>No government at all implies anarchy*

No government at all can just imply anarchism, ie. a kind of self-governing that doesn't ascribe to our conventional ideas about government, presidents, pms, members of parliament, senators, etc.

That is what I meant by anarchy - the state anarchism wants to achieve. Collins dictionary says anarchy is "4. the theory or practice of political anarchism" but it seems it might be a British usage.

I do not think it is something that will work in practice, nor do I think it would be stable if it did.

There are two common uses of the term anarchy (and likely more, your definition appears to be the fourth in that dictionary).

Anarchy as in chaos and anarchy where "everything goes" Mad Max style, and anarchy as in a volunteer governance system of direct democracy with no coercive authority.

The way you wrote it "which is worse than all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.", implied to me the former.

If you meant the latter, I'd call it no worse than the "very worst governments" and likely better than even the best traditional governments. Whether it can be long term stable is debatable, but a different claim. In any case, what we have is neither that well working, nor that stable.

Fair enough. I am just a lot more sceptical than you are about firstly, how well anarchy would work (I do not think it would scale up to the size of modern societies), and secondly how quickly it would be replaced by else and how bad that something else would be.

For the first, I'd say modern societies didn't scale well themselves, which is what causes many of our issues. We need to scale them down, split them into thousands of smaller communities, with more autonomy.

For the other, that's up for debate. They might just be replaced by misery on the current trajectory too.

I agree with you insofar as modern societies are over centralised. In my view the cure for this has to be more than just political - the economic structure (domination of the economy by big businesses) and technology and other things would also need to change.

Why is highly organized/systematized violence preferable?

Organized violence is self regulating if it wants to sustain itself.

Why are you under the impression that you have a choice?

Those that are violent will always exist, and will always attempt to leverage their willingness for violence, and those that are able to - through luck or circumstance - gain leverage will be able to use that leverage to consolidate more until they have a hegemony on violence.

That's simply an observational fact of human history.

Governments are a way of occupying that opportunity space with some structure that _organizes_ that otherwise disorganized "cut people's faces up and flay them alive" sort of violence, and replaces it with "you get to grumble about the taxman every year" sort of violence. The averager person loses more freedom when there isn't a government around. The average violent psychopath gains more freedom (to become the government) when there isn't a government around.

That's why. Because I, and most people, prefer the paying taxes to getting flayed alive for insulting the duke. The government is a _binding_ of the monarchy and the warlord class to rules. If you look at the history of western democracy, it's extremely obvious.

I highly suspect that one of the reasons that Americans speak in this way.. that government as an idea is inherently some nonsensical or flawed concept - is compensation for their own sense of futility and inability to effect change on their own government.

It's hard for them to reconcile their self-image as "free thinking exemplars for the rest of the world" with the idea that they don't actually have control over their society. So they default to the idea that "all government is bad". If government by definition is bad, then obviously you can't accuse Americans and American culture of being particularly poor at creating a government that serves its people: it's just a fundamental structural problem, not a cultural problem.

To use internet slang: it's a cope.

Americans have exerted control over their society before, of course. It's usually through embarrassment of the people in power, with an implied capacity for violence waiting in the wings.

"So, why not now?" I dunno. Something about temporarily embarrassed trillionaires. Everyone seems afraid to dole out the kind of humiliation that would change elite behaviors, under the mistaken impression that what we're dealing with is not just "a tough job market" or "adulthood" or whatever, but our own measure of unnecessary (but politically effective) humiliation, drizzling down from on high.

The earnest answer is that it's more predictable than random violence, and its predictability makes it somewhat more preventable.

That said, there is a tendency for a system to drift away from this predictability as it's subjected to "review" by people who really, really want a particular outcome, regardless of the systemically-proscribed conclusion. "Bespoke" judgments for edge cases undermines the principle of predictability, which makes a return to "random" "coercion" desirable for some (as those who coerce in anarchy generally have less absolute power than a large system does).

But then, how do you show mercy (people are driven to do so) in a zero-tolerance environment?

This is the tension.

A government that cannot commit violence is toothless.

How do you enforce court rulings?

We shouldn't be ignorant of how the violence is committed and restrictions should be numerous and enforced for sure.

But presuming a meaningful government that cannot commit violence can exist is unrealistic.