Lew Rockwell interviews me on today’s LRC podcast, on the subject of anarchism. (Actually the interview took place last September; there’s a bit of a podcast backlog.) I tried to avoid too much duplication with my previous LRC podcast on the same subject from two years earlier. (I vaguely remember now that we also did one on taxation two years ago but I don’t think that one ever aired.)
Fun stuff. You were clear and concise and well-informed and persuasive. I was envious.
Whatever else there is to say about him, Lew does have one fine voice for radio.
Nice!
Thanks for mentioning this – I’ll have to check it out.
Why do you sanction that capitalist Catholic scumbag? Of all the people… You’re not making yourself very credible by allying with Misesian right-wingers. Though if the Hellbound Alleee Show was still running, I’d invite you on!
Credible to whom?
People who don’t support capitalist Catholic scumbag, I assume.
Seems like a “meh.”
Francois Tremblay (emphasis added):
Man. You can take Franc out of Objectivism, but you sure cannot take the Objectivism out of Franc.
Speaking of which, I really miss Hellbound Alleee. /endtangent
You are a voluntaryist. Why would you refer to yourself as an “anarchist”?
Anarchists want to abolish government, so an anti-statist, by referring to his beliefs as “anarchism”, is, in effect, conflating “government” with the state.
To the contrary: the state is hardly a form of government at all; at least, not any legitimate or legal form of government. How can an aggressive monopoly on the use of force be considered a government? Of course, real governments – entities that govern or control – are ubiquitous to civilization: from the self government of the individual to organizations of ever increasing complexity, that if at least partially legitimate, to the extent that they are so, derive their right to govern from the consent of the governed through their voluntary delegation of their right to non-aggressive self government.
Of course, the form of government to which I’m primarily concerned with is “civil government”, which I think I can reasonably define as individuals or organizations of individuals that are involved in some aspect of the enforcement of rights and/or settling disputes over rights.
To be legitimate, these governmental agencies must compete for clients 0n a voluntary basis, as any other legitimate business or organization does, in the free market.
What we ideally want is UNLIMITTED legitimate government, at least to the extent that the market demand for it exists.
As the state feeds off of the limitation and destruction of legitimate government, anarchy is its essence. So now “anarchy”, as most people understand its standard definition, is synonymous with chaos and arbitrary violence of this primitive world, where the state is the dominant, but illegitimate, form of civil government
Not everyone uses the terms “government” and “state” in precisely the way you do.
Then not everyone uses the terms “government” and “state” in precisely the way you do. Why insist they do… or should?
That’s true. Statists always seem to conflate “government” with “state”. It’s in keeping with their agenda to marginalize the value of voluntary association; likening it to chaos, oppression and violence.
The question remains: Why do YOU conflate them? And why do so using the word “anarchy” with an obscure and irrational definition, when everyone understands “anarchy” to be the chaos and violence that always accompanies the breakdown of civilization?
The use of the word “anarchy” by voluntaryists, as opposed to something sensible, like “voluntary government”, has got to be the most self defeating nonsense, rivaled only by Ayn Rand’s attempt to redefine “selfishness” and “greed” into virtues.
Rand did it for its shock value, calling it a stunt. I think it was a pretty stupid stunt, designed to glorify her own ego by attempting to appear more revolutionary than she actually was. I have no doubt that vanity has caused “anarchists” to fall into the same trap.
Hear, hear.
The anarchist use of the term “anarchy” (to refer to a peaceful, spontaneous social order without government) is not exactly “obscure.” It is, for example, well known among anarchists. It’s even in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Of course, other people use “anarchy” to mean different things. But many of us think that those common usages are conceptually confused, and part of the aim of using the word (esp. in phrases like “anarchy is order; government is civil war,” etc.) is to help to point out, and clear up, the confusion. Perhaps you think that this kind of dialectical engagement is illegitimate, or needlessly confusing. But then, if you think you have a good reason to use the term “government” unconventionally, so as to include things that are completely contrary to the way that “everyone” uses the word (e.g., “voluntary government,” stateless government, etc., when “everyone” currently uses the word just to mean the specific organization in charge of a political state), in order to clear up the confusions that you think many are carrying around in their heads, I don’t see how you can consistently deny us the option of using the term “anarchy” counter-conventionally instead, for the same purpose.
The only major difference I can see is that our usage of the term “anarchy,” while somewhat counter-conventional in the broader linguistic community, is entirely conventional within an existing, well-established subculture and intellectual tradition (that is, among self-identified anarchists, of whom there have been a few). Whereas your use of the term “government” is, with few exceptions (Albert Jay Nock; Charles Lane; perhaps Gustave de Molinari), almost purely idiosyncratic.
Perhaps, rather than going on the rhetorical assault against anarchists for using the words “state” and “government” differently from the way that you use them, you could provide some explanation of what you find to be specifically useful about your counter-conventional reappropriation of the word “government.” Then we could tell you what we find specifically useful about our counter-conventional reappropriation of the word “anarchy.” And folks can try to figure out what is likely to be most useful to them in the conversations that they have.
Here, just to get things started, I’ll tell you one of the reasons I prefer the “an-archy” counter-convention to the “voluntary government” counter-convention: because an important part of the point I am trying to make is about the act of governing other people — the kind of power relationship that implies — not just the specific institutional arrangement of governing in a modern bureaucratic state. I don’t aim to govern anybody other than myself, and I aim, as far as possible, to bring about social spaces in which hierarchical relationships of governing are replaced by relationships on a footing of mutuality, equality, free association and free exchange.
How about you?
It’s clear that this 1910 Britannica entry conflated “government” with “state”. There’s nothing wrong with using “government” to mean “state” as when we commonly refer to the state as “the government”, yet this does not change the fact that “government” has multiple common definitions, the broadest one being “management and/or control”, so this in no way rules out the use of “government” in one of its non-state meanings.
Since our concern is with civil management and control, as opposed to say: governing a manufacturing business, governing a private charity, the biological principles that govern physiology or the physical principles that govern the trajectory of heavenly bodies, it would make sense to use a term like “voluntary civil government”, “stateless civil government”, “legitimate government” or “lawful government”.
The point is that “anarchy” allows for no government of any kind except for the kind of government that we call the state, because the state is the antithesis of government. The state is, as is anarchy, the engine of terror, chaos and war and the inhibitor of spontaneous order.
Anarchy is the health of the state. Ask any bomb throwing anarchist, political assassin or rioter. Their aim is to enable a power grab by a tyrant – preferably of their own ideological bent – who will usher in a totalitarian state where they can forcibly change human nature through re-education and liquidation of the stubborn individualists, at which point, their “benevolent leader”, in their sick fantasy, will phase out the state and all will live in enlightened bliss.
Except for a small percentage of libertarians, in other words, less than one percent of people “anarchy” is the violence, chaos and disorder that accompanies the breakdown and failure of civil order. This unconventional use of “anarchy” does nothing to clear up confusion about a stateless society. In fact, it plays right into the hands of the statists. Statist propaganda relentlessly portrays liberty as too chaotic, oppressive, exploitative, wasteful and inefficient, because of the anarchy of the free market. Referring to a stateless society as anarchy is self-defeating strategy that only succeeds at marginalizing voluntaryists as nut cases within the libertarian movement and marginalizing libertarians, by association, as nut cases within the general populace.
My use of the word “government”, as in “stateless government” is not only semantically logical, but is helpful in explaining how a stateless society can have legitimate authorities, laws and order. It also leads easily to understanding the evolutionary path, utilizing education and democratic institutions, from a system of state agencies to the gradual privatization of all necessary government agencies into voluntary governmental agencies competing for clients and members within a free market.
If it’s unconventional, that’s only because the state is ubiquitous, but it doesn’t always have to be so. In fact, not only is there voluntary non-civil government already existing, but anywhere there are people or organizations that privately settle disputes or privately provide security and/or protection, stateless civil government already exists. Stateless civil government is not a Utopian dream just as the stateless government of ordinary enterprises is not; they only show the degree of liberty enjoyed by society at some point along its evolutionary path.
This description of a stateless society is, for me, too uncomfortably close to the standard variety of Utopian anarchism.
A non-hierarchical social structure is antithetical to human nature. Hierarchical organizations are not inherently aggressive any more than people or non-aggressive any more than people. If I choose to voluntarily delegate authority to a person or an organization, what right do you have to prevent me from doing so if this organization commits no aggression? A stateless society can and probably would have many very large governmental structures, both civil and common. And so finally we come to another of my objections to the use of “anarchy” as a classical liberal ideal.
I’m pretty sure most statists (most people) sincerely believe that absence of the state will result in chaos, oppression and violence.
I think most people define anarchy roughly the same way Roderick does, not as “the chaos and violence that always accompanies the breakdown of civilization”, but because they expect anarchy to result in chaos they tend to use the terms interchangeably.
In fact, I once explained my libertarian views on government to someone and got the response “that sounds almost like anarchy”. (I had not used the word ‘anarchy’.)
Would anyone confronted with peaceful and orderly statelessness refuse to call that anarchy, just because there’s no chaos or violence?
I think if you call it ‘voluntary government’ and explain what you mean by it, many people will accuse you of trying to hide you’re an anarchist…
I think this will only succeed in getting you accused of trying to hide you’re an anarchist by obfuscation.
