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Notes -
the missionary is acting as though there is a law to be followed, when there obviously is not. The checkpoint guard is a potential threat, the "service charge" is not optional, and these realities must be engaged with. The missionary is thinking there's some system in place such that these realities are Someone Else's Problem, that the proper response is to file a complaint form and let the system handle it. He's blind to the fact that there is no system, that this is the way things are.
The cat lady is doing the same thing. She acts as though there's a system to enforce her will over and above her immediate actions. She apparently thinks there's a system that prevents the cat from walking out an open door, ignoring that no such system exists. She wants such a system to exist, ignores the fact that it does not, and so suffers the consequences.
The "dishes" poem (one of my favorites, by the way) illustrates the disconnect between cooperative systems of the type the people in these two examples are imagining exist, and the reality of individual choice. Washing the dishes is supposed to preclude breaking them, but there's nothing innate to the task to actually prevent this. What prevents breaking dishes is something entirely different, a whole other complex of assumptions and interactions with no actual connection to the act of dish-washing itself, and the existence of those assumptions cannot simply be assumed when it's time for dish-washing.
Assuming the above is correct, let's see if I can extend the pattern.
This scene from The Wire is all about the divide between the power of a hypothetical system and the power of material reality. The guard wants it to be one way: his whole job is in fact to be that system, that's the whole reason he's there, the reason he draws a paycheck, he has a uniform and everything! And yet, it's the other way: the system doesn't actually exist, even though he wants it to, even though he's paid to implement it, because at the end of the day, cooperation has to either be consented to or enforced, nd mechanisms of enforcement are both very expensive and quite limited in what they can achieve. Stanfield refuses to consent, and the guard, and the people the guard represents, aren't actually prepared for enforcement. They're bluffing, and Stanfield calls it. The guard's response is to try to guilt-trip him over his defection, as though Stanfield doesn't understand what he's doing, as though he's just making a mistake, and once this is pointed out he'll fall in line with the system. This doesn't work because Stanfield is not making a mistake, has no intention of cooperating, and knows that neither the guard nor the people behind him have any way of enforcing the system they're claiming exists. In reality, he has all the cards, and recognizes no reason to pretend otherwise. He is able to inflict emotional whiplash on the guard at will, by allowing the guard to pretend the system exists, and then demonstrating that it does not.
Applying it to the Culture War, there's the argument I've made for a long time here that the Constitution is dead, or that it is ink and paper, or that it is whatever five justices say it is. The point of all these statements is to highlight different ways that this system vs reality disconnect applies to the system of the Constitution: the document itself is not the power, the justices aren't even the power. The paper and ink and the justices interpreting it are just coordination mechanisms. The power comes from the social consensus that they exist to coordinate, and that power can be manipulated in a whole variety of ways that have nothing to do with a fancy piece of parchment or five people in silly black robes. A foolish person might imagine that their ignition key is what powers their car: they turn the key and the car starts! But of course, the ignition key is only indirectly connected to the car's engine, and if there's something wrong with the engine the key certainly isn't going to help.
This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.
I agree with your overall characterization. To be clear my objection "the constitution is dead" rhetoric has always been that something must have actually been alive at some point in order to be "dead". As for "the constitution is whatever five justices say it is." I feel that this is aptly covered by my closing observations on laws and kings.
Now carry your extension of the pattern even farther...
I've previously likened many of the anti-woke posters here on theMotte to people who are still in the Matrix. They may have taken the red-pill but they haven't freed their minds. They're still trying to model the world in terms of systems of inductive logic, they're still trying frame things in terms of where they sit in the intersectional stack, they still have not grasped the true implications of the "replication crisis" and apparent fact that the bulk of academic inputs are garbage, they still buy into obvious nonsense like "elite theory" and "external loci of control". In short, they still think that's air they're breathing.
A fair point. There was a big post I've tried to write a couple times about exactly this, how the partisan politics of my youth deeply ingrained an idea that the system actually ran things, that the key powered the car. And this is in fact how I grew up thinking about the constitution, as though the paper and ink had a life of their own, as though the social system that emerged from them was as dependable as gravity. I think a lot of people still think of it that way.
