I think Marx felt the same way.

So did many great thinkers. But he proposed achieving such ends through statist means. That’s why it has never worked, and we see that communist states are some of the most totalitarian in history.

I would prefer a government that doesn’t operate as a criminal organization, a monopoly, and an anti-social institution.

Here’s how it works. You write a long clarification of misrepresented views like this:

That’s an odd projection, especially since I have already admitted that I do not believe people actually need or want to be governed, that they wish only for others to be governed. The answers to the question have confirmed my suspicions. You keep mentioning the violence of aboriginals and Vikings, for instance, which serves as a good reminder that people need states to protect them the barbarians at the gates. It’s invariably someone else who needs to be governed.

I have also explicitly assumed people here are adults, that they have fully developed moralities, so much so that I wager their professed hostility to another’s property is fake.

You find a clause—not even a full sentence or argument—quote it out of context and shift focus so people like praxis and Xtrix have something to play with because they cannot offer much else. Sophistry doesn’t work on everyone, unfortunately.

Questions answered twice. You didn’t answer the questions. Now let us talk about you as if you weren’t here. Cringe.

This isn’t an interview. I’ve expressed my views and you can shit on them all you want. If you wish to speak in the topic I’m all ears.

I wish. There's not even that. So far, utterly devoid of arguments. Says stuff, doesn't know what he's saying, can't back it up. Two-dimensionally political from every angle. That's why his threads are generally a waste of time.

And here you both are, wasting your time, in everyone of my threads. I just want to talk about this stuff. Why are you both here?

A fully developed morality is a set of principles of conduct and behavior. It develops as one ages. Yes.

I assume that adults have some semblance of right and wrong which they develop as they age.

It is interesting though to poke at this sentiment: Why must you be governed? I have manners and conscience, which are constant and impregnable, you clearly do not. Isn't this self-righteous "I", reflected in the social, the kernel of all "us" vs "them" mentalities? No doubt many of the rioters that attacked the Capitol believe they don't need to be governed, that they have manners and consciences, and were doing only what was necessary to protect themselves from the corrupt "other" and its "state morality". Sweep them back in time and they are a tribe of Plains Indians or Vikings, fully equipped with manners, consciences, and compassion (for their own), securing and protecting their interests; the torture, rape, and terror only a different level of necessity. We may even turn NOS's thesis on its head and say those who say they don't need to be governed, demonstrate the need for governance most as their projection on themselves of a false exception proves most pointedly the need for common rules. Of course, I don't need to be governed, I am of divine moral purity and have no need for state morality; it is you, the plebs, the evil ones, who require external constraints...

That’s an odd projection, especially since I have already admitted that I do not believe people actually need or want to be governed, that they wish only for others to be governed. The answers to the question have confirmed my suspicions. You keep mentioning the violence of aboriginals and Vikings, for instance, which serves as a good reminder that people need states to protect them the barbarians at the gates. It’s invariably someone else who needs to be governed.

I have also explicitly assumed people here are adults, that they have fully developed moralities, so much so that I wager their professed hostility to another’s property is fake.

Where do you think conscience and manners arise from? Do you think they're magic universals breathed into our beings by sole virtue of us being human? Isn't it obvious they're socially contextualized with part of that context being that we live in highly structured states? The Plains Indians were about as close to stateless as described by your delusional utopia. As it happens, they tortured their enemies to death as a matter of routine. Yes, they had consciences and manners, just not any that someone like yourself, riddled with state morality, would recognize.

And there we have it. “State morality”.

Personally, I wasn’t raised by the state, nor did I socialize with bureaucrats and politicians in my formative years. We have tried law, compulsion, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and statism of various kinds, but the result is nothing to be proud of.

I don’t think you need to be governed. I think you’re an adult. I think your unreasonableness and propensity towards destroying another’s property is a silly ruse. Even your “system of representatives” would laugh in your face about your claims to my property.

You know I would choose peaceful resolutions because I suggested peaceful resolutions, but you wouldn’t accept and would run to authorities, like “most people”. You would prefer a third party, the monopoly on violence, to fill in where your own morals and conscience and deliberation wouldn’t. You need other men to do what you are unable.

