[Blink]

If one could, how would an archist society function?

I'm not an anarchist, but I was wondering if theoretically an anarchist society could work.

My view on how this would work goes like this:

• Since there are no laws, even if one person [person 0] attacks another person [person 1], they both have equal right to fight, fight back. [person 1 can attck back] (I got this idea from the thread by @Ayumi about murder)
  
• The main problem that I see with this is that for this to be able to function, everyone needs the time to find a way to defend themselves, otherwise it becomes disbalenced
  
• What about a society where the only law is that everyone needs to have potentially (some people just give up) equal ability defend themselves and to survive?
  

Note: This is for serious discussion only, if you are gonna be an asshole and just scream at the top of your lungs without giving any actual valid points, go away.

[Despised]

You know what's up punk. Don't even bother posting here.

[Despised]

You know what's up punk. Don't even bother posting here.

?

Not directed towards you. A troll member we have here who likes to destroy threads.

[Jiggly]

Have you ever seen the film purge? For some reason this really reminded me of that film and I wonder if the world would work similar to that.
I'm really not entirely sure how it would function. Power relationships and resources would be so different. Society is a broad word that encompasses such a huge variety of things that interlink and impact each other, it's hard to predict/guess how it would/could work.

I wonder whether people will be less individualised and more group based - Not necessarily gangs, but do you see where I'm coming from? If you group together with stronger people, you may be safer.

I don't have any expertise on this topic at all. This post is purely speculative.

[Blink]

Have you ever seen the film purge? For some reason this really reminded me of that film and I wonder if the world would work similar to that.
I'm really not entirely sure how it would function. Power relationships and resources would be so different. Society is a broad word that encompasses such a huge variety of things that interlink and impact each other, it's hard to predict/guess how it would/could work.

I wonder whether people will be less individualised and more group based - Not necessarily gangs, but do you see where I'm coming from? If you group together with stronger people, you may be safer.

I don't have any expertise on this topic at all. This post is purely speculative.

Never seen Purge. Grouping together sounds like something that might happen though.

[pvnk]

Have you ever seen the film purge? For some reason this really reminded me of that film and I wonder if the world would work similar to that.
I'm really not entirely sure how it would function. Power relationships and resources would be so different. Society is a broad word that encompasses such a huge variety of things that interlink and impact each other, it's hard to predict/guess how it would/could work.

I wonder whether people will be less individualised and more group based - Not necessarily gangs, but do you see where I'm coming from? If you group together with stronger people, you may be safer.

I don't have any expertise on this topic at all. This post is purely speculative.

Never seen Purge.  Grouping together sounds like something that might happen though.

Purge is nothing about anarchy. It's about a solution to crime through legalized acts of violence and what would otherwise be illegal.

Furthermore, it is a film of FICTION.

[Spore]

I would think people would form factions and groups as Jiggly said, and some type of governing systems from those factions, just to have some order despite it being overall anarchy. I say that because people generally like to form groups with similar mindsets, and from there they just set up their own rules and ways of life, just fading out the anarchist society over time.

[Blink]

I would think people would form factions and groups as Jiggly said, and some type of governing systems from those factions, just to have some order despite it being overall anarchy. I say that because people generally like to form groups with similar mindsets, and from there they just set up their own rules and ways of life, just fading out the anarchist society over time.

Most likely this would be the case.

[insidious]

I mean, this is a really difficult, but intensely interesting question to answer. A purely anarchist society would be very difficult to accomplish, it's pretty much a utopian ideal that is impossible, almost like socialism, except I would say anarchy is even more impossible, if that even makes sense.

So, it's very hard to conceptualize how one would function or work in real life because it's never really been done before.

Anarchy is a concept that I believe comes from a natural human tendency to be weary of authoritarian and centralized power-systems. It's a concept and idea that has it's roots way back in greek times, too, so it's not really very new and certainly, at least in my opinion, shouldn't be associated with the 'punk' movement of the 70's where scenes of angsty teenagers throwing rocks at storefronts, and running around the streets with fireworks come to mind.

