Ever find a YouTube video that just states everything you think on a subject?

I'm part of the problem because I see how people get without a leader? A lot oft he argument in the part I think you wanted me to read is that the government does bad things.
Yes, it does. But you know what else it does? It gives me a course of action if a person doesn't pay me for my work, besides killing them.
Anarchy is chaos, because people are chaotic. 40 million chaotic people are SUPER chaotic.

 

You are part of the problem because you think that leaders change anything, or help instead of harm.

It's not just 'the government' that does bad things. It's anyone who profits from doing bad things. By the same argument that people will murder and steal when it profits them, governments will murder and steal when it profits them. What's the difference? There is a huge one. The government, or a drug cartel or the mob, or any group with a monopoly on violence, makes far bigger plays than individual thieves and murderers. The worse part is that they have no one to punish them for the hundreds of thousands they harm, enslave and kill. Individual criminals have vigilantes. Private defense forces/security agencies/various criminal organizations have other groups who can and will step in to fill the spot when the people cry for a better option on the market.

The state is no more moral than any business. In the absence of competitors to hold it back, it will enslave us as much as it can while still making a profit. Hence we have always gone through a cycle of independence, reform, enslavement and revolution. Every single society has gone through this many times regardless of location or demographic. Every time we have tried to stop states from overwhelming the body politic we have failed. Every single constitution has been powerless in the face of amoral capitalism.

Read this entire article before repeating yourself.

 

Liking solely for DMC4.

 

God dammit this is the third time I've had an article thrown at me as an argument.
Okay, so I read it, and I have a HUUUUUGE fundamental problem with it, right off the bat.
It says the state is flawed because of... god and evil? For someone talking about indoctrination, I'm amazed your beliefs are based around as flawed of a concept as 'evil people'
The article talks a lot about how everything else is wrong... but what about it makes it RIGHT? It repeats that the state is flawed, brainswashing, how t doesn't get rid of bad things... how does eliminating all higher powers help that? How does that even slightly improve things?
The government or whatever you want to call it is PRETTY far from perfect, but how does the lack of rulers somehow stop people from consolidating power? The basis for our society comes from a person getting more than another person. Eventually someone would become a leader, if not in name. A well liked charismatic person, or a person with the money (or resources, if this society doesn't have money) to support people. And it grows from there. There are inherent flaws, but that article in no way convinced me that the inherent flaws of a ruler-less society would have less or better flaws than our current one. And certainly not that it's won't eventually lead to chaos.
Seriously, remove authority? So no teachers, no police, no firemen, no doctors. Nobody who can tell anybody what to do. So what happens when a kid gets mad and doesn't want to learn something? Who is even teaching them? Is the concept of parenthood gone in this vision as well? This would go beyond the concept of there being no punishment for questionable behaviour, for that matter. There would be no standard to base the behaviour on. Suppose your kid is at whatever counts for a school... or something where he's around kids, I dunno. And the kid gets in a fight. There's no authority figure to stop them, no form of punishment waiting for them. Suppose it gets too violent, and one of the kids dies accidentally. What then? The kid can't be punished in any standard way, so what happens? Does the parent kill the kid back? What about that kid's parents?
I'm not left feeling like this isn't a utopian society because it seems to operate under the assumption that everything will work itself out. And I guess if you're some sort of survival of the fittest extremist, it kinda would

 

Sorry for not replying earlier.

Words are symbols for ideas. When you destroy the symbol, you destroy the coherence. There are hundreds of thousands of documents that detail the various philosophies behind anarchism and the word they have in common in anarchism.

It has a new meaning that that meaning is due to ignorance and censorship of the people who invented it.

What are we going to do, retroactively replace the word in our documents and history?[DOUBLEPOST=1402211285][/DOUBLEPOST]

Don't get caught up in semantics. I do not believe that good and evil exist, but I do believe that theft, murder and so on are harmful and that 'harm' is bad for the wold I want to live in, or, evil.

The article is specifically written to counter a fallacy people use against anarchism. For why anarchism is a better alternative, you'll need to do some actual research. I didn't get unbanned to explain my entire political philosophy to you.

Consolidating power is creating rulers. It's a fact that capitalist societies will always tend towards consolidating. That is why the anarchist must lean to the left, while the voluntaryist leans to the right. We must stop consolidating because that is an amoral business choice that leads to harm. On a long enough time scale, it can lead to and thus equate to invading a foreign country for profit.

Anarchism is nowhere near perfect. It's unpredictable, uncontrollable and hard to imagine for someone who has lived in a state-run society.

But it still equates to much less harm than allowing a state to exist does.

If you want to know more (hint at the intent here), please read up on anarchist philosophy.

