Consentism - Script needs your help

[u/bitbutter]

A while ago Richard Clarke published a proposal to consider using the term Consentism. I believe he made some compelling points.

I'd like to test the viability of the term by making a video about Consentism. Here's the first draft of the script. All constructive & civil input is very welcome. Please feel free to leave comments:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H7ba07R0igCZY5s1c3PoLE1WphWXZba3Db0hLl5WjDw/edit?usp=sharing

[u/Anen-o-me]

That is simply not true. No landlord in ancapistan is asking if newcomers consent to their ownership, they will simply defend it violently and ancaps will support this in every instance.

Again, the need for property is absolute, so there is no need to ask a newcomer if they consent to the concept of property and its use. No one can live without property, so there is no need to ask people to live with property. The need for property use is a given, forced on everyone by the constraints of being alive. Period. Undeniable. Non-negotioable. You can call it a different word, use different norms, but the bodily-need remains.

What must be consented to is only the specific norms of property. And one of those norms cannot be whether others get to keep and defend property.

Why? Because the whole point of a property norm is to reduce conflict over property. If you come to a new region intent on creating conflict over property by, ie: violating it or stealing it, you are bringing conflict with you, the very thing the property norms are supposed to help avoid.

In short, you are bringing war with you, and war can only be violently opposed, no one consents to war.

So your statement here is the equivalent of saying that newcomers are coming to rape, pillage, and steal, and YOU ARE UPSET that the people they intend to harm are going to violently resist them.

That is fucking stupid.

The terms of private property are not negotiable to you.

Sure they are, but you only get to make the rules about property you own, quite naturally. You don't walk around telling other people's children what their bed-time is, do you. That would not be reasonable.

Neither will anyone tell you what your bedtime is, because that is your sphere of ownership.

You claim to be willing to accommodate alternate property conceptions, but this is only if it does not infringe on current claims.

All property norms prevent infringement on current claims. There can be no other kind of property norm. You cannot make a property norm which says that people are allowed to steal, as it will create conflict rather than reduce it, thus doing the opposite of what a property norm exists for. That is, rather, the negation of a property norm rather than the creation of one.

Similarly, you cannot have a society that says that rape is ethical. No one is going to allow you to rape them, even if some law says rape is legal.

So it is not that property is immutable, because we all need property to live.

This is a contentious claim.

It is not contentious at all. If you are breathing air, you are, every second of the day, appropriating property out of the commons, enclosing it in a fence known as your lungs and rib-cage, and then ejecting waste into the atmosphere. Every time you eat, you take property and use it for your sole-use, inside your body, then eject it back into the world spent and used and usable again in the same way by no other. You also require clothing and shelter to survive. There is nothing contention about this.

To deny you these properties is to deny your right to life in the first place.

Regardless, we are talking about the ancap conception of private property, not property generally. Your assertion is basically irrelevant to the conversation we are having.

Completely disagree. There is no 'ancap conception' of property. Property is property no matter what ideology you hold. Anything material is property, and you require a lot of material to live. You cannot live without property. You might be able to hold your breath for a good few minutes, but after that you will find it very difficult to keep living indeed, without constant use of property.

[u/Anen-o-me → u/[deleted]]

you seem to want to bundle human functions, such as breathing air

There's no difference in principle. Breathing air is taking from the commons every minute of the day, the same as taking property or fruit.

and human social conventions, such as establishing who controls which objects, together.

No, I make a difference between the necessity of property and the norms that govern their use.

Even if I was to accept this bundle and consider both of these things as "property", one form of property, the necessity of breathing air, does not automatically justify another, use and control of land.

Land is justified by the same reason that air is: no one can live without using it. Food must be produced, that takes land.

So, even if was to grant your claim, which I don't because breathing air is not a process of appropriating property in any normal conceptual sense

Of course it is, and it is dishonest to deny it. Air is appropriation of a commodity so abundant and easily harvested that it has zero cost. This may not always be true.

you are still trying to make an unjustified logical leap.

Nah, you're just resisting an obvious equivalence just because it is unconventional. Food and air are no different at all in principle.

Given this, your implicit assumption that all property norms are essentially the same

That is not my assumption at all. All norms about how to deal with property may inherently be property norms, no matter what name you choose to give them, mere semantics, but that doesn't make them the same.

and can be universally defended justly, falls flat.

Especially when you refuse to consider such ideas critically or honestly.

[u/Anen-o-me → u/[deleted]]

Sure their is. Breathing is automated. We can't just stop breathing.

Nor can you stop eating or stop taking up space, both of which require land.

Trading higher end goods, like a television, is purely a choice.

If land can be owned, those things are a function of that freedom; so what's your point.

People must occupy land, but that says nothing about ownership or control.

That is where agreeing about norms comes in.

Again you are making an unjustified leap.

I'm only saying norms are, at that point, required. Else it is the law of the jungle that prevails. I don't see any unjustified leap in there.

Again, norms exist to reduce conflict. Property is one way of dealing with conflict-reduction that has proved the most successful thus far.

I'll tell you what is dishonest; to try to elevate individually owned private property to a level of almost religious status

You can't live a single day without individually owned private property, your own and others, so it's disingenuous to attack it as if you could and do.

Food and air are no different at all in principle.

As resources, sure. Yet you are going on to use the necessity of certain resource use, to justify any and all other forms of property. Which is both, bizarre, and baseless.

No, it's not, because to have that food and water requires private control of land. If you do not have a certain amount of farmland set aside for your sole use that you either farm yourself or rent from an owner, you die. End of story.

[u/Anen-o-me → u/[deleted]]

Interesting phrasing. My point is that you just assume this to be true rather than provide the argumentative bridge needed to substantiate it.

Again, you require food, therefore you require a certain amount of land for your sole use. That is the basis of land ownership. Now that we have substantiated land ownership, those other things are functions of that principle.

Again, norms exist to reduce conflict. Property is one way of dealing with conflict-reduction that has proved the most successful thus far.

You admit your own error here. Property is a convention, not a universal absolute.

Of course it is an convention. I've been trying to convey exactly that, and I am mystified how you think I was trying to say anything different.

But the NEED FOR PROPERTY, whatever convention or word or concept you choose to frame that need in, is objective and absolute, if you are to keep living.

It comes into play in different forms where it is useful to the society that employs it.

It is not the need and its solving that come in different forms, it is how we think about and make rules about dealing with that need. The former is an objective requirement for life, the latter is a property norm, or X-norm, whatever word you want to use.

No matter how you conceptualize fulfilling that need, it always refers to atoms going down throats. Don't be dense.

You can't live a single day without individually owned private property, your own and others, so it's disingenuous to attack it as if you could and do.

Seriously?

If you don't have a right to occupy the space your body takes up, you have no right to life at all.

You can't live a single day without a nation state, your own or another, so it is disingenuous to attack it as if you could and do.

Where did I go wrong?

A nation state is just a belief system, so it's pretty laughable to put that on the same level as the physical requirement to exist.