Why the heck do we need a philosophy about liberty? The government has no right to restrict my liberty. In fact, government has no special right to even exist.
Because it's clearly not the natural tendency of people. Liberty for *them*, certainly. It's the liberty for *others* part which seems to require some philosophical instruction.
My parents did. We lived in a very small community in Belgium at the time, about 4000 and we knew our mayor, our financial person for the community, and the policeman. I am not sure there were more than 3 people in all. then in the 1970s it was considered that big was better, and the national govt fused 8 communities. The ruling went to the biggest one of course - we still knew our mayor since he had been in another post before. But barely any of the rest. And last year it was considered this was still not enough and 3 of these already fused ones were put together again. The people were not asked it they wanted this, not with the first, not now. Big is Bad. We can see it everywhere. When in that small community, we could call on the mayor and we could raise our voice when things went wrong. We knew him personally - he was a farmer in our village. The secretary was a man from our village. Where are we going to shout now? They won't even notice.
Sure, big is bad for us, but a smaller number of independent policies is significantly easier for the central planners to manage. Which is why they do it.
By which you mean to say that the central planners are evil and disgusting, hate everyone else, don't wish to involve the consent of the governed, and are therefore tyrants. kthxbye
I believe the Arabic language version of it did so, yes. I believe that was the direct reason Obama started spewing his lies about "ISIL" out of his evil vicious desire to hurt other people as much as possible.
Ideas and principles matter. Emotions matter. So do resources. You may have noticed that the peoples in Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi, Syria, Jordan, etc., are not exactly living any sort of freedom decentral lifestyle. They have been kept in slavery for generations. I blame the military occult banking syndicates, house Windsor, and other demon worshippers. If we're actually going to free any million or more of slaves, we have much work ahead.
In the year 2000 it was a request from a friend with whom I was working on a project in east Africa that I attend the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty. Another friend was kind enough to lend me his Volkswagen which got excellent gas mileage and so I set out from my home in Houston and drove up to London, Ontario for the event. Back in those better days of less communism there was no requirement to present documentation such as a passport to cross the border either way. So I spent some time in Ontario.
One of the presenters at the event was Ken Schoolland. Also at the event was Kerry Pearson. About 200 people altogether including Sarah Fitz-Claridge of "Taking Children Seriously," Hans Hermann Hoppe of fame and glory, Guido Huelsmann, myself, an expert on cuneiform writing, and a number of others. Kerry was more widely known at the time by his Internet handle "Lux Luthor" and was an animator. He was working with Ken on a short video based on "The Philosophy of Liberty" which doesn't look at all like the static image shown in your post. For my own part, I really liked his version of the video. Kerry passed away some years back. Ken, last I heard, was still living with his family though he is getting elderly as these things are accounted amongst humans in this era.
Well, the video was quite a hit later that same year. So its words were translated into many languages. Sometime around 2006 as Obama was infiltrating the USA senate, the video was translated into Arabic. By the time mass murderer Hillary and mass murderer Obama were exposed by the WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks revelations, Kerry's version of the video, in Arabic, had over 2 million views on YouTube. I think that would have been 2011. It was about this same time that Obama, being an evil Maoist, a hateful communist, and a mass murderer, began referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, known widely as ISIS, and regionally called "Daesh" in their language, by the phrase "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" and quite often with the acronym ISIL. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he did it because he is an evil disgusting pervert, scoundrel, rapist, and murderer. Well, of course, the ISIL.org web site was targetted by trolls and by ordinary people who thought they were attacking something to do with Daesh. So they re-branded as Liberty International. I have stopped going to their events since about 2016. But those are other stories for another time.
It was not. I've posted a link to the earlier (original) video showing 678K views on YouTube. It shows the original Kerry Pearson aka Lux Lucre animation. There is no voice over which seems to be a plus to the new one. I heartily dislike the wild west cartoonish depiction of the philosophy in the video you've chosen. But, I also dislike much about the entire YouTube system. For the original isil.org web site you might try the WayBack Machine or Internet Archive. You'd have to go to about 2010 I think to get a good count on the video's views on that platform, though I don't know if the view count was public. I can introduce you to the current mistress of ceremonies for Liberty International, Dr. Mary Ruwart MD PhD by email if you wish. The progenitor of the International Society of Individual Liberty, Vince Miller, passed away some years ago. My friend who was working with me in east Africa is also gone now but he was there at the very first meeting of ISIL in the early 1980s.
I prefer the original too. I find the cowboy graphics in the new one a distraction. If you search Youtube for Philosophy of Liberty the old one, posted 19 years ago, is at the top of the feed.
It seems a relatively recent distillation of the concepts is organizing relationships both between individuals and between the state and the individual into consensual versus coercive interactions.
