The process, always similar, takes 1000-1200 years to run its course. In their final 200-300 years, Spengler said, all civilizations stiffen into rigidity and formalism; creativity dies out and cynicism surges, the countryside empties and cities grow gigantic, and continuous warfare ends in coalescence of a political-economic world state. Writing in 1910-1915, he evaluated Western Civilization as already embarked well into this phase.”

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler

What is different this time is that if our western civilization dies, the rest of the world will go down with us. Can we raise a permanent culture in time?

Craig: I started out as a “conservative” and over the years went through minarchy and now anarchy. It took a lot of reading and several years to satisfy my concerns about all the same questions you ask here. Unfortunately I don’t have time to treat every question in depth, but I will mention a few points, one of which might spur somebody on to more reading. I’d recommend “Market for Libery” by Tannehill and “For a New Liberty” by Rothbard. A search of lewrockwell.com or mises.org on any topic you mentioned would quickly provide very good answers.

The frustrating thing about the objections you raise is that they are all problems that either exist only because government created them, or government makes them much worse than need be.

Prisons run amock for profit? How many millions of non-violent drug offenders are in jail right now, ONLY because of the government drug war, something which could never happen in a libertarian society. The prison industry relies ENTIRELY on government coercion. How could a prison somehow profit by rounding up prisoners if the government weren’t there to force taxpayers to pay for it?

“Think Blackwater (Xe industries), where war and unrest become profitable enterprises” again, only because they are paid by governments. No taxation, no big conflicts.

“healthcare services”… an industry so mangled and hamstrung by massive government intervention that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Government creates problems, government claims only government can fix problem.

“Corporations have largely infiltrated present governments…” Governments aren’t innocent parties “taken over” by evil corporations. Governments are the guys with the guns and the propaganda to make us think they have the right to use them. Corporations are then tempted to take adavantage of this coercive power for their benefit, so they lobby and hire ex-politicians and make some bribes. “Market dominance” is not a bad thing. If you don’t like it, you can stop it with a simple “no thanks, I won’t buy that.” The thing to fear is actual “physical dominance” which is what you get ONLY with government. Buy our stuff or else…

DDT and other airborne pollution: only a problem because governments have whittled away and mostly abolished traditional common law protections against trespass and property damage. Governments wanted industrialists to succed so they fixed the pesky problems of pollution by declaring that we can’t sue for damages any more.

Perhaps it could be said anarchy succeeds for two main reasons: 1) people operate for their own selfish interests, and 2) people do not participate in the running of their country. So let them tend to their own lives peacefully instead of forever clawing their way to the top of the political heap, seeking dominion over others.

localised feudalism maybe… also i believe that we are conditioned to think negatively and view things and a potential future negatively, plus Governments and country are an illusion, only community can live properly, know thy neighbor! how can you know someone on the other side of the country (ok, facebook!) when on top of it you don’t know your neighbor anyway! education should be about, as with Tribal people, understanding you need your neighbor to help one another? people do not participate in the running of their country, indeed! they do participate in the running of their local community though, the middle ages are past and it is the middle ages! now is now, not yesterday, nor tomorrow

as Lamarck said and on his death bed Darwin too, it’s not the bacterias, virus or diseases that is responsible for the mayhem but the ’state’ of the Terrain on which those grow…Perfect example of the Body/Soil holistic view opposed to science/medicine…

in massage the rigid structure is what you are trying to relax )) Anything too rigid will break at some point, too much law or ‘modern slavery’ and you’ll need revolution at some point! and as for human, if you don’t understand by developing enough awareness, the ‘dis-ease’ will be there to make things change or die, same for nature, when too much pollution or whatever you want to call it, Nature will self-regulate (and is self-regulating anyway, been doing without us for billions of years) and things will change even if that means human not being fit for evolution anymore

i think we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that we have no power, that we should give it away to some people! but the people have the power! knowledge should be passed on, not kept. People outnumber for sure the politicians, the police, the army, the traders! but as everyone blindly follow what they are told, you get the society we are living in now.

