RE: Can You Be a Vegan But Not An Anarchist?
@rocking-dave Thank you for your comment! Personally for me, the anarchism came after the veganism. I always questioned things about our government but never would classify myself to any political party or participate in much discussion of it. After becoming vegan is when I started to see a lot of the parallels. I now believe that a lot of the 'freedom' I thought we have is an illusion.
One point you said especially stood out -- "...I think there are many things that cannot be achieved without some form of government..." -- I can understand that thinking but what forms a government? People. So yes - most everything in society cannot be achieved without people of course. But the idea of a group of people in a hierarchal system ruling over the rest of us doesn't always achieve great things, war for example.
And unfortunately, the area of overlap or interface between the two is much greater than one might think. For example, the roads we drive on are made from our hard earning tax money, which taxes in itself is another conversation. But what are the roads made of? Asphalt. And ashpalt contains stearic acid that comes from tallow (beef fat). Pretty gross right? So money coming from my paycheck and yours is in multiple ways contributing to many things that we both might not support or agree with but there is not much as an individual I can do about that because in this society you are forced to pay taxes.
I think often times people underestimate humankind - individuals working together in a cooperative manner. We are very much under this idea that we constantly need some kind of overhead in order for anything to function properly but look at this system we are communicating on. Individuals are sharing their ideas and opinions and earning cryptocurrency from it, but more importantly many are earning a sense of freedom to expression, and no governmental system is needed for it to cooperate. Again, thank you for your feedback and good luck on going fully vegan if that is your goal!!!
Thank you for your reply.
Of course, governments are susceptible to corruption and most of the time corrupt. A lot of the individuals in governments around the world are self-serving pricks that only care about themselves. But with all its flaws and shortcomings, a rule of law is still better than lawlessness. In the state of anarchy, who or what would restrict this type of self-serving individuals from abusing everybody else, from building power by amassing resources and oppressing or killing everybody in their way? Humans didn't need governments to have wars and to kill each other and the current time we are living in is one of the least violent periods we have ever had in history.
If you want to talk about cruelty to animals, look at it that way. If we live under anarchy, people that see animals as objects would be doing whatever they feel like with them and there would be no real way to restrict them from imposing the least humane forms of breeding, farming and animal testing, right? But if you have some form of government oversight that is accountable to the people in some way, the government can impose restrictions on what can legally be done to animals and this is in fact what we are currently seeing all over the world. We have by no means reached justice or a truly moral treatment of animals yet, but I think we are a tiny bit closer to that then we would be in a state of anarchy.
This is indeed the case. Reality is not pretty, but to improve the status quo we need to offer a real alternative that is practically achievable. It really breaks my heart that we haven't gotten there yet, but I don't see how anarchy could ever get us any closer. Sure, governments are far from perfect, but what real alternative does anarchy offer besides a demonstrably impractical utopia?
Well, we have a lot of data to show us what we can expect from humans. While many of us want to be productive members of a cooperative society, data seems to show that most of us still act egoistically when given the chance. It also shows that even under the restrictive laws that we have right now that offer severe consequences for hurting others, many people still choose to do so. I don't see how imaging that removing the consequences would make us less likely to hurt others really and this is why I see anarchism as wishful thinking. If literally everybody wanted it and was ready to do their part in it, all kinds of utopias would be possible like communism, socialism, anarchy and more, but having everybody on the same page and having nobody willing to abuse the loopholes in the system is something that has never ever happened in history and I see no reason to assume that it is indeed possible at all.
Let's indeed look into the system that we are communicating on. Is it without rules and restrictions? Is it without government? If there are no rules, how come we have hardforks that change them? If there is no form of government, how were the hardforks decided on? Is voting for witnesses not a form of representational democracy? Also, let's not forget that the infrastructure we use to access the steem blockchain (the internet) would not and could not exists in it's current global form without the support and oversight of governments. If there were no tax dollars, there would be no internet. The internet had the chance to be standardized and becoming global only because of government oversight and regulation. So besides the system not being a true anarchy on the inside, it is able to function only in the context of a world that is not an anarchy either.
Additionally, while steem claims to be free and open, there are large actors that can indeed enforce rules by their own volition and you can see many people effectively being banned from getting any rewards and having their content visible in people's feeds by the efforts of individuals and groups of individuals. I'm not saying the people that have engaged in doing this and protecting the community from abuse or spam are doing a bad job, but I'm pointing out that the fact that they are able to succeed in their efforts shows how susceptible the system is to abuse from individuals holding enough resources. Destroying somebody's rewards through flagging/downvotes is in fact a way to force other individuals and restricting their freedom. So even in this supposedly anarchic system, people have started looking for ways to impose rules, there are people abusing the system and it's not all just freedom and cooperation.
Thank you, that is indeed my goal as I see it as the right thing to do and I'm actually quite embarrassed for not having done so yet.