Does it? My friend Ken Schoolland wrote those ideas in 1981, well before I met him in AD 2000. He and others were living in Alaska at the time and the ideas first became widely disseminated in a series of radio broadcasts on economic freedom. He subsequently worked to have the same ideas, and quite a few more, published as _The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey_ which has a publishing date of 1989. What you describe as cowboy graphics are in the currently pushed and purportedly "popular" minimalist, cartoonish, childish "school" of art. I think pre-school, really. It is part of the anti-realist, anti-human approach to mock and make fun of everything and everyone. I find the adoption of these graphics to be a tremendous disappointment. And, frankly, would like the people responsible for Liberty International to, well, act their several ages.
You mean besides the millions of views of the video on the http://ISIL.org web site for the years 2000 to 2011? Or the readers of the sixty languages into which his book The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey has been translated and the estimated hundreds of thousands of copies sold or distributed with some suggestions it may have had a million impressions? I wouldn’t know what you mean by “so little traction” given those figures. Probably because Joe Rogan has never had him on the Joe Rogan Experience? Or maybe because mass murdering child raping cannibal freemason demon worshippers don’t want his ideas to get traction? I have had the thought that Obama deliberately began calling ISIS by the term ISIL with the deliberate intention of causing thousands of people to work very hard to destroy the ISIL web site and presence. But, hey, they never sent a hit squad to exterminate the lot of us, so that’s probably what you mean. We got so little traction to protect us from being murdered. Yeah. Try that.
I don't mind the animation so much, given how good the message is. It's *essentially* that message, carried to its logical conclusion, that ultimately drove me to anarchism.
Same here. I was so locked in on the message that I only started to notice that I disliked the animation—and all the stupid noises the characters were making—near the end.
Thanks! I liked it. Putting it into practice is so key. As I watched I thought of people I know who espouse such sentiments and at the same time have ignored the boundaries I expressed. I remember when I taught six year olds and we would act out the wrong way to do something and the alternative. It was fun and really brought it home in a very felt sense to everyone. Maybe we need stages to role play some of these things so they land in a cellular way?
“Ok everybody, I need a two volunteers. Thanks, you two. Now, I want you to pretend you are sisters. One of you has a dress and the other wants to borrow it. First, let’s pretend she sneaks into the room and just takes it. Then her sister finds it all crumpled on the bed. Anybody got something we could use for the dress? Great….(they act it out). Now, how do you each feel? Let’s try something different. Anybody got any ideas? And what if she says no and her sister still wants it…?” But then I would get them to practice with one another next…first the way that doesn’t feel good or go well and then the other alternative. When they had to line up for something (and I didn’t like forcing them to walk in lines but I made compromises—and also quit public teaching after less than two years 😘😂but when they all wouldn’t stop trying to be first I would wait until they lined up and then make the back of the line the front, or make the person in the middle first. It was fun and funny and the habit of shoving one another for no good reason softened. I did have some fun when I used to teach. That idea came to me as my sister used to sneak in my room and borrow my clothes when I asked her not to and I was thinking of boundaries this morning as my antigovernment anarchist parents refused to do anything about it. They were not good at respecting personal boundaries either. Sometimes the obvious things need the most practice as nothing matters unless one can actually live it.That is a long response and I love the cartoon you shared and then then making things obvious and fun to learn.
> We go through life acting according to these principles. We defend our property and our lives. We feel the moral indignation when someone encroaches upon our person, property, or liberty without our consent. We know it’s wrong, deep down in our bones.
The first sentence there deserves pushback. People do NOT go through life acting according to these principles of natural human rights. They go through life acting on desires to obtain stuff and to not lose the stuff they have. There are plenty of reasons why a person would defend his/her property and life that have nothing to do with principles of natural rights.
This brings us to why the last sentence also warrants a caveat. Two people can each "know it's wrong, deep down in our bones" but have very different and incompatible motivations for *why* it's wrong.
The reason why a universal application of pre-political (natural) human rights need to be learned -- and, therefore, need to be taught -- is because they're NOT our deepest human nature and motivation. They're NOT obvious.
I agree that they need to be learned. Obviously we don’t know the principles.
But I am going to give some pushback on your pushback. We certainly behave according to the brute fact natural premises that underly those principles.
Specifically,
1. We each have a rightful domain—our person, property, and liberty—that belongs to us and to no other. We do not understand it in those words, but we definitely act according to the understanding. Everything reacts when its body, life, property, freedom, etc. are threatened.
2. No one else has any rightful license to act within or encroach upon that rightful domain without our consent. Here too, we do not know it in as many words, but everyone has that visceral, indignant “YOU HAVE NO RIGHT!” reaction. Everyone feels it. The anger. The enraged, “I did not agree to this!” feeling. Even moral relativists. Even people who oppose the concept of ethical naturalism still have this natural reaction. Because it’s natural!
