As I delve more into philosophy, and as my skepticism and rejection of religion and the state and the institutions thereof cements and calcifies - as it is fortified to a more solid, supported, and logically sound mass that resists the attempts of theists and statists, of the intellectually bankrupt, to penetrate its walls and crumble it, I find the ideologies of the two entering realms beyond absurdity. Once upon a time, I was a theist; once upon a time, I was a statist; but no longer am I that person. I found atheism, and with that influx of knowledge and acceptance of reality, came a natural and brief tendency toward nihilism.

And as nihilism faded, I found anarchism. At first, it was merely a philosophical principle, not an obtainable thing which can be realised by men during their current state in evolution. But something clicked - as I read into the past precedents of anarchism, some recent, and some distant, I discovered that since stateless societies already existed (and that is no contradiction, I assure you), it must be possible for modern man to also develop a stateless society, to cast aside the fetters of his godly shepherds and of his cattle driver, his slave master. Is man not supposedly more evolved than previously, today?

(For stateless societies, research the not-so-wild American western frontier, many of the American Indian nations, pre-Norman dark ages England, pre-Christian Iceland, Celtic Ireland, much of pre-Christian Northern Europe, Somalia [which hasn't been terribly chaotic since 1995, the maelstrom of straw men spewed by statists aside], and many of the African tribes.)

Anarchism itself, as with atheism, is a wildly simple thing - the latter being simply the rejection of deities, of all deities, and the former being the rejection of all coercive hierarchies. Infants are essentially atheistic anarchists, for they have no conception of gods or governments or gods within governments. But the problem with accepting either is the deconstruction of preconceived ideology involved. And with state education, and the innately religious taint which follows, one is told from their very intellectual onset, from the most primordial and savage stages in cognitive development, that the state is a necessary and indeed just institution, as they are told that god exists and the bible is canon of the universe.

Anarchy, or as it has become, anarchism (due to distortion on the former term), is not chaos. That is a straw man with no basis in reality. As in the stateless societies highlighted above, it is clear that societies can be sustainably anarchic without degrading into natural chaos or disarray, as is the mantra of all statists. Supposedly, even the cruelest, most despotic forms of government are preferable to the infernal anarchy. That society would degrade in an instant to an orgy of death and destruction without overlords with a whip in one hand and a shotgun in the other (and maybe a bible and school textbook in the pockets) to keep the cattle in line.

Some believe that the state apparatus is not to blame; that somehow, an organization with a natural vested interest in self-preservation, can be objective in all facets. I don't see how this can be - that is as contradictory as politicians and bureaucrats actively working to effectively and permanently downsize government and reduce the onus of the state - it is something that has never truly happened, despite the trends of Keynes-worshipping mercantilism and privatization/subsidising of late. If ever objectivity even existed amongst most men, it is an ability long lost. I understand that distancing oneself from their emotions wholly is a quite impossible task, much like pure abstractions, for the amygdala and other emotional centres of the brain have far too much of a stranglehold over even the rational cerebral cortex for emotions to be totally void. However, the frequent reliance upon ad hominems by statists and theists, as hammered into their subconscious by years of state indoctrination, is a totally and purely emotional response. These are thought processes ejaculated from the amygdala with little input by the cerebral cortex (and if the latter is at all heavily involved, it is indeed a decrepit organ in that unfortunate organism), with no grounding in logic or rationality.

Oddly enough, the state had not significantly delved into education as a form of increasing societal subservience prior to the 19th century. With this, and the emergence of the welfare state, Friendly Socities and other private institutions all but faded (although I'll expand upon this later) as they were replaced by the compulsory nature of the state. In previous societies, education was not considered necessary - after all, why must a man who is destined to slave himself to a factory worker for forty years know anything beyond basic mathematic and linguistic skills? And it is a valid notion. But today, education for all, even the very bottom of the barrel proletariat, is somehow necessary, despite the fact that they are doomed to an existence of perpetual wage slavery. But this is not for their sake, or for their true benefit, but to grease the gears of society, to remove the resistance from the herd, to increase compliance and sew the seeds of gullibility, submission, and subjective blindness.

I think of the modern proletariat man as the modern chattel man. Today's slavery is a much more subtle thing; we are presented with the illusion of liberty. Our masters, our glorious, infinitely wise and benevolent masters, have extended to us freedom for our own sakes, if you believe that statist rot. But in reality, as with allowing cattle open range, the modern man has simply been allowed more leeway for increased productivity and decreased resistance. Subjects who believe themselves free, who believe that voting and democracy is a panacea for all ills, and that bad things only last as long as political terms, are infinitely more willing to subject themselves to their masters than the overt serfs and slaves of eras bygone.

Below is an excerpt from an essay I am drafting (as it becomes more replete, I shall consider adding further excerpts to later posts):

Liberty stems from three intrinsic principles of sentient life as it is known; self-ownership, freedom from coercion, and the right to life. Naturally, all three apply if one does so in accordance with others’ rights – if one decides to coerce others, whether through force or fraud, he suspends some of his liberty temporarily. And if just demand is made, he may have to put forth the ultimate payment for his crimes – his very life. But to deny self-ownership is to embrace hypocrisy. For even those who may be tools or pawns for others nonetheless possess themselves – they are not the total automatons of others. They merely act as such of their own volition, typically as a perceived path of least resistance.

It is from those three pillars of ‘natural rights’ from which all liberty stems. Due to these being innate truths of man, we can say that, at the very least, a loose moral code is objective. But there aren’t multiple types of liberty – there is no such thing as civil, economic, or social liberty – only a singular liberty. This view of plurality fragments liberty; some believe that it is possible to revoke only one type of liberty, while the others can be maintained, that somehow this is something to be divided and conquered. This is not the case. Such a view of liberty is not realistic, but a false dichotomy.

In limiting one’s choices of what can be purchased for instance, you innately limit what they own, how they use their possessions, and other actions as a result of one single piece of regulation. Add hundreds of such laws and you have a populace that lives purely in an illusory sense of freedom. Thus in reality, the only truly separable branch of this idea of plural liberty would be political liberty, which exists only in the presence of a state. One can have no voting power but still be free in many other regards; vice versa, one can vote but still be grossly limited.

Expanding upon the three innate rights, the right to life might be somewhat deceiving. Some will no doubt straw man this as something it is not – to clarify, this right is not one to eternal life, or to the best of health no matter how one’s personal maintenance is, or to the best medical treatments on the globe whenever wanted or necessary. The right to life is much more basic – it is the right to have the means to survival (personal property), as well as the right to not be intentionally killed by another.

Self-ownership is likely the simplest of the three pillars, as it is the most straightforward and implies little else. This has already been covered, but to retread territory already trodden, one owns oneself. Even if they are a slave, they are still not the property of another; they do not act as their master pleases simply due to their nature, but due to the threat and reality of violence as vindication for not acting as their master pleases.

