combines anarchist and ecological thinking
- Critical of industrial civilization's impact
- Advocates small-scale, sustainable communities
- Often incorporates indigenous perspectives
- Key thinker: Murray Bookchin
Anarcha-Feminism
- Sees patriarchy as a fundamental hierarchy to oppose
- Links women's liberation with anarchist goals
- Emphasizes intersection of multiple forms of domination
- Key figures: Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre
Market Anarchism
- Supports free markets but opposes capitalism
- Distinguishes between market exchange and hierarchical corporations
- Often advocates worker cooperatives
- Key thinkers: Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier
Post-Anarchism
- Incorporates poststructuralist philosophy
- Questions fixed identities and universal theories
- Emphasizes continual resistance to power relations
It's a fascinating summary. Definitely a lot to explore. In my writing, I try to avoid getting into the weeds of intra-anarchist debates, because I don't feel it would be relevant to a lot of people, but maybe it would be helpful to offer more clarity on some of these historical traditions, and like name-drop some people who have been thinking about this stuff?
Not to mention, these kind of variances exist in all of the other ideologies too. So I could say I’m an anarcho-capitalist/cooperatist that leans toward social democracy or a social capitalist libertarian in favor of anarcho-globalism, etc etc but like what does that even mean? It’s too in the weeds to really get us anywhere.
These definitions are a huge help and advocate to the different anrchy concepts that have already been laid out. I think most thunk anarchy is just zero government and chaos. Thanks for sharing!
My thoughts and questions run along the same line as yours again Elle. If there are, or were, islands of lesser populations that have been able to live peacefully without police or jails, couldn't this be recreated? Were there not tribes of Native Americans that lived this way but got raided by other belligerent tribes? I read some stories of priests of the Catholic Church who encountered tribes that we peaceful. We know little of the Ancestral Pueblos who lived in the cliff dwellings in CO, but hey appeared to have lived this way as did many of the Pueblos. Ever since the time I managed several hundred inner city Detroit apartment units, I have wondered why industry all had to be in one location rather than move into small communities that could be kept small and manageable. The crowding of our cities is abhorrent because crime runs rampant among other social problems. Human ego is probably the one biggest obstacle to creating a community you are talking about. There is always a handful of people who want control over others.
> Human ego is probably the one biggest obstacle to creating a community you are talking about. There is always a handful of people who want control over others.
if a king is unseated another will replace them in pretty short order. its not the person sitting on the throne, its *the throne*.
*positions of power* (and not those currently in them) must be eliminated to incapacitate controlling behavior
I'm not sure the two (the throne, and the person on it) can be separated. Even if there's no throne, there's still someone who wants to take control and create one, no?
creating a throne and sitting on an existing one are very different things.
when the spanish arrived in central america, they found it relatively easy to take over the aztecs and the incas, because the systems of power were already established and all they had to do was depose the current power structures and take their place - the people in these empires already expected centralized control
but in the yucatan penninsula the resistance to colonization continues to this day (in the form of the EZLN or zapatistas) because they had no centralized power structure to take over, it was a diaspora of small groups, meaning conquering them would be subduing hundreds or thousands of peoples rather than one.
Sure, but almost everything has a centralized power structure today. There might be resistance to that, but do you think it would even be possible for any group to actually live apart from that today? (One idea I have for that is autonomous zones, but I'll be talking more about that shortly)
the centralization is in our expectations of a centralized power, look at how many people are taken in by heads of state, beore theres a head of state there needs to be the attitude of "there ought to be a head of state - be that prime minister, or a council, or a president" and the attitude that "some one has to be in charge"
thee attitudes in people create the positions, then power hungry fucktards seize the positions of power.
we must stop expecting someone to be in charge over the behavior of others.
we must abolish centralized power structures in our minds, each one of us, and deny the residual power structures access to our time and energy.
look at your expectations, do you expect some people to have power over others? what if its an employer? what if its a landlord? what if its government officials?
