First, because that’s zero-sum thinking, so they’re only going to think the second half of that. Take it from me, no-one from there is ever going to think “why are they doing this when they could/should be doing that” when they could just think the dependent clause without making it dependent on anything.
And second, because they know exactly who is responsible for veterans’ care, by every principle of honor and balance and debt, and by gods, they know a warbarrister or two who’ll be delighted to extract it from them on general principle.
(That would be the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, whom even a brief examination of the state of provision for both active servicemembers and veterans will demonstrate to be a bunch of faithless sons of bitches in desperate need of a reminder that loyalty runs both ways.)
I have seen people, in these current days of multiple atrocities, calling upon we merry writers of fiction to say something relevant.
Well, here it is:
Consider the public responses to events in these times as today’s sad and sorry reminder exactly how many of us would be red-flagged by the Guardians of Our Harmony as unfit for participation in a society of sane and reasonable people.
On the other hand, the Guardians of Our Harmony would also have the equipment to fix the issues. And if we can just rewrite my wonky mental OS to fix a few things, I’ll freaking volunteer!
(Loose cultural translations, but I suspect that Bright Shadow maintain a little flotilla of network maintenance gunboats all named along a similar scheme:
Would they be supplied by a fleet train ship named IS 418 I’m a teapot? Actually, is there a tea or tea-like drink common thereabout? And if so, how do they classify different teas?
There is a lot of tea, both tea tea and the infusions of many other plant leaves which are also recognized as tea.
As for classification, tea is serious business.
The tea lore is deep, the average tea shop has enough beautifully arranged jars of carefully processed leaves behind the counter to resemble a old-style compounding pharmacy, and once you’ve mastered an appalling amount of herbalism and camelliculture, the traditional cycle of the seasons, the interrelationships of the six elements, et al. to properly understand all the nuances of How Tea Works, plus at least the basics of proper ceremonial preparation and serving, someone outside your immediate family might consider trusting you with a kettle.
…and here my family thinks I’m weird for having a tea cupboard with several blends and also a few cans of components that get mixed to preference. Although sadly my local teashop has stopped selling ingredients and only does blends these days.
also I need to sew myself a tea cosy, this winter has been too cold for my poor pot
On FB, I have been getting some posts from Jesse’s Tea House, a purveyor of traditional Chinese and Taiwanese teas in the “wet serving” style. I’m highly tempted. Of course, the recent trade disagreements have made such teas very much not cheap. But as I can tell the difference between Lipton and Twinings, I’m assuming that I may be able to appreciate the different types of Chinese tea better.
Cynical amusement based on what I will be, I swear, posting later today:
Say, post-contact, it turns out that the Yellowstone magma chamber is getting a bit rumbly, and so we contract the Worlds’ leading specialists in performing surgery on planets -
Just imagine how much it’s going to suck for the poor sod with the job of explaining to President Notoriously-Never-Pays-His-Contractors why, exactly, it’s a bad idea to stiff your ecopoesis contractor.
(“Mr. President? The problem with trying to screw the company with a 1.2 km long surgical laser in orbit around Earth is that they have a 1.2 km long surgical laser in orbit around Earth.“)
The logistics/maintenance tender for this squadron, serving the whole constellation (someone would inevitably suggest Solomani Rim or a variant as a name), would obviously be IS 426 Upgrade Required.
The backup corvette for quick response reinforcement would be the IS 420 Enhance Your Calm.
So, things I was not expecting to see on this week’s dance card (but I really should have, because What Fresh Hell Is This? is a permanent section): the American rightist fringe adopting, essentially, the theology of the Hive from Destiny.
Seriously. Compare this bullshit and its like to the Books of Sorrow, etal., and enjoy cutting away all the bits of yourself that don’t serve pure survival and the culling of the weak.
“And it is majestic. Majestic.”
(ETA: And a C. S. Lewis villain, too. Thank you, Professor Weston, you will be seen to in time.)
Going beyond nihilism to literal entropy-cultism. Damn. The orbital cleansing fire creeps ever closer.
Many posts on the Substack/blog Notes from the Circus start with the same sentence:
“This is, after all, aphilosophyblog.”
That said, it does much commentary on current events. But it’s the underlying philosophical analyses and historical references that spur the recommendation.