Freedom from coercion is one which many deny even being possible. It is claimed that only in utopia can this be realized. Truthfully, none of the above rights will always be respected one hundred per cent of the time, by all people – there will always be those who seek to violate others’ rights for their own hedonism. However, the freedom from coercion maintains a few things: that one should be only voluntarily engaged in any contact or trade with any others, that might does not make right, that no one has a ‘god-given’ right to domineer other men, and that if one’s natural rights (any of the three above) are coercively jeopardized or assaulted by any, that the defense of rights can exact any toll upon the aggressor until the abuse ceases. This applies not only to individuals attempting to thwart others’ rights, but also collectives such as states. Ergo, violent insurrection is justified, because the state was the initiator, the antagonist, which served to begin and prolong the cycle of violence.


One of the oft-cited supports for democracy, or what is better described as republicanism, is the illusion of control innate with voting. Because people believe they are in control – and I assure you that that is all voting is – they also believe the system to be both legitimate and curable. What remains mostly unseen, however, is that the machination of democracy has been woven by an aristocracy which will never capitulate power or control. Mercantilism is something which most people cannot see, which, regardless of the cause of myopia, has resounding effects. Subsidies are often regarded as beneficial, regulation as benevolent, and monopolies as pure. Once again, the masses believe that the disease that taints economy or the corruption that riddles politics are present only for the duration of political terms; they see only the symptoms, but not the cause.

Proofs of the folly of voting are numerous, unwavering, and undeniably rational. If one should believe in the faith of anthropocentric global climate shifts, is it rational to force everyone to swim in the ocean to carry minuscule amounts of water from the ocean to alleviate coastal flooding? Clearly not. In this same sense, it isn’t rational to expect every potential voter to do so, because one vote will not at all make a significant statistical difference. In situations like the United States, it makes no discernable difference whether thirty people vote or thirty million; the outcome is guaranteed to be the same. That politicians are figureheads, ditto heads, and hold no real power also means that voting is inherently ineffectual. When one adds that voting is implicitly legitimizing the illegitimate institution of the state, that it is tantamount to begging for a less severe sadist or dominator, that elections can be distorted by media and corporations which tally the votes, and that not every vote is even necessarily valued or counted means that voting is another futile attempt at illusory control of the state by the masses.

There is a great analogy, albeit one provided by others, but one which is far too apt to be discarded. Consider an abusive spouse, and attempting to work with the spouse through years of turmoil; every night, you receive a beating, and most of your spouse’s assets are separate from yours (but yours are not from theirs, if that makes any sense). Your spouse also steals a portion of your income and imposes upon you arbitrary, unnecessary, and rather draconian rules, and warns that should you resist either paying them or their rules, that your beating will be worse than usual. Which is best – to work through your spouse with a counselor who seems to be intending to do well, but always sides with your abusive spouse and, in the end, cannot or will not enforce any judgment, or to distance yourself from them or seek retribution in self-defense? Clearly, the two latter are the far more logical actions; it seems evident that relapses are a common and inevitable occurrence in counseling, for even if the spouse’s actions are bettered for a short period, they always revert to the same old ways.

Politicians are not believed to be innately corrupt, which even the most libertarian and leftist politicians are, for they hold a false post of power, a position upheld with the blood of the citizenry and extortion money. Instead, politicians who are corrupt are seen as the exception. When one considers that politicians are ubiquitously aristocratic – that the proletariat cannot enter politics, due to several reasons, including campaigning, which cannot be carried out while functioning as a wage slave for half of most days, and which also requires significant assets to advertise oneself politically, among other barriers to entry, it is clear that government cannot be equitable when only the wealthiest comprise the hierarchy of the state apparatus. Worse still is that, in a system plagued with mercantilism, that most of the power can’t even be voted out of peoples’ hands – those with power rarely serve political terms, which would include the ditto head president who has very little actual power – that the most elite of the elite are bureaucrats or corporate big wigs who fall behind the shroud, behind the curtains, invisible to even the most keen or caring of political spectators, who are accountable to no one but their peers (and their bank accounts). Even if voting affected those within government to any real extent, the fact remains that the interests and goals of their predecessors usually fit and profit the newcomers as well!

Mercantilism is, of course, the merger of the state and corporate sector. This can manifest as subsidising, grants, barriers to entry, assisted oligopolies and monopolies, intrusive regulation (feeding into oligopolies/monopolies), privatization, and outright absorption of the corporate sector by the state. All of these aspects are present in even so-called capitalist societies – sheer absorption less so, but the others nonetheless are. A brief glance at any state capitalist economy and society will highlight this effectively. Furthermore, some of these affect not only the fiscal portion of society, but also private property owners; some regulations require permits or regulate the use of property by private citizens without the presence of market interaction. Uses which don’t necessarily cause any harm to others or impede upon others’ rights.

In the end, no matter how many logical inconsistencies, non sequiturs, and fallacies can be raised out of a statist treatise, or how many rational proofs for the validity and possibility of anarchism can be effectively stated, it is ultimately upon the believer, the statist, to provide an unquestionable burden of proof, as is the same in a religious context with theists. In the history of humanity, all proofs and truth statements provided by statists and theists have failed to do so. All arguments arising from the minds of theists and statists have, at best, been emotional and inconsistent; at worst, they have been utterly hypocritical, toxically irrational, and even pernicious. This is a final stone which has struck statism and theism dead, for believers of both faiths consistently place the burden of proof wrongly upon the skeptics. This alone highlights the intellectual invalidity of this position – the very fact that the believers have failed to even understand the abstract concept of logic.

How do you address crime in an anarchist society?

Saying that infants are atheists and anarchists is wrong. They don't reject deities or hierarchies, they haven't considered it or taken a stand at all. Big difference.

Infants ARE atheists. They have not explicitly rejected it, but they are regardless without faith, the precise definition of an atheist.

Anarchist is a bit of a stretch.

It is true that anarchism does not necessarily equal chaos, as anarchists believe natural equilibrium will arise out of a stateless society (with self-imposed order). However...



No. Humans are not fully rational, not even today, and will never be.
Government is inevitable, applying to all examples cited in your post.

It's amusing that someone so disgustingly smug for having purged himself of religion would then argue for mystical "natural" rights and "innate" truths. Don't be so proud of yourself for replacing one superstition with another.

Also your conclusion basically gives a free pass for as much violence as one is content to perform.

While there are many arguments (the majority irrational) I could make against anarchy, I'll stick to two for the moment:

1) While you provided a nice list of examples, have any of them accomplished anything more complex than building a bonfire? Most of the civilizations you cited were essentially agrarian groups, all of whom failed to produce cities, any significant technologies etc. Which means your basically promoting Anarcho-primitivism, which means I'm hoping your up for the 35-40 year life span, stink, constant grind of survival, and lack of teeth that implies? (Also, sorry to nitpick, but pre-Norman dark ages Britain definitely had a king, William the Conqueror/Bastard ran into him and his army when he invaded! Also modern Somalia, while it lacks an officially recognized government, does in fact have the hierarchies that you seem to hate; in the form of clan groups and Islamic Courts.)

