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Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.
The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.
A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.
B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.
C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.
But...
A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore
B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...
C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.
This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.
The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.
The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.
A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.
Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.
Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?
I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.
There is only one natural right in man, and that is the ability to do violence.
All other rights spring from this basic fact. We have social and political rights because someone in history stuck a bayonet in someone else who was trying to deny those. Any right not backed by violence will wither and disappear in short order.
The last argument of kings is the final right of every man.
Thanks, Mao.
I think you’re overlooking something. Violence is uncertainty. Both about who will prevail and who expects to prevail. We have social and political rights because someone decided to stack the odds in his favor by bringing a friend.
Individual violence is nothing compared to coordinated violence. Cultivating and expending credibility such that other people are your friends and not your enemies’. Or, better yet, to extend the uncertainty in your favor, and let you bluff more strength than you might truly be able to draw. This is where @vorpa_glavo’s status games come in: does that chief command fifty spears or just ten? Will his sons move heaven and earth to avenge him, or let old insults lie?
Social bonds are the fundamental right of humanity. And thanks to the unreliability of people, they supersede any individual capacity for violence.
...I don't think I'd fully agree with this statement, but it is one of the most interesting insights I've seen here in quite some time. It crystalizes some of the serious doubts I've had about my understanding of Hobbes' argument in Leviathan: is the state of nature, the war of all against all that founds his argument, something that does or has ever actually existed? Has there ever been a moment when alliances did not exist?
I’m inclined to agree with @Southkraut and say that “all vs. all” is a figure of speech. While I don’t know where Hobbes would draw the line, I doubt he denied kinship bonds; they’re just categorically different than larger organizations. I’d put the transition around Dunbar’s number.
But then, I’m not sure I’ve fully internalized Unflattening Hobbes.
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Isn't it a war of subsets of all against subsets of all, and Hobbes was just being concise?
In that case, how can we ever be said to have escaped the state of nature? There's never been a time when there was no conflict between subsets of all either. It's entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding his theory, but the above post has me curious if this is another example of false knowledge, something we all sort of assumed was accurate because it sounded plausible.
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I most certainly do not overlook this, it's what makes the system as fair as anything else that exists.
The rest of your comment seems to think that I said violence was the best political system, but that is not my argument. How power is produced from violence is a corrupt and despicable business, but we call it politics. None of that impacts my argument that violence is the only inherent human right.
It is the only method by which the truly disadvantaged can inject some uncertainty into their otherwise certain outcomes.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I didn’t read you as claiming violence was the best political system. My point was that social games—scheming and alliances—are a more effective method for achieving goals than mere violence. They scale better, and leverage the uncertainty of violence. They also carry much less opportunity cost. I think this makes socialization, or perhaps simply speech, an inherent human right. Political power comes from the barrel of a gun, but it doesn’t have to be your gun.
This is true, but only for what I think is a vanishingly narrow definition. It is a rare outlaw indeed who can’t leverage social ties. Even if he only does so to amplify his violence, he will get more with cooperation and threats than with the acts themselves.
I think you're arguing something I'm not arguing against.
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Well, of course. It is implicit.
But bringing up this fact ignores the past thousand years of political development, namely, that we live in the era that states have monopolies on force. It brings to mind the sort of self-representing lawsuit maker who smugly brings up the Magna Carta at his trial for tax evasion. Yes, we understand the principle, but it's not very useful for our purposes.
Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder. And through this lense we extend this sense of self to the material (private property) and the abstract (autonomy of action.) Unless you are so radical that you say you have the right to kill anyone you please.
Which, of course, is fine. But then I'd have to report you for strange notions.
No, we don't. From Prigozhin to Weaver to Rittenhouse, our modern states have long lost (if they ever had) any sort of monopoly on violence.
Obviously I disagree. All rights can be misused, but the right is underlying, ineradicable. A right means nothing if it is only the right to do something in a manner prescribed by society in a given time and place. Violence is always an option, if not always the smart or moral one. Point is, the right is "unalienable" in a very real sense. Nobody can take it from you. Because of this, it underwrites all other rights, because if they are trampled far enough, we can activate the most ancient and powerful of all rights.
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While I believe there is a lot of truth in what you say, I think there is one other wellspring of "natural rights": social status games.
Sure, sometimes social status games are backed by violence, or the threat of violence, but consider something like accessibility laws for disabled people. There is no risk of disabled people violently uprising against the state, and the vast majority of people would not raise arms against the government if the government got rid of wheelchair ramps, etc.
So, why do we have accesibility laws in most of the developed world? It is because throwing a bone to disabled people imposes a small enough dead weight loss on the economy, and a large enough increase in the prestige of Western institutions among Western elites that the ruling party is willing to use political capital to do it. (Or the reputation and prestige lost for undoing it is too large to truly contemplate.)
Violence is important, but it isn't everything.
Social status games are just violence with extra steps.
Also, the ADA is not about disabled people, disabled people are a McGuffin to let big capitalism strangle small capitalism.
Disabled access laws are class warfare intended to enrich trial lawyers and bankrupt small businesses.
It's using the violence of the state to enrich the parts of the economy who will not miss the "dead weight loss" because they build a new store every week, rather than the parts which have a legacy building which is harder and more expensive to retrofit.
There's no status here, no morals and no ideology. Just violence and money. Status is what gets sold to the rubes.
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