Specifically for this Discourse, I have a particular recent post to share that is highly relevant to the Imperial philosophy:
This realization didn’t come from watching current events. It came from years of working through political philosophy, moral philosophy, metaethics, and epistemology. The more carefully I examined libertarian arguments, the more I kept hitting the same fundamental problem…
and after some meta-ethical discussion and references to source philosophers, OP says:
The fascist tendency reveals itself at the bottom of a libertarianism that has no conception of the common good.
Because that’s what this tradition denies: that the common good exists at all.
The Imperials would be mortally offended by the notion that the common good does not exist. The most generous assessment would be a doleful lack of enlightenment in the proponent’s self-interest. Most would skip straight to the conclusion the OP comes to: these are coercives rationalizing their coercion.
And:
The fundamental question libertarianism asks, when you strip away the rhetoric about freedom, is: Who can I exclude? From my property, from my business, from my community. The frustration with any conception of the common good is that having such a conception limits the potential answers to that question.
This is when I thought, “what an antithesis to the philosophy of the eldrae.” Because the Imperials are always thinking about who they can include, not exclude. When they have to expel a Defaulter, break a slaving polity, or crack down on cheating customers, they may take satisfaction in fighting coercion and entropy, but the exclusion is decidedly not the point. They want everyone to join them.
The OP concludes that the only option is returning to classical liberalism. I bet Imperials would have a different opinion… but the necessary implication is that property rights are not the highest good.
(Side note: I clicked on that link, began to read, and –
I was once young, stupid, and libertarian…
Ah. Yes. “Let me take a moment to position myself as the voice of mature wisdom, young tyro; and also make sure you preemptively lose confidence in making your rebuttal by preemptively labeling it, and you should you choose to make it, as stupid. All by implication, of course.”
My dear sir, that rhetorical trick was old when Athens was young, and were I reading your article for itself, this would be where I dismiss the rest as likely to contain more polit-flavored bullshit than the north end of a southbound Congress.
But since I am only here for the sake of reader comments, I struggle on.)
So I’ll just touch on the relevant parts from the Imperial point of view.
Now, obviously, exclusion is a large part of what property rights entail. (Although putting it that way requires that unowned goods belong to everyone, rather than no-one, which has rather large flaws of its own that I’ve touched on before. Is it meaningful in any sense to entertain wild joint property claims on the entire observable and unobserved universe?)
But at the risk of seeming to defend Hoppe, of all people, exclusion is good. Hell, it’s not only good, it’s great, for all people making this argument go straight to the supposedly-scary[1] “but assholes can post ‘No Blacks[2], Queers[3], or People Who Would Not Phrase This Sign In Terms Of Slurs’ signs on their stores”.
Leaving aside just how livable your life would be if your home and chattels weren’t yours to default-exclude people from, and thus the favored squat and shopping mall for everyone nearby who doesn’t have their own thing, consider that without property, you can’t do anything that you can’t do with your bare hands, naked in the rain. And that’s leaving aside that you also need a body, which has ofttimes been considered property even by people who aren’t propertarians[4], and without that you can’t do a damn thing at all.
The argument, in their terms, would run:
Property enables you to do things which, lacking it, you could not otherwise have done. Any constraint on property is therefore, eo ipso, a constraint on the liberty of the individual owning it.
And now consider the less obvious cases. Excluding your labor is how property rights ends slavery. Excluding your body is how property rights deal with murder and torture and slavery again and rape and child abuse and your social obligation to give it up to whatever syphilitic horndog asks because, by Jove, that ass has responsibilities to the common good, and he and his friends here held a quick democratic vote that you’re the one getting fucked tonight.
…call that a fascist tendency if you like, sir. I call it the barest step out of the mud.
(Where goods and chattels are concerned, there are covalįr-based reasons why the eldrae would immediately see the necessity of a very expansive conception of private property, but just because humans have a weird sense of self - that seems to mostly stop at their skin, if you can believe it - such that they can’t even tell when they’re being egregiously violated is no reason to abuse the poor crippled dears.)
So, to finally address things you said -
No, they aren’t. However, since depriving people of property reduces their jírileth, by subtracting from their phase-space of future choices, and, by doing so intentionally and by force, threat, and/or fraud, means they don’t even have ulqóras, they are a necessary, even though not sufficient prerequisite for the highest goods. (See here for definitions.)
Sure, this blows taxation, regulation of private property and democratic decisions about economic (and social, which people always carefully forget) organization out of the water - which is right and proper, say the Imperials, because having concluded that drinking a mug of poison every morning with breakfast is a Bad Thing, we have successfully generalized that drinking a third of a mug of poison is also such.
