this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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Those small communes only work because everyone is opting in for the anarchist model. Most people have no interest in that model, and so it will never scale beyond such small communities where everyone opts in.
It especially isn't going to work as soon as you reach the scale where tribalism sets in. That's a natural human behaviour and cannot be eliminated. The human brain craves an "us versus them" narrative. You know this to be true, because your brain does it too, even if you suppress that part of your brain, it's still there and you're aware of it. Some of us can rise above it, but we all know that especially in large groups, humans revert to their more base instincts. The only way to prevent that tendency from dominating society is with the structure imposed by a government.
Like, how exactly would you envision anarchism working in NYC, with the current population of NYC? Not some hypothetical group of people who've all drunk the anarchism Kool aid. Literally just how does it work in a city that big with regular people who haven't read your anarchist newsletter? Because you will never get everyone to agree that anarchism is the way to go. So you're going to have to come up with a model that works for people even if they don't want to be part of it.
Why? Would it not be in their self-interest? Enlightened self-interest, that is. If it is, and they still have no interest, what makes them choose otherwise? How do we free them from that kind of conditioning?
That is true but also overstated. Over here in Europe we're tribalist AF going down to the village level, doesn't mean that we're at each other's throats. At least off the football pitch, that is.
You're overstating the power that governments have -- they all, by necessity, even the likes of North Korea, govern by assent or acquiescence from the governed it's a simple numbers game. It is a question of culture, not of having police at every corner. Who, btw, in many places do the exact opposite of reducing tribal tensions.
NYC isn't a good place to start moving towards an anarchist municipality. Plenty of anarchists in NYC, doing their neigbourhood thing, but capturing Manhattan is pretty much impossible without full smaller cities haven gotten the bug first. It's like starting a D&D campaign as low-level character and saying "but this is pointless, I can't even slay ancient dragons".
Attempting the impossible is a sure-fire way to be disappointed. To feel disheartened, powerless, fatalist. To then fail to achieve the possible. Consider Anarchism not as a vision that is to be realised, or even provable in your lifetime, but as a compass to guide your direction: Can you take a step? Then what's stopping you? Let things yet beyond the horizon be things beyond the horizon, they might not even exist any more once you get there. What's the worst that can happen, that you made the world a bit of a better place? I'd take that risk.
Europe was in a state of constant war until they began to form larger, more federal power structures like the EU. This example supports my point.
It's not in people's interest to participate in the anarchist model because it sounds like a huge hassle, an incredibly inefficient way of running a society. Like I would much rather elect someone to make laws on my behalf. I realize that system doesn't always work in practice, but what the hell, if you're allowed to speak in hyper-idealized terms, then I am too.
It's not conditioning. It's completely rational to not want such large numbers of people to be involved in every little decision. We've learned over human history that mob rule is not good. Representative democracy is a natural consequence of that.
As someone who works in an office environment, I can tell you the decision making process has seriously diminishing returns as you add more people. A meeting with 4 people will usually make the same decision as one with 30, and will do it in a quarter the time. And yeah sometimes the 4 person meeting will make a mistake that the 30 person meeting would have caught, but it's still worth having decisions be a bit more error prone to not have quite so much time wasted on the natural bickering and bikeshedding that humans tend toward when trying to make decisions as a group. Go watch the TV show Parks and Rec, pay attention to the scenes where they consult the public about their decisions. That's what anarchism is going to look like (in fact, it's a pretty accurate depiction of real world public consultations). Most people are not going to be capable of participating in public administration in good faith.
You ask how we can "break the conditioning" but the thing you're responding to is human nature. So what you're actually asking is how to brainwash people into all adhering to one system.
The EU has exactly zero capacity to put boots on the ground to stop countries from fighting each other. The only boots it has is FRONTEX, that is, border guards. They wouldn't stand a chance against the police force of a single larger city.
Noone's stopping you from doing that. There's generally plenty of delegation going on. Noone's putting considerations about the cement mixture used in lamp post foundations to the general council, everyone knows that it's best left to the engineers.
While they're probably not good examples for how things would look in the west because the conditions they operate in are quite different, I recommend looking at how Chiapas and Rojava do things. They don't get bogged down in meetings. Here's a couple of videos (also about other places).
That's what consultations look like if people use the little chance they have to ever get heard in person to air general grievances. Even just emotionally. Can't expect people to act sensibly in your "conservation of the red-footed sparkle toad" consultation while their community is getting demolished for a highway expansion -- without consultation. Replace whatever with whatever in that equation.
Meanwhile, there's plenty of studies surrounding sortition (which would be a great intermediate step in many areas) showing that if you take a random sample of people (actually randomised) and sit them together with a couple of experts for at least a couple of days to hash things out, they do come up with very very sensible stuff. More like juries.
Nah what I'm asking of you is to stop saying "this thing I'm thinking of won't work because human nature" and instead say "hmm maybe another thing could work" and "probably not perfect but it's better than we have now and we might learn from it". You're not in school, any more, incomplete and approximate answers earn full credit when it comes to catalysing societal change.