All libertarian ideologies (including left and right wing anarchism) are anti-social and primitivist.
It is anti-social because it arises from a hatred of working in a large groups. It’s impossible to have any sort of large-scale institution without having rules that people want to follow, and libertarian ideology arises out of people hating to have to follow rules, i.e. to be a respectable member of society, i.e. they hate society and don’t want to be social. They thus desire very small institutions with limited rules and restrictions. Right-wing libertarians envision a society dominated by small private businesses while left-wing libertarians imagine a society dominated by either small worker-cooperative, communes, or some sort of community council.
Of course, everyone of all ideologies opposes submitting to hierarchies they find unjust, but hatred of submitting to hierarchies at all is just anti-social, as any society will have rules, people who write the rules, people who enforce the rules. It is necessary for any social institution to function. It is part of being an adult and learning to live in a society to learn to obey the rules, such as traffic rules. Sometimes it is annoying or inconvenient, but you do it because you are a respectable member of society and not a rebellious edgelord who makes things harder on everyone else because they don’t obey basic rules.
It is primitivist because some institutions simply only work if they are very large. You cannot have something like NASA that builds rocket ships operated by five people. You are going to always need an enormous institution which will have a ton of people, a lot of different levels of command (“hierarchy”), strict rules for everyone to follow, etc. If you tried to “bust up” something like NASA or SpaceX to be small businesses they simply would lose their ability to build rocket ships at all.
Of course, anarchists don’t mind, they will say, “who cares about rockets? They’re not important.” It reminds me of the old meme that spread around where someone asked anarchists how their tiny communes would be able to organize current massive supply chains in our modern societies and they responded by saying that the supply chain would be reduced to just people growing beans in their backyard and eating it, like a feudal peasant. They won’t even defend that their system could function as well as our modern economy but just says modern marvels of human engineering don’t even matter, because they are ultimately primitivists at heart.
I never understood the popularity of libertarian and anarchist beliefs in programming circles. We would never have entered the Information Age if we had an anarchism or libertarian system. No matter how much they might pretend these are the ideal systems, they don’t even believe it themselves. If a libertarian has a serious medical illness, they are either going to seek medical help at a public hospital or a corporate hospital. Nobody is going to seek medical help at a “hospital small business” ran out of someone’s garage. We all intuitively and implicitly understand that large swathes of economy that we all take advantage of simply cannot feasibly be ran by small organizations, but libertarians are just in denial.
You did not read what I wrote, so it is unironic you call it “word salad” when you are not even aware of the words I wrote since you had an emotional response and wrote this reply without actually addressing what I argued. I stated that it is impossible to have an very large institution without strict rules that people follow, and this requires also the enforcement of the rules, and that means a hierarchy as you will have rule-enforcers.
Also, you are insisting your personal definition of anarchism is the one true definition that I am somehow stupid for disagreeing with, yet anyone can just scroll through the same comments on this thread and see there are other people disagreeing with you while also defending anarchism. A lot of anarchists do not believe anarchism means “no hierarchy,” like, seriously, do you unironically believe in entirely abolishing all hierarchies? Do you think a medical doctor should have as much authority on how to treat an injured patient as the janitor of the same hospital? Most anarchists aren’t even “no hierarchy” they are “no unjustified hierarchy.”
The fact you are entirely opposed to hierarchy makes your position even more silly than what I was criticizing.
all well and good but there is one aspect which i disagree. Modern supply chains are an inefficient way to organize our economies. We are destroying flora and fauna at great speeds in the name of maintaining modern supply chains and convenience. We should not consume things which are not able to be produced sustainably and that means only having things that are produced locally.
World spanning supply chains are a symptom of greed, war-mongering, and anti-sustainability. they are world devouring activities.
They are incredibly efficient for short-term production, but very inefficient for long-term production. Destroying the environment is a long-term problem that doesn’t have immediate consequences on the businesses that engage in it. Sustainable production in the long-term requires foresight, which requires a plan. It also requires a more stable production environment, i.e. it cannot be competitive because if you are competing for survival you will only be able to act in your immediate interests to avoid being destroyed in the competition.
