Political Systems and Nation States

[Anonymouse]

Nations do exist, but they are artificial creations, reflections of political systems. The boundaries are illusions, along with the ideas a nation tries to instill. They are merely human attempts at trying to define things and classify. Political systems that you find in existence now, came out of the Enlightenment. The "nation state" came out of the Enlightenment, led by Germany. And this was a hand in hand effort with the rise of industrial capitalism.

Going back to my point, we are eager to relieve ourselves of responsibility, and in doing so we give the State power to do the crime we would otherwise not do ourselves. We submit to the political ideology at hand. So we not only fear the State, we fear the enemies of the State. In doing so we feel it is the State that can save us from the "enemies".

What would be the likely consequences, to the state and political systems wherein men and women no longer lived under state induced fears of one another? The fictional works of Orwell, Huxley, Kafka, Rand, and even Shakespeare, gave more about the nature of political systems than most political science PhD dissertations. War is the basic social system and the end of war means the end of national sovereignty. Because allegiance requires a cause, and a cause requires an enemy, the war making societies require and thus bring about conflicts.

It is not enough to just have the capacity for such systematic violence. deadly force must be employed with regularity to keep a nation’s subjects in awe of the powers of life and death held by the State over their lives. This is whyespeciallyy since 1941, the United States government has managed to involve itself in one military campaign after another throughout the world. While all societies have moved to organization, man has always rebelled against authority. There are several definitions of anarchism and the thought behind it. Peoples most common reaction to the word 'anarchism' without even reading about it lead them to state that huimans cant dispense without government or state.

It should come as no surprise to any adult that political systems are inherently disruptive of peopls lives. Government regulation inhibits creativity, production, and the exchange of goods and services, that war, the greatest abomination of all, is essential to the well being of the state, while the lives of millions are routinely sacrificed to the power interests of those who profit from political behavior. Thomas Hobbes observed that a stateless society would render our lives "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," a proposition that is part of the catechism of every dedicated statist.

But history and current events have refuted Hobbes. It is the state, not its absence, that threatens the well being of us all. it was the state that introduced a destructive power known as the A-bomb. I have frequently observed in response to those who dismiss my views on the virtues of a stateless society that political systems, in the 20th century alone, killed some 200,000,000 human beings. How many were killed by anarchists? The very existence of the United Nations functioning as a super political system is the clearest admission of the failure of governments to control the violence and disorder generated by politics. When the UN can so easily emulate Baghdad looters, Hobbes' bromide loses its sedative effect.

[Anonymouse]

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

Democracy you say? You mean the illusions that me and you have more political power than Rockefellar or J.P. Morgan, or Armand Hammer?

[surferarmo]

Violence did not just come out of the blue Anon. It was always there. Lets simplify things. Lets travel back to the days of the nomads. I find a spot where there is a plenty of game hunting. Your tribe comes and stays next to mine, and you threaten our supply of meat. I am hungry 24/7 and I want all the meat. So I kill you and most of your people to creat a bad ass reputation if you will to keep others at bay. I created a boundary. I did not draw it on a map, I just dont want you or anyone in my area. Yes that boundary is only respected because of fear, because of violence. But I never called my game hunting plot a nation. It is my area until I decide to move on. Therefore violence can exist without a nation. Thus the nation does not cause violence, it is violence and fear, which causes nations.

[jahannam]

(i know you're gonna say I'm being on Anon's side again... whatever... I don't care)
but surfer... first of all...
Anon's arguement wasn't about nation vs. no nation
it was about anarchism vs. state power.

second of all... about your tribe example... you don't have to call your game hunting plot a nation. any group of people on earth, distinguished from the rest in any way is a nation. people don't decide to call themselves a nation when they please. Therefore, when your tribe was fighting together for their survival as a whole, they were fighting for a cause, their nation's cause... violence has never started nations.

[surferarmo]

A nation therefore always has existed like I stated before. No Jahannam, his original arguement was not about anarchism, thought it was implied. We were earlier discussing the falsness of a nation, and that it is an artificial concept that we have broughten into existence during the enlightenment.

