Why I am Basically an Anarchist

[CoccoBill]

Its own best interests better damn be the populous' best interest or they aren't getting any of populous' money. Why pay an organization to do something that you don't support? Oh right, because its the law to pay the government tax money to do x,y, and z, much of which I don't support. It seems to me the simply doing whatever it is is going to make the organization money should be what the people who are giving that money to the organization value.

Something not being in direct conflict with populous' interests is not synonymous to it being in their best interests. By definition, a company's raison d'etre is to create value for shareholders, not to make the population happy. I don't care how many times the fantasies of trickle-down effects are mentioned in the media. If a CEO does not use any and all means necessary and allowed by law to improve the company's performance, he gets sacked. If there's less regulation, who wouldn't use the extra tools available? Moral and public interest values only play into the picture on the level that is absolutely necessary (to not lose ALL customers, or to break any laws where sanctions might jeopardize their business). Just because someone sells a product or a service that has demand, doesn't mean their behavior is in the best interests of the population.

So we will just agree to disagree here. I don't believe that.

Maybe I'm completely off-base here and I don't mean this as offensive, but it sounds to me like what you're advocating is a form of social darwinism where only the strong survive and the weak are weeded out. A society that doesn't aim for common interests, but encourages self interests and inequality. If this is the case, yes, we disagree fundamentally, and I would argue that "you" are the reason we need regulation.

[wufwugy]

Maybe I'm completely off-base here and I don't mean this as offensive, but it sounds to me like what you're advocating is a form of social darwinism where only the strong survive and the weak are weeded out. A society that doesn't aim for common interests, but encourages self interests and inequality. If this is the case, yes, we disagree fundamentally, and I would argue that "you" are the reason we need regulation.

I would like to point out what I think is a disconnect which emanates from the flaw in approaching reality ideologically. It's kinda like I would say that Libertarianism and Liberalism want the exact same things fundamentally, but the former approaches it in a way that only works in a magical Utopia, while the latter tends to use an approach that has some basis in how reality works.

I think what ISF is saying is that the optimal way to achieve the optimal society is for the individuals within that society to have the right values. My problem with this is not that it doesn't make sense on some level, but that it just doesn't work given social and biological realities. On top of that, and I think this is how you've read it, this type of ideal would most likely effect into social Darwinism down the road. Likewise, it's not that Libertarians have bad ideals (they have great ideals), they just don't know how to implement them in such a way that the eventual effects are not some form of Oligarchy.

I think another disconnect in this argument comes from not understanding evolution. It appears to be a common trend among humans for us to think that we're some kind of exceptional organism with distinguished qualities. This couldn't be further from the truth. As I'm sure you know, everything we are exists because it was on some order a more efficient surviver than the competition. This doesn't create optimization, it creates adaptability, and that idea alone sets off all kinds of dillemmatic alarms (has to do with how specialization and generalization detract from each other beyond a certain point). Biology itself is not well suited (if at all) for idealistic optimization, but with moderating the environment in such a way that works best with the adaptations of each particular organism.

When I first started becoming interested in philosophy about a decade ago, I found that I hated it and ended up shoving it aside, but years later I realized that the reason for this hatred was because so many 'philosophers' make the egregious mistake of pretending that we live in a world where idealism provides explanation. It does not, and once I realized that, philosophy became a much more enjoyable subject for me.