Replies

"You're suddenly getting highly emotional, so I'll take a break for the moment. What personal experience with suicide is prompting this intense reaction? Whatever it was, you have my sympathy and condolence. Note, however, that FR doesn't allow bad language. Repeated dropping of the F-bomb will get your posts deleted, and might lead to a brush with a moderator."

You were giving an number of signs that you were more interested in absolute, fetishized freedom than in good (I will detail these below). I could view these signs as one of (a) coincidental, or as (b) a result of you basically being an OK guy fundamentally motivated worthy concerns who happened to pick up some jargon from others (hey no one is perfect), or (c) as a result of your being what I call a "death-wish" anarchist (not that the people I call this are entirely bad or motivated, as people, solely by a death wish - it is just that is one strong thing inside some people).

I have spent the last number of years of my life in university, and even on the internet, with Gen-Y peers, surrounded mostly, shall we say, *not* by clean-cut Republican folk. Not having calculated that things would be different on FR (as I should have calculated), I ended up pegging you for (c), after consideration of the signs I was getting (which I will detail below). Having pegged you as a (c), I was essentially going to give up on the conversation, but not without yelling what I really thought of you and your situation first (what I thought is a mix of ideas I mostly derived from having read 1984, which I assumed almost all Americans read in high school, and some ideas from what I think really drives anarchists to obsess over Fight Club, and some ideas from a book written in the '60s during their recovery from Ayn Rand's cult - I can go more into all this later if you want).

Then, after the yelling, I read on (I am now behind on reading my pings, and I don't want to wait to read them all before replying), saw that when pressed you really backed up your position not with a fetish, but with real concerns - this suggested that one of (a) or (b) were the case. I realized I was mistaken. I noted that what I did was weird (I really should have considered the fact that I was on FR--and also the fact that you appear to support Israel's fight for survival against terrorism--more carefully). I tried to explain it as best I could in a line or two.

The signs you were giving me (that I can remember) were the following:

(1) Jargonized use of 'government', jargonized use of 'constitution', jargonized use of 'anarchy'.

(2) Insistence that what differentiated your form of constitutionalism was mine was, essentially, whether or not we talked about it, and the name. This is manipulative.

(3) Apparently grouping me in with enemies of freedom and with property infringers for disagreeing with you. Again, I am not on your property by typing stuff FR, unless you own FR. If I am in your head at all, it is because you chose to read what I wrote - you can always go to yahoo.com or something else. If I am not infringing on your property, and you believe I am saying bad things, the way to fight that is with words. Not by categorizing me in with property infringers. This delicate distinction has the potential to reduce massive amounts of bloodshed, and to allow people who disagree with each other to live with each other nonetheless. It also has the potential to allow multiple people to learn from each other without having to fear for their safety.

(4) Failure to recognize that words like 'freedom' and 'liberty' have two meanings - one loaded with ideas morality and maximizing human choice and human potential hand human happiness (by limiting freedom just enough ("Human liberty" = you should not be 'free' (see below) to steal my car and have me powerless to stop you, or be free to steal my car and go unpunished, or the like) so that your neighbor has freedom, too), and another meaning that is simply about lack of constraint. Absolute lack of constraint is not possible in this world - cars would float. Absolute lack of constraint for living things means death.

(5) A slip-up use of the word 'victimizers' when what you should have said was 'tyrants'. This confusion is important because changing government will not reduce 'victimizers' because a man can be his own victimizer. Someone who thinks "anarchy" will eliminate victimizers is mistaken, and quite possibly looking for an external solution to a problem only he himself can fix, inside himself.

This last one, (5) is related to why I think cubicle-living urban anarchists obsess over the violence and voluntary submission in Fight Club (note that in the real world, once you have a structure like that, the chances of everything is does staying voluntary 5 years after they have started blowing up buildings, is next to nil). They see allegiance to an voluntarily-chosen tyrant as a way to get out of what they see as prison, and they obsess over this option instead of, say, taking a salary cut and moving rural, or starting their own businesses or the like. Even though there are many unjust bounds in our society, it is still good to make as much, starting with yourself, out of what you do have (and we have a heck of a lot more than, say, people in Poland in the 1970s, or Angela Merkel growing up - read about what she did in spite of her unjust restrictions, and how she herself is now using what she learned from her experiences to make things better). That is the only way those bounds will become more just: hard work by self-motivated, clear-thinking, caring individuals, doing what they can. Civil war, or government collapse, will just birth a different unjust system if the ideas in the heads of people are wack (and people who can see any sort of long-term hope in the social structure formed in Fight Club have wack ideas). This does not mean you hit people for disagreeing with you. It means you hold your own and try to talk to them.

