Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but in my (very limited) study of anarchy, I’ve yet to hear it addressed:
If anarchy works, then why don’t we have it? How have governments come into existence?
If I understand correctly, anarchists believe that anarchy would prevent any individual or organization from gaining large scale coercive power. Yet surely at some point in early human history it was the case that there was no government–and government still formed and has been forming ever since.
That’s what I was asking. I always felt that criminals would become enslaved and form the first class of tax payers. As incentives changed the companies became governments.
Governments did not evolve from a situation of no government, but from a situation of primitive rule by elites. Read the “tribes with chieftains” section of Rise and Decline of the State for an example.
It took deliberate political will to create systems without central government throughout history, for example the medieval order based on the division of power between the lords, the emperor and the church, which was only destroyed when protestantism destroyed the church’s authority.
Well, by government I mean any coercive rule, so primitive rule by elites would be included. Either way, the question is why they were able to gain such a position, and why it would be any different this time if we were to eliminate the government.
So, if I understand correctly, for a stable and sustainable anarchist society to exist, the majority of its public would have to understand the advantages of it and be on board with it. Which, interestingly, sounds very similar to what would occur under an educated minarchist democracy in which the government was basically voted out of existence.
So the real problem–as it has always been–is that people don’t understand freedom and don’t realize that they should want it. When they do, we’ll get peaceful anarchy. Until then, dismantling the government will only result in chaos. The best course of action would seem to be educating people in the value of liberty.
Insane cults which were invaluable in setting up the original states
When states originally came about there was, of course, no precedent that would give reason to fight against the state, and therefore they were overrun (something which there would be very little problem with today after about ten thousand years of this crap)
There lacked a sound counter ideology to fight against the state
Think about it like a cancer (an analogy which works so well with the state) having a tumor is not the natural state of man, but neither is having no risk nor chance of a cancer, however once the suitable counter medicine is developed we can fight against such a disease with almost perfect success.
If plasma TVs are so great, why didn’t we have them before?
Because we hadn’t reached that stage of understanding and industrial maturity yet.
The same is true for understanding of other things. It was simply too easy for memes and people to abuse the situation of underdeveloped knowledge of reality and the difficulty of finding alternative viewpoints.
I was hoping someone would say something like that. Do you think that we’re anywhere near that stage of understanding yet?
Of course, this makes it easy to say “well, in a perfect world anarchy would work.” The implication being that if humanity isn’t ready for it it will result in chaos. Do you agree/disagree?
It’s a little difficult to say, but we can see that humanity is growing up fast. We’ve entered the age of information and people’s skepticism and rational self-organization is ripping up the status quo at a faster pace than ever before.
“Not the majority, only the natural elites would and they would have to ensure not to allow one to seize power over the others.”
Are you sure about that? The way I understand it, as I think has been explained by Hoppe, is that the incentive structure under ancap would be such that would not permit any type of monopolist to come into existence. That is, even if the majority wanted to create a state, it couldn’t be done.
Is this to say that democracy works? I would say the reasons that a market society would work so well is exactly why we don’t have one. Welfare lovers, warmongers, tax parasites, etc. would not prosper. Large corporations who could very well succeed, have built in incentives to accept state largess and bailout policies. They can lobby the govt to receive special benefits, which is probably a better use of capital than to promote a libertarian society in which their fate is uncertain.
I think I also answered that question. The people in power have no reason to give it up. Educating the other 90% is hard. Getting them to agree that they have been lied to is even harder. Getting them to do something about it is near impossible.
