Scalability of Individual Responsibility in Anarchy
My recent article I presented a case that nonviolent censorship and shunning are both fundamental features a non-violent government. I made the case that it is entirely possible for non violent governments to have as much or even more power than their violent alternatives that exist today. Anytime there is sufficient consensus among the masses, social pressure can be much more powerful a motivator than any prison sentence. Sadly, social pressure can be manipulated and abused through propaganda to create negative outcomes.
Peer pressure usually operates in a pseudo pyramid (@gikitiki)
This concept is an accurate observation. There are leaders and followers and this is something that will always be true. It is almost cliché in movies that some popular “bully” steers the opinion of their lackeys. People latch onto people and follow their opinions in an effort to improve their own social standing.
It takes some major event to dislodge the followers from a bully. The followers usually find a new leader and will blindly follow that leader.
People must own themselves (@williambanks)
People need to form their own opinions. This is the crux of many similar arguments. In particular, if you don’t take the time to derive your own opinion about someone then you are letting someone else control your thoughts. This is claimed to be the opposite of freedom and anarchy. You are still a slave if someone else draws your conclusions for you.
We all want people to think for themselves. It is the best defense against some psychopath gaining influence over the masses. It demonstrates that people are taking personal responsibility.
When you have a system of organized coordinated shunning of people whom you have never met, then you have a system of government that has the potential to be abused. Whoever has the ability to manipulate the consensus algorithm has the power to make arbitrary law. The masses who have bought into the consensus algorithm will follow it off a cliff if they do not think for themselves.
Like Larken Rose states, the belief in authority is the root of all evil. Whether that authority is with a government or a blockchain based consensus algorithm. The moment people feel compelled to comply with an authority they become a tool to the system.
We need to Separate Ends from Means
Anarchists frequently condemn statists for allowing the ends to justify the means. Statists are willing to tolerate violence so long as the end result is a mostly peaceful society. They have no guiding principle other than the outcome.
When I set out to build a free society based upon the principle of nonaggression, the goal was to achieve “governance without violence”. When I present my case for how it might work, many anarchists are suddenly concerned about the potential outcomes of a society based only on nonviolence and free association (or disassociation).
Without lifting a finger to hurt someone, society still has the power to condemn a man and any who help him to death by economic shunning. This is an unacceptable outcome to many anarchists. Any system that is capable of coordinating this economic shunning would be perceived as a new threat: the new state.
In their mind they picture a utopia where there are no rulers or social forces acting on them in ways they do not like. They imagine a world of free thinking individuals who are universally tolerant. This kind of thinking is just as deranged as communists who think that one day everyone will be selfless and work for the common good.
Is Non Aggression Enough?
If we are to build a system the bring about a society structured as closely to our ideals as possible, then it may be the case that non-aggression is a necessary but insufficient principle. Imagine we succeeded in creating a world government based upon blockchain technology that had no police, prisons, or guns. Imagine that it had the support of the masses.
Now imagine that the propaganda machine convinced the masses (via blockchain based economic incentives) to voluntarily shun everyone who refused a vaccine. Imagine that anyone who amassed a certain amount of wealth was also shunned if they didn’t give it away to a socially acceptable cause?
Why there is nothing to Fear!
Fortunately we don’t need to fear these potentially undesirable outcomes. Absent the fear of violence, any sufficiently large group of people who share a common belief would have the ability to form their own self-sustaining communities (effectively their own country). The pursuit of freedom and profit will drive people to separate from the herd mentality.
Any kind of sustained shunning would be countered with underground movements where people secretly ignore the official consensus until enough people defect and the official consensus changes.
The power to shun is also the power to secede from the greater society to form your own smaller community. Free market competition among communities is what will drive all communities toward the most profitable social arrangements.
Some people fear that these communities would eventually "go to war" against one another. This would not be the case if all communities had the nonaggression principle as the foundation of their own governance structure.
