Why should I care? Or why punks are correct and old wise philosophers are wrong

To summarize: the author struggles with the question why they should care (mostly about society and social contracts). The author references Plato's Republic, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and one of Wolff's blog postings and quotes the bible on stuff. To me there is no clear line of argument visible. I presume the author thinks they are some kind of a Christian punk. Fine by me.

The author seems to be blissfully unaware of existentialism, French or otherwise, which could have either saved the author 12 years of anguish (OTOH, a very existentialist thing to have) or made the article more interesting. Maybe both. This way I'd say, needs work.

Violence is not mentioned even once. Maybe because it is and always was _the_ ground to compel all people to enter a social contract. Decentralization and deregulation of violence was attempted many times and ended up with survivors agreeing to centralize it again. And maybe that was what Kant had in mind and then immediately missed it too, instead he argued by property. And yes, private property elevated to moral imperative...has its drawbacks.

The author quotes Plato only to make a point that Plato explicitly dismisses, and completely ignores the rest of The Republic, which is a sophisticated thought experiment devised to counter the unsatisfactory ending of the first book and Thrasymachus's position.

This is really not how you should deal with other authors. It would be much better to make the point he wants to make without false witnesses and name dropping.

I'd have to re-read TFA a few times to be sure, but it seems that the author echos something that I have felt for some time: humans don't scale.

There is no "categorical imperative" on the plane of existence for the same reason the Tower of Babel collapsed. Once we get above the 23 chromosome pairs defining the standard human, little is enduring.

To govern and coordinate people at scale requires stripping individuality and binding them through, e.g. a UCMJ[1]. That is, some sort of military-ish authoritarian system.

For a glance at history, authoritarianism is both attractive, and transient.

So history seems more a chemical reaction of a variable set of "people-molecules" in an environmental "solution", building up and tearing down structures as we collectively fumble along.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Jus...

If that font is meant to be better readable by dyslexics, it has the opposite effect on me. Like comic sans would have, too.

Closed.