once people are convinced that there should not be a prime minister or president or queen or congress or anyone else pretending to make decisions *on their behalf*
once we stop expecting someone to be in charge - while having to deal with the repercussions of currently having societies based on that principle
we will all be eye to eye, no one above anyone else, no throne to take
Right, there's always that one guy who who ruins it for everyone. (I've written about that guy before: https://www.elysian.press/p/humans-are-good-except-for-that-guy). I think we all want to have a little more autonomy locally, but there will always be people who use that autonomy badly so we will always wind up having to lose a little autonomy in exchange for protecting ourselves against him. It's a balance!
The really interesting question is if there have been cultures that didn’t have “that one guy”, and how they managed to get there. If the culture itself can be structured in a way that prevents the emergence of people that wants to rule over others.
It seems like some native cultures did manage to find this, existing peacefully for long periods of time.
Clearly it didn’t help them when encountering other cultures which did not share these values. But that doesn’t mean that they are not worth studying to learn how they managed to do it. There might be lessons we can apply to ourselves.
Maybe always trying to rule over others is not human nature as such, but more an artifact of specific cultures (especially ours).
That IS a really interesting question. There are certainly cultures with less of that guy. For example, many Scandinavian countries have nearly eliminated crimes of poverty. But yes, it's worth learning what works and what doesn't in that regard!
I can recommend the works of Daniel Quinn, especially "Ishmael", for an in-depth exploration of this question (is it human nature, or our culture?)
Shame could work, but I don't think we could build a community with shame. Shame is a byproduct of having one's identity anchored in the Other--quite an ask in our longstanding individualistic culture. Vine Deloria, Jr. points out that indigenous cultures on Turtle Island, which he describes as shame-based, addressed crime quite effectively without stocks, jails, or any punishment. In such a culture, we'd blush with shame whether the offense were ours or another's. Deloria also points out that indigenous thought is flexible and resilient, not about repristenating the continent by pretending that the last 500 years never happened.
I'm fascinated by that 150-person figure. The historian Lewis Mumford points out that a New England township would split in two if it got too large for self-government. Jefferson, late in life, pointed to the New England township's size and civic life as arguments for his "little republics" of no more than 100 citizens who would do all civic work directly. These republics (beginning in Virginia) would relate federally to larger regions via representatives. Hannah Arendt, whom I sometimes think is an anarchist (she celebrates "isonomy," Athens's self-understanding in which no one ruled), supports Jefferson's idea in her book On Revolution. Arendt calls small groups of "no rule" the institution that is missing from the American Constitution. Without such "institutions," she believed, the spirit of a revolution cannot be maintained.
I’m a huge fan of small self government, and I had no idea Hannah Arendt was a proponent! Thank you so much for directing me to her and Jefferson’s ideas. I really think our cities could have more capability for self-government if given the chance and I’m interested in exploring this idea more!
The bit about blushing with shame is lovely, and exactly what I was getting at. I'm not as familiar with primary sources on this topic as I hope to be, so thanks for sharing some references!
Love this series, but I can't help but find myself making the exact same arguments you are and kinda sadly shaking my head at the counters by Peter and other anarchists. I think they're longing simultaneously for a past that never really existed and a future that can never come to be. We have to make peace and utopia another way, anarchy is not the answer.
Idk, I don't think we need to give up hope yet! I'm ever-optimistic about humanity's potential, however egregious the situation seems now. It's easy to look at everything around us and despair, and who knows we might not make it through the bottleneck, but I still think we have what it takes.
I'm also very optimistic for humanity, but on the other side I just doubt it will be an anarchy revolution that gets us there. Anarchy is not the only way to get to post capitalism, and probably the least likely.
This is a great series. I agree with you our world has become to complex to fully self govern. More important is what anarchist principles can we implement into our modern world to make life better.
More power to local governments and cities is also what Nassim Taleb is advocating for in Antifragile or Skin in the game. I don’t remember which.
