No, that’s not anarchism, it’s kleptocracy, by definition.

Anarchism means more rules, more intimate regulation of public works, not less. For power to spread out, you have to work to prevent its concentration, or you are just catalyzing a transitional moment in history.

What makes me think we can overcome the sociopathy is that culture has progressed along with our knowledge of the mind, and that the spirit of liberty never dies. A minority are authoritarian, even if it’s a large minority. We do have to counteract the immense amount of propaganda and ideology, however.

I think the age of simplicity that Anarchism brings is left in the past of our evolutionary progress of organized systems. Great idea, but proven it will never hold because it’s more of a transitional state that will eventually grow into complexity it’s principles can’t answer anymore.

Anarchism is the next step in that path. Instead of rigid systems that are immutable, anarchism is a fluidic organisational system that can adapt and respond based on the needs at the time. It's biology vs circuity. One is etched into plastic forever unchanging, the other grows new branches and drops old as needed.

Simply by being here on the Fediverse you are showing a preference for this dynamic interconnected system over a rigid top-down controlled one.

but are never able to or incapable of doing so.

The Zapatistas have been capable for 30 years.

The sudden collapse of a state is not the ideal case for successful anarchist revolution, true. Pre-revolutionary Anarchism is like a fetus or a botfly larva, developing new functions and larger cooperatives over time while living inside a host. Growing more resilient until it is strong enough to survive without the host. If the host dies, wolves come to eat the host and the fetus/larva gets eaten too, but if the anarchist community grows strong enough to burst forth under its own power then it can resist other threats.

At that point they can still get bodied by something stronger or more powerful, but the same goes for every organism. Unfortunately for the past century the US has been going around the world murdering leftist movements like a housecat in a park with native bird species. When US hegemony collapses, the resulting power struggle could serve as a distraction for anarchist movements to burst forth and have no rulers above them, hopefully allowing them to grow strong enough to face whatever the new global power balance becomes.

That takes us outside the realm of anarchist historical examples, though a good analogy would be the anticolonial movements in Africa and south Asia that massively grew in power during WW1 and WW2, resulting in European nations having to decolonize afterward. Still, we can imagine anarchist communities continuing to grow to fill the available space and using their anarchic structures to be more productive and prosperous than capitalism or state communism (there's a lot of research showing that happier, unalienated people doing what they choose to be doing are way more productive than people being ordered to do something until they are exhausted).

Through their prosperity and shared creed, anarchist communities across the world can be in solidarity to defend themselves against whatever passes for a hegemon in the post-US world, as the people of nation-states see their prosperity and pursue anarchic reform or revolution in their own countries. And so the entire world could become anarchist.

Even in Anarchism there are different ideals on how it should be achieved. With those nuance differences that would eventually come to some immovable beliefs that would cause larger systems to develop to overpower differences.

Anarchism grows when people agree to work together towards a common goal. When there is disagreement on how to move forward, people negotiate and hopefully find a way to join forces. Between communities with different methodologies, this is called a federation. If disagreement builds, communities can defederate from one another, and people can switch community if they want. Or disagreement can shrink and communities can intermingle to the point you don't even notice which is which. Lemmy is an anarchic federation of admins (though the admins are unfortunately still the monarch of their servers).

So, given we are here talking on Lemmy across instances, clearly differences of opinion aren't enough to blow up an anarchic federation. Association is voluntary but we all want to communicate despite our differences, and we all want to defeat reddit. An anarchic federation emerging in a multipolar post-US world would have threats aplenty to keep them unified in the short term, and in the long term their growing strength gives them the luxury of defederating over minutiae if they really want to without their societies collapsing.

A lot of people don’t want to govern themselves or be involved in the complexity of making community decisions. They’d rather have someone else do that and eventually that someone else becomes a leader and that path leads to a hierarchy.

I don't want to clean the toilet either, but I'm gonna. Governance is a chore, and you don't get to skip out on your chores because you don't like it. And yes, charismatic leader-types exist, and it's the duty of every anarchist to get those people away from power and to have structures that prevent them from gaining power.

First off, don't accept a single-point-of-contact. Communities should always send at least two people as representatives to be taken seriously. Second, if they keep sending the same person, ask them to switch it up. Redundancy is healthy. Third, check up on them, and if their community is hierarchical, try to help them with that and don't entrust their representatives with important tasks. Thus the hierarchy doesn't spread and can hopefully be dissolved in time.

I think the age of simplicity that Anarchism brings is left in the past of our evolutionary progress of organized systems. Great idea, but proven it will never hold because it’s more of a transitional state that will eventually grow into complexity it’s principles can’t answer anymore.

Anarchism is more complex than hierarchy and more capable of handling complexity than hierarchy. The set of "simple rules" of anarchy are equivalent to hierarchy's one rule of "listen to the boss unless you can become the boss". Hierarchy is like trying to build an organism with only two kinds of base pairs, where anarchy has four. Anarchic structures are more complex, more flexible, more diverse, more capable of adapting to circumstances using the same volume of ideological payload.

Hierarchy has people out here living in western European-style housing in the tropics and impotently complaining about the heat. Hierarchy has people sleepwalking through life, permanently exhausted and unable to place or act on the staggering array of feelings they have because it doesn't serve the interests of those with power over them.

But in anarchy? Those feelings are used. Our social instincts aren't just reactivated, they are placed in a context where they do productive work. And like a human is more capable of throwing a rock at a target than doing the trajectory calculations for a thrown rock, so too are people more competent at local governance than at voting for a representative they've never met. People empathize with migrants face to face but can demonize what they see on TV.