Heck, even plants know they’re being eaten, and they don’t like it.
No. 2 is an ethical statement, not something evident from human nature. There's nothing about the natural reaction to being infringed that would necessarily universalize into an ethic of universal valid claims for every person. Such a notion is new and rare in human history (and still rare today, even among people in "free" countries).
> Heck, even plants know they’re being eaten, and they don’t like it.
And yet some plants that don't like being eaten, trap flies and eat them. Weeds choke out other plants and feast on their remains. Taller plants block sunlight from shorter plants. Etc., etc., etc.
Principles aren't human nature, and the premises of human nature neither inevitably nor easily become the principles you seek.
The reason they need to be taught is precisely because they're not obvious and do not automatically follow from our human nature.
Really, who needs to be taught things that are obviously deep human nature?
#2 has normative implications, but it itself is a statement of natural fact. Ontological authority—birthright, inherent, automatic authority—does not exist in nature. All authority must either be granted consensually or imposed by force.
Anyone who attempts to refute this and assert some form of authority is stuck in a performative contradiction. If they assert that they have a right to rule me in my own domain and I refuse, they have no choice but to impose their rule by force.
(Note, this is a similar method to Rothbard’s proof that all creatures seek valued ends. When someone disagrees, they are seeking the valued end of disagreement. They cannot disagree without proving the claim.)
> Ontological authority—birthright, inherent, automatic authority—does not exist in nature. All authority must either be granted consensually or imposed by force.
*Political* authority is a construct, yes. You could argue that might-makes-right exists in nature (and in human nature), but that animals (and humans) have developed social mechanisms to reduce the cost of having to make every friction a form of combat.
On consensual vs. imposed, I agree that those are the two categories of options. Of those two, imposed/might-makes-right seems more natural. The problem is, scaling up leads to slave-master societies that struggle to escape subsistence-level existence. Consensual, when trying to scale up, is more flourishing. The problem is, it goes *against* what is most obvious about us, and therefore requires more effort to arrive at and maintain.
Might-makes-right doesn't have to be taught and learned, because it's obvious and closer to human nature.
Natural human rights aren't obvious and are more abstract than deep nature, and so have to be taught and learned.
[As an aside- I would argue that both coercion and persuasion are natural. There are plenty of examples of force winning the day in nature, but there are also just as many examples of cooperation, non-lethal dispute resolution (dances, displays, etc.), peaceful respect for territory, reciprocal altruism, etc. If nature were nothing but violence, everything would be dead.]
You're describing the utility of non-lethal force. But that's still harm/coercion. Not all violence is deadly violence. Taxation is theft, is violence, and is an example of non-lethal force.
I'd say that non-lethal violence and non-violent persuasion are different things.
Okay, so I think we are on the same page. We might not arrive there via the same route, but I think we come to the same conclusions. But just to be sure, can you tell me what your conclusions are? What are the fundamental premises and principles that make you an anarchist?
No rulers, and no wannabe rulers. No willing support of monopoly-violence institutions, coercive civil authority, imposed hierarchical social order (however you prefer to describe/define it).
And I realize that this goes against some extremely deep aspects of human nature; it's obvious why someone would be what we call a statist, but it's not obvious why anyone would be an anarchist.
I would also like to point out that when someone works, they are giving up part of their life (time, we only have so much) and so, their property also represents part of their life.
Nobody has a right to anyone else's life, and so nobody has a right to anyone else's property.
We solve it closest to home. We don’t worry about the world. We get our own houses in order. We build our own worlds. And then we have lots of babies and raise them right!
Yes, the local focus makes sense but it’s a big problem that not enough doctors are willing to address - medicating people for normal problems of stress, anxiety, etc but drugging children- whose frontal lobes do not develop until at least 21- has had devastating effects on society at large.
It does. It deserves a macro fix. I hope someone is working on that. We need people pushing on the wall from all directions. They way I figure it, though, is
A) we have more than enough people working within the system, and not enough people working on exit-and-build. So I figure the within-the-system efforts can spare a few of us.
B) it is good to focus on what we can control, and we can definitely control the close-to-home stuff.
I surely agree, too! I will say though, that the act of accounting for Our energy added into a system via "money" in any form gives rise to the ability to pay People to be bullies...
And when it's You against a gang of bullies, You are likely to lose.
And given We have tech both to obsolete the accounting for Our energy and to automate needed work no One WANTS to do, We can see that "money" in all forms is archaic, but the tech to obsolete accounting for Our energy (and therefore "money") is well hidden and suppressed by the moneyed Ones presently in control.
They surely don't want to lose Their power to buy the things and the People (including bullies) to Their agendas.
No offence to the author, but to me this is one flat-as-a-pancake platitude piled on another.
