Comment on Female tourist takes down phone-snatcher in Argentina
ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoi suppose it’s an understandable knee jerk reaction to assume that.
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i wrote it because when i see riots there’s usually “it was anarchy on the streets!” somewhere….
but in this case there was a large number of people who saw someone needing help and decided to help, which is actually anarchy on the streets…
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 day ago
They’re both technically anarchic, (no hierarchy among rioters either) but things like this demonstrate the lack of hierarchy is clearly not the problem in either situation.
ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
anarchy isn’t just the lack of hierarchy, it’s an organization of society without hierarchical government.
a riot is chaos, not anarchy.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 day ago
It’s a bit of a semantic grey space, like many words. For common use, anarchy and chaos are synonyms, hence why your initial comment could be read both ways. For a certain class of ‘rebellious’ individual, it’s used more like a naive, ‘lower case l’ libertarianism. For some, it means the absence of any social structure at all, a ‘state of nature.’ For some others it’s the de facto reality of all systems using a definition of ‘who has the most capacity for violence makes the rules.’ For those studying sociology and anthropology, it’s used specifically for a class of societal organizational systems that may be highly organized but share a lack of hierarchy. The shared element between the various uses is the lack of structure so I lean toward keeping it to that basic concept and hesitate to claim any of them are the ‘correct’ definition.
ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
the equivocation between chaos and anarchy is a deliberate tactic to malign the philosophy.
if every time there was riots people yelled “there’s communism in the streets!” it wouldn’t change the meaning of the word.
throwing libertarian in there is just nuts so i see this going nowhere.