Max More, founder of Extropianism, argues that there is really no such thing as the State. Here we explore More's "Deep Anarchy," which is coming up on its 35th anniversary.
I'm honored that you read and commented on my ancient essay. In the third-century since then, my views have changed little. If I were to write that piece today, I would add something about public choice economics and other analytical approaches to understanding the emergent motivations of parts of "the state".
BTW, N. Dexia is engaged in a series on alternative governance/social organization approaches. I recently pointed him to your work and that of Tom W. Bell. https://ndexia.substack.com/
Small erratum: where you say 'deontology' I believe you mean 'ontology'.
While I'm sympathetic to the goals here, the methods don't appeal to me greatly... I have too much sympathy for the bag of marbles, I suppose. It is never as straightforward as this makes it sound to slice up ontology into legitimate and illegitimate entities. In this regard I'm partial to Stephen Yablo's fictionalist retort to Quine, but I don't suppose that kind of approach would satisfy you, Max.
Thanks for the correction! Yes, ontology. Brain lapse is all and will be fixed immediately.
Now, allow me to offer an erratum of my own: Legitimate or illegitimate just means legal or illegal if I'm not mistaken, so whether and to what extent the ascriptions of ontology are justifiable or not is different from questions of legality/illegality. Assuming you mean justifiable, not legal, I would say this: How would it be justifiable to equate a bag of marbles with an eagle, much less a collection of inanimate, disembodied raptor parts with an eagle? More's justification hinges on the manner in which these parts stand in a certain relation to the whole entity in causal-functional terms. If you object merely because you have "sympathy" for marbles, you'd have to explain such sympathy in causal-functional terms or explain why causal-functional relations among parts are irrelevant. (If your answer is for one to look up Yablo's retort to Quine, fair enough. I can consult the ChatGPT oracle.) I hesitate ever to mess with Quine, though.
Hey Max - to be clear, I was not trying to send you off to read Yablo vs Quine, that was more of a 'my own side quest in this regard was such-and-such' remark. I don't think you'd find fictionalism as productive a philosophy as I do given your preferences.
I'll try to explain my position on ontology, though, which is fictionalist in nature. Note that when I say 'play' this is not a dismissive term for me. Play is a very serious matter to me.
Contemporary attempts to assert ontology (especially Quine, who kicks this off to a great degree) is an attempt to police existence. What can be legitimately said to exist? This is the sense in which I use 'legitimate' here. Fictionalists like Yablo and myself see this game as misguided. But you and Max More buy into it, and you do so in the same way as Marx, for what little that comparison is worth. There's a whole bag of problems here, but I don't want to engage you on eliminative materialism because your underthrow project seriously doesn't require this so I won't help you out by challenging this aspect of your world.
"How would it be justifiable to equate a bag of marbles with an eagle, much less a collection of inanimate, disembodied raptor parts with an eagle?"
How is it justifiable to equate an eagle, a virus, and the Japanese shinkansen train...? They all fit More's criteria, but should we be claiming any ontological necessity to these kinds of groupings? It feels very arbitrary to me, even though it leans in an interesting direction.
It is not that I want to equate the bag of marbles with the eagle, it is that playing More's game you want to eliminate the bag of marbles as a legitimate conceptual entity. But it's at least as legitimate as the Jupiter-and-Jupiter's-moons system, although an even better comparison is the eagle's nest. The eagle is more than just an organism. Beavers are an even better example than eagles here, but tangents upon tangents if we don't take care.
Your title 'The Great and Terrible Illusion' is all about de-legitimising the state fiction, and this is Quine's game of ontology. But your own desire to underthrow the state draws you into how you play at ontology. The state is more like the beaver's dam than the bag of marbles. The beaver changes the landscape for everything that lives around it, just as the state does. It doesn't matter that the state is a fiction - it has real effects, and that's 'the difference that makes a difference'. In my view, the bag of marbles is much more like money in many respects. But again - tangents upon tangents!
Bottom line: your argument here will persuade only those people who play ontology in the same way as you and More. Are you looking to recruit Marxists? I don't think they'll play at underthrow with you, personally. Other than that, the only people I see you drawing in on this path are people already in or around your project. You need more than that. You need, ideally, everyone.
