Re: Down with Democracy!

Seth David Schoen (schoen@uclink4.Berkeley.EDU)
17 Dec 1997 09:38:50 GMT 

Daniel C. Burton writes:

>Seth David Schoen <schoen@uclink4.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>: >1. Democratic rule can be a bad thing.
>: >2. Basic liberties should not be subject to the opinion of the majority.
>: >3. A limited republic with checks against democracy is better than pure
>: >democracy.  (In my opinion, the most important of these checks is that
>: >powers are enacted locally and limited nationally.)
>
>: I guess these are appropriate principles.
>
>Actually, now that I think about it, we should scrap all those formal
>criteria.  #2 is good and pretty basic and maybe we should use that as a
>guideline, but in true libertarian style we should try to work with
>whoever we can, and if we can't work things out to mutual satisfaction,
>we should just get up and leave them.

I assume that if it's an antidemocracy protest, #1 is also a pretty
reasonable idea.

Of course, if some people don't agree with elements of the antidemocracy
protest, they can hold their own parallel demonstration or
counterdemonstration.

I don't think order is bad, I just think coersion is bad.  If people
voluntarily want to get together and have a protest which does have an
organizing principle, that's great, as long as they don't try to prevent
other people from protesting in some other fashion.

I wouldn't _complain_ about the presence of people who didn't agree with
these ideas; I think they would make it more interesting.  At the same
time, I don't think I'd want to _invite_ them; I think the protest can
benefit from having some kind of moderately (ugh) coherent idea behind it.

>I guess what I said before about the "fuck everything" anarchists isn't
>really what I meant to say.  I a lot of my friends are anarchists of some
>sort, but not libertarians, and definitely not leftists.  I don't think
>they want us to all go up in flames either, and they seem to have an
>innate respect for individual sovereignty (beyond merely an ideology), but
>chaos is part of their thing.  Actually, I prefer some chaos to too much
>institutionalized authority as well....  These are the supposed "Type 3"
>anarchists I briefly mentioned earlier.

I've met some "fuck everything" types who _don't_ care about individual
sovereignty in general.  That ideology disturbs me.

I can imagine people liking chaos and individual sovereignty, but I hope
they don't like chaos so much as to object even to voluntary order.
(And there's also a "Hidden Order of Everyday Life", even emerging from
social environments without strong organizing rules, providing more
substance for interesting arguments.)

>Basically take an
>anarcho-capitalists and subtract the capitalist part, or take an
>anarcho-socialist and subtract the class struggle, and this is what you
>get.  Personally, I think people like this are a lot closer to
>libertarians than left-wing anarchists are.

Although that depends on whether you think of property as natural or not.
I think left anarchists think that these people are a lot closer to
left anarchists than libertarians are. :-)

>I've even heard people
>influenced by this sort of thinking call themselves "essentially
>libertarian, but not political."

Hmmm, but remember that other people, not necessarily these people, are
"libertarian socialists" and frequently their own descriptions of their
beliefs sound like this -- without a class struggle, still, perhaps, but
without expectations that private property will remain significant.

>It would do us good to seek out people like this, because they just might
>be interested in something as bizarre as a political rally against
>politics.  (None of the ones I know actually go to Cal.  They just live
>around here.)

That would be fun.

>As far as the objectivists go, Ayn Rand wrote a lot of stuff about how
>freedom shouldn't be subject to the vote of a majority.  She even has some
>good quotes if we can dig them up.  I think we could work that in and
>objectivists would like it if that was part of the theme -- a protest
>against excessive democracy.  We should explicity state at the beginning
>that we don't all agree with eachother, but we do agree on some things.

Yes, that's true.  As long as they're not offended by joining in with
anarchists, it would be cool.

>As long as we're moving in the right direction and we don't get the
>fascists involved, I think we'll be OK.
>
>Start thinking of slogans....
>
>Warning:  Excessive democracy can be harmful to your health.

Do you want to try to get an amplified sound permit for the protest?

-- 
   Seth David Schoen L&S '01 (undeclared) / schoen@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Magna dis immortalibus habenda est atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo
custodi huius urbis, gratia, quod hanc tam taetram, tam horribilem tamque
infestam rei publicae pestem totiens iam effugimus.  -- Cicero, in Catilinam I