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Comment by lambdaone

2 hours ago

This is one of these circular relationships. You and your friends can experience true, free, cooperation exactly because you don't have to be on guard 24/7 against enemies, because you live in a civil society that has rules, and people to enforce those rules - ultimately by coercion through violence.

Peaceful anarchy evaporates when bad actors arrive. I wish it wasn't so. A structured civil society is the nearest we've managed to get to being able to live in relative freedom almost all of the time. It's the least violent, least coerced option we've been able to find.

The other way would be to go live in a group by yourselves off the grid, and as long as every one of you is good and decent that will be fine, but the moment one of you goes bad, you either have to choose violence or they will do whatever they want to you.

"A structured civil society is the nearest we've managed to get to being able to live in relative freedom almost all of the time. It's the least violent, least coerced option we've been able to find."

Can you source these claims?

Civil society only seems to be getting LESS free and MORE violent all of the time. And in America, I constantly have to protect myself against enemies be it scammers or the thug who tried to mug me for my wallet.

The term anarchy is used in academia for all kinds of non-hierarchical civil societies. Academia being academia, they chose to stick with a dumb label. But the set I think OP is describing is more intuitively understood as non-hierarchical social systems.

  • >evaporates

    Not going to school GP (presumably not one of the hill peoples for which self-defense is mother nature)... ?

    Actshually, Jura Federation dissolved

    (Not too sure about bad actors in or around it)