Taken to the extreme the statist view becomes too static and the anarchist view too chaotic.
OK I think I should just take on a mission of explaining to people why equating anarchy with chaos might not be the best way to describe anything and why it's probably just repeating decade-long doublespeak fueled propaganda.
Anarchy doesn't mean chaos. Chaos comes from trying to control that which by its very nature cannot be controlled from a single place. Look anywhere in nature. Look to the stars or to the biosphere - do you see a ruler there? (you might say that you believe in an all powerful God controlling these things - in that case this line of reasoning is not for you) I don't. Yet do you see chaos in the movement of stars or in the behavior of nature?
Yes, we find lots and lots of chaos in the universe. Even in the movement of stars. But in the case of orbits the chaotic component is usually small compared to the stable component.
It is the stabilizing force of gravity that creates our solar system, but it is the semi-chaotic nature of atoms driven by photons that makes life possible. This balance between order and chaos is underpinning the whole of the known universe, on all levels.
How come that it's fine with everything else but when it comes to humans and their business, suddenly we have to have centrally enforced rules or everything slips into CHAOS?! Is it our cultural viewpoint, which views humans as something distinctly apart from nature (thus allowing humans to ravage their environment in search for quick personal gain)? Or is it a fundamental distrust of other humans (instilled by governments imo...remember divide and conquer?) which makes one scream in horror at the thought of what might happen if people were free to do what they saw fit?
As i explained above, this is hardly a notion exclusive to our part of the universe.
The only sense in which we 'have' to have these larger structures in society is to contain the information flowing at that level. If you don't define some overarching rules (or if these rules are not somehow in place, like they are in nature) then there is no game at that level and the process becomes chaotic there. Good luck getting others like yourself to share resource. Can you imagine how our world would look russia suddenly decided on their own to stop exporting energy and saudi arabia single handedly decided that crude price is now 5x the previous price?
I mean, you can try to negotiate without the help of an overarching structure but both russia and saudi arabia will laugh in your face. You know why? Because they have something you need and it is more basic than anything you have that they may need.
It is exactly my trust in humans to operate along certain enthropic principles that makes me say this. Survival of the individual is programmed to take precedence over survival of the group, which is programmed to take precedence over survival of the species.
Even putting all this aside, it seems hilarious to me that the proposed solution to the problem of not trusting people in general to behave cooperatively and non-aggressively seems to always be: install a government and put some of those people (which cannot be trusted, remember?) in charge. Not even any people. But the corrupted sociopaths, which are attracted to power as flies are to shit and which only get further corrupted by the power they gain? Very weird.
Well, there's yer problem.
Or in any case, a very likely place to find the current problems.
The problem is that these global interactions are pretty new to us and we are still finding out what the best balance is.
Parasites will roam freely, but they do so everywhere in nature so there is nothing new there. If anything, we need to learn to survive despite the parasites. Sometimes parasites can become usefull to the goal of survival. Sometimes even necessary. That is the reality we humans must deal with. You can't have meat without killing an animal. You can't have a computer to type on without chinese slave workers. The chinese slave worker cannot get a better house without you buying the stuff they make.
It all is dictated by enthropy and that is what forces out hierarchies of energy (most basic resource). Energy is what makes life possible. Denying someone energy means killing them. But energy, at the rate we are consuming it, is not abundant. The world contains and receives only a certain ammount of energy. All life somehow competes for this limited resource and humans are particularilly good at it within their own class (multicellular animal life). And because we are good at it we outcompete other species in our branch of the energy hierarchy. Effectively we have become the most elite top predator on earth. And these energy hierarchies continue throughout our social structures as well. We evolved along many levels of hierarchies. We can classify the universe
because there are hierarchies.
But can we become the top of the piramid of life?
Well, no, because we need the plants. Plants sustain a relatively stable substrate of oxygen and nutrients that is needed by most non-plant life to exist. But not all plants are good for all of life. Plants can act pretty egotistically. If a pond has too many nutrients and a water plant grows over the whole of the surface most of the life (including other plants) in the pond dies away. So the situation is, we need this overarching system of plants to even begin thinking about our own structure in any sense. Without plants all modern life would be destroyed to a primordial state. But plants are systems of their own and allow dynamics that are not necessarily benefitial to the whole. That is why humans have learned to control plant life (one can argue that we control it too much).
And we have a similar situation within human society.
We need a structure to somehow manage the logistics of resources on the biggest scale applicable (in our case, the world) so that a certain balance is maintained. The question is not if this structure is needed but rather where you want to put the balance and how you can achieve that. And if i make the comparison to our relation with plants, maybe we have let the garden overgrow a bit too much. Time to pull out the weeds.
To reiterate: anarchy is NOT chaos. imposition of order = escalation of chaos. Anarchy just means letting any system find its equilibrium without imposing rules on it. I get why this might be tough for many - it requires trust in other people, in nature, the world and life in general. Trust which has been abused for centuries by institutions like the church and government.
To resolve to this equilibrium you would need to let the participants compete over energy again. I can already tell you who the winners will be and that the losers will fall so far behind that our global society will rip apart.
The thing is that we, as a world,
need this to resolve to cooperation. Any other resolution will involve a lot dead people.
Competing for energy is not a good way to ensure cooperation.
You can even say that competition is a pretty dubious way of cooperating if not for a larger overarching structure that ensures a basic security (this also involves a basic division of resources) for the parties involved.
Anarchy trivially allows for feedback loops that have a degenerate effect on the system as a whole. Trust is somethig that does not work automatically on a large scale and the pressure of competing over resources will lead to deception (humans, compared to other lifeforms, are particularilly good at deceiving. It servers the same purpose as aggression but is non violent in its operation) and aggression. These factors in turn make the system lose cohesion over time.
Anarchy can only work on a very small scale where everyone already has enough resources. Then you can have enough trust. They are your neighbours and you know they won't take your stuff. But even in these small more or less personal level situations things get ugly when resources are limited. A neighbor would steel your chicken if it means he can survive. This is just how humans work. And to remind you, it is because we evolved along enthropic hierarchies that make our universe move.
PS: I see some discussion about morality here. You don't need to drag vague moral concepts into the discussion of whether government should or shouldn't exist. Taking a look at what's efficient and what's not seems to be sufficient.
Morals are something typically human and play only a secondary role. If you have no food your moral standards tend to become less important.
Efficiency is maybe also not the right term to define these things. Sometimes you need to put up with some inefficiencies to achieve a certain goal. Evolution operates in this way. We still expend energy to grow an appendix but yet we are pretty successfull.
I think that human society is pretty inefficent as a whole. We waste a lot of energy (in fact, we waste a HUGE amount of energy) on things that are not realy needed. We piss away energy for fun. No other lifeform does this to such a degree.
But at the same time, we are the top multicellular species on the surface. So how could we have become so dominant while throwing away all this energy? So i have a problem with this notion of efficiency.