2) What would keep an anarchist society from devolving into a Darwinistic dystopia in which the strong are free to coerce the weak as they please? Without those fascist pigs to keep them in line, criminals are suddenly free to do as they please, and don't forget all those psychotic religious fanatics who will come out of the woodwork when you give them the run of the place.

Finally, while I don't mean to be accusatory, don't do what every half-assed anarchists does when I try to debate him and start with "The government oppressed me/black people/religious minorities/kicked my dog etc. Not trying to be a jerk, but I have yet to find an Anarchist who could actually tell me why his system was better.

If any significant evolutionary changes have occurred in the past 10,000 years (since we can definitely say the first states emerged) it would have been in the way of making man more suitable to live in an organized, hierarchical society. Biological Evolution isn't pokemon: Animals don't (Always) evolve to become bigger, stronger, faster, and more intelligent all at once; they become more suited to their niche of survival. So if anything we'd be less suited to an anarchistic lifestyle.

That would rather be agnostic I think. Atheists believe that God doesn't exist. There's a large difference between that and not believing in God.

Superstition? You clearly did not bother to read it beyond the surface, and if you did, you either have poor reading comprehension or some other issue for which I cannot raise a diagnosis. Either take the time to understand your opponent and the actual material of the debate (rather than phantoms you conjure) or speak not at all.

Were you to not debate the projections you cast yourself, you would realise that, in fact, anarchism is not freedom from consequences for one's actions. If you have any rational thoughts which you can assault me with, I will respond; until then, I'll most likely ignore you.



Several ways. After all, anarchism is merely a society without coercive hierarchies, and there would be many types of communities within the broader scope of anarchism. Some would be communes, some would be wholly free markets, and some would have non-geographic voluntary states to replace the coercive hierarchies of late. In the two latter, most people would subscribe to private defense and arbitration firms. It is true that compliance with the judgments of said firms would be voluntary in many cases, namely when dealing with torts (which would almost entirely replace imprisonment, for prisons will not exist in a free market, and of course fines, which replaced torts so that the state could get in on that revenue), but if a client does not comply, the defense agencies revoke the contract for defense, and the client is thus ostracised. No one else will want to engage in a contract with the person, for they are likely to violate contracts. If the crime is bad enough, the person may well be killed (especially if they refused to pay voluntary torts and forfeit the defense agency's services).

Torts, of course, are reparations paid directly to victims, and would likely comprise the brunt of all punishment for crimes. Fines contrarily are paid to the state and the victims see no part of the fines. Fines arose in post-Norman England and were thusly adopted by many, many other states who saw the wealth to be had, including the not-so-distant American government.

I do find it amusing, however, that 'defense' or 'security' is a justification for the state. Consider a few things: one, the state does not prevent crime - it merely punishes it. It is well known that capital punishment is a poor deterrent, and jail time and fines are as well. Two, you're insinuating, or overtly stating, that a coercive institution with a monopoly on force must steal your income and threaten you with violence to prevent you from having your money stolen or being threatened with violence. That's a blatant contradiction, a non sequitur, which holds not an ounce of logic - after all, those things have already happened. Three, crimes committed and/or approved by the state apparatus will, despite being crimes according to the state's very own definition, be perfectly permissible and even lauded at times. The state is likely one of the largest bastions of hypocrisy alongside religion. Lastly, considering that barriers to entry and other highly obtrusive regulation force artificially high unemployment, they spawn status crime. It seems manifest to me that in anarchistic societies, status crime would be far lower. The most prevalent crime, then, will most assuredly be crimes of passion.



Humans needn't be fully rational, as I am well aware of my own intellectual faults - by no means am I mentally pristine or infallible. By the very fact that I was incorrect in the past shows this. However, stateless societies have been destroyed due to a few things:
- Religion, and in particular, Christianity. Religion taught the proletariat to be submissive, and with a newfound gullibility, they accepted the 'divine rights' and mandates of coercive hierarchies. Consider Iceland - tributes to the church represented their first taxes, and the churches were quickly exploited by a few chieftains. The chieftains used the newfound taxation to expand, regardless of market forces, because they were now outside of that - a discontent consumer base means little when they are forced to pay due to threats of violence. A few chieftain families - five, if I recall correctly - then buy up the rest of the chieftancies, resulting in an oligopoly, and war ensues, which raises the violence to that of mainland Europe. The people, now disillusioned with the horrors of internal strife and moderate civil war, call for the king of Norway (I can't recall exactly which) to quell the violence. Stateless England and Ireland also partially fell due to this.
- Viewing the state as legitimate, despite faring better without it. This was the case with the American west. The settlers readily submitted to government migration from the east.
- Not resisting external or internal coercion enough (until, of course, the point of no return is already long passed), or simply being invaded by a vastly superior military force. This was the case with the American Indian nations, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the English and Irish (combined with religion).

In any case, the conquered either submit to the state, and passively legitimise it and submit to its will, or they are outright eliminated.



I'm not arguing primitivism in the slightest; consider, if you will, that after a few centuries the Roman empire's progress had all but stagnated, as slave labor and the use of state violence was far more profitable than increasing productivity or technological advancement. This view of Rome as the pinnacle of technology and civilisation is totally erroneous. While infrastructure was highly advanced, technology in general was little better in Rome than in the Rhineland or Gaul. Yes, England had a king, but he was mostly in a formal position except in time of war. Yes, Somalia has Islamic courts and clans, but the clans are non-geographic, and thus non-state entities, and the Islamic courts typically hold little sway in most matters.

I don't see how it is at all possible that the state actively encourages innovation - rarely does the state or its extensions actually produce anything physical or marketable at all, let alone technology. The best it can do is passively encourage it through loosening its grip on the individual, but this always leads to higher productivity, an increase in state revenue, an increase in state size, and unsustainable authoritarianism symbiosis and thus stagnation in productivity and innovation. Such was the case with Rome, the Ottomans/Islamic Empire, the Soviet Union, and almost every other empire one can summon to mind.

And as an aside, I actually believe that primitivism would serve only to restart the cycle of state oppression.



Consider this quote: "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason." How is that relevant, you ask? As I stated above, the state is a very hypocritical institution, and in few facets is it more so than in law enforcement, or the use of coercion to further its mostly arbitrary societal standards and force them upon all within its geographic boundaries. The state is the polar opposite of voluntarism, of liberty, and even the most libertine governments are necessarily coercive. You're already in a situation where criminals are free to do as they please, only they're sanctioned and blessed by the state.

A state is much like a mafia or any other criminal organization - in fact, it is one, only it is amongst the largest of them all. Despite what it would have you believe, the state is far more violent and coercive than the worst of cartels and mafias. You are currently being coerced by the state and its institutions, for at gun point it steals the fruits of your labor, and threatens you with violence (either in the form of a rape pen or a bullet) if you should refuse to hand it your money and abide by its rules under a social contract that you never signed nor consented to. If anything, anarchism could be no worse than statism, than existing in the throes of a state. In all likelihood, anarchism is a thing far better than existence under a state. How?

