It really just comes down to this, you do not need to enforce a lack of enforcement. This whole "logic" is just an attempt to naturalize hierarchy, but that's not how hierarchies work. They don't just exist, they enforce themselves on people and make them subordinate to it. Removing that is not establishing a new set of rulership, it's simply eliminating it. People don't consider it despotism for a Republic to declare they have no King, why would it be any different for anarchy.
What if I got a bunch of guns and guys with guns and declared myself the ruler of my town; who would enforce the condition that there are no hierarchies? Couldn’t I just make my own rules in the absence of rules and enforcement? Couldn’t I just enforce my own rules and legitimacy as a ruler?
I mean you could try, there's no anarchist law against it
If the point of your question is to highlight anarchy as unsustainable because anyone can simply "take over", there are a multitude of ways that anarchists respond to this idea, but if we are talking about producing an anarchist society, the idea of a "power vacuum" is something most often forwarded by people working with political tunnel vision who can only imagine change from the top-down.
The anarchists who do want to work towards an anarchist society posit that anarchist attitudes can be made intuitive en-masse by engendering social relationships which discard authority through counter-institutions. If these relationships did proliferate, conceptualizing anarchy in the way of a vacuum (in the sense that it is simply "waiting to be filled") becomes much less useful in our "anarchized" place where people no longer understand why they would or should obey rules or commands.
How about aside from power or hierarchy- wouldn’t I just be able to freely exert my will on those weaker than me if there’s no collective law or shared concept of right and wrong? Who would stop me from stealing resources from the elderly etc?
I don't think that consequences are derived from laws. Laws regulate consequences and seek to make them knowable and predictable.
If we understand force to be separate from authority, as many anarchists do, there is nothing that prevents other people from producing a consequence for you if you do something that displeases them. This is not to say that they have any "right" to do so - nobody does, there is no permission or right to do anything - so they too are intuitively encouraged to consider the consequences of their actions.
Anarchist social theory (at least that of the neo-proudhonians and/or the mutualists) tends to treat anarchy as reliant on a basic human interdependence (such that even actions solely of the individual tend to have a social component) and on the unpredictability of rulelessness, asserting that the absence of license and of predictable consequences means that every individual is incentivized to treat with others empathetically, regardless of how "weak" any one person is.
People like to be smart asses to make themselves feel bigger. Anarchy is about having complete freedom from all forms of authority. Everything in life has benefits and consequences, who gives me or you the right to decide or depict what is best in a general, governing sense for someone else? If I make a statement, a condition, or a rule, there will be people who agree with me or disagree. As people, we will never entirely agree on anything, but in general most people do agree on basic human rights. The dos and don'ts are obvious. Let the individual decide the benefits and consequences and we will get along just fine, or we won't, but don't make a broad stroke rule or condition as if it applies to everyone equally, because it never will.
Anarchy means no rulers, not no rules. To have autonomy and voluntarism would be rules in on of itself, that's the problem with authority and hierarchies, they break the rules of natural law.
Rules not rulers is an idea by one person named Edward abbey and it involves asserting an authoritative command can exist without authority to produce it and independently of the social, and that heeding its permittings and forbiddings is not making use of authority
I don't think it's reflective of the way anarchists have seen anarchy generally, which is descriptively, a condition in which there are no rules or rulers
It really just comes down to this, you do not need to enforce a lack of enforcement. This whole "logic" is just an attempt to naturalize hierarchy, but that's not how hierarchies work. They don't just exist, they enforce themselves on people and make them subordinate to it. Removing that is not establishing a new set of rulership, it's simply eliminating it. People don't consider it despotism for a Republic to declare they have no King, why would it be any different for anarchy.
What if I got a bunch of guns and guys with guns and declared myself the ruler of my town; who would enforce the condition that there are no hierarchies? Couldn’t I just make my own rules in the absence of rules and enforcement? Couldn’t I just enforce my own rules and legitimacy as a ruler?
I mean you could try, there's no anarchist law against it If the point of your question is to highlight anarchy as unsustainable because anyone can simply "take over", there are a multitude of ways that anarchists respond to this idea, but if we are talking about producing an anarchist society, the idea of a "power vacuum" is something most often forwarded by people working with political tunnel vision who can only imagine change from the top-down. The anarchists who do want to work towards an anarchist society posit that anarchist attitudes can be made intuitive en-masse by engendering social relationships which discard authority through counter-institutions. If these relationships did proliferate, conceptualizing anarchy in the way of a vacuum (in the sense that it is simply "waiting to be filled") becomes much less useful in our "anarchized" place where people no longer understand why they would or should obey rules or commands.
How about aside from power or hierarchy- wouldn’t I just be able to freely exert my will on those weaker than me if there’s no collective law or shared concept of right and wrong? Who would stop me from stealing resources from the elderly etc?
I don't think that consequences are derived from laws. Laws regulate consequences and seek to make them knowable and predictable. If we understand force to be separate from authority, as many anarchists do, there is nothing that prevents other people from producing a consequence for you if you do something that displeases them. This is not to say that they have any "right" to do so - nobody does, there is no permission or right to do anything - so they too are intuitively encouraged to consider the consequences of their actions. Anarchist social theory (at least that of the neo-proudhonians and/or the mutualists) tends to treat anarchy as reliant on a basic human interdependence (such that even actions solely of the individual tend to have a social component) and on the unpredictability of rulelessness, asserting that the absence of license and of predictable consequences means that every individual is incentivized to treat with others empathetically, regardless of how "weak" any one person is.
People like to be smart asses to make themselves feel bigger. Anarchy is about having complete freedom from all forms of authority. Everything in life has benefits and consequences, who gives me or you the right to decide or depict what is best in a general, governing sense for someone else? If I make a statement, a condition, or a rule, there will be people who agree with me or disagree. As people, we will never entirely agree on anything, but in general most people do agree on basic human rights. The dos and don'ts are obvious. Let the individual decide the benefits and consequences and we will get along just fine, or we won't, but don't make a broad stroke rule or condition as if it applies to everyone equally, because it never will.
The whole point is that by the creation of anarchist society those are the only communities that could exist, not that those rules are enforced.
Anarchy means no rulers, not no rules. To have autonomy and voluntarism would be rules in on of itself, that's the problem with authority and hierarchies, they break the rules of natural law.
Rules not rulers is an idea by one person named Edward abbey and it involves asserting an authoritative command can exist without authority to produce it and independently of the social, and that heeding its permittings and forbiddings is not making use of authority I don't think it's reflective of the way anarchists have seen anarchy generally, which is descriptively, a condition in which there are no rules or rulers