Thinking about it, though, wasn't that the point? Weren't the Constitution's authors attempting to create an instinctive, unquestioned norm, something where compliance didn't have to be enforced on a case-by-case basis, but could simply be assumed? My church seems "alive" to me, because we don't argue about whether God exists, whether Jesus died for us, or whether our goal is to serve him. If those were live issues within my church, if the preacher and the elders considered them live issues of debate, I'd be looking for a new church, because I would consider my current one to be "dead". Ideally, wouldn't it be the same for the constitution?
This was me, for a long, long time, as you no doubt noticed, and the temptation is still there.
There's a deeper thread I wish I had more time to follow; briefly, the systems, when they work, make things a lot easier for everyone involved. Certainly that's how it was for me. I didn't want to accept that there wasn't a systemic answer available, because non-systemic answers seem riskier and scarier than systemic ones. Probably it's no more complicated than the difficulty of distinguishing prudence from cowardice; the latter will always frame itself as the former, one can always say that that any risk is too great.
A scene from one of my favorite films:
Tommy wants a plan. He wants a systemic answer that assures him everything is going to be fine, that risk is minimal. He wants lines to color inside and the assurance that as long as he does his part, everything will work out. A lot of people are like Tommy. I certainly was, and still am to at least some extent. Freedom is scary. You changed my mind pretty significantly by having a similar conversation once upon a time, but for this reality to sink in one has to be willing to accept the possibility of considerable losses. There's another effort-post I've been considering, looking at rationalist and proto-rationalist fiction, stuff like HPMOR and Ender's Game, and the way certain Enlightenment assumptions bleed through every part of the narrative: there's a right answer, there's a winning move to find if you're clever enough, there's always a way out, a way to fix things, a way to get what you want. The same idea comes through in a lot of Scott's and Yudkowski's writings. They look at the world and imagine there's a system to manipulate, a right answer to parrot back, a solution. Hence Utilitarianism's attempts to "solve" morality like a math problem, and all the absurdities and atrocities that result. My experience is that this idea is very attractive, and it dies very hard.
This is the sort of magical thinking that we almost inevitably engage in because our minds are a tiny subset of the enormous universe that they are trying to model, so our minds inevitably have to simplify almost everything about reality.
Another such simplification, for example, is the idea that there is such a thing as "the left" and "the right".
Another is viewing the economy through abstractions like "the market" or "socialist planning" rather than viewing it as an immensely complicated system of land, physical materials, people who all have their own motives, computers, communications flying every which way, and so on.
It often is for a long time until it isn't.
Lenin: "there are decades in which nothing happens and weeks in which decades happen".
But it is difficult to function without the belief in this dependability, even though to be convinced of the dependability would again be magical thinking. So again, our minds simplify in order to face reality.
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The problem with shrugging off all of academic ideas and modern thought is you get to a point where you don’t have anything to trust. No man is an island, and even if we know for a fact most of the knowledge around us is BS, one person simply isn’t capable of navigating the world solely on their own intellect. Especially not in a modern world, where due to increasing complexity we must take hundreds of things for granted a day.
What is your solution to living life completely blackpilled, trusting in no one and nothing but yourself? How do you interact with others, teach your children, seek advice or role models?
You describe this as though it were a bug rather than a feature. What's the old line from Michel Du Montaigne? all I know for certain is just how little I know.
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Thought from before the modern era? Thought from the modern era which does not seem to have been significantly influenced by modernity?
How does thought from before the modern era grapple with massive shocks like climate change, modern economic swings, dealing with technological addiction?
How do you teach your kids to avoid modern thought if their peers are exposing them constantly?
How do you determine which modern thought isnt “significantly influenced by modernity?”
God. Morality. Reason.
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I that scene it's not as if they're not prepared to enforce compliance and totally bluffing, they're just not prepared to enforce compliance on Marlo Stanfield. If Bubbles tried to steal something the security guard would have stopped him without a second thought.
