Article: Europe's pain is coming America's way

[Lowe]

There will not always be thugs, thieves, and slave drivers.  Generations from now, human beings will look back on our times and wonder how we stayed sane in a nightmare of violence, propaganda, and dissociation.  Much the same way as we would look back on the Middle Ages.

Another poster has written that a society, without coercion, would require an educated populace.  That's skirting close to the truth, but that's not it.  What a peaceful society requires is undamaged adults, from undamaged children.

Today's humans treat their children like slaves.  They beat, humiliate, and terrorize them, and refer to it euphemistically as "spanking" or "discipline."  They send them to indoctrination camps where they swear allegiance to the state, and are fed a ridiculous retelling of history, and they call this "education."

Proverbially, the legs of the young are broken, and then at eighteen they are expected to stand on these broken legs.  What kind of man or woman stands then?  The kind who can live on his own, unafraid of a self-guided life, without coercion?  Or the kind who lives in a half-adulthood, always needing something half forgotten.  The father and mother of the state, stand-in for the absent parents.

The stateless society is the end, the last stage in our movement.  It's when the ancient world is finally gone.  To get to the end, though, we start at the beginning.  And the beginning of the life of society, is the beginning of the life of the individual.

[MediumTex]

There will not always be thugs, thieves, and slave drivers.  Generations from now, human beings will look back on our times and wonder how we stayed sane in a nightmare of violence, propaganda, and dissociation.  Much the same way as we would look back on the Middle Ages.

Another poster has written that a society, without coercion, would require an educated populace.  That's skirting close to the truth, but that's not it.  What a peaceful society requires is undamaged adults, from undamaged children.

Today's humans treat their children like slaves.  They beat, humiliate, and terrorize them, and refer to it euphemistically as "spanking" or "discipline."  They send them to indoctrination camps where they swear allegiance to the state, and are fed a ridiculous retelling of history, and they call this "education."

Proverbially, the legs of the young are broken, and then at eighteen they are expected to stand on these broken legs.  What kind of man or woman stands then?  The kind who can live on his own, unafraid of a self-guided life, without coercion?  Or the kind who lives in a half-adulthood, always needing something half forgotten.  The father and mother of the state, stand-in for the absent parents.

The stateless society is the end, the last stage in our movement.  It's when the ancient world is finally gone.  To get to the end, though, we start at the beginning.  And the beginning of the life of society, is the beginning of the life of the individual.

I completely agree that a vastly more enlightened society is possible, and that more fully developing a sense of personal freedom in the individual is a way toward a better future...

...but it's hard to imagine a world without thugs and thieves. 

If we look at our current government, which is outstanding compared to most in other parts of the world, it is still infested with thugs and thieves who go about their thugging and thieving without ever questioning the premises on which their power is based (i.e., coercion, confiscation, and the implicit threat of violence).

On a related topic, in the world you are envisioning, what place do you see for a religious movement like Islam?  It seems to me that religious movements like Islam (and there are others--I am just citing that one as an example) would create many obstacles to the realization of the stateless society you are imagining.

[jackely]

...but it's hard to imagine a world without thugs and thieves. 

"And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

"The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them."

These are verses in the Bible that attracted me to Christianity. It would take a fundamental transformation in human nature, to be sure. but I think that is what the Bible is getting at. I think communism taught us in the 20th Century that it is not within human power to make such a transformation. So I think we either look to the divine or we are hopelessly lost.