Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
If you go by the definition that anarchy means no government, then animal communities that do not govern themselves with a government must be anarchies. But we're mammals and if you look at social mammals like other apes, wolves, elephant seals, giraffes, then you'll see that social hierarchies are common. A pack of chimps or wolves may be led by an alpha male or female and if you do something wrong, you may get ostracized from the community. This behaviour is largely coded for by their genes and animals behave according to their place in the hierarchy instinctively.
How common this is is not really the point. The point is that this is also part of our evolutionary past. Society and culture are not exclusively products of ideas that only exists in our thoughts. They are part expressions of our nature and biology as social mammals. This is just yet another level to debate against anarchy from. We have an instinct for cooperation and that's part of what's made our species so phenomenally successful. Put jokingly, if we wipe the civilized slate clean and start fresh and watch societies build from scratch, perhaps less social animals like tigers could form stable anarchies, but I believe humans wouldn't. Our willingness for cooperation would eventually lead to the formation of some sort of government.
This point was meant as a rebuttal to the notion that anarchy is more "natural" than to be ruled by a government, but in a world inhabited by billions of people, is that really true?
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We may or may not have an inborn instinct to cooperate, that's not really the point. What is the point however is that cooperation has proven to be a successful way to create wealth and thus it's the rational thing to behave in a society (generally speaking). That however, does not imply compulsory cooperation, partly because in that case the evaluation of every given social interaction (e.g. trade of values) would not be in the hands of the participants for whom it concerns, but in the hands of the government.
As for the animals, I'm no zoologist or anything and I don't claim to know wether or not other species are able to reason their way to a certain social system, but that's not the point either. Analogies to the domain of other animals are not very helpful in debating about how humans should interact with each other, simply because the one thing that puts us apart from other species is that we are able to reason, to separate right from wrong, to conceptualize our environment, to think ahead before acting. It's part of our nature to reason, thus debating wether or not it's 'natural' to form social rules among human beings is to bypass the human nature itself.
So there, I was not justified either in continuing the comparisons between humans and animals regarding the social behaviour. My mistake.
