Libertarians who go round saying “the state doesn’t exist, it’s a hallucination” as if this is clever need to reconsider their position. On this basis, Oxford University is a hallucination, your family is a hallucination, “you” are a hallucination....
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Demanding an “empirical” manifestation of an abstract entity. Anyway, the bottom line is that humans can invent abstractions (not just socially, what is this thing “the atom” can you show me an atom. You can’t, no more than you can show me “the state”).
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This pseudo-empiricism is the mirror of lazy “postmodern” people who say it’s all just a “social construction”. So? We invented something through social construction...what does that show? Was it a useful invention? What does the invention do?
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You can’t uninvent social institutions anymore than you can uninvent TV. Because people can see TVs and aircraft they don’t say, “It’s just a human invention, we can do without it.” They can’t see social inventions, and so they assume we can dispense with them at will.
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When Nietzsche said that the state was a lie (or similar), he was not saying that it doesn’t exist or is a hallucination. I think his point was more nuanced than that. He knew that the social lie is necessary to allow human social organisation. And that truth is veil upon veil.
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We can play with these social lies, but you can’t dispense with the lies. Simply relying on the lie of “you” is no more sensible than the lie of the state.
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End of conversation
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