Self-limiting anarchy

[inibo]

I don't normally post entire articles written by someone else, just enough teasers to get you to go read the whole thing. In this case I'm making an exception. This essay probably has the most articulate expression of my political philosophy that someone beside me could have written. Indeed, reading Butler Shaffer's essays have helped clarify my

Comments

[anubislux]

Intersting. I'm unclear if the "Self-limiting anarchy" is your title for this or somehow assumed by the author, but the principles expressed in this essay are near identical, word-for-word, to Ayn Rand's Objectivist definition of "Capitalism". All of this is exactly the nature of social and political relations I advocate as ultimately "thelemic".

Thank you for sharing this. I'm marking this down for future reference if I have to take a Government class again down the road.

It would not surprise me. . .

[inibo]

...to find that Shaffer is Randian Objectivist. I've not read Rand myself, never felt the call, and several writers whom I respect seem to disparage Rand, or at least Randians. As to Thelemic, perhaps, I suppose, with respect to the Law as an organizing principle. Many of Shaffer's observations on hierarchy might conflict with the fraternal order model, though.

If there were such a thing as congregational Thelema...

But now I'm being too abstract.

Ah,well, yes

[inibo]

Definitions are key. I have wrestled with the idea of the origin of property, or at least the idea of legal title. It is a conundrum. On the simplest level I suppose it is what Shaffer describes in another essay:

"Property" is not simply some social invention, like Emily Post’s guide to etiquette, but a way of describing conditions that are essential to all living things. Every living thing must occupy space and consume energy from outside itself if it is to survive, and it must do so to the exclusion of all other living things on the planet. I didn’t dream this up. My thinking was not consulted before the life system developed. The world was operating on the property principle when I arrived and, like the rest of us, I had to work out my answers to that most fundamental, pragmatic of all social questions: who gets to make decisions about what? The essence of "ownership" is to be found in control: who gets to be the ultimate decision maker about people and "things" in the world?
~Do You Own Yourself? 2002, Butler Shaffer

[baal_kriah]

Liberty without responsibility isn't liberty, it's license. It's as illusory as real freedom without self-discipline.

[inibo]

Responsibility is one of those type of things rebhershy was talking about needing definition.

I feel responsibility for and toward myself, my family, my friends and others I've entered an agreement or come to an understanding with, such as work and such. I don't know if your reaching for it or not, but I don't really feel much responsibility toward society or other larger abstract constructs. My relationships are with people, not classifications or categories.

[baal_kriah]

I see distinctions between things like society and people as entirely artificial, for convenience only, not in fact real. When we mistake the appearance of duality for the actual situation we miss the fact that reality is seamless. As Ortega y Gasset put it, "I am I, and my circumstances". If I miss the fact that the border most of us put at the surface of our skin is not a wall of separation but merely a layer in the universal onion I alienate myself from my self and initiate the ugly cycle of so-called selfishness that eventuates in death instead the immortality that is my actual state.