Division of Labor and Delegation of Responsibility
In order for any nonviolent community to scale beyond a couple dozen individuals, it is necessary for there to be a division of labor when it comes to reputation and policing the community. It is not practical for everyone to derive their own opinion of every other member. People must defer to someone they trust.
The reason we join societies and accept voluntary forms of governance (such as blockchain based voting), is because these societies and organizations provide us with more value than they take. These organizations may have elected officials that are granted the power to make rules. All that matters is that they do not have the power to use violence and aggression to enforce their rules.
This is what blockchain technology is all about, defining governance structures that people voluntarily consent to. Some communities have simple rules like immutable censorship free money transmission. Other communities have more complex rules like paying people for subjective work with a prohibition on plagiarism. Still other communities may set their aims on replacing insurance, justice, and other aspects of government with effective non-violent alternatives.
What is clear is that for any community to scale, it must embrace division of labor and rely on algorithms to disintermediate reputation and coordinate social punishment.
I feel like I am strapping on a vest covered in steak and walking into the lion's den with this comment, but here goes nothing. ; )
I think that hope is just as utopian and unrealistic as communists who "think that one day everyone will be selfless and work for the common good."
These different communities are likely separate because of some difference in fundamental views and values. But they still share the same space and resources (not the exact same land area of course, but they are all part of this interconnected and finite planet). Even if they remain tolerant of the (in their view obscene) behavior occurring in their neighboring community as long as it remains contained to that region, there will likely be situations where there is forced interaction between the two communities because of their need to access or manipulate shared resources. For example, they may both be pumping oil/gas out of the same shared reservoir. Or one community may be upstream the other community, and be consuming too much of the water or even polluting the downstream water that the other community relies on.
Perhaps this can be viewed as an act of aggression against their neighbor, but do you really think it is not a plausible for some communities to do these things if it benefits them (via higher profits, more convenience, greater access to resources, etc.) especially if they empathize with the impacted community less because of fundamental differences in values? I think it is very likely. And therefore the likely result would be that each community builds up militaries to defend their access to resources, and occasionally those communities will end up going to war over these sorts of resource conflicts.
So let's recap. The non-violent government will have mechanisms ultimately backed by coordinated shunning to deter behavior deemed undesirable (i.e. crime) by their local community (i.e. state). The coordinated shunning will require the shunned individual to defect to another established community (another state) that will accept them. If their behavior/values are so unaccepted by society that there does not exist an established community to accept them, they will be forced to survive in the outskirts of civilization where they will almost surely die (basically acting as a death penalty for them not choosing to comply with the rules of the community they used to belong to) because it is incredibly difficult for even a small tribe much less an individual to survive and be self-sufficient in the wilderness. It becomes even more difficult for them to survive as the natural resources available to them further dwindle as more and more of the civilized communities claim and develop land for use in their societies (and therefore become unavailable to the shunned outcasts). These developed communities will inevitably run into conflicts with other developed communities that hold different values. These conflicts can potentially become an existential threat to the community, so they will need to organize and develop a specialized force to defend themselves (i.e. a military). Once one accepts that a military is needed to defend the community's existence from acts by other communities who wish to expand their usage of resources, then they must accept that their military must be well-equipped to handle the threats otherwise it would just be providing an illusion of security. So this sparks a cat-and-mouse game of developing better weapons technology compared to their enemies (and potential enemies).
So what are the differences again between what this "non-violent" community/government will surely evolve to become and the modern nation-state? Maybe it is that they allow people who break their rules and refuse to or cannot pay restitution to victims to leave the community to another one that may accept them, rather than holding them prisoner within their community? At first glance it is a nice thought I suppose, although it does totally change the game dynamics of deterrence via punishment which a sociopath will surely take advantage of if they know there is another community ready to accept them even after they commit their terrible acts.
