Something else I have been thinking about. If we were to engage in a thought experiment, how would social life look under an anarchist or communist society? — unimportant

Excellent subject.

Well, mostly anarchists and communists are both communists; the end goal is the same of living in equal and vibrant communities without private property. The communist parties we know will generally explain that in order to get to communism we must first go through socialism, which is the workers owning the means of production, which we aren't even "there yet" and the state must in fact manage the economy in order to compete with the imperial capitalist nations constantly trying to get a hand on their resources, which would sound paranoid if they weren't actually out to get them.

So the communist end goal, of both anarchist and communists, is actually super easy to visualize as we have practical examples.

There's both the deep past or contemporary hunter-gatherers as well as, whenever people become shipwrecked, a la Swiss Family Robinson, and it goes well, then that's all basically communism.

If we then imagine many such communities developing and interacting with a devolved decision making structure that sorts out inter-community issues, even planetary issues, then the system can become quite large and sophisticated but maintain its communist nature.

The essential characteristics are that there's no private property, and by property is meant the means of production like land and tooling and not personal items of consumables, so the management of the important things are decided by the communities involved.

To anarchists and communists, it is absolutely obvious that the private ownership of land is a terrible idea that also has no justification. Even many of the original free market liberals saw it as absolutely obvious that the land should be owned collectively and rented out to form the tax base of the government.

So it really almost happened with the fall of feudalism, and the reason why it was essentially common sense is because the lords were the government, so the idea they can just keep all the land would be the same as Trump giving himself all the US federally owned land when he leaves office.

That would be the standard answer.

However, in my view the critical thing that is missing is the source of energy. If you want a decentralized society (starting from where we are right now) a decentralized source of energy is needed, hence my focus on solar thermal energy.

I agree with boethius on the origins of police and while it's related I think it better in another thread? — Moliere

Yes, seems we should make a thread dedicated specifically to police. The police and the standing army are the two ingredients necessary to even have a state, and I feel there's not enough attention paid to the history, theory and contemporary practice (and alternatives) to these systems.

Thanks also for the encouragement, I do appreciate it.

You're really saying that all the prisoners of the world not only deserve to be in prison due to their being unable to conform to the social contract — boethius

Please quote where i mentioned prison. Please.

If you really believe all the states in all the world have a perfectly just imprisonment process and protocol, then I will present the evidence to the contrary. — boethius

Please quote where I suggested this (or even mentioned it as a topic???????)

and are a lost soul of little concern to me, simply digging yourself further into the darkness, the prison of your own mind, with every thought and fancy. — boethius

This explains you, I guess.

Please quote where I suggested this (or even mentioned it as a topic???????) — AmadeusD

I write:

Of course the main evil of police is the whole justice system of essentially disappearing citizens from the community and imprisoning them without possibility of work, generally in a process without any effective rights for the poor. — boethius

To which you cite me, so it's very clear what you're referencing, and then respond:

This is an utterly bizarre way of characterizing protecting wider society from the ills of people who cannot conform to the social contract. Exile is less humane, but more on-point. Would we want that? — AmadeusD

Contradicting my point that people are put in prison with no effective rights to the port.

i.e. That what I describe as injustice you describe as justice, and the alternative for all these people would be exile.

You write pretty clearly when dismissing concerns about how just prison systems are, but then suddenly you have no idea what we're talking about when I point out your claim is essentially not worth responding to. And clearly you don't want to expand or support your claim, so seems you yourself agree that your claim is such vapid and empty propaganda that it's no worth responding to.

and are a lost soul of little concern to me, simply digging yourself further into the darkness, the prison of your own mind, with every thought and fancy.
— boethius

This explains you, I guess. — AmadeusD

The statement does describe me as well, of course the full statement without taking out the start which reads:

If you don't actually believe it, then you are not interested in truth but simply feeling superior to your "idea of who prisoners are", and are a lost soul of little concern to me, simply digging yourself further into the darkness, the prison of your own mind, with every thought and fancy. — boethius

Which also applies to me. "If", key word here, I was not searching for truth and went around asserting things I did not even believe to be true in order to support a cruel power structure that happens to act in my interest, then the statement would apply to me as much as anyone who chooses power (whether real or vicarious) over truth.

