Worldbuilding 202: Anarchy
Greetings and strombuliform! Well, you know… I am a twisty twurly Limax sometimes! Hello everyone, and welcome to my blog once more! Today, I will talk about anarchy as a government form, but to do it, I need to make something clear. I am not an anarchist, I don’t believe it is viable for any large scale society, and I think that anarchists are, at the best of times, idealists who have a severe deficiency of real life experience. But despite this, I will try my best to make accurate and fair statements about anarchy. If any anarchist feels I misrepresented it, feel free to comment, and I will edit to reflect your input!
Definition
As always, the mastress of worldbuilding loves definitions, so why not do it once again? The difference between this and ordinary definitions is that anarchy is not defined by what it is… but by what it isn’t.
Anarchy is the lack of a ruler/ruling class.
In other words, there is no state; after all, a state requires a ruling class of some sort. A fundamental thing in any state is the monopoly of violence. That is, the state has the right to exert violence in order to achieve its goals, and it is the ONLY entity that has this right. This violence generally means ordinary police officers and related agencies.
Anarchism is the fundamental rejection of this monopoly. That there shouldn’t be any entity that has the monopoly of violence. And from that, much of the rest follows. Anarchy has had many forms and ideas throughout history, both positive and negative, but this rejection of the monopoly of violence and, with it, rulers, is the fundamental aspect that unifies all forms of anarchism.
State of Nature
This is a philosophical state, an imagined state, that humans could exist in. I say imagined not to be dismissive but to highlight that it is how we imagine it. We live in a society, and have for thousands of years. Our entire conceptual world for the last 5 thousand years has been to varying degrees of societies, and the state of nature is whatever preceded this.
So, how can we know what the state of nature would be like? Well, we can’t. We can make educated guesses based on groups of people that have been found and didn’t live in proper “states,” but we cannot be certain they were close to what was before societies and civilisations. After all, societies are old now, and all these groups of people that have been found will inevitably, to some degree, have been in contact with some societies and thus influenced by them in terms of concept and organisation.
So, the nature of it cannot be determined easily. Many have thought of anarchy as inherently bad, no law or order… Which, fair, no laws because there is literally no leadership to make laws. Others have imagined it as a considerably more harmonious state of being, even viewing it as a paradise.
I find both views equally absurd because that is not how people behave. Sure, it didn’t have modern comforts, but humans are not creatures that inherently are fine with things being garbage. You like order and structure, so while there are no ”laws,” there are agreements between people in groups on how to run things, and if not, they talk or a fight breaks out that others have to deal with. So, I personally think that State of Nature was in fact something in between, not awful and unstructured but a structured existence among more equals. The details, however… Who knows?
Duality
Which leads to what I think is the general duality of anarchy: the two kinds of anarchy that people tend to imagine.
Chaos
This is based on the idea of lawlessness and that people are inherently selfish and bad and all that jazz. And as I have said, like in my post on slavery, people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling. So if you view it like this, then the moment there are no rules in place to contain the bad behaviour of people through society and structure, everything bad will happen!
And I will not be an idealist, I hope my writing have affirmed more than enough I tend to stay in the middle and adhere close to the real, but there is no doubt in my mind that if anarchy breaks out in any modern country, or any type of realm that has a societal structure and state, there will be A LOT of bad things happening.
People see opportunities and decide to take them, and a lot of pent up anger and feelings will all be unleashed at once. But that is like when left handedness spiked right after it was no longer deemed to be bad; when you release the floodgates, the flood comes all at once as you had held it back, and now it is free to flow.
Eden
The other opposing view tends to often be more that anarchy is an Eden-like state once it is achieved in its proper form. People work together and sing kumbaya or however that saying goes. And sure, this too has some merits to it; after all, things are rarely based on complete lies.
People are social beings who want to live with others, and humans wish to be seen as good. It is how you evolved, to work together and, through the power of cooperation, become the dominant life form on earth that reshapes the history of the planet! …Oh wait, we are back to civilisation building and not anarchy. Honestly, even without societies, you humans managed to do a lot of damage and eradicate countless species because you found them yummy.
