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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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The older I get the more I dislike this first principles thinking based on rights and so forth. I think ultimately there is only one social law in the world, the law of the jungle. Just as any other animal, you get to keep your property if you can physically keep it. You conveniently evaded the issue of natives in USA, but that was precisely the case. Natives could not keep their land so they did not. As easy as that.

Current social and economic arrangement exists because it has legitimacy. Legitimacy is ability to keep powerful individuals from exerting violence to take what they want. You can get legitimacy by naked power, by growing the spoils so there is easier way to get ahead than using violence as well as by creating social structures regulating violent behavior or any number of other means.

This will be a tangent, but I recently watched YouTube discussion of some people from Niger where they reacted to US news reports about recent coup in that country which was described as anti-democratic and authoritarian etc. And they laughed, Niger ranks 189th out of 191 countries in the world in UN Development index, it is as poor as it can get. It does not matter if god himself was ruling that country and he was just unlucky, the result is abject poverty and failure. The regime simply has no legitimacy, it does not work and no number of "first principles" talks about democracy and freedom make any sense in Niger. If society is in ruin and ruled by illegitimate regime, is anti-social behavior really antisocial?

For people who defend the current conception of property in the industrialized world, and who think that we should accept the idea of starting at step 3 and not worrying about 1 and 2, what is the justification?

It works. First World now is still arguably the best place and time to live in history of mankind, even now in 2023. The current system has build up some legitimacy, it was able to grow its population along its wealth for centuries now. There may be some reasons to play on the edges and adjust things here and there, but I do not think we are close to anything that should require drastic measures like in Niger.