| | Robert Bidinotto writes:
[S]houldn't intellectual values such as epistemology, logic, concept-formation and definitions also succeed or fail by the interplay of supply and demand?
Since, as anarchists argue, the marketplace should rule over all else, well let's be consistent about it. Let's allow philosophical truth to be determined by economics, too. Let's allow sovereign consumers to "vote with their dollars" among competing offerings, in order to decide what our principles should be. Let's put the definitions of "rights," "justice," "self-defense," "aggression" and "liberty" on the auction block, to be determined -- and enforced -- by the highest bidders.
This is actually rather interesting philosophically in its implications(!) -- even if anarchism isn't.
I tend to view pacifism, anarchism, and isolationism as concepts and ideas which are highly related. They seem to form an intellectual continuum with pacifism being the most irrational and absurd. All these ideas and ideals seem fundamentally anti-intellectual. The proponents seem to be secretly against argument and discussion per se. They always seem to defend their views with incomprehensible gobbledy-goop, and their self-confidence in such mental rot invariably seems to lie in the fact that they can always point to some other thinker(s) who posit similar views but express them with even more sophisticated and tricky gobbledy-goop and rot.
It all seems very anti-intellectual and unserious at its core. Whenever I read an argument for anarchism -- I always seem to experience the curious phenomenon of losing interest in the discussion at the very first sentence! I'm not sure how they manage and achieve this, but they do. For me, there just isn't any intellectual meat or rational sustenance to their arguments.
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... you can't allow "market competition" over the very definitions and meanings of such basic legal principles as "justice," "rights," "aggression," "self-defense," etc.