 

Well honestly I just want to finish up what this all started with
Unpredictable, uncontrollable? That sounds like synonyms of chaos to me
And that's why that's what the word became associated with it

 

How do I put this... Chaos implies a lack of order. Anarchism has an order, but it's voluntarily created. It isn't coercive. If you don't like the order, you can always not participate. Every time you get together with your friends and play a game, you are conducting ordered play voluntarily. Your play is uncontrollable. People are not forcing you to play. Friends who don't want to play can do their own thing. That is an every day example of anarchic order.

These kinds of things occur naturally.

I don't believe it would get to kill or be killed because people naturally value socialization and some kind of stability. They will voluntarily form community watches to defend themselves. Some places already do. It's not Lord of the Flies out there.

In practice, it's power, or immunity to social and other consequences, that escalates the amoral desire for profit. Most people are kept back by the simple wish to preserve their reputation.

 

What eliminates the possibility for profit in this system though? Is there no money? Is everyone given what they want freely? If a person volunteers to make a community watch, how does this prevent them from being corrupt cops, or abusing their power?
(also, I dunno about you, but unpredictable sounds like the exact opposite of order)
And my murder case is an extreme one, referring to accidental murder. What happens then in this situation? There are no official channels to go through for reparations, and no technical reason why a person can't revenge kill someone, just a moral obligation.
I don't know about you, but when playing multiplayer games that require co-op there is almost always one person who tries to take the role of leader, or wants to make progress as a reaction to the rest not doing things 'right'
This is especially true in cases where one person has more skill than the others, they tend to gravitate naturally to a position of power.

 

Unnecessary. There's no need to retroactively edit everything. People are capable of understanding classic literature such as Shakespeare after learning the meaning of the words back in the day and their historical context and the same can be done here.

And I love how you're trying to pin all the blame on others for ruining anarchism's name when its followers haven't exactly had the best track record.

 

This is always the possibility of profit. For with any system to work—democracy, communism, even monarchy—a vast majority of the people under it have to be on board with the basic principles behind it. A society of anarchists would be no different. You cannot create anarchism by removing the currently existing monopolies. You will be left with people who still believe in the old system and a lot of people who know exactly how to exploit that believe in the old system to their own gain.

You have to change the whole population, give or take, over to your philosophy before it can actually become a social order. It follows that the people in an anarchist society have to be people who won't take **** from domineering types and stand up for what they want. To be honest, you had a decent point earlier. The most prominent threat to anarchism is peoples' natural instinct to follow an alpha.

That is an irrational concern because the logic is circular. 'Anarchism can't work because people want rulers.' 'People want rulers because anarchism can't work.' If they didn't want rulers, we wouldn't have a problem. (Nearly) Every person on their own agrees that anarchism is ''good in theory". You'd think that they could actually implement it, having such a universal agreement.

The problem lies in the inherent irrationality of people.[DOUBLEPOST=1402213474][/DOUBLEPOST]

Won't they just mock those old texts for containing something they believe to be folly? We need to get rid of the negative connotation on the word for them to respect those texts no matter what we do with our words for now on.

 

This reminds me of the people in my English class who would giggle at the use of the word "gay" in older texts and like those people, that's a sign of immaturity. I expect the people who read such texts to be more mature than your average teenager. But maybe I'm being too optimistic. Although I don't think it's a radical idea for people to comprehend that the meaning of words change because it basically happens all the time.

 

This is why I call you naïve.

 

People don't want leader because they're told anarchism won't work. They want leaders for... well. Lots of reasons. People want a God so they can cope with death and misfortune. People want a President they can do what they want but for no risk, and then they can blame the President if they do something they don't like. Kids don't want authority, but they need it to learn basic stuff that they irrationally don't want to at a young age. Parents want this because it makes raising the kid easier. We want police because they can be a middle man that protects people from basic acts of violence or criminality. Seriously, what about crazy stalker exes in this system? If there's no authority that can keep them away from a person, what stops them? HOPEFULLY a community watch? That's also not sympathetic to him? Or being bribed?
A big reason we want authorities on many other aspects of our lives though? Because life is complicated. Being in charge of everything to do with yourself is a lot of work. For a lot of people it's not just impractical, it's impossible
People think it's good in theory ( I very much doubt universally) but a lot of people can see flaws, and honestly, it's probably a black coffee syndrome anyways. Everybody LOVES to talk about how they love freedom and equal rights and stuff, but in reality most people are a lot more boring than that. The concept of freedom is cool and enticing... but it's a burden, too, and honestly too much for most people to handle. It's so easy to listen to someone, you know?

