Some bloggers get annoyed with comments, some don't. I only get annoyed with trolls, but overall I really like people to comment on my blitherings, as it gives me the feedback I need to write, and also often challenges my assumptions. So if you got an opinion on what I write, or just a question, I'd like to see it.
And of course, if you like this blog, please send your friends here!
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
A Moral Conundrum
The Moral Conundrum
By Kevin Karl Biomech
Recently, I received two responses to a video I put up on youtube asking the question which is an unanswerable moral conundrum if you believe that the State should exist. That question, which above all others led me to anarchy, is simply this: At what point does that which is immoral or impermissable to the individual become moral or permissable to the group.
I actually didn't expect anyone to try and answer that question directly. It's a question who's main purpose is to make the recipient THINK DEEPLY about their convictions of morality.
Proceeding from the concept of Universality, the answer is simply that there can be no such exception. Even situationally, the exceptions are so rare as to not be codifiable. There are the so-called "good samaritan" acts, in which you act to save the life or safety of a stranger, but even here, that's not a real exception. It is not immoral or impermissable for an individual to act in the defense of another, especially one who's incapacitated or in imminent danger.
Yet that's the trap I got drawn into. I was once captain of my school's debate team, and I blew it.
One gentleman had replied that the line is drawn to protect the weak from the strong. This statement, while not in itself wrong, is unrelated to the question. It is both a non sequitur and a strawman. Subtle, though. Here's why it fails.
One, it's a non sequitur in relation to the question asked. Why? Because the question is when does it become permissable or moral for the group to do that which is impermissable or immoral for the individual to do. In no culture that I've ever read of or experienced is it impermissable for the individual to defend the weak against a strong aggressor. Not one.
It is a strawman because it argues a different question. I did not ask if the group could do something that was ALREADY morally permissable to the individual. That is pretty much given in the question itself, as well as general experience of the human race.
It is further a sweeping generalization, because it implicitly states that being strong is Malum in Se, which it is not. Had he said a strong aggressor, or the Evil Strong, then the statement would have been correct within the strawman, but still unrelated in any real sense to the question asked as the topic of debate.
To my knowledge, it has at all times in the history of humanity been considered both a moral and courageous act to defend someone against aggression that they were unable to contain on their own. A rather common example right here in the United States would be the "schoolyard bully" getting his ass kicked by another youngster with a conscience whilst perpetrating his bullying upon someone unable to adequately defend themselves. (The inevitable target of such bullies).
Whether this defense was carried out by one man or a group isn't even part of the equation. It's a just response to an injustice, and therfore morally permissable to both the individual and the group. It does not provide an exception to the immorality of an act at the individual level vs. it's morality at a group level. If anything, it reinforces the basic assumption of the question: Morality is universal or useless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ayG2htuz6s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtc7_SBtaYY
By Kevin Karl Biomech
Recently, I received two responses to a video I put up on youtube asking the question which is an unanswerable moral conundrum if you believe that the State should exist. That question, which above all others led me to anarchy, is simply this: At what point does that which is immoral or impermissable to the individual become moral or permissable to the group.
I actually didn't expect anyone to try and answer that question directly. It's a question who's main purpose is to make the recipient THINK DEEPLY about their convictions of morality.
Proceeding from the concept of Universality, the answer is simply that there can be no such exception. Even situationally, the exceptions are so rare as to not be codifiable. There are the so-called "good samaritan" acts, in which you act to save the life or safety of a stranger, but even here, that's not a real exception. It is not immoral or impermissable for an individual to act in the defense of another, especially one who's incapacitated or in imminent danger.
Yet that's the trap I got drawn into. I was once captain of my school's debate team, and I blew it.
One gentleman had replied that the line is drawn to protect the weak from the strong. This statement, while not in itself wrong, is unrelated to the question. It is both a non sequitur and a strawman. Subtle, though. Here's why it fails.
