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[ded_maxim]

"So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? the poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars."

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Comments

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

the poor I'm talking about and the poor Chesterton's talking about really differ only in location. The fact that the anarchy option has only rarely been available to the poor has no bearing on their predisposition towards it, which is undeniable. Bottom line, governmental coercion is that much less fun when you're exclusively its subject.

not that I personally give too much of a shit about "the poor" as some monolithic entity

[(Anonymous)]

their predisposition towards it, which is undeniable

well doh, everyone's first choice is to live by yourself on 10000 acres of fertile land
but when that option is not available, ppl in general prefer to have a government to oversee their neighbors

if the poor have predisposition to anarchy, and the rich do too, why is it so rare? the only real examples come from frontier societies like Iceland, where 1, the resources are much more abundant and 2, most of the population are young males ie not a random sample by far

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

how about to scrape out a living in wilderness, surrounded by Indians, with no access to modern medicine and at the mercy of the elements? Is that everyone's first choice, too?

anarchy is so rare because: 1) the rich aren't predisposed to it, and neither is most of the middle class, 2) it takes serious balls to live in an anarchical society, 3) as prosperity comes, it breeds governance through the inkspot theory 4) coercion breeds coercion-Mahno wound up being forced to use some of the same methods he hated just to keep his state from being eaten alive. For all that, there are at least two steady-state anarchic societies I can think of which have been in existence for thousands of years-the Bedu and the Pashtuns. Hopefully you won't argue that it's because of the incredible wealth of the Rub Al Khali and Helmand province.