Quote from: The Scientist on April 21, 2013, 11:17 pmSomalia is proof of the success of Anarchism.As well, Anarchism would require all people to think and act alike in a manner that contributes to everyone and everything as a whole so as to keep society in harmony. Isn't this contrary to the idea of total freedom?Saying that Somalia is proof anarchism or free market capitalism is defunct is an extremely tired meme. I suppose that Hitler was voted into power democratically is also proof that democracy is defunct. Certainly had a bigger effect on the world than Somalia, that's for sure.In the "birthplace of democracy", Athens, this happened:QuoteThe city of Mytilene in Lesbos had revolted against Athens and, like Melos, surrendered unconditionally after internal dissent. In this case the Athenian assembly voted to kill all males of military age, but retracted the decree the following day. Even so, over one thousand Mytileans were executed as instigators of the revolt.How do you think the citizens of Mytilene felt about democracy? If that happened today there would be teenagers in Mytilene walking around with t-shirts saying "Democracy. How's that working out for you?"Yet we know this is not the true picture. Lazare faire capitalism has created levels of wealth and sophistication in Hong Kong that is close to science fiction it's so astonishing. Hong Kong has a government so tiny that it's more like having a chain store of 7/11s running the country. Modern republican democracy is a major step up from the Feudal system and divine right of Kings.So the world is a complex place, it has levels.Some people take a statement such as that to mean relativism, that everything is true for a given value of true, but I don't mean that. Just because things are complicated doesn't imply there aren't unchanging principals. You'll notice that it's not just so called "anarchy" that isn't working for Somalians. You can, reasonably, say that democracy, socialism, communism and free markets aren't working for Africans either, because that's what the data says. It annoys me when armchair ideologues propose X is the solution for Africa, because they have problems so basic it's scary. First of all, they do have a "government" in the Congo, which is just 1 country in Africa and it's about 25% of the size of the entire European subcontinent. What they really have, if they are lucky, is a tribal system. Or a vile feudal system without any of advantages! The politically incorrect, but entirely accurate description of what they have, is a savageocracy. It is an incredibly, incredibly dangerous place to be. As they themselves say: "This is Africa". So I never want to hear ever again, about how "anarchy" is not working out for Somalians. Somalia is not the worse place in Africa by a long shot, and believe me, I know that is saying something kind of crazy.--@ jpinkmanMuch of what you say is logical and correct to my eyes. I do think that you're overlooking something though, and that results in what I call "present blindness". Sometimes knowing how the system works results in increasing confidence that it is in an optimal state, an equilibrium point, which while you may or may not consider it utopian, is seen as superior to other alternatives, even when there is no evidence for such a thing and in fact the system is evolving into a new form that will tear up old assumptions. It's just that it's not fleshed out yet and we don't see the bigger pattern.The fastest way to appreciate this a real hoodwinker, is travel. If you visit China and talk to their intelligent intellectuals, you get the same present-blindness. Then you realize you've got the same problem yourself!Your idea of anarchism may be some anarchist's idea of anarchism, but it certainly is not mine.The key thing you overlook, is the time period involved. I do not expect anarchism to suddenly flourish out of nowhere within a few short years. I think it shall gradually evolve (well... probably more punctuated equilibrium than gradualism) into a new mode of societal structure over many decades, centuries even. It is not a lower order organizational concept like "democracy" or "corporation". It is a higher order concept like "nation state". Most anarchists think of anarchy as a grass roots concept. I do not.To take a brief detour, consider capitalism. What is it? Capitalism is not about corporations, it never has been. If it was, we'd still have guilds. People who say that competition is the main difference don't _quite_ get to the nub of it either, although they are near the truth. There is a quote from an economics essay that expresses this well:QuoteThose who object to economic planning on the grounds that the problem is solved by price movements can be answered by pointingout that there is planning within our economic system which is quite different from the individual planning mentioned above and which is akin to what is normally called economic planning. The example given above is typical of a large sphere in our modern economic system.Of course, this fact has not been ignored by economists. Marshall introduces organisation as a fourth factor ofproduction; J. B. Clark gives the co-ordinating function to the entrepreneur; ProfessorKnight introduces managerswho co-ordinate. <emphasis>As D. H. Robertson points out, we find "islands of conscious power in this ocean of unconsciousco-operation like lumps of butter coagulating in a pail of buttermilk."'