Okay, that's an interesting and completely untenable perspective.
Human beings being able to exist in large groups in close proximity to each other takes an incredible amount of organization, which involves bureaucracy and central planning, and rules and regulations. Individuals providing aid to individuals is not going to build and manage things like sewer systems and the delivery of clean water, and if you don't have those, no amount of helping your neighbor is going to get you out of having half your children die before age five, which until the sanitary revolution in the late 1800s was the level of infant mortality expected in any society. And today, a reliable indicator of a failed state is a sharp rise in infant and childhood mortality because of thrle breakdown of infrustructure. And that's just one example.
Likewise, anyone who has ever had to deal with bullying or exclusion will tell you that if your ability to survive is entirely dependent on the goodwill of your neighbors, and your neighbors don't like you, you will probably die.
On both a large systems scale and small individual scale, this type of anarchy is infeasible and would be horrific. And the systems humans develop time and time again to deal with these problems are, inevitably, government. Every time humans have lived in groups of more than a hundred or so people, they have developed a government. That is what we naturally do. and the interesting thing is that when you start trying to get most anarchists to tell you how they would solve these problems, eventually, after you break through the buzzwords, and the bs, and get them to start making plans, what they come up with, whether they are willing to call it that or not, is a government.
And the rest of the anarchists? Well they are much worse. These are the anarchists who decide that if humans in large groups inevitably form governments, then the solution is that humans should only ever live in small groups, that we should go back to being hunter-gatherers. The population of the planet is order of magnitudes, too large to support as hunter-gatherers, and this group of anarchists, either implicitly or frequently explicitly, are willing to countenance the death of the overwhelming majority of humans alive today in order to bring about their anarchist utopia. This type of anarchism got real popular for some reason in the 2010s, and the line between these guys and eco-fascists, is fine, permeable, and ultimately meaningless.
I am willing to guess that you are in the first group of anarchists, which makes you willfully ignorant and profoundly naive. I feel for you, because utopian visions and a world that refuses to live up to them are a very hard thing to deal with. You are ultimately exactly the kind of anarchist who prompted me to make this post, because people like you are annoying and incredibly frustrating to work with, because you are so disconnected from how humans and human societies actually work.
annaxmalina
blakekathryn
stormborns
origamiaround
jbbartram-illu
2087
