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Who watches the watchmen? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago by CraigOhMyEggo@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, no, I'm not talking about the movie/show The Watchmen. I'm referring to the ancient philosophical question "quis custodiet ipsos custodes" or "who watches the watchmen". Go read up on that elsewhere.

For those of you who don't know and need a summary here, it's a question often posed in reference to the fact that the person or people in charge of making sure the rules are honored have nothing preventing them from disobeying the rules. There's never anything preventing the person guarding your treasure from stealing some of the treasure, for example.

What's the best remedy to this that you can think of?

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[–] A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Dual-power structures, consensus-based democracy, and federated communes. Between those three are most of your answers.

And obviously we don't have the conditions necessary for anarchism at present, or we'd already be living it.

[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Yay a rabbit hole! Thanks for the key words :)

[–] A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

No problem!

Honestly, one of the best introductions to anarchism is The Conquest of Bread by Petr Kropotkin. It's a century old and still very relevant and approachable. You can find it for free on The Anarchist Library.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

And one thing to understand about anarchism is that it’s very much a goal oriented philosophy more than most other political philosophies. What that means is that you get a lot of different approaches and concepts from people trying different things to attempt to achieve similar goals. And this often involves practical differences between different situations. Rojava is necessarily going to do things differently from how the maknovists did things and they’re both very different from how some punks who bought some land for a commune in the American Midwest will handle it.