https://www.sapiens.org/culture/anarchism-democracy/ "What is anarchism apart from these caricatures? And how does it relate to “antifa”? The term “anarchy” literally means “without [a] ruler,” and not, as many believe, “no rules.” Although many anarchists want radical change, the change that most envision is not societal breakdown but rather people learning to collectively rule themselves <https://theconversation.com/what-is-anarchism-all-about-50373> (or in other words, direct democracy). The basic premise guiding anarchist political philosophy is simple: Humans are fundamentally cooperative <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-prince-of-evolution-peter-kropotkin/> by nature and, when given the chance, flourish in situations of collective self-governance <https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691161037/two-cheers-for-anarchism>. By self-governance, anarchists typically mean an arrangement in which every person has an unalienable right to participate fully in any political decision made on their behalf—and to leave any association that makes a decision they find unconscionable. Taking the term in this broadest sense, attempts at anarchist societies or collectives over the last two centuries have been numerous and persistent, if often short-lived. However, as anthropologists like to point out <https://www.prickly-paradigm.com/titles/fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology/>, humans organized themselves in stateless societies <https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300169171/art-not-being-governed> with great success for much of ancient history, and many continue to do so in various ways, without using the label “anarchy.” In fact, “state-level” societies have existed for only a fraction of the roughly 300,000 years modern humans have thrived—emerging an estimated 5,000 years ago <https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-0-387-72611-3_10>—and should still be regarded as an experiment, with mixed results." ... " As an anthropologist who has studied and worked with leftist activists in the U.S. for more than a decade, I’ve come to understand anarchy as something that looks very different from the violent, lawless chaos that many people picture it to be. ... The use of the term “anarchy” to describe the riot isn’t shocking—violent chaos is, after all, one of its generally accepted meanings. But it has little to do with how actual anarchists understand and apply their political philosophy. While an exciting idea, anarchism in practice is, well, boring. Far from what window-smashing insurrectionists are doing, it mostly takes the form of an extremely slow-moving and highly rule-bound process of collective deliberation. Anarchy, paradoxically, means more rules, not fewer, and more collective responsibility <https://www.routledge.com/Constructive-Anarchy-Building-Infrastructures-of-Resistance/Shantz/p/book/9781409404026>, not less. Unfortunately, since much of the United States has been misled <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/technology/antifa-local-disinformation.html> into thinking that anarchists—specifically, those involved with “antifa <https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-antifa-trump.html>”—were responsible for the putative anarchy at the Capitol, an impressionable observer might think that actual anarchists want violent chaos. The cognitive dissonance would be amusing if the situation weren’t so horrifying. If there had been *actual* anarchy in the Capitol that day, rather than a right-wing insurrection, Ernst and her Republican colleagues would likely have been in for a long, well-facilitated meeting aimed at complete consensus. "