You need to live in a place like Palo Alto, then rural Idaho to really understand that. :)
I don't need to live any other place to know what I said and that what you said I said is not what I said. <g>
I still maintain that high population density tends to promote collective thinking,
I agree with that. Never questioned it. People who live in close quarters need more collaboration, more protocols. This applies regardless of whether you live in Utah or Connecticut. If you live alone, for example, you live differently than you would with a spouse, three kids, and a mother-in-law. If you have a lot of traffic, you need traffic lights. If you don't, winging it works just fine.
To me, its the self taught rancher who lives his life independently of the norms or considerations of anyone else. What is it to you?
You keep wanting to make this into a red/blue thing, seems to me. I see it as more abstract, conceptual. It's a question of who makes the decisions and when.
In a collectivist environment you get a large array of rules. Choices are made for the group in the establishment of the rule set, a defined culture. The individual has limited flexibility. In a libertarian environment, there are minimal pre-ordained rules and the individual makes ad hoc choices by whatever criteria the individual values. The net result of all those individual choices becomes the culture. The culture is pre-established in the case of collectivism or the result of myriad individual actions in the case of libertarianism.
Either way you get a culture. The question is which provides the culture that better supports the interests of the community. There are advantages and disadvantages either way. I submit that the libertarian approach produces a more vibrant, robust culture over time because you get more creativity and more responsiveness to the needs of the people. Plus you don't waste a lot of energy carping over the stifling rules or even trying to get consensus on a set of rules, energy that could be put to productive use.
In either case you will have some flinty ranchers doing their own thing and thumbing their noses. That's a wash. |
