This post by Digbydrone, Tristero, basically exhausts the entire taxonomic range of logical fallacy, although it does provide an object lesson in the proper use of the phrase, "begs the question." The observation that present conditions exist, ergo they exist doesn't even count as philosophy when you're stoned. I know whereof I speak.
Tristero doesn't appear to know what libertarianism is, having confused it with some kind of bowdlerized anarchism. Libertarians come in many varieties and differ in their beliefs about the proper scope of a constitutionally limited government, but libertarians believe in a constitutionally limited government. Libertarianism is a governing philosophy, and although it claims that the best possible mechanism for good governance is a system in which authority is strictly delimited and deliberately confined to certain, very particular uses, it is no less a theory of government than totalitarian Maoism. Even the most extreme minarchist ultimately requires a governing agency for the maintenance of property "rights." Scratch a libertarian, and you will always find a statist with a confused and naive superstition about the self-limiting nature of power.
As for debunking this Island-of-Doc-Moreau anarcho-libertarian argument-against-the-state, our friend Tristero might have stuck to an appeal to tradition, which, although a fine logical fallacy in its own right, is a lot less egregiously retarded than his weirdly metaphoric attempt to make government into an analogue of breathing. That's right: a hierarchical subset of post-agricultural, socio-cultural organization is the same as a basic biological necessity. Now, obviously people can survive without government--marooned on a desert island, or treking the wilderness, or living in neolithic isolation somewhere--at least for some modest period of time, which calls the comparison into question. Equally obviously, all terrestrial vertebrates, along with acquatic mammals and reptiles, breathe, and yet most, if not all, seem to do just fine without a bicameral legislature. I am not saying this to be snide, either. Even if we stipulate that government is necessary, inevitable, and universal, it is still not the same as breathing. Its necessity, inevitability, and universality (which, by the way, I emphatically do not stipulate) arise from totally different circumstances and conditions. Even if we stipulate that humans are so-called social animals, that our social organizations are fundamental and innate to our species, as genetically inherent in their way as the organization of a colony of eusocial insects, still it would not be the same as breathing. (And, by the way, Wislon and Hölldobler will explain to you that eusocial colony behavior is not genetically predetermined either.)
Anyway, Tristero isn't smart or serious enough to spend much more time on, but let's back up over the corpse once more before fleeing the scene.
Every society, no matter how small, has rules, ie, a government.Governments promulgate and enforce rules, yes, but rules are not synonymous with government. Plenty of organizations and social units have rules and are not governments. Oh, what's an easy example? How about fucking families? How about offices? How about consensus-based vegan food cooperatives? How about string quartets? Does the violist jail the second violinist for missing the downbeat? Again, I'm not asking just to be facetious, but to point out that a consequence cannot be used in isolation to prove a cause. The existence of rules implies government; it correlates with government; but it is not the same as government.
Tristero's two arguments are: 1.) It is impossible not to have government; 2.) If we did not have government, things would be bad. They render each other incoherent. If government is literally inevitable ("unavoidable" is his word), then a counterfactual conditional about its absence is totally meaningless. If, on the other hand, it is possible, merely undesirable, not to have government, then government is not, in fact, inevitable. Emergent properties are not fundamental conditions, even though they may appear as such.
via Montag, who emailed me the link
44 comments:
Governments promulgate and enforce rules, yes, but rules are not synonymous with government. Plenty of organizations and social units have rules and are not governments.
Yes. This.
Plus, what's the worst thing that could happen in anarchy? Someone might get all the guns, take over, impose a bizarre system of laws by force and start enslaving or killing everyone who disagreed? GOD FORFEND SUCH A WORLD, etc.
I see you've raised me and turned the tables. Hmmm.
La_Rana, you are a constant source of hope and inspiration to me, and if you weren't a heteronormative pairbonded monogamist, I would totally have like a million of your babies.
That and a uterus.
One of your three adjectives is accurate. hooah!
this post made my day, IOZ. and Professor Coldheart's comment warn't too shabby either.
Yeah, like, how can you play anarchist soccer if there aren't any rules?
Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?
its taking me a long time to read ALL your previous posts, but its worth it. :)
damn la rana, I opened the comments hoping to be the first to cattily observe that the good 'sieur still seems to smart a bit from your response down the page, and there you were ...
Anon @ 2:06: Why would I smart from la_rana voicing sentiments I agree with in regard to another blogger?
This is my favorite IOZ oeuvre yet.
