It's impossible to generalize this without factoring in the external environment.

Put a group of mentally stable people together in a safe, hospitable community with unlimited resources and yes the theory will probably hold true.

But what happens when the food runs out? If there's a natural disaster? A plague? Some other crisis? What if they get invaded by a neighboring tribe whose intentions aren't so great?

That's the true test of anarchy, and humans have shown throughout history that they soundly fail it.

You do not have to wait for food to run out. There is always 'that one guy trying to ice skate uphill'. They test the limits on everything and do not care about others at all. It only takes one jerk to ruin a party. I know at least 4 people like this, probably more (they hide it better). They would rob you in a heartbeat if they could get away with it and even if they cant. But in general they seem nice and happy and stable. The reality is they just do not want to get caught.

Evolutionarily, you probably want those types too. An orderly tribe might get slaughtered by some unforeseen situation that they try to fight together; whereas the individualist "I don't give a shit" type might just run away - and let his genes survive. Same in situations of starvation: the DGAS types will lie and cheat to get a bit more of this and a bit more of that, ensuring the survival of their genepool - whereas the meek will probably die out.

Evolution is not a dinner party, to misquote a certain Chinese guy.

Actually in times of crisis and war communities tend to bond together.

Yeah, we totally saw that during Covid...

We absolutely saw that in pretty much every crisis and wartime studied.

And yes, even in COVID times people banded together across countries to help each other.

LOL. I got screamed at by a lunatic because my three year olds trainrobber bandana wasn't covering her nose. Banding together has caveats.

Yep first thing that happened was shitcan the kids. They knew kids had very little relative risk but the argument was it's worth them losing an education, you don't want Grandma to die do you?

Dawn of Everything has possible examples of that

Btw anarchy is quite new. You may learn from eg Zapatistas or Rojave but these are anarchy adjacent

I lived in Rojava and they are quite capitalist outside a few sectors. Go someplace like qamislo and it's basically capitalism with street vendors and stark disparity of wealth and poverty. However you can get free bread by simply appearing at a few stalls.

The socialist (leftwing anarchism adjacent), mustache-jesus ("apo") stuff is far more revered in the military and certain communes.

Thx for the perspective

This is completely untrue though. Yes, some people are and will continue to be complete assholes who will take advantage of any kind of situation, but pretty much all evidence point towards people banding together and helping each other in times of crises.

Its corporations and billionaires and dictators being able to mobilize massive amounts of wealth and/or people that lead to terrible outcomes. So anarchists are completely correct: their tenets reduced to the simple slogan of 'no gods, no masters' is the only fundamentally correct ideology.

Something I'm coming to realize is even independent of the whole "engagement" thing, media in general (that also goes for movies, TV, video games, etc) are manipulating our brains into expecting higher highs and lower lows than most of us will regularly directly encounter in our real lives (and when I say "expect" I mean in the sense that when we don't get that, we experience that as a negative feeling of boredom rather than a positive feeling of freedom to start doing something interesting).

When you get off that diet and start interacting with people more in real life and use "boring" time as an opportunity to try new things (again in real life, offline), it feels good. Like eating fresh veggies after subsisting on fast food for so long you forgot what real food tastes like.

I'm kinda preaching this to myself since I grew up on all that stuff and am trying to maintain the awareness of this different perspective in order to improve my own mindset (I was tempted to say productivity, but raw output isn't the goal so much as using that "boredom" feeling as a trigger for exploration).

This has been my experience as well.

e.g. if you read anything on your local cities subreddit you will think everyone in the city is left leaning. You will think that anyone who isn't left leaning is the devil; they are pedophiles, conspiracy theorists, etc.

If you go out into the city 99.9% of the people are perfectly pleasant regardless of their political leanings.

You don't need many bad actors to turn an unpoliced society into fiefdoms. While you could squint a bit and believe that most people behave in a reasonable fashion, the reason is that they are conflict averse. They can be coerced to serve anyone who is willing to resort to (enough) violence.

Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History is also a good read for dispelling the common misconceptions regarding human behaviour.

Yep which is why I'm ancap anarchist not socialist anarchist which seems almost an oxymoron. You cannot take things from people, like means of production they've produced, and force them to share without aggression.

All anarchism stems from voluntary interactions, which depends on free trade .