Anyway, when you view people in that light, as wanting to help, wanting to be together, wanting to have good social relations, and wanting to do well for the group, this view isn’t too weird either. Because all of these are true, just like the previous ones. People are, for the most part, inherently good.
Real
I am sure from how I phrased those above that it should be fairly obvious that I, the great Vivian, do not believe in any of the extremes being remotely accurate when it comes to the reality of the basal definition of what anarchy is. Yes, when anarchy happens and it is unwanted, it will be chaos for some long ass time, but once things settle, people tend to be more cooperative.
Scale
One of the biggest issues as to why you cannot have an Eden-like anarchy is simply a matter of scale. Anyone who has dealt with a group of over a dozen people knows it is close to hopeless to organise them if everyone is just doing their own thing. And sure, you can have temporary leaders that take charge of specific projects and all of that, and it still is a form of anarchy then, so let’s say for the sake of argument that we can extend this up to 1000 people–I am being incredibly generous, in my opinion.
But after that… Yeah, it is definitely hopeless to organise anything without having a hierarchy, and hierarchies breed more hierarchies, so in little to no time, you will start having a hierarchy that maintains itself because those who were there, even if intended temporarily, now have knowledge on how to do it. And if they already know how to do organisational stuff, why not let them keep doing it because it is more efficient for everyone? Division of labour, which I talk about in my economics post, which in short is that by dividing up labour and specialising, you become better at it, and everyone gets better off. A thousand jacks of all trade do less than a thousand specialised workers.
Consensus
One of the big issues in any project is reaching some kind of consensus. Anyone with friends, let me count… Yes, I do have some, so me, too! Anyway, if you have 3 or more friends and you have to decide something, you know the variety of opinions can cause problems in deciding anything. Scale that up to 100 people or so, and it is essentially hopeless to ever reach any kind of consensus where everyone agrees.
Talk all you want, people won’t agree that any plan, action, or colour is the best one. So the next best thing to hope for is a begrudging acceptance of whatever the outcome is, and that is pretty much what most democracies are based on in real life. You might not win or get the opinion you want, but you have a system where you can begrudgingly agree to the outcome.
But this is not easy in of itself, especially if the potential outcomes can significantly affect you and your life. If the discussion is to level your house to make more arable land, then, well, yeah, you are not ever going to accept any outcome no matter what it is. Heck, you are going to be outright hostile to any proposition that outlines any possibility that your house is trashed, unless some people really sweeten the deal for you so in the end you feel like you gained something–read my post on trade for that!
This leads to an actual implementation of anarchy…
Direct democracy
Alright, not all direct democracies are anarchies, but some possible anarchies are direct democracies. What is the difference between direct democracies and other democracies? ANNE! DO WE HAVE DEMOCRACIES ON THE LIST!? (Anne: Coming in March!) Annieway, the difference between direct democracies and “ordinary democracies,” most commonly representative democracies, is that there is a middle man in representative democracies. Namely, the person that represents the people. So you vote on a person that represents you somehow, and see my post on voting systems to decide which you want instead of the boring, trite, first past the pole!
And of course, we cannot have these middle men, that is a ruling class of people! This is anarchy, not… uh… archy! Yeah, well done Vivian, you saved that. So direct democracy is one way to solve this because you, the people, literally vote on things exactly. Want to demolish Bob’s hose? Let’s vote on it! Is the person guilty? Vote!
Yeah, there are a lot of issues with this method. This is why early on, anarchy was actually considered a form of corrupted democracy that devolved into a popularity contest of mob rule where any majority could enforce their will regardless. This form of governance is just A form of democracy, but some rather intellectually deficient individuals think this is what democracy means and that “republic” means something else–no, as I explain in my post on governments, democracy just means people rule. Republic is one form of democracy.
Anarchy reigns
So despite all of these factors, when do anarchies actually arise? Well, if we exclude the State of Nature, which was 99% of human history, then since the dawn of civilization, how have anarchies arisen? The primary causes for anarchies rising up, regardless of their actual structure, is… collapse of central governments. This can be either because of war, natural disaster, internal failures, revolution (Anne), or any number of other causes.
