Could anarchy work?

The thing about most political questions is that you don’t need a huge social experiment or tons of theory to answer most basic questions. All you need is a single complete unit to study. Enter, one human family. All government is just a scaled up version of this. So the data you gather from studying it is an honest and useful representation of the larger social structure.
Would, or does, anarchy work as a family structure? What is the result for the kids and parents? Is it a viable general rule for human survival and flourishing in that confined context? No? Well, it really is that simple then. If it doesn’t work at that most atomistic level, then it cannot be scaled up. That is the monad at which all fundamental theories are tested, and from which they all derive and upon which they all depend. It is the fundamental physics of human society.
So no, we aren’t there. We will never get there. We live the struggle again in every generation to learn, to be socialized, to adapt, to develop our capacities, to find our place in the larger structure. Until children are born programmed being and knowing all they could possibly need, which is imposible, anarchy will be fundamentally impossible as a viable strategy. If you can’t deal with that, then you can’t deal with the reality of the human condition. If you have any illusions about it, go start a family and your illusions will be dispelled. Deluded theory melts away like fog in the light of actual experience. And this particular bit of experience is invaluable.
That’s why Rousseau was such a bad theorist. He was so in love with his fog that he discarded the one true means to testing and improving his theories, his own children. He developed all sorts of lovely ideas that real human children would just have inhibited and contradicted and gotten in the way of. So he sent them to die in orphanages with an average life expectancy of less than a year. Five in all. But he got to keep some lovely theories about how humans were all born fundamentally perfect and complete, if we could just let the perfection take its natural course. I’m sure he would have seen anarchy as a perfectly viable option. He never had to sully his tidy world with the reality of actual child-rearing.

As a minor detail, the minimum viable sample size would be a family of four: two parents and two siblings, in order to properly model inter-sibling rivalry and conflict. Four is the minimum where you start to see all the real social complexities and their solutions, the adaptations we’ve developed to manage them, emerge. Everything scales up from that point. The germ of everything already exists at that monad.

(On someone suggesting that if anarchy is so bad why isn’t there a supreme world leader, and once states are sufficiently armed everyone just leaves them alone)

I honestly don’t understand what this objection means. Are you saying that organized armed states are examples of anarchic government? Are you saying that it is the case that people naturally have no inclination toward (nor reasonable arguments for using) violence, and that includes countries? Because those all seem like counterfactuals. And in what way is it hard to answer who rules the governments of the world? They are ruled at a hundred different levels of order and administration, from the federal level, down to state, then county, then city, down more informal community leaders, right down to the rulership of a family or individual over their own specific property or territory. Or perhaps you mean that the fact that there isn’t some single collective ruler over all those dozens of levels of rulership and administration and organization, over all the world a states as a whole, means that it’s actually anarchic? In what sense is a single, supreme world leader in any way necessitated?
Human liberty is by nature contextual. It exists within limits defined by what it means to be human, to exist in a particular time, to be a member of a particular country, of a particular city, of a particular family, to be particular sort of person with this or that characteristics. Your freedom exists within all these contexts. It’s what you specifically, taking into account all that that makes you up, can do. You don’t have absolute freedom because you are limited and particular and contingent in a hundred different ways, many of which you have little to no control over. So absolute freedom is simply an illusion. It is undifferentiated being. There is no “freedom”, only “this freedom”, the freedom that you possess within your particular context. And that’s still a heck of a lot of freedom to manage.
I don’t want to be unfair to the position, but it sounds a lot like “I’m a big boy now, so I don’t need any parents”. And all the other kids will see (my idea of) sense and will all know and do exactly what (I believe) they should, because why would anyone do anything else and why would it ever affect anyone else, so everything will be fine and we won’t need any rules or structure to manage conflicts at any level, except possibly the national level. And we can extrapolate this to the whole of humanity, and it will all just work out fine at every level, so long as we’re heavily armed enough to keep any other major states away from us. Because the biggest differences between people exist at the highest, national level and not at the individual level.
None of this really has anything to do with my essential point. Which is that family demonstrates in microcosm the fundamental, actual limitations and potential of human social structures. Anarchy doesn’t work as a family structure. We all need parents. Some people will always need parents, even when they’re older. And we all learn something from being parents. The responsibility of and need for shaping and guiding and placing limits and structure around our children’s freedom, and the way that those limits actually allow them to develop, to attain and maximize the freedom and opportunity that they have, eventually becoming functioning, contributing members of the community with the appropriate amount of individual autonomy.

We can never be truly autonomous, because we simply need each other too much. And by teaching these things, by taking on this responsibility, we actually submit to a restriction of our own freedom. We become part of the structure that hands itself down across time. And we see how it is never a goal or end state that is reached, but a living process that is handed down through the generations. The same problems being confronted and negotiated and fought over and optimized again and again across ever-fluctuating conditions.

