I’m gonna need someone to explain how Anarchy is better. You’ve seen the Purge, right?
I haven’t seen the purge, but I know enough to know it’s not a good model for human behavior.
Ask yourself, is the law the only thing stopping you from going on a murder-spree? Why would it be for anyone else.
What are you talking about? We’ve seen petty theft become decriminalized in certain cities and theft has skyrocketed. Just because most people wouldn’t steal doesn’t mean no one does.
You don’t know anything.
You’re comparing petty theft to murder
One of these crimes has a word in it that quite literally means insignificant in it, do you not see how they’re nowhere near comparable?
An anarchist’s idea of anarchy is never really the simple definition of anarchy that most people know.
From what I’ve read, the simplest way to put it is not the abolition of rules, but the abolition of any state mechanism that’s separate from the population or that could enforce rules without the broad consensus of the people.
For instance, most anarchist philosopers still argue for a form of government, but they always try to integrate it with the people as much as possible through things such as council democracies.
Well that’s not “the purge” obviously, but every description of Anarchy just sounds like it’s recreating a high school government (complete with cliques and everything). At any anarchist commune, the popular people are elected to the council. That’s how popularity works.
First world countries already have representative democracies. People are getting what they vote for. The problem is: people are stupid and shortsighted. That problem would be worse if you remove the institutions we’ve built up.
To a degree, I agree, and that’s why I’m not an anarchist. I do, however, believe that most of the reforms we need for our democracies are similar to the goals of anarchism, and therefore anarchists can be good to read critically for inspiration.
A more delegate inspired model of representative democracy with more accountability to their electorate, STV and proportional representation so that the government more closely aligns with the population, worker cooperatives and unions so that the population has a broader say in the economy. These are all things I believe we need and feel in line with the spirit of anarchism.
We do not have functional representative democracies. The material and economic reality of the current system leaves what little democratic practices we have vulnerable to manipulation. There is a power imbalance between our democratic systems of power and the purely economic power structures, resulting in the former being dominated by the latter.
What anarchists envision is not simply the removal of the current powerful institutions, but the replacement of them with alternative democratic institutions. For democracy to survive and function it must be the dominant power structure in a society.
Most forms of anarchism are extremely pro-social and left-wing, unlike nearly every portrayal in media. The word anarchy itself simply means “without rulers”. So, it’s understandable that those with a vested interest in avoiding such conditions would want to portray it negatively.
One of the major foundational assumptions in nearly all forms of anarchism is that hierarchical power structures are fundamentally unjust, unnecessary, and exploitative. Additionally, an important common assumption is that must humans are cooperative and, given the opportunity, engage in mutual aid (I’d argue that this is well-documented in history). So, as an anarchist, I’d say that the that the removal of the established power structures would lead to a more fair world where everyone is enabled to pursue their interests and strengths, rather than being sabotaged by things outside of their control, like what family they are born into, or ground down by the orphan crushing machine that maintains societal stratification.
It demonstrates your political ignorance that you suggest some equivalence between Anarchy and the Purge; almost as if your conception of both is informed purely by Hollywood and pop culture.
Anarchy ≠ lawlessness. Anarchy in the most simple terms means ‘without rulers’ or ‘without authority’. Anarchists propose a stateless society in which all people engage in voluntary free association. In practice attempting to create an Anarchist society means eliminating coercive forms of authority by single groups or individuals, and instead distributing power as equitably as possible.
Anarchism is not a lack of order or regulation, it is simply a removal of governing bodies - a stateless society.
That does not mean that there is no law or anyone enforcing it, it simply means that the regulations are decided upon from the bottom up instead of the top down