Marlo takes two Lollipops he could easily pay for while looking the guard in the eyes. He's signalling his power and his ability to flaunt the rules and personally disrespecting the security guard. The security guard knows Marlo can have him killed on a whim, he's scared to look him in the eyes and says 'he's not stepping to" Marlo, but him having pride as a man means he can't let the slight to unanswered. He's not asking Marlo not to defect, he's not trying to get the lollipop's back, he just wants to be recognized as a working man outside "the game" who isn't going to interfere with the gangs but shouldn't have to tolerate such clear disrespect either. And Marlo of course says no, it's the other way.
One of the running themes in The Wire is that the code of honor that allows drug dealers to exist alongside the community is in decay. Omar takes pride in never robbing a citizen, he's gunned down by a child. They shoot at his mother on her way to church. Avon's generation might have stolen, but they wouldn't have personally humiliated the security guard in doing so. Marlo is the next generation, he's more ruthless and has people killed constantly for vague suspicions or minor slights. The system that no longer exists isn't state and federal law, it's the norm that people outside "the game", especially "citizens" are to be left alone and not really interfered with.
I guess it comes down to what it means to be a "bluff". You say that if Bubbles tried to steal something the guard would stop him, but would Bubbles actually try to steal something? Bubbles isn't Marlo, and he doesn't have the power or the understanding of that power that Marlo has.
The guard has no gun, only a radio, and no one he radios is going to do anything worth mentioning about Marlo's theft of two lollipops. Marlo would not do this in front of an actual cop, because the actual cop has an actual gun and an actual police force behind him. An actual cop can prosecute a fight, his organization will back him, and Marlo will definately lose. The guard is not a cop, only pretending to be one, hoping the actual power of the cops rubs off on him vicariously through a bit of social mimicry. He's hoping he has authority because he looks like authority, without actually backing it up. He's bluffing.
Yes, exactly, and it's the same with real-world issues as well. State and federal law, like the Constitution, are coordination mechanisms. Their goal is to create a norm of cooperation between all the members of society. That norm is where all the benefits come from, and it can be weakened or destroyed without those mechanisms changing in the slightest way. Breakdown of norms is a social problem, and systemic solutions might be necessary to solve them, they are by no means sufficient. If your counterparties aren't actually looking to cooperate, cooperation isn't on the table.
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The reasoning is true, but the problem with accepting it is it removes all legitimacy from government. If e.g. the constitution and the justices say I can carry a gun, and the real power says I can't, then for what reason should I not violate every single one of the state's edicts provided I can get away with it? Where does the state's legitimacy derive? Lysander Spooner's answer (it doesn't) seems to be the only one which makes sense.
Raw force.
Be nice until you can coordinate meanness.
Democracies end in military dictatorships, because eventually the best way to get to the top is simply to co-opt the raw force. As countries become more successful and peaceful, the more impact control of their shrinking military has.
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I think the question of legitimacy and power are separated here. Power rests with whoever can bring force to bear on the population. If you’re in a weak enough state, power might well rest with gangs. They wouldn’t be legitimate, obviously, but they’d have power. Legitimacy comes from whatever legal theory gives the rulers the right to rule. David could rule because God chose him as head of a theocratic state. Charles III rules because he’s the eldest son of the former Queen. Biden rules as President because he won the election and therefore has the right to the office.
Law is almost always an idealist thing. It gives rules but rules are merely the map and assume that everybody is doing exactly what they’re supposed to do and further that the enforcement and judicial branches are not compromised. This rarely happens perfectly simply because laws generally forbid things that people very much want to do. Businesses want to skirt labor laws (paid breaks and lunches are expensive. OSHA laws can be expensive to follow as well). Dumping stuff in the river is much cheaper than recapture. So there’s always an incentive to try to negate any laws that you don’t want to follow. As such a lot of laws simply aren’t enforced or if the cops bother judges overturn them.
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And again this is the sort of thing that I'm talking about when I say that there is a giant Hobbes-shaped whole in the discourse. The obvious response that almost every red-triber learns as a child is "from the consent of the governed" and yet this concept seems to be completely alien to progressives and the wider left. A cynical man might even theorize that the absence of this concept is why the philosophical left seems to be so much more prone to devolving into totalitarianism and mass-murder that the ostensibly more authoritarian right.