One, it's a non sequitur in relation to the question asked. Why? Because the question is when does it become permissable or moral for the group to do that which is impermissable or immoral for the individual to do. In no culture that I've ever read of or experienced is it impermissable for the individual to defend the weak against a strong aggressor. Not one.
It is a strawman because it argues a different question. I did not ask if the group could do something that was ALREADY morally permissable to the individual. That is pretty much given in the question itself, as well as general experience of the human race.
It is further a sweeping generalization, because it implicitly states that being strong is Malum in Se, which it is not. Had he said a strong aggressor, or the Evil Strong, then the statement would have been correct within the strawman, but still unrelated in any real sense to the question asked as the topic of debate.
To my knowledge, it has at all times in the history of humanity been considered both a moral and courageous act to defend someone against aggression that they were unable to contain on their own. A rather common example right here in the United States would be the "schoolyard bully" getting his ass kicked by another youngster with a conscience whilst perpetrating his bullying upon someone unable to adequately defend themselves. (The inevitable target of such bullies).
Whether this defense was carried out by one man or a group isn't even part of the equation. It's a just response to an injustice, and therfore morally permissable to both the individual and the group. It does not provide an exception to the immorality of an act at the individual level vs. it's morality at a group level. If anything, it reinforces the basic assumption of the question: Morality is universal or useless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ayG2htuz6s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtc7_SBtaYY
Sunday, March 9, 2008
A Call to Revolution.
Good evening y'all.
I have and will continue to argue with statists as to why they are choosing the wrong path. It's part of who I am. But today, I'm not speaking to the people who believe in the State. I don't much care about them. They've chosen to be a slave, and that is their shame, not mine.
Instead, I'm speaking to those who live under the state, but either reject it or question it. You are my brothers and sisters, not those who labor under the yoke because they think they owe it to themselves. You, like me, do not have such a base opinion of yourself. You don't need to subsume yourself in a "Greater" Whole in order to feel complete. You do not bend the knee just because you're told to. You have discovered the seeds of liberty and discontent.
You know that humans are not perfect, nor always moral, yet you still wish to be human. You know that no society ever conceived will avoid every pitfall nor fulfill every wish. Yet you still wish to improve society. You either know or at least suspect that if the old attitude that humans are irredeemably evil, then we would never have come this far.
Those of you my age and older remember a different world where the rules were not so imposing, and it was actually possible to be free in most things. Those of you around or under twenty years of age have already seen it change for the worse, and it's obvious even having never tasted the freedom that men twice your age once took for granted. We remember when it was good to be alive, and people who left this country wanted to come back.
You see that all this is lost, and some of you want it back. Or at least some return to "normalcy" rather than the current nightmare pace on a treadmill at high speed. All of us, young and old, basically wonder What Went Wrong and How Do We Fix It.
Many of you, even though realizing the State is deeply flawed in an of itself still seek your solution there. To you, my words are fairly simple. Your courage is appreciated and valuable to the cause of liberty, but you are using the wrong engines. Working within the system strengthens it. By no means am I saying you should not work the system against itself, but I am saying that attempts at reform WITHIN the Federal System as it stands will only strengthen them. You may win some temporary concessions, but you will ultimately have become suborned, even if not in your person, in the public mind to the system. You would be better off to vote for the greater evil, the greater incompetent, the most tax and spend buffoon on the planet, then to try and fix the system. By doing this, you are helping to destroy it far faster than any revolution of arms in the street could. By trying to reform it, you send the message that it is worth preserving an instrumentality that has completely failed in every aim it's founders put forth.
It is not worth saving.It is time for a change.
