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[deleted] wrote

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RedEmmaSpeaks wrote

I think many here are a little confused. There is hierarchy in raising a child, but the hierarchy between child and parent is considerably different from that of the one imposed by the State.

While the adult holds a position of leadership/authority, granting him/her the ability to make many decisions regarding the upbringing of their child, it's not the same kind of hierarchy as the State or as Corporations, where you have situations like Jeff Bezos, who has enough money that he could give $50,000 dollars to every one homeless person in American (which is estimated at 553,742) give 100,000 students a full ride to Harvard, covering four years of tuition, room, board, textbooks, and everything else, buy the entire gross national product of Iceland for a year, fund every US National Park for ten years, give every Amazon worker a $20,000 bonus, end world hunger, and after doing all that, he'd be left with $3.5 billion dollars, making him not only significantly richer than most people, he's sufficiently richer than a lot of other billionaires.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos's workers are barely scraping by on minimum wage, with many on some form of government assistance, pooping in bags and peeing in bottles in a desperate effort to keep up with the punishing pace set by their employers, and many are virtually homeless, due to being unable to cover rent or travel. There was an article in the UK Independent talking about how many of their Scotland workers are camping in tents in the woods near the warehouses, because they don't have the money to travel to and from work.

This kind of hierarchy is far different from the parent-child kind. In our world, if the parent lived in absolute luxury, sleeping in a massive mansion with god-only-knows-how-many rooms and bathrooms, eating gold leaf and wagyu beef every night for dinner, while their child spends their days and nights sleeping in in an uninsulated closet and finds food by digging through garbage cans, we would call that neglect and the child would be taken away and given to parents who aren't colossal assholes.

Then again, my vision of an anarchic society, is that there isn't one massive society that's identical across the board, but many different kinds with a wide variety of beliefs and customs, or in other words, tribal-band style living. The tribes would form loose Iroquois Confederation-style alliances, but will mostly do their own thing. The children in these societies would be raised in a communal fashion where while the child knows who their mom and dad is, they are also cared for by the other adults in the tribe, because again, all evidence points towards humans being wired for tribal-band style living.

Sorry everybody. I swear I had no intention of making this post so damn long. A spigot was turned and I wound up having more to say than I thought.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

Then again, my vision of an anarchic society, is that there isn't one massive society that's identical across the board, but many different kinds with a wide variety of beliefs and customs, or in other words, tribal-band style living. The tribes would form loose Iroquois Confederation-style alliances, but will mostly do their own thing.

My thinking has been trending towards anarchist ideas. But I wonder if these individual tribal-bands will be at a higher risk than broader hierarchical corrupt society towards all forms of bigotry and related abuses?

You could have NiceLittle Village but then down the road is BurnTheGaysTown and further up is HangLatinosVille and across the river signs for "Welcome to FemaleGenitalMutilationBurg". We know there are cases of small, primitive tribal groups with surprisingly nice social structures. But savagery exists in small independent groups too.

How do you guard against that in a non-hierarchical way?

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

savagery

There's so much wrong with that word.

BurnTheGaysTown

Stopping fascists from killing people doesn't create a hierarchy. They're the ones building the hierarchy (where being gay renders you subhuman), you're the one breaking the hierarchy and restoring equality and anarchy.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

I'm saying that without an evil hierarchy connecting communities, any individual community can be suborned by bad ideas and the other anarchist communities have voluntarily given up the right to intercede.

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RedEmmaSpeaks wrote

And that's a bad thing how? So long as the actions of a community don't spill over and affect other communities, I fail to see how not interceding is a bad thing. Once it does spill over and affect other communities, then they have the right to deal with it, but again, any alliances will be loose ones. Most of the indigenous societies enjoyed less warfare and with women being roughly on equal footing with the men in the group.

I have a feeling you're one of those types who believe that humans are inherently brutish and cruel, but truth doesn't bear that out. Despite all the wargle-bargle about how people will riot in the face of a disaster, the truth is only a small percentage of bad seeds riot. The rest of the population band together and do what they can to help each other get through the situation. And often the population manages to organize themselves, decide who does what, and what needs to be done, without a lot of help from the State and without needing to brutally enforce their rule.

Again, for all the Survival of the Fittest talk, humans are inherently wired for altruism and empathy. And really, in the long run, altruism wins out. Yeah, looting and pillaging gets you plenty in the short-term, but the person who utilizes that strategy, pretty much can never relax their grip on power; if they show a moment of weakness, their people/enemies will take advantage of it.

Since mortality is the fact of the human condition (a person will get sick, hurt, and old, regardless of how strong they may be), eventually they will be in a position of vulnerability, needing the help of others. And there is a basic rule: piss off enough people and eventually some of them will come looking for you. Again, how many people would be willing to stick out their necks to help this asshole when things get rough for him.

If we must use the Survival of Fittest logic, if a style of living/beliefs work for a community, then the community will survive/prosper. If said beliefs are in fact terrible ones, then the community will collapse with the survivors probably opting to join other communities.