Sentence 1/ 'This philosophy is based on the principle of self-ownership: You own your life'. This is a trivial truth, contributing nothing, and leading to nothing. You might as well say: 'You own your hands'. Well thanks for telling me.
Sentence 2/ 'To deny this is to imply that another person has a higher claim on your life than you have'. Another utter platitude - to deny it is like denying that humans breathe.
Sentence 3/ 'No other person, or group of persons owns your life'. Ditto for this empty, vacuous claim. (I am assuming that the author means 'owns' ontologically here).
Sentence 4/ 'Nor do you own the lives of others'. Of course I don't, how could I, naturally speaking? Legally is another matter, e.g. if I ‘legally owned’ a pet.
Sentence 5/ 'You exist in time: future, present and past.' This equates to: 'You are reading this because you can see and you can understand English.' Oh, no kidding.
Sentence 6 Part 1/ 'This [time] is manifest in life ...' In other words, life is lived in and through time. Well knock me over with a feather.
Sentence 6 Part 2/ '[Time is manifest in life...] liberty and the product of your life and liberty'. This is an explanatory cheat: Out of nowhere, with no foundation whatever, the word 'liberty' is slipped in, by verbal sleight of hand. 'Liberty' is what this text is supposed to be about - it's in the title - and yet it enters without definition, like a thief in the night. It is likely that the author means 'freedom', 'autonomy', or what they call 'self-ownership', when they use the word 'liberty', but should they not have said so – in a ‘philosophy of liberty’?
Sentences 7/8/9/& 10/ Are also totally inconsequential, glaringly obvious facts, adding nothing to nothing.
Sentence 11/ 'A product of your life and liberty is your property.' Here a new and important concept is added: 'property'. Nevertheless, all we get is more verbal froth, amounting to: 'Because you have your own autonomous life, you can go and get yourself a job, and earn money, and you can buy things with that money, and those things you will “own”, and hence they will be your “property”'. Oh, you don’t say.
We then get another mouthful of rhetorical candyfloss, ranging from the observation that humans barter and exchange - is there anyone who didn't know that? - to stating that if someone comes along and tries to take your stuff, you're going to try to take it back. All animal know this too of course, there is no need to speak of 'rights' here, this is still in the realm of nature, but if you are going to talk about rights surely you should define the term, and yet once again the author just slips it in as follows:
'You have the right to protect your own life, liberty, and justly acquired property from the forceful aggression of others'. Apparently, the author thinks it's okay not to point out that the term 'right' can mean different things: 'natural rights' - the rights we have in virtue of being in the world - 'God-given rights' - the rights bestowed (for those who believe in this) by a separate creator-being - and 'legal rights' - the rights that you have in virtue of the legal system you live under. In any case, the point being made is a damp squib, amounting to: 'It's okay for you to fight back if someone tries to take your stuff, and they will fight back if you try to take their stuff'. Isn't that what all living creatures know and do anyway and already?
I'm afraid that was all I could take of this rhetorical concoction, which, in any case, ends up floating away, carried off in its own hot air balloon, hopefully with Dominic Frisbee on board.
That wasn’t its purpose, though. It was just a five-minute video talking about the principles. Explaining how a condition of consensual order could be maintained by private, voluntary, and market means takes a little longer.
There is plenty of information out there, if you are interested.
What addresses those is the obsoleting of the tool that makes crime alluring and pays for wars. Antisocial behavior would be irrelevant as long as the three Laws of Ethics are upheld by Most, whose duty it is to arrest (or call for help in arresting) Any who break those Laws...
Why the heck do we need a philosophy about liberty? The government has no right to restrict my liberty. In fact, government has no special right to even exist.
Because it's clearly not the natural tendency of people. Liberty for *them*, certainly. It's the liberty for *others* part which seems to require some philosophical instruction.
My parents did. We lived in a very small community in Belgium at the time, about 4000 and we knew our mayor, our financial person for the community, and the policeman. I am not sure there were more than 3 people in all. then in the 1970s it was considered that big was better, and the national govt fused 8 communities. The ruling went to the biggest one of course - we still knew our mayor since he had been in another post before. But barely any of the rest. And last year it was considered this was still not enough and 3 of these already fused ones were put together again. The people were not asked it they wanted this, not with the first, not now. Big is Bad. We can see it everywhere. When in that small community, we could call on the mayor and we could raise our voice when things went wrong. We knew him personally - he was a farmer in our village. The secretary was a man from our village. Where are we going to shout now? They won't even notice.
Sure, big is bad for us, but a smaller number of independent policies is significantly easier for the central planners to manage. Which is why they do it.