Mark,
It seems to me you’re expending a lot more effort in talking about what seems “semantically logical” or rhetorically useful to you, than you are in listening to what other folks are seeing we might find useful in different linguistic choices. For example, I pointed to the Encyclopedia Britannica article as one example of the anarchist meaning of “anarchy,” not as an attempt to prove something to you about whether you are allowed to use the word “government” in the way you want to use it. Use the word however you want to; but this insistence that everyone must make the same choices about diction that you do strikes me as wrong-headed, if your interest is in communication and not simply ranting.
That’s fine, but you can say exactly the same thing about our counter-conventional use of the term “anarchy,” to mean “consensual social order, without social control,” as opposed to both the violent social chaos of civil war, or the violent social control of the state. That people don’t see the middle term — order by means of consent rather than control — is no doubt due to the ubiquity of the state. But it doesn’t have to be so. Etc.
You can’t use the unconventionality of our favored usage, “less than one percent of people,” etc. as a decisive argument against it and then turn around and insist that your own completely unconventional, less-than-1%, etc. usage is O.K. Either challenging the convention is legitimate or it’s not. If it is, then both uses are potentially legitimate, and the decision is a matter of rhetorical choices and conversational trade-offs, not a matter of one being “illogical” and the other being “logical.”
Look, man, I never said I would “prevent” you from doing anything. You do seem to be suggesting that any form of coordination, mediation, deliberation, or decision-making involves hierarchical relationships of “management,” “government,” or “authority,” or “control” (even if it’s a voluntary relationship), and I think that is absolutely false. But even if consensual power-relationships aren’t the only way to get these things done, maybe you’re just into that kind of thing. Well, fine; as long as you keep it safe, sane and consensual I’m hardly going to interfere. But my point is that while you may be into that, I’m not; I think that this kind of structured power over others strikes me as needless, stifling, and often actively hurtful, and is something that I want nothing to do with (either with consensually controlling other people, or being consensually controlled by them). That’s not my bag, so I’m hardly going to identify myself with a set of terms that foregrounds and emphasizes the prospect of voluntary social control.
Maybe that’s your concern. It’s not mine. Perhaps you think that dispute-mediation and deliberation just are matters of “management and control;” I don’t. In any case, calling this “civil management and control” tells you exactly nothing to explain the need for a dedicated voluntary associations to deal with it. There are lots of things that happen in the life of a civitas and some of them may be dealt with by neighborhood associations, others by universities; some by lodges, others by labor unions or professional associations; some by churches, others by rating or certification boards; some by credit bureaus, some by insurance mutuals; a lot will no doubt be settled peaceably and informally within families or social circles; some will be handled more or less ad-hoc, by third-party mediators without any standing mandate, who are called in only at need, and those mediators may be either amateurs, or hired guns, without being kept on retainer. If there is something special here that needs to be done by a dedicated voluntary association called a “government,” as opposed to all the other voluntary associations in the society, which does nothing else with its time but the governing, I don’t know what that need is. Perhaps you could make it clearer than the catch-all term “civil management.”
It sounds like you believe in a lot of ridiculous statist calumnies against anarchists.
It also sounds like you believe in a lot of fantastical statist propaganda about the breakdown and failure of civil order. While I am interested in promoting the breakdown of civil control, and in the emergence of spontaneous, uncontrolled social order, the fact is that breakdowns and failures of a coercive, State-imposed civil order (whether by acts of God or man) are not typically followed by catastrophe; rather, what follows is rarely any worse, and often substantially better, than the stable, orderly State violence that preceded them. Cf. this on “disaster areas” without effective government control for example.
I am not a classical liberal, and my use of the term “anarchy” has nothing to do with trying to promote “classical liberal ideals.”
I don’t mean to step in front of Mark: he’s doing a better job than I can describing why ‘anarchy’ is a stupid word to rally around. I look forward to many more comments from him. I’d only add: it’s stupid to rally around any word. How is this a consistent Wittgensteinian site again?
RadState,
I’m starting to read a pretty solid Masters paper right now on what you might call Molinari’s idiosyncratic conception of freedom. See here.
Martin:
I didn’t imply that the statist agenda was insincere on the part of the statists, although I would allow for the possibility that it is often the case.
Most anarchists define “anarchy” as an Utopian fantasy where people will live in perfect harmony without authority, laws or civil order after a period of culling and cleansing the people of their “base” human nature, instilling in the survivors an absolute embrace of altruism, where the period of “re-education” is brought about by instigation of the chaos and violence that accompanies the failure and/or absence of government – civilization.
“Market anarchists”, to the extent that they resist the corrupting influence of corrupt language that leads some to seek some universality between all anarchist philosophies, tend to advocate stateless government, irrationally eschewing all positive uses of the word “government” and words associated with it, replacing them with euphemisms, e.g., “dispute resolution organization” and “arbiter” as opposed to “court” or “judge”.
For everyone else, which is nearly everyone, “anarchy” means the same as its standard definitions – 1a, 1b & 2a
Definition of ANARCHY
1
a : absence of government b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
2
a : absence or denial of any authority or established order b : absence of order : disorder
Well of course. As I’ve already said, the statists certainly do! E.g., I brought up the subject of evolution of government from the state towards stateless government via privatization on an Objectivist forum, believing that elimination of the state would be in keeping with the non-aggression principle. They practically started a Stalinist show trial and lynching, where I was, figuratively, accused, convicted and executed for anarchism in the first degree, in spite of, or maybe because of ?, winning every argument they started with me, proving that is the state that most closely resembles anarchy.
Why would I want to let those who wish to enslave me place the false label of “anarchy” upon me? As the saying goes – “He who controls the language wins the debate.”
In addition to concentration camps, we also plan on having weekly executions of political dissidents, and to display their dismembered body parts all over the place, as a reminder to those who oppose voluntary associations. Basically, our utopia will be a nightmarish world reminiscent of Kurtz’s compound in Apocalypse Now — you know, “This is the way the effing world ends, man!” and all that jazz.
Brandon,
Have you considered that the “no-rule” creed can be easily and non-aggressively replaced by the “all-rule” creed?
Mark Uzick:
Would you care to name some of the Anarchist books you have read in which Anarchists defined “anarchy” that way? (In particular, those who claimed that a society without government would exhibit (1) “perfect harmony,” and (2) would be “without … civil order”?) Because I do spend a bit of time here and there reading the works of Anarchists, and I have no idea who the “most anarchists” you’re referring to here are supposed to be. But if this is how “most anarchists define anarchy,” then surely you can show me some concrete examples, correct?
This is a really absurd. Name the specific Anarchists you’re referring to here and give me citations of where you read them making these claims.
Well, that’s mighty big of you. I’m glad to know that maybe someday I can be in your club.
Well, I see that you’ve asserted that. But what’s the argument? As a libertarian I not only deny this, but in fact find it absurd; it seems like a straightforward denial of the possibility of spontaneous order. But spontaneous orders — in which there is no delegation of authority, no central point of control, and often isn’t even any shared purpose or plan — are everywhere; haven’t you noticed?
No, it doesn’t. Classical liberalism — if this means the doctrines actually advocated by historical liberals — such as Locke, Smith, Bentham, Bastiat, Spencer, Mill, et al., or latter-day “Old Liberals” like Mises and Hayek — advocates a territorial monopoly on the use of force in the hands of a “night-watchman” state.
Mark’s response to RadState is here.
Brandon/RadState, would you consider Hulsmmania Utopian? I mean, you’ll have to tell me what else it could be: I don’t know how else to describe the idea that economics is infallible and man doesn’t tend toward success. How is it not Utopian to believe that man’s actions are a 50/50 coin-flip — at best — but the act of creating economics is sublime?
Also, how many Mises Institute members agree with Hulsmann?
@Rad Geek
I’m simply making the point that passive compliance with statist language that implies:
a. liberty is chaotic, oppressive, exploitative, wasteful and inefficient, i.e., anarchic,
b. civil government, in essence, civilized order, can only exist through criminal acts of aggression, i.e., the state and…
c. liberty consists of lawless, authority-less, leaderless, non-hierarchical society
is to lose the debate with the statists before it has even begun. As the saying goes – “He who controls the language wins the debate.”
“consensual social order, without social control,”
It seems that you have crossed into Utopian anarchism, most likely because of the corrupting effects of a corrupt use of language, unless I’m wrong and you were initially a Utopian anarchist, now in transition toward libertarianism; in which case I admit that, providing that you and other anarchists can complete your transitions, a small percentage of the minuscule amount of anarchists may, by your use of language, become libertarians.
There is no order without control. Government means control. As you have the right to control yourself, if you do not interfere with the equal right of self-government of others, so you have the right to delegate governing authority to other people or organized groups that abide by the same principle of non-aggression.
It’s conventional and correct to regard the lack of civil government, i.e. anarchy, as evil.
It’s conventional and correct to regard government a requirement of civilized order.
My only argument with convention, in this case, is my belief that civil government need not be structured as an aggressive monopoly, i.e., it’s not necessarily a necessary evil.
Our ways of being unconventional are only superficially analogous.
