RE: A practical problem for the Anarchist and New Age Voluntarists (and any other starry-eyed idealist). (featuring @vuyusile as author)
I surely don't mean to be rude to this author, but why should anarchism have to have the answers to the problems that Statism caused? These statistics are disheartening, and in looking for possible root causes, we should consider the economic impact of The State, and truly appreciate the scope and size of the problem.
Anarchism is not some magical guarantee of peace and stability. It is not a panacea for the problems that plague our lands, but it does represent opportunity for change. It is interesting that as a people, we often demand of anarchy that which we do not of the state: a concrete plan of action to solve issues.
I appreciate your sincere and extremely well written post, but trying to give you a straight answer would require verbal gymnastics that would be rife with holes.
But suffice to say that government as an idea has only existed in our recorded history for about 7 thousand years. We have been around as this type of human for much longer than that. We use to have God Emperors and kings and queens, and one day we'll say that we used to have government, but all the bad people took it over for immunity so we stopped doing that.
Until then, anything much more than "ranting" will get you added to governments body count. The hard truth is that, if we want a change we have to dismantle what exists and begin again, after removing the rot from the underlying structure. The hardest truth is that we're all just human, and giving back power is the real problem.
I want two things in one form or another:
1 A plan of action to get to realize Anarcho-Capitalism rather than statism.
2 A plan of action to keep that freedom.
Now, I don't demand either of those things "from anarchy".
And in fact I don't fully demand them from anyone but myself, which is why I'm a an AnCap and a Cooperative Agorist CoAg, but I certainly still expect people to use their brains and we do need to come up with something that is actually going to be a viable competition to the state, rather than simply proposing a "random" or "chaotic" inorder not really capable of promoting or worthy of being called a society;
That's not what anarcho-capitalists want anyway. We're not nihilists. We don't want entirely "random" or "chaotic" events to take place -- not entirely --, but "human" events that are a matter of free will being purposefully exercised to the betterment of our own life and the lives of our loved ones.
(And, as you told the author, I mean no offence of course)
Perhaps you missed the point in my original post that accepted that the problem represented a failure by government.
I demand of every ideology/social program/school of thought that it demonstrate its usefulness in real world situations otherwise I won't invest in it.
Did you appreciate the contradiction in your third paragraph?
Government has been around as long as society has been organised in a unit bigger than the nuclear family. Unless we fragment completely to that level, government is here to stay. It is the form that is in issue; the policies and programs that are at stake.
I agree we need change; I don't think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I don't want to be defeatist.
There is no contradiction in my third paragraph. Government as an idea has only existed for about 7 thousand years as far as we can tell. Homosapien has been around for about 200k years.
Where is the contradiction?
We had a world before we organized into revenue extracting governments, and we will have one once these unsustainable power hungry entities burn themselves out or collapse the system and die from lack of tax money. That it takes 10k years for humanity's cycle of dependence on violent government to end and a new paradigm to begin is irrelevant, it will happen. We will either turn into a slave species (arguably already there), or we will shake off the "certainty" that government is the only way the world as it is can exist.
It's not defeatist, it is the greatest hope for life, since government does not care about life and is incompatible with our continued progress as a species.
The contradiction is in the third, not fourth paragraph.
Homo sapiens has not undergone any major species advance in evolution in the last 10 thousand years. It has undergone massive changes in its social organisation thanks in major part to the shift to cropping and urbanisation. Government was born out of the need for a social contract between competitors for scarce resources. The cause of government, whatever its form, has not gone away.
Isn’t your argument a nostalgia for an irrelevant past?
It also seems we are missing each other on the meaning of government. A large part of government, the executive, include people employed in it that care deeply about life. The legislature grapple with real people’s real problems, often trying to alleviate the plight of the weak. Judges constantly make decisions that are just and compassionate. Many laws exist to constitute and instantiate freedom. One cannot ignore this aspect. which is not to abandon our ability to be critical of the shortcomings.
Don’t we ask ourselves, since we recognise their fallabilites, whether they are doing more harm than good. At that point we mobilise to insist on change.