If there is an internal force within a society, a particular sect such as Christianity or Leninists, for example, the society can band together to repel this group, as they were the initiator of force, the antagonistic force. (Why would the society band together to fight the antagonist?) It is of their rational self-interest to preserve their current climate and keep thugs from reinventing states. After all, the only people who profit from the state are the elites and aristocracy who comprise the hierarchy of the state itself. (How would they? Couldn't a corporation or group have overwhelming force?) In reality, this isn't likely. As there would be no permits or limits for the weaponry one could own, a society could operate a stock of nuclear warheads for the unlikely event of a foreign state trying to impose themselves upon the stateless, and they could also have many, many firearms to repel any who assault the liberties of the individuals in the society. They could embody Yamamoto's famous quote in which he stated that Americans would hide a rifle behind every blade of grass.

You plainly assert that natural rights are the innate truth of man:

What else can be derived from that than you believing in natural rights (unless you wish to say you only used it as the standard terminology of your ideology, and not with literal suggestion that they are "natural" and "innate" [of course, your use of both words suggest that this is a long shot]) which are a silly concept as foolish and baseless as religion. If the basic assertion of your argument is rejected by me, why would I care for the substance? Would you seriously consider the content of an argument that began with a false claim?

And yes, your concluding paragraph does provide a blank check for acts of violence committed in the name of defending one's rights, especially considering that you apply it to individuals as well as collectives. (I never suggested it freed one from the consequences of those actions - nice strawman [by the way, I believe you used this term incorrectly in reference to Somalia].)

During the history of humanity there have been only three motives for commiting crime. These motives are poverty, mental disorders and jealousy. Poverty stems from private property (aka the economic differences of the proletariat and the wealthy). In a stateless society, private property doesn't exist so poverty is eliminated. Let's talk about mental disorders now. Mental disorders have two causes. The first cause is genetic vulnerability along with enviromental stressors. The second cause is a childhood trauma. Both the enviromental stressors of the first cause and the childhood trauma of the second cause stem from a bad upbringing enviroment. A bad enviroment means two things: 1) bad socioeconomic position aka poverty (I already talked about how poverty is combated) and 2) sexual, physical or emotional abuse, bullying and domestic violence. All abuses, bullying and domestic violence are caused by the hierarchical structures of this society and are forms of coercion. In a stateless society, hierarchy doesn't exist so all causes that cause mental disorders are combated. So, mental disorders won't be a problem. Last but not least let's talk about jealousy. Jealousy is a form of emotional poverty and arouses from the desire to have it all for yourself. So, jealousy arouses from the exact same stem as private property. So, by combating private property we combat the causes of jealousy.

So, as you can see for yourself all motives are combated by the mere overthrowing of the hierarchical structure and capitalism. Crime exists only because capitalism and hierarchies exist. Without them crime doesn't exist. So, that's why a stateless society wouldn't have crime.

If they are so baseless and foolish, why then is there no substance to your argument? You're seemingly contradicting self-ownership, which is one right, liberty, or truth that all must accept, and if you indeed discount it, you are by all means a hypocrite of the highest order. Read the analogy I made with slaves. Self-ownership provides the foundation for the other two 'pillars', which are all interconnected and form the basis of any objective, rational, mutual and voluntary interactions. Remove any of those three rights from the other agent in a voluntary interaction, and that activity is no longer mutual or voluntary. Another word for these rights, other than natural and innate, would be emergent.



It is self-defense, which is a right of all men, lest we be subject to the arbitrary, cruel, exacting, and hypocritical nature of the state. No collective has the right to dominate an individual - one million men do not have the right to control the life of one man and vice versa; individuals cannot control collectives, as one man has no right to subject one million others to his rule. Any exceptions to this, as I have rehashed constantly and consistently, are purely arbitrary and subjective, and thus irrational, involuntary, and parasitical. And I apologise for the straw man, but it seemed that was what you were implying. And no, I didn't use it incorrectly when referring to Somalia - please, indulge yourself and do some reading upon the reality of Somalia. You will find that you are astonished at the mounds of disinformation spewed by state and media sources.

Other examples include Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and the вільна територія (Free Territory) which covered most of nowadays Ukraine between 1919 and 1921. So, yeah I guess that they accomplished things a lot more complex like building a bonfire.



I redirect you to my response about crime and I'll just add that anarchist and stateless societies are built around solidarity (a word that is unknown to the current political system). Solidarity prevents such things from happening.

Natural rights are themselves a subjective and arbitrary concept (what creates and sustains them if not some form of coercion?) . There can be no objective and rational basis for the interactions of a being so blatantly irrational and absurd as man.

A strawman is not misinformation. A strawman is when you take an argument, misrepresent it, and argue against the misrepresentation. Merely portraying Somalia as chaotic is not a strawman. If you suggest that Somalia is not chaotic, and I then claim you are arguing that Somalia represents the ideal society, then attempt to demonstrate that it is not ideal, that is a strawman.

If all of man's interactions are absurd, irrational, and thus aribitrary, how are natural rights any more incongruent with reality than state-enforced rights? As I said, natural rights are emergent. Do men not own themselves?



I'm well aware of what a straw man is, and as many use Somalia as a precedent which proves the chaotic nature of anarchy and thus a support for their argumentation, I figured it fitting. If it appeases you, however, it is also true that much of what is said about Somalia is more in the realm of misinformation or falsehood than straw men.

(I found it necessary to tidy the post and complete a fragmented sentence.)

Self-ownership is not disputed, but the rest of the so-called natural rights are arbitrarily attached to it, as it is a no-brainer concept that can be used as justification for other bad concepts. The rest of your arguments do not follow from self-ownership.

Very interesting. I really like anarcho-capitalism in theory, but I doubt that it would work out as pretty as hoped. If humans were a little more rational then it would work great, but as it stands, not so much.

What is the real difference between a private defense/arbitration company and a state?



Atheism = A + Theism; a meaning "without" and theism meaning "religion". Atheism or theism means either the presence or absence of faith in religion, and agnosticism/gnosticism refers to whether or not it can be known. You can be an agnostic atheist ( IE, someone who does not believe in a god and also says it can't be known ) or an agnostic theist ( someone who believes in a god but believes it can't be known ). In fact most Christians are agnostic theists.



That doesn't make any sense at all.

Premise: Crime is caused by capitalism/free market/private property, thus removing capitalism/free market/private property removes crime.

The only way to remove capitalism/free market/private property is by force, since free market is literally how rational humans interact without restraint. You would need a state to enforce your stateless society.

That's a good question, and one which I admittedly did little to answer. And it is this: voluntarism. That is the separation between a private defense/arbitration firm and states. There are other things, such as the private firms not having a geographic boundary, and not being a coercive monopoly, but I like to think of that as a byproduct of voluntarism.

I prefer not to call it anarcho-capitalism, because capitalism summons to mind mercantilism, but Rothbard did coin the term.