I’ll try to make this easy to follow:
a. All human action is governed -controlled – by the individual and, through delegation of authority, organizations.
b. As human actions are not necessarily legitimate, so not all forms of government are legitimate.
c. To be legitimate, government, from self-government to the most complex businesses and organizations, must abide by the non-aggression principle.
d. To keep civil order among governments, people form special types of governments, i.e. civil governments, to compete in the market niche for courts, police, security and regional defense.
Your phrase:” all the other voluntary associations in the society” is simply a euphemism for governing bodies, most of which are simply businesses and non-profit organizations and an occasional civil organization that represents either a civil government, in the sense that any governing body is a government, or, in the societal sense, a part of the fabric of the stateless civil government of society.
Classical liberalism advocates the greatest personal and economic liberty, as enshrined in and limited by the non-aggression principle.
Roderick, is there somewhere I can download the podcast for listening? The web stream stopped playing after only a few minutes – twice. I don’t know exactly why, and hope that it isn’t due to my use of Linux.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-show/wp-content/uploads/183_Long.mp3
The download link is right there in plain sight but you missed it. There’s no “resume” support in mp3 — if an interruption occurs it has to be restarted. And it ain’t due to your use of Linux.
Roderick, beginning at about 2:50 it sounds like you are saying you counterfeiting money is analogous to the State producing currency. If so, thats a false analogy.
Mark,
I’m a bit behind, so in response to your earlier post:
I’m pretty sure most statists (most people) sincerely believe that absence of the state will result in chaos, oppression and violence.
I think most people define anarchy roughly the same way Roderick does, not as “the chaos and violence that always accompanies the breakdown of civilization”, but because they expect anarchy to result in chaos they tend to use the terms interchangeably.
In fact, I once explained my libertarian views on government to someone and got the response “that sounds almost like anarchy”. (I had not used the word ‘anarchy’.)
Would anyone confronted with peaceful and orderly statelessness refuse to call that anarchy, just because there’s no chaos or violence?
Oops, wrong thread… posted it again in the right one.
I think this will only succeed in getting you accused of trying to hide you’re an anarchist by obfuscation.
And again… apologies.
Rad Geek:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_Marxism
I’m not an expert on Marx’s or Marxist theorist’s strategies for attaining their “Utopia”. I was referring to the actual practices of the regimes inspired by their ideology.
It’s my guess that you were first a libertarian before you started straying into anarchism. Tell me if I’m wrong.
The universe is a product of an ongoing evolution driven via the engine of the dynamic interplay between spontaneous order and entropy. Hierarchical structure in physical systems, biology and society evolve through this dynamic interplay to become what it is and what it will be.
The universe means: All things existing, whether you approve of them or not, including: the state and its progeny and/or progenitor: anarchy. It also includes civilization and its progeny and/or progenitor: legitimate government.
Spontaneous order is not necessarily the harbinger of liberty, happiness or health. It also brings us the state, misery, cancer and disease.
Self control and legitimate authority to control are not created through the false authority of the agencies of central planning and control decreed by the fiat of the state, but control centers have their uses, often vital, in a complex society. Their structures, whether vertically or horizontally distributed, determine their function, the preferences of the entrepreneurs who start them and their clients/customers demands, within a competitive marketplace.
This is no panacea. Often, the demands of the market bring us harmful products, organized crime, destructive religions, irrational philosophies and the state.
I’ve always used “classical liberalism” and “libertarianism” interchangeably. If there’s a distinction between them, I’m not aware of it.
Mark,
RadState will respond that he wants nothing to do with Marxist strategies. What RadState will not understand is that — at some point — the monopoly of force will have to be defeated by force, bought out, or won over. Otherwise, you don’t get your word ‘anarchy’. So RadState will talk about counter economics as if this will somehow produce the capital or the reputation to buy or win over the monopoly on force — and provided that it could, which it couldn’t, now RadState owns the Pentagon, and He is a state, just like any other state. Hey! Radstate could even be “a secessionist republic of one” (plus the Pentagon)! Yippee! The “official state media” will be everywhere!
Or RadState might suggest at that point he would break up the military and sell off pieces to the highest bidders — who, RadState does not realize, will be working together and re-form the Pentagon and the previous State, except with much tighter restrictions. And then he’ll tell you something Murray Rothbard said. Or the very successful Madame Defarge.
MBH:
Thank you for your encouragements.
I’m not really sure where your coming from in the above post, but I assume it’s about how we can get to a stateless society or whether we even can.
My position is that a stateless society – political perfection – is only possible if all men were morally and politically enlightened. Until then, we must content ourselves with stateless government were we can find it, working to enlarge its sphere.
As I said in an earlier post: “Stateless civil government is not a Utopian dream just as the stateless government of ordinary enterprises is not; they only are the degree of liberty enjoyed by society at some point along its evolutionary path.”
BTW: The largest obstacle along this path may very well be ownership by fiat of natural resources, such as land, as things in themselves, instead of limited property rights in their use through their transformation into useful things.
Natural resources are not created by men and so cannot be property. We can only have property in the uses to which we put them and may exclude others from their use only to the extent that our use, if preexisting to theirs, is disturbed.
Where their intended use has a higher utility than ours, they can offer to buy some or all of our property rights in the use of the resource.
A monopoly on the use of a piece of land irrespective to any use of that land, I refer to as “landlordism”. If we had an otherwise stateless society, except divided into countless parcels, we would live in a society of many little states in their most virulent form: dictatorships and those without land would be either slaves or dead.
In time, either through buy-outs, alliances or aggression, the landlords would regroup back into conventional states.
Mark, I find your perspective is like fresh air. I think your position is entirely reconcilable with mine, and I think what our fellow travelers here call “anarchism” is reconcilable with stateless government — though the tendency toward functional fixedness is deeply ingrained ’round these parts (for understandable reasons to be frank — sometimes the south limits “dialogue” to dig-in-or-be-blown-away). I hope we can continue to transcend that.
I have come to find that working within the system vs. working outside the system is a false choice. If we want stateless government then we need an alternative system with a universal metacurrency that accounts for welfare, reputation, supply, demand, and transition. I think you’ll be one of the few to get the last unit of account. If an alternative system can absorb a modest amount of dollars to handle necessary interactions with the current system while making legal tender irrelevant through immediate measures of supply and demand (open source interactions/resilient communities), then the alternative system can grow in organic harmony, lateral to the current system. In fact, insofar as the stateless government platform produces wealth and esteem for its members, without pissing on the laws, then the alternative system would be this generations moon landing. We’re sitting on a win-win-win — provided our fellow travelers can recognize it.
Ah, the expected moment arrives with clockwork efficiency.
Brandon:
I’m not really sure where your coming from in the above post
Mark, this is the part where I am systematically discredited as difficult to understand. As we all know, those who are difficult to understand are always incorrect.
MBH:
In one sense that’s possibly true, in that this unplanned social order that they pin their “anarchism” on is nothing less than the product of governing human behavior – the decisions and rules that control actions of people as individuals and as organizations.
The problem with them is that twisting the meaning of words so that their language conforms with the statist world view that control/government is exclusively the product of the state forces them into claiming that order is spontaneous in a way that is analogous to the theory of spontaneous generation of life from inanimate matter, i.e., without a progenitor – a phenomenon without a cause. Of course, a rational theory of spontaneous order includes in its explanation its causes: the actions that result from the governance of persons and groups, which, in turn govern the form the order takes, which is itself some new form of governing order.
Statist language is clearly doing three insidious things to voluntaryists here:
1. It destroys their credibility in the minds of reasonable people, who instinctively and correctly understand that government, in all its variety, is the stuff of civilized order.
2. It reinforces the prejudice that the state is not only the only acceptable form of civil government but, by extension: “Then why not all government?”, from the thoughts and actions of each person to the organizations that people belong to, are customers of and work for, i.e., it serves as an excuse to expand the state into every aspect of our lives.
3. It corrupts the “anarchist’s” thought process, creating a mystical mindset where order is created without cause, which is very seductive, especially to young people, who may enjoy the feeling of being part of an elite group, able to delve into mysteries only a minority have the intelligence or wisdom to grasp. And so they find themselves “discovering” ever increasing universality with Utopian schools of anarchist thought, as they also depend on the belief in order without cause, i.e., cooperation without rules, further distancing themselves from libertarianism.
Stateless government that you’re describing already exists. It’s not an alternative system, but the very basis of civilization itself, insofar as the anarchic forces of the state are held in check, permitting civil order to exist.
Going outside of the system – agorism or the black market – can be a perfectly ethical activity for self-protection, survival and profit when the state blocks legitimate activity, but it is not a path toward liberty. It’s actually the state’s way to incentivize the proliferation of organized crime, chaos, violence and corruption as the perfect excuse to expand its powers.
There is no trick or special system to find a shortcut for the path toward liberty. Liberty comes to a society naturally, without any fuss, trickery or special strategy required, when the people both understand what it is and actually value it.
Education, via literature, academic study and marketing are needed to create the demand. When the demand is there, the market will supply us with liberty.
All governments, even anti-government – the state – are essentially enterprises that seek to give the market the kind of governance it demands. Yes…even the state will change, cleaning up its act by privatizing or eliminating pieces of itself in response to market demand as it’s expressed in the ballot box.
MBH:
This is my first exposure to Wittgenstein, so I apologize in advance if I’m missing something.