You are acting as if there is a category of the "the governed" that can "consent" collectively somehow.
The nation is an imagined tribe... not a one of these social intuitions actually worked in theory or practice once the modern nation state came about and actively started hacking people's communal instincts to start regulating people, not at the level of the village or town of the hundreds or thousands, but at the tens of millions strong nation... this is why the birth of modern bureaucracy was so horrific and killed so many tens of millions of people, people kept behaving and acting as if they were part of a social organ capable of sane joint decision making when they weren't.
Every cultural group and nation went insane in its own unique ways in the socio-cultural drift, and the only reason civilization didn't break down entirely in SOME places is because they had a unified culture that just so happened to ape the mad vision they imagined they were enacting.
There is no 300 million strong category of "the governed" that is somehow capable of making decisions and "consenting"... Your brain is simply hacked by tribal instincts that worked and produced effective social morality when your ancestors were navigating social relations of a few thousand.
"The system" and "the Governed" and "the consent of the governed" can go haywire and murder 10s of millions of people at a moment's notice for no reason at all outside of pure cultural inertia and no sane intuition or person would at all be capable of stopping it.
You are adrift on black seas of infinity, lost in a unstoppable collective dream that could turn to a nightmare at a second's notice for reasons barely intelligible to the dream itself, with figures and institutions appearing before you in the poorly stitched skinsuits of your friends and loved ones saying "Come give grandmother a hug" or "If it isn't my old comrade. Let me shake your hand" and for the moment they hug back or shake the hand, and encourage you to follow them further up the road, and you say "Of course I'll follow they're my dear friends and family" whilst everyone who's noticed the nightmarish miasma. and that the ground is not wet with mist but blood, is screaming "FOR GOD'S SAKE LOOK AT THEIR TEETH!"
...and you are acting as though it would matter if they didn't exist. Why? What makes you think that this the case? or that if it were that it would be remotely valid as a rebuttal if it were?
All tribes are "imagined" in much the same way that all words are "made up". They only exist in so far they are agreed to exist and while you are free to believe that things like a shared religion, shared philosophy, shared culture, or even shared personal affinity are no basis for social coordination. The people of history are under no obligation to abide by what you might consider "reasonable" "rational" or "real". When push comes to shove the definition of "tribe" is simply the Venn Diagram of those you're willing to bleed for and those who are willing to bleed for you. Appeals to constructs like "race" and "economic class" are the purview of the socially atomized urban narcissists who being unwilling to bleed for anyone but themselves and thus have no tribe of their own.
You say that I am "adrift on black seas of infinity" but you're wrong. I am not "adrift" I am sailing, and If were feeling uncharitable I might suggest that you are only able to hold the beliefs that you do because you've never ventured beyond the shallows of your safe first-world middle-class existence. @FCfromSSC speaks the truth, true freedom, the kind that comes from clear-headed understanding of what "freedom" actually entails, is fucking terrifying and not for the faint of heart.
As for the implied accusation that it is people like me who pave the road to oblivion and concentration camps, I would point out that between the two of us, I am not the one who has recently been writing apologetics for the actions of men like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao.
I've never written one apologetic for a single one of them.
I compared them to Lincoln and the great leaders of history... You applied the Modus Ponens that I was therefore saying they weren't as bad, when I claim the modus tollens "They're all fucking horrifying beyond comprehension"
You believe in a Christian world where good and evil exist, and even if not in balance, the good is not wholly outweighed by the bad, whereas I believe in a Lovecraftian world where we are adrift on the nightmarish black seas of infinity.
Sorry is I have to be insufficiently condemnatory of our cultures collective boogeymen to beat it into peoples fucking head that the worst human beings who ever lived, and the people they think of as great leader, statesmen, and heroes,, or even just mediocre politicians are VASTLY closer in both degree and kind than ANY are to ANYONE that any person should consider remotely praiseworthy.
