Thank you Knight.
Esuric,
Romans 14:23 is certainly one of the clearest statements of this fact. See also 2 Timothy 1:7, Matthew 22:29 and Hosea 4:6. In all, there are 63 references in both Testaments attesting to this fact.
nhaag,
Re: ‘Desirous’ v. ‘Inherent’.
I think you may have a good point worth exploring.
Agreed, but I don’t think you are going far enough to point out why?
In other words, in my view, it is precisely BECAUSE God (Religion) exists and is the origin of my existence, authority and freedom that I, (and other individuals who compose a society), take primacy and precedence over the State, which does not exist in the absence of individuals to compose it!
Knight,
That response was to you.
Because the individual can say no to the collectivist garbage of religion and the state. The individual has the true mind–religion and state only have hiveminds.
This seems contrary to history.
Does this fact apply than if you have a healthy fear of God?
He showed both wrong through Hume while you stated that empiricsm, and positivism are based on Hume’s theory of causality thus proving you wrong because both empiricism, and positivism are based on the verification of theories through experience while Popper showed, through Hume’s problem, that this could not be done. While you state that Hume’s theory of causality were utilized by the empiricist and positivists, it was actually that theory that proved to be their undoing.
It does answer the question for me. All these ideas are human constructs. Human freedom is a human idea just like socialism is. And these ideas are based on human desires. Some people want to be free of the herd and some want to be free of material obligations. But they’re both human ideas and as such, reflect on humanity in part and as a whole. You cannot say that socialism is an inhuman doctrine. Socialism is sort of the highest expression of the human desire to have everyone pay for things so that, in effect, no one pays for anything.
“The Individual” is philosophical nonsense, “The Individual” has never existed, rather he lives a collective existence with his fellow men in society, and the society that he lives in has great influence on his identity through the norms, mores, and language that he learns from his society.
Seconded, no man is an island.
But while his actions may be influenced it is ultimately him who decides which actions to take. Attempting to define Humans top down placing ‘society’ or ‘culture’ before the individual will only be done in error. First comes the individual, followed by his community. The individual is one of the many Lego blocks of ‘society’, ‘culture’, and the ‘collective’.
If the collective came before man than we would argue that the collective is an organism, controlling it’s right wing, left wing, and maintaining a single coherent thought. The collective would operate in concert, akin to an ant colony. This is not the case of man. We are not Ants.
This does not nullify the fact that speaking of “The Individual” as if he is an island is nonsense.
The question I ask myself is “to what degree are we like ants?”
I don’t really have a very good answer. But I do know that humans can act as a collective. I know from reading my Origins of Totalitarianism book that totalitarianism is as much a movement of the mob and the masses as anything else. Which implies that humans are able to act as a collective. Like ants. Individuals, ofcourse, make up that collective, but their actions can become synchronized to the point where it becomes difficult to tell where one ends and another begins. There’s no simple way to tell to what degree man acts as individual and to what degree man acts as collective. I’ve been trying to figure out where the split occurs and it seems fuzzy to me.
This problem also occurred to me while I was reading Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Perhaps there is a semantics issue I’m having here but even if a man lives in the heart of NYC, he is still an island and sovereign unto himself, he is not necessarily defendant or sovereign to his neighbors and others.
This would be counter-praxeological.
So writes an individual engaged in a performative contradiction.
No one was talking about individual atomism. Strawman.
And yet is so influenced by his society that he is not an island all to himself. One cannot simply ignore the fact that an individual is a part of his society from when he is being socialized for throughout his life the mores, norms, and language of his culture will influence how he forms his identity, and thoughts. Man does not come into being as an independent being, but rather as a part of a larger social framework hence speaking of “The Individual” is nonsense.
Maybe it is, I’m not a student of praxeology. But if it is counter praxeological, how do you explain bank runs except as a group phenomenon of fear and panic that creates a self reinforcing spiral of deflation? How do you explain boom time behavior of overspeculation and overtrading except as a group phenomenon of mania and euphoria which ignores historical price trends and which creates a self reinforcing spiral of inflation? Humans can act as collectives. Groupthink is a well documented human weakness.
Have you ever seen the experiment with the lines of different length?
To Asch’s surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed to the majority at least once, and 14 of them conformed on more than 6 of the 12 trials. When faced with a unanimous wrong answer by the other group members, the mean subject conformed on 4 of the 12 trials. Asch was disturbed by these results: “The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.”