Liberty is worth dying for. Our forefathers believed that, and many thousands of them DID die in the only Civil War this nation has actually ever seen. It ended in 1781. By 1789 the seeds of tyranny were already sewn anew in the newly adopted Constitution of the United States of America. Not that the document itself is inherently evil. It was a well intentioned attempt to bring a new sort of order to a society that had always before labored under a King. Given that background, it was a noble attempt. It was doomed to failure from the beginning. It has major flaws IN IT'S CONCEPTION, regardless of the words of the document. No contract should be valid upon people merely because they were born in a certain place. No Government should be perpetual. At BEST, a semi coherent State might be useful in Time of War. A temporary alliance to repel an invader, agreed upon beforehand BY THE PARTICIPANTS, and for a limited sPECIFIED Time could be useful. After that people should be able to freely return to their own property and pursue their own lives. From this basic error, that any group of men has the RIGHT to bind Posterity forever, flowed all the other errors of this admittedly well intentioned document. That a Perpetual Organization that could only operate via theft on a grand scale should ever be allowed to exist is it's other major error.
These errors, and upon reading the histories of the Men who created the document, they were probably honest errors, must be corrected. In so doing we will commit other errors. It is our nature. We improve, we fail. Both are true, and this dichotomy, in my arrogant opinion, needs to be embraced rather than fought. Constant flux in the way society operates is INEVITABLE, and usually for the better. So long as every man and woman has the ability to CHOOSE whether or not they shall change is paramount. This goal, and the United States of America, are incompatible. But the Dream that created the United States is FULLY compatible with this goal!
It is far past time. Yet for the most part even the dedicated Anarchist quails at Revolution. It is fraught with danger, and the ends often uncertain. We know in our hearts, even if we haven't fully admitted it, that the old means of revolution are closed to us. We cannot take up arms and drive off the invader, for He is too deeply entrenched. We cannot replace our Overlords at the ballot with a new set of Overlords and hope to accomplish anything. So we need to Revolt in another way, or multiple other ways.
We need a Revolution of the American Mind. We need people to lose their apathy and LIVE! Yet the forces arrayed against us, particularly that apathy, seem often insurmountable. They are not. There are ways. There is always a way.
If you wish to use Political means, by all means do so. The Ballot isn't the answer. Instead, use your talents. If you are an able speaker, SPEAK! If you have a handy turn with the written word, WRITE! Above all else, if we are to ever become free, we must educate as many people as possible that it's POSSIBLE!
Remember that a handfull of men turned thirteen Crown Colonies to revolution to FORM this experiment in the first place! And remember how they did it. Neither the Cannon nor the Bayonet won the War for Independence. Words won the war. Written and Spoken WORDS! If the words had not been there, and had not been shamelessly and tirelessly promoted by men who had a vision of a society where they could be free, then the revolution would never have occured. Most of the people, then as now, were complacent even when angered. "This is the way it has always been" came to mean "This is the Way it will Always Be" in their minds. Just like now. Yet it's never been true! It hasn't always been like this, and that's been true in every generation. The older men can always tell you of a time when things were different. Not always better, but ALWAYS different! This is the essence of what it means to be alive, and being alive is a wonderful thing!
Sit down with your friends and stand up in front of your fellows and preach the word of Liberty. Ask them to join you, and when your numbers be such that it's possible, call them forth to repudiate their overlords and dismantle their house of lies and deceit! If one town withdraws, then another follows, then another two or three, That is how it will be won! Against a frontal assault, our Overlords are nearly impervious. But they cannot survive the death of a thousand cuts. And the simple refusal to obey them is a more powerful weapon even than the Mighty Nuclear Bomb.
Soldiers of the State will have no qualms returning fire on the field of battle, but all but the very worst of them will quail before firing on a crowd of civlians who simply will not obey them. And when the Worst Sort does so anyway, that too is to our advantage. In the Modern world it don't take weeks to spread the news of an atrocity. It takes minutes.
Yes, if we are to succeed, there will be people who die in the cause. This is tragic, in the actual meaning of the term, but it is inevitable. Some things are worth dying for. But in the longer term, and this is far more important, Liberty is worth LIVING for!