In that clip it seems to me that Wittgenstein isn’t wrong for being obscure, but is both wrong and obscure for being non-intuitive.
He lacks faith, not only in his own mind and judgment, but in that of all humanity. If Man’s mind was limited to the subjective; if intuition could not correspond to a sense of what might be possible or impossible, then no advances in the arts and sciences would have been possible.
If a lion could speak English, then, of course, we could understand it, because a lion lives in the same world and is subject to the same physical laws that we are subject to. The lion, on the other hand, wouldn’t have the capacity understand everything we say.
I don’t get what he means when claiming that philosophical problems are meaningless, yet gives a list of some specialized branches of philosophy where the problems are genuine.
Mark,
In that clip it seems to me that Wittgenstein isn’t wrong for being obscure, but is both wrong and obscure for being non-intuitive.
Try 3:51-4:40 into this clip for Wittgenstein’s own response.
Hold on. He’s not making the claim that man’s mind is limited to the subjective — far from it actually. Even in his earlier work (which the last clip depicts), he’s uplifting the outer realm (the objective) into the third realm (the home of propositions) and ensuring that inner realms (the subjective) aim toward the up-lifted outer realm — which allows all three realms to handle conceptual content. To say that man’s mind is limited to the subjective is to say that the outer realm cannot be up-lifted into the third realm, and the inner realms cannot aim toward an up-lifted outer realm. Wittgenstein is saying that these generic inner realms and the generic outer realm is entirely incoherent, unspeakable, to be passed over in silence. In effect, his earlier work expands man’s mind into the entirety of the world.
Sure, but to speak English is to play our language-games, and a lion cannot play our language-games. So if it were to speak, it would speak another language.
A “philosophical problem” is a way of saying, “I don’t understand X about my generic inner realm or Y about the generic outer realm.” Insofar as linguistic and theological problems don’t fall into that trap, then they’re legitimate. But the “philosophical problem” must to dissolve entirely. Can you see why?
Mark,
Re: the previous comment: I agree to a large extent. There’s plenty in that comment I’m still chewing on. That the ballot box can provide liberty is true so long as the population is well-educated, but then you seem to imply that certain situations call for alternative solutions. I think you put forth a fair-minded take on liberty. I hope everyone here can maybe think outside their box.
“Though our mind is not the measure of things or of truth, it must, assuredly, be the measure of things that we affirm or deny.” — Descartes
MBH:
Is he saying that knowing that the earth goes around the sun makes you see it differently than if you had no knowledge of astronomy?
I would answer that it, however, still looks like the sun orbits the earth, but that the knowledge motivates me to envision other possible perspectives to account for appearances.
When I see the sun move across the sky it seems to go around the earth, but when I think about the earth orbiting the sun, I see a mental image of that instead. And when I think of the reason it seems this way – the earth’s rotation – I get a mental image of a globe spinning on its axis.
Language, our abstract thinking process is primarily auditory, allowing us to vocalize concepts – words – to communicate with others and communicate internally – think.
When I’m putting together a thought, I do it by composing words and only when the thought begins to form does it become a mental image that lends the thought concreteness for the visually intuitive confirmation of its validity – by validity, meaning the thought has the potential for being true.
I’m not sure where he made or implied that proposition, but I’ll take that at face value.
Unless this is perceptual data being processed by the unconscious mind according to its previously established conceptions and beliefs, bringing about automatic reactions and emotions without conscious thought, then this runs counter to my introspection on my thought process stated above.
Then asking: “What a would a lion say if he could talk?” Is a poorly worded question. “If he could talk” implies: “if he could talk some human language” because lions already do talk their own language and I’m sure that, somewhere, there are researchers working on its translation. As I already stated, I think we could understand Lion, even if some of the words were new, they would represent concepts we could understand, but the lion wouldn’t understand Human beyond the words that it already has.
MBH:
Is he saying that knowing that the earth goes around the sun makes you see it differently than if you had no knowledge of astronomy?
I would answer that it, however, still looks like the sun orbits the earth, but that the knowledge motivates me to envision other possible perspectives in order to account for appearances.
When I see the sun move across the sky it appears to go around the earth, but when I think about the earth orbiting the sun, I see a mental image of that instead. And when I think of the reason why it appears this way – the earth’s rotation – I get a mental image of a globe spinning on its axis.
Language, our abstract thinking process is primarily auditory, allowing us to vocalize concepts – words – in order to communicate with others and communicate internally – think.
When I’m putting together a thought, I do it through the composition of words and only when the thought begins to form does it become a mental image that lends the thought concreteness for the visually intuitive confirmation of its validity – by validity, meaning the the thought has the potential for being true.
I’m not sure where he made or implied that proposition, but I’ll take that at face value.
Unless this is perceptual data being processed by the unconscious mind according to its previously established conceptions and beliefs, bringing about automatic reactions and emotions without conscious thought, then this runs counter to my introspection on my thought process stated above.
Then asking: “What a would a lion say if he could talk?” Is a poorly worded question. “If he could talk” implies: “if he could talk some human language” because lions already do talk their own language and I’m sure that, somewhere, there are researchers working on its translation. As I already stated, I think we could understand Lion, even if some of the words were new, they would represent concepts we could understand, but the lion wouldn’t understand Human beyond the words that it already possess.
Roderick,
(1) Mind is not the measure of things. [from Descartes]
(2) Mind must be the measure of a subset of things. [from Descartes]
(3) If X does not measure Y, then X does not measure a subset of Y. [by definition]
(4) (1) and (2) violates (3) [by definition]
(5) Descartes’ proposition is not merely hard to understand, it is a contradiction. [from (3) and (4)]
(6) A proposition that contradicts itself is senseless. [from Wittgenstein]
(7) Descartes’ proposition is senseless. [from (5) and (6)]
(8) To distinguish the senseless from what’s merely hard to understand is to break a proposition’s code. [from Wittgenstein]
(9) Wittgenstein is a code-breaker of propositions. [from (7) and (8)]
(10) A code-breaker may be difficult to understand, but she yields correct propositions. [from (8) and (9)]
(11) “Those who are difficult to understand are always incorrect,” is a proposition. [my own facetiousness]
(12) Those who are difficult to understand are just as likely to be correct as incorrect. [from (10) and (11)]
Mark,
Well, do you look at the sun and see it as the point around which we rotate? And isn’t that un-natural compared to how you saw it before you understood that?
Do you ever see a new aspect to an object in the world? Say, that the earth rotates around the sun — when you were young. Is that a “mental picture” or is that an aspect of what you perceive?
I say,
You say,
But to call it data is to suggest that it contains information. What information is to be gained — about the world — when the source is something that doesn’t align with the world? We automatically “think” the sun rotates around the earth, but does that give us any information about anything in the world? You can talk about things of the world all day, but the criterion for information/data is that it derives from what’s in the world.
If a lion possessed the English language, it could possibly name the things around it, but it wouldn’t use the names in a way we understand. To have our words is not to have our concepts.
In case my talk of Open Source is too hard to understand, try how it’s working in Egypt right now.
If what I say is too hard to understand, what’s happening in Egypt is an Open Source Insurgency.
This is clearly false, unless the terms are understood in a way clearly different from the way Descartes was using them. It seems to me that you have a habit of seizing upon an outlandish interpretation of what someone is saying in order to dismiss it. It makes trying to have a discussion with you enormously tiring.
How is ‘what we affirm or deny’ not a subset of ‘things or of truth’?
If you’re suggesting that affirming/denying is psychological and that which we affirm or that which we deny is logical, then yes, I’d agree that one is not a subset of the other. But Descartes isn’t saying that: he says that what we (say-ably) affirm/deny has to be measured differently than what is the truth. But that can’t be: what we affirm/deny and what is the truth are both logical. There’s nothing psychological about “things we (say-ably) affirm or deny” or “things” or “truth.” Why should we measure them differently?
Actually, affirming/denying is also logical since it’s an action. I don’t know how to interpret affirming/denying as psychological. What am I missing? How is Descartes right?
First: from the fact that I can outwrestle any kitten, and kittens are a subset of mammals, it does not follow that I can outwrestle any mammal. Your claim that whatever applies to the subset must apply to the whole set gets things upside down.
Second: even if it were true that whatever applies to the subset applies to the set, it would still be a fallacy to say “My preferences determine which books I pick, and books I pick are a subset of books that exist, so my preferences determine which books exist” — because “My preferences determine which books I pick” doesn’t mean “Concerning the set of books that I pick, my preferences determine de re of the members of that set that they exist.” So likewise, to say that our mind determines what facts we should accept doesn’t mean that, concerning the set of facts that we should pick, our minds determines de re of the members of that set that they hold.”
But your bizarre interpretation of this particular Descartes passage isn’t the point. The point is that you continually, reliably, pick the goofiest and most uncharitable interpretation of people’s words that you can find, and then without even pausing to wonder whether there’s any chance in hell that they meant anything like the meaning you’re imposing on them, you pounce triumphantly, leveling cryptic accusations based on tenuous free-association connections of your own invention. Over and over and over. Indefatigably.
That’s not a discussion; maybe it’s performance art, I don’t know.
