[Brutha]

And yes, perhaps the biggest challenge to a successful Anarchy would be building a mature society out of a bunch of people who've been indoctrinated in "stop hitting your brother or I'll smack you".

Where there is no power monopol in the hands of the goverment people go and say: "Stop hitting my little brother or I'll smack you". In a society where the power monopol is in the hand of the goverment they let the goverment do that job.
That reduces the amount of violence that citizins commit.

Eric S Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere about the open source gift economy goes into a lot more detail but in a (grossly oversimplistic) nutshell: Once basic needs are met, reputation becomes the coin of the realm.

The problem is that reputation alone isn't enough to built effective production chains.

In addition to quote a bit: "A free society is a society were it is safe to be unpopular".

I don't think for a moment that the world would become a perfect utopia if government were taken out of the picture. But would it be a better world than it is now if people were raised in an environment of personal responsibility? That's a question worth asking.

Not holding people accountable for their actions doesn't produde a enviroment of personal responsibility.

Fortunately, unlike the USSR, we have had the opportunity to witness and study a hard-working society whose rewards aren't monetary - the open source software community. (Note: not a perfect analogy to Communism by a long-shot, but a good study of non-monetary motivation).

I don't think that their is a greater sense of personal resposibilty amoung people who write open source than under those who write closed code.
In addition it is no society. The amount of people who live from gift money is very limited in the open source community. The majority makes their living with selling support nowadays.

I've noticed that in real life tradition is more compelling than law. While it is one thing for the hero to order everyone to be nice to each other, not everyone is going to listen. However, if there is a long tradition of working together, people see no reason to break it off. Its like a habit that you don't notice but affects your life.

The advantage of written law, is that you know where to go to to erase it. When you have a problem with traditions (which we have), you don't know where to go.