views on society?

As a pack-social species that is certainly our instinct. Max would know these things because he's so nostalgic for the Stone Age, when we actually lived that way.

Nonetheless our uniquely massive forebrains give us the ability to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior. We've been doing that steadily for about eleven thousand years. In that time only a minority of people have voted against joining civilization. Their children often flip them the bird as they sneak off to the nearest city.

If we have an instinct to distrust anyone outside our circle of fifty, indeed to kill him because he's a competitor for the scarce resources of our hunting and gathering territory, we need a way to constrain our instinctive behavior. Most of us do it easily by simply growing up learning how prosperous, comfortable, easy and fun life is when we let civilization's economies of scale and division of labor produce a fabulous surplus, and reasoning that all of this is worth denying our inner caveman his right to kill all strangers. Even if most of this is done unconsciously.

We constrain ourselves so it must be more or less voluntary.

We can always depend on Max to pull up the worst cases and present them as the norm. In fact it's Mesolithic societies that were/are dictatorial. The Patriarch is the absolute commander of all activities and the only way to stop him is to kill him, which violates our instinct to trust and care for members of the pack. This authority structure was even carried forward into the Neolithic Era. The Village Elders were pretty difficult to argue with.

It's only very recent versions of civilization that have experimented with democracy, or even with the earlier concept of the commonfolk having any semblance of rights. Abraham's Ten Commandments, a basic set of rules for maintaining civilization that even Patriarchs, Village Elders and Kings are obliged to respect, only go back four thousand years.

Well ya got me there. There's been an alarming trend toward creating ever-larger nation-states with "one size fits all" micro-rules that require a huge bureaucracy to administer. But the EU is an encouraging counterexample. It's apparently possible for a hegemony to maintain peace, establish standards for commerce and release controls on internal migration, while still allowing its component communities to live by their own customs. Perhaps we'll see more of that in the Post-Industrial Era. Or perhaps the EU's way will prove to be the best way and the rest of us will simply have to petition to join it.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

True. Which is a good reason for a libertarian society in which the rules are the bare minimum necessary to ensure the maintenance and advancement of civilization. Rules against the initiation of force and fraud are the cornerstone of civilization. To that extent we constrain ourselves by mutual consent so we must not mind it if it only goes that far.

But to allow one set of citizens to enact rules preventing a smaller set of citizens from doing what they think is right, even though it causes no direct harm to others, is nothing more than the horror of majoritarianism. Indirect harm can be handled imperfectly but adequately by the tort system and civil courts. People who can't sleep at night because somebody somewhere is having a good time doing something they don't approve of... well they should take stronger sleeping pills. The U.S. is certainly going through a Nanny-State period in which the elite get to tell us all what to do, but all I can say is that America is famous for its pendulum politics and we'd better duck when that pendulum swings back the other way.

To the extent that our inner caveman resists any constraints on his urge to rape and pillage, well we can't let that go unstifled or there won't be any civilization. As I said, most people seem willing to make that minimal tradeoff of instinctive behavior for learned and reasoned behavior, so it's consensual, not dictatorial.

But if we're being forced to do things that we actually believe are wrong, then either our educational system is failing to enlighten us as to how they are really right, or the government has too much power. In a democracy we're supposed to have the ability to fix both of those problems, albeit slowly to avoid the violence of revolution. If most people are satisfied with the pace of change, then I don't know how we can make it any better for the ones who are not. There's no more frontier where they can go back and live in the Stone Age, and I have sincerely bemoaned that loss in a number of posts.

Our ancestors obliterated a number of societies that were still Neolithic (farmers) or even Mesolithic (hunter-gatherers). If they were still around, our malcontents could go live among them.

 

Up until rather recent times a good portion of the population had the option to do just that. There were wide swaths of this planet where civilization had not yet taken hold. Yet the direction of migration of people was overwhelmingly from the Neolithic societies to the realms controlled by the cities, not vice versa. I've pointed this out to you several times before and you're ignoring it. In other words, you're trolling.

I don't quite get your point. As I've also pointed out before, without the formal rules and laws people still attain positions of power by force and intimidation. Primitive societies are absolutely "stifling," with a Patriarch or a clique of Village Elders who have absolute control over everyone's lives. It's no wonder young people sneaked off to the cities as soon as their neighbors started building them. So to answer the only coherent question in that ramble: No. It's certainly not pretty.

You're being disingenous as usual, your way of disguising your trolling to make it look like scholarly discourse. Who's doing the "stifling"? Until recently, by the scale of history, most people were relatively free to opt in or out of civilization, and they opted in.

The United States is one of the most democratic societies ever created. For almost an entire century, our people have consistently voted for governments that keep enacting more "stifling" constraints on our behavior. Western Europe is in many ways ahead of us. How exactly do you get away with calling this behavior anything other than "voluntary?" People from less civilized societies are queuing up to get in.

The only candidates in the USA who run on a platform to reverse this trend are those of the Libertarian Party. Their message is so unpopular that they are in constant danger of not getting enough votes or voter registrations to stay on the ballot.

So who is being "involuntarily stifled?"

I agree with you that we have too many rules, but if we're willing to live in a democracy we have to settle for what the majority want. But I do not agree with your consistent implication that you'd rather go live in a Stone Age community. Even if there's one out there somewhere with a benign Patriarch who doesn't micromanage the lives of his constituents, I'm not willing to live without the music our technology makes possible, or the other benefits of civilization, like electricity, roofs, running water, and an eight-hour work day sitting at a comfortable desk. If I'm willing to accept rules I don't like as the cost of having the other 99% of a life I do like, is that not voluntary?

And I'm certainly not willing to live in an era when people are free to rape, murder and pillage, which is what you seem to be saying. If you insist that you are, please amplify on that statement and give us a little insight into how you expect to be happy there.