Roderick, you’re projecting. I say, “if X does not measure Y, then X does not measure a subset of Y.” How could that possibly mean “if X does not measure a subset of Y, then X does not measure Y.” How?
I’m not going to be charitable to Descartes where he’s just flat out wrong. If you want to pretend he’s right when he’s wrong, that’s your deal. But don’t make shit up that I didn’t say. That’s a bit unprofessional; don’t you think?
MBH:
I think Roderick is using the contrapositive of your premise, not the converse.
No; that’s not a contrapositive. What he’s saying does not follow from what I say.
It doesn’t. And I never said it did. Please go back and read what I wrote. What I actually wrote, not some hallucination that intervenes between you and the text. Holy shit.
You’re pretending that I imply genus below species. My actual claim: If you can wrestle all mammals, then you can wrestle kittens. If you can’t measure the height of any mammal, then “you can measure the height of kittens” is false. That’s not a hallucination. That’s not an uncharitable interpretation. That would be a fact. If Descartes thinks mind cannot measure any part of a genus, but that mind can measure a species of that genus, then Descartes contradicts himself. How is that wrong?
Yes, if one were to interpret Descartes’ remark in that utterly bizarre way, that conclusion would indeed follow.
1. To “pretend” is to make a claim to the throne.
2. As an anarchist, I do not make claims to thrones.
3. Therefore I do not “pretend” that you imply genus below species.
Think about what’s wrong with that argument I just gave. Because that’s what your arguments tend to be like. You hit upon such crazy interpretations of other people’s words that conversation becomes impossible.
Dude. You’re welcome to tell me the non-bizarre interpretation you have in mind. But instead of offering an alternative, you simply say that my interpretation is bizarre. That’s a bizarre way to engage in dialogue. Tiresome even.
I take Descartes’ reference to “things” and “truth” to attempt at aiming toward atomism. I think atomism slides off the cliff of language. So if “things” and “truth” are going to reference anything say-able, they must aim at concepts per se. And we do measure concepts by the same instrument we measure concepts we affirm and concepts we deny. No?
Is it not fair to distinguish what Descartes intends to say from what Descartes’ propositions actually imply? Why is the latter not a sufficient interpretation for you?
Mark:
Rad Geek:
I’m unable to use your post at this link to decide which part of the political spectrum you were coming from, but I would have taken your word for it in any case.
Thanks. That was an excellent essay. I enjoyed it very much.
BTW: It’s ironic that women tend to have much less supportive for the right to bear arms than men. Feminists should use this as evidence that women are still psychologically damaged by a paternalistic culture, but most of them are too damaged themselves to realize this.
You are mistaking control/government for aggression/the state.
A spontaneous order in the physical realm is governed/controlled by universal physical principles applied to the conditions that give rise to the order and in turn, creates conditions for the output of new spontaneous physical orders also governed by the same laws. The control of a creator/God is not required to explain order.
A spontaneous order in the social realm is governed/controlled by decisions of people/self-governors and/or organizations/governing bodies applied to conditions that give rise to the order and in turn, creates conditions for the output of new spontaneous social orders also governed by the decisions of the people and/or organizations applied to the conditions that give rise to the orders. The control of a central government is not required to explain social order.
Not at all. I’m not addressing anarchism’s origins or all its variations. Marxism is a variant of anarchism that is, in the number of its adherents, its pervasive form.
You keep asking for my credentials. Well, I don’t have any to speak of. That I can so easily debunk anarchist arguments is an embarrassment for anarchists, but not for me.
While I don’t read Marxist political philosophy, I’ve read enough about it to find it repugnant.
As for “market anarchism”, the only books that I’ve read are “For a New Liberty”, which I found stupid and simplistic, and “The Market for Liberty”, which I enjoyed. Rothbard is so revered that I have to assume that he wrote far better books than “For a New Liberty”.
BTW: I met Rothbard in the early 80’s. At the time, he was the only anarchist I had ever heard of. For reasons I’ll get to later, I thought I was an anarchist, so until that meeting I had thought of him as a hero. What I found instead was a defensive, evasive and dogmatic fat little man. And no, the subject wasn’t about anarchy. I went home feeling disillusioned. Maybe I just caught him on a bad day.
While I don’t know all the variants of market anarchism, I understand enough to realize that for the voluntaryist movement, using the anarchist label is a self-defeating, confusing and intellectually corrupting use of language.
I first heard about anarchism from Ayn Rand’s writings and radio interviews 40 years ago. Applying her “non-initiation of the use of force” principle to the analysis of her claim that proper government requires a monopoly on the use of force and that competing governments within an area was nothing more than the worst form of evil: anarchy, I concluded that she was inconsistent and that I was an anarchist.
So, from the beginning, I’ve been an advocate of stateless government, only figuring out, many years later, that it has nothing to do with anarchy; in fact, it is the state itself, to the extent that it limits legitimate government, that is anarchy.
Mark:
Well, the link was to a comment, not to the original post. (The original post at that URL was not by me. The relevant part of the comment I was linking to is the part that begins “But I mentioned it specifically in order to offer myself as an example,” etc. The brief comments about my motivations for getting interested in markets may be tangentially connected to this conversation: the whole point was to deepen my understanding of how spontaneous social orders might emerge and flourish without the need for centralized management or control. The problem with most traditional social anarchists, when there has been a problem, is not that we have called for too little consensual social control, but that we have called for too much; our picture of social transformation has too often looked like one damn committee meeting (*) after another. Markets are valuable as models insofar as they offer an alternative model — mutual exchange and competitive experimentation — for uncontrolled social interaction.
I don’t think that I am. My point about social control (“management,” “government,” etc.) is not limited to a point about coercive forms of control over others. To use the distinction from the “Invisible Fist” essay, I am not just talking about the reality and importance of voluntary orders here; I’m also talking about the reality and importance of undesigned or polycentric orders, which is what I took the business about “no order without control” to be denying. Perhaps what you mean by the word “control” and what I mean by it are different, in which case maybe we should spell out some of the details. My point in talking about orders without control is not merely to point out that there are orders without coercion (I already knew that you acknowledged that). It’s to point out that there are also examples of social order — mutual exchanges among peers in a marketplace, a game of pick-up basketball with no referee, a group of friends settling on the toppings to get on a pizza — where the order emerges without anyone being in charge (who’s in charge of the market exchange? of the basketball game?), and often without any shared purpose or plan (people swapping goods and services in a market often have completely disparate aims; they get along because markets allow the coordination of action without conformity of plans).
Maybe what you mean by “management” or “control” is compatible with social orders in which nobody is in charge and where there may not be any shared purpose or plan among the people participating. If so, I have no objection to the claims you make about it. But I’d be curious who you could say is managing or controlling, and what it is that is being managed or controlled. In any case, if you’re using the terms so that they don’t involve one person having definite power over other people, then I’d submit we’re no longer talking about “governing” in any literal sense.
This claim is both ignorant and absurd. How many anarchists do you think would accept your claim that Marxism is a form of Anarchism? How many Marxists do you think would accept that claim? Marx was certainly aware of Anarchism and had some definite views on the relationship between his ideas and Anarchistic ideas; have you read any of the things that he wrote about Proudhon, Bakunin, or Anarchism as a body of ideas?
I never asked you for any credentials. I asked you for evidence to back up your claims. Here, the kind of evidence you might have cited are texts that anyone could read, regardless of their credentials or status (**). If you assert that “most Anarchists” believe or say X (***), then you ought to be able to name at least one Anarchist who believes or says X, and to show where X appears in that Anarchist’s work.
If you don’t know enough about Anarchist writing to do that, then that’s no great fault of yours. But it is a good reason to think that — unless and until you have made the minimal effort necessary to make yourself less than ignorant about what actual Anarchists say and believe — you probably ought to wait to find out more about it, or else avoid making strong claims about what “most Anarchists” believe or say. Not because you lack “credentials,” but because you lack knowledge; and if you don’t know what you’re talking about, why keep talking about it?
As for Murray Rothbard, I’m sorry that you found him personally disappointing.
(*) All of them voluntary and run by consensus, natch. But meetings nevertheless.
(**) A lot of them are available for free on the Internet.
(***) The same goes for “Marxist political philosophy,” or any other body of ideas that you know only through a Wikipedia page.
Roderick:
OK, I’m confused. I rechecked his posts and I can’t find where MBH made that claim. Please quote the part where he wrote that.
Logically, Descartes is implying that “things that we affirm or deny” is not subset of “things or of truth”.
Therefore: Things we affirm or deny – propositions – are not really things or truth, even when we mistakenly refer to them as such.
Thank you Mark. I have not made that claim.
MBH:
What about my claim? I’m confident that the implication is correct, but do you believe he meant that implication or was he simply careless?
If he meant to make that implication, it’s a very mysterious way to make the proposition it implies.
oops:
I meant:
“I’m confident that the implication is the correct one”
Mark, propositions can only have a sense if things touch them — if the outer is up-lifted into the third realm. Affirming/denying can only be done if they touch things — if the inner aligns with the up-lifted outer. What we affirm/deny is the relations between things — their conceptual content. What propositions relay is the relations between things — their conceptual content. Things themselves though are also relational; you might say that they exist within the sphere of causality — also a conceptual content.