Capital is hierarchy and relies on state violence for coercion power / protecting property ownership

Take away the state and I can self defend my capital from aggression with ak47. Under anarchism then what you going to do? Either you attack me, get someone else to attack me, or have a 'not' state do it.

Or just maybe leave me alone and agree to trade capital voluntarily. All options.

How would you defend your all 100 properties at once without a state? If by capital you mean your personal belongings, then they can easily stay with you. Anti-capitalism concerns monopoly on land, resources, machines relevant for production and intellectual property like patents. Some people don't have access to those and they have to either become slave workers or starve.

Capitalism is based on theft of labour, which is the complete opposite of anarchism. You can either have capitalism or anarchism, not both.

And no, capitalism is not the same as voluntary interactions or free trade, no matter what people keep trying to claim.

I don't believe in stealing labor. I think you should be able to trade your labor for gold or whatever other valuables you like.

Capitalism and markets aren’t the same thing

I'm not sure that anarchism works, but what I will say is that you can't really translate the way that people behave "in captivity" into an anarchist state.

For example, I gladly would give money to fund infrastructure in my neighbourhood, I help my friends, family, my neighbourhood both financially and with time, etc. I enjoy helping out those in genuine need.

When that becomes taxation and when I end up being forced under the threat of violence to fund all sorts of stuff that I don't feel I (or anyone) should be paying for, my behaviour changes, because it no longer makes me feel good to do so.

So I end up minimizing my taxes due, earning less via income, trying to avoid paying for things like parking etc etc because it doesn't feel like a fair and equal trade.

A lot of people feel this way.

Anarchy probably works okay in low density areas rich in natural resources resulting in low competition.

The pastoral idyll, the hunter gatherers, etc. Once you get high density, anonymity, etc. that comes with towns and cities it probably breaks down quite a bit and you need a force to keep it from imploding.

Indeed, anarchy was the default state of human nature until communities reached Dunbar's number, i.e. around 150 people. Then, they did invent civilization for a reason!

This civilization meant exploitation of peasants, genocide of Native Americans, slavery, exploitation of women. It created a lot of wars and suffering. I treat anarchism as a direction to try to get nice parts of current world (scientific research, some technologies like advanced medicine) without the inequalities and suffering that was done along the way. Anarchists postulate structures, a lot of them postulate replacing current structures with federated decentralized structures utilizing various horizontal ways of making decision with the possibility to delegate someone to a task where they have certain autonomy and they can get instantly recalled if for some reason they are not adequate to the task.

Don’t kid yourself. Native Americans were just like any other peoples and warred against each other, took slaves or simply put the losers under the sword. People in any system are still people with the same tendencies. Culture can influence people up to a point. Even in strict places where you get killed for certain peccadillos people who enforce those mores are known to engage in those same peccadillos.

People might think the British were not brutal with their own people, but if you read up on the Clearances, you’d know they valued people less than sheep.

> I treat anarchism as a direction to try to get nice parts of current world (scientific research, some technologies like advanced medicine) without ...

Don't fool yourself! The niceties of modern times require a critic mass that is orders of magnitude larger than what anarchism can cope with.

Anarchists can federate so scaling is not a problem.

That doesn't pass the sniff test for me. The smallest possible human "community" would be a single family, and families are definitely coercive and hierarchical.

In a single family, you have parents and toddlers. Coercion and hierarchy are there for education.

What we are talking here is a community of adult people.

Children becoming fully independent from the authority of their parents and relatives at a certain age is a uniquely modern, American idea. Everywhere else, and throughout the rest of human history, hierarchies of age and blood relation tend to be immutable and pervasive.

Parenting doesn't have to be hierarchical. Giving support doesn't constitute hierarchy is the sense that anarchists use the term.

Ancient Native Americans used to have an interesting system. Most of the year they would roam around in "anarchic" groups of 100-200. During the buffalo hunting season, hundreds of nomadic tribes would come together and build a tent city with thousands of individuals. They'd elect a tribe to "police" the hunt, effectively insuring that everyone got a fair split of meat, and other animal products. There was a rule where the same tribe couldn't be elected twice, so if someone took an issue with the way order was kept, they could wait until hunting season was over and volunteer their own tribe to police next year.

There's plenty of people that will use the boot for the joy of using the boot.

Hunter gatherers don't really universally not have hierarchical societies. Both explicit and implicit.

True. Just saying I see it being a viable system in some instances of those circumstances, but not all, nor most. But that under those circumstances it has a viable path.