How so? You're telling me that men do not have to respect each others' lives? Each others' ability to remain free, to not be enslaved? You criticise me for inviting an open door for all sorts of heedless retribution, and yet you seem to be stating that men's lives and ownership don't necessarily need to be recognised in mutual and voluntary interaction. After all, to respect self-ownership is to respect freedom from coercion, as no man would coerce or enslave another whose ownership he recognises. And due to voluntarism, there would be no loss of life and no depravation on the means to sustaining life (property), ergo mutual respect of the right to life as I described it.

What if his wife (Or whatever the law and religion-less equivalent would be) is really hot? What if he's a few inches taller than I am? What if he has really nice hair? What if he's just plain got better luck than I do? There'll always be jealousy. If all anyone had was two rocks and a potato sack for a shirt, someone would complain that their potato sack was itchier. I'm also a bit meh about the whole "Heirarchical social structures cause mental disease" concept, but I don't have enough knowledge of Psychology to debate so it can stay.

EDIT: Could one of the Pro-Anarchy guys toss me some links explaining the concept of these voluntary Protection/Arbitration companies, and what the whole geographic thing has to do with the clan system. I'm curious, and I don't want to accidentally start throwing strawmen.

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertari ... er_29.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18iO1OIkElI

I'm sure you can find others.

None of that follows from acknowledging self-ownership. Merely acknowledging it does not mean that one places it at the core of an absolutist thought or that self-ownership is an inherent state that cannot be changed. The rest of what you posted is just a naive view of humanity.

From what I have gathered, I thought that Atheism was just a lack of belief in god. It seems very irrational for anyone to deny the existence of god without any sort of evidence, and I think Atheists know this. If someone was to prove gods existence, they would then accept and acknowledge a god. But until then, they lack belief that there is any sort of god.

And yes, Agnosticism is having no faith (gnostic=Knowing). From how I see it, it's the most rational and "scientific" approach on god/faith/spirituality/the supernatural.

Thanks, I'm sure I could have found something if I'd googled it but there's decent odds it would have been either a) idiocy or b) not the source your using or one you agree with (anarchists aren't exactly known for their loyalty to authority viewpoints) and then I would've been arguing the Pope about Lutherans, so to speak.

Self-ownership cannot change, unless a physical mind control device supplants the rational functions of the individual. Consider this, once again: Even if they are a slave, they are still not the property of another; they do not act as their master pleases simply due to their nature, but due to the threat and reality of violence as vindication for not acting as their master pleases. Self-ownership remains even in slaves, for, after all, they are perfectly capable of attempting to escape.

Even if people aren't consciously aware of these principles or their supports, most no doubt have an intuitive understanding or acknowledgement of these natural or emergent rights. It has been said that in a society of murderers, the punishment for murder would be highest. And it is due to this intuitive understanding of said rights.

The denial of physical self-ownership (as in the example of a slave) nullifies the value of self-ownership. And again, none of what you have said follows from the acknowledgment of self-ownership. It's just a basic concept that can easily be subverted in reality, but being so basic, doesn't really justify anything.

Cool. What stops a private defense firm from becoming a coercive monopoly? Obviously they would profit pretty significantly from being the only guy in town. They do have the tools necessary for defense, and it seems to me that tools for defense could very easily be used for tools of coercion.

Additionally, how do you propose to deal with free riders, in this defense agency?

I never really quite got on board with the anarchist viewpoint of politics, but I got pretty close to it right before I began heavily reading Ayn Rand. I was particularly fond of writers like Leo Tolstoy and also Murray Rothbard, and I still read both on occasion.

What I think I've ascertained from your opening post is that the principle concept of self-ownership is innate, which means it is predetermined by virtue of existence. This may potentially lend itself a bit to dualism, since innate concepts can not be observed through any physical medium, but can be discovered via reason and intuition. If reasoned out as such, they can be argued as leading to the 3 Lockean rights of life, liberty and property, which developed out of John Calvin's early theories on self-ownership.

The only area where I think you and I diverge on is the nature of the state, which I see as having the potential to be either good or bad depending upon the vigilance of the populous. Like with individuals, the state can err and becoming tyrannical when it gains too much power over others, as all forms of collectivist ideology seem to want to grant it. By the same token, the irrational egoism of some under the Nietzschean mode of thought would lead to similar problems under an anarchist model.

Ultimately the problem is choice, it is basically what destroys the inherent perfection in any model of an ideal society, and it is just as innate of a reality as self-ownership. Choice is dependent upon reason and knowledge in order to be properly exercised, but that alone is not sufficient to guarantee a constructive choice. I also diverge with you on the concept of arbitrary actions being the primary cause for destruction, I do believe in the concept of malevolence and I think that most collectivist ideologies were created for a purpose closer to malevolence than whimsical thought, although most adherents to those ideologies are highly arbitrary and emotional when explaining why they accept those ideologies.

I also have a different take on religion, since I am not an Atheist. I believe that just like the state, religion is a means for asserting metaphysical beliefs and speculations that can be used either as a tool or a weapon, depending on who it is wielded by. Dogmatism is often arbitrarily applied and pitted against reason, but like a hammer and a saw, can and ought to work hand in hand with each other, in spite of the idiocy that has dominated many schools of modern thought.

While these 'pillars' of natural rights are somewhat axiomatic, and obviously abstract, I fundamentally disagree on their ability to be subverted or their being arbitrary. Recall that time is an abstract entity, and yet it governs the lives of most people on this planet. As I said, a loose objective moral code is possible for voluntarism.



Competing firms and a lack of physical domain, because if a defense firm gets out of hand, it would surely lose its customer base and be a target for its competitors who would exploit that opening to [legitimately] absorb more customers. These defense firms are a supplement to self-defense, and aren't necessary, and of course would not be large or powerful enough to coerce an entire population. Even modern governments do not wholly operate on coercion; there is still a consent mechanism involved in the masses. If all of the almost three hundred million non-government affiliated Americans were to raid every state and military organisation and agency in the country, the government would fall within short order, even if everyone was armed with cudgels and stones or nothing at all.

As for free riders, I imagine the contracts would occur on a purely individual basis, and of course, as I said, are not geographically bound, and so no free riders could benefit unless they were to themselves initiate a contract with the defense firm.

I think that you are taking a (il)logical jump here. Mors Gloria is talking specifically about the disparities between the haves and the have nots that create a need, thus the crime. You have also totally stripped the "premise" of its psychological implications.

Noobot...I've read all the posts so far and although I may concur with some of your ideas, I still haven't seen how your theories could actually be applied unless you're some all-powerful god and are able to scratch us all off the face of the planet and begin the human expirement all over again painting a better picture with a different canvas, better color schemes, and new inspiration. I don't mean to imply that I believe in god and that only he could do this. Your views remind me of the movie Zeitegest Addendum. It all sounds nice on print although Phantom does have some issues. The problem is how do we go about to putting these theories into effect?

