It is fashionable to cut away the values in which humanity is rooted. We should not cut away our roots, but transcend and include them in healthy ways. Liberalism is the master doctrine for this.
"[Does] liberalism without monopoly states remain liberalism"?
That is the heart of the matter.
The nearly 400 year history of the state form of government (dating from the Treaty of Westphalia) inextricably binds the two. This is why ersatz group rights multiply as the state metastasizes.
A monopoly state that guarantees true individual rights is a squared circle of contradiction.
Maybe I'm missing something, but in what way are (low) Hunter Gatherer tribes NOT (high) Decentralized, Polycentric Orders? (Unless we imagine, wrongly, that most tribes are or were hierarchies of control, with the chiefs being autocratic Big Men who acted as dictators.) BTW am reading Underthrow book and enjoying it. Yes, Jefferson was right!
Hey, thanks for reading the book! They are decentralized, polycentric orders in a rudimentary sense. But almost all roved in sub-Dunbar clans and could only scale beyond that number with settled agriculture, which invited all the brigands to create protection rackets. More to the point, though, hunter-gatherer tribes shared similar psycho-social patterns: animism, clannishness, and communal sharing that would not work in super-Dunbar groups. Roughly, their "consciousness" was attuned to clan dynamics, as it should have been.
Why couldn't animism scale to larger groups? It seems to me that leftism, when expressed as 'religious' belief, is nature worship and, in the form of New Age, spiritism.
And, come to think of it, a belief in the morality of communal sharing seems to be the basis of the desire for collectivism as socialism.
And might the 'diversity' of leftism be seen as a sort of appeal to clannishness, a division of society into sub-groups or factions, with victimhood being what they have in common as opposed to blood relation?
So leftism is a regression, appealing to naivete or even the primeval Jungian inherited desires and proclivities. But the goal of leftists is to replace the hunter-gatherer Decentralized, Polycentric Order with order created by top-down control. The idea of an Underthrow grows from the same primordial Decentralized, Polycentric Orders roots but in an opposite direction from that of leftism, toward freedom and spontaneous order, which were the good parts of tribal societies?
I'll stop, before I end up writing my own book here. Needless to say, I have found Underthrow very thought provoking.
Insofar as classical liberalism sets human rights on the power of the state as a first principle, Kingsnorth is right ("[Enlightenment liberalism] has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures").
The Orwellian antithesis between individual and state is a false one; history shows that based on liberalism's first principle, both have grown in grotesque metastasis.
Yet Kingsnorth leans theocratic, which is just church-state fusion. I agree that liberals must move asymptotically towards anarchism and that liberalism needs an upgrade away from the Hobbesian variants, which is why I wrote "In short, liberalism—sufficiently upgraded—integrates worldviews."
I guess we'll have to agree to play the same word games to determine whether liberalism without monopoly states remains liberalism. I would argue that it does.
"[Does] liberalism without monopoly states remain liberalism"?
That is the heart of the matter.
The nearly 400 year history of the state form of government (dating from the Treaty of Westphalia) inextricably binds the two. This is why ersatz group rights multiply as the state metastasizes.
A monopoly state that guarantees true individual rights is a squared circle of contradiction.
Maybe I'm missing something, but in what way are (low) Hunter Gatherer tribes NOT (high) Decentralized, Polycentric Orders? (Unless we imagine, wrongly, that most tribes are or were hierarchies of control, with the chiefs being autocratic Big Men who acted as dictators.) BTW am reading Underthrow book and enjoying it. Yes, Jefferson was right!
Hey, thanks for reading the book! They are decentralized, polycentric orders in a rudimentary sense. But almost all roved in sub-Dunbar clans and could only scale beyond that number with settled agriculture, which invited all the brigands to create protection rackets. More to the point, though, hunter-gatherer tribes shared similar psycho-social patterns: animism, clannishness, and communal sharing that would not work in super-Dunbar groups. Roughly, their "consciousness" was attuned to clan dynamics, as it should have been.
Why couldn't animism scale to larger groups? It seems to me that leftism, when expressed as 'religious' belief, is nature worship and, in the form of New Age, spiritism.
And, come to think of it, a belief in the morality of communal sharing seems to be the basis of the desire for collectivism as socialism.
And might the 'diversity' of leftism be seen as a sort of appeal to clannishness, a division of society into sub-groups or factions, with victimhood being what they have in common as opposed to blood relation?
So leftism is a regression, appealing to naivete or even the primeval Jungian inherited desires and proclivities. But the goal of leftists is to replace the hunter-gatherer Decentralized, Polycentric Order with order created by top-down control. The idea of an Underthrow grows from the same primordial Decentralized, Polycentric Orders roots but in an opposite direction from that of leftism, toward freedom and spontaneous order, which were the good parts of tribal societies?
I'll stop, before I end up writing my own book here. Needless to say, I have found Underthrow very thought provoking.
Insofar as classical liberalism sets human rights on the power of the state as a first principle, Kingsnorth is right ("[Enlightenment liberalism] has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures").
The Orwellian antithesis between individual and state is a false one; history shows that based on liberalism's first principle, both have grown in grotesque metastasis.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947660853
Yet Kingsnorth leans theocratic, which is just church-state fusion. I agree that liberals must move asymptotically towards anarchism and that liberalism needs an upgrade away from the Hobbesian variants, which is why I wrote "In short, liberalism—sufficiently upgraded—integrates worldviews."
My warning to liberals about Hobbes is: https://underthrow.substack.com/p/fears-intellectual-fruit
The upgrade might look like this: https://underthrow.substack.com/p/asymptotic-anarchism-for-anti-authoritarians
I guess we'll have to agree to play the same word games to determine whether liberalism without monopoly states remains liberalism. I would argue that it does.