Re:Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)
by pdonis on Sunday September 06, 2020 @04:51PM
(#24394568)
> Imagine the American government disbanding.
What you would get then is not a society that had evolved into anarchy by a natural process, and therefore had institutions appropriate to such a society. (Yes, a society that is a functioning anarchy will still have institutions. But none of them will have a monopoly on violence.)
What you would get instead would be a society that had evolved with a hierarchical set of centralized governments, which was then forcibly deprived of those governments, without restructuring all of the other institutions in the society that only exist in the first place because the society had centralized governments. Obviously this will be worse than either what we have now, or what we would have if we lived in a society that evolved into anarchy by a natural process. But that is irrelevant to the question of whether a society that evolved into anarchy by a natural process could be better than what we have now.
What you would get then is not a society that had evolved into anarchy by a natural process, and therefore had institutions appropriate to such a society. (Yes, a society that is a functioning anarchy will still have institutions. But none of them will have a monopoly on violence.)
What you would get instead would be a society that had evolved with a hierarchical set of centralized governments, which was then forcibly deprived of those governments, without restructuring all of the other institutions in the society that only exist in the first place because the society had centralized governments. Obviously this will be worse than either what we have now, or what we would have if we lived in a society that evolved into anarchy by a natural process. But that is irrelevant to the question of whether a society that evolved into anarchy by a natural process could be better than what we have now.