Written by “ziq” 🙄 I am tempted to discard it outright…
But from a quick skimming of the article it is a long treatise based on semantics and a strawman.
Obviously no-one that says “rules but no rulers” means that in the way ziq interprets it in the article. It is a shorthand for a specific audience that thinks “Anarchy” is about chaos and has otherwise little idea about it. Basically all it says is that a community isn’t a free-for-all and actions have consequences 🤷
If anarchists like ziq did not exist, capitalists would need to invent them.
My response to seeing it was written by ziq was pretty similar lol.
I think you’re right when you say that the saying “rules without rulers” is usually used to put down the idea that anarchists just want people running around killing each other.
But it’s worth noting that anarchists don’t really support rules as most people think of them they’re more voluntary agreements created through consensus decision making
They don’t know who I am, they’re just rejecting an author using a pseudonym and not their real name because they’re not an anarchist and don’t understand security culture.
So you claim someone is using the pseudonym “ziq” since years to post articles on websites run by you to make you look bad? 😅
And btw, hello from a fellow anarchist that also uses a pseudonym and understands security culture quite well 👋
No?
Live in an anarchist community, to see it in practice. I learned a lot from that experience, my main take away is that I don’t ever want to live in a community again.
Fair enough, for some people the trade-offs are not worth it.
However, most of today’s self-proclaimed anarchist communities struggle a lot with people’s deeply ingrained hierachical conditioning, both in the sense that they intuitively fall back on it if challenged and in the sense that some people that are over-represented in such communities through self-selection have deep traumatas and lash out at anything they percieved as threatening their autonomy. Both combined often make a very explosive setting, but this doesn’t really invalidate the idea of an anarchist community by itself.
Interesting read if nothing else. The author makes thought-provoking points about how communities that implement rules tend toward governmental structures rather than anarchy. I agree that we (anarchists) should strive to be as clear as possible about the distinction between personal boundaries, voluntary agreements, and enforceable rules. Even if studied anarchists understand the distinction implicitly (and e.g. understand that the “rules” of an anarchist community, online or otherwise, are really voluntary agreements that we make in joining the community), spelling it out explicitly for the new people could be important. Some folks understand things literally.
the more i read about anarchy the more obvious that its a pipe dream built on hope and ignorance… ignorance of the behavior of the human species.
a complete fantasy ignoring all of human history… a childlike utopia mashed with rugged individualism
I find it very curious that people come to this conclusion, when Anarchism is literally based on the opposite assumption, i.e. “all power corrupts” and has a long history of trying to find ways to prevent bad actors from taking over. I find any political theory other than Anarchism to be naive and child-like fantasy that is easily disproven by most of recent human history.
Quote from somewhere else:
I was reading Peter Kropotkin book and he made an AMAZING point that if anything, power structures and capitalism are utopian! To believe, that the people you place as higher with more Power, would make the right decisions for you when it goes polar opposite to them GAINING more power in a system that only recognizes furthering of power, is I’d say, far more utopian than to believe that people will literally work together to make communities where everyone is happy… like they literally did for MOST of human history before stuff like monarchies were established