Instead of saying "no, no, I'm authentic, I really believe what I stated, convicts broke the social contract and the only alternative to the current system is exile" in which case you're still obviously wrong but at least not bad faith, maybe you could learn something about how either prisons work or then language works (if you meant your general statement to be incredibly restrictive, just don't know how to use your words to say that), or then, instead of that, retracting the statement and apologizing for bringing obvious pro-cop (and likely racist, but feel free to explain a non-racist basis for your point of view) propaganda to a philosophy debate that may frustrate or then "establish psychological dominance" over people who can see the injustice of the police and prison system as is generally practiced but can't articulate it easily (for example children) but simply doesn't work on people who A. know the subject and B. know how basic reasoning works and C. aren't intimidated or confused by bold assertions of obvious falsehood.

seems we should make a thread dedicated specifically to police. — boethius

I don't object to it continuing in this thread? I was also finding it relevant and this thread has had its natural meanderings already and does not seem out of context.

However if you feel it would not get the attention it deserves in this one do not let me stop you making a dedicated one.

If we then imagine many such communities developing and interacting with a devolved decision making structure that sorts out inter-community issues, even planetary issues, then the system can become quite large and sophisticated but maintain its communist nature. — boethius

To bring back an analogy this does strike me as sounding very similar to the open source idea of federation. With many jumping from X to Mastodon, apparently the Fediverse works very much how you just explained it, where there are smaller hubs of self-hosted servers with their own communities, which can also communicate with other hubs.

I am not really familiar with the meaning of the term federation; only from Star Trek but it seems something I should learn more about! I recall it being used in The Conquest of Bread in the first few pages.

it really almost happened with the fall of feudalism — boethius

That reminds me of another thought I had been having. In order to know thy enemy what is the history of capitalism and how did it avail over others that, as you mention above, could perhaps have come to be instead?

Did capitalism exist before the industrial revolution? I am getting through The Conquest of Bread and in that I recall them indicating that it did indeed spring from that. Isn't that a difference between the Communist and Libertarian views? that Communists peg it as a recent phenomena due to our stifling ourselves with concentrated power and not using the technology in the right way whereas Libertarians wish to view capitalism as an extension of the natural order of hierarchical man and evolution and thus just, as such.

You write pretty clearly when dismissing concerns about how just prison systems are, but then suddenly you have no idea what we're talking about when I point out your claim is essentially not worth responding to. And clearly you don't want to expand or support your claim, so seems you yourself agree that your claim is such vapid and empty propaganda that it's no worth responding to. — boethius

I too am interested to see if they are able to bring anything substantive to their claim.

So, going through this piece by piece - you're leaving me with no much more to say than "So, you made it up".

You quoted yourself, not me. I'm not going to answer for your own utterances (given you didn't clarify anything in my response).

I did not intimate that prison, per se, is just. You are making absolutely insane generalisations based on literally nothing I've said, but something you've assumed.

"policing" in general is for:

protecting wider society from the ills of people who cannot conform to the social contract — AmadeusD

Yes? Yes. That's what I said you mischaracterized. Besides this, it is quite rare that people in prison shouldn't be there. You're trying to have a 'details' conversation about concepts. We're talking concepts. Stay on topic. If you want to talk about specifics (i.e which crimes require imprisonment etc..) then ask those questions/bring up those topics. Don't throw shit at me for responding in kind to your posts.

I did ask you to quote where I said it. It would've easier to just say "Sorry, you're right. You didn't say this. I made an assumption. can you please clarify for me?"

The statement does describe me as well, of course the full statement without taking out the start which reads: — boethius

I said it explains you. If this is your attitude, I am not surprised you would also make insane statements like this:

you yourself agree that your claim is such vapid and empty propaganda that it's no worth responding to. — boethius

This is so childish and underhanded, what did you actually expect as a response? Respect? Your final paragraph just tells me you're not reading much here before responding. That's not my issue. Ask clarifying questions if you have them, or at hte very least, refrain from being a dick.

Oh if you're fine with it I am. I mostly didn't want to distract from your main point but if you think it's on topic then it's on topic -- it's your OP.

The NAACP has a bit of writing on the origins of police that is short and provides another perspective other than the law-and-order picture of dutiful citizens protecting their fellows.

