[Nevermark]

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.

[immersible]

Thank you for this comment.

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."

[Nevermark]

> 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.

[immersible]

"> An authoritarian individual or group are equally immoral."

I agree.