Oh, I'm not saying there's no redeeming qualities to the piece, just that some of its assertions are ludicrous. Especially the ones made in the beginning. Sort of reminds me of the Motte and Bailey thing where someone pushes their luck and then backtracks to a more reasonable claim.

I hate DND alignment so much. It's bad for dnd, it's bad for philosophy, it's bad for everything. The worst thing I keep engaging with it to hope I can make it better, but it never will happen. I'm finally just admitting I hate it and it can never be good.

It is very insightful to equate charisma with a form of wealth and domination. To live free from the tangles of politics and government, it takes a creative resourcefulness to manifest opportunities that often hinge on those with authority, ironically. In my travels, living as a permanent immigrant (i would say expat but that word has a strange connotation these days) from the US, I am saved over and over again by my ability to persuade and adapt to all situations. Some form of generational wealth likely aided that process, which is not negligible, and it is a high bar to expect others to live the way I do; I am paid well to do online freelance work that took significant education to acquire, because I had connections in the company who I also bargained with for better pay.

So you're absolutely right and I'm guilty of using that system which the world silently condones, as a means to grease the wheels of its behemoth machinations.

I guess we'll just have to wait for the zombie apocalypse to see who is right.

“We are trapped in our bodies and our conscious.” Discuss

The statement is indifferent as to the question of whether this is good or bad.

"good or right" as in morally or self interested or something else?

Dude you are buggin. Chomsky is controversial for sure, but raises a valid idea here. Authority has to have a purpose, a service to the people, or it's just authority for the sake of itself/ the authoritarians. There are lots of ways to interpret the justification of authority by the millions that fall on all political spectrums. Everyone who participates in a society justifies authority somehow, or at best ignores it and carries on with their lives. The talk here is about a reaction to authority that humanity seems to always fall back on, the dismantlement of it and fall/ growth(?) to anarchy.

To use a crude analogy: the Neutral Good alignment.

I think, like most things, Aristotle was right with the Golden Mean

Strike a healthy balance between questioning norms and acknowledging that norms tend to become popular for a reason (although there are many exceptions obviously)

That really is such a cop-out non idea. Liberals think liberal democratic state authority is justified. Marxists think the dictatorship of the proletariat's authority is justified. Islamists believe the authority of the caliphate is justified.

I would say freethinker, though that doesn't speak to the validity of a person's beliefs, just their ideological independence.

The fact that the man is a gnostic saint should be enough for anyone to know what is on the surface isn’t necessarily what is being said, reading Nietzsche through an “occult” lens frames the concepts of his work in a drastically different light than reading it like contemporary philosophy.

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TIL what Anarchism is and that I am one

Many someones made your phone, computer, home, electric power, Wikipedia, YouTube, wikiHow, Google, your glasses, etc. Self reliance is a myth. Self reliance is wearing a grass skirt and dying from a simple infection obtained while trying not to die from dehydration. Insecure people believe the myth to avoid the reality that we all rely on thousands of other people everyday

That's all true but it isn't what Emerson was talking about. No-one can be fully self-reliant, but you can take charge of your own life, make meaningful decisions for yourself and not just be carried along by the flow of society. It is about living a rational life, rather than the life society expects of you.

Bro, maybe they were stating that the very quotes and memes you argued against are propaganda. This is overly defencive

A bit busy right now so I can’t share my thoughts, but I love this and completely agree.

I hate that I love to be caught in semantics, but here I am. Caught in semantics. And loving it.

I rebel, non-conformer, and contrarian are all the same term here because they carry similar broad societal meanings(read baggage) even if your usage or the dictionary definitions are distinct. I don't have a good term yet but I think you've identified what the correct word needs.

1. Connotation that someone will make a choice in line with their ethics/morality despite the cultural zeitgeist.
2. A personal ethics/morality that is considered and informed based on both primary societal standards and secondary or tertiary knowledges as well.