[jahannam]

we didn't bring it into existence... we just realized such a thing exists.
it's just like anything else..
whether it's math, physics or politics. the answers are there. we just look for them. we don't create the answers. we realize (know of) them.
so the concept of a nation HAS always existed. but we didn't know of it until the enlightenment.

[surferarmo]

we didn't bring it into existence... we just realized such a thing exists.
it's just like anything else..
whether it's math, physics or politics. the answers are there. we just look for them. we don't create the answers. we realize (know of) them.
so the concept of a nation HAS always existed. but we didn't know of it until the enlightenment.

This is EXACTLY what I stated in one of my posts in this thread. Go check it out and realize that you agree with me.

[hyeclass]

if ppl like me and u get together yes we have lot more power after all this counrty was made not because of riches but ppl like me and u

[Anonymouse]

There was war long before the “enlightenment” period. And there has been organized violence long before the industrial revolution, or any other “event” that historians like to talk about. When these things are really a gradual progression.

And as for your “illusion” of democracy argument, thanks to a system of laws anyone can sue anyone in a court of law, and in that way seek justice. You can argue about the other side having more money for lawyers and investigators, however it is obvious than in a democracy the individual does matter. An example of that are the millions of dollars awarded in damages when individuals sue corporations that have hurt them. Also the recent Kobe Bryant case is a clear example that money does not protect the powerful from justice completely. All that girl had to do was file a report, and Bryant was charged with a crime with a trial pending. I think these are good examples of democracy in action.

This is not about violence or war, this is the artificiality of nation states and how they have caused more violence with political systems than have individuals. "Justice" or an "enlightened" society never has and never will exist. Rewarding worthless paper money to someone by the government doesn't show a value of individualism. It only reinforces the States role as the arbiter of "justice". We tell ourselves that the state can rectify all of this.

Democracy is an illusion otherwise Bush wouldn't be in power now. For anyone to believe that the individual holds more weight and influence than say Armand Hammer, who funded the Russian Revolution, is in denial of the facts. Corporate lawsuits are the wosrt example in trying to prove the case of democracies preservation of individualism. That is just a degenerated effect of what corporate America has turned into. If fifty years of smoking has given me lung cancer, it is the fault of the cigarette companies in producing the cigarettes. If our children grow up to be crude or unfocused adults, it is not due to examples we set as parents, the fault lies with rock music or television. When will people let self responsibility reemerge?

All political systems are dependent upon the generation of mass minded thinking, to persuade each of us to lose our sense of individuality and responsibility in the collective herd. We condition our minds to accept identities for ourselves, to think of ourselves not as self-directed, self-responsible beings, but as members of various groups, whose interests are not only mutually exclusive, but antagonistic.

"Democracy" especially in the U.S. is no different. All political systems depend upon a modus operandi that is completely contrary to what most of us experience with other individuals, methodologies that none of us would tolerate from friends, family, or even strangers. So whether we think of a given system as communist, democratic, socialist, fascist, feudal, or a welfare state, all governments forcibly confiscate legal title or control of property that had hitherto been owned by individuals.

Humanities obsession with collectivist ideologies is destroying both the quality and the existence of human life. While we are social creatures, and need one another’s cooperation in order to survive, we are also individuals who require mutual respect for our respective interests. Only the individual is able to generate thoughts, to be creative, to reproduce, to sense pleasure, to love, and to have transcendent experiences. Only the individual has come up with the most fascinating inventions, theories, and ideas that the mob could not have had the faintest clue about. All contributions to mankind from a to z have been because of the individual.

I suspect that many of us become angry or discomfortable at the opinions of others that contradict our own, not because we know them to be false, but because we fear that they may be true.

[Anonymouse]

By the way, I never said there was no war prior to the Enlightenment. It's just that it was during the "Enlightenment" that we had the birth of ideologies and isms and the idea of nations states. The Enlightenment gave birth to the idea of manifest destiny, of "progress" at the expense of life. Enlightenment thinking created an ideological prism from which there was no turning back, and from then all history has been viewed through this prism and that is why surferarmo stated "Natiosn are not artificial, we live in them". That is true to a point. We live in these ideological prisms, but we don't live in anything per se, we live on this planet, on the same land that is not divided but only with armed guards and politics.