You're missing the key chunk of information on this, Monsieur. For a guy like Tristero, coming up with rules for others, or more accurately, defending the myriad of meaningless rules and abuses of rules that his favored political party (more accurately still, the people who own them) would come up with IS as important to living as breathing.
You're just resentful because Tristero was in the vanguard of the Great Pwog Boycott of '09, which put your beloved Whole Foods out of business within a week.
Dead, horse, beaten. Lay off the mid-morning coke, IOZ.
Youch. Maybe not the best time to glibly assess libertarianism as a response to the dastardly tyranny of Mom and Dad.
In any case, I am intrigued by your last sentence and your citation. Book to read, thanks.
But if you stop breathing, you die. Oh, right.....
--Donny
"When you think about it, it is simply outrageous that in order to live, I must breathe. The injustice of it all! For instance, if I want to stay underwater for an hour, I can’t because I am forced, whether I like it or not, to breathe every once in a while, or I’ll die."
I do believe Tristy's out of his element. He's like a child that wanders into the middle of a movie and ...
so, government is like a snorkle?
No Friday chart?
Petulantly,
J
I was doing alright until I came to to, "then a counterfactual conditional about its absence is totally meaningless..." Does this construction mean anything? And from there one realizes, isn't the whole argument inflated, if not meaningless? For example, "government" (unless given some new technical meaning) is not a defined sufficiently to make or refute such generalizations about it.
But even if one tries to make a case from the popular definition, the argument for inevitability is either obviously false or the concept of government has to be stretched so far--to include so-called tribes, kibutzim and kindred forms of society--as to be absurd.
Even the most extreme minarchist ultimately requires a governing agency for the maintenance of property "rights." Scratch a libertarian, and you will always find a statist with a confused and naive superstition about the self-limiting nature of power.
Oh come on, IOZ. How come libertarians get bashed for desiring a minimal state (which I guess you imply isn't possible - and I would certainly agree, on the face of it - when you call minarchism confused and naive), when that same nature of power isn't any less limiting to the prospects of a truly stateless society?
How about this: one can be a libertarian, and ironically detached, too!
Oh, and some advocates of "bowdlerized anarchism" do indeed refer to their philosophy as libertarian. There are degrees and degrees.
A lotta angles, a lot of ins and outs....
Some libertarians ARE anarchists, and some like Roy Childs have argued that in order to avoid internal contradiction even paradigmatically minarchist doctrines such as Objectivism must conclude in anarchism.
There are a number of libertarians friendly to the "rules" vs "government" distinction, and many such as Albert Nock actually distinguish between "government" and "the State". Bob Black is among the few who reject "government" even in that sense.
There have been some instances of situations in which there was nothing we would now call a "state", yet there was still "government" in the above sense. Bruce Benson mentions a few (Iceland is a particularly popular example among ancaps nowadays) in "The Enterprise of Law", but in fact even that may not be necessary, as evidenced by (the neither anarchist nor libertarian) Robert Ellickson's "Order Without Law".
People critical of extreme libertarianism often say that Somalia is the result, but by many indicators it actually improved when its government collapsed. Admittedly, that's a low bar, but neither should anarchy be blamed for the country's starting at such a position.
My own view on the state is best summed up by Randall Holcombe: "Unnecessary, but Inevitable".
I will never quite understand how liberals can jump from "government is a necessary evil" to "thus it isn't evil" without batting an eye.
I suppose it'd be more accurate to say that western-style government is a contemporary expression of that urge for rules. The sinfulness of blurring those concepts depends a lot on the point you're trying to make. Does your criticism (libertarians) of "the government" apply as well to the other cases that'd likely be expressed in its absence (the priesthood, or the executive council, or the manglement, cuz if you're complaining that government is coercive, try working for a living) or the principles (or necessary practices) that your own philosophy relies on? Is your advocacy for the specific (Tristero) predicated on the validity of the general? There be syllogistic fallacies.
My own thought is that the style of human organization (or at least the range of options) is mostly dependent on population density and resource availability.
some advocates of "bowdlerized anarchism"...
And there's no political philosophy that won't be failed by it's lesser believers. Libertarians have invented "vulgar libertarians" to distance themselves from the idiots they created. May I suggest "mere anarchists?"
(Sorry, sub "predicated on" with "confused with" or something along those lines.)
To IOZ @215:
I don't see how you couldn't have been smarting a bit from this comment of hers:
"This is why I've never called myself libertarian. They know the calculus, but when they see that their logic is heading toward a world without "property rights" they scramble like a cat headed for water."
But then again, I AM a Bear of Very Little Brain.
