Snowden Wikipedia page edited to label him a "traitor" from Senate computer

> Except that time happens and that single state policy is modified on a continual basis.

Great, so we can have ever-escalating conflict among factions for ephemeral control over the source of uniform top-down policy. And, on top of that, we get an ever-shifting policy equilibrium without any stability or predictability. How can this be regarded as a workable system?

The fact remains that at any given moment, there's a single set of policies that apply universally within society. The likely ephemeral nature of the current policy equilibrium has no bearing on the fact that the nature of the system eliminates all possibility of "agreeing to disagree".

In a system where all social questions are political ones, and all political questions are addressed as universals, there's no alternative to all-encompassing political conflict. Every divergence in values or priorities serves as the basis for an all-or-nothing struggle, that invariably spills over into the rest of society, and corrupts our social relations to the point that every other institution and community in society becomes polluted by political acrimony, even in contexts where the political state has no legitimate role. The so-called "culture war" in modern American society is a clear example of this.

> How is this not the case in a democracy?

It is the case in a substantive democracy, where clear boundaries are indeed drawn between distinct social context and institutions, and in which the state is properly regarded as a single institution within society, and not a unified expression of the whole.

Where those boundaries are blurred, and the political state is equated with society as a whole, substantive pluralism is diminished, and authority becomes concentrated in the institution of the state.

> Pluralism comes from the liberal doctrine of individualism; it's a natural consequence of asserting the individual worthiness and dignity, which demands that the individual's concerns be considered in some fashion.

No, real pluralism doesn't come from some vague notion that "individual's concerns be considered in some fashion", by some unstated but presumptively singular authority.

It comes from the recognition of the fact that society is the patterns of interaction that exist among individuals who assert their own agency, in pursuit of their own purposes, in undertaking relations with others, and that in doing so, they create a great plurality of autonomous communities and institutions, and maintain the inherent right to define the nature of those communities and institutions without making reference to putative universals promulgated by external third parties.

> Making a false distinction between state and society is useful only for disempowering citizens who see themselves as part of one but not the other

Asserting a false equivalency between society at large and the state in particular is useful only for disempowering citizens, who learn to outsource responsibility for their particular circumstances to external institutions and vague abstractions, instead of applying their own initiative, in concert with others, within the context of the substantive institutions and communities that they inhabit.

> Why do we rely so heavily on the fourth estate to speak on our behalf?

You might, but we don't.

> Why are we ourselves not speaking?

What is this obsession with talking, anyway. Speech isn't action, and exit is more important than voice.

> The fact remains that at any given moment, there's a single set of policies that apply universally within society.

Is your issue with universalism, then? That the policies fail to discriminate between different groups for different reasons? Would it be more proper to bring in communitarianism?

> In a system where all social questions are political ones, and all political questions are addressed as universals, there's no alternative to all-encompassing political conflict Every divergence in values or priorities serves as the basis for an all-or-nothing struggle

Except that this has been true for all of history, and it's by systematizing it that we gain some measure of control over it. Instead of conducting warfare every time people disagree, we have means for communicating and compromising as a first resort.

> by some unstated but presumptively singular authority.

You keep straw-manning me by implying that I'm proposing a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy, but you've yet to actually show that I'm doing this. Since I'm trying to argue in good faith, then either your interpretation of my claims are mistaken or my understanding of the consequences is incorrect. I'm willing to cede the latter, but you have to actually demonstrate that incorrectness.

Alternatively, you could make a positive proposition by suggesting an actual system that goes beyond "diffuse power as widely as possible to make sure no one can ever accomplish anything and the status quo never changes".

> It comes from the recognition of the fact that society is the patterns of interaction that exist among individuals who assert their own agency, in pursuit of their own purposes, in undertaking relations with others, and that in doing so, they create a great plurality of autonomous communities and institutions, and maintain the inherent right to define the nature of those communities and institutions without making reference to putative universals promulgated by external third parties.

I absolutely agree. This is exactly what I've been describing. If it were up to me, I'd strike down every single national border. I haven't figured out what to do about land use, but I'm a proponent of Benjamin Barber's federation of cities in the abstract: I simply do not find nations to be a useful social construct. Other people disagree with me.