But to clarify: my remark was about *my* personal response to this article. There is really no need for us to discuss this, excepting the possibility you want to understand me better (but understanding me better won't help you underthrow anything!). I provide these additional notes in this comment solely to draw attention to the risks of investing in ontology. In this regard, my 2016 essay "Ontology as non-theology' remains for me the relevant critique:
Hope something in these remarks is at least interesting to you! 🙂 And thanks for bringing More to my attention, as I had never encountered him. A lot of interesting folks out there getting ignored, of course! Please keep bringing it all together.
Hmmm, there you go with that word legitimate again. I assume you're playing fast and loose with non-standard usage. No matter. Now, I have noticed some patterns in your critical comments: First, dropping Marx (or anything) without any serious explanation as to why strikes me as an Obi-Wan hand-wave without content. If there is content to the suggestion, please explain how More echoes Marx or uses Marxist tactics. After all, Marx was wrong about a great many things, but not everything. And, well, he wrote a lot of books. The pattern here is dropping references as if winking to bystanders, but I worry no one knows what you're winking about.
Now, here's the thing about reality: it will mug us if we don't practice metaphysics, which--if one believes Quine--sometimes requires the practice of naturalized epistemology. Of course, we can learn from fictional accounts. Indeed, fiction can sometimes capture truth better than literal prose. But this doesn't change the concern that a field mouse doesn't need to run away from a bag of marbles in the same way it needs to run away from an eagle--unless that bag is being hurled from 20,000 feet. Likewise, Jupiter's gases and moons are an agglomeration whose parts stand in a certain kind of functional relation through various forces and fields we refer to as gravity. In the absence of those fields and forces, Jupiter would not be an entity we can pick out. Is "Jupiter" a kind of fiction based on some theory of gravity? That seems like something of a stretch. But let's suppose your retort might be something like: The State is an agglomeration of people that functions due to a series of fields and forces, specifically the underlying threat of violence to which most of us have been inured. Great! That is rather More's point. He argues not only that the FIT is a continuum, but also that absent the _fields and forces_ of threat, like Jupiter, the State would just be an agglomeration of people like you and me. He thus dispels the hypostatization, which subtly reminds us that those who rule over us are not a special, magical sort of person. They are the product of two basic forces: Our fears and the fallacy of hypostatization. Again, no one is arguing that this grouping of people can't be a dangerous protection racket. Instead, we are saying that people are just people and that these accretions of power are contingent. Without the threats, and thus our fears, the State would literally be nothing. Instead, it is a product of mass psychology in which people refer to other people as a special kind of entity.
I'll pass over those damn beavers and beaver dams today ;) In any case, the door is always open for criticism. Big love, -M
Why do you have such a narrow view about the use of the word 'legitimate', Max? This is really confusing to me. There are many senses of this word, and I find nothing unusual in my usages, and am baffled by your suggestion that there is something non-standard (shall we say, illegitimate!) in my sense. Please consider consulting your preferred dictionary to find the sense that fits mine (in Shorter Oxford, it is sense b or d).
Re: Marx, materialism/reductionism is the common thread. It is unfortunate that one cannot mention Marx without it being presumed to be about Marxism, but I guess I should learn this lesson. 🙂
Chris, first note that I wrote this piece 33-34 years ago and it doesn't necessarily accurately reflect my current view. I certainly don't disavow it and still find it to be largely right according to my current understanding. I might approach the ontological issue a little differently -- although I definitely would disagree with you about a loose collection of marbles being as much a thing as a planetary system. I would probably also deemphasize this rather technical philosophical issue in favor of the core message. People should not have to read Quine, the nominalists, and other schools of philosophy to understand and appreciate the main message.
If I can find time, I'd like to write an updated version of Deep Anarchy. Rather than a strict eliminatory view, I would probably look through the lens of a revisionary view (to continue with the parallel in philosophy of mind). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/#SpeProFolPsy,
I'm not clear why you ask about Marxists specifically. I would be happy for *anyone* to move closer to the "Max & Max" view but the Marxist approach doesn't seem especially open to this way of thinking. The early, more philosophical Marx at least superficially seems more friendly to individual autonomy but as he moved into economics, even that semblance evaporated. (I say that as someone who studied Marxism thoroughly back in the 1980s. For anyone interested in this area of political archeology, I recommend Kolakowski's three-volume Main Currents of Marxism.)
