But the security is contingent upon your participation in the society according to its rules. The security given to you is not a "transporter" which will instantly beam you to a safe place whenever you get in trouble. The security comes from being embedded in a certain tradition of a certain species.
Precisely, and there will always be governments that take advantage of certain blindspots, and no doubt try to actively create blindspots. It's in the nature of power and leadership. A leader is a component of a collective system as much as a working man, however, the leader is actually encouraged towards greater selfishness, no matter what ideology you ensconce the society and the leadership in. However, without some degree of leadership society certainly couldn't function on the scale that it functions today. I admit the possibility of anarchy in the form of functional egalitarian subsistence communities, but they only work on the small scale. A town in Oz called Nimbin became a hippy, anarchy zone of sorts, and now one generation later, the children of the old peace-loving hippies have very spontaneously became a rabble of reckless, selfish, violent little shit-heads. The speed at which the sweet fruit of hippy-love can become the odious decay of a pseudo-anarchy that is nothing more than selfishness showed itself in Nimbin.
tis true, to an extent.... but what happens to you in the end, after a long enugh amount of time has passed with you choosing to work out side of the 'norm'.... one thing or other will end up messing you up, you have to pay bills, you have to work you have to fill out forms telling 'them' where you live what you do how much money you ern where you'v been on holiday how many people live in your house...
Really? I shall have to ask the next Armish person I meet whether this is true. But then, they also have a very strict, indeed stricter, set of laws and rules of their own. But they are truly independent of the status quo of our modern civilisation. So that's something.
The social contract is not imposed on you.
In fact, we've seen what happens very quickly to societies or govt's that try to impose the social contract on people far too heavily. These societies don't last long. I'm thinking Hitler, Stalin and even Mao before Deng Shu Phing reformed the Chinese system away from the disasterous path it was headed down.
as you say its not a big conspiracy blahblah, but you CAN'T deny it 'is' there to an extent
We could never have gotten to this level of organisation and prosperity and sheer complexity would not these conspiracy and quasi-conspiracy theories have some very substantial seeds of truth in them. Think about the hierarchies indeed. One level, for all intensive purposes, presides mainly over the level below it. Organising and managing. Now how complex and how many levels in todays civilised society. In fact, at this level, on this scale, never before has it been easier to disregard the govt. Never before has it been easier in all of human history to do your own thing, provided you don't harm anyone. Murder, theft and violence are no-brainers to me. I wouldn't need to be a govt in order to stop you from stealing from me. But then, if the govt left everyone to fend for themselves the whole system would collapse, and our technology and soon after much of our harmony would be destroyed.
I just can't believe that anarchy will work benevolently on a large scale, even if what you say about the travellers is true. At the core of the human psyche is an illness of violence and brutality. This is because we are still evolving, and we are still animals. However, we are the weakest of animals, and therefore the most afraid, the most nervous. Even monkeys can amble through trees at speed to escape predators. Because of this basic illness our civilisation of organised technology and social contract has evolved, and unfortunately, because of it's nature, displaced those pockets where humans lived in an environment that demanded far less of them. Because in Europe we learned to hoard, to be afraid of the future, and to distrust others powerfully. As such, it made sense to secure the rest of the world. However, if anything, this technological and organisational solution to an economic lack that existed almost only in Europe and perhaps the MIddle East in other periods of history, has been suffered now by the rest of the world. And the new environment this human animal finds itself in, is probably going to be, in terms of an immediate transformation, less amenable to adopting anarchy as a viable means. Can you imagine handing all of THIS over to an anarchy. It would be disasterous.
But can you all imagine the kind of anarchy-derivatives that need to be calculated by those in power as this society grows. Never have those at the top been forced to allow as much freedom for those at the bottom than today. Also, advertising is manipulative, but you'll find that people already have a predetermined bent on what they like, so realy, advertising is manipulative only in so far as one product is competing with another in the same demographic. I also don't see proof of this subconscious effort to instill advertising prerogatives. I see reiteration of advertising themes. I see juxtapositioning of images. I see associations that are made in a very pleasant format that would otherwise be totally senseless. However, I don't discount totally the possibilities of what you're saying. I merely can't believe that any of these measures you say are underpinning the rule of our governments, are actually anything more than reactions or responses to actual uses of freedom (and instances of it's use - notwithstanding the nature of the situation).
