Political Systems and Nation States

[Anonymouse]

because the question youre asking has no answer. youre right we are slaves and the govt. can do whatever they please, so dont ask why. we, the people have always thought theres a lot of things wrong with the govt. including a lot of corruption on the side, but can we do anything about it, NO, because we are slaves to them. and i wouldnt necessarily call it slaves. but it could get to that point if we wanted to let it go there.

There is an answer and the fact that the human mind CAN think of an alternative and raise its level of consciousness it can happen. Its not an impossibility, but it is an improbability.

[Shangh_Hye]

When all else fails...turn to communism...im not a supporter...but many aspects of this "system" have proved its worth in the past...

[Anonymouse]

Well, I would argue that even those who are so called "controllers" are actually bound by the system themselves. I work at the headquarters, and I dont see people saying, "lets control the masses by war." I dont believe they are consciously doing it, but I do agree that we are bound by the state all the same. The controllers and the controlled are all bound by eachother. I belive the nation does control us, but I believe we need it. It almost gives us purpose and something to look forward to.

This concept goes inline with the Leviathan theory. I forget if it was by Thomas Hobbes, or John Locke, but it is attributed to one of those two. The people give their rights to a "leviathan" a greater being, one that they believe in, so that the leviathan can handle the affairs of the people. It all comes down to security. That is what people want. Security to do as they please.

The people at your headquarters might not want to "control" because they aren't about control since they aren't the true creators and wielders of power

Are you suggesting President Bush created this idea of power? It started with the nomads. There was a controlling force. Not one person was in control, but the amount of food at a given time and a given spot was in control. THey were controlled by the avaliability of game animals. We are all controlled by something. When people decided to settle down in houses and start farms, people with more grain became powerful because those with less would starve, and they would probably beg for grain from the man that had the most. One other man got jealous and he killed the man with the most grain so he could have the food, so he could have the power. Then it evolved to now. That is where power started. Not in some room where 5 philosophers made a system of control based on war. No one sat down and concocted this whole plan.

You must remember that in all societies exists a pyramidal hierarchy. There was a time that people created the system we live in. That time was the Enlightenment. The names of the thinkers you refer to all came out of the Enlightenment as well. It is then that the idea of "nations" and every '-ism' you can think of came into existence. So someone had to have created it.

Read above. It evolved. It was always there, it was just realized by philosophers. Nations were created to seperate those with loyalties to the certain grain owners.

I used the nomads as an example, but I took a whole course on them. That is where the role of females and males arose

Nations weren't always there. I disagree. You had Kingdoms and other regional areas. The idea of a NATION didn't exist until the Enlightenment. Germany became the first nation state with Bismarcks unification of Germany. Whereas kindgoms and such were suited for the feudal societies of the times, nations became the necessity for the growing industrial capitalistic system that came out of the Enlightenment.

Nations in themselves are artificial since we are only assigning names and meanings and boundaries to lands that existed way before we started naming things.

[omniscient]

Re: Political Systems and Nation States

I recently finished two excellent readings about the nature of political systems and nations. One was "The Myth of Nations" by Patrick Geary who is a professor at UCLA, and the other "Anarchism", by Daniel Guerin; both excellent readings. Throughout my course in reading these books alot of the fundamental ideas of nations and political ideas came into question, and I always thought of myself as more of a collectivist with regard to nations than anything else but this certainly erects some questions that quakes my views.

I have come to the conclusion that the State relies on its existence in acts of subterfuge and war. It must lie and pacify its citizens and make them have faith in the system in order for it to succeed. While people like the revolutionary forefathers of America and other people yapping about "soverign nation", the term itself contains its own negation. How can a people be sovereign by any means if they are a nation? The idea of being a nation in itself suggests that you are a slave to the system. You don't have to believe it but you are limited by the State.

The means in which the State achieves this ability to gull most of its citizenry is via the educational system and the press. You may view this as some "cynical outlook" or "conspiratorial" or the ramblings of a "nut" or what have you, but a deep questioning of your beliefs and the system will only show how dependent you are on it.

So thus it would not be in the interest of those who profit from Statism to have people question the State or the mechanics of it. War is the fundamental nature of every political ideology. Without war it cannot exist or survive. The State is really institutionalize violence that people have been conditioned to revere. The state operates on the basis of the most inhumane premises. Behaviors that we insist upon criminalizing if done by private parties are perfectly okay for the State. Why?

why ask why anon, thats what they want you to say. thats how our system works. thats why no one really questions it. i wouldnt say that youre a nut rambling about something that cant be fixed but the statements that you are making; are they from you asking the question why? or is it something one of the two authors wrote and THEY are asking that question? hope i didnt lose you

The books didn't really delve into the whys, just tried to give a synopsis of their theses, one being Anarchism, and the other of nations being artificial creations.

You cannot help but think of how the government tries to persecute those who commit the same crimes the government commits on an individual scale. When someone conspires against the government it is treason, yet it is perfectly okay for one government to send spies to conspire against another government. Do you see where this line of thinking goes? It presents a very complex dilemma for people who have alot of faith in the system and it is disheartening for most.

I believe the answer I am looking for lies somewhere in the area of 'fear'.

well I for one have never cared for the system, and i dont have any faith in it either. I mean whatever the US does for its well being thats fine because hey i live here and im selfish when in that aspect and so is almost everyone else. but that doesnt necessarily mean i have faith in our system. and the excuse or reason of"fear" is so pathetic when you think about it, but it is true

[omniscient]

because the question youre asking has no answer. youre right we are slaves and the govt. can do whatever they please, so dont ask why. we, the people have always thought theres a lot of things wrong with the govt. including a lot of corruption on the side, but can we do anything about it, NO, because we are slaves to them. and i wouldnt necessarily call it slaves. but it could get to that point if we wanted to let it go there.

