1. The exact quote: “The only time when I really felt I knew what I was doing”. To me, people know what they are doing when they are being told or when their back is to the wall: wars and extreme survival situations. A small elite can set their own course, but most cannot.
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How would you characterise the word "authoritarian", particularly the negative connotations it has? The word does not seem to me to have much to do with submission to nature.
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1. I see, per Aristotle, the “authoritarian” as someone who takes a virtue too far and turns it into a vice by becoming arbitrary and capricious. I actually view our current regime as authoritarian, though it defines itself against “authoritarianism”.
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2. Authority is defined as the power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, and judge. These laws, I would argue, must be derived from nature and reality.
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In other words, legitimate authority tells you what you had good reason to do anyway?
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Yes. This is evident in the idea of a just revolt against a tyrannous king. The revolt, as opposed to revolution, seeks to restore the natural order broken by a corrupted king, but not to instantiate a utopian political order in the place of monarchy.
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And your complaint is against "utopian political orders" on the basis that they are not "bounded by nature and reality", and you consider contemporary liberalism to be/to be aiming towards such an unbounded utopian order?
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Yes. What we’re dealing with is really a degraded liberalism—most of the values of classical liberalism, quite elitist, have been discarded. That’s why I call it technocratic liberalism, the language of rights is used as an ideology by a technocratic corporate-state hybrid.
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The reason the French Revolution, the English Civil War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and so on were so violent was that these were revolts against reality—usually leading to bizarre and fanatical pseudo-religious social policies, mass persecutions, and famines.
End of conversation
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I understood the initial impetus for this thread to come from the worry that people are attracted to authority per se, whether legitimate or not. That's a valid worry, but not one connected to the desire to do what nature requires, surely?
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I think a trick of our current regime is to characterise all “authority” as suspicious while acting in an authoritarian manner itself. In actuality, our regime is only against legitimate authority—authority bounded by reality and nature.
End of conversation
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