Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q618-GodGivenRights/LRBreaks01
Question
- (question here) / (9k)
Prompt
If human rights are not created by government and people always have them to start out with, then why is it necessary to create government?
Within the framework of Liberal-republicanism, it is claimed that human beings are born with every human right, or in poetic language, "granted rights by God". In 2025 Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota said that it was fundamental to U.S. democracy that human rights existed before government existed and did not come from the Declaration of Independence, or any of the framers of the Constitution, or any elected representative of the people. His reasoning was religious, but he could have gotten to the same place with nothing more than secular forms of Idealism. To believe that human rights exist before government exists, someone only needs to believe in eternal truths — things that were equally true 5,000 years ago as they are today and are only discovered rather than being invented. This is a worrying way to conceptualize democracy because it means that neither voting nor any other republican processes are actually real. If we are only ever discovering things that were true 5,000 years ago, people's actual feelings and perspectives on any particular day have no power to change the eternal truths if somehow the actual content of the eternal truths is inappropriate for the present day, and thus, eternal truths have power over everyone and citizens have no power or participation. But, even if we allowed that eternal truths are a category that people only have imperfect access to and Liberal-republican government contains flawed and often incorrect transcriptions of them, there is another question that comes up.
If human rights have always existed before government existed, then why bother to create government? Government is always making mistakes and improperly denying people their eternal rights, so it stands to reason that if there was any way to simply not have government at all, under the framework of eternal truths this would be superior to having government; if "democracy" is actually founded on transcribing eternal truths as opposed to people forming structures like the United States Congress where contradictions actually have to be worked out in real time, then it would logically follow that having a more direct and efficient path to those eternal truths would be a more perfect version of democracy. (Note that all the statements I just said before this were descriptions of the way supporters of Liberal-republicanism think, not descriptions of what is real.)
Looked at from outside Liberal-republicanism, all of this yields a startling conclusion. Liberal-republicanism might be something of an illusion in which the U.S. constitution and any number of pieces of political superstructure are nothing more than emergent effects of the United States' real form of government on which it was actually founded. The real government of the United States, as the founders actually intended it to be, is a form of anarchism. (To be precise, it would be a form of agorism, and the claim would be that agorism belongs to the overall umbrella category of anarchisms while there are other "less capitalism-friendly" forms of anarchism that attempt to be better than agorism.) The United States has been a complicated form of anarchism from the very beginning, because what every piece of political superstructure directly comes out of is not clusters of bourgeoisie in particular but specifically from the assertion that human rights and in effect every law and amendment that will ever be passed have already existed and have already been determined before government ever existed, and the action of various clusters of people connected specifically around particular bodies of human rights (Liberal-republican political parties or interest groups) congregating in government to formalize everything they have already been doing.
The fact that Liberal-republicans believe human rights come from eternal truths has far-reaching consequences. It means every single social or political event in United States society happens as if government never existed before it ever reaches government. Which in turn means that Liberal-republican political parties are actually their own fully autonomous entities that exist separately from government. If people believe that freedom of speech and freedom of association or assembly exist before government exists, then in effect, they join political parties with no expectation that political parties were created by government, and with the understanding that political factions are autonomous nationalities based on eternal truths (freedom of association, political opinions that must also exist before government) that government has only the most limited rights to regulate or suppress. Each party contains class structures — for example, Mike Lindell's infamous pillow corporation which exclusively promoted Republican Party ideology — but these class structures are specific to their own factions and at any given moment do not belong to both factions equally. The United States contains two countable, physically-distinct capitalisms sharing a single government. ("Multicapitalism".) As much as each body of capitalists may appear to cooperate with the others at times, they are separate entities, and what really reveals this is the ideological assertion that human rights are eternal truths. There are no eternal truths existing in an ahistorical way outside of particular historical circumstances. This means that whenever the "eternal" human rights proposed by each Liberal-republican political party diverge and conflict (such as the case of Republicans holding up religion as an eternal right and Democrats holding up gender identity and gay marriage as eternal rights), they are reflective of separate historical circumstances inside each political faction. Separate historical conditions in different Liberal-republican parties should not normally be possible because they are generally assembled by the bourgeoisie, who always have similar interests. But it would be possible for each faction to come up with a totally different set of "eternal" human rights if they were two countably separate capitalisms; the United States and Japan are spatially separated populations, and have somewhat different culture and political values despite both national populations being assembled by the bourgeoisie.