You can only teach people who are willing to listen! (unless you mastermind PR techniques obviously) i can only massage people who are willing to open, the one ready to open will see drastic body/life changes, the others will come back for more or unconsciously wait until they are ready!

Fear again! people are robots, can’t be bother too demonstrate in the street, to boycott things, even I unfortunately struggle to get rid of my conditioning!

but again i think all the arguing is just politics! it never gets anywhere, acknowledge the fact and accept it? do like Fukuoka did and do like Lawton is doing? there is nothing else you can do than get yourself doing your things, you can’t do for others, you might convince a few people! but they’ll go and do their own things in their own way anyway! Fukuoka did not try to convince anybody, he did explain when asked, but the government was not ready and he did not insist, waist of energy, that he used to put back in his land, people came to see him and there he taught, same for Ghandi people just followed?

i think access to land should be for everyone! well it’s only up to me to claim it back! so far i don’t because of fear, because of conditioning. But people in Bristol, UK claimed back some peace of land to farm and did not ask the council, they are doing it and trying to fight for it! Same in Paris, some people put their caravan and camp somewhere and they live there! Same in the US where some people (see Michael Moore’s Capitalism a love story) have claimed their house back!

the thing is that democracy has never existed words have lost their meaning, all is mixed up thanks to PR/Marketing/Education/Media. confusion, divide to conquer, that is why politics works so well for corporation! in France Sarkozi has been elected because he had more ‘one single party’ votes, when the ‘left/green’ together had a bigger percentage! actually the one that actually win the election is Mr Blank (vote) so who is Mr Blank?!

And yes corporation have understood now that owning energy was not the real deal, but owning the land, the water and even the seeds is the ultimate goal! About the rights for Nature (see post http://permaculture.org.au/2010/03/22/letters-from-slovakia-aggressors-victims-and-scapegoats/#comment-45577) and talking about the rights of microorganism, the solution is already there GM
but the Ecuador idea is amazing! http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1494/1/

if people think they actually had no rights at all (and i personally want things to be right!) then nobody would have anything, and all we’ll be just a bonus?! we actually would have everything?!

thanks to everyone for sharing ideas/opinions links, apologies for me approximate English, ideas and explanation as i am just a beginner

Agreed. Again, see the comment where I describe a potential bottom-up approach to government (don’t move your mouse’s wheel after clicking on the link, and it’ll take you directly to the right comment).

Regarding your query about traditional permanent cultures, watch out for a post I’ll do on this as soon as I have time to do so.

We’re getting into a discussion we’ve had elsewhere, which still has unanswered questions from me to you.

Okay, we completely remove government. What next? In a perfect world, full of perfect people (cooperation-centric, humble, self-sacrificing, philanthropic), all would be well. But, instead, we live in a world of uneducated people (when I talk about education here – I’m not referring to learning how to read and write and add and subtract, but real practical education about how people can live with each other and live with the land). These people have been ‘cultured’ to find their greatest satisfaction in accumulating wealth (land, goods), striving for recognition (positions of prestige/power), and regard money-fueled leisure time as their ultimate goal.

None of the social systems we have are perfect. Far from it. But, remove government oversight, and what happens next? Consider prisons, for example. Do we open the doors and just let everyone loose? Do we return to the kind of vigilante activities of yesteryear where pitchfork-waving villagers hang the guy in the town square, just to later find out it was all a mistake? If not, what happens next? Do we privatise prisons? If so, who covers the cost? If communities determine to do so, then we still end up in a situation, given the imperfect nature of people, as just mentioned, where the managers of prisons do so for profit. It’s in their interests for people to be guilty. The concepts of crime prevention and rehabilitation of offenders become enemies of the prison ‘industry’.