I am indeed, and would welcome the discussion continuing in the thread between you two, but I have higher priority questions which are currently taking precedence for me, as above.

The police stuff is an interesting side quest/plot. :)

However if you feel it would not get the attention it deserves in this one do not let me stop you making a dedicated one. — unimportant

Definitely continuing about police is entirely relevant to the discussion.

In any modern political discussion, such as we are having here, "the state" gets mentioned in abundance. And particularly relevant to a discussion about anarchism and communism because essentially all schools in both philosophies will agree that they don't want the state; that it's the state that is the main cause of our social ills and the differences between the many schools are mainly about how exactly to go about getting rid of the state and what exactly is best to build in its stead.

But what is the state exactly? We are so used to the state, it is so omnipresent in all our actions and considerations to do essentially anything, that it's both obvious what it is as well as distant, foreign and strange at the same time.

What the state boils down to is: the police force and standing army, a bureaucratic system that controls society with these too primary tools, and an education system that "teaches" everyone that the system is entirely normal and how to "behave properly" within it.

Why you can have very different cultures and very different political systems (in terms of how decisions are made on paper) but the exact same state structure that is extremely consistent in behaviour across cultures and times.

"Getting rid of the state" therefore boils down to getting rid of the police and standing army, bureaucracy and education system, as is practiced to maintain a state. Of course, the legitimate functions those institutions serve will need to be addressed in some non-state-based way.

So, for example, what could replace police and standing armies is community based security (devolution of security), what could replace bureaucracy is a system of inclusive councils where citizens have equal effective power in decision making on the issues that concern them, and what could replace education is self directed learning, as much as feasible, so children build up their own understanding as intellectually independent and autonomous spirits pursuing their natural curiosity, rather than "taught to behave" and their natural curiosity repressed over essentially 2 whole decades.

To bring back an analogy this does strike me as sounding very similar to the open source idea of federation. With many jumping from X to Mastodon, apparently the Fediverse works very much how you just explained it, where there are smaller hubs of self-hosted servers with their own communities, which can also communicate with other hubs. — unimportant

Yes, the general concept is free-association, and so the general goal is to build a society where people are as not coerced as possible and so any organizational structures are built due to people deciding it's a good idea, and that each "political unit" maintains their ability to simply drop out of any system they disagree with. In other words, if you want an individual to participate in your organizational scheme (for example build a computer factory that will require a large amount of resources and labour from many different communities), you need to convince them with force of intellect and if you fail they may just stay in their hut and tend to their own garden, and likewise you will need to convince communities to contribute to the scheme by force of intellect.

If anyone is not convinced they don't contribute and the idea is there is no option to force them.

There's a bunch of technical words to describe the differences in decision making structures, but they are all very weird, like devolution (why that word, unclear), so I coined the term "natural democracy" in my book Decentralized Democracy that attempts to go deep into all these subjects.

By natural democracy is meant the "people power" and leverage each individual in a society actually has.

So there is a natural democracy in any society that exists independent of the nominal structure (be it feudalism, dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy, a tribe or anything).

One top level view of the state therefore is a structure that minimizes most people's actual power and maximizing the actual power of agents of the state (such as bureaucrats and police). By power is meant real effective influence over outcomes. For example, a president of a state can be overthrown by the effective "natural democracy" of the real power regular people have, but clearly has many "levers of power" available to prevent that from happening; those levers of power in turn (generals, ministers, top bureaucrats, intelligence chiefs, billionaires, media organizations, chiefs of police, and even mafia bosses etc..) have far more effective power than regular people commanding their own smaller set of levers of power, and so on.

The president in the above example being simply one person who clearly has more effective power than regular people, but isn't necessarily "at the top"; could be lower down, and intelligence chiefs and billionaires at the actual top, but obviously, but the president is obviously far from the bottom.

So, each level in the hierarchy of state power depends for its application on the lower levels following orders or otherwise being influenced from the top (deals, coercion etc.), so how to parse anything that is probabilistic to evaluate value (in this real effective power) in the actuary sciences we bring in the concept of net present value. So the real effective power of an individual in society who depends on subordinates following orders or then striking deals with other powerful members, is simply the power assumed by that happening multiplied by the probability that it actually happens in discounting for any decay over time we maybe able to "price in" (if a president is elected, then their real effective power must discount the fact they can lose the next election).

