This article starts from an infinity of axioms that all have to be true for that single statement of the title to have even a small chance of making sense.
Underlying all the existing power structures, which people are educated into accepting and even defending to their own detriment and loss of sovereignity, there is anarchism pure and simple.
No political system will ever outstrip inherent sovereignity, the same way no amount of laws and regulations can eliminate the inherent existence of an underlying free market.
Conceptually, it all comes down to individuals. In that sense anarchy is the basis for everything.
In practice, people easily exert their coercive influence on each other, to resolve disagreements, incompatible goals and exclusionary ambitions, and without some organized form of decision making and enforcement (government), nobody but a despot actually gets to live a life of real self-sovereignty.
Both statements actually support the original assertion made by verisimi that any form of imposition of will by one individual over another by force is inherently immoral.
If anarchy is the basis for everything - because it is obvious that 'society' (or 'humanity') is nothing other than a term referring to a specific set of individuals who are intrinsically sovereign entities, unless they suffer from some mental condition that renders them incapable of self-governance - then it follows that any individual who imposes his will over another by force is, as you rightly put it, a despot.
It is unclear to me, though, why an individual that imposes his will over another by force is (aptly) considered to be a despot, but a group of individuals that band together to impose their collective will by force on another group of individuals is considered as being a moral and acceptable state of affairs.
I want to be clear that my arguments on this matter are not political but merely philosophical, stemming from the original point made which was that, morally speaking "anything except self-governance, is an abuse."
> It is unclear to me, though, why an individual that imposes his will over another by force is (aptly) considered to be a despot, but a group of individuals that band together to impose their collective will by force on another group of individuals is considered as being a moral and acceptable state of affairs.
An authoritarian individual or group are equally immoral, although groups may be more stable given some diversity of thought and need to negotiate.
But the ideal of coordinated rule is that the whole population negotiates to create the rules for the whole population.
Democracy is an attempt at that, using multiple levels of representation to get around the inefficiency of everyone having to weight in on everything.
But its worth noting there are three aims of democracy and other attempts at good government:
1. Getting the highest quality decisions made. This, it turns out, is very difficult. We could even say, unsolved.
2. Demilitarizing politics. Democracies are a huge (but not perfect) success in this case. Peaceful coup, after coup, after coup, (i.e. elections replacing encumbants) is a tremendous improvement over civil wars, purges, assassinations, violent intimidation campaigns, ...
3. Decentralizing power, to water down governments self-interest. Any individuals forming a government are going to be prone to ruling the state for their own benefit. However term and role limits create turnover and power checks that reduce each individuals ability to self-deal significantly. Corruption can be rampant, but if the system holds, then by definition the corruption is far reduced from a despot situation.
Most people don't consider #2 and #3 the main reasons for having a democracy, but I think both are far more important and reliable benefit than #1. So effective (most of the time), that we mostly spend our times arguing about #1.
"Pete is a secondary English teacher who was diagnosed with Asperger’s in 2017 at the age of 34."
'diagnosed'....
Intelligence made into a disease.
Diagnose the rest of the population with Cognitive-Autonomy Spectrum Disorder and give intelligent people the proper credit.
It is normal in the real sense of normativity being the majority.
Automatic-Authority-Bowing individuals are the norm. And that is not a problem per-se. Even if it is unhelpful and annoying to more independent individuals.
What I consider counter-productive to non-normative more independent individuals, is labelling them with some derogatory acronym and turning independence of thought and intelligence into a disease or disability.
It may be a completely different way of approaching the world and everything in it. And it may not be the norm.
However, turning it into a disability, makes for large industries and worse, government, to try and 'screen' and 'treat' Independent Thinkers into oblivion.
All the while making blind rule-following appear to be the something desirable.
In considering the hypothesis of history fabrication through object crafting one has to assume that, whoever would be involved in such an activity, would have a lot invested in it and not be a mere dilletant.
Furthermore, if such activity were to be carried out with the intent of preserving wealth and exerting control over populations, it would be plausible to assume that the activity would be carried out by a specific lineage and would, thus, span multiple generations.
Just as, say, families that specialize in wine production or ancient furniture restoration, a traditional business of historical artifact production would procure materials and store them with care, so that when the need arose, all that was needed was already handy.
If carefully considered, the hypothesis of producing specific artifacts to make for an augmented reality that then is sold to the general public could actually be pretty easily accomplished.
"Yasunaga S. et al. (1999) showed that the affected individuals in this family were homozygous for a nonsense mutation in the OTOF gene. "
(retrieved in 2024/jan/24 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-a...)