You forgot to add, "I'll sacrifice myself and hold your coins so that you won't suffer from the collapse".

Where are we going, again?

The example I previously gave, Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War, would probably fit the bill; Catalonia was a fairly well developed urban area, while Aragon was more of a rural area. Despite the absence of a central government, people still lived their lives normally, still traded with each other (and mind you, these areas aren't that small or sparsely populated), railways still got built, and so on. If they could do it with all the technological limitations of the time, I see no reason why we couldn't do better now.



There are a couple of things I'd like to comment about your post. First, I personally don't believe there is necessarily only one path to reach a non-hierarchical society. I'm sure many others will disagree, but one alternative to all out revolution could be incremental reforms of the existing structures; a slow and troublesome process at the best of times unfortunately, but an alternative nonetheless. Then, I guess it depends on what type of "anarchy" we're talking about here, but most types don't require you to cut fundamental needs to people. Are you sure you aren't thinking of chaos and disorder instead of anarchy (or if you will, instead of a non-hierarchical society)?

Second, it's fine if you believe that human nature will naturally lead to social hierarchies, but that isn't obvious and you can't expect others to accept it at face value; as I asked deisik, do you have examples you can use to illustrate this point, or at least a rationale to explain how you reached this conclusion?

You're right, people are born different and have different abilities; sure. This is the human nature argument I alluded to in a previous post. And one flaw in that argument is that it assumes these differences must automatically be translated from people to society as a whole, while ignoring that there are gaps that you need to bridge before you can take that step. Let me try and detail a few of the reasons for why this is so:

First, the structures that are needed for a hierarchical society to function, either don't exist in a non-hierarchical society or are fundamentally different. There is no central government you can enter and use to climb the ladder of power, or enforce your interests. Worker managed and controlled companies are very different from most companies you have today. Most other structures would be decentralized. Etc..

Second, despite the differences between people in a society, you don't have people who are capable and have the opportunity to do everything; you don't have many super-humans running around (if any). What this means is that no matter how good you are in a given field, you will need others to complement your flaws elsewhere; you need other people. Looking at the previous point, in a hierarchical society you already have all the structures in place, with people already forced to fill all the roles to support you, and you just need to climb the ladder to power if you have the skill. In "horizontal" forms of organization, it's pretty hard to create any form of large scale hierarchy, coercing people left and right to fill roles they likely don't want to, and particularly, don't need to fill.

Third, "natural inequalities", social hierarchies, the workings of established power, and so on, can only account for so much; I don't want to repeat the examples I previously gave, since you can just scroll back to find them, but the social changes that were brought about can't be easily explained in these terms alone. The truth of the matter is that, regardless of what inequalities exist among people, be they wealth, access, power, genes, education, or whatever, people still struggle to change society towards greater equality, to prevent wars with people they barely have any contact with, and realistically speaking, wars they would probably not even notice in their day to day lives if not for the media, etc.. Like it or not, things like social awareness, and education as Mike Christ mentioned, hold far greater sway than the (relatively small) natural differences people might have between them and the opportunism of the few.

You see, it's not that a non-hierarchical society would need to force people to conform to some artificial level of equality; rather, these differences would still be there adding to the society, but even if abused, would still not be able to break the anarchic nature of said society.




Someone receiving a couple of cents an hour is virtually a slave and there are many ways to control people; physical coercion is only one way and arguably, one of the least effective ones. Slavery would be just as profitable today for the jobs you can't replace with machines (or for which the replacements would still be too expensive, which is most cases). And by the way, despite the cold war propaganda, capitalism works best the least democratic the society is. Yet, despite being more profitable, we haven't descended to totalitarian states yet and depending on where you live, you might even have minimum wage and stuff.