But the main point is that the lower the probability people actually do follow orders or strike deals, the lower effective power you actually have. When people one or two rows down on the hierarchy decide not to follow orders and appropriate their actual power and ignore nominal constraints, that's then called a coup.

The basic criticism of this state structure from anarchists and communists is that there is no nominal structure that actually prevents abuses of power.

Therefore, anarchism and communism seek to create a social structure in which the natural democracy is as flat as possible (all individuals have comparative real power; aka. compactly equal capacity for physical violence as well as real influence in society) and then build up methods for dealing with bigger and bigger problems without state like structures in which individuals placed in charge of those processes have vast real effective power to determine outcomes (see Stalin).

Why then so much focus gets placed on the means of production, is because the people who control how things actually get done in a society, and in particular how a society reproduces itself (for example, the education system and how children are taught / formatted) have the most amount of power to determine the structure of society. If a few people have vast real effective power: surprise, surprise, they use that power to make sure they have even more power in the next iteration of the social structure (by both radical reforms on occasion as well as continuous incremental changes).

Insofar as regular people do nevertheless have a greater effective power together, due to numbers, then the state structure must prevent them from exercising that power by ideally making them want to be repressed and love their oppressors, but failing that resigned to their fate and inactive, and failing that divided against each other and ineffective, and failing that coerced by the threat of state violence, and failing that in prison, and failing that dead.

I am not really familiar with the meaning of the term federation; only from Star Trek but it seems something I should learn more about! I recall it being used in The Conquest of Bread in the first few pages. — unimportant

Federate simply means some process of voluntary association and collaboration, such as the federation of planets in Star Trek.

Why we don't have decentralized federated systems is not that "they don't work" or then developed into centralized systems, but mostly due to imperial conquest. People in a decentralized system do not usually simply give up their local autonomy to create some centralized monstrosity. But what does regularly happen is that a group as a whole realizes they can conquer and subjugate other groups either out of fear they will be conquered first (by either who their conquering today or then some more distant enemy that they fear will have the upper hand if they don't stock up on the conquering) or then simply because it seems anyways profitable to do, and once this process starts these society's can easily become both highly effective at conquering as well as dependent on more conquering for their society to function. These imperial structures then expand and conquer other groups, and then immediately apply themselves to the problem of maximizing their power over these conquered peoples for the indefinite future (i.e. start building the institutions of a state); through this process of conquest and subjugation people lose their old habits of federated association (as it takes a lot of time to develop a culture of complex decision making that processes the inputs of large amounts of people; once that culture is lost then it seems anyways more efficient that decisions are made centrally by bureaucrats of one kind or another) and is not trivially easy to re-learn (the old federated structure may have been the result of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years of cultural development).

That reminds me of another thought I had been having. In order to know thy enemy what is the history of capitalism and how did it avail over others that, as you mention above, could perhaps have come to be instead? — unimportant

Absolutely essential.

Capitalism is essentially the continuation of the feudal power structure and imbalances while converting to an industrial economy, in replacing land ownership with lot's of money and in particular who makes the money. Almost everything that happens in an industrial economy requires financing that requires loans and if you control that system of loans then you control the means of production and how society reproduces itself.

The land doesn't need to be owned directly by the people at the top in order to control society (such as in feudalism) it's just important that communities don't own the land and are therefore able to develop it as a community with voluntary labour that does not require bank financing. Again, it's a divide and conquer strategy in that the land is divided up and that prevents local economic forms from developing that are independent of both large scale industrialism and the financing necessary for its development.

If people developed as a community systems of "staying alive" that were autonomous locally then communities would not only be able to develop without financing but could opt out of contributing to larger structures if they disagreed on either practical or moral grounds. If enough communities followed suit, and indeed a majority, there's little a central bureaucracy could do about it.

Did capitalism exist before the industrial revolution? I am getting through The Conquest of Bread and in that I recall them indicating that it did indeed spring from that. Isn't that a difference between the Communist and Libertarian views? that Communists peg it as a recent phenomena due to our stifling ourselves with concentrated power and not using the technology in the right way whereas Libertarians wish to view capitalism as an extension of the natural order of hierarchical man and evolution and thus just, as such. — unimportant

The components of capitalism are all developed within feudalism before the transition to industrial imperial capitalism (aka. the Industrial Revolution).

