this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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Anarchism
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Discuss anarchist praxis and philosophy. Don't take yourselves too seriously.
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My thoughts about power balance, power vacuum and so on are simple.
Those who'd want to take power are usually cowards. It's no good to dead. It's no good if there's nothing remaining to have power over. The one who can destroy a thing owns it.
There's the Cold War MAD doctrine which was employed by all sides and simultaneously vilified by green, pacifist etc parties. But maybe now we can see how the world without MAD looks and see that it's better when everyone is armed to their teeth.
You can come to the truth from anywhere if you seek it honestly. It's the same with weapons - everyone arming themselves and being ready to defend themselves create a group immunity, where sociopathic behaviors get rewarded less, and sociopaths are more challenged in accumulating power. Again, the only real kind of ownership is where you can destroy your property. You own your life when you are capable of sacrificing it as you wish. When a society is armed to its teeth, then its power imposed upon any kind of power-accumulating authorities is more than theirs, and when it's disarmed, it's nothing compared to theirs.
People being accustomed to anarchy and actively wanting it are not enough. People want to try all kinds of things. People fear. People are malicious. People want worse societies when they believe they will be the ones imposing injustice upon others. People are also just stupid.
The Internet is not an example of anarchy, of course. It's nothing without its backbone cables built with participation of governments and enormous corporations and treated as strategic assets. It's no more anarchist than sea ports. There was a sprinkle of anarchy there in its transient years from an elitarian scientific thing to a common medium. That was not stable. Nothing anarchist can be stable in a system of dominating hierarchy.
I admit it was easy to buy into this fairy tale when I was a kid. In 2006 it seemed that the humanity is one step from becoming free and, well, humane.
All that said, I think eventually we win.
But we can never know, because our perception is always poisoned. It's much easier to do that than to thoroughly weed us out (it has a better characteristic considering their superior power, while the latter is not plausible to do). That's what the adversary is always doing. Any "smart and considered" action is likely wrong, because it's based on compromised perception. This is just like scammers calling you to "help catch criminals" or something.
The only way anarchism ever succeeds is by acting on rigid principle, as if fighting blindfolded.
You're missing the point of the example. I'm not pushing techno-libertarian utopianism here. I'm not even talking about what the internet does, I'm talking about what it is: A globe-spanning megaproject that connects (nearly?) every country, and is used by a full 2/3rds of existing humans. And it was made without a supreme central authority forcing everyone to cooperate in its creation and maintenance. ARPANET was created by the US, but no one forced the Russians or the Chinese to adopt the IP protocol on their computers and connect to their neighbors.
This is important because a super common anti-anarchist talking point is that people won't cooperate (at least not at scale) unless an overarching authority forces them to. The existence of the internet demolishes that argument. It would be fundamentally impossible if that talking point were true.
Also no one forced people to adapt railway gauge or PSTN standards.
I can't agree. It's the lower authorities submitting to the higher authority. That happens. A small group of authorities is close to one. In fact none are monolithic.
Nah. The US hasn't been able to force Russia to stop their invasion of Ukraine, nor stop them from playing fuck-fuck games all over the rest of the world. And China is almost certainly stronger than Russia is. They both joined the internet because they wanted to, not because they were forced.
Oh, they'll just choose to cooperate and act like a single central authority? Without a preexisting central authority forcing them to? 🤔
I'm begging your pardon, but when the Internet came to Russia, US was sending humanitarian aid there. Literally giving out chicken legs in Moscow.
Also differences in power are not two discrete states. A parent can't force their child to marry a specific person, but they can force them to live in a certain area, using, say, financial help as leverage.
So? They'll form a cluster.
One can say top-level Soviet bureaucrats were not yes-men to the general secretary either. They made decisions collegially.