Oddbean new post about login | logout Whether you could consider yourself an anarchist or not hinges on how you answer the question: "Is it OK to initiate violence to achieve one's aims?" I say "no" but we live in a world where the initiation of violence or threat thereof permeates everything. To achieve victory we must protect ourselves and starve those who would aggress against us. Hodl your bitcoin securely. Defend your self, your friends, your community. Bitcoin starves the State.
Agreed. And framing it as "an ideology that doesn't account for human nature" is flawed IMO. Its like somebody says, "I should be able to do what I want if I'm not hurting anybody." With the response being, "You're not accounting for human nature." It doesn't make sense unless the person responding to you wants to tell you what to do.
The human nature you aren’t accounting for is the part where other humans will not leave you alone. It doesn’t mean you aren’t capable of being sovereign due to some inherent flaw. Unfortunately for us libertarians, there are so few of us. We’re vastly outnumbered.
Technology creates sovereignty against the mob. This statement is akin to saying "But you don't realize how powerful the federal reserve is. They can print money and make people do what they want." A bitcoiner can see the flaw in this logic. All you need is an alternative and you make power structures irrelevant. Anti-Gun laws and Gun protection laws are irrelevant when people have 3D printers and CNC machines. You don't need to ask people to leave you alone, you make them. The first step however, is convincing yourself that you aren't bound to them or their rules.
Can you name a technology that has created a shield against the mob?
3d printer, radios, bitcoin, homemade explosives, auto-seers, home gardening, wells, and so many other things that keep you alive without their help, consideration, or otherwise.
I get what youre saying I just don't think this is a flaw in the ideology of anarchism itself. The ideology just states its wrong to initiate aggression. The fact that other people still will do that just makes them aggressors in the view of those ascribing to the ideology. How to deal with the aggressors is a more complicated question.
This is why I said it’s a meme ideology. It’s like communism. Great in theory. Horrible in practice.
Communism is not even great in theory. Its flawed as an ideology as its built on an incorrect theory of value and suffers from the economic calculatiom problem. An anarchist society may be difficult to achieve but its not ignoring human nature. Its basically just a moral framework IMO.
It’s a moral framework for autistic people. Nuero typical people don’t understand the non aggression principle and never will.
thanks for bringing this to light for me. I was very confused about why bitcoiners seemed to believe that voting is a moral failure, but I guess it makes sense if they come from an anarchist background, and while we can agree that bitcoin solves the biggest problem of our time, just because anarchists understood bitcoin earlier doesn’t mean that anarchy is the solution to our current political situation (and actually, as you mentioned, it cannot exist in the real world at any meaningful scale)