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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
Its a very big fucking distinction and you understand it perfectly.
One is an attribution of moral quality and virtue, the other is a description of how I think people in the past would have described a character hundreds of years ahead of their time.
They are vastly different things. Do you think my values at all align with a roman, Napoleonic Frenchman, or 19th century Ameircans? NO?! Then why the hell would you take my statement "People in the past I disagree with would like this figure" to mean "I like this figure"
You should assume from my statement "Normal people would like this" that I probably don't like it... given the general contempt I, and anyone with a braincell, hold 99% of the people who've ever lived in.
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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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