Submitted 2 days ago by IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
It wouldn’t.
Stateless societies don’t work, that’s why despite thousands of years of recorded history, we don’t have any record of one ever succeeding.
Even just having a village elder who decides disputes is a form of state. Hell, having parents who decide the rules in a family is a form of state.
States didn’t exist until a few thousand years ago. Hundreds of thousands of years of human history never had states.
You don’t need a state to function and reducing the concept of state to encapsulate non-state things (eg. Parenting) is a bit silly.
That’s true, but in those ages ppl still got speared in the back or ritually sacrificed. So is this more successful than all of todays states in case of murdering and terrorising? I doubt it.
States did exist, just because it was the strongest man in the tribe declaring the rules arbitrarily didn’t make it not a state.
Likely a neighborhood watch, then multiple neighborhood watch from different villages would coordinate and eventually they would probably consolidate to make coordination easier, oh wait…
we reinvented the steam engine again eh? We’re crabs?
Neighborhood defense crabs, yes.
“Yay no more tyrannical state, now lets create a system to protect ourselves and…
ah shit, here we go again”
There would be FAR less terrorism because terrorism is just the violent reaction to injustices perpetrated BY THE STATE by people that feel they’ve been wronged by the state.
That’s not an answer
Fair point: in the (IMO rare) rare case of a terrorist attack in an anarchist (maybe more like an anarcho-syndicalist) society, it would be handled locally like it was for a thousand years before organized governments were formed.
I call myself an Anarchist, but I don’t think there are many reasonable Anarchists who want a society without any government. It’s necessary for the function of protecting people. It shouldn’t be involved in telling people how to live their lives where it doesn’t effect others though, such as laws against drug use or any other lifestyle choices. It should step in to protect people from exploitation and dangers that they don’t choose freely.
To answer your question, it couldn’t. Essentially no one is asking for that though, so it’s not really a useful question.
As an anarchist, I answer this just about the same way I answer most questions. Through consensus of those involved, the form that takes is going to be different for each region, community, et cetera. Those that make up society need to have some way of making collective decisions, but it doesn’t need to be a state to achieve that. States are new, governing is not. I favor consensus democracy, but it’s by no means the only method. But questions like this are a double edged sword, they’re vital to explaining left libertarianism, but they’re also proof of how far we have to go before people understand even the basics of it. Stateless does not mean ungoverned, just as anarchism does not mean chaos. It’s simple a governing by the people. If we cannot be trusted to govern ourselves how in the hell do we think this is a tenable system, in which we choose individuals to govern us?
I honestly don’t understand how this works and I want to.
If everyone decides murder is wrong, then some people will have to be the force to investigate and punish those crimes.
Who is accountable for overseeing those using force to ensure they don’t use it for personal gain?
Isn’t that technically not anarchism? It sounds more like direct democracy with limited government.
Here’s a good page that goes into more detail, but no. Anarchism is not a total lack of government. It’s the removal of hierarchical systems and exploitation (inside and out of the government).
Mass murderers would be handled about the same, ie. taken down by local security after the fact.
Terrorism would be less likely to happen; without an organized state to terrorize, what’s the point? There’s no one to agree to the terrorists’ demands.
There will be violent gangs that would pop up especially when there is no state. So there is still Terrorism unless I misunderstood the term.
There probably wouldn’t be a “9/11” but there would be a bunch of angry white dudes just wanting to kill black people for some fucked up reason. dylan roof and the christchurch shooter aren’t gonna go away just because the state goes away
Idk mate, I feel like most anarchists are pretty fucken vocal about how we should deal with fascists. What would happen to them within a stateless society is probably what we say should happen 🤷♀️
And, like now, those acts would mostly be handled by taking out the shooter after the fact.
Hopefully without a centralized for-profit news apparatus making the perpetrator infamous and inspiring copycats, though honestly we could achieve that under the current system of government.
It wouldn’t
State is not the same thing as government
Historically speaking, in most cases where the state has had loose control the “justice” enforced by populations hasn’t been pretty. The idea of decentralized community enforcement is only able to be romanticized because it is distant, and it’s distant because it fucking sucks. Lynchings, witch burnings, and especially feuds and unending cycles of retributive violence - although the places they have happened in were not stateless, they primarily happened in areas where state control was loose.
Feuds are the natural consequence of a lack of centralized authority. If a Hatfield goes out and kills someone, then the McCoy’s deliver “decentralized community justice” by killing the murderer. Except the Hatfield’s say their guy was innocent and the accusation was a pretext, the McCoy’s are the real killers, so they go out and deliver “decentralized community justice” by killing a McCoy. And so on and so on for generations until everybody’s forgotten what even started it.
The only thing that actually puts a stop to that is the big bad state coming in and saying, “Anytime anyone murders anyone, it is an offense against me. No more “settling the score,” the score is settled now because I say it is, and if either of you keep this up you will be charged.”
But it’s not just the historical examples, which I’m sure “won’t count” for whatever reason - the effect is also observable in game theory.
In the case of the “Iterated Prisoner’s Delimma,” the most effective strategy is “tit for tat,” where defection is punished with defection and cooperation is rewarded with cooperation, which tends to result in cooperation with others following the same strategy. But what happens when we expand beyond two players?
For example, a game with a hundred players where everyone can put money in a pot, and the pot is doubled and then redistributed equally to everyone. In this case, it’s impossible to do “tit for tat” because punishing defection with defection means defecting against everyone else, who would them try to punish you for defecting, and so on. In this case, the most effective strategy is to contribute nothing, and it’s only a matter of time before everyone stops contributing.
This is a basic collective action problem, applicable to many irl situations, and the way to solve it is, again, to have a big bad centralized authority come in and tell everyone they have to contribute to the pot whether they like it or not. “The pot” could mean social services, infrastructure, common defense, etc.
How big would said society be
Poorly.
There could be alternative to state with its own police. If alternative to state is some kind of unions/syndicates, it could mean, there are, for example, Team Space (Union of Spaceship Institutions + some relevant Universities and Industry Manufacturers) and Team Earth (Union of Agricultural Manufacturers + Farmers + Union of Solar Energy Organisations) represented in the same city. Each of those have their own police funded by their own taxpayers. There could be many such “teams” in the same city, and they together manage infrastructure and security in the city. I think it’s important that those teams are kind of “omnipresent”, meaning the same team is present in many locations throughout the planet. For example there could be multiple dozens of such teams, and each city on the planet is run by some combination of those teams, which depends on variety of cultural and economic concerns and interests of such teams.
By sponsoring it.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 days ago
By not creating the mass murderers and terrorists in the first place, ideally.
Beyond that, anarchism usually embraces the idea of the broadly armed society and militias.
Montagge@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
My critique of that is that’s how you get tge US in the war of 1812. You don’t want to be the US in the war of 1812.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 days ago
My critique of your critique is that professional militaries are how you get every other fucking war since then, lol
wabafee@lemmy.world 2 days ago
What murderer? I’m just un-aliving him/her.