Sorry, you’re engaging in misrepresentation based on false preconception. I sound nothing like that guy. I’m not opposed to “the family unit” as such. I don’t think that there is anything inherent to the biological relation known as the family that is necessarily oppressive to women. I’m not a gender feminist or some kind of population control nut.
If you don’t accept the nuclear family as a necessary center of the good life, you obviously think that the nuclear family is inherently socially oppressive. (sarcasm)
There is a middle position, that I believe BP and I know I endorse.
All I’m really doing is denying the worth of traditionalist communitarianism, but this doesn’t mean that I inherently must lapse into marxism as a consequence of this. I hate this culture war stuff.
Except when it gives you the opportunity to take a shot at theists.
In that case, I am sorry, would you mind elaborating on your views regarding the family?
That was exactly my point; you do not have to choose between jacobinism and traditionalism. There are other positions.
I haven’t taken any shots at theists in this thread.
Why do you think that? Historically, the weaker the State, the more prominent the pre-State institutions. If you want a glimpse of the future anarchy, you’d do better to study Amish villages and Hasidic townships. Also, take a look at the Catholic communities funded by the Domino’s guy and by the Mel Gibson family.
Quakers are really more Unitarians and, along with the atheists, notoriously infecund. Religious tend to outbreed non-religious.
It seems to me that the implication of anarchy in the modern age is not a reversion to a pre-state society but a progression to a post-state society. I think you’re conflating traditionalism with statelessness in that you seem to act as if traditionalist modes of interaction or organization are the defacto alternatives to the state, which seems to imply a strange quasi-primitivism or romantisization of the past. This isn’t the freaking middle ages.
If pre-state institutions exist today and many people are still religious despite all the secularist brainwashing by the state why would they disappear post-state?
Middle Ages in Europe wasn’t such a bad time in terms of personal freedom. Certainly better than the later centuries with the absolutists governments and the height of religous intolerance.
It’s a progression to a voluntary society. The form of that society, pre or post, is irrelevant.
Not calling you a marxist (in this post) just wanted to point out, that romantisization of the future is a Marxist meme. “How do we reach utopia?”
You and I don’t know what the future will look like, certainly not the future where billions of market actors are behaving in an uncoerced manner. The essence of the economic calculation problem.
In the meanwhile, the constant challenges against people for having preferences rooted in past or present institutions do get tiring. We all get it. No coercion. Non-aggression. Now if some guy wants to prostrate in front of a cross, and read the bible to his children, and he and his wife agree to only socialize with people from their church, then so be it. A formless society is not realistic.
In that case, statism in the form of personifying the state is a form of religion – i.e., a belief in something that is unreal.
What “secularist brainwashing” are you speaking of? And I don’t really consider organized religion to be a pre-state institution. I’m not claiming it would dissapear post-state either (although it would functionally be reduced to a preferance), I’m just observing the degree to which it has functioned as an apologetic for power and the degree to which there has been an intertwined relationship.
I fail to see what relevance it has to a modern free society. It’s not even the same cultural and technological context. It’s not a model for a modern society, it’s obsolete.
And that is precisely part of the point! Accepting the arbitrary authority of something that isn’t real (at least when the concept is compared to the actuality).
My implied point was that by the very nature of this there is no way to return to the past, and that this notion of “the good old days” is clearly a myth.
I never posited utopianism. I just find traditionalism to be irrational (and utopian in its own way).
Precisely. And why is it, then, that some here seem to assue that the natural outcome is a uniform traditionalist revival?
The idea that human society is somehow fundamentally different because we have the internet and air travel is a progressivist myth. Feudalism is actually an entirely appropriate model for anarchist society, and my prediction is it’s coming whether the anarchists like it or not.
For the same reason that today people don’t believe the earth is flat.
Yeah, yeah, we all love the inquisition, feudal slavery, religious wars, that kind of thing – very libertarian.
And my point, is that progress doesn’t not occur without predecessors and their influence.
Right, and I find futurism irrational and much more utopian than traditionalism. At least with traditionalism, we know the failures and issues. Futurism allows the construction of realities where all problems are solved.
I can’t answer for others. They could be very wrong. But as I do not know what the forms will be, I can also admit, they may be right. They are making predictions, and I am listening to them as someone with an open mind.
Trads vs. anti-Trads. More libertarian blood sport.
That’s not what I’m positing. I’m positing that the degree of economic and cultural isolation that characterized medieval society is essentially impossible to maintain in the modern age in light of technological advances, a complexifying division of labor and cultural changes. I’m proposing that the cultural norms of those societies are obsolete today, and they weren’t particularly libertarian to begin with. That, no, the middle ages obviously was not a libertopia.
I don’t think it should take much reflection for one to realize that fuedalism isn’t anarchism. If you’re going to advocate fuedalism as an all-encompassing model, then please stop decieving people by associating it with libertarianism or anarchism, when it’s clearly a framework in which more centralized states form out of and was historically rooted in some degree of coercion.