Those unwilling? Leave them to be. By your very act of leaving them to their own devices, you strengthen our cause. Because they see that the way they subscribe to requires the initiation of force, but ours does not. They will see that we can be quite fierce in our defence, but that our attacks are all in the realm of ideas. As our ideas take root, many of the complacent will join us.
Some will hold out to the bitter end to remain under Rulership. Oh well. So long as they see the futility of ever stopping us from living as we will, and so long as they allow us our space, they are of no consequence. They will always be able to find someone to rule them, and I say that in that event, we'll be well rid of them both, rulers and peasants alike. Then Free Men can build a society by voluntary association and trade, free from the "need" for Overlords.
And to those who fervently desire to live under a State? My parting words to you are from a True American Patriot.
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-Samuel Adams
I have and will continue to argue with statists as to why they are choosing the wrong path. It's part of who I am. But today, I'm not speaking to the people who believe in the State. I don't much care about them. They've chosen to be a slave, and that is their shame, not mine.
Instead, I'm speaking to those who live under the state, but either reject it or question it. You are my brothers and sisters, not those who labor under the yoke because they think they owe it to themselves. You, like me, do not have such a base opinion of yourself. You don't need to subsume yourself in a "Greater" Whole in order to feel complete. You do not bend the knee just because you're told to. You have discovered the seeds of liberty and discontent.
You know that humans are not perfect, nor always moral, yet you still wish to be human. You know that no society ever conceived will avoid every pitfall nor fulfill every wish. Yet you still wish to improve society. You either know or at least suspect that if the old attitude that humans are irredeemably evil, then we would never have come this far.
Those of you my age and older remember a different world where the rules were not so imposing, and it was actually possible to be free in most things. Those of you around or under twenty years of age have already seen it change for the worse, and it's obvious even having never tasted the freedom that men twice your age once took for granted. We remember when it was good to be alive, and people who left this country wanted to come back.
You see that all this is lost, and some of you want it back. Or at least some return to "normalcy" rather than the current nightmare pace on a treadmill at high speed. All of us, young and old, basically wonder What Went Wrong and How Do We Fix It.
Many of you, even though realizing the State is deeply flawed in an of itself still seek your solution there. To you, my words are fairly simple. Your courage is appreciated and valuable to the cause of liberty, but you are using the wrong engines. Working within the system strengthens it. By no means am I saying you should not work the system against itself, but I am saying that attempts at reform WITHIN the Federal System as it stands will only strengthen them. You may win some temporary concessions, but you will ultimately have become suborned, even if not in your person, in the public mind to the system. You would be better off to vote for the greater evil, the greater incompetent, the most tax and spend buffoon on the planet, then to try and fix the system. By doing this, you are helping to destroy it far faster than any revolution of arms in the street could. By trying to reform it, you send the message that it is worth preserving an instrumentality that has completely failed in every aim it's founders put forth.
It is not worth saving.It is time for a change.
Liberty is worth dying for. Our forefathers believed that, and many thousands of them DID die in the only Civil War this nation has actually ever seen. It ended in 1781. By 1789 the seeds of tyranny were already sewn anew in the newly adopted Constitution of the United States of America. Not that the document itself is inherently evil. It was a well intentioned attempt to bring a new sort of order to a society that had always before labored under a King. Given that background, it was a noble attempt. It was doomed to failure from the beginning. It has major flaws IN IT'S CONCEPTION, regardless of the words of the document. No contract should be valid upon people merely because they were born in a certain place. No Government should be perpetual. At BEST, a semi coherent State might be useful in Time of War. A temporary alliance to repel an invader, agreed upon beforehand BY THE PARTICIPANTS, and for a limited sPECIFIED Time could be useful. After that people should be able to freely return to their own property and pursue their own lives. From this basic error, that any group of men has the RIGHT to bind Posterity forever, flowed all the other errors of this admittedly well intentioned document. That a Perpetual Organization that could only operate via theft on a grand scale should ever be allowed to exist is it's other major error.
