I really am curious what you mean by "moneyless" though. Like, is it just doing away with the money systems we've built (like banks, stock markets, etc) or is getting rid of the concept altogether and returning to simple bartering?
IrateAnteater
joined 1 year ago
Don't be making assumptions now. I've tried looking into it in the past, but I keep just getting sources like those; long on concept and short on specifics. Of course, anarchism being what it is, the answers you do sometimes get on the specifics varies wildly, depending on which brand of anarchist you are talking to.
You've completely misunderstood what I mean when I say "human nature isn't going to change". I'm not saying that all humans are greedy, or going to abuse the system. The "human nature" I'm talking about is the variability of peoples' personalities. This guarantees that at some point, no matter how idyllic the society you've created is, someone is going to come along to break it. And they may not even be acting out of malice. It might simply be that they think they can do it even better. Any system you set up needs to have mechanisms to deal with that.
Scale those thoughts to the human populations at the time. To give an extreme example, if Genghis Khan caused the same scale of death today, that would be 800,000,000 dead.
The world today is far better than it was, but nobody said it is was anywhere near perfect.
I know that's the goal, but what are the specifics on how it's implemented? How does it handle the smooth talker who wants to warp the system into something else for his personal gain? By the time you build in mechanics to handle these edge cases (without just handwaving it away with "the community will enforce it"), you converge back towards something similar to one of the various political systems we have today.
Maybe I'm just too pessimistic to get behind the anarchist thing. My day job is industrial automation and people not doing what was expected or what is best is what causes 90% of my headaches. Relying on people to behave rationally and do what's best just isn't in my nature anymore.
For 200,000 years, the world was an extremely violent place, where slavery, genocide, etc were the norm. The idea is usually to try to move away from that.
I am being genuine in my arguments. Political discussions are no fun when the disingenuous trolls take over, even if my sarcastic nature leaks out and I come across that way sometimes.
The first step is to lower crime / anti-social behaviour. If everyone in the community is happy, there's less need for anti-social behaviour. Sharing food and pooling resources
That first step is a doozy. And is basically the step that every political system gets kind of stuck on. The goal is simple enough, but the actual "how" of getting it done, not to mention how to maintain it once you've achieved it, is enormously complex.
And the society without money thing I don't think is actually possible, unless you want to go back to a purely agrarian society. Money, at it's core is just a placeholder for resources to simplify bartering. The systems we've built around it are often fucked and can go, but money itself is just a useful tool.
I try to think of systems that are stable and can scale up to cover everyone (this is also a pipe dream, since people aren't purely rational). The idea of no one in charge, and the community deciding and enforcing everything can work up to a small town level, but a national or global level, it falls apart.
Some things, like major infrastructure for example, are necessary to have, but impossible to fund through voluntary means. No individual or small community has the money to build it on their own, and getting everyone to agree on what exactly should be done for any given project is damn near impossible. There needs to be a central planning authority of some sort, and they need to have the funding to execute these types of projects. Now what scale and format that planning authority has is the heart of every debate on which political system is best.
the means of self defence are equally distributed
That has never been, and will never be true. You could magically eliminate all weapons on the planet simultaneously and it still won't be true, since some people are bigger and stronger than others.
And in case you haven't been paying attention to history; authoritarians very rarely just show up out of nowhere and take over. They are usually installed as leader after some form of revolution, then the title just gets transferred once the authoritarian system is in place. It's usually far more insidious than just some guy the village has to band together to fight off.
Ok, but scale that up and try to account for bad actors. Human nature isn't going to change, and so the are guaranteed to be people working to abuse the system. "The community will enforce" is just handwaving away the problem without actually dealing with it, just as much as bullshit like "the free market will solve x problem" is.
For single player games, I absolutely agree. If you're going to stop supporting the game, send out one last patch turning off any always online DRM and let people keep playing their game.
For multiplayer games, it seems like it's a bit more complicated. Who should be shouldering the cost to keep the game servers alive?
Honestly, I think that anyone who is this angry about Microsoft products needs to spend some time working with the types of industrial software that makes the manufacturing world go round. Just to get some perspective on what truly God awful software actually looks like.