Remember that Descartes finds himself in a state of radical doubt, and cheats by saying, oh God is nice so he wouldn’t be tricking me. But if we are to honestly re-orient ourselves from radical doubt, then we must find conceptual content in the world. And that only happens when we recognize that things are necessarily relational and re-present conceptual content — that concepts shape the senses in the first place and so to doubt a sensation is to doubt its conceptual structure.
I don’t think Descartes was careless so much as disturbed by the conclusions he couldn’t think through.
MBH:
If you could write in plain English, it would help communication with the academically uninitiated, like me.
Let me take a crack at translation:
Propositions only have sense if they are objective.
Propositions can only be affirmed/denied if they are concordant with intuition.
We affirm/deny concepts.
Propositions relay concepts.
Things relate to each other through the relationship of their causes and effects.
causality is a concept. (???)
OK.
We must obtain an understanding from the world; not from religious dogma or there will be conflict between dogma and reason.
Things are classified according to common characteristics called concepts. We don’t invent concepts; concepts already exist and are perceived by the senses.
How far off is my translation? I hope it’s very far off, because I disagree with much of it.
Does that mean you think he intended the implication? If so, then he didn’t contradict himself. He was only saying that abstractions are not real things.
Mark, I don’t think Descartes intended that implication, I think it’s correct though.
The interpretation is good. Do you think causality is not a concept?
MBH:
I was only translating; not evaluating. I simply didn’t know how the part after the hyphen was a restatement of, or in another way, related to the first part.
If the translation was good, I’m surprised, because I still have no idea what point you were trying to make.
I disagree with the following:
Concepts don’t exist, except as constructs of the mind. Even if we are born with some survival instincts in the form of rudimentary concepts, they don’t shape our perception, just our interpretation of it.
I missed this response earlier. But it’s essentially being handled elsewhere.
Roderick, just curious: do you still think it’s OK for Glenn Beck to use Nazi/Hitler references? Or has he lost those words’ purchase? See this.
MBH:
I hope you don’t mind if I comment too:
That video essay was a sleazily dishonest smear. Its premise is that since 9 out of 9 of Beck’s progressive targets are Jews, Beck must have a secret anti-semitic agenda.
The fact is that Beck targets number far greater than 9.
So the real question is:
Was the agenda of singling out Jews in this hate campaign only to smear Beck?; to turn Becks fans into Jew haters as a way to marginalize the Tea Party?; or both?
The agenda is to show that the guy calling his opponent Nazis is — himself — much more like a Nazi than his opponent. That would also be the truth.
Except that the accuser uses lies, smear tactics and the promotion of antisemitism, a tactic a Nazi would use; discrediting himself by his hypocrisy and at the same time proving that Beck’s use of analogies between Nazis and “progressives” is not unwarranted. The only claim left against Beck is that he’s using a Nazi style of phraseology; a very weak argument.
Beck can be overbearing, bombastic and engage in personal attacks, but at least he apologises for doing so, laughs at his own foibles and performs humorous caricatures of his own excesses. He also readily admits that his opinions were wrong, when they’re shown to be so.
How does the accuser use antisemitism?
MBH:
By singling out Jews from the many kinds of people that Beck quotes to show that progressives advocate and agitate for violence and disorder – anarchy – to catalyze the furtherance of the government’s abuse of power, knowing fully that among Beck’s huge following there are some who are susceptible to belief in a Jewish conspiracy.
I think it’s clear that the progressives have been on a witch hunt for racists and Jew haters among the Tea Party; look how they went after Ron Paul’s supporters during his bid for president. If they have trouble finding enough examples, then why not help to create them?
Um. Is there something wrong with highlighting racism? Are you seriously apologizing for Glenn Beck?
MBH:
No… That’s why I’m highlighting it; only I’m pointing out the actual racists.
No… I criticize him often, when, in my opinion, he deserves it, but I’ll give him credit where credit’s due.
Are you saying that Cenk — the accuser — is antisemitic?
MBH:
I said that he’s promoting antisemitism in the Tea Party to marginalize it. I don’t know whether he’s bigoted against Jews or anyone else, besides libertarians.
Do you deny antisemitism in the tea party?
MBH:
Are you asking me whether, in a tens of millions strong informal movement of people with a wide spectrum of libertarian – conservative sympathies, there may be one or more anti-Semites?
There are, apparently, not enough of them for the progressives to be satisfied.
Rad Geek:
Before I argue anything further, I must address one of my other pet peeves with the way libertarians – who should know better – misuse words: They chronically conflate the words “force” – “The use of physical power or violence to compel or restrain.” and “coercion” – “To cause behavior through the threat of force.” with the word “aggression” -“The initiation of force or coercion”. “Force” and “coercion” are clearly non-aggressive when used for defense.
Your examples of “ungoverned” – “uncontrolled” actions are actually the “self-controlled” – “self-governed” actions of people who join together to form a simple or temporary organization, governed by simple rules according to an informally stated or, sometimes, an intuitive mutual understanding of each other’s desires.
Do you feel that control needs some minimal levels of complexity, permanence or type of structure before it becomes real? – BTW: I think that’s illogical.
But, even if you are right: Do you believe that a large, complex, culturally and technologically advanced society can exist without controls, rules or laws?
One obvious, though not now existing, example of this kind of social order is a stateless nation or society that has no central “anti-government” because popular demand outlaws aggression. Instead, it has unlimited government, or I should say: limited only by market demand and the law of diminishing returns, competing for business in a competitive market, where courts, armies/militia, police and security are only common, unprivileged, businesses and organizations. The multitude of governing entities deal with each other by short and long-term contract and when they break contracts, have disputes, defend against criminals or foreign powers, they can turn to the services of specialized government agencies with whom they contract. These agencies that specialize in the use of defensive force and coercion would probably have reciprocal agreements or alliances for the contingency of a threat too large for a single one to handle.
This stateless social order, then, would have unlimited generation of units of independent governing bodies connected loosely to each other through an ever-changing and adaptable web of voluntary contracts at all levels of wealth and strength of arms.
I’m not speaking of the number of schools of anarchism or even the number of people who you would consider serious intellectual anarchists; I’m speaking of the number of leftists – and by that I mean Marxists – who either go out on the streets to riot and destroy property, or who support and encourage them. Their numbers dwarf the more “peaceful” ones that you’re thinking of, I’ll bet that most of the violent leftists recite platitudes and sing folk songs about how they are working for peace, love and a “green” earth.
How Open Source is working in Egypt today.
MBH:
You meant: “revolve”.
I see the sun move across the sky. Only after thinking that it must mean that the sun circles the earth do I conjure up an image of an orbiting sun.
Only after thinking that it must mean that the earth spins do I conjure up an image of the earth as a sunlit globe, rotating on its axis.
The sun’s path across the sky gives us no clues to show that the earth orbits the sun, but the thought that the earth does, no matter the thought’s inspiration, allows me to conjure up an image of the earth orbiting the sun.
Children don’t see that; they must be told, but I would allow that there may be things that they may correctly interpret from their perception.
A perception not a thought; interpreting the perception is the thought. The image in our mind, whether it is a copy of the perception or created in the mind to match a speculative interpretation, comes after the thought.
Perception, I don’t just mean vision, is information; information that requires interpretation.
Perception does align with reality; it’s the interpretation that often fails to do so.
We think we see the sun move across the sky. Because the thought is wrong, the thought gives us only partial knowledge. The part of the thought that there is movement involved is correct. The information that there is movement is a prerequisite of discovering the truth about which object is actually moving in a way that produces the perception.
Words are concepts that we compose into thoughts. Of course we would understand the lion, even if its vocabulary and thoughts were very limited.
I co-sign the links from P. Very helpful. Start with the second one.
Mark:
I’m speaking of the number of leftists – and by that I mean Marxists – who either go out on the streets to riot and destroy property, or who support and encourage them
The problem, as Charles already pointed you, is that marxists are not in any way “anarchists”. Marxists advocate for strong centralized state, which goes against any form of anrchism (social or market anarchism) that exist. So if your problem with “anarchists” is that they are marxists, I really wonder about your understanding of the term.
It seems to me that you have decided to define the term “anarchism” as “people who go in a rampage of indiscriminate violence in the streets” (or something of that sort). But then, even if there are some anarchists that actually participate in such form of violence, not all who do are anarchists (specially marxists), and such actions have little to do with the existent literature of anarchist thought.
Yes. Anarchists can be people who espouse any of the many versions of an ungoverned society or they can be people who sow violence, destruction and chaos, who may or may not be philosophical anarchists.
Obviously, the use of the label “anarchism” has serious problems of negative public perception and should avoided if only for that reason alone, but if you read my other posts, you’ll see that this is the least of my objections for appending it to an anti-statist philosophy, as, e.g., the state itself is the essence of lawlessness, violence and chaos, i.e., anarchy.
Marc Uzick,
Read this about sense-experience:
http://praxeology.net/unblog02-03.htm#08
http://praxeology.net/unblog03-03.htm#02
From what I read, it seems that you’re a Randian… I guess that’s why you despise the word anarchy. And you haven’t yet made the quote rad geek asked you to do.
MBH,
Dude, really… everyone can see your rhetoric (if it can be called that)… even an outsider like me.
Try being more honest… to others and to yourself. Maybe people will start to think more of you that way.