By which you mean to say that the central planners are evil and disgusting, hate everyone else, don't wish to involve the consent of the governed, and are therefore tyrants. kthxbye
Well, yes. That's pretty much exactly what I meant. :D
I don't wish to alarm you anon but the video that started the Arab Spring was this one, in its Arabic translation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muHg86Mys7I
Oh yeah, I think I posted that one last year or the year before. And you say it helped spur the Arab Spring?
I believe the Arabic language version of it did so, yes. I believe that was the direct reason Obama started spewing his lies about "ISIL" out of his evil vicious desire to hurt other people as much as possible.
So ideas and principles DO matter. People keep telling me that I focus too much on logic—that only emotional appeals work.
Ideas and principles matter. Emotions matter. So do resources. You may have noticed that the peoples in Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi, Syria, Jordan, etc., are not exactly living any sort of freedom decentral lifestyle. They have been kept in slavery for generations. I blame the military occult banking syndicates, house Windsor, and other demon worshippers. If we're actually going to free any million or more of slaves, we have much work ahead.
Much work indeed!
And I agree, emotion and reason are both essential.
In the year 2000 it was a request from a friend with whom I was working on a project in east Africa that I attend the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty. Another friend was kind enough to lend me his Volkswagen which got excellent gas mileage and so I set out from my home in Houston and drove up to London, Ontario for the event. Back in those better days of less communism there was no requirement to present documentation such as a passport to cross the border either way. So I spent some time in Ontario.
One of the presenters at the event was Ken Schoolland. Also at the event was Kerry Pearson. About 200 people altogether including Sarah Fitz-Claridge of "Taking Children Seriously," Hans Hermann Hoppe of fame and glory, Guido Huelsmann, myself, an expert on cuneiform writing, and a number of others. Kerry was more widely known at the time by his Internet handle "Lux Luthor" and was an animator. He was working with Ken on a short video based on "The Philosophy of Liberty" which doesn't look at all like the static image shown in your post. For my own part, I really liked his version of the video. Kerry passed away some years back. Ken, last I heard, was still living with his family though he is getting elderly as these things are accounted amongst humans in this era.
Well, the video was quite a hit later that same year. So its words were translated into many languages. Sometime around 2006 as Obama was infiltrating the USA senate, the video was translated into Arabic. By the time mass murderer Hillary and mass murderer Obama were exposed by the WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks revelations, Kerry's version of the video, in Arabic, had over 2 million views on YouTube. I think that would have been 2011. It was about this same time that Obama, being an evil Maoist, a hateful communist, and a mass murderer, began referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, known widely as ISIS, and regionally called "Daesh" in their language, by the phrase "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" and quite often with the acronym ISIL. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he did it because he is an evil disgusting pervert, scoundrel, rapist, and murderer. Well, of course, the ISIL.org web site was targetted by trolls and by ordinary people who thought they were attacking something to do with Daesh. So they re-branded as Liberty International. I have stopped going to their events since about 2016. But those are other stories for another time.
Was the video the same as this one?
It was not. I've posted a link to the earlier (original) video showing 678K views on YouTube. It shows the original Kerry Pearson aka Lux Lucre animation. There is no voice over which seems to be a plus to the new one. I heartily dislike the wild west cartoonish depiction of the philosophy in the video you've chosen. But, I also dislike much about the entire YouTube system. For the original isil.org web site you might try the WayBack Machine or Internet Archive. You'd have to go to about 2010 I think to get a good count on the video's views on that platform, though I don't know if the view count was public. I can introduce you to the current mistress of ceremonies for Liberty International, Dr. Mary Ruwart MD PhD by email if you wish. The progenitor of the International Society of Individual Liberty, Vince Miller, passed away some years ago. My friend who was working with me in east Africa is also gone now but he was there at the very first meeting of ISIL in the early 1980s.
No need now, but at some point, an intro will be good. Thanks!
I prefer the original too. I find the cowboy graphics in the new one a distraction. If you search Youtube for Philosophy of Liberty the old one, posted 19 years ago, is at the top of the feed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muHg86Mys7I
It seems a relatively recent distillation of the concepts is organizing relationships both between individuals and between the state and the individual into consensual versus coercive interactions.
Does it? My friend Ken Schoolland wrote those ideas in 1981, well before I met him in AD 2000. He and others were living in Alaska at the time and the ideas first became widely disseminated in a series of radio broadcasts on economic freedom. He subsequently worked to have the same ideas, and quite a few more, published as _The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey_ which has a publishing date of 1989. What you describe as cowboy graphics are in the currently pushed and purportedly "popular" minimalist, cartoonish, childish "school" of art. I think pre-school, really. It is part of the anti-realist, anti-human approach to mock and make fun of everything and everyone. I find the adoption of these graphics to be a tremendous disappointment. And, frankly, would like the people responsible for Liberty International to, well, act their several ages.
