Comment: OK, here goes.

The fundamental problem with anarchist philosophy, as I understand it, is that it is doomed to be a minority philosophy and provides no means to either change its numerical inferiority in society nor provide for itself a practical defense against the majority.

This objection seems to be little considered. I have attempted a post

http://www.dailypaul.com/274304/constructive-anarchist-thread

which is an attempt to at least begin the construction of the latter---practical defense---and if successful maybe even the former (who knows?). But as it stands now, this seems to be a major shortcoming of the philosophy, and some alternative must be sought. Let me explain a little more...

Here's an excerpt from "The Most Dangerous Superstition" by Larkin Rose:
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To be blunt, the belief in "authority" serves as a mental crutch for people seeking to escape the responsibility involved with being a thinking human being. It is an attempt to pass off the responsibility for decision-making to someone else: those claiming to be "authority." But the attempt to avoid responsibility by "just following orders" is silly, because it requires the person to *choose* to do what he was told.
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Here's the thing: It's a bit too much responsibility for most people to make all their own decisions. They have figured out that they benefit from people telling them what to do (governing them) when those people know more about various things than they do. This is a reasonable admission of personal limitation, and it is (perhaps at least) a reasonable desire to have a helpful resource in governance. It is part of human society and the advantage of specialization. As we all know, however, there are more than enough psychopaths who are ready to take advantage of this majority tendency.

The question is how to deal with the psychopaths.

The standard anarchist answer is that personal responsibility for decision making is part of being human, or is universally required, or at least we're happy for the rest of the world to go down the toilet before we'll let the psychopaths get the best of us.

While I can sympathize with this point of view, it's simply not good enough. Just as there are extreme psychopaths, there must be extreme anarchists who take it upon themselves to provide for the world of dependent (psychopaths). Note well that they are dependent psychopaths because they are more than willing to have their desire/need for guidance provided by those who initiate violence against others and are therefore guilty of the same---as that idiot Obama says, I get that.

I think we have a chance if we can provide guidance which can be taken voluntarily to replace the perceived benefit of coercive government. Some things need to accompany our services. Above all, we need to provide good advice, or sources for good advice. We need a rating system which results in that outcome in a, most likely, topic specific fashion. It may be that the general public still perceives the replacement for government as coercive at some level. But I'm digressing to the constructive side of things.

My main point is that I think there can be a notion of government---a source in society which guides people---tells them what to do, if you like---but is voluntary. It will have to be provided by the tiny minority of people who are not psychopathic. Most anarchists do not accept the responsibility to shoulder the burden of providing guidance for everyone else. And I hate that that's the way it's got to be, but I'm afraid it is.

The Christian church (and I speak here of the common human construction with which we are all familiar---not the real church) had a great opportunity to fill this role. Note how willing people are to voluntarily give their resources to it and follow the advice from it. Unfortunately, it was taken over by psychopaths of a different sort very early on, and the resulting advice has been pretty much uniformly terrible ever since.

In any case, this is why anarchy won't work---or why it might, if we get ourselves in gear and take on the unreasonable responsibility of governing society.