Consider the same for other social services. Think about privatising fire stations. “Sorry, we couldn’t come to put your house fire out, as we had to attend to the fire of a wealthier guy further down the road. It’s just not economically viable for us to help you.”

Consider healthcare services. As we see with the U.S. system – preventative health care is disincentivised. Rather, the system actually incentivises sickness. The less healthy people are, the more money there is to be made (in pharmaceuticals, hospitalisation, etc.).

Now consider the police force, and the army…. The present situation is to some extent at least, a disaster. We have these ’servants/protectors of the people’ actually protecting the interests of corporations, and increasingly being used to put down popular decent from peaceful protests. Yet, many of these people are conscientious in their work, and they play an important role in avoiding widespread mayhem. Remove government, and what’s next? Completely privatise the police and army? Think Blackwater (Xe industries), where war and unrest become profitable enterprises that should be encouraged (after all, multiple private industries are dependent on this).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqM4tKPDlR8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP_m4m62IfI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVrrDc3OAms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnVbulr2Pvw

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xe_%28company%29

The list goes on and on…

Corporations have largely infiltrated present governments. They’ve done so because governments stood in the way of their establishing market dominance. Think Monsanto for example. Remove governments outright, however, and for those nations where government oversight is still providing some defense against these predatory industries, then the doors are flung wide open for them. Along these lines, I also refer you to my mentioning (see link to my comment on another post in the link at top of this comment) governments outlawing the use of DDT. How do we protect society against these aspects without government oversight – do we just get all the villagers to firebomb the DDT factory? Take this to the next level then: what about witches? That neighbour of yours looks suspiciously like she’s practising the art of black magic. Perhaps we should tie her to a chair and toss her in the river, and see if she floats or not? Oops, later we learn you simply wanted to get rid of her for one reason or another, and this was an easy guise to accomplish this.

Disintegrate our current system, and we will return to localised feudalism. Of that I have no doubt. For those who survive, we’ll begin the process of a few accruing power and wealth – the process of centralisation – all over again. We’ll demand governments protect us from ourselves, and they’ll willingly do so, then we’ll be repressed and cycle back to revolution.

It’s clear our ‘democratic’ system really is not democratic. But, it fails for two main reasons (that I’ve expressed repeatedly in other articles and comments): 1) people operate for their own selfish interests, and 2) people do not participate in the running of their country.

If we could magically unite people in unselfish participation in the rebuilding of our world, we’d see a rapid resolution to most of our problems. But without that magic act, just removing government would see the world sink into the middle ages once more.

Life without abundant cheap energy – oil – to produce the worlds food is going to necessitate a return to more labour intensive methods of food production and harvesting, which in turn means enough people to produce our food must be enabled to live on the land. Permaculture, as the only sustainable closed loop system of food, energy and materials production is clearly the way to go.

The main problem here is one of planning law, farmland itself is very cheap. The laws created in the past to prevent concrete and steel urban sprawl are now preventing people from moving on to the land to carry out this work. Low Impact Developments, forest gardens, biochar and gasification all add up to a sustainable off-grid carbon negative lifestyle, which in todays climate will weigh heavier in court than any case the council might make. It really should be seen as an opportunity to regain autonomy at the community level as people take control of the means of production for their own, their extended families and their communities lives. The local IS global and the personal IS political.

I would say – and quite likely, Adam Curtis would agree on that – that one of the biggest problems is that ideologists who think they found a “silver bullet solution” for all our problems try to turn their crazy ideas into reality.

If we abolished government, a number of profound problems which right now are addressed by government won’t go away. The state’s monopoly on legitimate use of force was introduced to get rid of blood feuds. So – if you want to abolish all government, you better have some very good answers to questions how to deal with problems such as this – I take it we would prefer not to return to blood feuds but have something different instead. I don’t say such answers won’t exist. It’s just a bit cheap to pronounce “I know how to solve all problems – let’s abolish government” while not providing answers to such important questions.