What do you call this then?
As other users in that thread have pointed out, it's a pretty massive leap to go from "the Nazis were not uniquely evil" to "aKshUallY the Nazis were heroes of western civilization"
Not a quote.
My claim was for the majority of western civilization Hilter would be considered a "National Hero" such as Napoleon for the French, Alexander for the Greeks, Ceasar for the Romans (and later italians) Vlad Tepest for the Romanians, and Ghengis Kahn for the Mongols, or Lincoln for the Americans.
All war criminals who killed 100s of thousands if not millions and pursued explicit genocides in most cases (ask the Native Americans about Lincoln), but who are praised as heroes of their people by said people.
The fact people use a juvenile definition of the word "hero" thanks to Hollywood divorced from both its classical and early modern usage does not mean I am going to stop using that valuable and specific technical word. Not least because its positive affect accurately captures the socio-cultural esteem it describes.
I'm watching the japanese series right now Legend of the Galactic Heroes its an incredible military series with tons of classical allusion and political insight.
Do you think its title would be better translated as "Legend of the Galactic really swell guys" or "Legend of the Galactic Esteemed Military Conquerors"
potatoh potatah
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"progressives and the wider left" argue all the time that the government must follow the consent of the governed. They just disagree with you, and for that matter with me as well, about what sort of things the governed are allegedly consenting to.
America has plenty of authoritarians, but it has no large political block that is openly authoritarian or even particularly self-aware about being authoritarian. Both the blue tribe and the red tribe view themselves in much the same way: "we are the real democrats, the heroic and plucky underdogs, the other side are authoritarians who are oppressing and victimizing us".
Which is not surprising, both sides grew up watching the same movies about heroic and plucky underdogs who overcome oppression and victimization.
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I'm neither progressive nor part of the wider left, and your insistence that everyone who doesn't agree with you is has become quite tiresome. As for "from the consent of the governed", yes, I learned this in school as well. It appears among other places in the Declaration of Independence: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". But it's a fiction. Nobody "consented" except through tortured versions of consent ("if you don't move to an ungoverned place you've consented the government you're living under). And this "consent" cannot be withdrawn without punishment (as Jefferson, of course, knew). Government's powers are by and large not "just" at all.
Hobbes doesn't help, he just provides another tortured version of consent. Either the sovereign keeps you out of a state of nature in which case you should, by all means, consent because a state of nature is worse than anything the sovereign would do to you. Or if you don't consent, you're in a state of nature, in which case whatever the sovereign does to you is fine because that's what a state of nature is. So Hobbes's conception boils down to "might makes right", with some apologia about how it is right to bow down to might because only that might can keep you from the state of nature.
And for the umpteenth time it's not "everyone who doesn't agree with [me]", it's the specific set of "red-pilled" blue tribe academic types from progressive backgrounds that seem to generate the bulk of the anti-woke content here on theMotte. IE the sort of people I described above.
I would suggest that you find Hobbes' conception of consent (or willing submission as he would put it) to be "tortured" because it violates some closely held belief of yours. I am urging you to examine that belief.
All the social contract theorists are the same in several respects. One of which is that all of them are trying to find a justification for the authority of the state -- a reason (other than naked force) that one should obey. Note that means they are all starting from the conception that you must indeed obey. You talked earlier about reciprocal obligations; those do not exist at the individual level in social contract theory (and certainly not Hobbes); they exist in feudalism. And feudalism worked only in a different world, where the sovereign's power wasn't all that great compared to his vassals, and even a gang of bandits could aspire to cut themselves out a small fiefdom. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, there's none of that. The sovereign (or its representative, government, in Locke and Rousseau's version) speaks and you must obey. Hobbes says this crappy agreement is better than the alternative. Locke says if you don't like it, tough, move to some ungoverned land, and Rousseau allows for legitimate rebellion but not disobedience.
None of the social contract theorists would agree that it is OK to unlawfully carry a weapon in New York City, and all would agree that if caught the government is perfectly justified in acting against the weapon carrier. Regardless of whatever obligations the government was not fulfilling.
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