Anyone who has played a recreational sport or played a board game with friends—probably most people—has personal experience with consensual rules that don’t require a ruler or coercive enforcement.
And yet.
Many people will struggle to conceive of life without rulers or coercive enforcement, and envision anarchism as simply violent chaos.
Anyone who has lived in a country with jury trials has experience with judgement by one’s peers as an ideal of justice.
And yet.
Many people will struggle with conceive of life with peace and security as a communal responsibility, in which we are all freely responsible to and for each other rather than to some coercive authority.
Lots of people have direct, personal experience with the tenants and ideals of anarchism. But many of us have also been trained since childhood to see those experiences only in very limited and tightly constrained circumstances—and never to analogize them to *other* aspects of life.
If you have ever queued to ride the bus and boarded in an orderly fashion without an armed cop telling you what to do, or else…you’ve experienced life as an anarchist.
If you’ve ever held a door open for a stranger or bummed a cigarette…you’ve experienced a central communist tenant.
If you’ve ever bought a round at the pub with the understanding that someone else will get the next…you’ve engaged in reciprocity.
These are all things people do all the time! They’re things people even like and often profess to enjoy as ideals!
But suggest we organize our society around these ideals and suddenly you’re proposing unworkable idealism, at best, and murderous chaos, at worst.
Anarchism is simply the act of taking seriously the things our society claims to believe in: freedom, consent, equality, democracy, peaceful coexistence and cooperation.
I just saw someone say “voluntary consent works in small communities but breaks down at the level of the state or the whole world.”
Then why are we wasting our time with the whole “representative liberal democracy” experiment? Because that is, at least notionally, voluntary consent at the national level.
I think that many people associate anarchism with the things it disavows rather the things it avows. For instance, I don't intuitively associate those behaviours with anarchism, even though I associate anarchism with them.
My oversimplified mental model of how society shapes behaviour of people in it is that there are two significantly different ways it always does so: one applies to people who have reasonable amounts of empathy (even if they are prevented from abiding by it by e.g. terribly circumstances they are in) and the other applies to ones who don't. There are very few latter people, but societies have to somehow deal with them (v. serial harassers at e.g. conferences), and using the same approach for both either doesn't deal with latter well, or makes for an unpleasant society for everyone else.
If we take that assumption, an interesting part of the approach is how to decide which approach to use. This is where often some kind of presentability comes in, and this allows for exploits. Assuming I'm not speaking total bollocks, how would you describe this part in a large anarchist society (large in the meaning of low rate of repeat encounters of same people)?
@robryk
I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you’re asking