Do you think any nation or a group of nations will ever resort to anarchism?

I’m referring mostly to a collapse of the current system we have now.

We are already seeing it in a few places: parts of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sudan/South Sudan/Chad/Somalia.

There is a romantic notion that anarchy will result in total freedom for everyone, and some kind of free society where everyone gets long. Unfortunately, that isn’t realistic.

I think “descent” into anarchy perhaps but not “resort” to anarchy as a choice. There is a political system that is called anarchism which means a lack of government but I don’t see any but a few proponents choosing that or it working for very long. “A state of anarchy” is also used colloquially for any lawless region and we seem to have that in parts of the world. But hegelianism would teach us that it won’t last long: a dictator will arise.

What system? Some aspects of the current situation are insupportable. I’m sure many things are going to collapse and many more will certainly evolve and change. The wide-open question is which ones, in what ways, and when.

I think many escalating control systems are actually signs of breakdown of stability. For example, it’s more stable to not need paranoid security, than to have excessive security enforcement. Militarized police and security cameras everywhere means people are panicking because they perceive fundamental problems and disasters in their future. They escalate to mindset and expectation of the types of things they are afraid will happen.

The whole system of corporations competing for endlessly-increasing profits, growth, power and resource consumption is a recipe for certain collapse. So is the tendency to convert more and more land to human use, and continued accelerated extinction of non-human species. Not to mention climate change (what happens when places like India start being unable to support civilized human life?), ocean acidification (what happens when fishing collapses?), or the ever-decreasing corporate profit margins in employing most people in the 1st world? Some things are going to change because it won’t continue to function forever without massive unignorable problems. The question is what form those changes will take.

There’s always some level of anarchy out there, changing thing. There are always spikes of “anarchy” when old systems fail and need to be replaced.

There’s theoretical anarchy, which is a utopian aspiration that most humans are not enlightened enough to partake, and there’s real-life anarchy that I interpret as chaos. There are definitely countries that are in a state of chaos where the man with the most guns controls all potable water, food resources and anything else a person needs to survive. I cite the majority of Liberia, Chad, Ghana and others.

These are places that have well-armed, competing factions roaming the countryside pillaging, raping, torturing and murdering innocent villagers. As a villager, at any time, a group of men with automatic long guns in the back of a pickup can come through your village and take all the live stock, all the young men and girls. Then, a couple of days later, the competing faction will come through and kill everyone for assisting the enemy.

This happens on a daily basis in many countries. A visit to one these places will make you realize how far our societies are from this, yet how dangerous are those within our societies that who wish for rapid, radical change in our governments. It really makes you appreciate what you have and makes you much more willing to work within the system to encourage change, encourage evolution rather than revolution. The countryside in Haiti was like that after the 2010 earthquake for awhile. I had a German aid worker tell me that if he had a house in Haiti and a house in Hell, he’d rent out the house in Haiti and live in Hell.

Are humans developed enough to live in enlightened, theoretical anarchy? I don’t think they’ll be ready for another thousand years.

With a president encouraging citizens to shoot drug users in the street, it seems like the Philippines is heading in that direction.

The US in November.

I would say no way. Anarchy is the antithesis of most forms of government. It could arrive in the form of revolution, or in a void like in Iraq. But in my opinion, anarchy is unsustainable. The strongest, or most ruthless would form gangs or armies. Eventually a ‘leader’ would evolve and try and essentially create a new government. As mentioned above, like a dictator.

It’s an unrealistic concept, closer to nature, than to civilization.

No nation or country could do that, since it requires zero government. One group that has come close the last 45 years or so is the Rainbow Family.

I

Somalia

@Espiritus_Corvus “There’s theoretical anarchy, which is a utopian aspiration that most humans are not enlightened enough to partake…”

Exactly. Theoretical Anarchy gets a bad rap when the term is mistaken for Chaos.

Utopian anarchy is a fine pursuit, but probably only achievable after some wild earth pole shift wipes every human mind to the level of infantile, and we start all over naked in the garden… again.

