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.