Comments on: Your Feel-Good Cop Story Of The Year http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2012/11/29/your-feel-good-cop-story-of-the-year/ Life. Liberty. Property. Defending individual freedom and liberty, one post at a time. Fri, 17 May 2013 18:49:12 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Seerak http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2012/11/29/your-feel-good-cop-story-of-the-year/#comment-89889 Seerak Fri, 30 Nov 2012 02:38:26 +0000 http://www.thelibertypapers.org/?p=11176#comment-89889 tkc, I have yet to see any evidence for the assertion that society DOES exist.

After all: if four people get together, they form a society. If these four folks have a falling out and part ways, do they leave a society sitting there?

No. By the plain evidence of our eyes, there is no such entity as “society”, there are just four individuals.

Postulating society as an independent entity is just as arbitrary as postulating God as an independent entity, and both ideas have historically documented, devastating consequences for the liberty of individuals when fused with poltitcs.

]]> By: tkc http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2012/11/29/your-feel-good-cop-story-of-the-year/#comment-89885 tkc Thu, 29 Nov 2012 20:25:59 +0000 http://www.thelibertypapers.org/?p=11176#comment-89885 Sorry for the wall of text, the formatting didn’t cut and paste in with the rest of it.

]]> By: tkc http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2012/11/29/your-feel-good-cop-story-of-the-year/#comment-89884 tkc Thu, 29 Nov 2012 20:17:02 +0000 http://www.thelibertypapers.org/?p=11176#comment-89884 For my part, although for the sake of convenience I use the term society freely enough, I am not sure but that a fairly plausible argument could be made out for the thesis that there is no such thing as society. I say this, however, with no intention of coming forward as a modern William of Ockham, to fight the nominalist-realist battle all over again. I merely observe that I have never been able to see “society” otherwise than as a concourse of very various individuals about which, as a whole, not many general statements can be safely made. The individual seems to be the fundament thing; all the character society has is what the prevailing character of the individuals in it environment gives it. If they mostly work in factories, you have an industrial society; if they are mostly civilised, you have a civilised society; if they mostly drink too much, you have a drunken society; and so on. A tendency to disallow and disregard the individual’s claims against society, and progressively to magnify and multiply society’s claims against the individual, seems to me fatuous in its lack of logic. I have regularly had occasion to notice that grandoise schemes for improving society-at-lart always end in failure, and I have not wondered at it because it is simply not in the nature of things that society can improved in that way.
I have known many persons, some quite intimately, who thought it was their duty to take “the social point of view” on mankind’s many doings and misdoings, and to support various proposals, mainly political, for the mass-improvement of society. One of them is a friend of long standing who has done distinguished service of this kind throughout a lifetime, and is directly responsible for the promulgation of more calamitous and coercive “social legislation” than one could shake a stick at. In a conversation with me not many months ago, this friend said mournfully, “My experience has cured me of one thing. I am cured of believing that society can ever be improved through political action. After this I shall ‘cultivate my garden’.”
If faut cultiver notre jardin. With these words Voltaire ends his treatise called Candide, which in its few pages assays more solid worth, more informed common sense, than the entire bulk of nineteenth-century hedonist literature can show. To my mind, those few concluding words sum up the whole social responsibility of man. The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit.

-Albert J. Nock

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