Anarchists and Children

[Dondoolee]

Many threads bring up questions about the relationship of a child to the rest of the world; what type of “rights” they have, how they are governed, how the “code”/“law” of the system in question treats them, etc. Many threads debate on and on about the “proper way” it would operate under said system, or the utter grotesque failures of the system in question, and then go on to offer a better system which will then usually get shown the grotesque ends of that system.

The truth is though, with one exception; no matter which system you wish to operate under, there will always be grotesque results and wonderful success stories (assuming it is a system with a decent amount of population and some longevity). There are simply too many people, too many opinions, and too many possibilities for this not to happen. There is no possible way one system is good for all.

The reason is simple, no matter what system is offered it’s just - a system. As humans are many and unique a system is one and inflexible. Such a willingness to embrace such a conforming system will inevitably lead to some awful results.

What is the one system that isn’t barbaric? It is “your own”, as you are the ultimate judge of right or wrong. If you obey any other system (and have the power not to) and witness something barbaric and do nothing about it, you are a slave to a system and actually do not care too much about the child you feel is in need.

Fortunately though I think there are some things most of us can take some comfort in if we care about the “for the children” approach, while I do not claim anything I list equals right or leads to the ultimate truth, we do have tools:

-We can look at other primates and mammals and their relationship w/ the young
-Look at biology and developmental psych
-look at history in general

• look to our own personal experiences, philosophies, trials, and tribulations

After that I think we can also depend on a sort of “conformity of good intuition”; meaning that most people do not wish to treat children in a “barbaric and unfair” fashion, and this “intuition” is roughly congruent enough with most people to not cause massive homeostatic trauma to ones environment.

Also I think ALL anarchists could take comfort in the fact that a massively decentralized society leads to much more chances in diversity, opportunity, personalization, and customization for the role and fate of an individual within a society and the ability to act on your own system within your environment

[Amanojack]

In an outstanding article titled The Obviousness of Anarchy in Roderick Long’s 2008 book, John Hasnas writes the following. He’s writing for anarchy vs. government, but the argument works just as well for any pre-ordained system like the objective ethical theories.

@http://mises.org/journals/scholar/hasnas.pdf

Why would anyone think that uniformity in law is any more desirable than uniformity in dress? The quest for uniformity leads us to treat the loving husband who kills his terminally ill wife to relieve her suffering the same way we treat Charles Manson, to apply the same rules of contracting to sophisticated business executives purchasing corporations and semi-literate consumers entering into installment contracts, and to act as though the slum lord in the Bronx and the family letting their spare room in Utica should be governed by the same rules of property law.

There are, of course, certain rules that must apply to all people; those that provide the basic conditions that make cooperative behavior possible. Thus, rules prohibiting murder, assault, theft, and other forms of coercion must be equally binding on all members of a society. But we hardly need government to ensure that this is the case. These rules always evolve first in any community; you would not even have a community if this were not the case.

The idea that we need government to ensure a uniform rule of law is especially crazy in the United States, in which the federal structure of the state and national governments is designed to permit legal diversity. To the extent that the law of the United States can claim any superiority to that produced by other nations, it is at least partially due the fact that it was generated by the common law process in the “laboratory of the states.” Allowing the development of different rules in different states teaches us which rules most effectively resolve disputes. To the extent that the conditions that give rise to disputes are the same across the country, the successful rules tend to be copied by other jurisdictions and spread. This creates a fairly uniform body of law.* To the extent that the conditions that give rise to disputes are peculiar to a particular location or milieu, they do not spread. This creates a patchwork of rules that are useful where applied, but would be irrelevant or disruptive if applied in other settings.

One of the beauties of the common law process is that it creates a body of law that is uniform where uniformity is useful and diverse where it is not. This is the optimal outcome. Government legislation, in contrast, creates uniformity by imposing ill-fitting, one-size-fits-all rules upon a geographically and ethnically diverse population.

*Fairly, but not fetishistically. The law against homicide functions quite effectively despite the fact that the definitions of first and second degree murder and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter differ from state to state.

[Dondoolee]

Cool, thanks for the links. I think this line of thought is almost infinitely and self-evidentely more sane than ANY set in stone system could offer. I do get a little baffled when people reject it. I also think that the language in the articles that you linked could lead to much more productive dialogue and results with others in favor of massive decentralization. Maybe a stronger type of “Anarchist w/o adjectives” approach.

I wonder if the left and right anarchists/ minarchists would be more receptive to each other if this type of language was used

[Amanojack]

That’s exactly what I think. In all the scuffles on this forum every day - both among the regulars here and with left libertarians - I can see how the approach Hasnas details would short-circuit the disagreements. That to me is a red-hot clue that this is a more promising path forward.

[apehead]

It’s funny, you’d think that the egoists would be the most disagreeable folks on the forum, but idealogues really take the cake for vitriolic pig-headedness. Ugh, fixed ideas are awful things!

[Dondoolee]

Yeah funny how that works, but in reality there are probably many awful egoist types out there. From the jock who gave dudes swirlies in high school, the degenerate dude you find in dive bars who will raise hell no matter what, to the politician who loves control and himself. I think there may be a major aesthetics dividing line between the “self reflecting” type egoist to the “natural” egoist (for lack of better terms).

Perhaps the more “natural” types could be likened to the more primitive ancients / children Stirner talked about?

[apehead]

@Dondoolee

I think there may be a major aesthetics dividing line between the “self reflecting” type egoist to the “natural” egoist (for lack of better terms).

By psychological definition, the “natural” egoists you were describing are psychopaths or sociopaths. The “self reflecting” egoist still retains a sense of ethics, either as an artifact of formative indoctrination (church, parents, society), or due to innate instinctual influence (natural empathy, for example), which tempers the desires of the ego.

Of course, there are shades of grey in between.