A Couple Steps Behind Pete
I know I’m saying what Pete’s already said, but I kind of have to articulate it and my impressions of what he’s saying from my own vantage
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I think it is important for leaders of communities (or states) to understand the values of neighboring communities to create harmony and respect for their respectively different ways of life. I think this could help forge alliances between communities. Those leaders are going to have the emotional development and maturity to look at differences without embracing them or feeling like it’s a threat, so long as those neighbors stay on their side of the line.
But we have jumped the shark trying to encourage individuals within our own community to live together on a day to day basis with a hodgepodge of values and ideals that sometimes clash, and for the sake of daily living, perhaps are even mutually exclusive or competing ideals.
This has been the downfall, possibly of every society. It’s when the insiders, simple everyday people that best flourish in social cohesion and under cohesive leadership with very slow changes (and only when absolutely necessary), try to engage with one another as if they were allied nations unto themselves.
The average person is not sophisticated enough to even have amicable disagreements with foreigners far away, much less with people in their home, their community and with the added pressures of routine social involvement.
This is why it’s so easy to destroy a non cohesive society. The average person is ready to get bent out of shape over minor disagreements, and if you offer them political power as a way to force their neighbor to take up their own values (or die), the average person is happy to use that tool in this brutal manner without a second thought. We saw this throughout Covid and now, with divorcees and kids with gender dysphoria. They will turn any disagreement into an opportunity to smash their adversary.
Tribalism is our nature, and the early tribal outsider could damn a village. It’s instinctual to want to destroy a conflicting ideologue. It’s not evil. It’s to defend the village and survive. People today make this instinct out to be evil, left, right or center. It’s not. It’s a basic survival instinct.
It’s not the power that’s the problem. That’s the folly of libertarian and anarchist philosophies. “If we just get rid of power, harmony would ensue… maybe not perfect harmony, but more than what we have now.” People always have the power to exercise whatever power they can regardless of government. In a state with a high illegal crime rate, it’s obvious they already do. So it’s not the political power that’s the problem.
It’s the initial pressure of trying to create a melting pot society made up of average human beings running on instinct. Every society must have average people with good survival instincts surrounded by ethical cohesion to survive. Most people are common and average. Most people have these instincts and haven’t emotionally challenged them. If you don’t have enough people, you don’t have an army, and if you don’t have an army, you will be invaded and scrubbed out by neighbors who want your shit. This isn’t complicated. You don’t have to read a book or figure out how to train your neighbors to be moral and not invade you. You just set up a good enough “fuck around and find out” militia and people stop trying to find out.
If you give the whole community the same power of an army to destroy each other under the pretty label of “democracy” and fill that society with opposing factions, you are merely handing them the keys to their own undoing as a society. This is what your enemies would do or encourage. “Please, keep importing outsiders who have clashing values. We want to see you fall.”
So, it’s the layout of each society that’s flawed, not the power. People who aren’t ready to be radical individuals are given that power to wield in a neighborhood of competing ideals. And, they never will be ready or even desirous of it for the purposes that maintain and sustain a thriving civilization. Most people would rather not be responsible for the scepter. It’s not that they don’t want (at least on a conscious level) to be responsible. It’s that they aren’t ready and don’t want to have to do it. The average person asks, “why am I being challenged in this way?” Creating a life for the common people with less challenges is the task of creating order in a society.
We have as libertarians, anarchists, democrats and even classical liberals always overestimated the emotional development and human nature of the common man. And we have simultaneously undervalued those base level instincts and human nature in fortifying thriving societies. We need soldiers. We need workers. We need farmers. We need families. We need to give them the orderly society in which they thrive.
No man is an island, and most people are best organized or instructed as domesticated, cohesive cooperative beings with like-minded neighbors. Sure, everyone can have the opportunity to respect people of varied values, to be xenophiles and even to migrate to communities wherein people feel more similar to them at heart. But if you go elsewhere, leave your old values, your conflicting values behind. Same if you come here.
But to imply that the common man can or should all be able to go against their deepest survival instincts for living in a harmonious society, and then trying to program that instinct for cohesion out of them, to turn them all into ardent individualists in a “marketplace of ideas,” is a dumpster fire plan. It’s worse. It’s mad science. It’s not any less progressive than vaccinating every human with an untested experimental technology loaded with flaws without a control group. It’s in the same league as educating all toddlers that gender is subjective and waiting to see what happens. What will progressives endorse next? Growing all infants in test tubes and saying that a woman’s body is just as good environment for growing new life as a machine? The same mad science created the melting pot. Mad science says everyone is best acting as a radical individual and then, I’ve heard it claimed that society doesn’t matter.
Most of the modern “progressive” ideas I mentioned as a comparison may have seemed insane to you if you have an iota of sanity. But you still may not see or rather have not come to accept (much less appreciate) how your ideals of being an autonomous individual are not desired by the majority of people. I did the whole “Candles in the Dark” spiel long enough to realize that when people say they value their own freedom and finally conclude that they have been incongruent when faced with extending that freedom to everyone, that their true value isn’t the personal freedom of radical individualism “which they should morally extend to others.” For the common man to become congruent is for him to realize that the congruent stance is the acceptance that he doesn’t ultimately desire that kind of responsibility for himself. In that level of congruence, they know better than most of us what they are prepared to do about that kind of responsibility. Hoping they will take the scepter of personal responsibility on “principle” or “morality” again, it’s madness. This is why you still think that imposing individualism on them is somehow moral when it’s in fact, catastrophic. They don’t want it for everyone else any more than they want it for themselves. The values of common people exclude you from living cohesively in society with them. You need to change location or belief, not them!
These situations wherein we try to impose radical individualism unilaterally as some “greatest moral good” or “only moral principle” are the moments where we have unwittingly attempted to Frankenstein our way forward. We haven’t first looked at what we have lost in the experiment of forsaking or usurping basic human nature as social creatures. We just decided what was right for me is right for thee, without bothering to ask if that’s what thee wanted, and certainly without ascertaining if thee was capable of handling it.
Before you start espousing merits of this experiment, I have to tell you frankly. The results of this experiment are far more devastating than any aforementioned examples and lead to all the things you liberally blame on government. More of your individual freedoms have been lost trying to appease your neighbors and make this abomination come to life than you would ever lose building a society of homogenous values. It’s not government at fault here. It’s idealism. It’s our own hubris that’s the culprit. It’s our hubris to assume everyone would be better off living as autonomous individuals with the freedom to engage in “consensual” relationships with people who have conflicting values and in which said individuals aren’t emotionally developed enough to handle conflict.
I’m not defending this particular government. By telling me what a catastrophe this government is, you aren’t schooling me. You’re proving my point. The current regime is trying to govern through empowerment of competing factions of radical individuals. The current system you admonish is a better model for what most of you are advocating than what I am suggesting. You’ll never see it if you keep hoping that turning everyone into Frankenstein’s monster would be an improvement on the world. I think it’s blind madness.
Go ahead, Faucis. If you think acting like gods is morality as long as everyone can do it, I can’t wait to hear about your next scheme.