I know this sounds like a confusion question but my question is essentially
‘but why did government arise in the first place?’
And if it arose in the first place, surely it is a natural phenomenon and would arise again? What is so different about the circumstances today than those during the days of the origins of the state itself?
Not an argument against unlimited secession, I’m afraid. Today we have nukes.
I think basically it is difficult to understand how society might function without someone guiding it. That is, it’s difficult to understand spontaneous order and cooperation. There’s an interesting dualism in Chinese philosophy that arose during the Warring States period between Fa (Law or Legalism) and Li (Principle or Moral guiding force). Of course, Legalism played much more of an important role in developing the Chinese Empire since its theorists advocated using laws in order to control the way people acted in order to gain desired results. Li on the other hand, as far as I can tell, is very similar to natural law and the idea is that people are naturally good and if left alone will tend to their lives peacefully. Obviously, that idea isn’t very useful to people that want elevate their egoes or feel they have some important mission to accomplish as was the case with the first emperor of Qin. The first emperor is credited with many things, but his rule was despotic and totalitarian. People were sent to labor for breaking curfews or the smallest of infractions. I think also it may have to do with impatience. That is, sometimes people don’t want to wait to get the peaceful cooperation of others and want to use some means of force to attain their ends more quickly. That’s my two cents, I hope it wasn’t too rambling.
An interesting Chinese philosopher was Mencius. This is from The Mencius, “Gaozi said, 'Human nature is like whirling water. When an outlet is opened to the east (this is legalist thinking), it flows east; when an outlet is opened to the west, it flows west. Human nature is no more inclined to east or west.” Mencius responded, “Water, it is true, is not inclined either to east or west, but does it have no preference for high or low? Goodness is to human nature like flowing downward is to water. There are no people who are not good and no water that does not flow down. Still, water, if splashed, can go higher than your head; if forced, it can be brought up a hill. THis isn’t the nature of water; it is the specific circumstances. Although people can be made to be bad, their natures are not changed.”
Ironically, what you are expressing is very Rousseauian.
Wow this is really good stuff, cheers 
Although I myself tend to trend away from arguing that human nature will somehow be better/different in a free society; ceteris paribus and everything else.
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The first man who had fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. |
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I didn’t say anything that concerned property, in fact, homesteading seems to me to be a perfectly natural, or if not natural, it is “fair”, occurrence. I think Rousseau probably misjudged what the problem with his society was, and what ours is. I’m not really entirely sure, what you meant when you said that what I said was Rousseauian, so could you elaborate? It seems to me that what I said is very supportive of anarcho-capitalism.
"In common with other philosophers of the day, Rousseau looked to a hypothetical State of Nature as a normative guide.
Rousseau criticized Hobbes for asserting that since man in the “state of nature . . . has no idea of goodness he must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue”. On the contrary, Rousseau holds that “uncorrupted morals” prevail in the “state of nature” and he especially praised the admirable moderation of the Caribbeans in expressing the sexual urge[17] despite the fact that they live in a hot climate, which “always seems to inflame the passions”.[18] This has led Anglophone critics to erroneously attribute to Rousseau the invention of the idea of the noble savage, an oxymoronic expression that was never used in France[19] and which grossly misrepresents Rousseau’s thought.[20] The expression, “the noble savage” was first used in 1672 by British poet John Dryden in his play The Conquest of Granada.[citation needed] Rousseau wrote that morality was not a societal construct, but rather “natural” in the sense of “innate”, an outgrowth from man’s instinctive disinclination to witness suffering, from which arise the emotions of compassion or empathy. These were sentiments shared with animals, and whose existence even Hobbesacknowledged.[21]"
Insofar as Rousseau’s claims support the hypothesis that humans are naturally cooperative, I would agree with that. If you are saying that I am making a “noble savage” claim, I’m not. I’m trying to argue for a characterization of human nature, if such a thing exists. There’s the simple argument that if X is, then X is something, therefore man is, then man must be something. However, according to Wikipedia Rousseau also argued that man could only learn “morality proper” through education in a civil state (“Contrary to what his many detractors have claimed, Rousseau never suggests that humans in the state of nature act morally; in fact, terms such as “justice” or “wickedness” are inapplicable to prepolitical society as Rousseau understands it. Morality proper, i.e., self restraint, can only develop through careful education in a civil state.”)
