this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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I understand the analogy but it it just seems like you have zero idea of what you’re talking about. Where did you read a version of political theory where anarchism is likened to forcing everybody to follow the same political ideology?
I am not arguing anarchy is comparable to forcing everybody to follow the same political ideology. I am arguing that it would be harder for the user to impose a consensus on everyone else if they lived in a stateless society.
The user claims they want a national ice cream flavor, but then asserts anarchy is the only way to get the national ice cream flavor they want. My point is that isn't want anarchy does. The analogy is comparing apples and oranges. Being able to eat what ice cream you want and being able to form a larger consensus around which ice cream is best is not the same thing. It's an attempt to shoe horn in what the user actually wants while claiming it's anarchy.
And what that user wants is an ice cream dictatorship where the teaberry dictator enforces a teaberry consensus. Currently, in a democracy, anyone can eat whatever ice cream they want. To achieve a consensus around which ice cream is the national favorite we would hold a vote. This user wants a smaller dictatorship in the mountains where there is an imposed teaberry consensus and is willing to claim this dictatorship is anarchy in order to get it.
The analogy is a false analogy and a bait-and-switch. The lure is a promise of whatever consensus anyone wants but then swaps it out for a collection of dictatorships erroneously masquerading as anarchy.
In a stateless society, there would not be any passive consensus like a national ice cream flavor because there is no state. Everyone would have their own favorite which might happen to overlap with someone else's or might not. Everyone could get their favorite ice cream and essentials as if they were in a state based society. There would be only active consensus where people could agree to work together to avoid existential crises like a large meteor or famine.
The version of democracy you’re describing is an idealized dream version and does not exist in reality is the problem here. What you’re describing is more like… small community democracies in the style of like Athenian democracy. Which is absolutely not what we have. I also don’t see what you’re describing in what the other guy is saying his view is.
It's not idealized, but what we have now with a federal presidential constitutional republic. There are all kinds of subcultures in the US. A person can take their pick of a religion or a culture or none at all. Everyone is free to believe and do what they want as long as they don't harm anyone else. We protect minority groups. We don't have a national language, thankfully, but we do have things like a national bird.
Our democracy isn't perfect, but that's due to systemic issues that we know how to solve, but need the political will to implement. We also need wealth redistribution in the form of taking away the source of wealth and the wealth of billionaires.
I recommend reading the debate in full and seeing the contradiction for yourself.
Self-sorting into ice cream homogeneous organizations isn't a stateless society. It's a collection of dictatorships. In a stateless society people of different ice creams would work together independently of a state to meet their basic needs, self-actualize, etc. The difference between our democracy now and a hypothetical stateless society is the absence of a state that facilities a market economy, laws, public education, research funding, defense, etc. Everything that the state does now would be handled by systems we have yet to devise. Those systems would match goods and services, from people wanting to do those things, to people who want and/or need those goods and services.
The user's argument boils down to that meme. "I can't wait for society to collapse so MY ideology can rise from the ashes." The user wants the collapse so they can get there teaberry dictatorship not a stateless society. They don't want to just eat their favorite flavor of ice cream. They want everyone around them to have to it eat to. That is not anarchy.
People who like a subculture can already self-organize into a community. Moving from a democracy to a stateless society wouldn't change that. What would change when moving from a democracy to a collection of dictatorships is the freedom to choose. The only way to re-sort in such a collection of dictatorships is for them to collapse further until everyone is self-isolating. At which point very little if any ice cream will be had by anyone.