> Is your issue with universalism, then? That the policies fail to discriminate between different groups for different reasons? Would it be more proper to bring in communitarianism?

Universalism is wrong, granted, but that's not even the crux of it; the issue is that the "groups" you're likely referring to are also, in most cases, arbitrary logical constructs. The appropriate function of law - as distinct from policy - is to mediate disputes among actual individuals, not presumptive categories of people, according to the expectations, implicit and explicit, that give structure to the relationships among those particular people. (And the proper role of policy is to govern the activities of the state itself, as a particular institution, and not to insert itself uninvited into people's social arrangements, overriding their manifest preferences).

> Except that this has been true for all of history, and it's by systematizing it that we gain some measure of control over it. Instead of conducting warfare every time people disagree, we have means for communicating and compromising as a first resort.

This is simply incorrect; for the vast majority of history, law was generated via bottom-up emergent processes, that attempted to map the boundaries of the natural law inherent in each particular dispute. We've had a functional system of common law and equity operating this way for over 800 years.

The notion that law is something that people design, a priori, and apply to society as a whole from the top down, is a novelty that's been dominant only for about a century. I find it bizarrely perplexing that you seem to regard legislation as the only viable form of law.

> You keep straw-manning me by implying that I'm proposing a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy

This is a meta-straw-man, considering I said nothing of the sort. I'm arguing against the "state equals society" formula, which I entirely acknowledge is a form of democracy - no masquerade - but which is also clearly a form of totalitarianism. In this post, you seem to be articulating a model that diverges from this formula: you're re-purposing the term "state" to describe not an organized institution established for the purpose of exercising power, but to any structure that emerges within any social context. I don't think that's the way we were using the terminology when we began the conversation, and I'll point out that you began by objecting to distinguishing government from society, not state (however defined) from society.

> I simply do not find nations to be a useful social construct.

I agree that nations are far too broad and coarse to be considered substantive social contexts, but - and this is an assumption, so correct me if I'm wrong - I have a feeling that you would articulate merely smaller versions of nations as the appropriate scope within which to equate the state with society.

What I'm trying to point out is that every particular grouping of individual human beings is a society unto itself, and is in a sense sovereign unto itself: democracy isn't about people being arbitrarily shoehorned into classes or categories or purely abstract "communities", which then "express" themselves in the form of a system of law. Democracy is about people creating substantive social contexts - families, friendships, businesses, romantic relationships, weekly D&D groups, religious congregations - and manifesting law particular to that social context through their mutually-sustained interactions.

What we think of as the institutions of law - judicial institutions, not legislative ones - are merely a failsafe mechanism to be appealed to when disputes and controversies are not sufficiently contained and addressed within their originating social context, and threaten to escalate and spill over into other people's lives.

There's no room here for some legislative body, composed of strangers who you haven't met, to aggregate everyone's distinct circumstances, abstract them into a conceptual model, and then make prescriptive rules, again in the abstract, on the basis of that model. And when people talk about "the state" and "government" in the sense that began this thread, they're talking about this form of legislative state, not using those terms to describe the bottom-up patterns that formalize the mechanisms of concrete and particular social contexts.

You say "they aren't third parties", but it's absurd to suggest that any actual government operating on that legislative-state model can be regarded as anything other than a particular institution administered by particular people, not one of whom, odds are, is you.

> you're re-purposing the term "state" to describe not an organized institution established for the purpose of exercising power, but to any structure that emerges within any social context

So that seems to be the crux of our disagreement. I consider the notion that a state is necessarily an "institution established for the purpose of exercising power" to be bunk. As such, I use the term "state" fairly loosely: I didn't bring it into the conversation: you introduced the concept of a "political state" and I went along with it. I haven't yet found any particular reason to be nuanced about my definition.

> I agree that nations are far too broad and coarse to be considered substantive social contexts, but - and this is an assumption, so correct me if I'm wrong - I have a feeling that you would articulate merely smaller versions of nations as the appropriate scope within which to equate the state with society.

I prefer cities, but it's not something I consider myself on firm ground with. Cities are natural foci for people, but to discount rural zones and more importantly natural resources as demarcated by geography is an obvious mistake.

However, I also believe that it's a good idea to have institutions like the UN, to function as a world government capable of speaking for all of humanity.

So... smaller? Not really. I agree with your list of "families, friendships," etc., but I'm also happy with scaling the notion up to the species level, because there exist policies that we want to express at such a large scope. I can't usefully speak to a larger scope because I am admittedly disinterested in animal rights politics and we haven't met a sci-fi style alien species yet.

