[lsbskins1]

Quote by: Domino The problem with anarchy: people are sheep, who will always follow the best shepherd they can find, unless a wolf gobbles them up first. The hope of anarchists: individuals are not sheep, each one has a mind and a will, and you can't find a crowd of people without finding a whole lot of individuals, each following their own unique will. lsbskins1, all your arguments seem to consist of pointing out the sheepiness of people, and claiming that such a state is inevitable. You may be right, and there may be a lot of circumstantial evidence to support the view, but I very much doubt that you can prove any such thing. Anarchists believe that well-educated people don't have to be that way, and they seem to have a lot of circumstantial evidence in favor of that, but they, also, cannot prove any such thing. Btw, imo, brain-washing is just education with which you disagree. It's nice to think that education should include a lot of truth, but interpreting that truth is also a thing which must be learned.

Maybe that is a somewhat accurate depiction of my point, but only if you reduce it to some kind of base level version that a 5th grader could follow. My point is not that all people are "sheep". My point is that most people are not exceptional. Most people are average. That point seems to be fairly self-evident. If there are people existing that have above average talents, those talents will tell. Some will be more devious, some more ruthless, some more intelligent. All of these things lead to the ability to amass power. You can pretend that these differences to do exist or happily delude yourself into believing that if you just "educate people properly", they will somehow learn to refuse to take advantage of their talents but nothing in history has shown me that that will happen. The question then becomes, how we most effectively channel and/or counter these tendencies. Anarchist principles may attempt to channel, but they make no effective attempt at countering.