this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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I help with a social group. We jokingly refer to it as anarchism under a lazy iron fist.
Day to day decisions are made in a fairly ad-hoc manner, by those involved. If there is a disagreement that can't be resolved, or if it will have large repercussions (e.g. changing the fabric of the building) it gets raised to the committee and chairman.
The chairman is the sort who is only there because no one better wanted the role. He has no interest in micromanaging, but will resolve issues to get them to go away.
It's a remarkably effective system. Unfortunately it's a bit unstable in large groups. Those who want the role are also those you REALLY don't want with that power. No one has yet solved the issue however. How the f@#£ do you keep the troublemakers out, when they are also the ones most willing to work towards getting the role?
The other problem with anarchism is that the natural self policing systems break down by the Dunbar limit. Parasitical or cancerous behaviours tend to become crippling, forcing people to adopt other unofficial power structures.
I def. agree with the issues in re: Dunbar's number. Anarchism can, and does, work pretty well in small groups and communes. But scaling it to the size of a country... Well, that's the hard part. But if you don't, then authoritarian countries will eat you alive.
That unfortunately seems to be the case with most cops as well; the ones that want to do it out of a sense of civic responsibility seem to get pushed out pretty quickly by the ones that should never have been cops in the first place. And--looping back around to anarchism--cops are a necessary evil because otherwise you quickly end up with vigilante groups that enforce a capricious set of morality and ethics.