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Notes -
This was my biggest problem with Scott's 'archipelago,' really. At first, it sounds pretty wonderful to me - a free and pluralistic place where all kinds of people and cultures can pursue their own ways in peace, which is differentiated from "the whole world we now live in" through this central authority which keeps them from trying to conquer or exterminate each other-
-But it doesn't just do that: it also exists to save the people from themselves. To make sure that is properly exposed to the Objective Perspective and hasn't just been Indoctrinated into living in their own culture, so that every child can choose for themselves how and where they want to live, rather than being kept in a place that's not really best for them.
And that just destroys the whole thing. That's not an archipelago of many cultures and many values: that is one culture doing a lot of pretending and play-acting. You can profess anything you want, so long as you don't actually believe it. You can say anything you want, so long as you don't actually mean it. The whole benefit of such an archipelago - that even if some great evil is choking out all the world, you can make for yourself some little island of refuge from it - is gone, provided you aren't limitlessly confident in the incorruptibility of the central authority. And if you're limitlessly confident in the incorruptibility of any institution, what reason (beyond matters of taste and cosmetics) do you have for bothering with this 'archipelago' thing at all?
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