I used to think social media was good because thanks to them, governments couldn’t fabricate false narratives. But it turns out that they are still doing it.
I used to think social media was good because thanks to them, governments couldn’t fabricate false narratives. But it turns out that they are still doing it.
Aren’t capitalism and hierarchical societies in general a necessary stage of human development?
The indus valley civilisation was just as technologically advanced as ancient rome despite having a much lower population. If you are interested in the origins of hierarchy, LuckyBlackCat made a good video about that.
Black Mirror and Escaping Our Real Dystopia
It’s very debatable, but I also think it’s not that relevant. The world doesn’t exist in a static, idealized form for all eternity. Things change over time through their interactions with other things. That’s at the core of dialectical materialism. It can be useful to analyze the past and how particular forms of social and economic arrangements influenced the development of human societies, but I don’t think it really says much about what we should be doing now. We don’t have the counterexample of a world that developed differently. All we can say is what happened. The world developed that way, for all the good and bad that came with it. But we don’t live in a world where most people are illiterate hunter gatherers or peasant farmers anymore. We need to analyze the reality we exist in as it is now without presuming that this represents some natural state.
My answer is no. Capitalism and hierarchical societies have achieved impressive things…in spite of their capitalism and hierarchy, not because of it. If our society went directly to anarchy, we would have been better off by now.
How do you see anarchy in the past (like, say, in ancient Rome)? And why do you think humanity went to hierarchy? Genuinely curious.
… Not to be contentious, but ancient Rome was not anarchy in any meaningful sense. Like not even the dictionary definition. Rome was pretty firmly lorded over by a State, and that State maintained the “”“order”“” of the ruling class for generations.
What anarchists mean by “anarchy” is a society without hierarchy. Some hunter-gatherer societies were surprisingly horizontal in their organization, but these societies were not, in general, anarchic, because they likely still had some hierarchies like sexism, in-group/out-group dynamics, and authoritarian social structures. We can look to the past for examples of specific horizontal and anti-authoritarian practices, but none of these societies were truly anarchic because they had not yet grasped the importance of abolishing all hierarchy.
Better (but imperfect) historical approximations of anarchy at scale were Revolutionary Catalonia and the Makhnovshcina.
I think the big thing was agriculture. IMO, we were not psychologically prepared as a species to master agriculture so quickly. Some people were able to build up huge stockpiles of resources within a few generations. Once they got their power, they refused to give it up. Thus, the powerful structured our world around their whims over generations. Capitalism is the latest such scheme. Hierarchies maximize the variables authoritarians care about: control, domination, and abuse. It is only natural that abusers establish systems that best reward their kind.
To be clear, I’m absolutely not against agriculture. Quite the opposite! In my view, actively making sure that the fruits of humanity are equally available to all is necessary to break the feedback loop that enabled authoritarians to take power. But more generally: we need to bake horizontalness, autonomy, agency, and free association into all future systems and organizations from minute one.
Okay, I might have worded that bad. What I meant was how do you see historical societies that were hierarchical, like ancient Rome, going anarchical instead?
So the problem is dismatch between psychological and material development?