P., what is my rhetoric supposed to be proof of?
What I’m saying is that you keep misinterpreting roderick, rad geek and others. And you do it consistently. It seems like you do it on purpose.
The stuff about descartes is proof enough.
That’s what they say. But they’re also glued to a perspective and have to be hostile to anyone who pokes holes in their perspective. If they weren’t glued to a perspective, they’d be less likely to accuse me of misinterpretation, and more likely to actually engage in dialogue.
I agree that the Descartes stuff is proof. See here.
P.:
Whether your diagrams are from the side or head on, there is no escaping that we see the world outside of our minds though the lens of our interpretation of sense-data.
I wouldn’t rule out concepts as hereditary instincts, i.e., we are hard-wired to interpret perception in a particular way that evolved as a survival advantage.
OTOH we can to transcend prejudice, be it inborn or cultural. We can use reason to reexamine our concepts and the beliefs that we compose from them, creating our own consciously chosen instincts.
When I look at the sun, I see it move in a path across the sky because my animal instinct interprets change of position in a simple and practical perspective.
A monkey could never interpret this change in the sun’s place in any other way, but if someone tells me that the sun circles a globe on which we live, I can grasp what that means and whether it sounds logically possible, building a visual image of the model in my mind to check whether it feels intuitively right and, seeing that it does, then I can transcend my animal belief, internalizing this new, although wrong, model.
Then if I read that the motion I see is not that of the sun but of the earth’s rotation, I can transcend my learned prejudices and integrate this new perspective into my beliefs in the same way.
I would say that in people, both the Kantian and the Randian relationships between the external world and the mind coexist, but that it is the Randian model that permits people to transcend their animal natures.
I don’t despise the word; I despise its incorrect use as a form of Orwellian double-speak with statist implications:
1. Chaos is order.
2. The state ( anti-government ) is the only government.
and the way the words “government”, “authority”, “law” if used as legitimate voluntary actions, organizations or relationships go down the memory hole.
The idea that liberty is anarchy and that the state is order flies in the face of reality. It’s voluntary government that’s liberty and the state that’s anarchic.
Contrary to your guess, it was Ayn Rand that caused me to believe, for many years, that I was an anarchist. Her moral philosophy lends itself to the political philosophy of state-less government. I thought I was an anarchist long before I even knew the names of any “market-anarchists”.
From an earlier post:
“I first heard about anarchism from Ayn Rand’s writings and radio interviews 40 years ago. Applying her “non-initiation of the use of force” principle to the analysis of her claim that proper government requires a monopoly on the use of force and that competing governments within an area was nothing more than the worst form of evil: anarchy, I concluded that she was inconsistent and that I was an anarchist.
So, from the beginning, I’ve been an advocate of stateless government, only figuring out, many years later, that it has nothing to do with anarchy; in fact, it is the state itself, to the extent that it limits legitimate government, that is anarchy.”
How do you propose to set your mind aside and then start looking at things? What are you going to look with?
Dude. There is no “interpretation of sense-data”… there is no perceptual experience without perceptual judgement.
When a dog sees a cat, he sees it AS a cat. In the same way, when you see this: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Rabbit-DuckIllusion.html you see it AS a duck or AS a rabbit.
There is no pure “seeing-that”, only many “seeing-as”.
And it’s hard to see how a “seeing-as” differs from a perceptual judgement.
“we see the world outside of our minds though the lens of our interpretation of sense-data.”
Sure that we see the world through our sense-experience.
But we can only make sense of our sense-experience through our concepts!
We cannot make sense of a “non-conceptual sense-data”. We cannot make sense of a “non-conceptual” anything!
The fact that you seem to endorse the “randian” view shows that you didn’t understand the argument. The argument is supposed to show that all the “sideways-on” views are incoherent!
P.S. I owe this explanation to roderick… if anyone think I misunderstood him, please tell me.
MBH:
I take back my first interpretation of the Descartes quote. It was based on a misunderstanding of the phrase – “the measure of things”.
The implication I saw, that beliefs are not really things or truth, may still be there, but only as a secondary proposition.
It simply means:
While the existence and the nature of things and truth are not dependent on our mind, the existence and nature of our beliefs surely are.
You’re right about the contradiction. A non-contradictory way he could have made this, otherwise, good point would be:
“Excepting that which we affirm or deny, our mind is not the measure of things or of truth.”
Translating into a form that dummies like me could understand the first time:
“Excepting our beliefs, the existence and the nature of things and truth are not dependent on our mind.”
Do you mean to say that sense-data is a secondary experience, whereas reason is primary?
MBH:
No. Where do you think I implied that?
You didn’t imply that. I’m suggesting to you the only coherent position.
MBH:
The sense-data is true. We use our reason to interpret what it means, but our interpretation can be mistaken or incomplete.
Also: We cannot reason without something to apply it to.
This is what I mean by: “Sense-data is primary to reason.”
P.:
Maybe my terminology is confused. Wouldn’t interpretation of sense-data be perceptual judgment?
I don’t think I said anything to contradict that, unless you mean that concepts must be preconceived, meaning: they can’t be interpretations of sense data themselves.
Can’t we, sometimes, make sense of our sense experience by inventing new concepts or must concepts be hatched in the dark.
Do you mean in the sense that even if we have no idea yet what it is that we, e.g., smell, we must believe that it’s the concept “something” before we can make sense of it?
Well…if you define the “sideways-on view” as “an attempt to peek out from behind our concepts to see what the world is like without them.”, then I would agree. I just don’t understand how the graphical representations could help in understanding that, other than as symbols of the two approaches. The side view is just easier to use, as long as you don’t mean it to imply that you’re “peeking out” – I don’t see why anyone could expect to do so.
I hope P. will forgive me for stepping in, and I hope he offers a response himself.
Mark, I had the urge to fight this too when I started philosophy. I’ve come to see it this way: sense-data-as-basic vs. sense-data-as-baggage. Is sense-data the medium between us and the world or is it a by-product of direct experience? If we start the question here, then we see the issue more clearly.
Because there’s no such thing as “coherent nonsense” some people will take that proposition to be the same as this: “#^%*!$@%*)*$#@!, as long as you don’t mean it to imply that you’re ‘$&%@ #$%’ […]”
Again, I don’t think you understood me.
There is no “interpretation of sense-data”. We don’t make perceptual judgements based on a “non-conceptual sense-experience”. Our perceptual judgement is “built into” the perceptual experience.
I offered the argument of “seeing-as” and the picture of the duck-rabbit as examples of what I’m talking. Why have you ignored those arguments?
Another thing: you seem to be attributing to me some kind of platonic view, in which we are born with our conceptual framework… this is not my view, and I don’t know why you think that.
“Do you mean in the sense that even if we have no idea yet what it is that we, e.g., smell, we must believe that it’s the concept “something” before we can make sense of it?”
Yes, I think that’s right. In the same way, even when we don’t know exactly what we’re seeing, we’re at least seeing it “as something”.
About the “sideways-on view”: please, clarify your position. I don’t understand you. Do you think that’s a coherent view? Why?
“if you define the “sideways-on view” as “an attempt to peek out from behind our concepts to see what the world is like without them.”, then I would agree.”
That’s exactly what the “sideways-on view” is supposed to be.
P.S.: Beware: Do not confuse my “perceptual judgement ‘built into’ perceptual experience” argument with the “kantian” view. I only used that phrasing because it seems you’re not understanding what I’m saying, and the “built into” argument could be a more enphatic way of making myself clear.
MBH:
It’s the medium between us and the world produced as a by-product of physical interaction with the world.
You say it’s nonsense, but offer no reason why.
You’re saying that the side view is easier to use, but that’s not relevant to the issue. The issue is whether or not the side view is an actual view, or merely what you imagine to be a view. If you think that sense-data mediates our relationship with the world, then you admit that the senses could be fooling us and the world could be entirely different from what our sense-data suggests. If that’s true, then the same thing goes for thinking. Everything that we think could be a game played by sense-data. Sense-data could give us the impression that we know how to reason, but A=A could be a sense-data trick. We can’t know with certainty; we’re slaves to sense-data. Sense-data may even trick us into believing that the thoughts we have are actually ours, but they may not be. We don’t know. Worse, we can’t know. So long as we think that sense-data is what mediates us and the world, there may not even be an external world, or there may be 67 of them, or maybe the sense-data is the external world informing people that we can’t see. We can’t know. So why should you think that the side-ways on view makes sense? We could have 67 external worlds: we might need the top-down view. Or you could be the world: we might need to look behind you to see all the people your world is shaping.
Obviously all that’s silly; but the point is, if we accept that sense-data frames the world, then there’s an infinite amount of different side-views, top-down views, inside-out views, etc. that we’ll have to take into account and we could never know which one is right. So to say the side-ways on view is easiest to use is like saying “a, b, and c are the easiest letters to use, so we’re going to throw out the rest of the alphabet.” We can’t just make arbitrary decisions like that and consider them sound and valid.
Try reading this several times — very slowly, very patiently. Be aware of the times when sense-data just doesn’t seem like it’s enough to describe what’s going on.
MBH:
I’m saying that the layout of the graphic is irrelevant; it’s the explanation of how the model works that matters.
Either explanation can be used with either graphic. Because of this, I don’t think my point is really important.