Also, can such a society really function well without prisons? I am against retributive justice, but as far as I see there are two legitimate purposes for a prison. The first, which I consider the weaker of the two, is to act as a form of deterrence against highly undesired behavior (crimes) particularly in cases where monetary fines cannot act as a sufficient deterrence. For example, if someone is completely broke already and is unlikely to succeed in a job/career to earn enough money to cover more than the basic costs of survival, adding more fines to them is not going to deter them from crimes at all since they already don't have anything to lose from a financial perspective. The second purpose is to keep the rest of the population safe from someone deemed to be violent and dangerous. Now if there is no hope for rehabilitation, perhaps this usage of prison wouldn't be much different than simply shunning the individual from the community (assuming they can force them if necessary to actually leave and stay out of the physical territory of the community). Although even then, I doubt the community would be okay with allowing some group of people who, for example, killed many people in an act of terrorism to just leave the community to some safe haven to only regroup, re-plan, and try to attack again. However, more commonly, what about the case where someone's act of violence was a crime of passion, or mental illness, and society believes that with the proper help they can be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society? But in the mean time, I doubt society would accept for them to be left to roam free in their community and thus be likely triggered to commit similar act again. Without a prison system (granted I concede that the existing US prison system does a terrible job of rehabilitation, but it could in theory be changed to work better if there was enough pressure from citizens to demand change), the "non-violent" society would be forced to either live with the high risk of this volatile person continuing to live in their community committing another violent act or be forced to take the extreme position of shunning them from the community altogether, which if there is no other community that is willing to accept this person (with a now known history of violence), then that act of shunning would essentially act as death sentence. Is that really a more desirable society to live in? One where any act of violence committed by someone who is simply unable to pay full restitution for the damage they have caused should result in them effectively being sentenced to death even if they could be rehabilitated in time to no longer be a threat to society?
To me it seems that what the "non-violent" state-free government would evolve to would not be much different than the modern state. Call me a pessimist if you wish, but I believe this evolution would be an unavoidable result of the nature of humanity. Culture and education can of course influence human behavior and counteract certain negative aspects of human nature. And while I think that can and should be used to improve the state of society, I personally don't believe it can realistically make the "non-violent" society you envision radically different (in terms of the existence and need of aggression and violence in the society) compared to the modern state. In some ways, the outcomes of the society you describe in your writings that I believe are achievable seem more desirable to me than the current system, but these are improvements that I think if it were possible to achieve, could also be achieved through changes in policy within our existing society without completely abandoning the notion of a state. Of course in some other ways, the outcomes of the society you describe seem to me to be far more dangerous and terrible than the current system (of states) that we live with today.
And finally I will conclude by saying, yes, outcomes are what should matter in my opinion. If the emergent behavior of a system evolving according to certain imposed principles that were chosen due to a desire to see less violence and tragedy in the world instead led to an outcome of more violence and tragedy compared to an alternative system operating under difference principles, why would one wish to choose the former system? Now that is a claim about the state of the physical world, and I don't know for sure what would be the outcome of such a system. From a scientific perspective it would be interesting to see that experiment carried out to examine what the outcomes would actually be in reality. Of course, as with any science dealing with humans, there are ethical considerations that make doing the science properly very difficult. If we have strong reason to believe through previous historical case studies (granted you may argue deriving conclusions from those historical data points is flawed for a variety of reasons, but we can never have very pure data in this human-centric field unlike the hard sciences) that running the experiment could likely lead to mass human suffering (and not just of the people who voluntarily elected to take part in the experiment), then there is a serious moral dilemma with recommending or even allowing such an experiment to be carried out. But anyway, my point was about a hypothetical situation. Say we nearly all agreed that the likely outcome of that system based on "virtuous" principles would lead to more violence and tragic outcomes than an alternative system operating on other principles, but those other principles were not deemed "virtuous" perhaps because they reject the non-aggression principle. It seems strange to me to reject the system that is predicted to lead to less bad outcomes (assuming we all agree on what outcomes were bad versus good) in favor of the other system simply because of the principles behind them. Of course someone on the other side of the argument would say the same thing about my views; they would be confused how one can believe in ends justifying the means. Perhaps besides the differences of opinion about the true nature of the humanity and how humans would naturally behave in a true free society, this is probably the major reason for disagreement between rational anarchists and rational statists: deontological ethics versus consequentialism. As someone who doesn't believe in objective morality, I cannot say that one is objectively "right" and the other is objectively "wrong". But I can say that it is simply baffling to me why some people subscribe to deontological ethics, particularly people who are not indoctrinated into believing in a deity.