So long as humans continue to be born and to grow, we will all need more than anarchy. So long as the world is always changing and never stands still, anarchy will not be enough. If we saw history as merely leading to and ending with ourselves as the end product, perhaps we could entertain such a prospect.

Not that I’m suggesting tyranny. But if anything to the right of absolute freedom (which is a fantasy) and anarchy (which is a nightmare) is to be considered tyranny, then there isn’t really any reasonable discussion possible. Some freedom is obviously needed, and some governance. I happen to think that a true study of the art of raising a family is a very good lesson in finding that balance. Do too much and your children don’t develop. Do too little and they become pathological or die. They need leadership, structure, rules, guidance, opportunity, feedback, consequences, challenges, inspiration, negotiation, pressure, space, responsibility, understanding, encouragement. They need all these things in a complex interplay. We need all these things. Does that mean government should wield absolute control? Not in the slightest.

In fact, government should be oriented from the bottom up, with the individual at its heart, the body getting smaller and less central as you move away from the center to the extremities. Above the individual, the most foundational social unit is the family, so it is at that level, the most proximate level, where the most authority should be vested. And then as you go up, getting farther and farther away from the fundamental monad, you reduce the scope of authority and power and place progressively more and and more restrictions on it. Because as you go up that power will agrregate across higher and higher populations. So the higher you go, the more checks. The lower you go, the more protections. But you still want and need all the levels; your freedom at the lowest level still stands as a defined freedom that’s embedded in and needs and benefits from all these other levels.

You, individually, might stand at the center of the all the circles, but you aren’t just the bead in the middle, you exist as what you are and are able to do what you can do as a function of your extended identity within these other spheres. And you have a responsibility to them, as they have a responsibility to you. And those responsibilities and freedoms change and evolve across time, because even you are never standing still. You’re always becoming a different person in the context of all the other spheres, including time itself (as you age).

That process, that embeddedness, that relationship with all these structures and the other people who inhabit them, the way that they encounter you as you move through your intersection of those circles, that’s what it means to be human. To need and to be needed, to teach and be taught, to rule and be ruled. And nothing teaches you that reality like experiencing it with a new generation of tiny humans.

(On someone suggesting that anarchy would emerge naturally when people learn to rule themselves properly, become able to balance all their qualities and brain function, and willingly follow the lead of natural law.)

So, when humans stop being human, then. If it were possible to be born perfect, knowing all we need to know and able to do all we could need to do, it would already exist. But such situations only seem to exist in the lower animals, like insects. Even basic traits like personality and brain balance seem to encounter a problem so complex that the only way to solve it was through the creation of a normal distribution of variance (including some serious extremes and unfortunate combinations). No single person seems to be able to contain the necessary breadth of qualities that are needed for human survival and flourishing.
There would only be one kind of human if it were possible to avoid all this mess, an innately complete and perfect being. So as long as we’re still stuck with being human, hard as that is, we might as well make the best of it and figure out how to manage our conflicts with and need for one another in the best way possible. Which happens to include various forms of governance.

(Further notes)

The correct amount of force to use in any given situation is always the minimum necessary amount. But we also shouldn’t kid ourselves (and I do mean kid, it’s a child’s perspective to think the answer is none, even when only governing ourselves) that there isn’t a necessary minimum.

This is only a personal theory, but I think you get the leaders you deserve. It’s not a one-way street. Leaders reflect the people and the people reflect the leaders. Even in autocratic countries, the leaders are able to be what they are because they serve and reflect and embody some instinct in the people that seeks expression.
Being in leadership does seem to have a corrosive effect on any human. It’s not clear that leaders are all so bad. Many of them are extremely industrious compared to most people, and very accomplished and earnest. They’re a sort of maximized representative of a certain type within the electorate. Which is the idea, in a representative democracy.
I think we underestimate the degree to which we make what they are possible, that they are just an emergent reflection of ourselves. I remember when Trump was elected, my dad, a staunch Republican, just said “You get the leaders you deserve. This is who we’ve become.” and I think it’s true. Trump represented something conservatives wanted to be. And he helped them become more like him. AOC is that for the Democrats. Brash, outspoken, confrontational, sensational, uncompromising, unsophisticated, unapologetic, no patience for those who can’t get on board. They’re both media stars, their popularity forged in a new age of online sensationalism. We love Twitter and what it has turned conversation into (gossip), and it’s given birth to these avatars of our respective political zeitgeists. We made our leaders, so at least some portion of our disdain for them should provoke a little soul searching about what sort of people we really are, if this is what we give birth to.