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As long as we have a society dominated by government, we'll have a society dominated by its enforcement agents.

• krapp 12y ago
  This brings up the inevitable question of what you would have society be dominated by, if not government?
  • rayiner 12y ago
    I don't know why this is always posed as some sort of hypothetical or thought experiment, as if we don't have ample empirical evidence. Before modern nation-states emerged, we had feudal war lords in charge. When you overthrow nation-states, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, the feudal war lords return to power. Those are the two options.
    • mikerichards 12y ago
      Those are the two options. You were already arguing a false dichotomy, and then ended up admitting it with that last sentence. Hopefully one of these days (probably in the far future, if ever), we'll have a society dominated by individuals cooperating and interacting with each other without the need for a top down autocracy, which the U.S. is moving towards now. But as long as you have government agents and those in the media actively trying to divide people and pit groups against each other in order to gain power, that will never happen. And as long as we have indoctrination of individuals into thinking that government should be involved in every aspect of their lives in order to promote fairness, there's no hope.
      • rayiner 12y ago
        It's only a false dichotomy if there's another choice, and in history we haven't seen one at any substantial scale. In any society where there's no centralized power, a small organized group skilled in violence can terrorize and dominate a large, disorganized population. That's how feudal warlords came into power over scattered tribes in the first place.
        • phaer 12y ago
          You could have argued the very same way against the possibility of nation-states before the emerged historically. There's just no way to use history as some sort of "proof" that there are no other forms to organize a society besides what has already been there.
          • rayiner 12y ago
            Existence is always the favored proof of possibility.
            • phaer 12y ago
              Yes, but you are trying to use non-existence as a proof for the opposite of possibility.
      • krapp 12y ago
        You appear to be arguing a false dichotomy as well, that there's no middle ground between anarchy and fascism. Inevitably, complex societies bring the opportunity for people to organize themselves into power structures, and a power vacuum will be filled. People form societies with governments on the premise that having a system of laws and agents to enforce those laws is a better framework to live by than what came before, where rather than a state, the primary force of violent coercion was the family or the church. You can change the name or the scale but the story remains the same - government is not something alien to human nature, it's a part of the way humans try to organize and control their environment, and build on the complexity of the generations prior. I suppose you could argue that complexity itself is the problem, if government is an implicit evil, then the ability to form governments must also be an implicit evil. But then you have the problem of how to force people to "cooperate and interact with each other" without forming a government if they choose.