None of these are strong opinions, though, because they fall into the area of things I know I don't know.

> What we think of as the institutions of law - judicial institutions, not legislative ones - are merely a failsafe mechanism to be appealed to when disputes and controversies are not sufficiently contained and addressed within their originating social context, and threaten to escalate and spill over into other people's lives.

The problem is that you can't fully isolate problems. Your local religious congregation has members who work in a few dozen different businesses, all of which serve the wider community and more than likely do business in even further communities. This is even more true in the wake of globalization. Something as simple as a teenager deciding to leave his parents because they're stupid is going to call into question what kind of community-level support he can call upon to survive without his parents' blessing.

Every manifested law is going to find some way to clash with other manifested law. Who mediates the disputes for this, and under what rule of law do those mediations take place?

> And when people talk about "the state" and "government" in the sense that began this thread, they're talking about this form of legislative state, not using those terms to describe the bottom-up patterns that formalize the mechanisms of concrete and particular social contexts.

And I object to that. In a democracy, there shouldn't be prescriptive rules imposed by a small group onto the majority. The majority should have participated in the formulation of any prescriptive rules that are proposed. It irritates me that we haven't figured out how to make that happen, and it irritates me even more that I am pretty dry on useful ideas.

I'm going to footnote a thing I wrote [0] last month that gives a more bird's-eye view of my perspective. One of the last things I say there is this: "It's important, I feel, to aspire towards democracy rather than resign ourselves to it." On the whole, Americans have given up on the democratic project. Some are trying to establish themselves as oligarchs, while others are trying to find a way to exist anarchically, and those are the ones with opinions on the matter.

But the truth is that America isn't trying to be a better democracy. I want to live in a better democracy. I want other people to want it, too. I want other people to have a substantive vision of how it could be better, and to be motivated towards working for that. Pointing out that the people is the government, or at least should be, is part of that.

> it's absurd to suggest that any actual government operating on that legislative-state model

There is a lack of clarity in whether we're discussing theory or practice here. In practice, I don't consider any existing democracy to be sufficiently competent. And a huge part of that problem is that democracy had to be implemented on the backs of inherently injust political systems rather than magicked out of thin air. That detritus from history stays with us and makes more difficult an already challenging project.

I've felt that, in this thread, we've reasonably made it clear when we're talking about existing, present-day occurrences by citing "in America", but perhaps not?

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5998145

> So that seems to be the crux of our disagreement.

I think we're having two distinct disagreements here.

One of them is in our political ideals, and I think we can explore their respective differences to mutual benefit, so long as we agree on common definitions for the terminology we employ. I do enjoy these kinds of debate and discussions as long as we've established a common ground of semantics, but if we're talking past each other by using the same words as identifiers for substantively different ideas, the conversation can be tedious.

Which is where the other disagreement that I think we're having comes into play: this conversation began when another commenter made a point about people who call Snowden a traitor doing so because they equate government with society. It's clear that in this context, and in the subsequent discussion we've had, that the words "state" and "government" are being used to reference a specific institution that exists for the purpose of concentrating and exercising top-down power. If, in the context of conceptualizing your own political ideals, you use the word "state" to represent a different concept, that's perfectly alright, as long as you recognize that it is indeed a divergence from the vernacular use of the term.

(Of course, if this is the case, and you do define the word "state" in your conceptual system to refer to the actual emergent order of civil society, then it would have made more sense to regard my distinction between state and society as a contradiction in terms, rather than "the antithesis of democracy".)

All of that said, let's get back to discussing the actual substance of our ideas.

> However, I also believe that it's a good idea to have institutions like the UN, to function as a world government capable of speaking for all of humanity.

How, in your mind, is it possible to have a single institution, composed of a particualar set of people, that can "speak for all of humanity"? There are billions of people - as soon as any two of them disagree on something, there's no longer a single position with respect to that question that is adhered to be "all of humanity". And I'd wager good money that you can find at least one dispute with respect to the answer to any question; so how is it possible for there to even be anything to say for all of humanity?

And, I've got to wonder: if some institution is indeed somehow speaking for all of humanity, who could they possibly be speaking to?

> So... smaller? Not really. I agree with your list of "families, friendships," etc., but I'm also happy with scaling the notion up to the species level, because there exist policies that we want to express at such a large scope.

Perhaps there are policies that you want to express at the "species level", but there are none that I do, so the "we" is at best an exaggeration. "Families, friendships, etc." actually are substantive social contexts, but "species" is only an abstraction.