The conquest theory of state, as I believe it anyways, is wholly influenced by Franz Oppenheimer’s The State. It’s a refreshing deviation from the social contract theory. Anyways, thanks for the input and non-hostile discussion.

No, I thought it was the superior man's property, you thought it was the property of the one who tilled it. Thus we disagreed as to whose property it was.

You were about to enlighten me as to how we resolve that dispute between you, me, and the 7 million other people who have a legitimate say in what you (or I) do with our piece of rainforest without any formal system of representation.

Only a formal system of representation could come up with something like the Enclosure acts or the Decree on Land. Someone mentioned the Amazon earlier, and one can watch the formal system of representation sell the rainforest to the highest bidder, while all traditional and tribal claims are disregarded.

The resolution to the dispute between you and I is inevitably violence. Your claims to my garden are unreasonable; you seek to destroy what I have built and use to sustain myself; you refuse any peaceful resolutions. You’ll just have to come and take it.

I don’t view the state as an ideology. I view statism as an ideology. Also, I do not nor have not called for a change in the future world order. I suppose my defense of basic human rights could be boiled down to the promotion of manners, in a Nietzschean sort of way. The state is the coldest of all monsters, and all that.

I just thought it was an interesting question. I think it is extremely rare that people think they need to be governed, as if they had no conscience, manners, or instinct. This so-called social contract is where all the egoism begins. It’s a compact made with oneself, after all: “I will be governed so that you will be governed”. Like Rousseau said, it involves the complete alienation of the individual, together with all his rights, to the whole community. If he has already submitted to this idea, signed the social contract so to speak, he goes too far in believing everyone else has done the same.

Since you mentioned Gasset, how he portrays the attitude of the mass-man towards the state implies a more self-seeking and egoist view than I could ever endure.

“He sees it, admires it, knows that there it is, safeguarding his existence; but he is not conscious of the fact that it is a human creation invented by certain men and upheld by certain virtues and fundamental qualities which the men of yesterday had and which may vanish into air to-morrow. Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own”

…

“The mass says to itself, “L’ État, c’est moi,” which is a complete mistake. The state is the mass only in the sense in which it can be said of two men that they are identical because neither of them is named John. The contemporary State and the mass coincide only in being anonymous. But the mass-man does in fact believe that he is the State, and he will tend more and more to set its machinery working on whatsoever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it—disturbs it in any order of things: in politics, in ideas, in industry.”

I’ve never read Ayn Rand. That’s the hilarious part of the accusation.

I never said it could. Why do you personally need to be governed?

There's no theft and robbery until there's property. We're discussing who owns what so we cannot already be thieving and robbing it can we? We have yet to establish who's property it is.

I thought it was the superior man’s property.

That’s a misleading answer because it avoids the question outright and quickly enters fantasy. Elon musks private army will be of humanoid drones while Bezos’ rockets will look like dicks. They will maraud around the world spreading freedom while searching for weapons of mass competition. Public armies are controlled by democracy and history proves they have never taken or destroyed any property.

How does one demonstrate that having no government doesn't automatically generate some other form of tyranny or overarching organizational process?

I don’t think he can. The state is by now so ubiquitous and so many dependant on it that its abolition would invariably lead to some form of tyranny as they scramble for new states. People would first need to shed statism as they did religion.

Hang on. A minute ago you had s right to your garden because you tilled it. Now you're saying we could come to some arrangement?

What about the rainforest? Cycles the oxygen for everyone on the planet. You're going to need an awfully big hall to hold that meeting...

If only there were some system of representatives to simplify this mass negotiation process... Oh well, one can only hope...

Yes, just ask. Maybe we can trade, maybe I can donate, maybe we can till it together. Maybe I’m naive but I thought theft and robbery would be the last resort, so consider me surprised.

Therefore you have no right to your garden.

That there is logic. Allow me to sell you some.

I’ll pass. I am by now we’ll aware that you will not afford anybody a right to their own garden. What do you say to the Amazonian, then, given that they have stolen their village “the commons”? They have no right to keep their village?