His were powerful ideas. Why did they get so little traction in 45 years?
You mean besides the millions of views of the video on the http://ISIL.org web site for the years 2000 to 2011? Or the readers of the sixty languages into which his book The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey has been translated and the estimated hundreds of thousands of copies sold or distributed with some suggestions it may have had a million impressions? I wouldn’t know what you mean by “so little traction” given those figures. Probably because Joe Rogan has never had him on the Joe Rogan Experience? Or maybe because mass murdering child raping cannibal freemason demon worshippers don’t want his ideas to get traction? I have had the thought that Obama deliberately began calling ISIS by the term ISIL with the deliberate intention of causing thousands of people to work very hard to destroy the ISIL web site and presence. But, hey, they never sent a hit squad to exterminate the lot of us, so that’s probably what you mean. We got so little traction to protect us from being murdered. Yeah. Try that.
Really great encapsulation of basic liberty concepts. Thanks!
Right on!
Excellent message, marginal presentation.
Agreed.
I don't mind the animation so much, given how good the message is. It's *essentially* that message, carried to its logical conclusion, that ultimately drove me to anarchism.
Same here. I was so locked in on the message that I only started to notice that I disliked the animation—and all the stupid noises the characters were making—near the end.
Hunh. I didn't even notice the noises. 🤣
That's how much we refer the message!
Thanks! I liked it. Putting it into practice is so key. As I watched I thought of people I know who espouse such sentiments and at the same time have ignored the boundaries I expressed. I remember when I taught six year olds and we would act out the wrong way to do something and the alternative. It was fun and really brought it home in a very felt sense to everyone. Maybe we need stages to role play some of these things so they land in a cellular way?
Stages. Interesting. Can you describe what you have in mind?
I tend to think it terms of catechismic teaching:
——
What belongs to you and no other?
My rightful domain.
What is your rightful domain?
My person, property, and liberty.
Who has rightful license to exercise control over your rightful domain?
No one but me.
Who has rightful license to act within your rightful domain?
No one but those to whom I have given valid consent.
When is consent valid?
Only when it is voluntary, explicit, specific, transparent, informed, and revocable.
——
That sort of thing…
“Ok everybody, I need a two volunteers. Thanks, you two. Now, I want you to pretend you are sisters. One of you has a dress and the other wants to borrow it. First, let’s pretend she sneaks into the room and just takes it. Then her sister finds it all crumpled on the bed. Anybody got something we could use for the dress? Great….(they act it out). Now, how do you each feel? Let’s try something different. Anybody got any ideas? And what if she says no and her sister still wants it…?” But then I would get them to practice with one another next…first the way that doesn’t feel good or go well and then the other alternative. When they had to line up for something (and I didn’t like forcing them to walk in lines but I made compromises—and also quit public teaching after less than two years 😘😂but when they all wouldn’t stop trying to be first I would wait until they lined up and then make the back of the line the front, or make the person in the middle first. It was fun and funny and the habit of shoving one another for no good reason softened. I did have some fun when I used to teach. That idea came to me as my sister used to sneak in my room and borrow my clothes when I asked her not to and I was thinking of boundaries this morning as my antigovernment anarchist parents refused to do anything about it. They were not good at respecting personal boundaries either. Sometimes the obvious things need the most practice as nothing matters unless one can actually live it.That is a long response and I love the cartoon you shared and then then making things obvious and fun to learn.
That is interesting about your parents. I guess they confused the absence of government with the absence of order.
They wouldn’t happen to have started on the left and then moved in an anarchist direction, would they?
No…I can see the reasoning behind that though.
Good approach. It’s the emotion side. When added to the logic side, it’s a good combo!
> We go through life acting according to these principles. We defend our property and our lives. We feel the moral indignation when someone encroaches upon our person, property, or liberty without our consent. We know it’s wrong, deep down in our bones.
The first sentence there deserves pushback. People do NOT go through life acting according to these principles of natural human rights. They go through life acting on desires to obtain stuff and to not lose the stuff they have. There are plenty of reasons why a person would defend his/her property and life that have nothing to do with principles of natural rights.
This brings us to why the last sentence also warrants a caveat. Two people can each "know it's wrong, deep down in our bones" but have very different and incompatible motivations for *why* it's wrong.
The reason why a universal application of pre-political (natural) human rights need to be learned -- and, therefore, need to be taught -- is because they're NOT our deepest human nature and motivation. They're NOT obvious.
I agree that they need to be learned. Obviously we don’t know the principles.
But I am going to give some pushback on your pushback. We certainly behave according to the brute fact natural premises that underly those principles.
Specifically,
1. We each have a rightful domain—our person, property, and liberty—that belongs to us and to no other. We do not understand it in those words, but we definitely act according to the understanding. Everything reacts when its body, life, property, freedom, etc. are threatened.
