this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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So an abstraction that puts you in its prisons when you break their rules doesn't seem very abstract to me.
You've missed the point.
I can put you in a dungeon if you break my rules.
... when a person acts this way, they tend to be viewed as a serial killer or perhaps vigilante or terrorist.
What's the difference?
Scale of power? Perception of legitimacy or moral justness?
A constitutional charter that defines the limits of one's authority tends to aid the perception of legitimacy, at least until that charter begins to be ignored.
In theory at least, the charter is written by folks representing their constituencies, and approved by those constituencies either directly or through their representatives. Thereby gaining legitimacy through the consent of the governed.
In practice though, it doesn't always work out like that. Representatives might not truly represent the interests of their constituents, or might be captured by financial powers or ideological interest groups. Hence, corruption ensues.
I think smaller-scale units of governance would enable more direct democracy. These could then be syndicated into larger units to prevent issues like border skirmishes and resource wars, as well as competing value systems (like you might live in a socialist utopia, but the next village over might be a fascist hellscape that frequently raids your land to capture and enslave your people).
It's a more bottom-up, grassroots approach. As opposed to what we have now, where we still have multi-tiered levels of governance (federal, state, local, and sometimes municipal or metropolitan), but it's more top-down. The federal government makes the primary set of rules, and each level down makes more detailed rules to fill in the gaps and work within the space that's left to them.
In a syndicated system, the smallest unit makes their primary set of rules, and then those small units get together with others of comparable size to form an umbrella set of rules which governs their relations with each other. Then another level up, etc.
Of course, any system is only as just as the people who are running it, but anarchy is no different. In an anarchical society, nothing is stopping the next village over from becoming more powerful than you and asserting their will and dominance upon you.
Although it might seem contradictory, something can be abstract and concrete at the same time. These are relative qualities.
Relative to anarchy, the state is abstract. It depends upon a socially shared model of thinking that gets acted out by individuals. Take away this layer of abstraction and you are left with anarchy, i.e. the precursor of the state.
Prison is itself an abstraction, though its consequences feel very concrete to a prisoner. All of your thoughts and feelings are abstractions, and yet they seem concrete to you.