All I can say is that I've never seen it. It may be my neighborhood
(Minneapolis, Minnesnowta, USofA), but if I find a discussion with my
neighbors on any central topic, and find one in ten espousing rational
ideas, I'm having a good day...
At times I share your dim view. At other times, I ntoice how many times per day people--including stupid people--interact voluntarily without anyone making them do so.
Spontaneous anarchy broke out at Tiananmen Square.
At a communter parking lot, I saw people forming a queue for the bus. Without a word, a "front" and "back" were selected for the queue, and folks getting out of their cars voluntarily took the "back" of the line, which was to outward appearance undistinguishable from the "front" of the line. I actually defied the unspoken agreement and got in "front" of the line, and nobody said a word to me--but most everyone in the line glared at me. When the bus stopped, the "second" in line slipped onto the bus ahead of me, closely followed by the "third," and all without a word they pushed me to the back of the line without any coercion or even discussion.
Or consider even the miracle of the four-way stop sign. People negotiate wordlessly and take turns. If statists' view of humanity was right, a four-way stop sign would be the constant scene of four-car collisions.
These are the people you expect to act rationally and reasonably?
Remember, they live in an environment where coercion is a given. It's perfectly understandable that they attempt to steer that coercion in directions agreeable to themselves. It's also immoral (almost) all of the time, but the very existence of government presents them constantly with the false choice of being coerced into A or being coerced into B. In their personal dealings, people grasp private property and non-aggression very well indeed, and most people behave morally most of the time.
Okay - say they stumble into my hypothetial situation, in which force
has already been initiated between two citizens - so they can step in,
use force to prevent the further use of force between two citizens...
No, they can't. The first principle is an absolute recognition that the aggressor is in the wrong, and the defender is in the right. When you find two people fighting, the fight is either consensual or non-consensual. There is either zero or one aggressor. You don't know who is the aggressor, but that doesn't change the fact. If you decide to intervene, any force used against the defender is itself aggression, and you're guilty whether or not you realize it. If the defender then defends himself against you, using lethal force if necessary, he's fully justified despite all your good intentions. If you and the aggressor manage to kill the defender, and then the aggressor tells you that HE was the defender, and you and everyone else in the world believe him, then a crime was committed, whether or not it's ever exposed, and you're a criminal, whether or not you or anyone else ever realizes it. Since humans are fallible, that will sometimes happen.
So the bottom line is that intervening is a serious matter, and you shouldn't enter into it lightly. If you see a rape in progress, you can be nearly certain that you know who the aggressor is, and you're probably not a criminal if you intervene. But if you intervene in a conflict, and turn out to be wrong, then you bear the consequences of your decision.
It was my understanding that an overriding government that can make
such decisions was the antithesis of anarchy. Are we, perhaps, using
different definitions for that word?
Probably. Hoppe's definition of government, which I think is the simplest and best, is "an agent claiming territorial monopoly on the use of force and the resolution of conflict (including conflict against itself)." In other words, government claims a monopoly on judging who is wrong, even when government itself is the accused, and then claims a monopoly on force for defense, punishment or war-making, in a specified terrritory.
Everything government does can be done privately through contracts. The existing government would be legitimate in an anarchic society if everyone under its jurisdiction agreed voluntarily to pay taxes, obey laws, etc. In other words, if the "social contract" were a real contract and not a fiction. Indeed, a slight twist on the Articles of Confederation would make the original United States into a fascinating anarchic experiment: suppose that one could declare citizenship in any state of one's choosing, regardless where one lived or owned property! I.e., if Pennsylvania's laws were too oppressive, I could simply declare myself a Virginian (presumably, subject to consent from Virginia), and would be bound by Virginian law and exempt from Pennsylvanian law, without relocating. I could also declare myself stateless, but in that case I would have no access to defense or other services provided by the various states. Ego is envisioning something between those two possibilities. It's legit anarchy, if nobody can be compelled without consent to be subject to the "voluntary government" (which is, you rightly note, an oxymoron meant to describe something else).
...it's remarkably easy to run into folks who paint an encircled 'A' for
grafitti, and assume that because they claim the label, that they
represent the whole of the philosophy. Addressin' such misconceptions
was what I was trying to do here.
I applaud your efforts. The graffiti artists might join this forum and embroil themselves in endless controversy, by failing to realize that "anarchy" means something very different around here than they think.
References given earlier in this thread are excellent. Also, anything published through Mises.org will tend to explain what anarchists here are mostly about. Folks published on LewRockwell.com are not all anarcho-capitalists, but many, perhaps most, are. The Mises.org podcast has some excellent anarcho-capitalist material, and anything by Walter Block or Hans Hoppe is a particular joy to read.
--Len