2 years ago in #philosophy by valued-customer
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Well, that's certainly one possible response. Turned into a bit of a mess for everyone when it was attempted 230 years ago though. And then the world got Napoleon and massive continent-spanning wars.
I've also seen suggestions that congresscritters be hung from lampposts throughout DC.
I'd rather see them melt into impotent rage when a critical mass of people just refuse to obey.
Would you turn back that clock? Return humanity to monarchical divine right to subjugate humanity as serfs, mere possessions of deified masters? I would not. It is true that change inevitably incurs chaotic discontinuity with order, but when order is the imposition of divinity and subjugation, it is unjust, cruel, and intolerable to good people. Certainly deified overlords would keep that cruelty and injustice that favored them with sybaritic luxury while peasants had no recourse to necessities to heat their hovels beyond heaps of composting dung.
That is because they are not good people. That is why Marie Antionette is excoriated for saying 'Let them eat cake' when people had no bread. That is the cruelty we see being imposed today by a financial uberkorps of banksters that are acting in every jurisdiction to deracinate, dedollarize, and disempower populations, to strip from humanity all they own, take from them their homes, their meat and bread, their very humanity, and reduce us to 'hacked animals' inexorably surveilled by mandated injection of nanotechnological monitors that enable even our thoughts to be imposed on us, our homes to be supplanted by pods, and our diets to be comprised of vermin and chemical swill excreted by deified overlords who own every title, possess every property, and subjugate humanity as property, slaves over which they hold the power of life and death at their whim.
Because the vile overlords seizing power over the world today are not good people, and their legacy will be hell itself.
I will risk, even raise on my shoulders, any Napolean, any rebellion against the coming dehumanization and eradication of good people.
And I will.
Is that not a false dichotomy?
It is true that change inevitably incurs chaotic discontinuity with order
Is it?
While I am not persuaded entirely by his arguments, Hans-Hermann Hoppe makes the case in Democracy: The God That Failed that the incentives of monarchy and the de facto oligarchy arising in support of de jure absolute rule did not tend to match your despotic caricature. Taxes tended to be lower, wars were less total, and both technology and philosophy objectively did progress. The present depredations by our modern political class suffer from a high time preference imposed in large part by terms of office and the need to pandering toward various voting blocs.
the vile overlords seizing power over the world today are not good people, and their legacy will be hell itself.
I do not disagree here.
I will risk, even raise on my shoulders, any Napolean, any rebellion against the coming dehumanization and eradication of good people.
I do disagree here. The same kind of revolutionary methods will likely bring the same kind of repressive despotism. Revolution merely for the sake of revolution perversely seems to reinforces the political class, even if that class is replaced with a new one.
It is a lot less glamorous, but I argue we are better served by undermining the powers-that-should-not-be than we are by trying to overthrow them. After all, why do you think violent revolution is the alternative they portray throughout their educational systems and media productions?
"...I argue we are better served by undermining the powers-that-should-not-be than we are by trying to overthrow them."
We are not actually in disagreement, believe it or not. Even a cursory examination of my back catalog will reveal that I constantly beat the drum of adoption of nascent technological advances that decentralize the means of production, and predict that eventually we can just ignore wannabe overlords.
However, despite that confidence and the economic fact that centralization cannot compete with decentralization, and that decentralization is a clinal boundary of extraordinary significance, and not just advance of technology that will continue to benefit parasitic overlords, I cannot vouchsafe that this ongoing transcendence should - or can - simply be purely economic. The potential of overlords to undertake violent genocide cannot be discounted. The necessity to counter that violence cannot either.
I do not believe differently from you that violent revolution could not result in our finally gaining benevolent overlords. However, I suspect, and am preceded by many that have predicted that this transition will occur with intolerable violence, and will needs must be met with the will to defend and protect good people. That is not something I reckon will result in a new set of overlords, but will protect the transcendence of centralization and maturation of decentralized means of production, distribution of those means, and the diaspora of humanity across the universe to where illimitable resources are available to develop.
In that interest, then, of blunting the savagery of psychopathic predators that are obviously willing, perhaps demonstrably bent, on genocidal eradication of the folks able to adopt and develop decentralized means of creating the blessings of civilization and rendering overlords obsolete, I am fully willing to fight and die, on that hill.
I have an example of JT's point:
Violent revolution created the Soviet Union, peaceful resistance in the form of a parallel economy (otherwise known as the black market) ended it. By 1985, it was an open secret that the 2% of privately-owned farmland produced 30% of the food. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that, on average, private farmland was twenty-one times as productive as public farmland.
Simply abandoning tyrannical society and living on the fringes works a lot better to undermine it than active measures, though you will never get a statist to admit that the USSR destroyed itself; capitalism certainly helped, but it wasn't the military-industrial complex (not actually capitalist, but hey, details), it was Pizza Hut.
No, I'm completely serious: Pizza Hut is what brought down the Soviet Union... well, that and a 2600% inflation rate from the well-intentioned disaster called Perestroika.
BTW, this is the exact reason that statists want to mandate participation in their sick little social experiment they call "society." They need people like us, because we're the ones who can actually do stuff, but we don't need them. Of course, they like to flip this narrative on its head; I actually had one of these people tell me "good riddance, we don't need you" when I expressed my desire to simply live and let live...
...and Bill Astore wonders why I have an axe to grind with him.
Perhaps if you refer to my last reply to @jacobtothe above, you'll find us more in agreement than not. However, I am not a fan of abandoning society. I acknowledge that some folks are not able to sort the ongoing transition, and society is not going to manage this transition unscathed, but society is what will and that is what I intend to devote my work to.
There are too many examples of intolerable violent genocidal oppression than can permit pacifistic solutions alone to be potential. You can't sit on the sidelines while Vlad the Impaler rules. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do the right things to transcend centralization, but it does mean we need to be prepared to do all the right things, not just the easily palatable things.
Decentralization of the means of production is the ultimate economic force that will force societal evolution, and revolution will not create that paradigm shift. There will have to be people in a society that can seize those independent means for that evolution to succeed, and that may require defending them against genocide. We won't be able to just ignore psychopaths until we have the means to be secure from force projected by them, and that's the sad fact. There will be all manner of faults and flaws that come to light after the fog of war lifts, and that's what it is.
Violent revolution created the USSR, and violent revolution created republics. I cannot predict the evolution from centralization to decentralization won't be occasioned by violence, and it is silly to try, IMHO.
Abandoning the state's counterfeit society is not abandoning society, it is embracing the aspects that actually work. Gray and black markets, circumventing the lapdog media, and mocking them are tools that bring good results in the long run.
The government will likely respond to such activism through violence, and we may need to defend ourselves, but that does not mean initiation of violence by us will build a better world. Check out @badquakerdotcom's posts and books on sedition, subversion, and sabotage though.
I actually did read that, and I am indeed aware of the flip side, i.e. that many societies have become tyrannical slowly and by degree over the course of years or even decades. Call it the ratchet effect, boiling the frog, or even weaponised pacifism, it's all the same Machiavellian trick. We need to weigh our options when choosing how to fight it.