The automation of work was developed mostly by monasteries because they had access to books and mathematics but also motivated to save time on chores in order to pray more, the financial system of fractional reserve lending was developed to accelerate conquest of lands (you can lend out promises for gold you don't have if those promises finance ships to go steal more gold from indigenous people to then make good on your promise, before your competitors that are not using that shortcut; as long as more gold is inflowing from colonization than outflowing in coupon redemption, aka. "money", then the system is stable, and with industrialization gold in this equation is substituted by commodities of any form).

The crucial moments in locking the capitalist system as we know it today are first the land ownership; overturning feudalism could have easily been accomplished by just taking away the land of the lords just as it makes no sense today to let a president keep the land the country owns (land ownership could be a public utility and so land use determined by public interest considerations), then the financial system (banking could be a public utility and not generate any profits at all for a small set of private individuals, much less allow a small set of private individuals decide what gets financing and what doesn't), maintaining imperial domination (one way or another) of "former colonies", breaking the union movement globally, and then lastly the social welfare state (despite the flaws of not doing the previous 2 things it's nevertheless possible to create a social welfare state within capitalism, which does happen in some countries, but not enough for a new sort of system to emerge globally, such as had the US adopted nordic welfare state best practices, even 10 years ago; world would be totally different today).

To add to all these discussions of the state, power, decision making, community and so on, I think it is useful that I explain my own school of anarchism. Since your area of interest is large and historical I've tried to answer as much as possible from a perspective of "most anarchists" at given periods of time.

Most schools of anarchism and communism approach the issue from a psychological perspective, in that we (the people of earth) are psychologically "not happy" in industrial-imperial-capitalism, and what would make us on the whole much happier is to live in real communities where we decide things together. There will still be problems but they will be "our problems" that the whole community has an incentive to solve in a healthy and durable way, unlike a bureaucrat hundreds of kilometres away. Worse, these psychological problems give rise to all manner of vice and crime which makes the whole thing worse.

The problem with the psychological approach is that there exists the rebuttal that "it's just how it is and people will just need to get used to it", or in technical speak that the transition to industrial-capitalism is inevitable, likewise the imperialism that creates and sustains it, and the transition is difficult but the situation is the same as transitioning form hunter gatherers to farmers. Obviously hunter gatherers were not psychologically and physiologically adapted to be farmers, but they "got used to it". The transition to farming was inevitable due to population pressures (in this line of thinking). Farming is a response to reaching the carrying capacity of ecosystems with hunter gathering and so trying to increase the carrying capacity rather than fight to the death with more powerful neighbours, and a so a similar argument can be made about industrialism. Centralized industrialism outcompetes local and largely autonomous economic systems as a basis for human life, the trend is inevitable and therefore people will simply need to adapt to these new economic and social structures; just as hunter gatherers adapted to the new agricultural conditions and vastly different social structures that emerged to manage agricultural life.

In concrete terms, maybe we are simply fated to live in giant mega-buildings, powered by nuclear fusion reactors, that we never even leave, as such a system simply outcompetes all other forms of economic organization.

In short, the evolution argument of what we are adapted to can always be countered with an even more evolution argument that the new conditions we create are uncomfortable because we are not adapted to them but we will then evolve to be adapted to them. For example, with agriculture came terrible diseases that sometimes wiped out 50 to 100 percent of communities infected, but the survivors evolved to build immunity to such diseases and continue on with the agricultural experiment. We changed out conditions something our social and individual immune systems were not compatible with, creating problems and then we adapted to those problems to be more adapted to the conditions we created.

Therefore, of central and critical importance to all these conceptual consideration is what is actually feasible in terms of engineering.

In particular, is the industrial infrastructure sustainable and if not can it be made to be sustainable and retain its centralized industrial character?

For, if our current system is not even sustainable and can't be feasibly made to be sustainable, then that is a fatal flaw to the "we'll evolve to adapt to industrialization" as that would require industrialization being a sustained practice we can adapt to.