No, I didn't say that in 200 years we will all be living in non-hierarchical societies, without exception (I'm not a soothsayer); but I did provide the reasoning for why looking at the tendencies in society, that seems to me to be the eventual outcome. Now, you might not have liked my conclusion or how I went about reaching it, but the examples I gave are real, to the point, and touch upon the facts you believe are on your side. If you just continue to ignore them and cherry pick what you want to analyze, you can't be serious about trying to understand the reasons behind how these things work.

Like I said several times now, the human nature argument is not only a defeatist argument (which is always at least a red flag in itself), but is also a line of reasoning that tends to ignore whatever doesn't fit; mainly because there is no other way for it to work.

You may very well be right, but that would defeat much of the purpose of the "do not edit the enrollment post" policy; the other campaigns have that at least partly to allow users to just enroll and immediately start posting, while preventing scammers from changing their initial post count.

I would also like to join this campaign.

my current post count is: 639 (with this post).
my btc address is: 12LdcawCSPvT1SQqFTNMaSPFTr676GCUt6

Payment received and feedback sent. Thank you for running this campaign.

Take care.

As soon as all the November/December users reach the Senior Member rank, probably not; I'm sure we aren't few. 

You'll understand if people will ask for proof of your supposed levitation, telekinesis or remote viewing abilities before believing in you, right? Just don't go around trying to prove you're immortal please. 

I wonder how that differs from what I said in practice, given that you explicitly stated that without external coercion or constraints, an anarchical society would give rise to a hierarchical one; but fine, I won't pursue that. Instead, let me try and address the rationale behind your conclusions and maybe we can get somewhere with this.

So, your point is, hierarchical societies have advantages over anarchical ones, so that even if we started with an unconstrained non-hierarchical society, it would eventually turn to a hierarchical one; now, to account for this, you only mentioned the fact that hierarchical societies exist and that there are no large scale, technologically advanced anarchical societies to speak off at this point in time - an advantage in itself, of course. I'll try and address this point then, but feel free to detail other advantages you feel they might have.

You are of course right in that they don't exist at present; but it doesn't necessarily follow that hierarchical societies must have a natural advantage over non-hierarchical ones because of this. I'm sure this argument must have been used before the first parliament was ever created, before republics were established, or before people were able to vote either for their representatives, or directly in referendums to decide what measures they would like to see implemented in society. Established power has always resisted change, but changes are always taking place.

It's as I said in previous posts: this line of thinking tends to ignore a great deal of reality. Even relatively small successes like Catalonia and Aragon, during the civil war, took decades of education and experiments before breaking through; these things don't happen in a day. And everything considered, even what we call democracy (a far cry from what it should be, as we know, but still) hasn't been applied for that long (a couple of centuries), compared to millennia of totalitarian forms of government. And of course the basic idea behind democracy has been known for a long time, but it took this long for conditions (education, opportunity, etc.) to allow it to be implemented. Still, would you go back to the 15th century and say such a thing would never work on account of nothing like that existing for any known large scale society?

Another example I mentioned earlier was slaves. Look back and you'll see arguments that are not all that different: "our society can't exist without slaves; if they don't work the fields for us, we'll all starve", or some equally self-serving argument. Yet society wasn't worse off without slaves (you can argue why that is, but that won't really change the point). For women, one of the arguments against giving them the vote was that it would just give a second vote to the husband (so, being unfair to unmarried men), because women obviously couldn't deal with stuff like that. Turns out they could, and society is better for it (and more equal).

People are increasingly more involved with the societies they are part of, and as I'd said, for me the tendency seems to be positive and moving towards greater equality. In this sense, the reason you don't see large scale non-hierarchical societies is not because hierarchy naturally confers some advantage, but simply because we're not there yet; a lot more education, experience and opportunities are needed before they can exist.

What do you mean? I'm not asking you to give examples of anarchic societies like the ones I suggested.

If I understood your position correctly, you're saying that human nature is fundamentally hierarchical, and no matter the circumstances, that won't chance or even be mitigated in a way that would allow us to live in a non-hierarchical (anarchical) way. But this isn't obvious to me, so I'm asking you to either give examples of situations that illustrate your point, or to at least explain the rationale that led you to this belief.

