Chimera of Anarchism

You can feel it. It's almost palpable. People are getting desperate. Time is growing short, along with the days, as the ineluctable and increasingly terrible reality of the impending Presidential "election" presses in on us. We shudder, collectively, with the two appallingly inadequate choices which it presents us. The partisans try to paint it as a choice of good v. evil. But we all know: Evil, greater and lesser, but still...

Under that pressure a LOT of energy and bits/bytes have expended trying to compose some practical, practicable alternative to our current, corrupt, compromised system, and one which constantly raises its head is "anarchism."

Usually, by this, people who advocate it mean: (Anarchism) the political theory that a community is best organized by the voluntary cooperation of individuals, rather than by a government, which is regarded as being coercive by nature.

 This is, at BEST, mere wishful thinking.

At worst, it's dangerous delusion.  Horizontal organization is practicable at the level of SMALL, homogeneous groups, but not at the level of large, heterogeneous ones..

This kind of social arrangement MAY be possible in very small, self-sufficient enclaves, but (like "communism," unfortunately, which worked wonderfully well within the walls of medieval monastic orders, but almost nowhere else), anarchism is totally impractical when encompassing the 7.01 BILLION human critters already inhabiting the planet.

It is not possible to have a large, complex human society without social organization. Hierarchy and social stratification are inevitable and unavoidable in conditions of "civilization," where heterogeneous groups are assembled and housed in "cities," where traditional tribal relations and practices commensurable with tribal culture are dissolved under the pressure of close, unavoidable association with biological and social exogenes.

Organization begets people who can organize (not EVERYONE can).

Organizers always arrange it so they have power.

That means "rules."

And that means a means of enforcing them.

Power concentration--the MEANS of rule enforcement--creates the necessary conditions for oligarchies. There's ALWAYS volunteers.

And the historical record is far from comforting in this matter: Down through the ages, anarchists have usually SWIFTLY become the new oligarchs once the "old order" falls.

We can assess the balance-of-power struggle when I see you at the beach Chers; bring a chair...Paz!