To bring things back to Star Trek, faster than light travel maybe an attractive concept psychologically ... but is it possible? And as long as things stay at the concept level then nothing is ever resolved. For example, how many different concepts of faster than light travel have you encountered compared to how many actually exist? Obviously at some point technical feasibility trumps psychological attraction. Being able to teleport by "blinking" myself to anywhere I can think of is very psychologically attractive but extremely not-technically feasible with our current understanding.

The political debates of the 19th century can be more easily understood as these kinds of conceptual debates without any technical means of resolving the differences. There's not really a theory of ecological limits and science is viewed as simply this bestower of essentially magical powers with zero drawbacks. Therefore, who controls this great power is the primary issue.

However, now that we are reaching the material limits of the industrial system, what are even the feasibly sustainable technical modes of human society that we could develop from our current situation? Is a more fundamental issue than what political system is best.

Only some technical systems maybe viably compatible with our environment in a sustainable away, those which we could feasibly reach an even smaller subset, and only some political systems maybe compatible with such technical constraints.

Hence, my long technical adventure to all these issues (for example if fusion is feasible and will solve all our industrial problems with more industry, maybe best to work on that, and so on for every single technical proposal available) to eventually conclude local solar thermal energy is the only technically viable source of energy that is abundant enough to feasibly power both the transition to and sustaining a locally based economic system (and really any sustainable economic system at all that involves billions of people), and such an economic system naturally gives rise to a flattening of the natural democracy within any social system (creates leverage locally that naturally balances the leverage of any centralized structure; that we may imagine still take care of various large scale problems such as managing our nuclear waste, making computers, research universities, and even things like space travel if people remain convinced by the proposition).

One last note, the free rider problem is not a fatal blow to "opt-in" systems.

At the extreme, say someone does not want to contribute in anyway to society as a whole, the solution to this problem is that everyone has a patch of land they can live in a subsistence way, and even trade, if they want.

Whereas the typical prisoner today hasn't actually been presented with any plausibly reasonable social contract that they can sign, such an explicit social contract can be made with the responsibilities and the benefits, and you can be given the option to self-sustain (as part of your inheritance as a member of society) if you wanted to. Of course, anyone who does simply not agree to the social contract would very super likely still expect medical care if they were to become sick, but we have already demonstrated that universal healthcare is possible with a high percentage of free riders.

And it would be this sort of system where you really don't have to contribute anything if you don't want to that would be an example of a social structure without coercion, but with agreed rule sets for what we would call "normal life". For me, why I talk more about effective power and not non-coercion, is because the decision process I view as fundamental, and the goal to create effective equality in decision making processes of society, and such decisions could very well result in coercive measures on dissenters; obviously that would be a last resort in a anarchist society but we can always contrive extreme situations in which coercion is the only viable solution.

I have been thinking that while I was not politically aware over my life this does seem to get to the root of what I have always hated about society as I have known it during my lifetime.

I would get told that I was anti-social and things like that but it was rather that I felt that the empty consumerism that most of society revel in so joyously I found vile.

I always felt things like people getting giddy about buying new cars or going on package holidays or the creme de la creme, christmas just somehow made me balk and bristle.

The only way I could explain it before was the general distaste for consumerism but this thread has made me understand better what lies beneath.

Times when I have felt I had found my type of people is in counter cultures, perhaps another nod to small anarchist style communities, but sadly these seem to have been stamped out in direct correlation around the rise of social media. Any theories on this?

Why is it that society at large sees no problem with this vapid existence and on the treadmill of working to buy useless things that doesn't fulfill them long term, thinking that the antidote to their ills is just to get more money to buy the bigger thing, and on and on?

Why do most of society come to the defence of capitalism and say 'it isn't perfect but it is the best system we have' and just balk at any alternatives you might suggest as idealism at best or worse, dangerous and deviant?

During the time of much of the anarchist classical anarchist writings were produced from what I can read of the social milieu at the time things seemed a lot more unsettled so were people a lot more open to these different ways of living at those times? Sure anarchism/communism was hated too then but there seemed to also be a lot more fervent followers whereas today people, while not happy with their lot, and there is general malcontent, they would blame anything but capitalism for their grievances.

The state is almost sacrosanct and they will bicker back and forth about Left of Right under the current narrow band of politics they would dismiss anything more radical.