You've seen what progress Poland has made in the last few decades. Real progress can, and in fact only will, be made without getting men to prostrate themselves and their minds to other men Fight Club style.

"I'm not sure whether I understand you or not. If some idiot wants to commit suicide, do you believe it's your business to stop him?"

It is not my business to stop him. It is his life, not mine, not yours, he should have the choice is he ends it or lives it. More on what I believe to by the why of this later.

Apparently grouping me in with enemies of freedom and with property infringers for disagreeing with you.

That's a bit of a misunderstanding. My point is that if someone says, "It is imperative that society have a government and law-enforcement," then that person is saying, "I consider it an absolute necessity that certain people have special authority over you." In other words, you are expressly advocating that some people have the power to aggress against me.

If you had said, "I believe society cannot be without someone to slaughter Israel's supporters," it would be clear that you were doing something bad--namely, advocating mass murder.

Instead, you're suggesting that someone needs to be out there to build highways and such, and therefore, naturally, I have no choice but to pay those people whatever they demand from my income. In other words, you are advocating the theft of my property. You aren't personally stealing anything, but you are endorsing the thieves that are.

...another meaning that is simply about lack of constraint. Absolute lack of constraint is not possible in this world...

There are lots of meanings attached to "freedom". It can also mean that I'm not physically restrained. Or, it can mean that I'm washed from my sins. In older times, it would mean that I was a Roman citizen, and in more recent history, it would mean that I was not an African slave. None of those meanings are applicable, though.

The only applicable meaning in this context, where we're discussing law and interpersonal relations, is the meaning that satisfies the universality principle: it must be possible for everyone to enjoy the same freedom simultaneously. License to steal your car, for example, violates that test; it effectively makes me "freer" than you.

There are technically two possible definitions of freedom that satisfy that definition, but one of them is obviously excluded. One is freedom with private property, and the other is freedom with no private property. If I can steal your car, but you can steal mine, that might be called "freedom" by someone--such as an anarcho-socialist--but even in the best case that would imply a society in which conflict resolution was virtually impossible.

By contrast, freedom which includes self-ownership, brings all the rest of private property along as an implication. If I can't initiate agression against your person, because you are your own exclusive property, then I also cannot violently take things from you, such as the clothing on your body or the food already in your mouth.

Next, since you clearly have the right to defend your person if I should initiate violence against you, it follows that you can also defend the clothing on your back, or the food in your mouth, if I tried to seize if by force. Similarly, you have rights over the spot on which you are standing; I do not have the power to initiate violence in order to evict you.

From this, homesteading follows naturally: you cannot seize things from my person, but you are free to take things found in nature and not claimed by anybody, since no violence is required to gain it. Having taken some unclaimed thing from nature, it is put out of my reach, since taking it from you would require the intiation of violence. In short, we're back to my definition of freedom.

There are still open questions in this area, of course. There is a "continuum problem": things actually on your person are clearly off-limits to me. But what if you set that item down? If I'm quick, I can take it without actual violence against your person. However, even wild animals and five-year-old children grasp the concept that property rights extend beyond the physical person. Even kindergartners manage to get along, most of the time, recognizing that a toy isn't up for grabs when you turn your back, but only when you have clearly relinquished it.

The open question is: how far beyond your person, in time and space, do your rights extend? Does walking along an unclaimed trail make it your property? Or do you need to use it habitually? Or, do you also need to improve it in some manner with your labor? Does fencing a property make it yours? What if you never actually "use" any of the property inside the fence? Then again, what if you "intend" to use it--does future intention translate into present rights? It clearly depends on how far in the future you plan to actually do something.

I agree with the anarchists that these problems are usually solvable by custom and negotiation. I disagree with them that they always can: for example, the only watering hole in a desert will be hotly contested. Fencing it in and claiming that you plan to start a water park there in the future will get you killed. That's a thorny one, though: if you've lived on the oasis for years, a newcomer clearly doesn't have equal title to the watering hole. If two thirsty travelers discover it at about the same time, though, trouble will follow.

Civil war, or government collapse, will just birth a different unjust system if the ideas in the heads of people are wack

That's why I said people aren't ready for true freedom. Most people will gladly steal, or even kill--not just for the only watering hole in the desert, but for a pair of Nikes.