Below is my critique of the movie I compared your views with, seeing way too many obstacles ahead and highly suspicious of its method of implementation because if anything history has shown us is that no matter how common views appear to be shared by a group, the survival of that shared idealism would have to be perpetual and concrete every step of the way, something highly unlikely in today's unidealic climate.

Zeitegest Addendum:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 7695921912

My primary concern with the film 'Adendum', is that it relies too heavily on the presumption that technology is the key. The key, to exactly what, is not specified only alluded to. We have what appear to be a couple of analysts professing, what according to them, is the path to salvation.

So right off the bat they start off by proposing a utopian view; that all we need is to somehow convert the minds of billions of people, at an unprecedented, simultaneous level, of which would arise the cognizance of who we really are underneath our veiled fronts.

And who are we? Well, that's where conflicts come in. How do we determine what constitutes as 'human nature' in order to seperate the favorable ones from the unfavorable. This will not be as friendly a competition as these speakers would like to suggest. For example, if we use this forum as a symbolic microcosm of the world's personalities, we notice that rarely do discussions remain on a civil level.

As soon as somebody states an opinion that doesn't appeal to someone, he or she is accused of something or the discussion is reduced to finger pointing. People feel they deserve more than to just be listened to, they want to convert you. This will happen on the larger scale.

Even among people with seemingly similar viewpoints, with similar backgrounds, giving similar information, will nevertheless develop animosity towards each other simply out of spite, envy, and jealousy. It can be a given that this will result not only with many 'human natures' but a battle of wits, and if it's permitted to continue, with a possible hierarchy. And isn't this what we wanted to do away with to begin with?

What about the problem of technology? That problem is us. There is nothing wrong with technology but the implementation and misuse of it which becomes a problem for us. The film leads us to believe that it's soley technology that has made our life better, when it's everything that allows technology to appear, everything that's associated with it, that is just as relevant, and that goes for politics and religion. Like it or not, man has been guided by these institutions, with results we love and with some we hate.

Why we love and hate technology has everything to do with politics as well as religion; some to a higher or lower degree than others. So in my view, the film wants to isolate an ingredient from the mix and still call it 'the' soup. There can be revolutionary victories on an individual scale, say for example a scientist developing a new self-sustaining battery. But how is he going to mass produce it? Will he have to? Will it be a simple matter of getting it to the people? What if big corporations want to use his technology? Will he sell it to them? To the government? At what cost?

Where would he get his raw material from? Who would provide it for him knowing fully well that his invention might put an end to their business in the long run? He'd have to do alot of campaigning along the way, seeking out those willing to help him, that is, people who had already arrived either at similar ideological conclusions or been influenced by him not only cognizant this could be the end of life as we know it but that there will be those opposed to everything they stand for ready to stop them.

We would have to start not only with a new set of values but a whole new set of humans. At the present time I'm reading a book called Godless Communists, Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932, by William B. Husband. The book "offers a fresh interpretation of early communist initiatives to create an atheistic society." I'm barely half way through and already I've learnt that the Russian government's own accounts are testament of how the people, who had been severely underestimated, played a much larger role than they had been expected to concerning how the influence of religion guided their everyday lives, that is, as opposed to the government's own brutal programs of suppression.



The Russian people had had a long Pagan history. After the Roman conquest, the Christian Orthodox Church did not just alter their beliefs but maintained that religiousity that had already been in place for thousands of years.

Just like this film would have us believe, so too did the Communist Russian government believe that it would be possible to crush the people's spiritual followings, that they can be simply extracted out of the Russian mentality and discarded like trash. No matter how brutal the crackdown on religion scourged the lives of the people, like the iconoclastic destruction of churches or the imprisonment of school teachers, the Russians always found a way to deal with it, and in many cases it fomented their beliefs, whether Christian or Pagan.

So in essence what the film is advocating is not just taking technology from the religious and political spheres but expecting that man can be simply taken out of those spheres aswell.

This being said, what the film aspires to is a technocratic society without government (politics) and without religion (spiritual followings), ignoring the fact that these same foundations weren't just variables in an unfavorable equation but necessary tools that contributed or led to those very technologies that now seek to eradicate them in return, albeit, ignoring the input of the people inbedded within them, with possible results much more dangerous than our present state of things.

Naturally, what we're talking about here is science, specifically, a moral science, theoretically speaking that is. Since there is no moral science, no fixed set of rules governing how science should be used, on who's morality do we base it on? This leads us back to square one. There will have to be predeterminants, in other words a moral science cannot just appear out of the blue and yield itself for universal implementation, it has to come from somewhere.

Although I agree change has long been overdue, none of the ideas in the film are new nor original. The following slogans found throughout the film are only reiterations of what advocates for world government have been saying for more than 100 years.



This is coming from the mind of a human being, therefore contradicting himself when he calls for the non-human input in his grand-scale utopia.



The words common-good combined are a sort of oxymoron. What is the predetermined value system that serves as grounds for this movement?



Once again, they have reduced man to nothing more than a mere robot which they think, can be simply programmed to delete from itself a whole file system, let's not forget, a file system wherein lies more than just daily activity but where culture comes from along with moralities, values, ethics, and virtues---then download a new set of protocols, all the while pretending this can be done without any stress or glitches.

This brings me to my final problem with the film. Towards the end we are given a list of strategies, all well-meaning but ignoring the fact that conflict will be the biggest obstacle to the change. This means, that not only will it get worst before it gets better but that a violent upheavel might be a necessary precursor, of which we must rise from if we are to be victorious in achieving such a utopian society.

How will those violent times play into the creation of such a society? History has shown us that the violence never really stops, in fact it leads to more violence. I wish it were as simple as turning off a switch but it's not. I'm reminded of the forum microcosm. During the violent revolution, there will be those that fail to see the purpose of the revolution and will be tempted to use their show of force on neighboring countries in an effort to either seek revenge or inflict long-lasting damage as they vie for supremacy.

It's not that I believe we're all animalistic but that there are variables set in place ready to foil any plans for peace. How would we handle those 'rogue countries' that fail to 'go with the plan'? Do we just ignore them? Do we use force? I am too suspicious of a film that avoids to confront these issues and instead rather focuses on what we've known all along.


So getting back to the Noobot's topic, we can't just talk about it but take some action and see what happens. How many people thought they'd change our world during the sixties and look at them now working for the government, working for the U.N., working for the WHO, working for the Pharmaceutical Industry, working for the media?

Noobot, wouldn't it take some great event to send us running for a new system, if one can admitted to call it a system at all? What do you foresee or predict would 'need' to occur or happen in order for that awakening to come about for a substantial amount of people to start looking for a new way of life?

I apologise for not responding earlier - it quite simply slipped my mind.



But if voluntarism is the law of the land, and the objective ethics reflect such, then the state is clearly an institution which doesn't fit in. That is one of the primary facets where I diverge from minarchists like Rand or Mises.