But here's where we run into a problem. You say "autonomous communities and institutions" and I see a state. That's what a state is. "autonomous" is just another way to say "sovereign". These "putative universals" you refer to aren't "promulgated by external third parties". That's the entire point of a democracy: the universals come from the community expressing itself through a system of law.

They aren't third parties.

> you're re-purposing the term "state" to describe not an organized institution established for the purpose of exercising power, but to any structure that emerges within any social context

So that seems to be the crux of our disagreement. I consider the notion that a state is necessarily an "institution established for the purpose of exercising power" to be bunk. As such, I use the term "state" fairly loosely: I didn't bring it into the conversation: you introduced the concept of a "political state" and I went along with it. I haven't yet found any particular reason to be nuanced about my definition.

> I agree that nations are far too broad and coarse to be considered substantive social contexts, but - and this is an assumption, so correct me if I'm wrong - I have a feeling that you would articulate merely smaller versions of nations as the appropriate scope within which to equate the state with society.

I prefer cities, but it's not something I consider myself on firm ground with. Cities are natural foci for people, but to discount rural zones and more importantly natural resources as demarcated by geography is an obvious mistake.

However, I also believe that it's a good idea to have institutions like the UN, to function as a world government capable of speaking for all of humanity.

So... smaller? Not really. I agree with your list of "families, friendships," etc., but I'm also happy with scaling the notion up to the species level, because there exist policies that we want to express at such a large scope. I can't usefully speak to a larger scope because I am admittedly disinterested in animal rights politics and we haven't met a sci-fi style alien species yet.

None of these are strong opinions, though, because they fall into the area of things I know I don't know.

> What we think of as the institutions of law - judicial institutions, not legislative ones - are merely a failsafe mechanism to be appealed to when disputes and controversies are not sufficiently contained and addressed within their originating social context, and threaten to escalate and spill over into other people's lives.

The problem is that you can't fully isolate problems. Your local religious congregation has members who work in a few dozen different businesses, all of which serve the wider community and more than likely do business in even further communities. This is even more true in the wake of globalization. Something as simple as a teenager deciding to leave his parents because they're stupid is going to call into question what kind of community-level support he can call upon to survive without his parents' blessing.

Every manifested law is going to find some way to clash with other manifested law. Who mediates the disputes for this, and under what rule of law do those mediations take place?

> And when people talk about "the state" and "government" in the sense that began this thread, they're talking about this form of legislative state, not using those terms to describe the bottom-up patterns that formalize the mechanisms of concrete and particular social contexts.

And I object to that. In a democracy, there shouldn't be prescriptive rules imposed by a small group onto the majority. The majority should have participated in the formulation of any prescriptive rules that are proposed. It irritates me that we haven't figured out how to make that happen, and it irritates me even more that I am pretty dry on useful ideas.

I'm going to footnote a thing I wrote [0] last month that gives a more bird's-eye view of my perspective. One of the last things I say there is this: "It's important, I feel, to aspire towards democracy rather than resign ourselves to it." On the whole, Americans have given up on the democratic project. Some are trying to establish themselves as oligarchs, while others are trying to find a way to exist anarchically, and those are the ones with opinions on the matter.

But the truth is that America isn't trying to be a better democracy. I want to live in a better democracy. I want other people to want it, too. I want other people to have a substantive vision of how it could be better, and to be motivated towards working for that. Pointing out that the people is the government, or at least should be, is part of that.

> it's absurd to suggest that any actual government operating on that legislative-state model

There is a lack of clarity in whether we're discussing theory or practice here. In practice, I don't consider any existing democracy to be sufficiently competent. And a huge part of that problem is that democracy had to be implemented on the backs of inherently injust political systems rather than magicked out of thin air. That detritus from history stays with us and makes more difficult an already challenging project.

I've felt that, in this thread, we've reasonably made it clear when we're talking about existing, present-day occurrences by citing "in America", but perhaps not?

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5998145

> Like I said, I'm fine with discussing ideals, and exploring the full range of possibilites that we might aspire to, but let's at least clear up semantic ambiguity by not using the same words that already refer to extant things to also refer to idealized hypotheticals.

Then let's talk about ideals, because re-iterating the last few thousand repetitions of HN Snowden-the-hero is going to bore me pretty quickly.

> And, I've got to wonder: if some institution is indeed somehow speaking for all of humanity, who could they possibly be speaking to?

