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Comment by varjag | Hacker News Reader

One good uni friend of mine was an avid anarchist. We spent countless hours with him pitching Kropotkin and texts like the above (this was pre-Youtube). Then I had a chance to work for him: he still had anarchism thing going but was ruling his subordinates with steel grip and very much hierarchical way. Much later when I checked him on LinkedIn he was rising through Product Manager ranks on FB.

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He should have read Bakunin too:

> Nothing is more dangerous for man's private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one's own merits.

From _Power corrupts the best_

Oh yes that was on the list too.

I guess my point is that if you have beliefs like this, following up on them is the path of personal martyrdom. This is very much at odds with mundane things like having a family or a stable comfortable lifestyle. Few people (including those writing these texts and filming these videos) are ready to stick to that.

I think this becomes less and less true given how ridiculous are the social inequalities and how much are they a result of internal contradictions of capitalism and artificial scarcity that is an inherent part of this system.

I consider myself an anarchist - an anarcho-capitalist specifically. Hence the username.

I do my best to live by my values, but there was an inflection point for me where things fell into place and allowed me to live a "normal" life in society without compromising my values.

I realized that the whole point of anarchism is that order is emergent. We already live under an anarchic system; it's just that the order that has emerged is one based on coercion.

If I could wave a magic wand and all of the governments in the world disappeared, I wouldn't. Nothing of substance would change. A power vacuum would exist, which would be filled extremely quickly. While in a few cases we'd probably see communities coming together in a non-coercive way, in most cases it would be filled by the people most willing and able to use violence. Historically, coercive systems have scaled more readily than non-coercive systems, so the only reasonable thing to expect would be for these new proto-states to annex the non-coercive communities. Through military force if cultural forces are too slow to satisfy the ruling class.

In other words, trying to change the system is a fool's errand. The system we have today is a consequence of our society's culture.

I still believe in the NAP (Non-Aggression Principle), and that humanity would be much better living in a non-coercive and morally consistent way - but I recognize that our culture as it is today will not only never lead to that, but would not tolerate it.

So I do my best to limit my interactions with the state, and instead of trying to tear it down I spend my energy on changing society. I believe that introducing the concept of mutual consent to a single person is more impactful in the long run than directly attacking the state - even if by some miracle that attack "succeeded".

Every example that I can recall of successful anarchist or "anarchy-adjacent" societies arose organically from a small communities of like-minded people. With that in mind, if I want my descendants to live without the shackles of a coercive state, I must help mold the direction of society down a path that will ultimately lead to the conditions necessary for non-coercive governance to emerge.

To put it another way: the majority of the dyed-in-the-wool anarchists in America today are too busy writing F/OSS software and homeschooling their children to bother with anything as pointless as revolution.

Yet another person who did not have the insight (or honesty?) to realize what Robert Caro did:

Power does not corrupt, it reveals.

> Power does not corrupt, it reveals.

Hmm.

It seems I have yet more reading to do. Thank you! :)

There have been literally studies that demonstrate that yes, not only does power corrupt but it literally makes you dumber (i.e. it reduces your ability to feel empathy for others). The problem with hierarchies of domination is not that the wrong people are in charge, the problem is that there is a hiearchy and there are people in charge over others.

You'd think after a century that saw the same process of hiearchies being overthrown only to be replaced with "socialists" trying to use the same hierarchies that immediately restored the authoritarian domination of the previous hierarchy (or even extended it) people would have come to understand this.

Anark actually has a series of videos on this exact problem: The State is Counter-Revolutionary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTwxpTyGUOI&list=PLvwoHdNGq9...

These studies, were they like the Stanford Prison Experiment?

"Study" in sociology is, as far as I can tell, synonymous with "bed time story".

The replication problem does not mean your gut feeling or pre-existing biases are more reliable than potentially flawed or invalid studies.

When somebody's ideology says that people in power always behave poorly, that effectively gives them license to behave poorly when they find themselves with power. It's no longer their responsibility to handle their power well because in their ideology, good behavior when in a position of power doesn't exist. Anything they do wrong is blamed on the circumstance; it's societies fault for having hierarchy still, not their fault for abusing their power.

Different organization types can have different political systems so it doesn’t surprise me that a government or community anarchist would be hierarchical with their team.

I’m a communist when it comes to my family and an evidence-driven meritist when it comes to my scientific org, but democratic when it comes to my state. I think all these things are in philosophical harmony.

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