There is an answer and the fact that the human mind CAN think of an alternative and raise its level of consciousness it can happen. Its not an impossibility, but it is an improbability.

yes and a very high improbability. thats why I say..... why ask why, just let it be, in my personal opinion i hate politics and i think whoever is in politics are interested in politics is corrupt or on thier way to being corrupt thats why i hate even discussing politics most of the time, i have never been interested in politics. although there are many people that hate politics i would still tell those people to take a few political science classes still, just so they know the science of politics and how everything works in our system and "others". people should at least have an idea of what is going on here.

[Anonymouse]

because the question youre asking has no answer. youre right we are slaves and the govt. can do whatever they please, so dont ask why. we, the people have always thought theres a lot of things wrong with the govt. including a lot of corruption on the side, but can we do anything about it, NO, because we are slaves to them. and i wouldnt necessarily call it slaves. but it could get to that point if we wanted to let it go there.

There is an answer and the fact that the human mind CAN think of an alternative and raise its level of consciousness it can happen. Its not an impossibility, but it is an improbability.

yes and a very high improbability. thats why I say..... why ask why, just let it be, in my personal opinion i hate politics and i think whoever is in politics are interested in politics is corrupt or on thier way to being corrupt thats why i hate even discussing politics most of the time, i have never been interested in politics. although there are many people that hate politics i would still tell those people to take a few political science classes still, just so they know the science of politics and how everything works in our system and "others". people should at least have an idea of what is going on here.

I ask why because that is the natural process towards higher self development and elevating my thinking skills above the chains and shackles set by the system.

Now this is the great problem. If the masses on a grand scale can achieve this type of analytical and critical thinking then the system will cease to exist. But that is not how it goes, because of fear people just "let it be".

It is because of fear, both from ourselves and others that we don't question. We have been institutionally trained to distrust our capacities to lead self directed lives. That is one of the things the State is excellent in doing. We distrust ourselves to lead self-directed lives yet trust the most bumbling morally bankrupt politicial to do that exact same thing for us, in other words we have confidence in the judgements of the institutional leaders. This only comes from growing up fearing our sense of responsibility.

In the words of Epictetus: "It is a man’s own judgments which disturb him." The state is as eager to relieve us of this sense of disquiet as most of us are to give it up.

[omniscient]

yes thats my point, even though thats a good thing by taking your thinking skills to a higher level (and i am being a hypocrit because i do the same ) its still not worth thinking about because like you said it is highly improbable. so the masses will never reach that type of thinking on a grand scale and so the system will always exist. but i guess it is good to question it once in a while but you know your never gonna be able to take action against things like this. 99% of the people are chained and shackled by the system and they "fear" i just realized were gonna keep saying the same thing. your gonna tell me that we should still try to take our thinking skills beyond what the system has set and i will say that wont work on a grand scale, then you will say theres a chance lol , and i will say thats unlikely, and you question it (and hey so do i once in a while but i wont ponder about it for hours) but we will never act upon it as much as we like to question these things. i dont know if you get the point im trying to make here.

[jahannam]

wowowo I Was only out for a couple of hours.. .I come back...all these new threads with so many responses that I dunno where to start from!
well lets start...
being raised in Syria... I remember how EVERYone would forbid you to talk ANYTHING about the government, let alone questioning or investigating its systems...
and since they wouldn't teach us xxxx about the U S of A, we often thought that the American way of dealing with that kinda stuff is different. We thought that America and everything about it was open to everyone since it was "the land of the free"...
anyway... I haven't gotten to my point but I have to go...
yeah.. it's my boss... I'll be back

[surferarmo]

Nations are not artificial. We live in them, we know of them, therefore they exist. Leaders recognize nations, therefore, politcally speaking, it is legitamate. If nations do not exist, then neither does government, neither does power, neither does control, neither does war. You have acknowledged that all these things exist Anon. So I ask you, why cant a nation be official as opposed to artificial?

[hyeclass]

There are two major modes of democracy. Government by the peple, a form of government in which the supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the people. Government by populr representation; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained by the people, but is indirectly exercised through a system of representation and delgated authority periodically renewed; a constitutional representative government.

The latter form is that which exists in the UK. The reason I have included democracy as a form of social engineering is because democracy does not limit its power. It is possible (though unlikely) to achieve the same results as a vicious nazi state through democracy. The problems with democracy deserve separate discussion here are that a majority can 'vote away' the freedom of a minority. To use an extreme example imagine that you live in a village of 100 people and 99 of them vote to take your house. Despite the 'landslide' democratic victory there is no change in the morality of the theft they vote for. To a lesser extent this is what happens when one person votes for tax raises. The whim of a majority is no more moral than the whim of a dictator, just less likely to result in an extreme atrocity. The other problem is that it pits one interest group against another. Where the government decides to use one persons' private property to pursue a goal with which he/she does not agree, the two parties oppose. Democracy can rapidly decline to a series of adversarial groups seeking to have the government favour them, at the necessary expense of another. Thus we have young v old, healthy v ill, employed v unemployed, road user v non-road user, county v county, race v race and so forth. where the government serves only as a policeman there can be no such adversariality