Most economists are under a delusion known as neoclassical economics which is literally a nonphysical theory that treats the basis of the economy as not the material world we actually live in but abstract human ideas which are assumed to operate according to their own internal logic without any material causes or influences. They then derive from these imagined “laws” regarding human ideas (which no one has ever experimentally demonstrated but were just invented in some economists’ armchair one day) that humans left to be completely free to make decisions without any regulations at all will maximize the “utils” of the population, making everyone as happy as possible.
With the complete failure of this policy leading to the US Great Depression, many economists recognized this was flawed and made some concessions, such as with Keynesianism, but they never abandoned the core idea. In fact, the core idea was just reformulated to be compatible with Keynesianism in what is called the neoclassical synthesis. It still exists as a fundamental belief to most every economist that completely unregulated market economy without any plan at all will automagically produce a society with maximal happiness, and while they will admit some caveats to this these days (such as the need for a central organization to manage currency in Keynesianism), these are treated as an exception and not the rule. Their beliefs are still incompatible with long-term sustainable planning because in their minds the success of markets from comes util-maximizing decisions built that are fundamental to the human psyche and so any long-term plan must contradict with this and lead to a bad economy that fails to maximize utils.
The rise of Popperism in western academia has also played a role here. A lot of material scientists have been rather skeptical of the social sciences and aren’t really going to take arguments like those based in neoclassical economics which is based largely in mysticism about human free will seriously, and so a second argument against long-term planning was put forward by Karl Popper which has become rather popular in western academia. Popper argued that it is impossible to learn from history because it is too complicated with too many variables and you cannot control them all. You would need a science that studies how human societies develop in order to justify a long-term development plan into the future, but if it’s impossible to study them to learn how they develop because they are too complicated, then it is impossible to have such a science, and thus impossible to justify any sort of long-term sustainable development plan. It would always be based on guesswork and so more likely to do more harm than good. Popper argued that instead of long-term development plans, the state should instead be purely ideological, what he called an “open society” operating purely on the ideology of liberalism rather getting involved in economics.
As long as both neoclassical economics and Popperism are dominate trends in western academia there will never be long-term sustainable planning because they are fundamentally incompatible ideas.
All libertarian ideologies (including left and right wing anarchism) are anti-social and primitivist.
It is anti-social because it arises from a hatred of working in a large groups. It’s impossible to have any sort of large-scale institution without having rules that people want to follow, and libertarian ideology arises out of people hating to have to follow rules, i.e. to be a respectable member of society, i.e. they hate society and don’t want to be social. They thus desire very small institutions with limited rules and restrictions. Right-wing libertarians envision a society dominated by small private businesses while left-wing libertarians imagine a society dominated by either small worker-cooperative, communes, or some sort of community council.
Of course, everyone of all ideologies opposes submitting to hierarchies they find unjust, but hatred of submitting to hierarchies at all is just anti-social, as any society will have rules, people who write the rules, people who enforce the rules. It is necessary for any social institution to function. It is part of being an adult and learning to live in a society to learn to obey the rules, such as traffic rules. Sometimes it is annoying or inconvenient, but you do it because you are a respectable member of society and not a rebellious edgelord who makes things harder on everyone else because they don’t obey basic rules.
It is primitivist because some institutions simply only work if they are very large. You cannot have something like NASA that builds rocket ships operated by five people. You are going to always need an enormous institution which will have a ton of people, a lot of different levels of command (“hierarchy”), strict rules for everyone to follow, etc. If you tried to “bust up” something like NASA or SpaceX to be small businesses they simply would lose their ability to build rocket ships at all.
Of course, anarchists don’t mind, they will say, “who cares about rockets? They’re not important.” It reminds me of the old meme that spread around where someone asked anarchists how their tiny communes would be able to organize current massive supply chains in our modern societies and they responded by saying that the supply chain would be reduced to just people growing beans in their backyard and eating it, like a feudal peasant. They won’t even defend that their system could function as well as our modern economy but just says modern marvels of human engineering don’t even matter, because they are ultimately primitivists at heart.
I never understood the popularity of libertarian and anarchist beliefs in programming circles. We would never have entered the Information Age if we had an anarchism or libertarian system. No matter how much they might pretend these are the ideal systems, they don’t even believe it themselves. If a libertarian has a serious medical illness, they are either going to seek medical help at a public hospital or a corporate hospital. Nobody is going to seek medical help at a “hospital small business” ran out of someone’s garage. We all intuitively and implicitly understand that large swathes of economy that we all take advantage of simply cannot feasibly be ran by small organizations, but libertarians are just in denial.