The Tragic Worthlessness of War:

Watching the world these days might make one think the belief in war to be modern. In contrast these words: war, fighting and conflict have always existed as part of the human way. Might war be not the way of thugs but the way of mankind itself? Is being human in the end the same thing as being a creature of war?
Why? For war has no winner. No people in the history of man has ever won a war. How can one tell the mother of a dead soldier the war has been won? Can someone tell me who the winner is? Is it society, having to deal with the grief, destruction and blood that mankind leaves behind itself? Is it the country having lost a generation of men? Is it the King the throne of whom is made of blood and bones? The king who in the end dies as worthless a death himself.
Sun Tzu left the last chapter out, when he wrote what would become "The Art of War". He left out the part telling us there is no art to war. There is only the bodies of men, women and children, being fed to the meatgrinder that is the human existence.
"Only the dead have seen the end of war" - George Santayana

And my examples were similarly exaggerated examples of symbiosis. But have you ever been in nature? What is trying to dominate you on even a semi regular basis?

I yelled at a bear once in 4 decades. Does that even count? Yes I carry spray and/or boomsticks for the .01% of the time you might really need to exert some power, but that's pretty much my point. Actual conflict is rare and brief. Think of bunnies. Do they occasionally get disappeared and decapitated by death on wings? Yup, 2 seconds of terror out of 86,000 seconds in their final day. Do they get spooked and run like bunnies from any imagined threat? Sure. And they still spend 99% of their lives asleep or hippity hopping along eating from nature's bounty.

> I do not think capitalism is predetermined by the existence of markets.

But according to your definition of capitalism (which is owning things you don't use to produce an income for yourself) the moment someone's ranch, farm, plantation, or vineyard produces more meat, wheat, spice, cotton, or grapes than the owner uses, and he sells them for income, capitalism emerges. In what world is that not virtually guaranteed to happen for somebody?

And then, if in addition to simply producing goods out of the earth, some enterprising people see an opportunity to build something people will pay to use (like an inn or a stable), will they not build it if they have the means and incentive? Will someone not build a boat to ferry people across a river, for a fee? Will someone not build a carriage to pull with a horse to transport goods for a fee? Is it not virtually guaranteed all of this will organically happen for somebody because people need/want all of it to happen?

> Yes, some forms of authority are going to exist, but that isn't contradictory to anarchism. Just like authoritarianism doesn't mean pure 100% control over the oppressed (which is impossible), it's opposite is not 100% pure freedom from control.

OK, but to all the owners of goods/service producing farms, ranches, plantations, vineyards, inns, stables, ferry or delivery services, what you think of as "minimizing hierarchy and control" is going to look like some pretty strict control. Basically, you want to make all of that illegal, and you stand ready to deploy state violence to ensure none of it is allowed.

> one towards greater control over others and the other towards lesser control over others.

It sounds to me like you're all for greater control over others as long as "others" are people who create things people want to pay for. And you need a strong state to ensure that this control is effective.

But your state is going to need to be even stronger than that. Not only is it going to have to enforce these prohibitions on capitalism, now without anybody else to do them, the state is going to have to provide all of these goods and services itself. And a state that powerful is going to need a well defined command and control hierarchy if it's going to work at all. And now you've just brought the Soviet Union back online.

This isn't anarchism at all.

What am I missing?

I think the problems you are talking about are less system specific and more a matter of scale. We evolved to live in tribes of 150 or so people, and instead live in nations of millions, or in many cases, tens of millions or hundreds of millions. And at that scale any sociopolitical system is going to suffer from terrible distortions and breakdowns. The issue with Biden and Trump isn't that one is the right person and the other is wrong. It's that one is right for millions of people and wrong for millions more, and so is the other. And there are millions more for whom they are both wrong.

Likewise, people like Musk benefit from the fact that, at high enough scales, you can add a small amount of value to a large amount of things to make an awful lot of money. And money itself in large enough amounts can be used to generate more money simply by manipulating the system rather than through generating productive value.

But no system you design is going to avoid those sorts of problems at our current scale. Any system complex enough to handle things will also provide opportunities that those running it can exploit. And the very scale means you do need someone running things, because the alternative is anarchy in the sense it's detractors mean, violent chaos leading to endless warfare.

I know. Your point is lowly first-order thinking. I’m telling you to use second-order thinking and third-order thinking.

Not my point