Thanks for wading in! As noted above, I often forget that one is not allowed to invoke Marx without invoking the conceptual baggage of Marxism. The common thread is materialism/reductionism. I do not claim ANY commonality between 'Max and Max' and Marx beyond this. Please accept my apologies for any confusion induced. Marx for me is simply another philosopher, and has little to do with Marxists(!) but this is obviously a non-standard view.
"...although I definitely would disagree with you about a loose collection of marbles being as much a thing as a planetary system."
A *bag* of marbles and a planetary system. I realise this allusion is obscure, and I'm not sure I'll help anything by trying to explain. It is a reference to the unacknowledged difficulties that astrophysicists have in bounding gravitational systems to preserve their intuitions about planets. (Dwarf planets is a lot of fun in this regard, but tangents upon tangents again!)
We intuitively want Jupiter-and-its-moons to be one thing, and it fools us into forgetting that it is not one thing except for specific human purposes. Likewise, the bag of marbles takes its meaning and very definition from its human purpose. But I see now why this was a terrible analogy because it required enormous exposition. I just wanted to find a parallel that wasn't an object we can hold, and as an ex-astrophysicist I went straight to an example from the solar system (which would equally work, I suppose!).
Interesting that you'd want to eliminate the eliminatory view! This was all the rage at one point, but has fallen away, I would say largely because more interesting avenues were opened up in contemporary ontology (Latour in particular) and we have still not recovered. But I would suggest (but not request) you NOT rewrite "Deep Anarchy". I am tired of attempts to revise the past. "Deep Anarchy" - which I have literally only just discovered - is a wonderful artefact of its time (1990) and I would not take that away from it, personally. Your mileage may vary.
I'm honored that you read and commented on my ancient essay. In the third-century since then, my views have changed little. If I were to write that piece today, I would add something about public choice economics and other analytical approaches to understanding the emergent motivations of parts of "the state".
BTW, N. Dexia is engaged in a series on alternative governance/social organization approaches. I recently pointed him to your work and that of Tom W. Bell. https://ndexia.substack.com/
My pleasure, Max! I of course love Tom's work and will eagerly read N. Dexia.
Small erratum: where you say 'deontology' I believe you mean 'ontology'.
While I'm sympathetic to the goals here, the methods don't appeal to me greatly... I have too much sympathy for the bag of marbles, I suppose. It is never as straightforward as this makes it sound to slice up ontology into legitimate and illegitimate entities. In this regard I'm partial to Stephen Yablo's fictionalist retort to Quine, but I don't suppose that kind of approach would satisfy you, Max.
Stay wonderful!
Thanks for the correction! Yes, ontology. Brain lapse is all and will be fixed immediately.
Now, allow me to offer an erratum of my own: Legitimate or illegitimate just means legal or illegal if I'm not mistaken, so whether and to what extent the ascriptions of ontology are justifiable or not is different from questions of legality/illegality. Assuming you mean justifiable, not legal, I would say this: How would it be justifiable to equate a bag of marbles with an eagle, much less a collection of inanimate, disembodied raptor parts with an eagle? More's justification hinges on the manner in which these parts stand in a certain relation to the whole entity in causal-functional terms. If you object merely because you have "sympathy" for marbles, you'd have to explain such sympathy in causal-functional terms or explain why causal-functional relations among parts are irrelevant. (If your answer is for one to look up Yablo's retort to Quine, fair enough. I can consult the ChatGPT oracle.) I hesitate ever to mess with Quine, though.
Hey Max - to be clear, I was not trying to send you off to read Yablo vs Quine, that was more of a 'my own side quest in this regard was such-and-such' remark. I don't think you'd find fictionalism as productive a philosophy as I do given your preferences.
I'll try to explain my position on ontology, though, which is fictionalist in nature. Note that when I say 'play' this is not a dismissive term for me. Play is a very serious matter to me.
