Comment by coldtea
2 days ago
There are two common uses of the term anarchy (and likely more, your definition appears to be the fourth in that dictionary).
Anarchy as in political/social chaos, where "everything goes" Mad Max style, and anarchy as in a volunteer governance system of direct democracy with no coercive authority.
The way you wrote it "which is worse than all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.", implied to me the former.
If you meant the latter, I'd call it absolute much better than the "very worst governments" and likely better than even the best traditional governments. Whether it can be long term stable is debatable, but a different claim. In any case, what we have is neither that well working, nor that stable.
Fair enough. I am just a lot more sceptical than you are about firstly, how well anarchy would work (I do not think it would scale up to the size of modern societies), and secondly how quickly it would be replaced by else and how bad that something else would be.
For the first, I'd say modern societies didn't scale well themselves, which is what causes many of our issues. We need to scale them down, split them into thousands of smaller communities, with more autonomy.
For the other, that's up for debate. They might just be replaced by misery on the current trajectory too.
I agree with you insofar as modern societies are over centralised. In my view the cure for this has to be more than just political - the economic structure (domination of the economy by big businesses) and technology and other things would also need to change.