Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Young Libertarian Calls In To Debate Sam" video.

  1. You don't have to go back to the Indus valley. You can look at the things that were going on in Spain leading up to and especially during the Civil War of 1936, an important event often overshadowed by WWII. You can even find examples today of people practicing elements of anarchism, like the worker owned and managed businesses described by Gar Alperovitz. +Jeb Galicia As I mentioned above, anarchism has at least in a few cases arisen in response to the strongmen so frequently generated by capitalism, militarism, nationalism, and republican forms. We've seen strongmen take over democratic states, like Germany. Would it then be correct to say that representative democracy "isn't a really sustainable form"? If Anarchism has had a shorter lifespan than republicanism, it's because it has had to bear the double burden of not only resisting the right but also the capitalist left. Strongmen often receive the support of other strongmen because they exist together in a system that permits or in some cases encourages their anti-social behavior. So for instance we saw oil tycoons and IBM continuing to supply Hitler. I find it hard to see how such strongmen could arise as easily as they seem to today without a system of concentrated wealth and centralized power. In regard to strongmen, I think there's an interesting but by no means definite analogy between possible future societies and what Robert Sapolsky observed in baboon troops that had lost their alpha male members—when other alphas tried to take over, the group resisted and either expelled them or incorporated them into the new, less hierarchical structure. If baboons can do it, surely we can.
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