Memes

Or the control the hierarchical entity (state) must have over a populous to stop thievery and violence.

You'll find that the vast majority of anarchists nowadays are gradualists (short of the usual vocal minority), precisely because Anarchy depends on a populace sticking to social norms and rules, and that shit takes time to develop, and definitely can't be instituted by force. Or its final form be predicted from our position in time. Sure, if you live in tyranny a revolution is the way to go, but if you have a half-way decent liberal and social democracy pushing it further towards all three things is the way to go.

To paraphrase Kerry Thornley: With progressing enlightenment the state is going to wither away, or, that failing, it won't annoy anyone, any more.

Little tidbit, though: The internet is a quite proper anarchy, actually. I don't mean the web I mean the way ISPs, hosters, IXPs, etc, all interact on an infrastructure level. The internet has no government, what it does have is lots of technocrats writing requests for comments turning into consensus and a moral baseline (tolerate spam or CSAM and you're out). The ICANN is the pinnacle when it comes to centralisation, there (if DNS can even be considered to be basic infrastructure. The RIR are certainly more important).