2. No one else has any rightful license to act within or encroach upon that rightful domain without our consent. Here too, we do not know it in as many words, but everyone has that visceral, indignant “YOU HAVE NO RIGHT!” reaction. Everyone feels it. The anger. The enraged, “I did not agree to this!” feeling. Even moral relativists. Even people who oppose the concept of ethical naturalism still have this natural reaction. Because it’s natural!
Heck, even plants know they’re being eaten, and they don’t like it.
No. 2 is an ethical statement, not something evident from human nature. There's nothing about the natural reaction to being infringed that would necessarily universalize into an ethic of universal valid claims for every person. Such a notion is new and rare in human history (and still rare today, even among people in "free" countries).
> Heck, even plants know they’re being eaten, and they don’t like it.
And yet some plants that don't like being eaten, trap flies and eat them. Weeds choke out other plants and feast on their remains. Taller plants block sunlight from shorter plants. Etc., etc., etc.
Principles aren't human nature, and the premises of human nature neither inevitably nor easily become the principles you seek.
The reason they need to be taught is precisely because they're not obvious and do not automatically follow from our human nature.
Really, who needs to be taught things that are obviously deep human nature?
#2 has normative implications, but it itself is a statement of natural fact. Ontological authority—birthright, inherent, automatic authority—does not exist in nature. All authority must either be granted consensually or imposed by force.
Anyone who attempts to refute this and assert some form of authority is stuck in a performative contradiction. If they assert that they have a right to rule me in my own domain and I refuse, they have no choice but to impose their rule by force.
(Note, this is a similar method to Rothbard’s proof that all creatures seek valued ends. When someone disagrees, they are seeking the valued end of disagreement. They cannot disagree without proving the claim.)
> Ontological authority—birthright, inherent, automatic authority—does not exist in nature. All authority must either be granted consensually or imposed by force.
*Political* authority is a construct, yes. You could argue that might-makes-right exists in nature (and in human nature), but that animals (and humans) have developed social mechanisms to reduce the cost of having to make every friction a form of combat.
On consensual vs. imposed, I agree that those are the two categories of options. Of those two, imposed/might-makes-right seems more natural. The problem is, scaling up leads to slave-master societies that struggle to escape subsistence-level existence. Consensual, when trying to scale up, is more flourishing. The problem is, it goes *against* what is most obvious about us, and therefore requires more effort to arrive at and maintain.
Might-makes-right doesn't have to be taught and learned, because it's obvious and closer to human nature.
Natural human rights aren't obvious and are more abstract than deep nature, and so have to be taught and learned.
[As an aside- I would argue that both coercion and persuasion are natural. There are plenty of examples of force winning the day in nature, but there are also just as many examples of cooperation, non-lethal dispute resolution (dances, displays, etc.), peaceful respect for territory, reciprocal altruism, etc. If nature were nothing but violence, everything would be dead.]
You're describing the utility of non-lethal force. But that's still harm/coercion. Not all violence is deadly violence. Taxation is theft, is violence, and is an example of non-lethal force.
I'd say that non-lethal violence and non-violent persuasion are different things.
Okay, so I think we are on the same page. We might not arrive there via the same route, but I think we come to the same conclusions. But just to be sure, can you tell me what your conclusions are? What are the fundamental premises and principles that make you an anarchist?
No rulers, and no wannabe rulers. No willing support of monopoly-violence institutions, coercive civil authority, imposed hierarchical social order (however you prefer to describe/define it).
And I realize that this goes against some extremely deep aspects of human nature; it's obvious why someone would be what we call a statist, but it's not obvious why anyone would be an anarchist.
That's a great video!
I'm definitely going to show this to my children.
I would also like to point out that when someone works, they are giving up part of their life (time, we only have so much) and so, their property also represents part of their life.
Nobody has a right to anyone else's life, and so nobody has a right to anyone else's property.
Amen to all that!
Thanks! It says it all, and “it’s easier to do nothing.”
The medication generation has grown up, compliantly taking their daily soma now, thus they have become apathetic, so how do we solve that issue?
We solve it closest to home. We don’t worry about the world. We get our own houses in order. We build our own worlds. And then we have lots of babies and raise them right!
Yes, the local focus makes sense but it’s a big problem that not enough doctors are willing to address - medicating people for normal problems of stress, anxiety, etc but drugging children- whose frontal lobes do not develop until at least 21- has had devastating effects on society at large.
It does. It deserves a macro fix. I hope someone is working on that. We need people pushing on the wall from all directions. They way I figure it, though, is
A) we have more than enough people working within the system, and not enough people working on exit-and-build. So I figure the within-the-system efforts can spare a few of us.
B) it is good to focus on what we can control, and we can definitely control the close-to-home stuff.
