Anarchy or Totalitarianism?

Canell said:

That's not good enough. We need communitarian states (communities, where people know each other personally),thousands and thousands of them, in a world federation. The federation obviously is for providing peace (otherwise states may attack each other) and resolving conflicts between those city-states.

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I'll buy that. There's nothing magical about the current number of polities the world currently has. Having many more and smaller polities might be better. Everything has a natural best size, and I'm sure a giant state of hundreds of millions of people is not the best form for a republic. One in which one's representatives are personally known neighbors might might indeed work better.

haymarket said:

Very true. If the government were to vanish tomorrow, anarchy taking over, within a short time that void would be filled and we would end up with fascism.

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Fascism gets thrown around a lot, but it's actually a very efficient system, if you look at what it actually is. For a short period, it may actually be beneficial to some states/countries. It's neither inherently good or bad, just depends on the leader wielding that sword. However, anarchism could go so many different ways. You would have your benevolent leaders, your unruly dicks, your Macbeths, your stern self imposing leaders, your spineless cowards, your pockets of self sustaining separatists, etc. The list is quite long, actually. The only thing that is certain is that the productivity of people would drop dramatically. Totalitarianism is a crap-shoot. You either get a good leader, or you get stuck with an asshole. I'll choose the Constitution over either. It might not be perfect, but it's the best solution for governance that I've seen so far.

haymarket said:

Very true. If the government were to vanish tomorrow, anarchy taking over, within a short time that void would be filled and we would end up with fascism.

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No.

What would happen is that whichever factions has the most ability to commit violence will do so with each other for control of resources and those who process those resources.

So what we would have is warlordism, or feudalism.

Centinel said:

It just occurred to me that we actually have a state of anarchy right now, in that the roughly 200 states of the world exist as sovereign, independent polities with no system of government over them.

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I was pointing that out, but not as clearly as you did. Interesting things happen when you take another step back so you can see a wider view. Some only take steps closer to see what rule is being challenged.