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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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I feel like this is just rephrasing what I said, and that none of it changes my original objection.

Governing other people is harder than governing yourself. So to say that a person is incapable of governing themself but capable of governing others is a bit insane. Which is exactly the conceit of a nanny state in a democracy.

I think what has actually happened is that some people have recognized that some other people are sometimes incapable of governing themselves. They have stripped the incapable of the responsibility to governing themselves, but left them with the responsibility to govern others. We are left with children and the criminally insane to rule over us.

Governing other people is harder than governing yourself.

Eh, I think this depends on cases enough that neither this statement nor the reverse is usefully true. It is true that very few people are fit to rule others unchecked, without becoming corrupted by having more power than is wise.

Fundamentally, what a government--any government--is, is a methodology for figuring out what rules will be enforced within a society. Absent a completely anarchic state of nature--which can exist, briefly--there will be rules that are enforced. Democracy is that class of methodologies where that authority is spread most broadly, unlike, say, monarchy, where the authority is very concentrated.

In a democracy, you get to determine the rules that your neighbor must live by. But the same applies in reverse, and hashing out what that means in practice is part of democratic negotiation such that the demos arrives at a conclusion. Can you set some questions aside, such that each follows his own path? Yes! And you really really should do that in a number of cases, history is quite clear! But the agreement to set questions aside, and not make an enforced rule, is itself a rule that may be revisited.

There are a number of ways to decorate decisions-not-to-decide, and paint "we really mean it!" on them. "This is locked behind a supermajority requirement" or "this concept is culturally set aside as special." Even then, those protections may erode, and what was once settled becomes unsettled again.