Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

We may as well call Laozi an "anarchist" as a "libertarian"; he seems rather more interested in a classless society than a market-driven one. Or we could call him a "reactionary", since he writes about a supposed lost golden age in which society operated harmoniously.

Put another way — We should be careful about pattern-matching ancient authors onto modern ideologies, because we are likely to make useless but contentious claims.

We should also be careful to distinguish between political ideologies and movements. The difference is similar to that between religious creeds and churches: one is a collection of beliefs, while the other is a collection of participants with some sort of continuity between them.

Lots of people like to find old forerunners to their modern beliefs! I'm rather fond of the notion that Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830) of the Bavarian Illuminati, would support the LW and CFAR mission of rationality education. But that's pretty different from saying that LW and CFAR are part of the Illuminati.

We may as well call Laozi an "anarchist" as a "libertarian"; he seems rather more interested in a classless society than a market-driven one.

I think that anarchists are contained within libertarianism; yes, he doesn't look like an anarchocapitalist or a minarchist or so on, but that doesn't mean he's not libertarian. (I don't think it's quite fair to say "libertarianism in the modern American sense means anarchocapitalism," but that may be because I'm more familiar with the variation in the modern strands of American libert... (read more)

8gwern11y

I once read a book which made a pretty convincing case that the Tao Te Ching was written as a mystically-worded manual of statecraft for a totalitarian regime, pointing out the context of the times (the pre-unification period offering many other works like that), translation issues, and similarities of the passages about keeping the people ignorant and simple to other passages in statecraft manuals like the Book of Lord Shang. Ever since, I've been a bit dubious about how well we can understand classical Chinese thought...