It might be worth mentioning that there are also many different forms of anarchy stemming from one central idea. Green-anarchy, anarcha-feminism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc.

So, if i were to guess, pure-anarchy could never work in the longterm, especially for large groups of people. It simply...can't. Small factional anarchists groups, however, the likes of maybe island-tribes or african bushcommunities are very possible. And this is where I see pure anarchy leading to.

As @Jiggly said, people would split into factions, most certainly. It's no secret humans work better and have a natural tendency to form communities. Even on this forum, if you are reading this post, cannot deny that. This forum is a community of individuals, if we didn't have a natural tendency to form communities you wouldn't be here reading this, you'd be sitting in the dark fapping (probably).


@"Ender" you mention,
"What about a society where the only law is that everyone needs to have potentially (some people just give up) equal ability defend themselves and to survive?"
I'm not sure this would work, because by definition anarchy is pure radical freedom, so having a lw like this would be putting limits on this freedom IE: you have to have some caliber of self-defense, or whatever.

So pure anarchy is fickle, it can't work. Any way you look at it, I think.

Idealistically and theoretically you have a utopia without any authoritarian or any form of government whatsoever, where everyone works together and sings kumba-ya as their national anthem. Everyone is self-sufficient and provides for themselves and their family. Etc. Etc.

At best, it may evolve into something with some loose-form of government. Freedom still exists, trade is free, workers have absolute control of their work, the world may well still be in countries but seperated by continents. Within those countries there is no government, but hundreds of thousands of tribe-like communities. War would probably take place between these every so often, ofc. This is still half-baked and heavily idealistic, however.

At worst Anarchy devolves into a tyranical government, or everyone kills each other, or nuclear war, or whatever.

And with my opinions, I leave you with a funny WKUK video on anarchy:

[DarkMuse]

Honestly, this is indeed a very difficult government or anti-government to consider/evaluate. This is for a few reasons, I will try to describe the issues I foresee very clearly (please let me know if you want some clarification.

The first issue I see is the idea of free will. I think that this leaves a "regular" society in a governed society to have some people who choose to resist or who do not like to follow the rules. Knowing this, removing all laws may increase that number. I do not think that "good people" would go extinct not right away at least. I think that it is certainly possible for natural selection to remove some of the qualities that come as a luxury to a governed society but deviation from "norms" are almost always inevitable.

The next issue I see is how unbalanced the society is. If things are too unbalanced in favor of violence and impulsive behavior it's probably pretty likely that almost all of the population would be killed off. If this were the case, we could be sent back centuries to a more animalistic time in our history.

All in all, there are a lot of issues to be considered with Anarchy, most of which I probably don't feel educated on enough to be able to make a reasonable, educated opinion on. What I can say is that Anarchy poses a huge gamble, one that could most likely be avoided if another form of government was used instead. I personally believe that structure is important but my idea of structure is different from what most perceive that definition to be. Democracy is supposed to be a perfect system in that it is a skeletal system that allows the people to restructure to suit their own needs. This system's definition is Utopian (like every single government structure's definition) and, as expected, has been defected into a hole. Some may argue the size of the hole but it has nonetheless failed in some aspects. This can be attributed to many things but personally I blame the people. Maybe in the founding father day's people weren't as lazy or had less to worry about but that has been our downfall. I have personally seen intelligent people downgrade themselves because they choose to watch TV or play games or drink or do drugs, etc instead of being productive. I don't blame it on the nature of these distractions but because they are there and people are stressed, they choose to cope using these distractions and thus become addicted in a sense to these. Meanwhile, our government employees and corporate heads have the freedom and privacy to act mostly on their own will and for their own profit and needs.

I know I diverged from the original topic here but I think this is still an important fact to note. Maybe an anarchy would take away most of those distractions and would force society to act upon more pressing matters and cope with more healthy solutions. On the other hand, it may give more people the opportunity to bypass any sort of healthy coping mechanisms and choose to rape, murder, or harm one and another instead.

All in all, I think it's a gamble that is not worth the risk. We've come all this way so instead of tearing down whats already built, why not renovate instead. :-)