</emphasis>-- The Nature of the FirmA market is not the sum of activities by the corporations within it. Don't read that sentence too quickly, it's an important understanding and at first blush it may sound absurd.A market is the sum of *interactions* between those centrally directed organizations, usually mediated by information such as prices.It's not so much the butter, as the buttermilk. Things like "property rights", "contracts", "derivatives", "corporations" are lower order organizational phenomena. You cannot understand why a market works as a drastically superior alternative to one centralized central planner, OR, less appreciated by naive libertarians perhaps, why it is superior to us all becoming 1 man/woman corporations ourselves and trading in that way like survivalists, without having that context.Similarly, if you look at the patterns of the 20th century, you notice an evolution towards a network system that is similar to that described by some anarchists or pictured in the science fiction novels of Neal Stephenson.The dominant societal institution in the 18th century was monarchy. All world powers were monarchies. The rest it is fair to say were populated by savages of varying degrees of savagery. Being under a monarchy was a good deal then. If you were a white, male person with some money, you were about as free as anyone could claim to be, which also explains why everybody had god tier mustaches.The dominant model in the 19th was not democracy in the direct sense (except for Switzerland, they are almost supernaturally civilized people), but democratic republics, or liberal democracy. This started in the 19th and effectively completed for the developed world in the late 20th.In the century just gone, we had a major conflagration between Statist Communism and liberal democracy, but I think it's safe to say state based communism is a meme that has been laid to rest to a greater or lesser degree. Few influential left wing intellectuals support it.Anyway, my point is that we see an interesting trend when you step back from all of this.First you have feudalism, leading to monarchy, then the monarchy builds a powerful apparatus (using its coercive powers to enforce property rights and establish the first corporations, albeit with monopoly charters at first) which eventually allows free market capitalism to flourish in a fashion such as the world had never seen before in history. Truly, it was unprecedented. Then the existence of free markets, which brought forth enormous wealth creation, leads to the establishment of the middle class, Marx's much loved bourgeois. This in turn leads to a decentralization of power. The end result of that is liberal democracy republican hybrid that illiterates and children call "democracy" (I bet you've met people who think we vote the president into power! I swear it's like a subtle Jedi mind trick or an urban legend or something.).Now that we're up to date, we see the majority of the population is now "middle class", or else they are funded by the central government. Blue collar labor is extinct in whole areas, and with advancing robotics it's becoming more and more true all the time. Now that power and wealth are sufficiently dispersed (relatively to history, I'm not claiming there's no complaints, bourgeois are expert complainers), the result shall be a new form of government. Why? Because quite simply, the original role of the nation state was to enforce property rights. If you read the laws, they are entirely based on principals of ownership. Regular people paying taxes is actually a new idea, 100 years ago it was only the wealthy who paid them. The mechanism for enforcing property rights has actually become the biggest threat to them. The nation state was a single digit % of GDP everywhere in the civilized world 1 century ago, now in most states it's creeping past 50%. So we are approaching contradiction point.Despite what Hayakians think, this is not the slow route to Communism. The nation state is suffering from what programmers call "feature creep". It's not that the functions it does are unnecessary, it's just that it does them ass backwards most of the time. The result is that the central government spins off its functions in order to get anything done. See the following:- Blackwater accounts for a huge number, some say a majority of military enforcers by the USA, at least half of the Iraq occupation was done privately. The numbers of contractors are ten times what they were in the first Iraq war. In a separate bu related development, it has become extraordinarily expensive for nation states to go to war on a heap of levels.- The majority of new infrastructure construction is done with public/private partnerships, usually this translates to public money, private corps. As pissed off left wing types will inform you, this was not always so.- The size of the private intelligence, regular policing and security sectors has absolutely ballooned in size in the last 12 years. I don't think I need to make citations to prove it. Look at Statfor, Palatir and so on. Even the NSA has outsourced huge amounts of work out to private contractors. I am convinced that they are roleplaying as the Praetorian Guard (to those who don't know them, this is a huge insult :)).