Personally, I think this is contradicting what he is said to have claimed just in the previous paragraph, i.e. that humans are naturally compassionate. I also don’t agree that “justice” does not apply to prepolitical society. I think ultimately that implies that justice is simply based on might makes right, that is, it is whatever a “civil state” says it is. Next, “Rousseau, a deteriorationist, proposed that, except perhaps for brief moments of balance, at or near its inception, when a relative equality among men prevailed, human civilization has always been artificial, creating inequality, envy, and unnatural desires.[citation needed]”
What kind of equality does he mean? I think it’s obvious that in a state there are inequalities in power, that is some have more power to influence the central authority than others, or to gain political favor and benefits from that central authority. Furthermore, I think it’s also obviously true that civilization is “artificial” in the sense that what we think of as civilization is always a narrative created throught the selective use of history and ideology. I guess what Mencius was arguing was that human nature is good, but circumstances can make it bad, so it’s not necessarily true, from my view, that in a free society human nature will be “better” it will just be.
This is my theory. What is needed to counteract the State is the development of sound moral and legal arguments against State privileges. I believe that States take advantage of evolutionary maladaptive traits but I don’t think we have to wait for these to be bred out. The practice of rape has been severely curtailed by law and I suspect this occurred much more rapidly than the trait could be bred out. State privileges can be ended by law just as any other criminal behavior has been ended but we have long ways to go. With the nearly universal scope of statutory law, we’re further than we’ve ever been and, yet, with the immense progress in the technologies that make moral and legal progress possible (information technologies) we are also closer than we’ve ever been.
Clayton -
What about what I said was Rousseauian?
For all intents and purposes (as far as Sumer is concerned at least) management of grain surplus and religous absolutism.
Allthough there’s this too:
When he was consulted on how Spartans might best forestall invasion of their homeland, Lycurgus advised, "By remaining poor, and each man not desiring to possess more than his fellow
Well, that humans are good and don’t require coercion to act in “socially responsible” ways. Not that I disagree, I just thought it was ironic that libertarians have this Rousseauian view of human nature.
Government originated by conquest. When the first human beings decided to settle down and live in the same place (following the invention of agriculture), they became an easy target for criminal elements. Eventually, some bandit gang must have decided that it would be more profitable for them to stick around and live off of a particular group of victims permanently. Having a government provided them with “protection” against competing criminals by giving their set of criminals a monopoly on crime. In a primitive society, there is no division of labor and thus no market, so it was impossible to provide for defense through the market. Governments also provided other benefits to their subjects, such as a supply of slaves (captured by the government in warfare against other governments and against peoples that did not have government) to fill the labor shortage.
Some governments likely emerged out of religous institutions (although it is hard to tell whether Temple or King came first). Primitive peoples believed in their Pagan gods and believed that the priests were representatives of those gods on Earth. Religion is natural to man and would continue to exist in the absence of a government (I know this is obvious, but there are some blank-slatist atheists who actually claim otherwise). I think it is likely that some priest in some society decided to invent the idea of government and to have the priests operate said government.
In an advanced society with a long-established (mostly) free market and division of labor on a massive (near-global) scale, the market will be capable of providing the necessary law and order services competitively, just as it is capable of providing any other good. Human nature has not changed. The difference is that we have accumulated more knowledge and that we have the foundations of an anarchist society (specifically the free market and division of labor). Because the free market has created affordable and relatively easy to use means of defense and because an unhampered free market can create the necessary institutions, the modern anarchist society could protect itself against efforts to conquer it. This is not a sure thing, as such a society would not be secure so long as any state exists anywhere on Earth (because the very existence of one anarchist society is a refutation of the state’s claims that it is both necessary and inevitable). Anarchism poses an existential threat to all states, which will seize the first opportunity to invade and try to carry out a counter-revolution. The state could not re-emerge through ignorance, as the only way we would ever get rid of it is if people are aware of the merits of capitalist anarchism.
EmperorNero-
I don’t know. I’ve always viewed libertarianism as viewing humans for what they are, taking into account the bad and the good and attempting to think of the best way to minimize the impacts of sociopathic individuals.