Oh, a social contract.

We have not agreed to anything. No social contract. Just you coming upon my garden and deciding what to do next: destroy it, steal from it, or leave it alone. There’s always that other niggling option of voluntary cooperation, where we can work together towards a solution. How does one decide?

I don't need to be governed. I said at the outset that I am an anarchist. But you need me to be governed.

I don’t want you to be governed, nor want to govern you.

A right? Where do they come from? God? You get more and more desperately ambitious in your pronouncements. No, it is an insane suggestion that any man has a right to fence off land and reserve it to his own use without the agreement of his neighbours - which is to say, without entering into a social contract with his neighbours to mutually grant each other such and such rights and such and such redress. And should you wonder who is your neighbour, I refer you to the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Rights come from men. That’s why I’m asking you and not God. Will you destroy my garden, should there be no “social contract”? Is this why you need to be governed?

No. I'd turn your garden back to a state of nature. No appropriation of any fruit (figurative or otherwise), in fact a rejection of the fruits of your labour.

You’d destroy my food, then, and any food-bearing plants I created, because you are a superior gardener. I still fail to see how one justifies the other. .

Do you not believe that a man has a right, as a matter of dignity and survival, to put effort into a place of nature for his own living?

There we go. You believe you are entitled to the figurative and literal fruits of another’s labor because you think you can do a better job. The corollaries of such a sense of justice are profound. A man has no right to use nature to provide for his own survival. The superior man has rights to the nature, the efforts, and by extension, the bodies of lesser men. And this sense of justice and property is why you need to be governed.

But you yourself frame your concept of 'statism' as a violation of a preexisting condition. It is at least as abstract as any idea employed by Locke.

I would say the State itself was a violation of sorts insofar as it was the organized means of exploitation imposed on others, but only that the preexisting condition to the state was no state. If I were to get concrete about it, I would point to those who act out its functions, it’s written laws, and so on. Statism is rather a belief or ideology, and I would argue the prevailing one.

Nor should they be. It’s a brute fact that such abstract terms are without a referent. As intimated, the collectivism in Hobbes or Rousseau, statism in general, is nothing to be proud of.

Ah! The old 'you agree with me really though' argument. I wondered how long it would take to get there.

That you can't wrap your head around anyone thinking differently is your problem, don't project it onto others.

It was a question, actually, as evident by the question mark. Your efforts to skirt around it are obvious, because no one is stupid enough to act like a question was an argument.

Of course. You ruined my wilderness. I'd definitely use what force I have at my disposal to requisition it and return it to its proper state.

Why is it your wilderness? Is my garden on your property?

Like Rousseau says, family is the first society. I suppose kinship could be considered natural, but then again to say “state of nature” is redundant, because every state is one of nature anyways.

Alright. We have a big long discussion. We still disagree. Now what? Fisticuffs?

Do you really disagree, though? Would you actually lay claim to a garden someone else has built and cultivated, and upon disagreeing, physically take what he has built and cultivated?

But yes, if theft is your aim, you’ll just have to take it, won’t you?

Deliberation.

A state prohibits rule of the people. It’s very function is the rule of some people.

That is my justification. Now we weigh that against your justification, which I suppose is coming any moment now.

It’s true. And history does not look kindly on them.

I created it and nurtured it. It wouldn’t exist had I not done so. How does your superior gardening abilities justify your claims to it?

It’s true. I would assume, perhaps wrongly, that you have a conscience, and some modicum of respect for the livelihood of others, their labors, and so on. Absent that we are at an impasse, and you’ll have to try and take it.

Not just someone else. You.

Someone you do not know nor have ever dealt with. Another bogieman.

I'll have a crack. I'm a better gardener than you, so I deserve it.

How do your gardening abilities justify you having another person’s garden?

My garden? Not because I say so, but because I can justify it. I built it, planted it, and tilled it. If you can justify why it is yours, perhaps you can have it.

You and your desire to steal and appropriate another’s things is not unlike the State’s.

It's you.

It’s always someone else.