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wingedbeastIn the comments on the last installment, someone left a comment about a short story that depicted a society of perfect, pacifist, philosophical anarchism. It's a vision a lot of people have had, stretching from communes to compounds. Human history also has a number of examples of people with a different kind of vision, one of everybody holding perfectly to this one vision of how people should be.
The argument over how much law and order to impose upon a society, as well as the shape and nature of that law and order, is already contentious before the apocalypse. Part of that is that we pretty well know that it's going to take something on the level of an apocalypse before we could initiate one ideology or another. So, we argue for the small changes that we think bring us closer to one utopia or the other.
For you who are after the apocalypse, you'll have to deal with people arguing for and fighting for initiating their Utopian ideologies, whole-cloth. In that argument, don't trust any of them.
Part of this goes to my basic philosophy of law and society. I don't think any one way of life is going to fit all people on the basis that each person is a different person from the next. We have a basic species in common (unless the apocalypse involves aliens joining our society or the sudden evolution of some extant species), but that only accounts for one small part of our biological starting point. You've got development in the womb. You've got upbringing and socialization. People are going to be different.
That means that no utopia can account for all the people. For whatever vision of humanity you have, there are going to be more ways for humans to naturally deviate from thate vision than for them to fit in.
So, why not go for the anarchist's utopia? No laws. Everybody does as they please. The problem, there, is that we're in a society. That means we work together and we live together and we have a lot of ways to hurt each other or otherwise initiate conflict.
Therein lies the purpose of law, at least as far as I see it. This does impact my advice for you, the post-apocalyptic world that, somehow, has access to my blog. The law and government are tools that we use. They're not forces for good. They're not forces for evil. They're not inherently failures or successes. Use them to the extent that they are useful, but no more.
Luckily for you, post-apocalyptic society in a rebuilding phase, the amount of each that you actually need is mostly in relation to the amount of people you have. If you have numbers in the tens, then you can probably get away with keeping things informal.
As numbers reach the hundreds, you'll need to formalize things and establish the obvious pieces, at first. Then, things will grow. In the Brownian motion of people interacting with people, conditions will be shown in new light. Sometimes, new laws or a bit of growth of government will be needed. Sometimes, not.
In the most part, I advocate uses of government that don't restrict, but support. Human nature, for the most part, will be on your side. And, the good thing about nature is that you don't have to enforce it.
The argument over how much law and order to impose upon a society, as well as the shape and nature of that law and order, is already contentious before the apocalypse. Part of that is that we pretty well know that it's going to take something on the level of an apocalypse before we could initiate one ideology or another. So, we argue for the small changes that we think bring us closer to one utopia or the other.
For you who are after the apocalypse, you'll have to deal with people arguing for and fighting for initiating their Utopian ideologies, whole-cloth. In that argument, don't trust any of them.
Part of this goes to my basic philosophy of law and society. I don't think any one way of life is going to fit all people on the basis that each person is a different person from the next. We have a basic species in common (unless the apocalypse involves aliens joining our society or the sudden evolution of some extant species), but that only accounts for one small part of our biological starting point. You've got development in the womb. You've got upbringing and socialization. People are going to be different.
That means that no utopia can account for all the people. For whatever vision of humanity you have, there are going to be more ways for humans to naturally deviate from thate vision than for them to fit in.
So, why not go for the anarchist's utopia? No laws. Everybody does as they please. The problem, there, is that we're in a society. That means we work together and we live together and we have a lot of ways to hurt each other or otherwise initiate conflict.
Therein lies the purpose of law, at least as far as I see it. This does impact my advice for you, the post-apocalyptic world that, somehow, has access to my blog. The law and government are tools that we use. They're not forces for good. They're not forces for evil. They're not inherently failures or successes. Use them to the extent that they are useful, but no more.
Luckily for you, post-apocalyptic society in a rebuilding phase, the amount of each that you actually need is mostly in relation to the amount of people you have. If you have numbers in the tens, then you can probably get away with keeping things informal.
As numbers reach the hundreds, you'll need to formalize things and establish the obvious pieces, at first. Then, things will grow. In the Brownian motion of people interacting with people, conditions will be shown in new light. Sometimes, new laws or a bit of growth of government will be needed. Sometimes, not.
In the most part, I advocate uses of government that don't restrict, but support. Human nature, for the most part, will be on your side. And, the good thing about nature is that you don't have to enforce it.