Just 2 posts back from your post, you have someone from one such auction site: CryptoThrift. Now, I haven't personally used them, and a few people are complaining about the looks and feel of the site, but there definitely are a couple of these sites around.

You're supposed to ask only a single question, ne (ね).

Yes, ThisWeeksCoin didn't remove the feedback; escrow.ms removed him from his trust list, so he is no longer part of the default trust list.

These are all whistleblowers; that is, they all denounced abuse or illegal conduct in the organizations they worked in, or had access to.

A good portion of them tried to do so through the hierarchy initially and were ignored. When they saw no other way to deal with the situation other than going to the press, trusting whistleblower protection laws, they found themselves fired, facing criminal charges, persecuted, some jailed, silenced and pretty much tortured like Chelsea Manning, while most of the wrongdoings they exposed are still being ignored by authorities to this day.

In this context, I don't really find it surprising that Snowden has chosen to reveal the information he had access to from outside the area of influence of the US; had he done otherwise, he would still be in solitary confinement "waiting trial" (read, this is a form of torture), and unable to defend his position and why he took the actions he did.

EDIT: further, and as beetcoin pointed out, he left his family, girlfriend, career, any possibility of returning to the US, his reputation (which, at least in the US, is constantly attacked by the media), and will have to live with fear of being either assassinated, deported, or kidnapped for the rest of his life. And people think he did it for the fame? 

I see no reason to believe that would be the case; care to give an example, or expand upon it further? Because I'd think it was the exact opposite by looking at the, no doubt painfully slow, progress that has been made in society through time. I mean, there aren't only positive developments; it's a constant struggle, and we definitely slide back at times, but fortunately the tendency seems positive to me.

So for example, we no longer have slaves (well, yes, we still have them but pushed them out of sight, which is meaningful in itself); women can vote, which depending on where you are from, might have only happened about half a century ago; homosexuality is no longer the taboo it once was; etc.. One important aspect of this, which I mentioned just today in another thread, is that the public awareness and engagement in social life has increased through time. So for example, it took years before there was a considerable movement to oppose the Vietnam War in the US, despite most information of what was going on being freely available in the news. I probably don't have to go into detail about the loss of life on all sides of the conflict and the devastation caused by the war. Less than half a century later, there was considerable opposition to the Iraq War before it was even officially declared.

What you're basically saying in your post is that human nature is basically hierarchical; even in the "best" conditions, humans will be humans and we'll revert to the same old ways, and there is nothing we can do about it. To be honest, I find that to be quite a defeatist attitude, and one that tends to ignore reality.

I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't like paranormal phenomenon as described in this thread to be real. That said, I guess I'm one of those that believes that consciousness follows from the physical reality we're in.

As such, I see a few problems with your post. What do you mean by we "magically end up right here in this time period being alive and conscious"? I think you have that backwards; if the physical conditions weren't here for us or any other form of life to exist, we simply wouldn't exist. If the conditions were slightly different, life would have adapted, and we wouldn't be here, but rather a more appropriate form of life. Other than that, there is nothing special about this particular moment in time or space.

Also, quantum physics doesn't incorporate consciousness, you don't need a conscious observer; the action of observing in this context is analogous to "interacts with". So, a brick wall will do just as well as a human, as far as the observer effect is concerned. And the phenomena it deals with is indeed strange, but you have to understand that is natural, considering it's not something we've ever had to deal with during our 4 billion year evolution. But that doesn't automatically turn it into magic; it's just something we can not apply "common sense" to, as nothing ever trained us to deal with it.

Do you usually have problems with following conversations?

You mean, guys and girls like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, William Binney, Jesselyn Radack, etc.? Do you have any idea what they sacrificed to be whistleblowers?

I think you can't actually vote until you're at least a Junior Member, which according to this thread, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=237597.0, should be when you have 30 activity, or at most about 11 days from now.