Food for thought! Thanks to both of you for stirring up the debate. I find it hard to have a firm position on soft social sciences. Like you, I don't really believe in retributive punishment, but like @dantheman I thought about shunning as a form of punishment, just never thought about it in a decentralize way like he is proposing. Me too, I don't believe in such thing as definite good or evil (objective morality as you say) and that is why I love a good story where characters have to walk along the many thin lines of their consciousness' shades of grey (all drawn differently depending on each person's perspective) and where in the end necessity kind of acts like some sort of predestiny. I can't stand anymore Hollywood movies where the ''good guy'' who started with good intentions (non-aggression principle?) then ends up using any means necessary for some ''greater good'' or reparation. Maybe it's mostly the cliche aspect of it and that is been redone countless times... or maybe it's only the fact that it constantly brings up in our face the ideal of utopia (whether it's throught the means to achieve it or the outcome itself) which instinctively we must know is impossible. If we are to believe, as I do, in some kind of duality in our existence (not as polar opposites to each other but as infinite nuances) as what ables differentiation between one and the other, should we really hope to completely rid ourselves of bad things which ultimately is what define their good opposites? I don't know, I've been struggling with the idea of no governments at all versus a basic and very small one (for security purposes maybe?). But to say that full anarchists are mere idealists and that they espouse dangerous ideas equating to that of communist thinkers, I don't agree. One wants to be done with this artificial lever of power that is the construct of the state, the other one wants to pretend it's possible that every one can have it's hands on it without any kind of problem.
I really appreciate what you're saying here and have enjoyed reading about your vision, on Steemit and otherwise! I do think this statement:
is a bit too pessimistic. If you're talking about transforming people and the world dramatically enough to make anarchy work, you may need to entertain the idea that "human nature" isn't unchangeable, and that we may be able to reduce or even eliminate the desire for leaders.
Non-aggression and non-violence probably aren't enough, since they're just the conceptual opposites of aggression and violence.
I agree about the potential for blockchain technology to allow people to create voluntary governments.
Interesting thoughts. I've often pondered how scalable this really is. For instance, examining it from a US perspective:
A small town could be built on these ideas and function well, I think.
A county could too, but there would be differences among the towns
What about a state the size of Oklahoma? Is it still small enough to maintain integrity and invite competition from other states?
It seems apparent that in any large state, adhesion becomes untenable. There are too many variables of interest, conviction, principles, priorities, resources, etc. I only say this from an oversight perspective. It would seem that governance on a large scale is simply too subject to tension in diversity, interests and abuse.
Good points! Size and scalability really matter.
"Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants."
-- William Pen
@fulltimegeek
God is an invention of men, sustained by tyrants
The point is finding a way to tame people so they can't act freely.
Be it a religion, societal shunning, or traditional government, there must be some way to clip the wings of every human, so no one is truly free. There must be control.
Why do people think this taming is necessary?
I think that the main motivation (other than some people's sadism and sheer desire for dominance) is fear. People are afraid that they'll experience pain and loss and that things they don't want to see happen will happen, so they support "control" in various ways. The thing is, we can never control events well enough to completely end fear.
Control of people by other people or of people by an idea or concept is absurd. If we want to not feel afraid once and for all, we're going to have to find another way.
@edgeland I loved the quote. Everybody tells me to watch Mr. Robot, maybe I should start :)
I totally agree, control and authority are as real as any other inventions. When I'll have kids, I really hope they trust me because I have proven myself to them not because I have "authority" because I am their parent.
Haha, you should watch it! Great show.