> The problem is that you can't fully isolate problems.

The butterfly effect isn't a useful justification for turning every question into one of universal scope. Yes, there are things that may influence other things in incredibly remote and indirect ways, but we can still address matters by dealing with their direct proximate causes, and not by attempting to tweak every variable everywhere. In fact, we can only effectively solve problems by dealing with their direct and proximate causes; we don't actually have sufficent ability to comprehend, let alone adjust, phenomena at the macro level in order to effect outcomes at the micro level. Problems that we can't sufficiently isolate are problems that we can only effectively mitigate, not solve.

> Your local religious congregation has members who work in a few dozen different businesses, all of which serve the wider community and more than likely do business in even further communities.

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here. The religious congregation is one social context, the businesses are others, etc. Their commonality is only the fact that some of the same individuals happen to participate in both social contexts. Again, every particular grouping of people is a society unto itself; the actual participants in a business transactions are the ones involved in that social context, which has nothing to do with the religious congregation (unless the religious congregation is trading with them, anyway).

I think you're treating social groups like permanent, immutable things, that exist independently of the specific people involved in them. But that's not how it really works: if someone new joins your weekly D&D club, then that D&D club is now a substantively different social context. The equilibrium of expectations, understandings, etc. will have been shifted by the addition of a new person, bringing his own ideals, preferences, expectations, etc. into the setting.

> Something as simple as a teenager deciding to leave his parents because they're stupid is going to call into question what kind of community-level support he can call upon to survive without his parents' blessing.

But he's going to get that "community-level support" from an actual community - specific people with whom he establishes substantive relationships - and not from some abstraction mistakenly described as a "community".

> Every manifested law is going to find some way to clash with other manifested law. Who mediates the disputes for this, and under what rule of law do those mediations take place?

The fact that the collision is taking place reveals that there must indeed be some overlap among the relevant social contexts, and that overlap is a social context unto itself, in which law can be 'manifested' once more. Traditionally, we have used judicial process as the primary way of doing this, when no common ground between the parties exists outside of the conflict itself; and traditionally judicial process has generated law in a bottom-up emergent fashion.

As I mentioned earlier, we have many centuries of effective use of common law and equity as evidence that such a system works quite well; the experiment with supplanting law with legislated policy over the past century hasn't worked out quite so well, and indeed has often caused conflicts to escalate and to cause collateral damage to those who weren't party to the initial conflict in the first place.

> And I object to that. In a democracy, there shouldn't be prescriptive rules imposed by a small group onto the majority.

Nor should there be prescriptive rules imposed by "the majority" onto a "small group". Where people can't agree, they should agree to disagree, and disentangle themselves from each other to the extent that their values are incompatible.

But you are using the word "shouldn't" here, indicating a normative ideal. The word "state" in vernacular English, absolutely does describe the pattern that you don't want to exist. I don't want it to exist either, but I recognize that it does, and that it is, at least in this instance, a consequence of an attempt at a democratic system which failed in part because the ideology of democracy was successfuly leveraged to justify exercise of power, instead of regarded as a mechanism to constrain power.

> "It's important, I feel, to aspire towards democracy rather than resign ourselves to it."

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this aspiration, but I don't concede to make mere democracy the pricipal aspiration of political life. We don't create political processes in order to give everyone an opportunity in political processes; democracy is merely a mechanism, or an instrumentality, that we use in pursuit of more fundamental goals. For me, the fundamental goal of politics ought to be the maximization of human freedom, not the maximization of universal participation in politics.

> In practice, I don't consider any existing democracy to be sufficiently competent.

"In practice" means "in reality". When someone uses the word "democracy" in the context of topical political debate, they're referring to what actually exists, not what might exist and be called by that name. Like I said, I'm fine with discussing ideals, and exploring the full range of possibilites that we might aspire to, but let's at least clear up semantic ambiguity by not using the same words that already refer to extant things to also refer to idealized hypotheticals.

> I've felt that, in this thread, we've reasonably made it clear when we're talking about existing, present-day occurrences by citing "in America", but perhaps not?

The thread began by criticizing people involved in present-day occurrences in America; it wasn't, until now, clear where and when we were diverging from that context.

> Like I said, I'm fine with discussing ideals, and exploring the full range of possibilites that we might aspire to, but let's at least clear up semantic ambiguity by not using the same words that already refer to extant things to also refer to idealized hypotheticals.

Then let's talk about ideals, because re-iterating the last few thousand repetitions of HN Snowden-the-hero is going to bore me pretty quickly.

> And, I've got to wonder: if some institution is indeed somehow speaking for all of humanity, who could they possibly be speaking to?

There are several groups. The most obvious is the hypothetical alien culture. The other is ourself: past, present, and future. I hope, for instance, that we'll one day look at our history of space flight by trimming back on the competitive Cold War motivations and just call it different groups making attempts towards the achievement. That kind of reframing is useful and inspiring.

The institution is a platform for such speech. Arguably, the closest thing we have to that right now is YouTube.

> Again, every particular grouping of people is a society unto itself; the actual participants in a business transactions are the ones involved in that social context, which has nothing to do with the religious congregation (unless the religious congregation is trading with them, anyway).

This is a logically cogent notion, but it's not borne out in reality. Let's say there's two persons who have some relation, friends or enemies or whatever. These two people might (1) be in the same family, (2) work in the same business, and (3) attend the same church.

By your model, any disagreements that arise between them would be settled between them. But this is only how it happens in ideal cases. Real people often use their shared contexts as proxies for their disagreements. Estrangement, office politics, religious condemnation: these can all be motivated by such a smaller upset. For every particular grouping of people, you have the possibility of such spillage occurring. The "culture war" that you decried upthread, even if you stripped away all legislative efforts from it, is a demonstration of exactly this kind of spillage.

By your dislike of the legislative model, I find it hard to believe that you'd support larger social contexts imposing upon smaller social contexts, such as a religious group or business specifying the relationship between two persons. Yet such downward pressure is the only way, aside from a magical blessing of maturity, that larger social contexts can protect themselves from spillage from smaller ones. And this is assuming a model of the world where everyone exists in a perfect hierarchy.

This seems like a good time to bring in the problem of a third party observer.

If you're out on a walk and you see imminent murder, I'd say that you have an obligation to intervene, assuming no mitigating circumstances. Would you consider that a case of law being manifested right there? That seems a little bit too fast and loose for me: it justifies any and every action, as long as no one objects when the dust settles. That isn't law in any sense of the word, common or otherwise.

> As I mentioned earlier, we have many centuries of effective use of common law and equity as evidence that such a system works quite well; the experiment with supplanting law with legislated policy over the past century hasn't worked out quite so well

Can you be more specific about the references you're making here? Who has been using common law and equity, which centuries, when and how do you pinpoint the beginning of legislated policy? I don't think I'd be able to fully appreciate your arguments even with answers to these questions, but I'd at least have some context with which to Google.

> because the ideology of democracy was successfuly leveraged to justify exercise of power, instead of regarded as a mechanism to constrain power.

But if we posit that no state exists, whose power are we constraining? The typical construction of democracy that talks about "constraining power" usually presumes a distinct state/gov't: a subset of the population that exercises power over the entirety. But in our ideal imaginings, there doesn't exist such a state. What then democracy?

Thought experiment: let's say we are gods and have the power to package up a bunch of ideas and that package is called democracy. We magick up ourselves some humans on an Earth-like that we made, and then download the package into their brains. Can they create, or even aspire to create, a democratic society? Should they? I say yes, as that's how I'm packaging up my bundle.

> not the maximization of universal participation in politics.

I'd wager this is because the notion of participating in politics leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It does mine. But everyone has always participated in politics. This is where we'll likely get into a disagreement over definitions again. You mention earlier that every particular grouping of people is its own society with its own manifested law. I contend that the process of manifesting this law is politics.

As such, "man is a political animal". From this, I think you can deduce why I'd want to maximize active participation in politics: the alternative is passive participation.

> For me, the fundamental goal of politics ought to be the maximization of human freedom,

Alright. Here's a scary statement for you: I don't believe in freedom. I don't find it to be a meaningful concept on its own. To make a pop culture reference, "Free from what?" "Freedom." (The answer is the villain's, in The Avengers, if you haven't seen it.)

You can't maximize freedom, because freedom isn't merely unquantifiable, it's an idea that can't stand alone. You can have freedoms to do, freedoms to be, and you can have freedoms from this, freedoms from that, but you can't just have "freedom". Loki (the villain noted above) proposes the project of maximizing human freedom from the stress of decision-making; I can't imagine you agree with that.

Which leaves us with the question... which human freedoms do you want to maximize? As noted in my link, I like Nussbaum's Ten Central Capabilities as a minimum; not something to maximize, but a threshold that we need to cross.