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Comment by pandaman | Hacker News Reader

I figure that you imply, that you are the real anarchist or at least familiar with their way of thinking? I have a question for you then and please disregard if you are not a real anarchist.

How is the current system of any consequence for you to live the anarchy dream? Why can't you just ignore it and do what you wanted to do in the hypothetical anarchy? If I had these beliefs (i.e. the lack of social hierarchy and organized violence to uphold it) I would be very happy as I could immediately live in my ideal society by just ignoring the existing hierarchy and organized violence since all I could do about it in the true anarchy I can do already (i.e. submit to the organized violence or die challenging it).

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Any ideal model can be used to describe the current state of affairs as its pathological case. In the ancap paradigm, the existing government can be viewed as a really powerful corporation. In a left-flavored anarchist paradigm, the existing government is a large scale social contract. Or as you've said, an othered government is just a hostile group to be avoided. What matters is the overall heuristic of trying to shrink the structures to be more local and manageable. Anarchism in all its various flavors isn't a prescription, but rather a rebuke of prescriptivism.

Concretely, most anarchists still have a sense of justice, possibly even a stronger one. Murdering someone and then succumbing to (possibly organized) violence makes sense. Smoking a plant and then being attacked does not.

Well, everyone has a sense of justice. Some people think that murder for "dissing" them or being too rich/white/gay/smart/stupid/etc is just and some think that smoking evil plants like tobacco is abomination and kills everyone who gets a whiff of smoke. We already have a solution for reconciling individual views on justice that works much better than what anarchists managed to show in their CHAZ/CHOP, for example.

This does not answer my question though. Why anarchists are not happy? Why can't they live in their desired society right now?

Your comment isn't very coherent, and it's hard to assume good faith. Reading any anarchist philosophy will quickly lay out criteria for recognizing versions of justice that can actually be considered reasonable.

As for answering your question, that's exactly what my comment attempted but you didn't engage with what I said. You're effectively just arguing against straw men, and have invoked yet another with "their CHAZ/CHOP".

I get you, anarchists have some literature that describes their views on justice, I am fine with it. For all I care they might have some fashion magazines that provide guidelines on the reasonable attire for a sensible anarchist.

My question is still not answered by this and I don't see how is this related at all, to be frank. It's almost as if your answer is not quite coherent.

The reason I referenced anarchist definitions of justice is that you brought up a straw man version of justice that doesn't survive the slightest critique:

> Some people think that murder for "dissing" them or being too rich/white/gay/smart/stupid/etc is just

The problem with your initial "question" and subsequent replies is that they revolve around a sophomoric understanding that collapses the philosophy into meaninglessness.

What I said in my first reply:

> What matters is the overall heuristic of trying to shrink the structures to be more local and manageable. Anarchism in all its various flavors isn't a prescription, but rather a rebuke of prescriptivism.

You may have a hard time seeing this as the essence of anarchism, as it is a general desire shared among most people. But really, we've got lots of anarchist thought in our political discourse. Blue team: drugs, prisons, nondiscrimination. Red team: guns, taxes, business regulations. But we have very little anarchism in our actual political results, except for maybe ancap for big businesses.

If you read this thread, I am sure, you will find that you brought justice first. Neither I brought any straw men (is it some new trend on Tweeter because I have seen several people in the past couple months using "straw man" in some strange and unknown to me sense, all I know is a discussion technique of making a different argument for one's opponent and arguing it instead of the actual one. But nothing of this sort could be applicable here since I have not made any arguments, I am just asking a question).

So, to prevent any possibility of stramaning, are you now saying that anarchism is disagreement with some laws and not the rejection of the institute of government?

Every one of your "questions" has included your own caricature of anarchism. At this point I can no longer assume good faith. If you earnestly want to know the answer to your questions, then you need to do the work of understanding.

The current geopolitical situation prevents anarchists from living in their desired society because there is zero (or practically zero) free land to create such a society without it existing within a state that is not anarchist. This should be obvious.

That's my question! How is "free" land is different from any other? It's just a convention established by the government i.e. if you try to settle on somebody's land then eventually armed people will show up and make you go. So how is it different from the anarchy? Who will provide the "freedom" of the land and is incapable to do it now?

I'm struggling to understand what you're trying to argue, to be honest.

Not the same poster, but I think his point is:

Consider a world where society lived by the anarchist principles. In that hypothetical world, most people self-organized in a large group where:

- They decided to democratically appoint representatives that flesh out large-scale agreements and called it law

- They decided it is necessary to have people dedicated to securing the lands where they live from both internal and external threats

... and so on and so forth, until they effectively self-organized into the equivalent of our current society.

Is there any difference between that world and ours? Why can't an anarchist assume that this is what actually happened (there's some merit to the idea) and be happy to live in an anarchist world, our world?

This is one explanation. The question I have is more of the "what are you going to do when some people will get together and apply concerted violence to you (not dissimilar to the way the government works right now)?". I have not seen a single attempt to answer this in the few hundred comments. It appears most anarchists do not even realize this possibility even exists.

Right-flavored anarchism (eg anarcho-capitalism, cryptoanarchism) addresses this question directly - a plurality of competing defense companies that would be incentivized away from actually fighting as it would be unprofitable.

If you don't mind me asking, what is the difference with feudalism where plurality of land lords provided the same service?

Peasants didn't have much mobility between lords, therefore they were seemingly coerced. Would anarcho-capitalism as stated necessarily play out similarly? Who knows.

The core of anarchism is the heuristic of rejecting hierarchies and coercion. A negative doesn't make for a compelling mass movement, hence all the different flavors are attempts at imagining structures that could replace the current ones. They all have obvious potential failure modes, but the core remains - downsizing the structures of arbitrary authority.

This is exactly my impression too. E.g. the OP article begins with characterizing anarchists as out of touch dreamers: Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. Judging by the name of the site it appears to be a positive characteristic too, which adds to confusion.

Free land is a land where I can live without someone threatening me with violence if I don't share part of the profits I make with my labour.

The freedom can be provided by the inhabitants of such land, either by getting weapons themselves or by paying some members of this community.

By this definition all land is free as you can go ahead, inhabit it and get weapons or pay some members of the community.

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