Yeah, I also want to raise free kids who think and act independently. Of course I'll have to do things like teaching them math and holding on to their hands so they don't die in traffic when they're toddlers, but I'm not going to set up any false authority or structure. Why add to the confusion?
Somebody wants to build a Steem Community IRL.
Blockchain stuff is fun, but it relies heavily on computers, and your proficiency in their use.
You say blockchain technology will help define government structures that people consent to. Just because people can discreetly move money around?
I'm not sure this justifies it as much as I'd like.
Look a little further into it. The blockchain can create contracts between two parties with certain rules and certain results. That way, if the contract is not executed, the person who didn't do the work doesn't get paid. Another example is medical records. Would you rather some hospital owns them where you have no idea if they are secure or of they are being sold to another agency, or would you rather have them at your disposal and protected with encryption? There are many examples of how the blockchain could replace politicians, lawyers, accountants, etc. It can cut out the middleman and all people have to do is sign into their account.
Of course this technology is new and there will be problems that need solutions, but so far, the possibilities are endless.
..."This kind of thinking is just as deranged as communists who think that one day everyone will be selfless and work for the common good"
I think I have run into this kind of anarchist! Thanks for separating the two kinds of thinking as people tend to group the two together...
Really this idea that you have expressed here @dantheman. Maybe with more individual responsibility may come collaborate responsibility of less responsible individuals somehow providing a balanced response so that responsible individuals may better deal with irresponsible individuals. Although I'm not sure how that may shape into a solution at the moment upon a path stemming along this idea..
@dantheman Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I did not get around to comment on your previous article. I agree completely with your assumption that nonviolent governance works many times better than the force-monopolies we have now. Force has no logical end before death, so any governance based on violence is a death threat. This is anything but a naturally balance association of parties. When you call it non-violent, i would actually just call it free competition on services presently called government. Competitive governance will undoubtedly fast diverge towards non-violence, since it is a preferable attribute to a service provider.
State controlled education is collectivist indoctrination. This has always had only one purpose. Create obedience that can be exploited by psychopaths and useful idiots. You cannot exploit a person that is a 100% individualistic (which is another description of "anarchist") and therefore fogging peoples judgment and getting them to give up their personal sovereignty is possible only if they can be indoctrinated to see themselves as a part of a collective. Free associations based on contracts are not collectives, collectivism is a mental illusion, based on false mental aggregations of separate but identical concepts.
If it is unacceptable for an anarchist, that a person is shunned from life preserving services because of his or hers actions against the free associations that are available, they are not anarchists. Anarchists want 100% individualism and therefore logically must accept other individuals self inflicted actions even if it means they will die. Those genes are not worthy of reproduction anyway. The social forces of free choice to not engage in free association with other people is as basic for real anarchists as actual active free association. Ostracism is the tool too keep people from diverting the consequences of their actions onto somebody else.
An important difference between competitive governance and forced governance is that competitive will stop giving you services, if you do not comply with the contract. Forced governance will force you to "receive" their services and force you to pay for them, regardless of your individual need. Non compliance means death by government. Non compliance in free society means self imposed "social" suicide. The difference is personal individual choice.
the non-aggression principle means "no initiation of force". This is the anarchist principle that is the minimum for deciding if an action (based on free choices) is moral or immoral. But in the case that someone aggress against you, you are no longer bounded by this principle, since the aggressor has escalated the "conflict" beyond the scope of the principle. So you are free to choose your retaliation against the aggressor to ensure your return to non aggression scenario again. The retaliation does not have to be equal in "force" as the aggressor, it is completely up to you to decide the scope of it. Otherwise it would still be the aggressor that dictated and controlled the situation and therefore a bigger incentive to figure out a way to use aggression. The fog of war retaliation force, would inhibit aggression.
(btw i consider myself an anarchist)
By definition, there is no governance without coercive power. It doesn't necessarily mean that there is violence involved. I don't see any kind of form of rules enforcement in social media platforms.