- The central executive issues unusual numbers of orders to bypass the usual processes, not (just) because they are power mad, but mostly because they can't get anything done. The old levers aren't functioning as expected. Power is draining away from the central executive and they intuit it. --What you are seeing here, is the slow motion implosion of the nation state. These trends are continuing to their logical conclusion, which is:Collapse.Eventually the principal agent problem (closely related to public interest theory) shall lead to whompingly high levels of what pine terms "official corruption", in both meanings of the word 'official'. Slowly at first, and then virulent like cancer.This scenario has already happened, it was called the Fall of Rome. This is precisely how the Roman Empire fell. Precisely. As. In. To. The. Fucking. Letter. The parallels are just hysterical and I can't get into hardly any of them now. It seemed like a great idea to outsource protection to the Visgoths at first, but ultimately it led to downfall. This is happening right now to the governments of the developed and developing world, only on a much faster time scale than the Roman fall (it took quite a while, it was obvious it was inevitable only in retrospect).However nothing in history repeats itself *exactly*. As Mark Twain said, it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. So I expect something different to happen this time.Yes, the central executive loses its meaning. There is some decay and decline, yes yes. But unlike Roman times, there is this dispersion of power and wealth among the population, with a hugely successful means of multiparty communication called the Internet.So I expect to see, ultimately, self organization to ultimately produce a system of political economy best described by anarchy. There will be all kinds of organizational structures appearing at first, a veritable Cambrian explosion of systems. This will seem very stochastic to us, and we'll call it anarchy in the derogatory sense of the word. However in this Cambrian explosion, certain forms of organization will be heavily penalized, such as people readopting centralized planning or the traditional national state they shall probably feel very nostalgic for. In the end, our modern weapons turn centralization into weaknesses. Once you have a satellite picture of your enemies, they are effectively dead meat. Any center becomes a target. Being anonymous means being alive thanks to drone technology.Likewise, our economic system, the market, makes it very difficult to obtain fixed arrangements such as that communism could in theory provide (if, as The Scientist adds, if we were actually robots).All evolution works by natural selection. The outcome will be biased towards various forms of loose confederations with a diversity of lower order organizational forms such as direct democracy, tyranny, oligarchy and more. This network of competing, cooperating entities are what I call anarchy. Or perhaps panarchy to be pedantic.Like corporations in a marketplace, the average expectation of one of the entities within a confederation won't be very long. We could switch between democracy and oligarchy in the same way people expect presidents to change. The most important factors in peoples lives won't necessarily be the sector they are in geographically, but the ideology that they follow, what clique, what network (subnet?) they belong to, and NGO things like "Common Economic Protocols" shall posses enormous power. Before you ask "how to enforce the CEPs?", you're thinking of the wrong question, look at Bitcoin. Bitcoin is in my estimation, the first common economic protocol. It's in a nascent form, but it's true that this is what it is nonetheless.In short: Anarchy is the buttermilk, the other forms of organization are the butter. It's like how under the umbrella of "nation state" you have a huge number of contending forms of state based organization.-- Last words --Finally, with some sense of irony, I agree with Karl Marx. There is a pattern to history. Perhaps not the one he envisioned, but there is certainly an order.Some people are no doubt going to be compelled to say that these "entities" I mention as parts of these "confederation" are essentially modern nation state government forms anyway, and that there is no practical difference. But this is wrong. I'm not saying there won't be things *called* governments. I am saying they won't matter. In my idea of the future, saying there is a government, would be a bit like a British person today saying they have a monarchy. The label exists but the practical meaning has expired. Ultimately your "government" will be reduced to the same level of import as liking the the Nestl fanpage on Facebook. Governance is an important product or service, but then again so is food production and distribution and society does not hold Walmart to especially elevated levels of reverence.Unlike Mr Marx or Mr Fukuyama, I do not believe there is a 'final stage' to human societal development such as Communism or Democracy respectively. I think it is a product of technology, esp. the information part of society, and population size, and so it can scale up and down over time like the zig zags on a BTC chart, but that there's a general trend to higher levels of complexity over time. P.S. I'm currently working through Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I have to say it's massively influencing my thoughts, it is quite a magnificent work. It's also titanic, so I expect not to finish it for ages. Can't wait to see how it ends! :D              -.- state of book bliss -.-