> Anarchy probably works okay in low density areas rich in natural resources resulting in low competition.

Anarchy, or anarchism?

In my private lexicon, "anarchy" is simply a state of social disorder. "Anarchism" on the other hand, is any of a number of political views that reject hierarchy, violence and masters (so anarcho-capitalism is capitalism, not anarchism). The maintenance of order in a society without using hierarchies or violence ironically requires a lot of organisation and "rules".

People have to opt-in to those rules, at least in the sense that you can live with them for now. Yes, there will always be people who reject all rules, and refuse to cooperate with others. They get shunned, which sounds awful; but nearly all anarchist societies are embedded in some hierarchical state, so opting out isn't that awful.

I have trouble imagining an anarchist society that encompasses an entire state or territory. I'm told that Iraqi Kurds have established something like that, but I have no experience of it, and don't know how it works. I've only known anarchism working in relatively small groups, with a surrounding non-anarchist society to absorb and deal with the opt-outs.

> I find this definition interesting because it seems to me there’s a very prevalent portrayal in media pointing towards the opposite, that is that humans left alone (read, without some powerful/wealthy authority) will unravel into the most depraved state imaginable.

That's not surprising as the media, speaking generally, is a class which aligns itself closely with the ruling class and is incentivized to maintain the status quo.

Um...how many stories in the media, from the front page of the NYTimes to top-grossing movies, are about the incompetence & evils of governments & members of ruling classes?

I'm thinking that the problem is audience bias. Outside of a few little niches, running "All Is Well in Happy Valley"-type stories does not pay the bills.

> Um...how many stories in the media, from the front page of the NYTimes to top-grossing movies, are about the incompetence & evils of governments & members of ruling classes?

I don't have a copy of today's NYT so I'll leave it to someone else to perform the exercise. But it's besides the point. You're asking the wrong question. Again speaking generally, when the media criticizes the "incompetence & evils of governments" it is in effort to elevate or promote some other government party, or to promote their alternative program or policy, not to fundamentally alter the system of government itself. When they criticize a member of the ruling class it frequently is part of a coordinated PR campaign organized by another member of the ruling class.

Anyone part of the media who veers too off course the path of allowable opinion is quickly reigned in or let go.

Yes, but when you report about missteps of governments and members of ruling class, you can either frame it as:

The system (democracy for example) is good, it's bad people doing it wrong.

or

The system is bad, it attracts, and it will always attract psychopaths.

Media are using only the first approach and almost never the second.

People can't even manage an intersection with traffic lights without someone enforcing rules... sadly.

I live in a capital of a small chicken-shaped european country, where we have a couple of intersections where basically all life stops during rush hour. As soon as the light turns green, people rush into an already full intersections, honk at people alreday stuck there, then wave angrily at the next batch of people honking at them, when the lights change and noone has moved a bit.

Then one day, our rich and corrupt mayor had to pass there, and had to exit his car to wave at people and yell at bus drivers (city employees) stuck there too.

So, the next day (and a few weeks after), police was patrolling that intersection, literally stopping cars from entering a blocked intersection (even if their light was green), and driving there was finally managable, if you drove into a non-clogged direction, you could actually drive through. A few weeks later, no police anymore, chaos is back.

Same for parking... city streets and city police (actually two branches that can give out fines), you get fined within five minutes of parking where you shouldn't or parking and not paying. Hofer (=Aldi) parking, where noone enforces parking: https://old.reddit.com/r/Slovenia/comments/188zh49/malo_de%C... (no, these are not parking spots, but it was raining a bit, and some drivers think they'll melt if water touches them).

So yeah... a human can behave nice, people as a group? Nope.

I am willing to bet that not only does where you live have state, but plenty of it. It's like pointing at how bad the outcomes of your state are for the people and then going "see, that's why we need the state." It reads more as an indictment of the state than an indictment of anarchism.

In whose interest is it to have people generally believe that they are incapable of behaving in a reasonable manner?

I think the media portrayal is quite wrong, but the reality is far worse for the anarchist ideology.

Around 1% of people are responsible for 63% of all violent crime convictions: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24173408/

So the vast majority of people are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. But a tiny minority of people, even in a world where we try to force "reasonable behavior," cause an unfathomable amount of suffering and destruction. If we completely give up on the idea of "forcing people to behave," you have to have a good answer about what exactly these people do in that world, and what exactly happens as a result.