this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Yeah... I guess it's just a bigger topic than I have time to tackle right now.
Enforcement would range from relentless requests to stop, and maybe blockade of some kinds, to sanction and exclusion. Self defence rules would be well agreed upon and might be physical. There is always a limit where coercion is necessary, anarchists just want it waaaay over there.
Justice discussions are harder than most, but we have a lot of rights documents to draw from.
Exclusion from a well organized community you live in or next to would make life very challenging.
Identifying dark triad individuals and redirecting them to other non-destructive tasks would help a lot.
It kinda just sounds like reinventing government piecemeal though. You get that, right? That's why I abandoned anarchism. It either requires that you ignore the complications of material reality in favor of vague ideology, or bit by bit you wind up creating a system which doesn't really look like anarchism anymore.
Anarchism isn't really a coherent societal system. It's an ideal by which you measure how "over there" the coercion is.
You may have been told that anarchism is no government, because ideology keeps us believing that government requires a ruling class, that social hierarchies are necessary.
But it is more government, ironically. It just doesn't rely on persisting structural hierarchies. This means that DiY self-governance is a lot of work, with little room for lone wolves.
I think that a functional sustainable anarchy that can defend itself and maintain a reasonable amount of compromise without losing its essence will require a whole lot of sociopolitical automation to support all that autonomy.
No, not really, I've perused anarchist literature. I didn't have to be told anything.
You're right though, DIY self governance is a lot of work. And the more people you interact with, the less you believe that a significant portion of people are willing to put in that work. They will offload that effort onto others in the vast majority of cases. Representative democracies provide a framework to do so. Eliminating representative democracy doesn't suddenly imbue the average person with the will to engage locally to fill the void, it just makes them more likely to offload that effort to whoever has the will to become a demagogue (i.e. charismatic assholes). It devolves into "anarcho"-capitalism.
I'm not against the principles of anarchism, to the contrary I see it as the desirable end goal. I just don't think it's a useful contemporary framework, I don't think we're getting there in our lifetime (barring some kind of transhumanist functional immortality that breaks the timeframe of "lifetime"). The sociopolitical automation you seek isn't just going to pop up in a power vacuum, it's going to require a long, incremental process. As Agent K said, "A person is smart, people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals".
Society progresses in generational steps. You don't steer it like a speedboat, you steer it like an aircraft carrier. Unfortunately we don't get to be the anarchic generation, the best we can do is nudge society in that general direction, and raise children to carry on the Work.