From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 13 2002 - 14:05:36 MST
Daniel Ust wrote:
>>
>> ### Who will stop a state from forming itself out of
>> the dregs of the society, attacking the honest
>> anarchists around them?
>
> My hope would be that a mature anarchist society would evolve feedback
> mechanisms to prevent such. I would like to run the experiment...
### What kind of feedback mechanism? Give me details....
------
>
> To turn your analogy around: government is like having an aquarium
> with legally mandated tiny fish and a giant monster fish in the
> middle. Yeah, the monster fish will probably keep the medium sized
> fish from eating the small ones, but it will spend a lot of time
> eating the small ones itself.
### Hmm, I like this analogy. We'd need to ask an aquatic ecologist to tell
us if total mass and health of small fishes is better in the presence of
large numbers of medium-sized predators freely feeding on them, versus
having a large predator keeping the medium ones in check (and perhaps
responding to supermajority decisions of the small fishes). I do have the
impression that the sardines can live well with sharks, but poorly with
piranhas, with all the incompatible salinity needs.
--------
> No! The key to stability is to have internal mechanisms that don't
> rely on a "cohesive group." Once you put your reliance on that, you
> are depending not on the structure of the system but its content. A
> system structure such that there are incentives for the powerful to
> abuse power -- such as the ones we live under -- will have such abuse
> in spades.
### Perhaps I should have written "a group with the correct political
beliefs". Once the members of a society stop believing in the mechanisms and
institutions of the society, the society will change, for better or worse.
Structure alone is not sufficient. You can't make a silk purse out of a
sow's ear. For stability you need both the correct mechanisms and the
correct beliefs about their functioning. Pure anarchy provides neither the
mechanisms nor the way of maintaining beliefs. As I said above, give me your
detailed ideas about making anarchy stable, and I'll join you.
-----
>
>> A demarchy with some
>> constitutional checks and balances (effective procedures
>> for preventing the representatives from exempting
>> themselves from the laws they pass, forced disclosure
>> of information, a bicameral supermajority IQ-weighted
>> Borda count voting system, and others) should produce
>> a much more stable and responsive system than current
>> democracies, and we do know that democracies can last
>> quite a long time, even in the absence of transparency
>> and modern voting methods.
>
> I disagree. I think the first emergency that comes along -- and such
> emergencies always come along -- and the system will collapse into
> your typical democratic system. You're merely adding a few more
> bandaids onto the something like the US Consitution. Checks and
> balances as such don't work when they're internalized into the same
> institution.
>
### Describe the type of emergency you have in mind, the interactions
between the individuals and the political forces which would cause the
collapse. I don't see any that would not be balanced and blocked. A demarchy
would be a different animal from a vested-interest free-for-all
semi-democracy.
Rafal
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