ForumBot, you complained earlier that you can’t move to a free society, since governments have infested the entire world.
Question is, why do you think that is? How did this state of affairs come about? My explanation is that a group that is incapable of defending itself against another group intent on organized coercion inevitably becomes the slaves of the second group. Which means, in order to actually exist, a society must possess at least enough strength to keep itself from being invaded by neighboring groups. And it must be at least strong enough to prevent “cheaters” from prevailing.
Any society throughout human history that was unable to do this didn’t last more than a generation. Any social philosophy that requires everyone, everywhere to assent to it, or the whole structure falls apart, is an unworkable philosophy. Given the contentious nature of humanity, 100% agreement is impossible.
Now, you asked also where rights come from. And I’ll answer you. They are created by human beings. Human beings are animals, we evolved from social creatures very much like a chimpanzee. Does a chimpanzee have natural rights? Of course not. But chimpanzees have functional societies. They expect certain behavior from each other. They form friendships, they love each other, they have rivals, they have enemies.
If one troop of chimpanzees chases another troop of chimpanzees away from a particularly nice territory, have the first troop violated the property rights of the second troop? This sort of behavior is exactly parallel to thousands of incidents throughout human history, most of which are too tedious to go into here. So, when one human did it to another human, did that violate that ancient hunter-gatherer’s human rights? Well, maybe it did, but so what? What difference does it make?
Except we humans have slightly larger brains that chimpanzees, and, while we certainly can live “naturally” in accordance with our instincts in socieities not much different than those chimpanzee bands, we can also deliberately attempt to create social rules.
And human history is full of examples of various attempts at invented social rules. One person is supposedly a “king”, another is supposed to be in communication with some supernatural entities, another has the right to work with metal, some are supposed to be slaves, some are “foreigners” and totally outside the social framework. And this can get incredibly elaborate…certain people are always supposed to dress a certain way, eat a certain way, perform or not perform certain sexual acts at certain times, and on and on.
And it turns out that societies that developed the idea of planting seeds in the ground and harvesting the resulting plants were able to acheive fantastic population densities, as well as storable food that could be stolen. Back in the old HG days warfare was about either killing rival tribesmen, stealing “their” women, or driving them away from prime territory. Now you could go in and steal the farmer’s grain after he had laboriously grown it all year. Or–better yet–stick around and tell the farmer that you’re not just stealing his grain this year, but every year from now on. Of course, the disadvantage is that now you’ve got to leave him enough grain so he and his family doesn’t starve to death, but the advantage is that you can do this every year. And since the farmer and his family spend all their time tending the crops, while you and your family spend all your time practicing fighting, the farmer has no choice.
Except the trouble for you is that other people have the same idea, and so you have to fight those other professional fighters for the right to steal grain from various farmers. Sometimes you form agreements with those other fighters and ally with them, other times you fight them, either to prevent them from stealing your farmers, or to steal their farmers. And so the aristocracy is created, and all you have to do is realize that it works exactly like the mafia.
So, what about those rights? Where are they? Well, it turns out that aristocrats like nice things, and so we have professional artisans, and the fighters take a portion of their output. And we have professional priests, who protect the fighters against supernatural threats. Now, it turns out that taking everything from your farmers and artisans leaves them starving and destitute. You can only skin a sheep once, but you can shear it every year. Societies where the fighters paid no attention to the welfare of their slave farmers and squeezed them harder and harder tended to have LESS wealth than societies that gave those slaves a bit of leeway. Societies that codified the expectations of the rulers and the obligations of the slaves worked better than societies that worked on the whim of the rulers. Predictability allowed more profit.
Eventually these rules became so entrenched that the slaves actually came to believe they were ENTITLED to the protections of those rules, and that the fighters were OBLIGATED to enforce them. And certain revolutions in technology enabled a peasant farmer with a new weapon to be the military equal of a person trained for warfare since birth.
And now that vast peasant armies could slaughter aristocrat armies, suddenly the power of the aristocrats faded. And so these peasants started to talk amongst themselves. What exactly were all these laws for? Why were some people deemed to “own” certain things, like land, or factories, or slaves, or whatever? Why should the aristocrats get to decide everything, when we can kick their ass?
And so the former laws that had been based on force of arms now became rules based on…the simple fact that some sort of laws have to be in place, or the sort of society that enabled us peasants to fight the aristocrats could not exist. We could either live as hunter-gatherers in perfect freedom (except when our neighbors killed us or stole from us or raped us, or whatever), or we could be agricultural slaves, or we could be citizens of a society capable of sticking together and kicking the ass of anyone who got any funny ideas.
And so, here we are. Our laws, our social customs, our religions, our science, was never designed from first principles, it evolved through trial and error over centuries as people groped for some sort of social order that wasn’t sheer misery. And the social order has been remade beyond recognition many times, but never remade from first principles, it always was remade on the foundation or the ashes of the previous social order. And the track records of societies who tried to implement “scientific” social order are not pleasant. And so most people have developed a healthy skepticism of proposals for top-to-bottom changes from first principles of our society. Not that we don’t think there’s room for improvement, after all, our society is only slightly better than living as a feudal serf, but just that proposals to improve things often make things much worse.
And so, things like individual sovereignity are going to fail. Suppose you declare yourself sovereign on your “own” land. What does that mean? But what right do you own that land? It’s your property you say, you bought it, it’s yours by right. Except it’s only yours in the context of the society that granted you that right. The United States granted you the “right” to that property, because you traded certain colored pieces of paper with the former holder of that property, and transfered ownership to you. Except, absent the United States, the only people in the world who agree that the property is yours is you and the guy you bought it from. If you declare independence from the United States, what stops some guys with guns from moving in to “your” property and either killing you or enslaving you?
In the United States, you’re a member of a gang that has agreed to protect you against other gangs, and one of the requirements for membership in our gangs is that you agree to help out members of your gang. You don’t agree to help us, we don’t agree to help you.
So your property rights are a social convention that exist because we’ve discovered that pretending that things like property rights exist make for a more pleasant society. God didn’t make you owner of that half-acre suburban lot, you have no natural right to it, and almost certainly within the last one or two hundred years that land you “own” was violently expropriated from someone or other, either with explicit violence or the implicit threat of violence. And then someone bought that land from the expropriator, and again, and again, until it comes to you. And you only own the land because the rest of us agree you do.
You can argue that you own the land even if no one else agrees, but so what? How does that make the slightest particle of difference? You can argue that you SHOULD own the land even if others disagree, and if you’re arguments are persuasive then everyone else will agree with you that you do own the land, and viola, your property rights are granted by social convention.