Well, I don’t understand why you think anarchist means no rules.
It means no hierarchy.
It’s even the whole word itself.
An-Archy. Hier-archy.
So your thesis is based on wrong assumptions and is a word salad from my point of view.
You did not read what I wrote, so it is unironic you call it “word salad” when you are not even aware of the words I wrote since you had an emotional response and wrote this reply without actually addressing what I argued. I stated that it is impossible to have an very large institution without strict rules that people follow, and this requires also the enforcement of the rules, and that means a hierarchy as you will have rule-enforcers.
Also, you are insisting your personal definition of anarchism is the one true definition that I am somehow stupid for disagreeing with, yet anyone can just scroll through the same comments on this thread and see there are other people disagreeing with you while also defending anarchism. A lot of anarchists do not believe anarchism means “no hierarchy,” like, seriously, do you unironically believe in entirely abolishing all hierarchies? Do you think a medical doctor should have as much authority on how to treat an injured patient as the janitor of the same hospital? Most anarchists aren’t even “no hierarchy” they are “no unjustified hierarchy.”
The fact you are entirely opposed to hierarchy makes your position even more silly than what I was criticizing.
all well and good but there is one aspect which i disagree. Modern supply chains are an inefficient way to organize our economies. We are destroying flora and fauna at great speeds in the name of maintaining modern supply chains and convenience. We should not consume things which are not able to be produced sustainably and that means only having things that are produced locally.
World spanning supply chains are a symptom of greed, war-mongering, and anti-sustainability. they are world devouring activities.
They are incredibly efficient for short-term production, but very inefficient for long-term production. Destroying the environment is a long-term problem that doesn’t have immediate consequences on the businesses that engage in it. Sustainable production in the long-term requires foresight, which requires a plan. It also requires a more stable production environment, i.e. it cannot be competitive because if you are competing for survival you will only be able to act in your immediate interests to avoid being destroyed in the competition.
Most economists are under a delusion known as neoclassical economics which is literally a nonphysical theory that treats the basis of the economy as not the material world we actually live in but abstract human ideas which are assumed to operate according to their own internal logic without any material causes or influences. They then derive from these imagined “laws” regarding human ideas (which no one has ever experimentally demonstrated but were just invented in some economists’ armchair one day) that humans left to be completely free to make decisions without any regulations at all will maximize the “utils” of the population, making everyone as happy as possible.
With the complete failure of this policy leading to the US Great Depression, many economists recognized this was flawed and made some concessions, such as with Keynesianism, but they never abandoned the core idea. In fact, the core idea was just reformulated to be compatible with Keynesianism in what is called the neoclassical synthesis. It still exists as a fundamental belief to most every economist that completely unregulated market economy without any plan at all will automagically produce a society with maximal happiness, and while they will admit some caveats to this these days (such as the need for a central organization to manage currency in Keynesianism), these are treated as an exception and not the rule. Their beliefs are still incompatible with long-term sustainable planning because in their minds the success of markets from comes util-maximizing decisions built that are fundamental to the human psyche and so any long-term plan must contradict with this and lead to a bad economy that fails to maximize utils.
The rise of Popperism in western academia has also played a role here. A lot of material scientists have been rather skeptical of the social sciences and aren’t really going to take arguments like those based in neoclassical economics which is based largely in mysticism about human free will seriously, and so a second argument against long-term planning was put forward by Karl Popper which has become rather popular in western academia. Popper argued that it is impossible to learn from history because it is too complicated with too many variables and you cannot control them all. You would need a science that studies how human societies develop in order to justify a long-term development plan into the future, but if it’s impossible to study them to learn how they develop because they are too complicated, then it is impossible to have such a science, and thus impossible to justify any sort of long-term sustainable development plan. It would always be based on guesswork and so more likely to do more harm than good. Popper argued that instead of long-term development plans, the state should instead be purely ideological, what he called an “open society” operating purely on the ideology of liberalism rather getting involved in economics.
As long as both neoclassical economics and Popperism are dominate trends in western academia there will never be long-term sustainable planning because they are fundamentally incompatible ideas.
Because we understand chaos and complexity theory.