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Notes -
the missionary is acting as though there is a law to be followed, when there obviously is not. The checkpoint guard is a potential threat, the "service charge" is not optional, and these realities must be engaged with. The missionary is thinking there's some system in place such that these realities are Someone Else's Problem, that the proper response is to file a complaint form and let the system handle it. He's blind to the fact that there is no system, that this is the way things are.
The cat lady is doing the same thing. She acts as though there's a system to enforce her will over and above her immediate actions. She apparently thinks there's a system that prevents the cat from walking out an open door, ignoring that no such system exists. She wants such a system to exist, ignores the fact that it does not, and so suffers the consequences.
The "dishes" poem (one of my favorites, by the way) illustrates the disconnect between cooperative systems of the type the people in these two examples are imagining exist, and the reality of individual choice. Washing the dishes is supposed to preclude breaking them, but there's nothing innate to the task to actually prevent this. What prevents breaking dishes is something entirely different, a whole other complex of assumptions and interactions with no actual connection to the act of dish-washing itself, and the existence of those assumptions cannot simply be assumed when it's time for dish-washing.
Assuming the above is correct, let's see if I can extend the pattern.
This scene from The Wire is all about the divide between the power of a hypothetical system and the power of material reality. The guard wants it to be one way: his whole job is in fact to be that system, that's the whole reason he's there, the reason he draws a paycheck, he has a uniform and everything! And yet, it's the other way: the system doesn't actually exist, even though he wants it to, even though he's paid to implement it, because at the end of the day, cooperation has to either be consented to or enforced, nd mechanisms of enforcement are both very expensive and quite limited in what they can achieve. Stanfield refuses to consent, and the guard, and the people the guard represents, aren't actually prepared for enforcement. They're bluffing, and Stanfield calls it. The guard's response is to try to guilt-trip him over his defection, as though Stanfield doesn't understand what he's doing, as though he's just making a mistake, and once this is pointed out he'll fall in line with the system. This doesn't work because Stanfield is not making a mistake, has no intention of cooperating, and knows that neither the guard nor the people behind him have any way of enforcing the system they're claiming exists. In reality, he has all the cards, and recognizes no reason to pretend otherwise. He is able to inflict emotional whiplash on the guard at will, by allowing the guard to pretend the system exists, and then demonstrating that it does not.
Applying it to the Culture War, there's the argument I've made for a long time here that the Constitution is dead, or that it is ink and paper, or that it is whatever five justices say it is. The point of all these statements is to highlight different ways that this system vs reality disconnect applies to the system of the Constitution: the document itself is not the power, the justices aren't even the power. The paper and ink and the justices interpreting it are just coordination mechanisms. The power comes from the social consensus that they exist to coordinate, and that power can be manipulated in a whole variety of ways that have nothing to do with a fancy piece of parchment or five people in silly black robes. A foolish person might imagine that their ignition key is what powers their car: they turn the key and the car starts! But of course, the ignition key is only indirectly connected to the car's engine, and if there's something wrong with the engine the key certainly isn't going to help.
This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.
The reasoning is true, but the problem with accepting it is it removes all legitimacy from government. If e.g. the constitution and the justices say I can carry a gun, and the real power says I can't, then for what reason should I not violate every single one of the state's edicts provided I can get away with it? Where does the state's legitimacy derive? Lysander Spooner's answer (it doesn't) seems to be the only one which makes sense.
And again this is the sort of thing that I'm talking about when I say that there is a giant Hobbes-shaped whole in the discourse. The obvious response that almost every red-triber learns as a child is "from the consent of the governed" and yet this concept seems to be completely alien to progressives and the wider left. A cynical man might even theorize that the absence of this concept is why the philosophical left seems to be so much more prone to devolving into totalitarianism and mass-murder that the ostensibly more authoritarian right.
You are acting as if there is a category of the "the governed" that can "consent" collectively somehow.
The nation is an imagined tribe... not a one of these social intuitions actually worked in theory or practice once the modern nation state came about and actively started hacking people's communal instincts to start regulating people, not at the level of the village or town of the hundreds or thousands, but at the tens of millions strong nation... this is why the birth of modern bureaucracy was so horrific and killed so many tens of millions of people, people kept behaving and acting as if they were part of a social organ capable of sane joint decision making when they weren't.
Every cultural group and nation went insane in its own unique ways in the socio-cultural drift, and the only reason civilization didn't break down entirely in SOME places is because they had a unified culture that just so happened to ape the mad vision they imagined they were enacting.
