Perhaps we need a department of education to coordinate all this schools.

Oh yea, and how is that working out for you?

I didnt realize corporations were sentient entities capable of acting on their own, rather than groups of people doing people things…

I didn’t realize it takes rocket science to understand the difference between individual behavior and institutional incentives.

The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 was signed because people, left to their own devices, self-destructively pollute their water supplies. That law mandated people couldnt dump shit in the water. It also was passed because state laws weren’t effective at stopping people from polluting the water

It’s interesting that you quietly swap in “people” where history mostly shows industrial corporations dumping waste for profit.

Working class communities were not the ones lobbying to pour chemical sludge into rivers.

Most of the legislation you listed was not the state heroically saving humanity from itself. It was the state reacting to industrial capital externalizing costs onto the public. Central authority stepped in because private ownership plus profit incentives produced pollution at scale.

You’re treating absence of centralized state authority as if it means absence of rules, standards or coordination. That is not what anarchism argues. It argues against concentrated political authority. It does not argue against collectively enforced norms.

You cite centuries of people “fucking up.” A lot of that history is profit driven extraction protected by law, not spontaneous communal self destruction.

If anything, your examples show that concentrated power and profit incentives required constant correction. That is not a great defense of hierarchy.

Again, you’re assuming complexity only works if there’s hierarchy and profit at the top.

Now I’m no hydraulics expert, but I’m pretty sure a reverse osmosis pump does not need a CEO to function. We have engineers, machinists, operators and logistics workers who coordinate their labor. For the last time, anarchism does not mean no organization. It means organization without concentrated ownership and coercive authority.

The way you frame this makes it sound like the only reason you’d ever lift a finger for anyone is if there’s a paycheck or someone above you making you. That’s not really a strong critique of anarchism. It’s more of a self report about how you see community.

This feels like projection more than anything else.

There are tons of people who voluntarily do hard, unpleasant, or dangerous work because they care about the people around them. Volunteer firefighters. Mutual aid groups. Community search and rescue. The number of regular people who stepped up during disasters when official institutions failed is huge. The idea that nobody would bother maintaining water systems unless a central authority forced them to says more about how you see people than about how people actually behave.

You’re also mixing up anarchism with “no coordination.” Anarchism isn’t “everyone does whatever they want and society collapses.” It’s opposition to hierarchy and domination, not opposition to organization. Sewage plants and water treatment don’t exist because of some mystical power of the state. They exist because people need clean water. They require technical knowledge, cooperation, and systems of accountability. None of that logically requires a top-down ruling authority.

You brought up Grafton, NH, (I had to google this) but that doesn’t look anything like anarchism. That looks more like a hyper-individualist, market-first version of libertarianism with almost no civic culture. Anarchism, especially in its socialist or syndicalist traditions, is built around collective responsibility and shared management. Those are very different things. “Nobody owes anyone anything” is not the same as “we organize ourselves without bosses.”

And on the clean water point: communities historically pushed for sanitation because cholera and dysentery were killing people. Public health measures often came from collective pressure long before centralized bureaucracies standardized them. People don’t need to be tricked into wanting potable water.

You say the greater good requires protecting people from their own stupidity. Maybe sometimes. But you seriously think centralization magically fix negligence? Flint, Michigan had a state. That didn’t prevent a water disaster. Bureaucracy can fail just as hard as decentralized systems, and sometimes with less direct accountability.

The real disagreement here seems to be about human nature. If you assume most people won’t lift a finger unless coerced, then yeah, anarchism sounds ridiculous. If you assume people are capable of organizing around shared needs when they actually have ownership and say over things, it becomes less far-fetched.