La_Rana is a he, for the record, and I think you will see that I no longer call myself a libertarian for exactly the reason he describes.
Hey now, the gender confusion is deliberate, and I always enjoy when it perseveres amid all the macho bullying and pusturing.
It's usually the violist who misses the downbeat, actually.
to IOZ at 250:
Ah - I must not have been reading between the lines you've been snorting ...
So then, you accept your ultimate transmogrification into an anarcho-syndicalist like Sollie, my Mom's betrothed, who came back from the Spanish Civil War and opened up a newpspaper stand ..
Anonymous to IOZ at 250:
Has he actually applied that label to himself? I think you are engaging in the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Wot, reality not fitting into predetermined categories, to be then labeled according to rational rules? I'm shocked, shocked!
That, and entropy.
Capt'n Obvious
to TGGP - I haven't engaged in any phallusry since my early teens ...
and anyway, that was in another country, and besides etc etc ...
1)Go Montag!
2)The lines between social norms, and government, and crime, seem sort of blurry to me these days. Homo homini lupus, as they say (and this is NOT a reference to sexual orientation).
May the Creative Forces of the Universe stand beside us [metaphorically speaking], and guide us, through the Night with the Light from Above.
"Anyway, Tristero isn't smart or serious enough to spend much more time on, but let's back up over the corpse once more before fleeing the scene."
Wow...nice!
Yeah, that's right. Government isn't the same as breathing. The analogy is inexact, because it's an analogy and not a literal description. Oh noes!
I think IOZ' position is that, even as evaluated as an analogy, it's bullshit.
Yawp. Not inexact. Incorrect.
I'm sorry but I have a difficult time seeing how Hobbes was wrong.
If you have rules and you have people with unequal abilities then those who are better at gaining money (or power as it's also known) will exert influence on others that limits their choices.
That's coercion in my book. Just substituting truncheons for bargaining power does not freedom make.
So if people are in any way unequal then those with greater ability will have more money and power. I don't see anyway out of the tyranny of human nature.
Except you don't show that it was incorrect. You just show that it's inexact. Tristero's point was that government is as necessary to a society as breathing is to an individual. It's irrelevant that it's not biological, or that it's emergent rather than fundamental--that makes the analogy inexact, not incorrect.
Your "counter-examples" aren't, because families and symphonies aren't societies. They're institutions that depend on larger societies to preserve and promote them.
Also it's hilarious that you respond with such pedantic whining when someone makes fun of your pet hobbyhorse, even though you're so full of ironic detachment about everyone else's.
Donald, breathing, 99 times out of 100 is the single most urgent human need. you can only survive minutes without air. days without water. days without sleep. weeks without food. and depending on conditions, the need for shelter will trump some or all of these needs.
the analogy isn't merely inexact, it is stupid. societies are, as you point out, "not biological," so the analog is way too abstract.
what makes a society? what's more, what is the single most important aspect that constitutes a society (breathing being the single most urgent human need)? people. you have to have people. evidently a group larger than your standard family unit, according to you. next you need resources, to meet all of those people's biological needs (see above.)
so probably people come together around some resource (a clean water source, a good fishing spot, an area with an abundance of edible plants, etc.) and if they are smart the people will put their heads together and come up with a plan to manage their resources, and maybe an ethic that keeps them from killing each other.
these alone do not amount to government as Tristero would have us believe. things like authority and enforcement under the auspices of some form of government only come along with real, artificial, imagined or invented scarcity.
in any case, to belabor this stupid analogy by turning to Maslow's hierarchy, i put "government" as a necessity on the spectrum of societal needs on the order of Maslow's "esteem" if not "self actualization" needs. (way past breathing here.)
a more apt, somewhat biologically based analog would be the life of a person. respiration is one of the requirements of being considered to be alive. first thing an infant does out of the womb is breathe. then they learn to suck a tit, rudimentary communication, later they learn to eat, talk, walk, shit on the pot, and so on. in this analogy, in the life line of society, government comes in around the time in life that the kid learns he's expected to subvert his personal aspirations in order to be a productive member of society.
one of the recurring themes around here is that societies with great populations, 300 million, say, just for example, tend to become murderous death machines and slave drivers. due in large part to the enormous power that government lays claim to. is this really the consequence of simply drawing breath?
I thought Monsieur won? what are we still talking for?
Tristero here,
I agree with you that a libertarian is "a statist with a confused and naive superstition about the self-limiting nature of power."
But I really wouldn't recommend, as you do, scratching a libertarian to find out. Like sores, that just irritates and inflames them. Both are best left alone in the hopes they will heal.
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