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You can appreciate a thing without having it rule you.
Autocratic monarchies and tyrannies were the rule for most of human history. Arguing over the system of government is a very modern problem. Previously, unga bunga with the biggest bunga stick wins, and the biggest concern was either getting curbstomped by some other unga's tribe or that your unga wasn't great.
Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them. And even then, the person has to spend most of their time maintaining their tyranny. Diffusion of power also means diffusion of responsibility, and vice versa.
The weirdness we have now is because people want all of the power and none of the responsibility. If anything, there might be a valid argument to bring back landed gentry and give people a free pass to move to whichever fief suits them best.
Tyrannies are problematic because there's rarely a good plan for what comes next. Once a tyranny ends (i.e. tyrant dies) there is chaos or more tyranny. The purpose of the liberal order is to try and preserve some semblance of continuity through time culturally and politically, too smooth the road, so to speak.
Agree. Another belief that is simply accepted by most people is that universal suffrage is 100% right and good. Try arguing the opposite! I agree that landed families probably ought to have more of a say than renters or welfare people, but of course I think that...I own property. How we would manage giving some people more than others based on some type of meritocratic system is kind of the base level problem. The simple solution is 'might makes right,' but 2k+ years of human society have brought us to a point where most people globally think there's something wrong with that formulation, largely that the mighty (not the same a noble, merely those with power) shit all over the weak. So we have an ideal--a liberal ideal-- that we give everyone the same amount of liberty, or whatever, and here we are...the mighty shitting all over the weak, again.
The Yarvin solution, as I understand it, is to stop pretending that liberalism exists and embrace the power of the strong and attempt to wield it...somehow. My main disagreement is that it just gets right back to the starting point where it's a coin flip if the monarchs will curb-stomp you or not and there's no exit, just monarchs/tyrants/oligarchs all the way down.
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I'd agree that the quality of 'tyrannies' (a rather loaded term for "rule by one") "depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them"… but only because all governments depend massively on the quality of the people in them. Personnel is policy, personnel will always be policy. If 'tyranny' is thus problematic, it's only because, like Aristotle noted, it's higher variance than the "rule of few," and "rule of many" is lower variance still, as larger numbers "average out" the extremes of both vice and virtue.
Going back to my comment in the "liberalism and parenting" thread, the liberal project has been about seeking out a set of top-down institutions so well-designed to align incentives that the quality of individual people within the institutions no longer matters, working even for Kant's "rational devils." I'd argue that this is an unworkable project with an impossible goal; any government depending upon human beings depends massively on the quality of those human beings, so we must stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and start cultivating virtuous leaders.
But we will never stop dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. Five minutes with the average person should tell you all you need to know about including them in your system. You either have to build a more perfect system, or exclude those people entirely.
People consistently try to build a more perfect system because they notice things are broken, and correctly intuit that building a more perfect system is preferable to trying to make other people perfect.
Why not? Were people in the Middle Ages doing so? Or did they hold that
And that the world is fallen, we are barred from Eden by the sin of Adam, the poor we will always have with us, and perfection will only be in the Kingdom to come?
People have always worked to make things a little better, but they accepted that some things are just facts of life, that cannot be changed, only endured. Only with the "Enlightenment" did the West really start trying to immanentize the eschaton.
Why can't we reverse this? Why can't we get back to people accepting that parts of life, including the government from time to time, are simply going to suck, and that's just how it will always be?
Much as with the medieval era, it seems like a total civilizational collapse back into barbarism and pre-industrial technology would probably do the trick, so why not something less extreme?
I hope I don't need to point out that this is a hard sell to anyone in the information age. Please, by all means, share your less extreme plan for getting people to accept this.
I'd say you do, actually. Are you familiar with Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions? Because what I'm describing is part of Sowell's "Tragic Vision," which he holds as defining the right, in contrast to the left's "Utopian Vision." And even now, 37 years after that book was published, there are still plenty of people who hold the Tragic Vision.
So, what is your plan?
I don't particularly have one for much of anything cultural or political except "wait for our Augustus." But just because I, personally, don't have a specific plan for accomplishing the triumph of the Tragic Vision over the Utopian Vision, doesn't mean it can't happen.
I'm very confused. Please don't take this the wrong way, maybe I'm misunderstanding your position.
You want people to accept that parts of life are going to suck and will always suck. You want people to put in a leader that will make things suck... less...? Or put in a leader that will make things suck more? Or are you asking for a leader that will make things suck less for you and more for others?
How are you going to get people to accept that things will suck for them forever? When in the information age, it is trivially easy to be bombarded with information about how great things are for some of them? Even monkeys flip their shit when they see another monkey gets grapes.
I mean, you could just go directly to naked use of force, but that doesn't seem to be what you're proposing. Unless you want an Augustus to apply force for you.
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