Political issues that have plagued hierarchy for decades become solvable in hours when people are in the same room as those their decisions affect and left to make the choice for themselves. Little gets delegated to broader circles, so that by the time to former nation-state level governance, there is very little for representatives to do. People are just out there handling their own shit. Even globally relevant functions like the linux codebase or unit standardization can be staffed by the willing and adopted by the willing as they currently are, without intervention by a federal circle.

If history proved one thing, it is that we as humanity had never a time when everyone would compromise with each other.

Communism on paper is fucking fire! In reality it is fucked up. And the main reason is us, humans. Doubt that Anarchy would be much different.

Internet is the definition of a decentralised information sharing system, though. If you don't like your current search engine, you swap to another. If you can't find the information you need on one forum, you go to another. If you have the information more accurate and up to date than the list you find online, you update it (if it's in a wiki format) or contact its author to contribute.

Centralisation of the internet is the direct result of authorities trying to impose their will on people who didn't consent to it.

You can also have wikis or defederated platform, you should know, you're on one...

We're on the fediverse, if you don't like one server you go to another. Maybe you moved here from reddit? Systems can be created with anarchism in mind.

If the list is such an important resource that managing would give the person / people too much power, mechanism to mitigate that could be implemented either from the organizational side or from the technical.

Examples for organizational mitigations could be:

• management of the list rotates between members of the community
• the power to make decisions and the role of management could be split: the community decides on a policy, the people responsible only implement the policy

Technical mitigations might be:

• design the list to be decentralized, like the fediverse where multiple list exists, they get federated and noone can monopolize the knowledge
• list are maintaned similar to code repositories where everyone can make a copy, change it, fix it etc.

Also like... why would you do that in a world where nobody else does that? Growing up / living in a society where sharing, solidarity, equal access to ressources etc. are the norm, its hard to imagine this being much of an issue. There wouldnt be a profit motive, being in a position of power would be undesirable and maybe even looked down upon and you could spend your effort for something actually fullfilling. But even if that issue would pop up, a society attuned to a anti authoritarian life style would be easily challenging that situation anyway. When capitalism, the state, and hopefully other systems of power are out of the way, this small problem would probably get dealt with in a single meeting or mediation session. Because its so miniscule in the grand scheme of things.

I admire the ideals of renaissance men trying to become proficient in every possible skill ...

Look, maybe given the situation you would try to become proficient "in every possible skill", most people will just focus on a few key ones, and maybe have a few auxiliary ones.

No one is telling you to put your life in the hand of a hobbyist, but if you had a big wooden table with a broken leg, would you rather buy a new table (seeing as actually finding someone who deals with woodwork in this economy is almost impossible), or go see a friend/neighbor/friend-of-friend who does woodwork as (mostly) a hobby, and trade favors with them in exchange for keeping your old table you are probably sentiment about for longer than expected?

Easy. They don’t believe it. They think Tablesville is exaggerating. They think Tablesville is confusing what is causing the polluted water. They think that pollution isn’t that bad.They don’t care about Tablesville. Take your pick.

So that's assuming that Johnsville is naturally deeply uneducated, unwilling to listen to any evidence presented, won't test their own waste treatment output, or are majority sociopathic (lacking empathy for others), or a combination of all the above.

I could see perhaps a very insular and small religious fundamentalist town perhaps being capable of totally ignoring the problem, but any larger settlement tends to attract more education amongst the population. Our current system usually puts the sociopaths in leadership positions which can then override a community's wishes, but under an Anarchist system it would be highly unusual that the majority care so little about others to the point of not wanting to help whatsoever.

They think that their need to spend more time with their kids in their very short and mortal lives is worth more than Tablesville’s need to reside on a very specific piece of land that Johnsonville can’t even see the point in inhabiting.

In an Anarchist society, people would only really need to contribute about 2 to 3 months of work per year to have a functioning society that is able to provide everyone's basic needs for free. That would leave 10 to 9 months out of the year as completely free time for everyone to do with as they please, which would make it even more difficult to justify not spending a little extra time to treat your waste water properly for the sake not actively poisoning others.

If Johnsonville is in a good position and largely helps, rather than is helped, while Tablesville is a barren little scrap of swamp, what need does Johnsonville have of Tablesville’s good will?

If they become so uncooperative and hostile to their neighbors, than they could receive negative perception or treatment from other federating communities near them, which would probably go a long way to encouraging them to just treat their waste water better.

Bruh, people will put other lives at risk to end a job - not a capitalist job, but everything from volunteer work to self-improvement - a fucking hour early.

People are desperate to stop working an hour early because our current society gives them virtually no free time to enjoy life, to rest properly, or to not worry about needing to make ends meat just to survive and not become homeless. Most of their waking hours they are exploited with the majority of their effort going to the benefit of a few undeserving folk.

Would they be so desperate not to help if they were now afforded most of the year to themselves? I think many would find meaning in helping out in some of their spare time, since it is not longer exploitative or coerced.

You don’t need capitalism to provide a motive for overcoming goodwill and empathy.

It's doing the heavily lifting for most of society.

A democratic socialist state has the obligation to enforce the laws made by common agreement upon all members of the polity, even those that disagree.

A society of self governing communes could still federate with each other, and with that federation agree to some standards to become a part of that federation, such as adequate waste water treatment.

Nah, you're not taking a meme too seriously when the op is rampaging about the thread, telling people they're not leftist enough.

No, but they serve to illustrate how a guerilla can defeat the largest state military in the world, which is what the concern was.

If you want to have exact historical examples of something succeeding before supporting it, you're never going to be first at anything. And with capitalism murdering over a hundred million of our grandchildren per year, we don't have the luxury of patience.