I always felt things like people getting giddy about buying new cars or going on package holidays or the creme de la creme, christmas just somehow made me balk and bristle. — unimportant

We have similar experience. When I was 16 I tried to opt-out of the commercial side of Christmas, started calling it Arbitrary Gift Day and asked people not to get me anything ... people then got me presents anyways and then resented me for years (as I bought nothing as I said I would) my oldest sister resents me to this day about it, and we almost have not spoken since (I'm now 39).

This was all very shocking to me as my concerns about the environment, labour conditions in China, were clearly well founded and that everyone else also believed. My family is super "left" so they weren't denying climate change or explaining to me that child labour was a natural and healthy market process between parties in engaged in mutually beneficial transactions.

So, I didn't even think people would take issue with my moral stand.

What I learned was that for most people consumerism is not viewed as a vice, which to me was clearly obvious anyways even if it was sustainable and ethically sound labour conditions ... clearly a vice to consume things you don't need only for temporary pleasure. Maybe not a serious vice depending on these issues, but it's clearly never some sort of virtue.

Rather, for most people in Western society, consumerism is essentially a spiritual experience, and the family dynamics that occur if you stop consuming are essentially the same as if you are in a super religious family and not only stop going to church but inform everyone you're now on the side of the devil and fully committed to satanism.

Times when I have felt I had found my type of people is in counter cultures, perhaps another nod to small anarchist style communities, but sadly these seem to have been stamped out in direct correlation around the rise of social media. Any theories on this? — unimportant

Again, same experience on my end. I've spent a lot of time visiting experimental places here in Europe, religious, "anarchisty", non-profits, or otherwise, and lived in an eco-village for a time (then they rented the space I was in to someone else for more money). I've also visited places like Auroville in India and spent many months in Mexico and Cuba (Mexico for the anarchist, Cuba for the communists). Spent some time in "intentional communities" in San Fransisco as well.

The problems are always financial and interpersonal, along with cartel and Fidel Castro based problems (who's an interesting character but also problematic on some issues).

The main problem in West is financial. When normal people had purchasing power, free or inexpensive education, could buy land etc. then it drives intentional community migration. When people are more constrained financially then the migration pattern reverses and becomes really hard to start and sustain such projects. And if there's no migration pressure in this direction (as people have students loans to pay off for example) then the interpersonal problems that arise, and lack of financing to smooth things over, causes the breakdown of these communities.

To make mattes worse, industrial farming is subsidized, uses illegal labour to get things done (as Trump has no problem informing us), so it's also difficult to compete economically as an organic farm. Margins are tight so the only model that works economically is either the corporate approach, just applied to organic farming, or then the family farm model (where you have the same financial interest as your spouse and can benefit from entirely legal child labour of your own children). If you try to make a community with different financial interests, so not a healthy spouse relationships, then tight margins is a recipe for unending financial disputes.

To make matters even worse, these places attract people who are not motivated by any ecological or ethical consideration, but are in search of new tribal relations. Which is of course perfectly fine to be in search of, but it can then easily give rise to unresolvable differences in values, and this is even worse than the financial tensions. It can take a lot of resources to house, nourish and deal with someone's incompatible moral system, and when these communities are founded they want to be welcoming and help people, but these kinds of terrible experiences easily destroy the whole thing.

To give one typical example, one eco village I visited had a community building "open to the needy", and it simply became a drug den and the community members (who built their own eco-houses on the property) would never go there, and then of course this created all sorts of problems with the police as well, and also community members fearing for their lives; I went to check out the building and there was easily over 1000 empty alcohol beverages of one kind of another, lying around or in big garbage bags lying around, and a whole assortment of drug abuse paraphernalia.

Point being, it's not easy to translate values into practical action and in our society if there's no financial model for it it's very difficult to sustain.

However, even if these social experiments aren't sustainable, they are still super valuable as it is often these random personal initiatives that prove things are possible and build momentum for changes to government policies. Obviously the government paying for things is a financial model. Churches do a lot of this stuff too. For example, here in Finland it was churches and secular non-profits that pioneered the "home first" model to deal with homelessness, which then created the experience, learning and data necessary to change government policy to "zero homelessness".

The difference with the eco village is that the churches and non-profits involved had money and obviously know dealing with homelessness is complicated; so they have a plan and don't just naively make a space available to the wider community; the eco village wasn't planning to deal with substance abuse, but assumed people interested in ecology would be interested to stay with them and learn about organic farming and sustainable building practices and so on.

