Leaderboard

I take it this is a first draft, and you are looking for comments so that you can improve your argument. Here are my suggestions. First, simply asserting a contrary position is not making an argument, it just makes us aware of an alternative position. What more-perceptible facts support your claim over the contrary claim? My recommendation is to begin by clearly and accurately stating what the common premises are, and what the essential difference is between the two positions. The argument against anarchism then has to be based on that difference. The essential difference is that Anarchism holds that government is not necessary, in order to maintain a rights-respecting society, Objectivism holds that it is necessary. We know for certain that Objectivism allows and requires use of force by the government to prevent the initiation of force, and to retaliate against the initiation of force. We don’t actually know what Anarchism “says” about self-defense and retaliation, but at least certain strands of libertarian-anarchism such as Tannehill anarchism allow for non-governmental use of force. I have never encountered “roll over and die” anarchism that requires you to lay down and take the beating if someone initiates force against you, but maybe there is such a sub-belief. Since Anarchism is not a coherent philosophy, you are strategically doomed if you try to cover every belief that some person labeling himself as “anarchist” believes in or does. State your premises as to what Anarchism says. In Rand’s lecture on Objective law (it’s out there somewhere probably on the ARI website, maybe someone has a link), she states the essential property of objective law as being where every man knows what is forbidden, and what the consequences are for doing the forbidden. Anarchism denies the validity of this principle: what follows from that? A crazy theory is that therefore, nobody knows what’s forbidden, and most right-leaning anarchists deny that, they refer you back to the non-initiation of force principle. The alternative, which those Anarchists do tend to believe, is that man has innate knowledge that allows them to know right from wrong. As for consequences of initiating force, I can’t say that I’ve encountered a systematic Anarchist treatment of the proper consequences of theft, rape, or fraud. Since they deny the validity of objective law, either the consequences are arbitrary, or we have magical innate knowledge that spells out the consequence for violation of rights. Here is a practical domain that distinguishes the Anarchist view of protection of rights and the Objectivist view. I wrote a book, the book is my property, I make money from the sales of that book – it’s part of the means of my survival. In an Objectivist world (and the world we live in), my right to the book is codified in objective copyright law. You may not make and sell copies of my book without my permission. If you do, the government will force you to compensate me, and it will punish you in a specific way. What about Anarchism? I can hire an enforcement squad which will not only defend my actual rights w.r.t. the book, it can create new rights based on my “innate knowledge” and reasoning about my “true rights”. For example, I can declare that resale of my book requires payment of royalties to me. The squad can award to me compensation that is much greater than is recognized under law, therefore it could decide that death or at least torture is the propert penalty for copyright infringement. Naturally, the infringer has his own squad, which takes a different view. If you deny the validity of objective law, that means there is no control over the use of force. Now go back to the supposedly shared premise, the non-initiation of force principle. There is a direct contradiction, that Anarchism seeks to both not have initiation of force in society, and to say that there is no objective principle that governs the use of force. Although most Anarchists are not pacifists, I believe that roll-over and die is the only principle that is compatible with Anarchism. That is, Anarchism make a different choice for the most fundamental question, Life, versus Death.

What you observe here are "free will" and the "man made". These are somewhat different from the primacy of consciousness. The relationship between existence and consciousness in the same thing is hierarchical. Your consciousness is possible due to and indeed arose from existence. You weren't, then you were (now you are) and your consciousness is, but one day you simply won't be. Technically, the existence of you, in all your complexity, does not at once "cause" you to be conscious... you ARE conscious because of your identity... the whole nature of the complexity of you... things are their attributes after all. Electron's do not have charge because of existence causes them to be so, electrons simply exist AND ARE negatively charged. Your conscious existence has specific requirements in reality, i.e. in the "natural" world from which you consist, which were not met, prior to your being conscious... and will not be met... after you pass. The reverse, i.e. a disembodied consciousness, deciding it needed something to be conscious of, giving birth to existence, to one day in the far future dissolving it ... would be the erroneous idea of the primacy of consciousness. Consciousness does play an interactive and hence causative role in the world- it would have to since, far from being cut-off from it... it is embedded and constituent here fully of and by the natural world... a natural and real identity as absolute as anything else in existence. As such, free-will and the man made are not counterexamples of the primacy of existence they are examples of it.. in a particular structural and functioning form.

"Perfect practice makes perfect. If you practice a mistake long enough, you'll get very, very good at it." — Miss Byrd, piano teacher.