There is no 300 million strong category of "the governed" that is somehow capable of making decisions and "consenting"... Your brain is simply hacked by tribal instincts that worked and produced effective social morality when your ancestors were navigating social relations of a few thousand.
"The system" and "the Governed" and "the consent of the governed" can go haywire and murder 10s of millions of people at a moment's notice for no reason at all outside of pure cultural inertia and no sane intuition or person would at all be capable of stopping it.
You are adrift on black seas of infinity, lost in a unstoppable collective dream that could turn to a nightmare at a second's notice for reasons barely intelligible to the dream itself, with figures and institutions appearing before you in the poorly stitched skinsuits of your friends and loved ones saying "Come give grandmother a hug" or "If it isn't my old comrade. Let me shake your hand" and for the moment they hug back or shake the hand, and encourage you to follow them further up the road, and you say "Of course I'll follow they're my dear friends and family" whilst everyone who's noticed the nightmarish miasma. and that the ground is not wet with mist but blood, is screaming "FOR GOD'S SAKE LOOK AT THEIR TEETH!"
...and you are acting as though it would matter if they didn't exist. Why? What makes you think that this the case? or that if it were that it would be remotely valid as a rebuttal if it were?
All tribes are "imagined" in much the same way that all words are "made up". They only exist in so far they are agreed to exist and while you are free to believe that things like a shared religion, shared philosophy, shared culture, or even shared personal affinity are no basis for social coordination. The people of history are under no obligation to abide by what you might consider "reasonable" "rational" or "real". When push comes to shove the definition of "tribe" is simply the Venn Diagram of those you're willing to bleed for and those who are willing to bleed for you. Appeals to constructs like "race" and "economic class" are the purview of the socially atomized urban narcissists who being unwilling to bleed for anyone but themselves and thus have no tribe of their own.
You say that I am "adrift on black seas of infinity" but you're wrong. I am not "adrift" I am sailing, and If were feeling uncharitable I might suggest that you are only able to hold the beliefs that you do because you've never ventured beyond the shallows of your safe first-world middle-class existence. @FCfromSSC speaks the truth, true freedom, the kind that comes from clear-headed understanding of what "freedom" actually entails, is fucking terrifying and not for the faint of heart.
As for the implied accusation that it is people like me who pave the road to oblivion and concentration camps, I would point out that between the two of us, I am not the one who has recently been writing apologetics for the actions of men like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao.
I've never written one apologetic for a single one of them.
I compared them to Lincoln and the great leaders of history... You applied the Modus Ponens that I was therefore saying they weren't as bad, when I claim the modus tollens "They're all fucking horrifying beyond comprehension"
You believe in a Christian world where good and evil exist, and even if not in balance, the good is not wholly outweighed by the bad, whereas I believe in a Lovecraftian world where we are adrift on the nightmarish black seas of infinity.
Sorry is I have to be insufficiently condemnatory of our cultures collective boogeymen to beat it into peoples fucking head that the worst human beings who ever lived, and the people they think of as great leader, statesmen, and heroes,, or even just mediocre politicians are VASTLY closer in both degree and kind than ANY are to ANYONE that any person should consider remotely praiseworthy.
What do you call this then?
As other users in that thread have pointed out, it's a pretty massive leap to go from "the Nazis were not uniquely evil" to "aKshUallY the Nazis were heroes of western civilization"
Not a quote.
My claim was for the majority of western civilization Hilter would be considered a "National Hero" such as Napoleon for the French, Alexander for the Greeks, Ceasar for the Romans (and later italians) Vlad Tepest for the Romanians, and Ghengis Kahn for the Mongols, or Lincoln for the Americans.
All war criminals who killed 100s of thousands if not millions and pursued explicit genocides in most cases (ask the Native Americans about Lincoln), but who are praised as heroes of their people by said people.
The fact people use a juvenile definition of the word "hero" thanks to Hollywood divorced from both its classical and early modern usage does not mean I am going to stop using that valuable and specific technical word. Not least because its positive affect accurately captures the socio-cultural esteem it describes.
I'm watching the japanese series right now Legend of the Galactic Heroes its an incredible military series with tons of classical allusion and political insight.
Do you think its title would be better translated as "Legend of the Galactic really swell guys" or "Legend of the Galactic Esteemed Military Conquerors"
potatoh potatah
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