Now we are getting to the root of the problem....force, control, power. My present perspective is that we are kind of locked into this relationship with other entities by the laws of nature. To even survive and eat we must exert force and control upon our surroundings. A Fundamental truth seems to be that Organisms interact with their environment and those interactions involve force. However, nature doesn't label that force as good and bad...we do. In nature, force works with a kind of harmony to create the circle of life. When humans stopped being a part of nature and instead decided to be above it as master of the planet, that is where the problems begin. Do I believe we can live in a government-less society? Yes. But I believe that such a society would require us to reenter our traditional place in nature. We cannot at the same time subdue the planet and all other species of animals and plants and at the same time proclaim that we should eliminate all relations of force.
doodle,
Exaaaaactly. We're forgetting that these ideas such as "rights" we may believe come from God or something, but they're in no way natural. Every animal tends to think subconsciously that it has a right to life and maybe even property around it, but if you look at nature as a whole there is no "right" to anything... even your own indvidual sovereignty is subject to force by desease or predator.
To establish "rights" is to lift us above nature, even if it's just an internal philosophy one may have that one finds unenforcable.
Above the lion hunting the gazelle, the snake invading the bird's nest.
But we don't just ascribe ourselves individual sovereignty... for the sake of our own prosperity we claim lordship over land in ways that go WAY beyond mimicking a squirrel guarding his nest in a tree or a wolf claiming hunting land.... It's neither natural (in a biological way), nor is it directly related to indivdual sovereignty (the idea that we don't harm one another as a philisophical position).
It's something else we add on, and in almost all cases, it takes an organized legal structure to give us this to any meaningful degree. It "feels" natural because it's hard work to morph nature to our advantage.
However, doing this requires that we define what is ours for the taking, and whether government does it for us or we do it for ourselves, it means we have to exert some control over our environment, which almost always means shooting "trespassers," ignoring "lesser claims," and changing that environment, sometimes to the detriment of the surrounding areas,which is most certainly forceful. It also messes with ecosystems, a form of force on others' ability to enjoy the land/water/air that they use. Lastly, it almost always means that we're displacing certain native species of animal, who most certainly have instincts similar to ours about their "rights," but we conveniently don't deem them to have any... and it appears that we treat certain nomadic cultures or those who have more sustainable use of land to have no legitimate claim either... for some reason we have to modify the land from its original natural state to have claim.
So this whole idea of private property in nature, of actually being able to OWN vast acreage of nature, completely destroy that land from its original state and modify it to what we please, displace animals and/or nomadic cultures, ignore externalities, and shoot "trespassers," while extremely useful to some, is almost entirely a convenient sub-category of "using force."
So the problem isn't just that "we're not all libertarians," it's that our environmental constraints are not consistent wth the premises of libertarianism, or at least any form other than pure, property-right-ignoring anarchism... but then we're simply leaving ourselves ripe for takeover by some other force most-likely worse than our current federal government.
"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
- Thomas Paine
