tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28755195.post5087487746109148480..comments2023-09-25T04:26:51.568-06:00Comments on The Barefoot Bum: On law, part 1Larry Hamelinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08788697573946266404noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28755195.post-37933739271162515282010-02-10T07:21:14.403-07:002010-02-10T07:21:14.403-07:00"This is a common straw man. My opinion is th...<i>"This is a common straw man. My opinion is that we already have an anarchist society and that no other society can, in fact, exist."Perhaps. But this view would seem to render "anarchism" somewhat vacuous, n'est pas?</i><br /><br />No, I disagree. If you lived inside a bucket but you thought you lived inside a palace, it would be important for you to be disabused of your faulty appreciation of your situation, even if, functionally, there was nothing immediate you could do about it.<br /><br />Borders between countries, generally, do not exist. They are fiction. It is important to realize that they are fiction and that you can, physically, go wherever you like.<br /><br />Natural rights do not exist. They are convention. It is important to realize that they are convention, and that other people need not care about your pursuance of them.<br /><br />Laws are words written on pieces of paper, usually by people long dead, and you have never been consulted about whether you agree with them or not. Most of them are stupid and many of them are designed to preserve the wealth of some at the expense of others. They have no moral authority. Their authority is the muzzle of a gun.<br /><br />Realizing these, and thousands of other, basic, incontrovertible facts about reality is, I think, very healthy and necessary. You may not be able to do anything about it right now, but you will never be able to do anything about it unless you acknowledge it.<br /><br />Knowing that we already live in an anarchist society throws into sharp relief the implicit 'divine right' of the state. The state, as represented by government, consists of a group of people, individual men and women, who are approximately equivalent to the gang members of a mafia. Government is simply the most effective organized crime syndicate in town.Larry Hamelinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08788697573946266404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28755195.post-67249235589873147242010-02-10T07:20:33.839-07:002010-02-10T07:20:33.839-07:00First of all, we do have agriculture, divisions of...<i>First of all, we do have agriculture, divisions of labor, and sedentary culture. One obvious at least hypothetical reason is that conditions have substantially changed.</i><br /><br />Agreed. I may have miscommunicated, giving you the idea that I somehow yearn for a 'prelapsarian' past. I don't. I was specifically trying to illustrate that the alleged yearning for this prelapsarian past is a straw man commonly raised in arguments against anarchists. I don't think we need to revert to any sort of 'simpler' state.<br /><br /><i>Also, as you note, we are all "anarchists" in a sense: Our "hierarchical" legal systems are what we already have worked out collaboratively.</i><br /><br />I have to object to this. We did not work out our existing systems collaboratively, and we did not do so in 2 senses:<br /><br />1. The people who actually were contemporaneous with the implementation of these systems did not collaborate. Some forced others, using violence or the threat of violence, to comply with their self-aggrandizing megalomania.<br /><br />2. People now living merely inherited the customary behaviours of long-dead predecessors, without themselves contributing in any way to the design of the systems, and without any of them being afforded any realistic opportunity to object. The customary behaviours continue to be implemented using violence or the threat of violence, by the few hereditary beneficiaries of the original violence, at the expense of the many descendants of the victims of that violence, themselves now victims.<br /> <br /><i>(Note that based on my reading, it looks like one big element of bullshit in anarchism is the deprecation of "hierarchy", which seems to mean either "socially constructed coercion" at best or at worst "coercion I personally don't like".)</i><br /><br />I think you are being unfair to some interesting thinkers. Bear in mind there is a gulf between theoretical design and practical implementation. Refer to my earlier comment that 95% of people are bovine. The problem you're referring to is a consequence of morons hijacking perfectly cogent social theory and abusing it, in precisely the same way as whatever morons they are overthrowing did. The same criticism can be levelled at socialism and communism. In practice, greedy, self-important buffoons become tyrants, whether their starting point is capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, theism, or anything else. I don't deny that what you describe is descriptively correct most of the time; I question whether it is a consequence of the design or a consequence of abandoning the design in favour of self-gratification.Larry Hamelinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08788697573946266404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28755195.post-86980678945206823042010-02-10T07:17:28.906-07:002010-02-10T07:17:28.906-07:00[For reference, I've posted the body of Mr Ave...[<i>For reference, I've posted the body of Mr Aversion's email in comments with his permission, omitting only prefatory and closing remarks and identifying information. Passages in italics indicate where he is quoting me. The thread of this conversation begins with the post <a href="http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2010/02/anarchism-authority-and-voluntary.html" rel="nofollow">Anarchism and authority</a> and its comments.</i>]<br /><br />-----<br /><br /><i>This contention is incorrect. Since laws against rape specifically are newer than other laws, we can make scientific comparisons. And the data are unequivocal: making and strengthening laws against rape reduce the incidence of rape, and not just by incarcerating the rapists. Societies where rape is legally condemned have less rape than societies where rape is legally permitted.There are, of course, a lot of other factors. But the scientific truth is unambiguous that without specifically coercive prohibition, those other factors are substantially weakened.</i><br /><br />I think you need to make a distinction between a societal change and the existence of a law formalizing that societal change. I think it is disingenuous to suggest that because something is written down on a piece of paper, it affects societal behaviour; disingenuous to suggest that the existence of rape laws reduces rape. Rape laws come into existence in societies tending towards better rights for women. The laws have no effect on rape statistics whatsoever; the laws are a consequence of the tendency not to rape in broader society. This is precisely my point. The laws contribute nothing other than a burdensome (and lucrative for some) overlay.<br /> <br /><i>It is definitely the case that at least some people are undeterred by laws and government. Even so, it is still desirable to make rape specifically illegal. It's desirable to use formal, objective criteria for determining when we do indeed impose actual coercion on people, and those formal objective criteria need a formal structure to be even a little better than, "kill or imprison everyone we don't like on a particular day."</i><br /><br />I don't really get this. It's not as if the undesirable things are mysterious, difficult to define, or constantly changing. There is a small handful of socially unacceptable behaviours that are common amongst all people - so common in fact that in most modern legal systems, statutes about them derive from what is called 'common law'. Murder, theft, assault, etc. Most people know these things are undesirable and most people don't do them. As I said, I am not convinced that sufficiently many people are deterred by laws, to justify the existence of the cumbersome legal framework. Your argument would make sense if there was a risk of many people forgetting socially normative behaviour, or for socially normative behaviour to be constantly and radically shifting, but in respect of these basic interactions among humans, the rules are well-established and require no elaboration.Larry Hamelinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08788697573946266404noreply@blogger.com