Our interpretation of the sense-data is often wrong and it often fools us, but when our sense-data is wrong, it’s a sign of a disease, degenerative condition or consciousness altering drugs.
That’s true; the only thing that we know is that our own consciousness exists. Everything else, even our own physical existence is extrapolated from the empirical evidence of our senses as interpreted by our reason. I think we do get a head start on learning, though, with the help of rudimentary animal instincts that either give us or predispose us to certain concepts, e.g., Mother or food and, possibly, some beliefs, e.g., spirits and gods, as well.
It’s silly because, if it were true, we could not have survived or evolved as a species or as societies. We require faith in ourselves and, because we are social creatures, a fair degree of faith in our fellow Man, if we are to thrive. We are born with a natural confidence in or ability to develop our faculties and take great joy in the process. We have pleasure, pain and instinctual drives to help us know if we’re doing things the right way. When our mental judgment brings success, our automatic reward is pride, happiness and the respect and love of our family and neighbors to encourage continued successful behavior.
That’s why we have to guess; notice the results and keep trying until we get it right, identifying what that sensation signifies so that we can respond to it, after some practice, without thinking . We do this when learning new motor skills or learning body language. Inherited instincts may also be involved to some extent.
Do you think Objectivist epistemology is flawless?
MBH:
I’m not trying to argue for a particular metaphysical theory in the same way that I came to this site to debate as an advocate for state-less government. Though, even as an advocate for some position, I’m always open to correction, my metaphysical arguments are more exploratory and uncertain and their purpose isn’t to convince anyone so much as the hope to learn something new.
BTW: Aren’t my beliefs partially Kantian? If so, then how could I consider Objectivist epistemology to be flawless?
While it’s obvious that I’m influenced by Ayn Rand, I don’t agree with all her political conclusions, I don’t think that her epistemology is complete and I don’t understand her belief in a concept as meaningless as “free will”. I’m not dogmatically devoted to her philosophy.
P.:
It’s probably my fault. I have little experience in metaphysics; the problem may not be my failure to understand the ideas so much as the terminology or we may have differing epistemological beliefs. So there are three possible reasons for disagreeing.
Then why can we see the images more than one way?
We may make learned or inherited automatic unconscious judgments, but first there’s a sensory stimulation. We can’t interpret a duck in terms of rabbits, but we can interpret the shadows, light and colors that make up the rabbit as a duck. You seem to say that we can’t look objectively at the image as patterns of light, but can see them only as something first.
What am I missing?
It seems to me that – “Our perceptual judgment is “built into” the perceptual experience.” – is something like “conceptual sense experience” in your graphic of the “Kantian view”.
That we see things as something is the result of our confidence in our faculties; after all, it could be a hallucination or a dream.
Our belief that there is an existence outside of our consciousness is an interpretation of what our conscious experience means, whether we make the original interpretation or it’s an inborn instinct.
I just meant that it doesn’t have to be used that way, since you can imagine either “peeking outside” or not “peeking outside” with any symbolic model; even one made from concentric spheres. This is not important; forget I ever said it.
So why are you insisting upon a metaphysical position?
MBH:
I only insist that your propositions make sense to me before I accept them. Also: that there’s an actual difference in our beliefs to begin with, not just a problem of terminology.
I want to understand a new and better perspective, if there is one, or to confirm and build on what I already believe. You don’t expect me to do so uncritically, do you?
Of course not. The problem though is that you’re putting forth metaphysical propositions against the ontological propositions that we put forth. That’s like bringing a bat into a boxing match and saying, “I don’t know that I agree with your boxing technique: the bat keeps knocking you out.” Our point is that a bat never knocks anyone out “in boxing.” Maybe “in a street fight.” But if you want to investigate the nature of being — formally — then you have to play by the rules of investigation. When you bring in sense-data-as-basic, you’re not boxing anymore, you’re out in the streets. You can’t make that assumption “in ontology,” just as you can’t bring a bat to the ring “in boxing.” It doesn’t make you a better boxer; it makes you a street fighter. And even in street fighting, a bat isn’t a great weapon.
“Then why can we see the images more than one way?”
I don’t understand. How does my view deny the possibility of seeing something more than one way?
In fact, I used the example of the duck-rabbit exactly to show that our perceptual experience is defeasible.
In fact, it’s exactly the opposite: It’s the “randian” view that denys “sense-data” can be defeasible. In this view, “sense-data” is infallible… it’s only our interpretation of it that is defeasible.
And what I’m arguing is that there is no infallible “sense-data” which we must interpret.
“but we can interpret the shadows, light and colors that make up the rabbit as a duck.”
Dude, are you saying that our sense-experience when we see an apple is “of a round and red object” which THEN we interpret to be an apple?
I find that absurd. When we see the apple, we see it ” AS AN APPLE”… not “as a round and red object”.
Sure, when you don’t have the concept of an apple yet, you might see it “as a round and red object”… but then you’re still “seeing-as”.
It’s very difficult to make sense of the things you say… maybe you should read about the dinjuctive view about sensory experience. That’s the view I’m holding.
BTW,
“Our belief that there is an existence outside of our consciousness is an interpretation of what our conscious experience means”
This is the skeptical sideways-on view. It’s incoherent. You seem to say “we can’t know what the world is really like”… but that’s a senseless phrase.
You can’t describe what it is that you’re skeptical about… so you can’t frame the question.
And no, i don’t hold the “kantian” view. Didn’t you read my “P.S.”?
P.:
Because if we see a rabbit, instead of what it really is: sense data as shapes, then we can only interpret a duck in terms of a rabbit. This is nonsensical; it’s clear that we interpret the shapes to be a duck.
Well…so far, the Randian view makes more sense to me.
It seems to me that we’re tangled in semantics. When we say that we (a)”see” an apple, what we mean is that we (b)”see” a shape and color that we interpret to be an apple, i.e., we (a)”see” a shape and color as an apple.
Where (a)”see” means: “to discern”, and (b)”see” means: “look at”. There are over 20 definitions of “see” in the dictionary.
“When we say that we (a)”see” an apple, what we mean is that we (b)”see” a shape and color that we interpret to be an apple”
No. We see an apple, full stop.
If you don’t have the concept of an apple yet, or if you don’t recognize it as an apple yet, then we don’t see it as an apple… we see it “as an object that is round, red, etc.”
Nonetheless, we see it “as an object”! (Or even better: as a concrete particular).
“Because if we see a rabbit, instead of what it really is: sense data as shapes, then we can only interpret a duck in terms of a rabbit. This is nonsensical; it’s clear that we interpret the shapes to be a duck.”
Dude, we do not “interpret the shapes” to be a duck. We SEE IT AS A DUCK-SHAPE! There’s no intermediation here.
The thing is, we see it, DEFEASIBLY, as a duck. So, in the case of the duck-rabbit illusion we can drop that perspective, and see it as a rabbit.
We don’t see it merely as lines and colors which we interpret to be X. We already see the X.
Sure, for someone who doesn’t have the concept of a rabbit-shape or duck-shape he might see it as lines and etc. But we do have those concepts… so there’s no such questions here.
I hope roderick long, or any other person, help me here. I don’t know if I’m doing full justice to roderick’s views here.
P.:
We only see it as a concrete particular if we interpret our perceptions as representing things external to our consciousness.
I already addressed this:
P.:
That’s right:
“We see it as a duck shape.” = “Our mind interprets it as a duck shape.”, where see = discern or judge.
Concepts are mental constructs. There is no ideal “duckness” possessed by all ducks for us to recognize. Each duck or duck shape we see is evaluated for its associations with our concepts, which includes “duck”.
Dropping one perspective doesn’t create the other independent of mental judgment.
The shape must still be compared with the concept.
Let’s try to look at things this way:
Do you think dogs make perceptual judgement?
“see = discern or judge”
No, “seeing” involves judgement. But seeing is still the sensory experience. What I’m saying is that there is no sense-experience without judgement.
“We only see it as a concrete particular if we interpret our perceptions as representing things external to our consciousness”
WTF?
Are you saying that when I die, the world dies with me, because everything is my conciousness? That’s absurd. Incoherent, actually.
It seems that you haven’t really read the blogposts from Roderick.
“Concepts are mental constructs.”
It depends on what you mean by that phrase. Are you saying our mind must impose our concepts in a world which is, otherwise, a “formless chaos”?
Because that’s an incoherent view.
“There is no ideal “duckness” possessed by all ducks for us to recognize.”
Are you saying that every abstraction is precisive? So that “duckness” must necessarily be idealistic?
Read this rebuttal to that kind of thinking:
http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae9_3_1.pdf
“Each duck or duck shape we see is evaluated for its associations with our concepts, which includes “duck”.”
I can’t make any sense of this.
“Dropping one perspective doesn’t create the other independent of mental judgment”
Sure not. Who said otherwise? What I’m saying is that there is no sense-experience which doesn’t already involve a mental judgement.
There is no pure sense-data which we THEN must interpret.. because that is like saying our “sense-data” is a “formless chaos”… which is senseless.
“The shape must still be compared with the concept.”
Again, I can’t make any sense of this.
You seem to be saying: “Here, let me take off my conceptual goggles to look into the sense-data and compare it with my concepts”
That is the sideways-on view.