I’ve come to the conclusion that governments are ultimately tribal in character. The modern (Western) state also has a manorial layer overlaid on top of the tribal layer. My reasoning goes like this:
The ancestral condition of humanity involved living in relatively small, relatively isolated groups. These groups were territorial in nature - each had a “home range” within which they would migrate in search of forage and game. Essentially, the home range was jointly “owned” by everyone in the group.
As time went on, improvements in technology (i.e. agriculture) led to larger and more stable food supplies, so the groups became more sedentary. I see no reason why this would change their view of land ownership. Keep in mind, however, that the land ownership system that was apparently at work was still a kind of private ownership - not just anyone could use or even access the land. There was a distinction made between members of the group (“natives” or “citizens”) and outsiders (“aliens”).
Of course, technology continued to improve, and with each improvement there came to be a greater division of labor. This also led to increasing interactions with neighboring groups. As the potential for interactions increased, so did the potential for disputes. Throughout this entire time period, there were surely both peaceful and violent interactions between members of different groups.
Violent interactions, or disputes, could have two outcomes. Either they could be settled peacefully by a mediator (“judge”) or they could escalate into a blood feud (“war”). I’m not sure how often the former prevailed over the latter. But when and where it did, it led to a history of dispute settlements (“law”) that could be used as precedents in later disputes. Long-standing contractual agreements (“treaties”) could also be formed between or among groups.
So far, all of this sounds rather libertarian or even anarchic. What, then, led to the state? I think the state was born whenever membership in a group came to be seen as demanding blind obedience to it. Since the earliest groups were based on kinship, and one couldn’t change his kin, one could be considered to be part of a group that he could never leave. When that perception is adopted, it’s conceptually easier to demand blind and total obedience from group members - after all, it would appear that they literally have no choice in the matter.
What did this mean in practice? It meant that one or more “leaders” of the group - typically the oldest male(s) - usurped for themselves authority (i.e. legitimate coercive ability) which they may or may not have already earned from the rest of the group. By this I mean that they turned a privilege into a right. As the saying goes, respect is earned, which means it can be unearned. Usurping previously earned authority meant treating it as though it no longer belonged to the people who had bestowed it, if that makes sense.
Whether this was done through appealing to “tradition”, “experience”, “the majority”, or through sheer force, it didn’t matter. Interestingly enough, a similar thing goes on today with corporations. A lot of corporate innuendo seems to be about management usurping de facto ownership (i.e. control) of a corporation from its true owners, the shareholders.
..which would make one think: isn’t our focus on the state wrong to begin with? Perhaps it’s just a matter of spontaneous rules. Many groups evolve spontaneous rules over time, and the groups with the best rules expand. Through a trial and error unconscious process, we approach ever closer to full individual sovereignty as the highest social rule. The state is just e remnant of former rule sets, not an enemy in itself, and will be done away with when some group that spontaneously evolves into an anarcho-capitalist order survives long enough. Of course, our modern world lack spontaneous orders, but is run on enforced orders, which kind of slows the process down a lot.
Merlin-
How is it an unconscious process? It’s pretty ridiculous to say its unconscious given human action.
I think your last sentence answers your initial question, namely in the negative.
I mean ‘unconscious’ as in producing unforeseen consequences, and not in its real psychological sense the market is spontaneous because it produces effects far beyond any participant’s intents.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. After all, event he enforced orders of today are the spontaneous (i.e. largely unplanned) consequences of initial natural orders. Hence, perhaps not enforcing would be unnatural right now.
If I understand your argument correctly, then by your reasoning, any given murder would be considered natural - after all, the murderer naturally wanted to commit the murder. So you can see that I don’t hold this kind of naturalism as my yardstick in evaluating the state. Otherwise, I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
There is a difference. A murder is indeed a simple human action, i.e. the murderer wants to kill, and pursues the means that will bring about the end he seeks.
Spontaneous orders, on the other hand, are such that no one designed them willingly, but they arise through the interlocking of a myriad of actions producing unintended consequences. So, they are ‘independent’ of our will (please, let’s not dwell on terms, I know that’s not true in the first sense).
So, the murderer can chose not to kill as he can choose to kill. Than, since he can chose, we can say easily that his action is immoral. The emergence of a spontaneous order, on the other hand, cannot be prevented, as no one designed it in the first place, so speaking of a ‘moral’ natural order is meaningless, as wrong implies the possibility to do right. 2+2 is 4, and that’s neither right nor wrong, but just is.