People typically act in what they perceive to be their best interest. Malevolence does exist, but for the most part, violent actions are done not of pure spite or sadism, but because it is either seen as the path of least resistance or the sole solution to a problem.



Dogmatism can do no good. If a position cannot be justified beyond very basic intuition, it is likely a position not worth maintaining. Thus religion holds no place in the mind of anyone who fancies themselves objective or rational. Faith, and its pal dogma, are quite the polar opposite of reason and each opposing faction seeks to destroy the other, for they are fundamentally incompatible. Reason and dogma/emotions/faith occupy separate parts of the brain, and those who invest their intellect into reason represent an entirely different mindset and philosophy. The emotional are often anti-conceptual and anti-knowledge as a general principle, which is quite clearly reinforced by their dogma.



I was an anarchist well before I viewed Zeitgeist Addendum, and while I enjoyed the first half (so there is little to say other than concurrence), the Venus project's vision is unrealistic. For anarchism to work and be pure, there can be no forced societal moulds; different ideals and societal models must be capable of existing simultaneously, without one seeking to conquer or destroy the others. Whether some of these should collapse due to their artificial nature is irrelevant; quite simply, no external forces should aid in any such collapse. It would be much better if you were to take to time to address my argumentation as opposed to this miscellaneous media.

The kind of catastrophe necessary for any kind of expedient revolution will, of course, be obvious and overt governmental abuse - the obvious formation of what is undoubtedly an authoritarian police state, rather than the mercantilistic subtle slavery of today. I only fear that such an event may represent what I deem the point of no return, where any action against the state will thereafter be nigh impossible.

Also, I'd like you to elaborate upon your stance that government and religion produce anything of commercial or practical value at all, let alone technological advancement.

The problem is I'm not seeing where the state is necessarily contradictory to voluntarism, at least at a local/community level, though I would say in 100% of currently implemented state models it definitely acts in a capriciously coercive manner.

I've taken a lot of influence from Mises regarding economic theory, but my views on the state itself is closer to what was likely advocated by Patrick Henry/Samuel Adams, namely sovereignty resting in the hands of localities, where people are not bound to the caprices of outside governing authorities.



I would agree with this, although I would approximate that about 1% (or maybe slightly less) of a given population will be either prone to malevolence innately or maybe by volition. Oddly enough a lot of these people seem to end up in leadership positions considering all of the carnage going on in the world.

The existence of government can provide a means of power for such people, and it has in many cases if a populace is not vigilant, but this form of behavior would likely still seek power absent a pre-existing medium of implementation, particularly among those who are not vigilant and looking out for any sort of threat to their property or life.



But intuition itself is the precursor of any form of metaphysical speculation, be it dogmatic or unrestricted spiritualism. Where do we specifically draw the line between basic intuition and what you describe as the anti-conceptual/anti-knowledge state that a deranged emotionalist/cultist would exhibit (the latter is more of a consequence than an implementation).

I received a fair amount of my philosophical training from Dominican teachers, who some would say were the precursors to Enlightenment thought during the Medieval period. Do you derive your understanding of epistemology from any Aristotelian school or elsewhere?

I don't think a truely anarchist "state" could exist successfully. (i.e no laws, no crimes)

Human nature prevents this. There is always someone who wants what another has, whether it's a house, car, or a rock.

This leads to some form of economics, such as trade (if you give me that rock, I'll give you this stick) or hostile behavior. (give me the rock or I'll kill you).

Without some form of guidelines, or something to aspire to, people tend to be greedy and violent. Even in the wild, there is always a dominant figure (typically the strongest male or female) that enforces behavior. The fact that humans know how to make and use weapons would more or less equalizes individuals, making violence and war inevitable.

Education would be our only real prevention of unacceptable behavior, but without some way to keep hostile/irritating members of people in line there will still be violence and "crime".

Pestilence and famine are also inevitable as the population grows. That's the way it is for animals, and that's the way it is for us.

The language used in your argument is SO unnecessarily contrived and overly convoluted. Im willing to wager that if you really understood what you are saying then you would say it in much simpler terms and in a more accessible way. Unless youre actually trying to sound like a douche.

I don't think it was convoluted, usually when giving opinions people will ask you to get more specific, so he essentially preempted that by trying to lay out every aspect of his views, in a fairly wordy fashion no less.

P.S. - apostrophe marks are not the enemy, try using them, they don't bite.

It depends on who thinks it has any commercial or practical value.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't writing develop out of the need
to calculate how many pigs, sheep, cattle, horses, bitches, and land
a herdsman, farmer, tribal leader, or priest had?

Some of the earliest art like say that of the Cave of Lascaux may
depict horses or bulls, but I don't think they were just created in awe
of the beasts. They could have been drawn to designate where such
animals roamed, how many, and in what season.

Eventually we get to the printed press, which although initially is
guarded by the elite priests, the skills to write and print eventually
get out and now you have a bunch of slaves knowing how to read and
write.

Don't mean to simplify its history, but the printed word is then used
by scientists and philosophers, teachers, and political leaders which led to
other technologies, some good some bad. My point is elminating the
influence of religion, politics, government, and technology cannot be
so easily done whether the technology came out of some direct
consequence or not and whether the technology was used for good or
evil.

Take for example the work of Tesla. If we are to believe in his work,
he could have eliminated the slave-grid we're all a part of now. According
to some, the government appropiated his findings and kept them all
to themselves, preventing us from living a better life. But to some the
technology we do have is seen as essential for an easier life.

You are not dealing with a world of a couple of hundred people that can
be easily 'shown the way' or be manipulated into going 180 degrees the
opposite direction.

For instance, in Adendum they propose to use some designated land
for their grand scheme. Would your idealic un-system of living allow
any technology? I know you've said yes, but wouldn't that require
the people to get those materials from somewhere else? Do you think
some country is just going to allow you to squat and use their land
and resources?

The reason I compared your anarcho system to Adendum is that they
talk as if they already have the country or land set up ready for
settling. They never adress how they're going to get to that point. They
want us to accept the destruction of our economic and social way of life
as if there's a light at the end of the tunnel with nobody hiding at the
exit ready to shove us off the cliff.

Do you propose we take back our country by force? Should we take up
arms?

I live in a farming community away from the city here in south Texas.
The nearby city didn't give a fuck about us during the aftermath of
Hurricane Dolly. We lost power for a whole week, that's seven days. The
Salvation Army didn't come to our road until the fourth day with a couple
of bags of ice and some self-heating food packs. We didn't need that,
what we needed was power restored.

While everybody else had power restored within a few days our area
remained in the darkness. We had gas generators so we still had to
travel to the gas station to get gas.

So now I'm thinking of buying a solar-powered generator. Should I
do some research to see if the technology came from the government or
was invented by some religious person? Should it matter?

They already scratched us off their list to have our garbage picked up by
them so we now have to go with another company becuase the city thinks
we all live too far. We live three minutes away.

So we're all thinking of making our own town. There's all kinds of
people living amongst us. We have a radiologist, a psychologist, a bounty
hunter, a drug dealer, some ex-cons, several university students, a
couple of witches, three natural healers and a bunch of religious folks, all
coming from a couple of farming families.

