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4 Comments

  1. secretary
    October 18, 2018 @ 8:23 am

    I am not a legitimate student of anthropology, but it occurs to me that there are basic physical need, (both actual and perceived), that drive survival. With that in mind, governance of ones own household may also be accepted as a “right of survival”. Where is the line drawn from slavery to indentured servant to apprentice to master. Certainly among the several basic units of “collective living” there would be different “opinions” as to what is acceptable.
    Because of our basic greed and propensity for self preservation at any cost, we are lost without empirical laws of respect.
    Who determines these “laws”?
    (I know where I turn, and I consider these “truths” to be infallible but this is not universally accepted.)

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    • Logitarian
      October 18, 2018 @ 8:56 am

      These are good and valid concerns.

      Fortunately, the most basic rights of survival you mention are actually universally understood. Even the staunchest proponents of “all property is theft” will violently reject another’s attempt to rob him of his phone or wallet or clothing. Similarly, defending one’s home from intruders is accepted in essentially every culture and belief system.

      With subtle variations, the Non-Aggression Principle is a widely accepted and practiced governing principle in daily living (although it’s undermined and overruled by the existence of involuntary government). Building on these fundamental rights of personal ownership and property, individuals and groups naturally establish additional rules and conditions under which they prefer to interact with one another. What differentiates voluntarily establishment of these frameworks of law from the existing government system is simply the lack of a ruling class.

      The line between slavery and liberty is very clear: if an individual is kept in a situation by force or by threat of force, they are not free. This litmus test can be applied to practically any scenario and will yield a clear answer one way or the other.

      The Common Law system (on which modern western law is based) developed long before it was commandeered by government to be used as a method of enrichment for the State. Prior to the actions of Alfred the Great, large regional groups were not bound to each other by law, and universal rules of engagement were practiced and enforced without the need for an overarching ruling class.

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  2. NumberOneSportsFan
    October 19, 2018 @ 11:06 am

    This definitely charts a course of optimism for the future of humanity. The tradition of liberty and individualism realized through consensus building and not the forced hand of the mob. Implementation of this would of course rely on all members of every faction to have been indoctrinated into the ideals liberty. It would appear that humanity as a whole has a long way to go before this is realized.

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    • Logitarian
      October 19, 2018 @ 11:33 am

      This brings up an important point, and a critical difference between the voluntary approach and literally every other system of government.

      All other political ideologies (ie socialism, democracy, monarchy, etc) require that every individual be subjected to the same ideology. For socialism to work, all members of the union must reject capitalist notions of incentive. For democracy, all participants must accede at times to the wills of others, with some never getting the change to be in the power-wielding majority.

      Voluntarism is entirely the opposite. Voluntary interaction among individuals involves zero requirement that one person’s will gets forced onto another.

      Voluntarism therefore is the exception to the rule that all members of a society need to hold the same beliefs. If only a relatively small fraction of a population began to reject the idea that majority equals authority, any socialist or democratic system would be in immediate danger of dissolution. If even two people in a group of ten refuse to surrender any part of themselves or their property, the group will find it exceedingly tenuous to forcibly hold it together.

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