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ELI5 why is anarchy not "the guy with the bigger stick" making the rules? (lemmy.giftedmc.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm politically agnostic and have moved from a slightly conservative stance to a vastly more progressive stance (european). i still dont get the more niche things like tankies and anarchists at this point but I would like to, without spending 10 hours reading endless manifests (which do have merit, no doubt, but still).

Can someone explain to me why anarchy isnt the guy (or gal, or gang, or entity) with the bigger stick making the rules?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Oh, I never thought of the Fediverse being anarchic (anarchistic?), that's a nice thought (then again servers are mostly structured hierarchical with admins and mods and users?).

I'm not sure how well it translates into societies, though. I love the principles of anarchy, I strongly believe that there should be no one ruling over or deciding for other people but I'm not sure this would work in reality since I can just see how the people with the "big stick" (armies) would just invade us while we're endlessly debating what the best course of action is. I know this is a bleak outlook on the world but you can kind of see it happening now where Russia can just count on Europe and the US arguing among themselves (in their respective systems) while the dictatorship is just fucking shit up. I sure hope I'm proven wrong!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

bear in mind here that i’m very much not well-versed in anarchist philosophy, but

servers are mostly structured hierarchical with admins and mods and users

i think even in systems like direct democracy (afaik a kind of anarchy because people directly vote on everything?) it doesn’t really scale and you end up needing to elect someone to make implementation decisions toward the overall goals of the society

the key is that it should be very easy to replace that person, and they should have no real “power” other than things that people would mostly come to the same conclusions about anyway - they’re an administrator, a knowledge worker, and their job is procedural

in the fediverse, we join servers whereby we agree to their rules. moderators and admins are a procedural role that is about interpreting and implementing those rules. we can replace them at any time by changing servers and our loss is minimal - less so on mastodon because of the account transfer feature! thus their power over us is always an individual choice and not something that is forced upon us either explicitly or implicitly

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Servers are heirarchic, but heirarchy is optional; the lower level members are free to leave at any time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's not a perfect model, but it's decently close. If Lemmy had a way to distribute server ownership to a group of individuals, that would be even closer.

If I was a whiz at developing, I would love to build that kind of feature.

I understand your concern of external threats to an anarchistic society, but I would just remind you that plenty of centralized governments/societies have also been conquered by other centralized powers. Being centralized by no means protects you from that threat. I think the more relevant factor is just overall size of the opposing force.

It doesn't matter how weak hamsters are compared to you. If enough of them attack you endlessly, eventually you will succumb, if for no other reason than pure exhaustion lol.

However, there are clear examples IRL of far smaller and weaker decentralized forces successfully resisting a much more powerful centralized force. The VietCong vs the USA in Vietnam, the Mujahideen vs the USSR in Afghanistan, the American Revolutionary forces vs England, the French Resistance vs the Nazis, etc.

I would highly recommend the YouTuber, Anark. He has fantastic content discussing all aspects of anarchism, including defense. He also has links to many other great resources to learn about Anarchism.