These errors, and upon reading the histories of the Men who created the document, they were probably honest errors, must be corrected. In so doing we will commit other errors. It is our nature. We improve, we fail. Both are true, and this dichotomy, in my arrogant opinion, needs to be embraced rather than fought. Constant flux in the way society operates is INEVITABLE, and usually for the better. So long as every man and woman has the ability to CHOOSE whether or not they shall change is paramount. This goal, and the United States of America, are incompatible. But the Dream that created the United States is FULLY compatible with this goal!
It is far past time. Yet for the most part even the dedicated Anarchist quails at Revolution. It is fraught with danger, and the ends often uncertain. We know in our hearts, even if we haven't fully admitted it, that the old means of revolution are closed to us. We cannot take up arms and drive off the invader, for He is too deeply entrenched. We cannot replace our Overlords at the ballot with a new set of Overlords and hope to accomplish anything. So we need to Revolt in another way, or multiple other ways.
We need a Revolution of the American Mind. We need people to lose their apathy and LIVE! Yet the forces arrayed against us, particularly that apathy, seem often insurmountable. They are not. There are ways. There is always a way.
If you wish to use Political means, by all means do so. The Ballot isn't the answer. Instead, use your talents. If you are an able speaker, SPEAK! If you have a handy turn with the written word, WRITE! Above all else, if we are to ever become free, we must educate as many people as possible that it's POSSIBLE!
Remember that a handfull of men turned thirteen Crown Colonies to revolution to FORM this experiment in the first place! And remember how they did it. Neither the Cannon nor the Bayonet won the War for Independence. Words won the war. Written and Spoken WORDS! If the words had not been there, and had not been shamelessly and tirelessly promoted by men who had a vision of a society where they could be free, then the revolution would never have occured. Most of the people, then as now, were complacent even when angered. "This is the way it has always been" came to mean "This is the Way it will Always Be" in their minds. Just like now. Yet it's never been true! It hasn't always been like this, and that's been true in every generation. The older men can always tell you of a time when things were different. Not always better, but ALWAYS different! This is the essence of what it means to be alive, and being alive is a wonderful thing!
Sit down with your friends and stand up in front of your fellows and preach the word of Liberty. Ask them to join you, and when your numbers be such that it's possible, call them forth to repudiate their overlords and dismantle their house of lies and deceit! If one town withdraws, then another follows, then another two or three, That is how it will be won! Against a frontal assault, our Overlords are nearly impervious. But they cannot survive the death of a thousand cuts. And the simple refusal to obey them is a more powerful weapon even than the Mighty Nuclear Bomb.
Soldiers of the State will have no qualms returning fire on the field of battle, but all but the very worst of them will quail before firing on a crowd of civlians who simply will not obey them. And when the Worst Sort does so anyway, that too is to our advantage. In the Modern world it don't take weeks to spread the news of an atrocity. It takes minutes.
Yes, if we are to succeed, there will be people who die in the cause. This is tragic, in the actual meaning of the term, but it is inevitable. Some things are worth dying for. But in the longer term, and this is far more important, Liberty is worth LIVING for!
Those unwilling? Leave them to be. By your very act of leaving them to their own devices, you strengthen our cause. Because they see that the way they subscribe to requires the initiation of force, but ours does not. They will see that we can be quite fierce in our defence, but that our attacks are all in the realm of ideas. As our ideas take root, many of the complacent will join us.
Some will hold out to the bitter end to remain under Rulership. Oh well. So long as they see the futility of ever stopping us from living as we will, and so long as they allow us our space, they are of no consequence. They will always be able to find someone to rule them, and I say that in that event, we'll be well rid of them both, rulers and peasants alike. Then Free Men can build a society by voluntary association and trade, free from the "need" for Overlords.
And to those who fervently desire to live under a State? My parting words to you are from a True American Patriot.
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-Samuel Adams
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