Contemporary attempts to assert ontology (especially Quine, who kicks this off to a great degree) is an attempt to police existence. What can be legitimately said to exist? This is the sense in which I use 'legitimate' here. Fictionalists like Yablo and myself see this game as misguided. But you and Max More buy into it, and you do so in the same way as Marx, for what little that comparison is worth. There's a whole bag of problems here, but I don't want to engage you on eliminative materialism because your underthrow project seriously doesn't require this so I won't help you out by challenging this aspect of your world.
"How would it be justifiable to equate a bag of marbles with an eagle, much less a collection of inanimate, disembodied raptor parts with an eagle?"
How is it justifiable to equate an eagle, a virus, and the Japanese shinkansen train...? They all fit More's criteria, but should we be claiming any ontological necessity to these kinds of groupings? It feels very arbitrary to me, even though it leans in an interesting direction.
It is not that I want to equate the bag of marbles with the eagle, it is that playing More's game you want to eliminate the bag of marbles as a legitimate conceptual entity. But it's at least as legitimate as the Jupiter-and-Jupiter's-moons system, although an even better comparison is the eagle's nest. The eagle is more than just an organism. Beavers are an even better example than eagles here, but tangents upon tangents if we don't take care.
Your title 'The Great and Terrible Illusion' is all about de-legitimising the state fiction, and this is Quine's game of ontology. But your own desire to underthrow the state draws you into how you play at ontology. The state is more like the beaver's dam than the bag of marbles. The beaver changes the landscape for everything that lives around it, just as the state does. It doesn't matter that the state is a fiction - it has real effects, and that's 'the difference that makes a difference'. In my view, the bag of marbles is much more like money in many respects. But again - tangents upon tangents!
Bottom line: your argument here will persuade only those people who play ontology in the same way as you and More. Are you looking to recruit Marxists? I don't think they'll play at underthrow with you, personally. Other than that, the only people I see you drawing in on this path are people already in or around your project. You need more than that. You need, ideally, everyone.
But to clarify: my remark was about *my* personal response to this article. There is really no need for us to discuss this, excepting the possibility you want to understand me better (but understanding me better won't help you underthrow anything!). I provide these additional notes in this comment solely to draw attention to the risks of investing in ontology. In this regard, my 2016 essay "Ontology as non-theology' remains for me the relevant critique:
https://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2016/04/ontology-as-non-theology.html
Hope something in these remarks is at least interesting to you! 🙂 And thanks for bringing More to my attention, as I had never encountered him. A lot of interesting folks out there getting ignored, of course! Please keep bringing it all together.
With unlimited love and respect,
Chris.
Hmmm, there you go with that word legitimate again. I assume you're playing fast and loose with non-standard usage. No matter. Now, I have noticed some patterns in your critical comments: First, dropping Marx (or anything) without any serious explanation as to why strikes me as an Obi-Wan hand-wave without content. If there is content to the suggestion, please explain how More echoes Marx or uses Marxist tactics. After all, Marx was wrong about a great many things, but not everything. And, well, he wrote a lot of books. The pattern here is dropping references as if winking to bystanders, but I worry no one knows what you're winking about.
Now, here's the thing about reality: it will mug us if we don't practice metaphysics, which--if one believes Quine--sometimes requires the practice of naturalized epistemology. Of course, we can learn from fictional accounts. Indeed, fiction can sometimes capture truth better than literal prose. But this doesn't change the concern that a field mouse doesn't need to run away from a bag of marbles in the same way it needs to run away from an eagle--unless that bag is being hurled from 20,000 feet. Likewise, Jupiter's gases and moons are an agglomeration whose parts stand in a certain kind of functional relation through various forces and fields we refer to as gravity. In the absence of those fields and forces, Jupiter would not be an entity we can pick out. Is "Jupiter" a kind of fiction based on some theory of gravity? That seems like something of a stretch. But let's suppose your retort might be something like: The State is an agglomeration of people that functions due to a series of fields and forces, specifically the underlying threat of violence to which most of us have been inured. Great! That is rather More's point. He argues not only that the FIT is a continuum, but also that absent the _fields and forces_ of threat, like Jupiter, the State would just be an agglomeration of people like you and me. He thus dispels the hypostatization, which subtly reminds us that those who rule over us are not a special, magical sort of person. They are the product of two basic forces: Our fears and the fallacy of hypostatization. Again, no one is arguing that this grouping of people can't be a dangerous protection racket. Instead, we are saying that people are just people and that these accretions of power are contingent. Without the threats, and thus our fears, the State would literally be nothing. Instead, it is a product of mass psychology in which people refer to other people as a special kind of entity.
