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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (14548)	5/26/2001 11:53:11 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Rather, people gradually realized that rules had to be developed, and the group had to have some way to enforce them. The same would happen on your island. Now that was a much more straightforward response. The history of the State and of Law is a long one, with much experimentation. In the end, we have reached a point where the world is composed of a variety of systems of law and order--many of them very immoral, IMO. On the island there would exist the same law that existed for the first man--the right to self defense. In a community of a dozen friends with a committment to similar values, this would likely be sufficient. If others came to the island, a formal structure would likely need to be implemented to accomodate Humankind in its more representative variety. I hinted at this in my first post on the subject. The danger of imposing an elite structure over the egalitarian community is that they have more power (and carry weapons) and thus the ability of immoral and unreasonable people to cause harm is simply multiplied. A huge number of people are convicted every year because of crooked cops, etc. But let me not stray off topic... My only point is that I would be comfortable on an island with certain people, including those mentioned by Karen, and of course my family and friends--without any LAW other than our own goodwill and committment to standards of reasoned values. I explained why I believed this would be workable in my first response to Karen's introduction of the subject. You can certainly believe that we could not live without an imposed police structure. But I still am saying to you that I would have no problem with the scenario, and would much prefer it over a formal legal system. On the other hand, if there were any religious people to be part of the group, I would insist on a formal structure or back out. I don't say this to imply that religion in and of itself threatens instability regardless of the practitioners, but only that I believe that when the resolution of differences rely on imput from two (or more) entirely different languages, then they cannot be necessarily resolved in a reasonable manner. I would not want to be trapped on an island where the RULES or the expectations involved imaginary friends who were favoring one or more of the people with ideas and concepts that were not able to be perceived and processed by all. Even though most of those people would probably be quite tolerant and moral--I would still rather they were on another island, as their appeals to the supernatural would make me uneasy, and would certainly disturb the tranquillity of my sleep.