@Zaku I suppose this would involve mainly the westernised nations. Also with the whole Brexit thing thrown into the mix, this complicates the stability of many government systems even more so.

But this question can apply to the entire world really.

No, not as a form of government, which anarchy is just the opposite of. Anarchy is a death throe, nothing more.

When you say resort, I missed the fact that you’re asking whether any nation would deliberately choose anarchy. I think the answer is almost certainly not.

@stanleybmanly Well who knows. Maybe it could be a collective choice or just the way things could turn out. It is possible that a government body could be so bad that people would rather have anarchy.

But perhaps “devolve” or “fall into” anarchy would be a better angle for this topic. I think if this where to happen it could be a very dystopian way of life for the nation or nations that this may occur in.

@kritiper
Well no. I mean that the bodies of governments in many nations would collapse into nothing. And as a result we’d have anarchy.

Anarchy is simply the lack of a centralized government or a codified set of laws. It most certainly has existed before and has worked just fine. However those were different times and more tribalistic societies (many Native American societies, for instance, anarchic in nature).

I don’t think it’s realistic that any modern, large-scale society could successfully transition to an anarchic one. That time has passed. Perhaps there can still be groups of people who can implement, among themselves, anarchist principals, though at the end of the day they’d still, ultimately, be subject to the laws of the state they exist within.

New, truly anarchist societies may once again arise once this society has come to it inevitable death.

This is a very broad question topic. There are modern ararchic intentional communities, though of course they exist on territory claimed by hierarchical countries. They’re generally not Anarchy in the UK type, but rather people who agree to live without hierarchy in one way or another, as much as they can manage to agree to something like that.

@NerdyKeith If you mean a condition of anomie and the breakdown of society into complete chaos, then please do not use the word “anarchism”.

Also, a mere “collapse” of a current system doesn’t mean much either. Something can collapse and be replaced by something better. Many Eastern Bloc nations had their authoritarian single-party “state socialist” sytems collapse and be replaced by liberal democracies.

@stanleybmanly
“When you say resort, I missed the fact that you’re asking whether any nation would deliberately choose anarchy. I think the answer is almost certainly not.”
_____

What do you mean by “nation”...? Is a nation a grouping of peoples who agree to live under a certain set of rules? Or is a “nation” a group of elected officials that the previously discussed peoples engage to represent them?

I think any established group of publicly elected officials would never entertain such a notion. They would feel extremely threatened by even a whisper of such a thing. They would have to renounce their perceived power, and the peoples propensity to accept their claim. It would be rejected as a fall into anarchy.

Yet if the same choice was explained fully and offered to… the People “of” a “nation”, and the truest idea of Anarchy was offered, then we might be surprised if the results projected a different sway. I’m curious to see the answers.

What’s to loose…? If the People decided that Anarchy was a better choice away from Capaitalism… Then that decision would be the will of the majority of the People, and would therefor be the result of True Democracy.

It’s the difference between Arising towards Anarchy and Falling into anarchy.

Things happen in cycles. When a culture collapses, it is preceded by symptoms such as distrust of immigrants, rejection of traditional standards of excellence, change in the dominant religion, gated communities guarded by private police, etc. After the collapse comes a dark age. It’s dark because the people have forgotten how to write, and maybe the dominant language has changed. People rarely “resort” to a system of government. They usually let it happen by accident: they are happy to turn over all their responsibilities to someone, and they don’t want them back, ever. That doesn’t work, and eventually they go through another collapse. It has always been so.

For that matter, why would any group choose anarchy? If the group chooses anarchy isn’t it therefore united in the choice and no longer anarchic. The goal may be anarchy, but the group pursuing it is not.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Anarchy is _not _ democratic. Democracy implies societal agreement to follow the wishes of the majority. Democracy is a form of government.

Anarchy means I do not have to behave as the majority wishes; indeed, I am free to do what ever I wish with no fear of any societal restriction.

Missed the point.