When the government fails and all other institutions do as well, anarchy tends to reign, initially the bad kind, but from what I have seen, in a lot of cases, once it settles, it becomes the better kind where people's kind nature tends to emerge. It won’t be perfect, and you often have pockets of people being kind and then fighting each other. The whole in and out group and that humans can only have strong relations to about 200 people thing. But people are still often good! Sometimes…
Fall of Anarchy
Because people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling, anarchies, even the most well intended, tend to fall fairly quickly. Unless they are for a very small group of people, at which it can quite naturally survive for an infinite amount of time!
But when you have cities and nations where there are thousands, millions of people, and all between, anarchies tend to be a fairly short lived experiment. The dark sides unfortunately tend to overshadow any and all of the good parts. This is partially because the human brain has naturally evolved to focus on negatives over positives; after all, negatives might kill you and need to be avoided, but positives won’t kill you and can safely be ignored.
And with that, strong people tend to rise up and take charge. This is primarily because people become desperate to get away from the uncertainty and fear they are feeling, and anyone that promises, and to some degree delivers, to get rid of this, will be a messiah-like figure. And this tends to be the classical “strong person” who cracks down and is ruthless to create some sense of order. After all, any order is better than no order. Order is predictable, disorder is not.
So the end of anarchies tends to often result in authoritarian regimes. Not always, mind you, but often. And then, once that is established, it can take ages for it to change, since power breeds corruption and attracts people willing to maintain whatever status quo there is. It is rare that an anarchy results in a democracy, but it has happened historically. Though where on that scale you land can vary wildly. And as stated, it tends to be toward the authoritarian end of it.
Idealisation
I feel I need to bring this up. I think anarchy is idealised because of, well, the same reason people theorize illnesses are making a comeback. People have lived too well too long. Namely, today things are so well and good that whenever living standards take a dip because systems are not perfect–and to be honest, the neoliberalism of the 70s did fuck the systems a lot and it has deteriorated since then–it feels like the systems are complete failures.
Don’t get me wrong, systems can ALWAYS get better over time, and sometimes the current system cannot be patched but needs to be scrapped and started all over. But people have forgotten how truly awful things can be, so anarchy, with the usual kindness people feel with the small group they tend to interact with, tends to… look appealing then, until the hell comes.
Anarchy de Vivian
How would I go about creating an anarchy, despite me not liking this system of “governance”? Well, I do like a challenge. First of all, I would definitely have a direct democracy system, but not a first past the post kind of voting for anything, so no binary choices. This disincentives mob rule. Secondly in this, each time there is an election, a group of people are picked to do the counting, always new to prevent concentration of power. Then I would also have it so that there are different voting systems each time there is anything in order to prevent people gaming the system, preferably a dice being used to decide.
Then, I would still have hierarchies, but they are all essentially temporary for a specific project. Build up to do a project, and the moment they are no longer needed, they are dismantled. Again, to prevent concentration of power that will sustain itself. And any hierarchy that has to exist is constantly replaced from bottom up. Meaning if you’re at the top, you are the first to leave the project after some time. And then start at the bottom on something else.
And that is all I can think of now. Essentially, things only exist for when they are needed, removed when they are not, and people are constantly replaced, all to remove the possibility that anyone starts accumulating any power that remains.
We have, of course, Monty Python making it somewhat work with some basic ideas.
Summa Summarum
Anarchy is a “system of governance” that is often idealised because of what I think are idealistic reasons and belief in the goodness of people. I admire that faith in people, but I know enough to know how foolish it is. But for it to work in fiction or reality, there needs to be a lot of safeguards to prevent any accumulation of power, as the moment it starts accumulating, hierarchies become more rooted, and eventually, they are the norm that remains, and anarchy is no more.
So yeah, I do not like anarchies other than as a transitional phase, and even then, they are not interesting so much as what happens. If any anarchist feels I misrepresented or you have other ideas, do feel free and comment below. Any correction will be added, and if someone comes up with a great idea for how an anarchy could work, I will add it to the end of the post.
Blogpost Image was AI generated.
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