Hi, On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 03:04:13AM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote: > On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 11:58:33AM +0100, Emile van Bergen wrote: > >>If each person has the weaponry to take out 10 other people, people will > >>be pretty polite to each other. > > > >Again, that's just the right of the strongest. Everybody defends himself > >with his own weapons. I don't think that builds a good society. > > No, but it's a necessary precondition to preventing accumulation of > power. If an individual can take out 10 others, than it will take more > than 10 people to overwhelm and coerce him by conventional means. It > raises the stakes for which people will feel it is worthwhile to try a > little coercion on their neighbors. > > Defending yourself with your own weapons doesn't build a good society, > but it provides a good base on which a nice society can be built. I don't think so. You overestimate the intelligence of people's reaction to a populist speaker that says, if we all team up together, we can rob the other guy and split the rest amongst ourselves! It raises the stakes, for sure, but not enough for people to keep trying, unless he knows that a bigger group is already /organized/ enough to thwart them. > >So tell me then, how would an anarchist society defend itself against > >a few hundred people teaming up to excercise power over their neighbors, > >with their weapons that each can take out ten people each, as you say? I > >think you'd have one continuous civil war over the resources that /are/ > >scarce. > > The answer to that is simple; if 100 people banded together like that, > 1000 would rise up to crush them. An armed populace is deadly to the > aspirations of those who are greedy. And then the other 1000 discovers that they're quite successful in overcoming the bandits and decide to take some more. That's what always happens in revolutions .Then you need 10000, and before you know it, you need a whole country. More likely, before 1000 rise in response to those first 100, another group of 100 rises and keeps fighting the other 100 forever, exhausing lots of resources, their human energy, ruining infrastructure and natural resources in order to fight the other group, and so on. Again. See Africa. I'm sure you see a beautifully organized bee hive there, but I think with our capability for creativity and compassion, humanity should be able to achieve somewhat more than a bee hive. It's much more comfortable to live in an area where you know *everybody* is subject to the exact same system, a power that protects the freedom of each individual, as is the case with a good democratic government with a monopoly on violence. It's not that some form of balance can't be achieved while continously fighting each other, that's entirely possible. It's just that I'd rather see all that energy spent on something positive. Balances come in lots of forms, high tension to low. A high tension balance among people is a waste of human energy and creativity, IMHO. Cheers, Emile. -- E-Advies / Emile van Bergen | emile@e-advies.info tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 | http://www.e-advies.info
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