I'll pass over those damn beavers and beaver dams today ;) In any case, the door is always open for criticism. Big love, -M
Why do you have such a narrow view about the use of the word 'legitimate', Max? This is really confusing to me. There are many senses of this word, and I find nothing unusual in my usages, and am baffled by your suggestion that there is something non-standard (shall we say, illegitimate!) in my sense. Please consider consulting your preferred dictionary to find the sense that fits mine (in Shorter Oxford, it is sense b or d).
Re: Marx, materialism/reductionism is the common thread. It is unfortunate that one cannot mention Marx without it being presumed to be about Marxism, but I guess I should learn this lesson. 🙂
If your point is materialism or reductionism, there are many other thinkers you could refer to which would be far less misleading.
Aye, but are there any who were so obviously attempting to rework the meaning of the State...? Maybe so, but I don't have their names at hand.
Chris, first note that I wrote this piece 33-34 years ago and it doesn't necessarily accurately reflect my current view. I certainly don't disavow it and still find it to be largely right according to my current understanding. I might approach the ontological issue a little differently -- although I definitely would disagree with you about a loose collection of marbles being as much a thing as a planetary system. I would probably also deemphasize this rather technical philosophical issue in favor of the core message. People should not have to read Quine, the nominalists, and other schools of philosophy to understand and appreciate the main message.
If I can find time, I'd like to write an updated version of Deep Anarchy. Rather than a strict eliminatory view, I would probably look through the lens of a revisionary view (to continue with the parallel in philosophy of mind). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/#SpeProFolPsy,
I'm not clear why you ask about Marxists specifically. I would be happy for *anyone* to move closer to the "Max & Max" view but the Marxist approach doesn't seem especially open to this way of thinking. The early, more philosophical Marx at least superficially seems more friendly to individual autonomy but as he moved into economics, even that semblance evaporated. (I say that as someone who studied Marxism thoroughly back in the 1980s. For anyone interested in this area of political archeology, I recommend Kolakowski's three-volume Main Currents of Marxism.)
Hi Max,
Thanks for wading in! As noted above, I often forget that one is not allowed to invoke Marx without invoking the conceptual baggage of Marxism. The common thread is materialism/reductionism. I do not claim ANY commonality between 'Max and Max' and Marx beyond this. Please accept my apologies for any confusion induced. Marx for me is simply another philosopher, and has little to do with Marxists(!) but this is obviously a non-standard view.
"...although I definitely would disagree with you about a loose collection of marbles being as much a thing as a planetary system."
A *bag* of marbles and a planetary system. I realise this allusion is obscure, and I'm not sure I'll help anything by trying to explain. It is a reference to the unacknowledged difficulties that astrophysicists have in bounding gravitational systems to preserve their intuitions about planets. (Dwarf planets is a lot of fun in this regard, but tangents upon tangents again!)
We intuitively want Jupiter-and-its-moons to be one thing, and it fools us into forgetting that it is not one thing except for specific human purposes. Likewise, the bag of marbles takes its meaning and very definition from its human purpose. But I see now why this was a terrible analogy because it required enormous exposition. I just wanted to find a parallel that wasn't an object we can hold, and as an ex-astrophysicist I went straight to an example from the solar system (which would equally work, I suppose!).
Interesting that you'd want to eliminate the eliminatory view! This was all the rage at one point, but has fallen away, I would say largely because more interesting avenues were opened up in contemporary ontology (Latour in particular) and we have still not recovered. But I would suggest (but not request) you NOT rewrite "Deep Anarchy". I am tired of attempts to revise the past. "Deep Anarchy" - which I have literally only just discovered - is a wonderful artefact of its time (1990) and I would not take that away from it, personally. Your mileage may vary.
Many thanks for engaging!
Chris.