It’s not a friggin’ gradient. Either you’re expropriating someone or you’re not.
What the author fails to grasp is that it’s a two-stage process. Like the koan says:
The Master said:
First, do no evil. Then, do good. This is the Way.
The Student said:
What if I must do evil in order to do good?
The Master immediately struck the Student with his staff, knocking him senseless.
And it was good.
– The Book of Five Leaves
The first stage, in this case, is achieving ulqóras, negative freedom, the absence of constraint - which, conveniently, also pretty much amounts to do no evil. All you have to do is respect domain (which includes property rights) and obligation, which should be simple, and you’re all done.
But then there’s the second stage, maximizing jírileth, which is much more complicated, a worthier challenge, and is where all those obligations people assume voluntarily come in, including the very large and broad ones we term “virtues”.
But, and this is where he fails the test, you can’t go backwards. You can’t maximize jírileth by abolishing ulqóras, because it’s the base jírileth stands upon. If you’re trying to tax, regulate, and democratize your way to freedom, you will always fail, because you’re going in the diametrically wrong direction.
(I additionally note that there is plenty of evidence out there that security - in their lives, liberties, and property - is notably correlated with generosity and liberality. It’s a lot easier to give of yourself and yours when you can be confident that it is yourself and yours in the first place.
You’re a lot more public-spirited when everyone’s not trying to rob you.)
tl;dr You can’t make the world better by making it worse, and everyone who has thoughts along those lines should be struck upside the head by little bald men on mountains until they are appropriately enlightened.
While generally agreeing with the underlying truth, here, an Imperial would be very picky and contrarian - as is their nature - here, and[5] say that the term has become little more than a political shibboleth used by people who have a hand in your pocket, a knife at your throat, and a desperate need to dress them up for a night out. (There are also some issues here with whether it is even possible to meaningfully aggregate a “general will” in the first place, much less as to its right to override the particular will, and indeed as to whether a common good can exist as anything other than an aggregate of individual goods.)
Now, what they would talk about, eloquently and at length, are community goods, which are those goods common among a community which, perceiving this, forms a voluntary association to promote them.
The largest, of course, is the Empire (the Worlds’ premier sovereign services provider) and the smallest a couple of chaps sharing a pond across a property plane, but there are billions upon billions of them in Imperial space alone, all acting, in their voluntary, non-coercive way, to promote jírileth.
And that, gentlesophs, is how one promotes the general welfare and secures the blessings of liberty for oneself and one’s posterity.
(The argument people usually make at this point amounts to people not choosing the good if it’s left up to them, at which point Imperials respond that if your answer is forcing people to do as you tell them rather than educating them in virtue, then you, sir, are epically failing to choose the good.)
On the other hand, this. Quite so, indeed.
Enlightenment oft proves hard, alas, but one can always hope and strive to spread it further.
At least for myself, I don’t think supporting the right of black and gay people to shop at stores owned by racist homophobes is quite the winning move it pretends to be. I, for one, lack confidence in the high contractual fidelity and general trustworthiness of people who hate me for the dumbest-ass collectivist reasons. ↩︎
It seems cruel to point out that in much of our history, exclusion of these people from businesses, homes, and other properties was enforced by government against the will of the property owners! Common good, don’ch’know. ↩︎
To adapt Clausewitz: “Everything in liberty is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.”
To wit: nearly every implementation of property rights yet instantiated has shunned recognition of some portion of the Right of Domain, and twisted the Right of Obligation to fit that shunning. Granny Weatherwax’s definition of evil, “treating people as things”, is on a similar harmonic: as long as your definition of power requires shaping events by constraining the choices of others, as opposed to voluntary actions by one or more selves in concert… the korasan calls are, as the other author notes, coming from inside the philosophical house.
One advantage of the Imperial perspective is that by organizing as a “sovereignty service provider”, it’s easier to appreciate the comment on Madison:
Madison’s genius… was understanding that power itself must be dispersed and counterbalance… [the Founders] understood that private power, when sufficiently concentrated, becomes just as dangerous to liberty as government tyranny.
Which the Imperials aren’t fully ignorant of. That’s why they favor diarchies over monarchies, constituent nations over provinces, regulation via community ad-hoc activism, and so on.
Ring Dynamics and Bright Shadow are strong counterarguments, but by the time they had their interstellar monopoly powers, the Empire also had rationality and enlightened self-interest so deeply wired as to prevent abuse of that power.