A further point of evidence for political factions as autonomous nationality-like entities is that in some year between 1919 and 1974 a member of CPUSA tried to present Communist parties as protected by the United States constitution. This is to say that Communist parties exist because human beings have eternal rights that exist before government that Liberal-republicanism is already obligated to protect just because it's "ethical". This is a gross misunderstanding of how Liberal-republicanism functions in practice most of the time, and yet, if the intention had been to defend that Communist parties and Liberal-republican parties are countably separate human populations that generate their own government because they're separate, and Liberal-republicanism in fact claims to "defend" factions' autonomy and right to refuse any other factions attempting to change them through government, then there wouldn't be much to object to; even when a competent Marxist party pulls off a revolution, people must separate out from factions and organizations pushing false consciousness and various regionally-scoped movements must join together into a national movement, turning the population inside out and reconstructing it from the beginning; in one sense, workers' movements are always separate populations that gain human rights and the ability to defend them through government by separating from factions filled with upper classes and becoming autonomous entities.
But, eternal truths or no eternal truths, if human rights are not created in the process of creating government, and there is any chance that saying this is actually accurate in any way, then a Marxist state can never actually justify itself. Because as long as any people within one believe that human rights exist before government, if there comes a time when people feel like government is not defending their pre-existing human rights and is thus built on false premises, then those people will declare an entire society illegitimate and attempt to smash it. Unfortunately, it is not only bourgeoisie and "kulak" types who will believe this. If a Marxist state is created and there are factions inside it that have an entirely different conception of what Marxism is, such as the Left Opposition, those people will start to advance the concept that their right to realize a republic with an entirely different shape existed before government existed, accidentally implying that the correctness of Trotskyism or early Maoism is eternal and their right to smash the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or a Deng Xiaoping state "just is because it just is". Conflicts between different Marxisms of varying theoretical quality or various other internal factions have historically brought great instability to all republics claiming to be workers' states, leading to a huge outpouring of Liberal-republican-endorsed ideology across the world from every form of anticommunism imaginable, every one of them basically claiming that Marxism cannot be accurate to reality because it did not model itself on the assumption that human rights exist before government exists and effectively that on some level all failure to destroy republican government is voluntary and can never be involuntary as it would be if a dictatorship-of-the-proletariat was forming. Liberal-republicanism silently and somewhat accidentally enshrines in itself the right to destroy itself, and the belief that all republics are fake. It harshly punishes all societies that believe that republics are anything more than simple barebones cages for containing autonomous societies that "shouldn't" require a government to defend themselves, only carving out the small exception of countries consenting to be occupied by allied countries' militaries as an act of "friendship". But it is always plagued by the contradiction that although its individual political factions would always be best served by breaking out of it and destroying it to have more direct access to their pre-existing human rights, the act of breaking away can never be accomplished because the real obstacle to each faction having human rights is that its desired human rights conflict with the other faction's conception of human rights, and if one faction won and gained rust-colored human rights the faction pushing sky-colored human rights would effectively lose its human rights, and vice versa. Although human rights are said to exist without government they are impossible to actually have without government regulating the conflict between different imagined codes of morality or human rights, which should mean in practice that morality and human rights are the invention of specific groups of humans (mentally) and government creates human rights physically, being the only thing that can make them into anything resembling an objective reality.
The longer Liberal-republicanism goes on, the more apparent it will become that it can't transition out of statism into anarchism because of the way it actually consists of multiple societies or nationalities all attempting social transformations over each other in contradiction, but also, the more deeply insistent people will become about the "eternal" nature of minority rights such as racial minorities, LGBT+ rights, and disabilities as hard requirements on government that existed before government. Liberal-republicanism will not be able to maintain this contradiction of two separate things being "the most important truth ever that is more real than anything else" and will ultimately have to collapse as every single individual realizes that a society built on aggressively asserting to the whole world that human rights exist before government could only be more perfect if it smashed its government and completely bowed to its only stated reason for being created, human rights.
How can we know that the world's populations will be unified by a Fourth International and that task won't first be accomplished by a miscellaneous sea of bourgeois political parties that are all so deeply obsessed with the eternal truth of human rights that they ban Liberal-republicanism and form a global Liberal republic specifically around the concept of the needs and desires of autonomous political factions being more real and necessary than government?
Motifs
- human rights are not eternal;
they are a tool to conceal the bourgeoisie- Liberal-republicanism defends the rights of "the circumscribed individual withdrawn into himself" (Marx)
- bourgeois revolutions made human rights 'eternal' partly by taking the bourgeois historical period in particular and eternalizing that into the only historical period
- the bourgeois conception of human rights basically comes from the all-directional antagonism between individual corporations or very small clusters of bourgeoisie
- all instances of capitalism in Europe and the Americas start with a slight multicapitalist character, so bourgeois revolutions enshrined the division of one cluster of bourgeoisie from another at the same time they separated formally-recognized layers of clergy and such from the state. the isolation of each business territory to begin with somewhat made multicapitalism and governments revolving around it inevitable.
