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RE: A practical problem for the Anarchist and New Age Voluntarists (and any other starry-eyed idealist). (featuring @vuyusile as author)
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.