What is your opinion on direct democracy?
“What anarchist principles can we implement into our modern world to make life better?” Is exactly the right question in my mind, and something I definitely explore in my work!
I’m a fan of direct democracy as it’s implemented in Singapore, and I’m very interested in exploring how that could work elsewhere! (I’m writing a post for January that goes more into this!)
anarchy is built on different principles than modern civilization, it very unlikely that any of the concepts found within anarchy can even be applied to civilization, and many anarchists hold the perspective that anarchy cannot exist in this context.
anarchy is not a reformist position, and in the current social milieu it would have to be carefully built from the ground up, preventing civilized principles from corrupting its incubation.
modern civilization is how it is because its build on principles of coercion and widespread violence. it can not exist without these aspects
without coercion, everyone is able to opt out, and many will, and the weight of civilization will cause its collapse.
without widespread violence, against humans and non-humans, civilization will not be able to secure the resources it uses
gotta start from scratch, and be real careful to not let the principles of civilization corrupt the process.
From Claude.ai I got many kinds of anarchism. Which one are we talking about? Claude: I'll provide a balanced explanation of anarchism and its various schools of thought.
Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates for the abolition of hierarchical authority and involuntary, coercive institutions - particularly the state. At its core, anarchism emphasizes:
- Individual and collective freedom
- Voluntary association
- Mutual aid
- Self-governance
- Opposition to hierarchy and domination
Here are some major anarchist perspectives:
Individualist Anarchism
- Emphasizes personal autonomy and individual liberty above all
- Often supports market exchange between individuals
- Key thinkers: Max Stirner, Benjamin Tucker
- Views collective organization with skepticism unless fully voluntary
Anarcho-Communism
- Advocates abolition of both state and private property
- Supports collective ownership of means of production
- Emphasizes "from each according to ability, to each according to need"
- Key thinkers: Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman
- Envisions decentralized communes coordinating through federation
Anarcho-Syndicalism
- Focuses on labor organizing and worker control
- Sees trade unions as the basis for a new society
- Advocates general strikes as a revolutionary tool
- Key figures: Rudolf Rocker, Noam Chomsky
- Popular during Spanish Civil War
Green/Eco-Anarchism
- Combines anarchist and ecological thinking
- Critical of industrial civilization's impact
- Advocates small-scale, sustainable communities
- Often incorporates indigenous perspectives
- Key thinker: Murray Bookchin
Anarcha-Feminism
- Sees patriarchy as a fundamental hierarchy to oppose
- Links women's liberation with anarchist goals
- Emphasizes intersection of multiple forms of domination
- Key figures: Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre
Market Anarchism
- Supports free markets but opposes capitalism
- Distinguishes between market exchange and hierarchical corporations
- Often advocates worker cooperatives
- Key thinkers: Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier
Post-Anarchism
- Incorporates poststructuralist philosophy
- Questions fixed identities and universal theories
- Emphasizes continual resistance to power relations
- Key thinkers: Saul Newman, Todd May
It's a fascinating summary. Definitely a lot to explore. In my writing, I try to avoid getting into the weeds of intra-anarchist debates, because I don't feel it would be relevant to a lot of people, but maybe it would be helpful to offer more clarity on some of these historical traditions, and like name-drop some people who have been thinking about this stuff?
Not to mention, these kind of variances exist in all of the other ideologies too. So I could say I’m an anarcho-capitalist/cooperatist that leans toward social democracy or a social capitalist libertarian in favor of anarcho-globalism, etc etc but like what does that even mean? It’s too in the weeds to really get us anywhere.
Very true. The weedy boxes designed to help categorize often end up confusing.
Well, one big thing for example, I won't ever subscribe to anarcho-communism where private property is abolished.
These definitions are a huge help and advocate to the different anrchy concepts that have already been laid out. I think most thunk anarchy is just zero government and chaos. Thanks for sharing!