What if the majority voted for Anarchy?

And if it ever became a problem, the majority could sway away from it back to democracy.

In this way, Anarchy becomes a democratic choice.

@zenvelo “Anarchy means I do not have to behave as the majority wishes; indeed, I am free to do what ever I wish with no fear of any societal restriction.”

Not exactly. A big component of anarchism is free association. There may be no centralized authority and no codified laws, but if you flagrantly disregard the mores of the group of folks you’re with they will cast you out.

This whole thread is anarchic. We can’t even agree on what is anarchy.

Somalia is a failed state, and Syria seems to be lurching that way. As has been pointed out, what does one mean by anarchy? Asking if a nation or group of nations would resort to anarchy sounds kind of goofy to me. It’s not as though a government just suddenly decides that no government would be best, and everyone resigns.

@zenvelo ” We can’t even agree on what is anarchy.”

That’s because most people’s idea of “anarchy” comes from stupid, simplistic, pop-culture, “fuck the rules, I do what I want and I make create chaos” cliches that completely ignore anarchy as a political philosophy.

Most people simply think “anarchy = chaos”, which isn’t actually true. The word itself simply means “without rulers”. Of course the ruling elite have always propagated the notion that without them the common folks simply cannot manage themselves. That without them everything would be chaos. That (the) God(s) has(have) divinely ordained them to bring order to an otherwise disorderly world. And most folk tend to believe this. Hence the longstanding conception of “anarchy = chaos”.

@Darth_Algar most people’s idea of “anarchy” comes from stupid, simplistic, pop-culture, “fuck the rules, I do what I want and I make create chaos” cliches that completely ignore anarchy as a political philosophy.

So what’s YOUR idea of anarchy, oh enlightened one?

Wait, scrap that! Political philosophies are pretty worthless—it’s what REALLY happens that matters. And in real life, human beings tend to be competitive. If there’s no ruler over some land, this amounts to a “political vacuum” that will sooner or later be filled by some ruller. In the meantime, chaos will take place as the people who want to be rulers fight one another.

@olivier5 You need to review the history. When the Israelites came into the promised land they had no king and no laws in the land between cities. The people known to the Romans as Germanicus, the Dutch Empire, and the American colonies all had no central government. They were all prosperous, peaceful, and unconquerable, and after a century or two the people threw it all away and demanded a central government. No “political vacuum”, just no authority higher than a city council.

@olivier5

If you truly wish to understand anarchism as a political philosophy (from the tone of your post my guess is not) then you can try reading about it yourself. Posts on message boards are wholly inadequate to convey such ideas in anything more than snippets. The writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman are a good place to start.

“Anarchism as a political philosophy” is like atheism as a religion.

As usual, we don’t know what we are saying, but we are willing to fight about it.

@SmartAZ what you describe is simply a finer granularity of political entities, from the city-state down to the hunter-gatherer tribe. I have had the privilege to live in Afghan villages not ruled by any central or even local state, during the late 80s. The villages were simply ruled by traditional councils of “white beards” (elders). Once in a while village X would dispute village Y over a pasture, a cow or a woman, and some micro-war would happen, which usually ended in a joint assembly of elders, with a mullah or another as referee, hashing it out and paying “blood money” for whoever got killed… This was a paradise for men, but hell for women. You see, there’s always SOME power relations going around… In this case, a pretty severe case of women exploitation by men. Those same men showing up at the village council.

Likewise, a city-state is powerful. It usually has a form of elders assembly, an aristocracy or a ruler. Someone’s in charge.

These smaller and older forms of political structuration are not without oppression and injustice. Power (military, violent, or in softer forms such as economics) is not out of the equation simply because some central nation-state is absent from the situation. It’s just more power to the locals or to some of them anyway.

Beside, micro-states and tribes often end up swallowed by larger ones. City states like Rome founded empires in antiquity, and they did so for a reason: economies of scale, more power to them. That is why living in micro-states today is such a privilege: It’s becoming rare.