By itself, the critique of Earth libertarians lends itself to the No True Scotsman fallacy— but the Empire, even Doylistically, is a detailed portrait of True Scotsmen.
To deliver a quick note here for those who are still relatively new to the ‘verse, it may seem odd to talk about inclusion when talking about a society that has, without explicitly naming or talking about it, been running Project Lumpenwerfer (prehistory-forseeable future) in the background for its entire existence.
(Unfortunately, even the greatest efforts to enlighten occasionally run into some really determined darkness, and you can’t just leave that lying around making a mess, now can you?)
Re:
Pedant that I am, I note this his go-to example for private power is the British East India Company, which is an example of private power in almost exactly the same way that I am an example of a minotaur.
It was founded with a Royal charter issuing it a state-enforced monopoly[1], acquired sovereignty, armies, and administrative authority by acts of Parliament, added to it in various dodgy ways (often to missives from irritable bureaucrats in London reading, to paraphrase, “Stop stealing countries, you fucks!”), and formed lobbies in Parliament to further leverage state power to its own ends.
That’s not private power. That’s what happens when you have a government powerful enough to be useful and greedy enough to rent said power out for profit.
Private power (in the absence of being able to rent state power, and not run wildly criminal, which is a form of making your own state power) is positively benign by comparison.
(Why, Amazon hasn’t stormed my house with a heavily armed goon squad and forced me to buy books even once.)
ETA: Which example reminds me to point out that Zwolinski’s dictum:
“Power removed from the state does not magically evaporate into thin air. Instead, the removal of state power often simply opens up possibilities for that power to reconcentrate in private hands.”
is not actually true. If you deprive the government of the power to impose tariffs, operate masked brute squads, or run death camps (and I note that we have done the latter, and it’s mostly stuck), do you expect to see private versions of all of these to pop up tomorrow?
No, because Team Rights-Enforcement[2] is still on the case unless you subscribe to a particularly insane form of anarchism, and says These Powers Do Not Exist Here. No-one’s doing or able to do all the horrible things the Imperial governance specifically forbids itself to do, because that bit is prepared to enforce the shit out of the Fundamental Contract. Which is the case in any form of non-straw libertarianism ever.
ETA again: And his current example is the us.gov compelling Starlink to withdraw services in order to extort Ukraine. The problem in that sentence is not the “private power”, and the solution is not to cripple everyone who might hypothetically be useful to a tyrant doing what tyrants do. The solution is to throw the bastard at the start of the causal chain off a waterfall!
They have, arguably, monopolies. They don’t have monopoly powers.
(Defining monopoly powers here as those things which preserve monopolies via extra-market means, like legal monopolies handed out by governments, or regulatory monopolies - like tariffs, certificate of need laws, etc., etc. - which do the same job indirectly, and so forth.)
Ring Dynamics, Bright Shadow, and the rest of the Big 26 are restrained by identity. Namely, to keep the job, you have to do the job to the satisfaction of your clients. There’s nothing more pathetic than an interstellar transit provider that doesn’t provide interstellar transit; it’s just an office building with a bunch of folks sitting around staring at the walls until the bailiffs come and take up the carpet. Trade secrets won’t help: everything but the very latest innovations are off-patent. Anyone can build a stargate, or a squirt router - and people willing to pay a premium to avoid the monopoly do - and there are plenty of ambitious people who would be happy to take over their dominant position if they took their eye off the ball.
They are acutely aware of this particular dynamic at the Gatehouse.
And, of course, they have a contract.
Well, more of a Contract, really. Both the Gatehouse and the Golden Quay (the Ministry of Transport headquarters) have a nice framed copy in their atrium, as an exquisitely important piece of corporate or ministerial history.
And the sovereign services provider under which they chose to incorporate would be perfectly happy to enforce that contract, should it be necessary.
(It never has been. No-one’s that stupid.)
The only type of monopoly that actually exists beyond challenge, and almost the only type of monopoly that actually exists period. ↩︎
Liberty Lass, Captain Capitalism, and the Iron Obligator. ↩︎
I’d go so far as to say that this is a more or less accurate account of the way things work in the Western world and much of the rest of the world today.
The cultural delta here is likely to lead to all sorts of really messy consequences. You shouldn’t engage in “performative speech acts” unless you intend to perform, belike, and not just cultural custom but the entire Imperial legal system agrees on that point.