In any case, basic knowledge of nature is that diversity is strength. Having many different ways of living works better than our current One-Size-Fits-All standard which has only managed to keep going as long as it has because until recently, there were always new lands to expand to with new resources to exploit. The problem is now, Industrial Civilization has effectively expanded to every corner of the globe; there are no more new lands to exploit. It's keeping itself going by cannibalizing other Capitalist nations, but there's an obvious flaw in that strategy.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

In Africa there are small, independent, communal tribal groups still performing female genital mutilation. Are you making the argument that allowing that to continue is better than intervening?

I understand that altruism is innate and many communal groups have lots of morally desirable behavior. But I strongly suspect that, for example, the patriarchy that permeates modern society didn't arise from nothing when the first hierarchies were formed. It was a continuation of patriarchy that already existed. There are plenty of well-known examples of primitive low technology communities without sexism, but there are plenty more - the majority, as far as I understand it - where it was prevalent. And it was prevalent despite countless thousands of years of freedom from large scale hierarchy like we have today.

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BigG wrote

Intervene how, out of curiosity?

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RedEmmaSpeaks wrote (edited )

I'm curious as well. After all, Vietnam and the current War on Terror prove how easy it is to defeat an ideology via military violence. FGM is terrible, but I fail to see how intervention, sweeping in, guns blazing, and taking over, would solve it. I suppose he could mean nonviolent solutions like spreading education, but I doubt it. Usually when people use the word "intervention," they are almost invariably referring to military solutions.

Though the simplest and best answer is edmund has no basic knowledge of anthropology or tribal society like at all.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

As I wrote to BigGeorge, I'll repeat here. I'm not sure what kind of intervention is appropriate. But I think if non-intervention and allowing the existing society to evolve on its own was going to fix the problem, it would have happened centuries ago.

Even spreading educational material is a far cry from anarchist non-intervention. Isn't it?

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RedEmmaSpeaks wrote

It is a horrible practice, but at the same time, no one can police the whole world and it's a foolish thing to try; it amplifies problems, not solves them. About the only intervention I would suggest is spreading educational materials and providing a haven to anyone fleeing said abuses. Any other, like I said, would only exacerbate the problem and the people who would be in the most danger in that situation, are women and children because those are the most vulnerable populations in any conflict.

Like I said, I focused my concerns primarily on military options because most of the time, when people talk about intervention, unless they're talking about a drug-addicted relative, they mean some kind of military effort.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

I'm not sure. I don't want to fall into the military-industrial trap of "invade, that will fix everything" or even just the general political trap of "just do something, the important thing is to have the appearance of trying to solve the problem".

But "ignore it, and hope the problem will resolve itself" has not worked for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years - how old is the practice? So I see no evidence that non-intervention will ever solve the problem.

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RedEmmaSpeaks wrote

If you'd studied any decent anthropology, you'd know that most indigenous people managed to take care of each other and live quite comfortably without a massive state-imposed hierarchy. In fact, the State as we know it, with its size, hierarchies, and massive inequalities, didn't really come into being until about 10,000 years ago, but Homo sapiens have existed for at least 100,000 years. So somehow for 90,000 years, we managed to live relatively peaceful lives without a State.

Somehow we managed to regulate ourselves and take care of our own and we'd manage to do so again. Despite all the doom and gloom on the news, extensive evidence says that humans are inherently wired for altruism; we want to be good and take care of each other. Studies with babies and toddlers have proven that it's a trait that kicks in fairly early.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

But these indigenous people often had sexist practices and other forms of intolerance. And there was tribal warfare long before modern states existed.

We didn't have mass slaughter until the State existed. So it's probably fair to argue that pre-State independent groups were better. But that doesn't take us far enough to argue that pre-State independent groups were good.

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ziq OP wrote

Yes.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq OP wrote

Yes. Forcing authority on anyone is best avoided. So avoid it. Being embarassed by their tantrum isn't justification to use force.

..Or don't avoid it but be aware that you're manifesting archy; not anarchy.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq OP wrote

We don't live in a perfect world.

Anarchists living in industrial capitalist nation states are forced to make decisions like that everyday. Every time we go to work or walk down a street we're subjecting ourselves to archy.

In a perfect world we wouldn't need to deny a child anything. In a perfect world a child wouldn't feel the need to manipulate you into buying a lump of plastic.

We don't live in a perfect world.

Just strive to do your best to avoid creating more archy.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq OP wrote

I still see no reason you need to force the kid to come with you. Just say you're not buying it, walk away and they'll follow. If they cry, they cry. No law against crying.

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retiredshared5 wrote

If they don't follow, I get arrested. That's the issue. I do have to force them to come with me.

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ziq OP wrote

I'm sure it wouldn't be the first time the state forced you to obey its commands that day.

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retiredshared5 wrote

It isn't, but I'd rather not go to jail and leave the kid in the hands of the state.

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ziq OP wrote

I wasn't suggesting you not obey.

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retiredshared5 wrote

Ah, my bad. Usually I don't obey, so I assumed that was the insinuation.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

I wasn't trying to suggest leaving the building without the child. In my experience (with nephews tho and not living in a police state like the US) if you say you're leaving, they follow. But this post was never meant to be parenting advice and I kinda wish I had never got into this pointless rhetorical question comment chain.

All I wanted to do was talk about the definition of anarchy. In practice, living anarchy isn't always doable because of personal danger. Anarchy is the ideal but compromises always happen when we try to survive in a screwed up world.

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