There’s lots of work to do and my humblest thanks for all you do!
And mine to you!
I surely agree, too! I will say though, that the act of accounting for Our energy added into a system via "money" in any form gives rise to the ability to pay People to be bullies...
And when it's You against a gang of bullies, You are likely to lose.
And given We have tech both to obsolete the accounting for Our energy and to automate needed work no One WANTS to do, We can see that "money" in all forms is archaic, but the tech to obsolete accounting for Our energy (and therefore "money") is well hidden and suppressed by the moneyed Ones presently in control.
They surely don't want to lose Their power to buy the things and the People (including bullies) to Their agendas.
The Problems in Profit (article): https://amaterasusolar.substack.com/p/the-problems-in-profit
'The Philosophy of Liberty' - A critique
No offence to the author, but to me this is one flat-as-a-pancake platitude piled on another.
Sentence 1/ 'This philosophy is based on the principle of self-ownership: You own your life'. This is a trivial truth, contributing nothing, and leading to nothing. You might as well say: 'You own your hands'. Well thanks for telling me.
Sentence 2/ 'To deny this is to imply that another person has a higher claim on your life than you have'. Another utter platitude - to deny it is like denying that humans breathe.
Sentence 3/ 'No other person, or group of persons owns your life'. Ditto for this empty, vacuous claim. (I am assuming that the author means 'owns' ontologically here).
Sentence 4/ 'Nor do you own the lives of others'. Of course I don't, how could I, naturally speaking? Legally is another matter, e.g. if I ‘legally owned’ a pet.
Sentence 5/ 'You exist in time: future, present and past.' This equates to: 'You are reading this because you can see and you can understand English.' Oh, no kidding.
Sentence 6 Part 1/ 'This [time] is manifest in life ...' In other words, life is lived in and through time. Well knock me over with a feather.
Sentence 6 Part 2/ '[Time is manifest in life...] liberty and the product of your life and liberty'. This is an explanatory cheat: Out of nowhere, with no foundation whatever, the word 'liberty' is slipped in, by verbal sleight of hand. 'Liberty' is what this text is supposed to be about - it's in the title - and yet it enters without definition, like a thief in the night. It is likely that the author means 'freedom', 'autonomy', or what they call 'self-ownership', when they use the word 'liberty', but should they not have said so – in a ‘philosophy of liberty’?
Sentences 7/8/9/& 10/ Are also totally inconsequential, glaringly obvious facts, adding nothing to nothing.
Sentence 11/ 'A product of your life and liberty is your property.' Here a new and important concept is added: 'property'. Nevertheless, all we get is more verbal froth, amounting to: 'Because you have your own autonomous life, you can go and get yourself a job, and earn money, and you can buy things with that money, and those things you will “own”, and hence they will be your “property”'. Oh, you don’t say.
We then get another mouthful of rhetorical candyfloss, ranging from the observation that humans barter and exchange - is there anyone who didn't know that? - to stating that if someone comes along and tries to take your stuff, you're going to try to take it back. All animal know this too of course, there is no need to speak of 'rights' here, this is still in the realm of nature, but if you are going to talk about rights surely you should define the term, and yet once again the author just slips it in as follows:
'You have the right to protect your own life, liberty, and justly acquired property from the forceful aggression of others'. Apparently, the author thinks it's okay not to point out that the term 'right' can mean different things: 'natural rights' - the rights we have in virtue of being in the world - 'God-given rights' - the rights bestowed (for those who believe in this) by a separate creator-being - and 'legal rights' - the rights that you have in virtue of the legal system you live under. In any case, the point being made is a damp squib, amounting to: 'It's okay for you to fight back if someone tries to take your stuff, and they will fight back if you try to take their stuff'. Isn't that what all living creatures know and do anyway and already?
I'm afraid that was all I could take of this rhetorical concoction, which, in any case, ends up floating away, carried off in its own hot air balloon, hopefully with Dominic Frisbee on board.
It's a good essay, but optimistic in that it fails to address crime, war, antisocial behavior and what a society does about these things.
That wasn’t its purpose, though. It was just a five-minute video talking about the principles. Explaining how a condition of consensual order could be maintained by private, voluntary, and market means takes a little longer.
There is plenty of information out there, if you are interested.
What addresses those is the obsoleting of the tool that makes crime alluring and pays for wars. Antisocial behavior would be irrelevant as long as the three Laws of Ethics are upheld by Most, whose duty it is to arrest (or call for help in arresting) Any who break those Laws...
Let’s Obsolete Money and Get Rid of Cartels! (article): https://amaterasusolar.substack.com/p/lets-obsolete-money-and-get-rid-of
What Do You Know About Ethics? (article): https://amaterasusolar.substack.com/p/what-do-you-know-about-ethics