As a general rule, trying new social things is very complex and simply maintaining that complexity has a high cost that people usually don't realize at the start.

Why is it that society at large sees no problem with this vapid existence and on the treadmill of working to buy useless things that doesn't fulfill them long term, thinking that the antidote to their ills is just to get more money to buy the bigger thing, and on and on? — unimportant

We can learn about the history, but at the end of the day it remains a pretty big mystery why people do what they do. As I mention above, it seemed obvious to me that consumption was anyways a vice and I thought everyone believed the same thing, so it's not so clear to me why I learned that lesson but a surprising amount of people learned the exact opposite lesson in the same culture.

Likewise, everyone starts to believe the system is not sustainable (there wasn't really any denialism about it in the 90s; Al Gore was vice-president and he talked about it and seemed to be "dealing with it"; the denialism industry was really started under Bush) ... so there's not really a controversy at that time, and this is also Canada which is very "ecological branded" and big national value ... so again, it's surprising to me that I am the only person that is really alarmed about it.

If a doctor told you that your hearts not sustainable in your current lifestyle ... genuinely seems alarming and seems to imply your heart is going to stop if nothing is done about it, and seems the same situation that experts are telling us that every thing around us is not sustainable in our current lifestyle and everything is going to stop if nothing is done about it. Sounds super alarming.

So again, not sure why no one else was alarmed by this information, but it seemed to me that my interest in mathematics habituated me to accepting logical conclusions. That's sort of the process of learning mathematics, building the habit that what "feels true" turns out is simply not true if it can be proven wrong by clear and irrefutable steps. Indeed, a lot of proofs are done by assuming the opposite and seeing where that leads (to mathematical Mordor, that's where it leads), and a lot of mathematical results are "almost can't believe it" kind of things, and especially the mathematics that's difficult to learn. Likewise, mathematical truths are timeless, so if things are true now they are true also later, and so for me it only mattered if our system was unsustainable or not, and not how long it could be unsustainable for.

So that's my little pet theory of why I was alarmed enough to change my behaviour concerning our shared environmental predicament, whereas plenty of others who believed the exact same set of facts did not even consider the idea there was anything in the slightest to do about it, but ultimately it's pretty mysterious why some people do one thing and other people do another thing.

The postmodernists seem to have the most insight into how things are working psychologically, but they are also bark raving mad and so also cannot be trusted on that account. My view of postmodernism is like shrooms experts telling me how shrooms work while high out of their minds on shrooms. Both the best source of insight in some ways, but also potentially delusional.

Why do most of society come to the defence of capitalism and say 'it isn't perfect but it is the best system we have' and just balk at any alternatives you might suggest as idealism at best or worse, dangerous and deviant? — unimportant

Again mysterious, but why the phrase was coined "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism".

During the time of much of the anarchist classical anarchist writings were produced from what I can read of the social milieu at the time things seemed a lot more unsettled so were people a lot more open to these different ways of living at those times? Sure anarchism/communism was hated too then but there seemed to also be a lot more fervent followers whereas today people, while not happy with their lot, and there is general malcontent, they would blame anything but capitalism for their grievances. — unimportant

Yes, feudalism was very communal and fresh in people's memory, and the transition to industrial capitalism is ongoing and no one knows where it will lead, so if the system can change it stands to reason it can change again. On the ownership of land, obviously doesn't make all that much sense that the previous government top officials (the lords) get to just keep all the governments land. So there's also clearly issues of dispute over all these fundamental matters that are not part of a new status quo that people just accept. Serfs lived on the land and had plenty of rights to the land and also within the feudal system, so even in normal Western jurisprudence they should be bought out of their rights if they are to be kicked off the land. So people obviously lived the enclosures as unjust both in personal experience and intellectually.

Peasants wanted to keep being peasants for the most part and also have the skillset to be peasants, so it's not so easy to control them.

Today people are accustomed to the status quo and have only the skills for the status quo and no one remembers the "before times".

The state is almost sacrosanct and they will bicker back and forth about Left of Right under the current narrow band of politics they would dismiss anything more radical. — unimportant

Agreed.

The state is in people's heads first and foremost, and it is a powerful state of mind.