There are several groups. The most obvious is the hypothetical alien culture. The other is ourself: past, present, and future. I hope, for instance, that we'll one day look at our history of space flight by trimming back on the competitive Cold War motivations and just call it different groups making attempts towards the achievement. That kind of reframing is useful and inspiring.

The institution is a platform for such speech. Arguably, the closest thing we have to that right now is YouTube.

> Again, every particular grouping of people is a society unto itself; the actual participants in a business transactions are the ones involved in that social context, which has nothing to do with the religious congregation (unless the religious congregation is trading with them, anyway).

This is a logically cogent notion, but it's not borne out in reality. Let's say there's two persons who have some relation, friends or enemies or whatever. These two people might (1) be in the same family, (2) work in the same business, and (3) attend the same church.

By your model, any disagreements that arise between them would be settled between them. But this is only how it happens in ideal cases. Real people often use their shared contexts as proxies for their disagreements. Estrangement, office politics, religious condemnation: these can all be motivated by such a smaller upset. For every particular grouping of people, you have the possibility of such spillage occurring. The "culture war" that you decried upthread, even if you stripped away all legislative efforts from it, is a demonstration of exactly this kind of spillage.

By your dislike of the legislative model, I find it hard to believe that you'd support larger social contexts imposing upon smaller social contexts, such as a religious group or business specifying the relationship between two persons. Yet such downward pressure is the only way, aside from a magical blessing of maturity, that larger social contexts can protect themselves from spillage from smaller ones. And this is assuming a model of the world where everyone exists in a perfect hierarchy.

This seems like a good time to bring in the problem of a third party observer.

If you're out on a walk and you see imminent murder, I'd say that you have an obligation to intervene, assuming no mitigating circumstances. Would you consider that a case of law being manifested right there? That seems a little bit too fast and loose for me: it justifies any and every action, as long as no one objects when the dust settles. That isn't law in any sense of the word, common or otherwise.

> As I mentioned earlier, we have many centuries of effective use of common law and equity as evidence that such a system works quite well; the experiment with supplanting law with legislated policy over the past century hasn't worked out quite so well

Can you be more specific about the references you're making here? Who has been using common law and equity, which centuries, when and how do you pinpoint the beginning of legislated policy? I don't think I'd be able to fully appreciate your arguments even with answers to these questions, but I'd at least have some context with which to Google.

> because the ideology of democracy was successfuly leveraged to justify exercise of power, instead of regarded as a mechanism to constrain power.

But if we posit that no state exists, whose power are we constraining? The typical construction of democracy that talks about "constraining power" usually presumes a distinct state/gov't: a subset of the population that exercises power over the entirety. But in our ideal imaginings, there doesn't exist such a state. What then democracy?

Thought experiment: let's say we are gods and have the power to package up a bunch of ideas and that package is called democracy. We magick up ourselves some humans on an Earth-like that we made, and then download the package into their brains. Can they create, or even aspire to create, a democratic society? Should they? I say yes, as that's how I'm packaging up my bundle.

> not the maximization of universal participation in politics.

I'd wager this is because the notion of participating in politics leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It does mine. But everyone has always participated in politics. This is where we'll likely get into a disagreement over definitions again. You mention earlier that every particular grouping of people is its own society with its own manifested law. I contend that the process of manifesting this law is politics.

As such, "man is a political animal". From this, I think you can deduce why I'd want to maximize active participation in politics: the alternative is passive participation.

> For me, the fundamental goal of politics ought to be the maximization of human freedom,

Alright. Here's a scary statement for you: I don't believe in freedom. I don't find it to be a meaningful concept on its own. To make a pop culture reference, "Free from what?" "Freedom." (The answer is the villain's, in The Avengers, if you haven't seen it.)

You can't maximize freedom, because freedom isn't merely unquantifiable, it's an idea that can't stand alone. You can have freedoms to do, freedoms to be, and you can have freedoms from this, freedoms from that, but you can't just have "freedom". Loki (the villain noted above) proposes the project of maximizing human freedom from the stress of decision-making; I can't imagine you agree with that.

Which leaves us with the question... which human freedoms do you want to maximize? As noted in my link, I like Nussbaum's Ten Central Capabilities as a minimum; not something to maximize, but a threshold that we need to cross.