It’s existential in both cases. I think that’s where the purpose comes from. In war, you are told: “Do this, or we will be destroyed.” Rounding Cape Horn, you are told: “Do this, or you will die.” The state in one case and nature in the other— ultimately both are nature.
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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