Life without government

That would be the wrong way to create an anarchy, since you have a massive power vacuum.

 

If it would be possible to maintain laws without a governement, yes. I don't see how though.

 

Belgium seems to be ticking over nicely.

 

Well, unless retaliative measures can be indulged in, non-violent persons will be dominated by violent ones.

 

Well, you can be a bully without having bullets. For example, you can use your teeth and bite those you don't like.

 

It is enough that some of us already are wolves.

And that is not a controversial hypothesis.

 

Anarchy only works in small communities, well at least compared to democracy. Anarchy is pretty much useless, maybe even more so than communism.

 

Think of it this way, wolram:
It only takes a single bully within a population of otherwise nice, inoffensive persons to spread misery.

That is, an altruistic, benevolent anarchy is an unstable equilibrium with respect to a "bully perturbation". Only if the population acknowledges its own right to retaliate can its social system becom stable. But that in effect, amounts to some form of invested authority.

 

I think most democratic nations put a rather large priority in ensuring that such a catastrophe does not wipe out government in its entirety. In the US, for instance, there is a long chain of succession set up to replace the P, VP should anything happen to them, and all the members of this line can never be found within some specified radius of each other, should some catastrophe strike (if for no other reason than to give someone the responsibility to call for a nuclear strike, should the threat arise). If a giant chandelier fell on the President's podium during a State of the Union address, incapacitating Bush, Cheney and Pelosi, the person with his finger on the nuclear button would be a 91 year old man. They take the continuance of government pretty seriously out here.

 

Whether you call it government or not, certainly some form of leadership needs to exist to prevent chaos. Basically, someone needs to be in charge of ensuring everyone gets their fair share of common resources, especially when those resources are spread out over great distances. You see this happening in any group situation. If everyone is trying to make decisions, or everyone just wants to follow orders, nothing gets accomplished, but if one or two people emerge as leaders, and the rest of the group sorts out into followers, or one group leader delegates leadership of smaller tasks to individuals, things will function more smoothly.

Government is basically a way of delegating the levels of leadership so you avoid fighting amongst the potential leaders (except during campaign years of course ).

 

Moonbear's description of government could be expanded to saying it is a power distribution system. Oligarchies, democracies, aristocracies, and authoritarian are different categories of whom having power over whom.

 

Governments are generally used to oppress people (or protect us from others that want to oppress us) and, since there are a lot of people out there that like to oppress other people, other governments would be immediately organized. This would be done both by people wanting to oppress and others who want to protect themselves from the first group.

Those who refuse to join one group or the other will become slaves of the oppressors.

 

Predelegation certainly existed during Eisenhower's and Kennedy's administrations. Early in the Johnson tenure, predelegation became clasified and remains so. It is quite possible that a Navy Commander in Chicago has the button as well.

 

From what I know of it, it was an actual source of inspiration for the Founding Fathers, along with Enlightenment thoughts from the continent.