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Haven't read Huemer, came across it while researching. Part 2 sounds like topics not ventured enough in this genre IMO.
And I never said criticism needs a replacement attached, I'm just curious what comes next. You've been sketching bits and pieces of it: rules that are unwritten, local, and enforced by people who still have to see each other tomorrow; reputation that can't be seized; logistics that don't need a licence; staying unnamed so it doesn't start wanting what a state wants; and not converting the herd, just being a different species in the same jungle.
These have precedence. James C. Scott documents hill peoples in Southeast Asia who did that for centuries, through mobility, dispersal, and crops that were hard to tax. History also points the other way:
- Scott's hill peoples held out until states got roads, aircraft and radio, what he calls distance demolishing technology.
- In early modern Europe, as Tilly tells it, the armies raised to fight neighbours became the tax collecting states that ran everything afterwards.
Not expecting anyone to have a neat answer. It's just the part I find interesting: what keeps the holes in the jungle open once the other side gets better at closing them, and what stops the defence from becoming the next ruler.
So many of these orders start free and end up state shaped that I wonder whether it's something built into how humans organise at scale. And if it is, whether it can really be stopped, or only outrun for a while.
hm, you're the second person recommending it, so I just downloaded it from AA. have you read it yourself?
...and tbh I'm not a fan of any argument based on "if you do not provide a solution you are not allowed to criticize the existing thing"... especially when that argument is used for complex systems: they can only emerge, they can never be effectively planned by humans, who can barely see first-order effects, let alone have incentives to do anything beyond their political lifetime: