Is anarchy really the best way forward?
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- I've been thinking about the contexts within which the United States was founded, specifically Holy Roman Empire and protestantism. The Holy Roman Empire produces the Doctrine of Discovery that authorizes the colonization of the Americas because white Christian men are superior to non-Christian indigenous men. Today the Tipsy Teetotaler shared a quote of Matthew Crawford that says the following about a consequence of protestantism. #
But this brings with it a certain anxiety: if I have to stand on my own two feet, epistemically, this provokes me to wonder, how can I be sure that my knowledge really is knowledge? An intransigent stance against the testimony of tradition, and a fundamentally Protestant stance toward religious authority, leads to the problem of skepticism. Tocqueville’s great observation is that the way Americans resolve the anxiety that comes from a lack of settled authority is to look around to see what their contemporaries think. The individualist turns out to be a conformist.
#- The subhead that the Tipsy Teetotaler wrote for the above quote is, "Individualism, ironically, creates lemmings." I think these contexts are important in understanding the current state of the United States of America.#
- The land upon which I as a citizen of the United States now live was stolen because of a belief in the supremacy of one group of people over another, which allows for slavery and the contempt of one human for another. The majority of the people who ultimately settled on that stolen land were raised in a theology that taught scripture alone and scripture apart from anyone other than oneself was authoritative. Consequently we have a pyramid of people who think they are naturally better than others and know more than others, and the "others" are beneath them. #