On that last bit, isn't forcing people to view the word without a stigma kinda counter intuitive? Surely the only way for someone to TRULY grasp this would be for them to come to terms with the old definition themselves. Otherwise they're jsut being fed another definition, not truly understanding it

 

I'm glad you realized that, about their reasons.

I do not have those desires like most people. Never have. The most dangerous phenomenon to Anarchism is the church and deity-based religions. This is the reason why the church and the state have always been so close. That article covered that a bit.

I don't like thinking about this because I want to believe people don't have these weak desires. I want to believe they can be better.

I need to believe it. If I accept that I can't just convince people not to desire authority figures, I'll give up on them.

Then I'll have to kill them as incontrovertible threats to my ideal world.[DOUBLEPOST=1402214882][/DOUBLEPOST]

On this part: I'm not sure what you think I was proposing, but why should I think they will come to terms with the definition on their own power when they have not already? The schools teach the wrong one for a person's whole life and they have no reason to look further.

 

I used to be pretty pro authority, when I was younger. Everyone around me insisted my life would work out if I just did everything right, so I did. But that let me down. So I'm very against the concept of blind trust in authority, but I'm also pretty aware of how much people need it. Honestly, in a slightly different world, I could have been right there with you, in your beliefs, but I'm not, for whatever reasons.
I think a core of that is that power requires responsibility. The prospect of having power is enticing, but terrifying. Imagine somehow being presented with every single possible life path before you. How would you choose? That's the terror of choice. But let someone else help you? Push you along? It's pretty easy to assume someone else knows what they're doing better than you. I mean, that's how I feel when I'm in these debates. It always feels like the person I'm talking too is so confident they're right that they MUST be, because I didn't feel nearly as confident.
Now about weak desires, are you referring to wanting to lower the complexity of life, or the black coffee thing? I'm not quite clear on that, so I'll just address both.
I'd be hard pressed to believe that people don't desire simplification of life. That's one of the core driving forces in a human being. We always gravitate to the option with the least effort and greatest payoff. And it doesn't have to be a physical payoff, doing something harder for a moral purpose or for someone you care about is still paying you in a karma sort of way.
With black coffee? It's a well documented thing. Lots of people love sugary coffee, but in tests they often say they like black coffee because they think it makes them look cooler. I actually have a perfectly related example. Me and my friend were talking about Assassin's Creed. Now if you or anyone reading this doesn't know, on a bare level, Assassin's Creed is about the conceptual battle of freedom versus control, represented by the Assassin's and the Templars respectively. At one point my friend asked "What do you think, are you more of an Assassin or a Templar? I'm definitely more of an Assassin" except he's really not. His entire life was planned for him by his parents. He became a life guard because they said so, he takes the classes they tell him to, he constantly asks why I don't trust politicians and companies, heck, he has so much brand loyalty he literally named his dog Nike, and his hamster (or gerbil or something) Umbro. But it's much cooler to be the guys all about freedom and stuff, right?
And that's the thing, it's fun and easy to TALK about freedom, but true freedom is terrifying! And what's the natural reaction to fear? To desire comfort? What's comforting? An authority figure.
Er, if you kill everyone, don't forget me, the guy who kinda sorta doesn't disagree with you when you build your new empire ._.

You're proposing exposing a person to a word in a way that somehow disallows them from viewing it with modern bias, correct? But what makes your definition correct instead of the others' is arbitrary. One definition just came first. Change history slightly you you could change the words, or replace them with new words, or eliminate them entirely. So by just telling a person your definition of the word, that's no different than any other government trying to censor something. A person needs to come to terms with the word by on their own, and your reason for not giving up and trying to explain it to them? Trust that humans aren't inherently stupid. Almost everybody knows the old definition of gay.

 

Me, myself and I abhor leaving any aspect of of their life up to others completely. I find it extremely important that I am able to survive without any help at all. I believe the level of personal responsibility is something every person should have. I have virtually no fear of death, though. Lack of self-preservation probably has a part to play in these things. Okay, a big part.

I also believe schools instill this kind of trust from a young age. Back in the days of the Frontier in the US, anarchy was the primary mode of living for people who moved to the west. Despite that, the level of crime was relatively the same as that in the colonies. People weren't sucking their leaders' thumbs back then and they did fine. I know it doesn't compare to our modern day, but it shows how adaptable humans can be. It's possible people are so reliant on the state because that's the time they live in as much as anything.

Aaah, I get it. I have a lot of reasons for being angry about the adulteration of anarchism. I strongly believe that children are steered away from anything but pro-state notions in schools from when they can barely walk to when they go out into society. Leading into the schooling problem above, I think that the only way to get them to actually look for anything other than the state-approved answer for the test is to encourage them to teach themselves.

How many people read books after graduating?