Comment on Lawless society

• Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Okay, I appreciate you saying you’re interested, I’ve found that’s a useful filter to find good conversations, and I’ve always found this particular topic very frustrating to talk about. Hierarchical realism - the idea that there is no alternative to hierarchy - is incredibly pernicious. People seem to have a hard time questioning it.

  So as to the assumptions:

  That’s when you have an organised force opposing them, which doesn’t need to deal with internal disputes the way an anarchistic force would need to.

  You have drawn the dichotomy between “organised” and “anarchistic”. This is such an entrenched misunderstanding that you can explain it plain as day to people and it’s like they don’t even hear it.

  Anarchy requires far more organisation than hierarchy. In fact the classic anarchy symbol of a circle A means “anarchy is order”. Anarchy isn’t chaos, it is the absence of hierarchies of domination.

  And internal conflicts happen within established hierarchies, all the time. You see this in strikes and labour activism. They’re a much bigger problem in hierarchies because the bosses can’t acknowledge or deal with them. They don’t know what to do when the “do as I say” lever stops working.

  In fact, something that tends to get left out of typical histories is the military revolt that played a significant role in ending the US’s invasion of Vietnam.

  So the idea that organisation is a feature of a dominance hierarchy is wrong. Domination is used when organisation can’t be. Anarchies have to be supremely organised to exist in the first place, and it doesn’t magically stop working because conflict occurs. The thing about organisation and consensus building is that it is actually far more robust than dominance hierarchies.

  Hierarachy is strong but fragile, because it is necessarily arrayed in tension against itself like the molecules of a Prince Rupert’s drop. It seems impossibly hard and unassailable, but disrupt the right part and it explodes. It has no flexibility.

  There would be no reason to believe hierarchy were better in any respect except that it is currently the dominant world order. That wasn’t always the case and it seems to have a hard expiration date. The question is whether we can destroy it before it destroys the ecology.

  So that’s the spiel about assumptions. Sorry I went so long, I didn’t have time to edit it down. I could go on about how hierarchy has embedded itself so deep in all our psyches, but I’ll spare you that.

  So as to the question about internal criminal activity, which seems like the best way to put it. You’re asking about any “involuntary or enforced way of preventing them from exploiting society”. Well, there really isn’t one.

  Like I said, voluntary prison is a method for dealing with individuals whose behaviour necessitates such treatment. Organised groups are a different situation, so the idea just doesn’t apply.

  When I said the answer was violence, I was trying to make that point.

  As for how to stop such organisations from metastasising, I don’t have any examples of such a thing actually happening, so I don’t know, except to point you to societies where it just… doesn’t come up. Rojava uses a reconciliation process to prevent things like murder from turning into full-on blood fueds, which used to be a problem, but that’s a little different.

  Apart from telling you that the problem just doesn’t appear to arise in the first place - and I could talk about “leveling mechanisms” here, but that’s getting pretty deep in the weeds - I can point you to an example where an indigenous horizontalist society excised criminal and state elements that were deeply embedded. It’s not the same, but I hope it’ll be illustrative.

  It was Cheran, Mexico, where politicians, cops, illegal loggers and drug cartels were merged into a fucking rat king of corruption that was smothering the town. Murders were a daily occurrence, plus all the other problems you would imagine in that scenario.

  An underground network of women organised and rose up against them. On the day it happened, there was so much popular support that they were able to evict the entire oppressive structure at once without undue violence. Once they’d clearly won, some young men wanted to start lynching the captives, but the women who’d run the day stopped them and told them to simply let them go.

  The town still runs on horizontal organisation principles, it keeps out the state completely. No cops, no politicians, no corporations, no drug cartels. The murder rate dropped off a cliff.

  Now, that’s not the end of the story. Let’s imagine you’re in a town with that history, and you want to start a crime syndicate. How do you do it? Who do you talk to? How long do you think it takes before you’re dragged in front of a town meeting to be dealt with? Would it even occur to you to try?

  I suspect this is why the problem you brought up doesn’t have any examples.

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