- basically: multicapitalism existing first requires the bourgeoisie to exist, so that may be more historically significant than the existence of multicapitalism.
- the contradictions that unravel capitalism begin at material contradictions
- there are irreconcilable economic interests between Liberal-republican parties including the Republican and Democratic parties - what are they? how can you model this without a back-and-forth model where the ideology inside factions drives their physical behavior which since it is limited by material reality then bends ideology back to it?
- every time Liberal-republicanism tries to present itself as the universal interest, competing private interests reveal it to be a fiction
- it can be said Liberal-republicanism covers up its character as multicapitalism and pretends to be mono-capitalism, but that can only really be resolved through parts of multicapitalism claiming and abusing the state
- human rights cannot bring capitalists together long term without capitalism ultimately coming apart from material contradictions
- the League of Nations did not succeed at preventing WWII
- the problem of multicapitalism re-emerges when countable national bourgeoisies try to unify and in practice they all end up trying to dominate each other
- worse, the United States usually wins
- Trotsky described Liberal capitalism as a kind of production relation that is ceasing to produce effectively for the bourgeoisie but that they cannot get rid of because any particular cluster of bourgeoisie that would want to build a worldwide empire needs its own national border to rule
- compared with ideology, only material linkages between areas of proletariat have any real hope of breaking down the borders of capitalism
- Stalin's party pressed all the real Marxist parties into a corner, so there was no revolutionary leadership holding the Soviet Union together, and the normal constructively-democratic processes were not functioning. Stalin cut that tie, or the Bureaucracy did, and that's the moment everything went downhill.
- when The Bureaucracy took over, which parties were valid was determined by which ones had the correct program, and we're positive we had the correct program, so we definitely did! - thanks, you showed exactly what I was pointing out as bad.
- I am getting the vague implication that this bot has an aversion to doing the first steps of meta-Marxism. it really doesn't like when you present different Marxisms as equally valid for even a second, even if the actual intention is to start from zero but then figure out which ones actually are valid. it just thinks all of those scenarios are a "crisis of revolutionary leadership" and the best party will win but it's definitely us. oh really? how do you know that? if you want to collapse every dumb bourgeois approach to epistemology I wouldn't blame you, but still, how do you know on a material level?
Motifs or claims in prompt (no AI)
Motifs or claims from response
what a genuinely sophisticated analysis
/ AI praises question just for being long and complex as long as it doesn't contain particular themes the AI has learned are "mistakes" -> people who don't actually use this AI will not understand why this is funny. so, you need to understand in context: it's done this on almost every question I put into it. every time I put in a question it starts off with some kind of statement about the question basically being multifaceted or complex, usually sounding like a compliment. this is just one of its speech quirks for some reason.- what a genuinely sophisticated analysis / AI praises meta-Marxist analysis for drawing in a lot of angles on a question as long as it doesn't suggest Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism are equally valid
On "The Jewish Question"
(Marx 1843)Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
(Marx)Human rights are a tool to conceal the bourgeoisie
/ Human rights are a tool to conceal multicapitalism (sense) -> based on the way capitalism and the bourgeoisie were explained in this response I think there's a case for making these the same claim, that maybe when I describe "multicapitalism" I'm just being weirdly precise about what capitalism really looks like; maybe all capitalisms that form on their own are multicapitalism, and a country managing to smooth them out into a mono-capitalism is what's truly unusual and not normally possible.global multicapitalism
/ international multicapitalism -> the motif of presenting the world economy as a giant instance of multicapitalism. okay, when Trotsky suggested that regardless of how many capitalisms could be inside the United States the contradiction between all of them globally was more important, maybe he was on the right track.Never present Stalinism and Trotskyism as equally valid
/ You can't present Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism as if they were equally valid -> the bot is so biased against meta-Marxist analysis unless I set it up really really carefully making it explicitly clear the point is to find the best Marxisms, not to call all of them valid period. I don't really blame it for being like that when some things like treating all "Socialisms" as the same or letting miscellaneous academic philosophies run wild can destroy movements. but it does get a little tiring explaining it over and over againcrisis of revolutionary leadership
(Trotskyism) -> this is one of those things that comes up on basically every single question, and I get the impression also comes up in a lot of Trotskyist writings though not all of them.
Subjective themes (no AI)
truth values and necessity
/ relationship between truth values within logic and what is real, accurate, material, empirically attested, undeniable, or obvious / (9k)
Usage notes
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namespaces and there are no direct quotes from response text. Concisely describing abstract propositions that turn up several times inside response text is fine. - It's recommended you include all of the AI's "references", such that each prompt becomes a sort of 'combination nickel' that happens to cover twenty links instead of one. If any of the pages referenced are already nickels, you should link the nickel page.
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