One way would be to use a polycentric form of law where each individual could determine what or which form of law to live under that protects them by voluntarily entering some sort of protective group. Or choose none at all and merely protect their natural rights on their own.
A key difference here from democracy is that merely living in one place doesn't lock you into a specific legal system.
Of course these also suffer one of the same weaknesses as democracy, e.g. if certain groups disagree with you they can just kill you if they're able. We see this in US for instance where if a guy named Randy Weaver cuts a shotgun 1/4" too short than what the 'people' say your right to bear arms includes and then for contested reasons doesn't show up for court, then a man named Lon Horiuchi can snipe his wife dead while holding a child and then get promoted and go on to do similar things at Waco.
It’s illuminating and sad to piece together the picture of what you actually want. You mention dictatorship being better than democracy and then talk about “polycentric law” which seems to basically be sovereign citizen stuff. And then you trot out Weaver who was specifically under siege for refusing to appear on charges of dealing illegal arms to white suprematists.
You don’t have a problem with democracy. You’re just a white supremacist. You want a white dictator so you don’t have to worry about the voting rights of minorities or whites who might be sympathetic to minorities.
It must be tough trying to illegally deal arms at an Aryan Nations meeting and not know which guys are really white supremacists and which are undercover agents.
Weaver never 'tried' to be an arms dealer. The ATF approached him and asked him to do it. The ATF was the only 'white supremacist' that we even suspect Weaver might have discussed gunsmithing with. And as far as I know, he's never even been convicted of doing so. The only thing Weaver was convicted of AFAIK is not showing up for court, for something he is still presumed innocent of (edit: actually, fully acquitted of).
It's quite possible he didn't even cut the shotgun too short. The barrel of the gun is supposedly in ATF archives somewhere, but no one seems to know where it is. Very convenient.
And that’s shitty and entrapment. Which is why the charges were dismissed.
I wonder how you see the government do something bad and think a dictatorship is the solution.
> The ATF was the only 'white supremacist' that we even suspect Weaver might have discussed gunsmithing with.
Is there something backing this claim? Like, was there testimony somewhere from the rest of the Aryan Nations group that he never discussed this with anyone else?
You’re also putting “white supremacist” in quotes like that’s questionable. Maybe the ATF agent was not a white supremacist but this was at an Aryan Nations meeting and Weaver was a self described white separatist.
>Is there something backing this claim? Like, was there testimony somewhere from the rest of the Aryan Nations group that he never discussed this with anyone else?
OK I stand corrected, you still suspect it, even though the only evidence has turned up is that he dealt to ATF agents after they asked him to do it but actually he was acquitted of that. So you suspect he did this with others without evidence just like I might suspect he is Bigfoot or DB Cooper since I cannot prove that negative.
>I wonder how you see the government do something bad and think a dictatorship is the solution.
I do not. I am not in favor of any monopolistic form of government, so that eliminates both democracy and dictatorships.
> One way would be to use a polycentric form of law where each individual could determine what or which form of law to live under that protects them by voluntarily entering some sort of protective group. Or choose none at all and merely protect their natural rights on their own.
I don't have much in the way of critique or judgement to offer on this political philosophy, just an observation: it sounds tribal or even pre-civilization. Out of curiosity I asked an LLM what present day countries most closely implement it. It came back with Somalia and a label: anarcho-libertarianism, with the caveat that it isn't an exact match. Historical examples were also interesting. I'm curious whether you think that's a good example or not.
If the world had more unsettled land I think your ideal would be a lot easier to implement. The U.S. was borne out of people fed up with their current situation (legal or otherwise) deciding to start something new. The fact that it's made up of 50 states, each with their own set of laws and relatively high internal mobility, suggests that its already a mild compromise away from pure democracy and toward your ideal.
To me the purest form of your ideal seems unstable, especially in the face of power imbalances and conflicting choices, and I suspect it would inevitably evolve into something else. As far as I can tell history supports that view.
Yes it was sort of done in Somalia. That's how xeer law works -- there is a great book by Dutch lawyer Michael van Notten[0] that explains how polycentric law works in Somalia. It was found by most objective measures to be more stable and prosperous than democracy there [1] -- the researchers called it 'anarchy' but actually the period of 'anarchy' in somalia wasn't so much anarchy but decentralized legal system.
This allowed Somalia to be one of the few regions in sub-Saharan Africa that had a fairly smooth negotiation between interacting with various tribes while preventing any majority tribe from crushing the minority tribes. Tribes could still live in the same regions and practice their own laws while allowing feuds to be appealed up intertribal 'courts.' Thus even if it was just a guy and a camel and another guy and a camel, you still had law and you could even dish out the consequences yourself but still be held accountable up the chain.
I do agree the 50 states was an interesting and helpful idea. Under the constitutional form of the federal government, which narrowly restrains the federal government via the 10th amendment, there was a lot more room for states to 'compete' yet free travel and trade between the states.
You could probably get a lot closer to a hybrid of ideals by pulling the powers of the federal government way back into what the constitution authorizes. It wouldn't be polycentric law but it would make the monopoly far less onerous, as the cost of moving between jurisdictions is pretty cheap. There were a lot of challenges with racism and sexism in early USA but overall the restraints on the federal government were very good at giving the states a close approximation of polycentric law. Most of this started to get crushed in the very early 1900s and completely crushed by the 30s, although the civil war's elimination of any notion of a right to secession pretty much sealed the deal that the feds could gain an iron grip and the states couldn't check those powers by seceding so they had no real teeth to stop it.
>o me the purest form of your ideal seems unstable
Yes this is the story of the history of man. Hardly any theoretically pure form of governance has been able to exist in the history of man, let alone be stable in that form.
A key difference here from democracy is that merely living in one place doesn't lock you into a specific legal system.
Of course these also suffer one of the same weaknesses as democracy, e.g. if certain groups disagree with you they can just kill you if they're able. We see this in US for instance where if a guy named Randy Weaver cuts a shotgun 1/4" too short than what the 'people' say your right to bear arms includes and then for contested reasons doesn't show up for court, then a man named Lon Horiuchi can snipe his wife dead while holding a child and then get promoted and go on to do similar things at Waco.