: This assumes no aspiration of individuals above small, beautiful communities. But of course history shows us otherwise. No, the idea is that everyone aspires to approbation of the Other, and is inherently communal in personality (i.e. environemtn determines consciousness).
:Are you suggesting some kind of surgical or chemical lobotomy to weed out the natural leaders and meglomanics?
'natural leaders' and meglomaniacs are social cosntructions- people do not follow leaders because they are leaders, leaders are leaders because people follow them- we make our own rulers. A leader only leads because they are obeyed. Social systems construct modfels of leadership.
: What if I don't like the rules and don't want to leave. Maybe I want to kill people for sport. What should be done with me? Cast me out you say?
Why should you just want to kill for sport, a properly socialised individual wouldn't even think of it- of course the properly socialised individual means rejecting teh Hobbesian model of the war of man against man....
:But the faction of degenerates will decay into poverty while the faction of those industrial types will thrive. You know this but you will scream about the inequity of it when it happens.
Which assumes that they will degenerate- in India they ahve a prison system, in which prisoners are moved into a demarcated compound, which they may not leave after dusk until dawn (basically its a line in teh sand), wherein they live with their famillies-mostly they are murderers, etc. they work industriously and hard. Why should we assume that a person committing an 'odffence' is an inherent degenerate, further, if they have been properly raised in society, they are unlikely to abandon it and their sense thereof, of self worth...
:there is no agency of enforcement and therefore there are, in practice, no rights.
There are no rights in teh bourgeois sense of privelleges and rights owned by the individual, instead the collective effort is to ensure self-freedom and protection.
: It may be nice to wonder what life would be like if every man and woman in the United Kingdom asserted what this man did. Britain would cease to exist. But with no central authority, disputes of each soveriegn would be settled in every manner, including violence - no stranger at all to the hearts and souls that live there.
No, anarchy means 'no leaders' it doesn't mean 'no authority' and authority can be found in communal democracy and social co-operation.
I hope Britain ceases to exist.
: When you take on this man's case, you make an argument against democracy. I think you know this but do you wish to make the case that anarchy is superior to democracy?
No, you take an argument against *representative democracy* no direct democracy...diffferent beasts.
: This theory is optimistic and hopeful. It is also quite humanistic and naive. Most men will always follow others of good character. Some men will aspire to raw power and seduce his followers. Others will simply have good character and garner followers. When has this not been so?
Russian peasant communes spring to mind, as does europe in ost of the middle ages where people lived in small villages co-operatively...etc.
: Good men with powerful ideas and bad men with powerful ideas will produce nations. Men war. City-states will war. Nations will war.
Ah, the great man theory of history (assumedly good women don't exist...). Was it one man who made America, or was it a whole nation of people, whole classes longing for freedom? Why do people war, what is the cause- competition over property rights, most usually...eliminate the economic cause, and war will disappear...
: Under anarchy there will be more nomads, vagabonds, theives, murderers, hobos, and bums. Just like always there will be inequity and hardship. But there will be one less thing - justice.
Bwahahaha! Hobbes lives! Lets put it this way-
Most crimes are property crimes (theft), giving people free access to teh goods of society, free access to anything they want, would eliminate theft entirely. Further, it would eliminate violence associeted with theft, further from that, it would eliminate crimes based on lack of self worth, frustration with the system. After that we dwindle down to the crimes of passion- some of which may well disappear in a restructuring of gender roles. You see- you assume constant unchanging individuals, of eternal types, murderers, leadsers, etc. Anarchism is based on environmental determination.
: Gideon, it isn't wealth distribution that causes these things. It is the heart of man that fosters greed and covetry. If men weren't greedy they wouldn't hoard so much. If men weren't covetous they wouldn't envy so. Why would you blame something so innocous as money or an economic system for something that is so clearly an issue of the heart?
Exactly, men are greedy, but they desire within a system that structures their desire- a system that makes their mind. If we do away with artifical scracity, then hoardinmg would stop, theft would stop, and everyone would be able to satisfy their desires peacefully.