What do you recommend we do? Set up a pagan way of life, an athiest,
a religious way of life? We can't demand we all follow any one faith
or non-faith because there's a bigger religious following of some christian
faith or other and they'd be the first to demand christianity be the
standard.

Although we could all get into organic farming and well-drilling, set up
our own schools and clinics, it's obvious we will not be able to do it
without any outside help.

We've had people who live outside the land come in through our roads
and drive at excessive speeds nearly killing some of the children
who were playing in their front yard. The nearby city police will not
lend any assistance so they must call the sheriff who takes anywhere
between 30 minutes to a couple of hours just to get there.

Should we put up a gate to keep outsiders away? People have to leave
the area to get groceries, to work, to get materials etc. Trust me your
ideas may seem well meaning, and I do enjoy reading everybody
philosophizing back and forth but our little part outside of town has
some huge problems to deal with, and I don't see how theories can
help get us out of them.

Actually I'm arguing that position backwards. Not that Government leads to technology but that technology leads to government, or at the very least to hierarchical systems of organization. The first "great civilizations" in Mesopotamia, Egypt, early China and elsewhere developed because of Irrigation Canals, dikes and dams. These structures were large, too large to be built independently and without organization. Leaders emerged, hierarchies emerged, tyrannies emerged. I argue that as long as technology exists it can grant power, and as long as power can be imbalanced there will be hierarchical structures; whether they call themself "state", "corporation", "Church", "Kingdom", "democracy" however you like it. On the other hand I'll concede that this mentality could change over the 10/100/1000 years it would take to get humanity going into the direction of pseudo organized Anarchy.

We're probably thinking about the same book called Ancient God-Kings
which lays out the rise of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and early China, like you
said, from the irrigation systems which allowed crops and animal farms to
flourish, moving farther from the nomadic life.

"Sumer's fields produced such bountiful harvests that not everyone
had to farm. Managers, or planners, emerged, men who laid out the
canals and dikes and made sure the flow of water reached its destination.
These specialists developed a new technology: instruments for measuring
surveying, and calculating slopes and flow patterns, and mathematics
that would make those measurements useful. "

"While some specialists spurred the advance of farming, others focused
on spiritual matters. An increasing numerous priesthood elaborated a
complete cosmological system that explained all aspects of the natural
and human world. The Sumerian religion proved to be so powerful that
it endured for 3,000 years, greatly influencing the succession of peoples
who occupied Mesopotamia after Sumer's declne."


This suggests that both the hierarchical system and religion could have
risen exclusively from each other but not necessarily at loggerheads
eventually joining forces to protect their power.

So couldn't a hierarchical system have already been in place before this
technology took them away from the nomadic life? Who decides who are
the managers and who are the slaves? Was there such a decision even
made at all? Some tribes had shamans for leaders while others held
second rate positions as medicine men.

The question would then be how did this one tribe or group of tribes
become so powerful, smart, or big enough to need such technology
in the first place?

Sharper spears? Sharper shamen?

I quite explicitly stated that anarchism is not utopic in any fashion. Anarchists have no delusions of a perfect world under anarchy, in which all of the inhabitants therein are purely mutual, non-coercive creatures, where no one's rights are violated. There will always be those who subjugate others, or at least attempt such, but this can be minimised through the abolition of entities like religion and the state. Of course, the very fact that stateless societies have and do exist, successfully, entirely undermines the statist argument of impossiblity or contradicting nature.



If you were to become cultured, I'm sure you would find a vulgar (common) vocabulary inadequate. By no means am I "trying to sound like a douche." This ad hominem, I think, stems from your incapability or unwillingness to understand my arguments. In the future, bring something more productive and intellectually stimulating to the table, else you should not post at all.



The only states not contradictory to voluntarism are non-coercive, non-geographic organizations as I have laid out above. But these are more quasi-states than government as we are so accustomed to. These would be purely subscription based, and thus capable of truly being voluntary, unlike the states of today which are necessarily coercive simply in that they tax their population. Taxation is a euphemism for theft, as protection is in crime circles for extortion. They're one and the same - there is no objective separation between taxation and extortion other than the specific parties perpetrating the two.



While small, localised governments are capable of doing less harm, as they are almost always far less intrusive, they are still incapable of productivity.



Exactly - governments attract the worst or, rather, most aggressive and coercive of men to its ranks. Intrigue and backstabbing are quite necessary functions within government, and far worse things are done without (externally; things done by government to those outside of the immediate institution).



Of course. But if no one has a legal monopoly on force, and no justification in the eyes of the masses, they can garner no nearly ubiquitous support for coercion.



I do value intuition; I myself am considered an intuitive introvert. However, despite the initial intuitive inclinations, I eventually put forth some rational justification, whether correct or not, whether derived from others or self-realised, for my judgment. So the line between emotional intuition and sound or justified intuition is just that - rational proofs or rhetoric which is not inherently contradictory and fallacious. I'm sure there may well be other distinctions, but at the moment I cannot summon them to mind.



Actually, I don't consider myself to have adopted my view of metaphysics from a single source (although I'm sure there's someone out there with compatible metaphysics). Unfortunately, I really haven't been able to immerse in any school in particular. But from what I understand of the Aristotelian school, only a small portion of my views are contained within his treatise. Objectivism is far more influential to me than Aristotle.



Writing most likely stemmed from the need to permanently (in the eyes of men) preserve information, namely scripture and laws. Still, the state did not invent writing or linguistics.



Which has nothing at all to do with government.



Politicians and government have no real expertise but in their own devices (such as law), and so cannot produce anythings which require expert specialization. Even the research of a state organization such as NASA would still occur without the state, only it would be privately run, and likely more efficient.



I'm well aware that the world holds over six billion people.



There won't be countries. Resources will not be controlled by one person, or a few people, as no monopoly or oligopoly can control all of the land mass in the world.



I already addressed this, and essentially, yes, we should. The government initiated force, and even under the loose, objective ethics of voluntarism, it is still just to overthrow government. Addendum never addressed the vehicle of anarchism because it's rather obvious in some lights and rather complex. The following addresses only an American movement, although it would be similar elsewhere. There would need to be initiatives to get more to consider the philosophy, and a loosening of the grip of religion and (religious) statism. That would be the 'grass roots' movement, so to speak. Then the American government would be overthrown, and a new one is established in its ashes. The remaining people are coaxed out of statism by enforced minarchism, and a government which eventually has no purpose but the spectacle of politics and taxing the population by less than five per cent. And so on.



I can assure you that the technology was not invented by the state or by Christianity. Regardless of whether a statist Christian invented it, neither areas of his dogma at all contributed.



Not everyone will be an atheist even in anarchism, but their gospel will not be forced upon any whether in the form of the state or religion directly. Solutions for problems under anarchism are provided by congregates of individuals, rather than the simple solution of appealing to the state as a cure for all ills.