Morality And Ethics: How Nihilists And Idealists Are Right

No, there is a difference between a benevolent ruler and a tyrannical one. The philosopher king takes the irredeemable qualities of humanity and through wise council fashions/molds into it something better than itself. The sole goal of the philosopher king is to elevate humanity beyond its natural selfish animalistic existence and to root out those that get in the way of this transformation as enemies of humanity.

Democracy is democracy, and while we’re not very free, or in control of our government, we’re still more free, and in control than say North Koreans.
If I was going to push for something, I’d push for more freedom, and control of our governmnent, rather than less.

The philosophical oligarchy will ideally be made up of decent men, but of course that’s not something that can be guaranteed.
They will be educated in ethics and philosophy.
There will also be some democracy and checks/balances.
They will govern things according to the golden mean, moderation in all things, nothing in excess, as opposed to the greedy, corporate oligarchs we have now.

There’s no way around it, a wholly evil man, will make wholly evil laws, unless he can be partly controlled from outside somehow.

People will just have to judge these philosophers for themselves, if they’re decent, and wise enough to relinquish some of their sovereignty to, but they don’t have to relinquish all of it, we’ll find a balance.

No democracy is free, that is all a gimmick sold to the masses. No democracy is free from tyranny, oppression, or without constant bloodshed either. Here we are at the height or peak of democracy where your retort is that we need more democracy. None are more slaves than those slaves who think of themselves as being free. I like and respect you Gloominary but this is where we part ways ideologically. Nobody is free within any society as all individuals rely on each other for survival no matter how lowly or great that reliance is. We all stand on each other’s shoulders. There are no checks and balances in democracy, that’s just more propaganda gimmickery sold to the masses as an unquestionable acceptable lie. All of democracy is excessive especially since it has no moderator to enforce moderation.

A dictator within certain parameters and restrictions in place is what I support. I’ve alluded to this in our prior conversations.

I like and respect you too, but we’ll have to part ways on this.

Care to elaborate on these parameters and restrictions?
Who would enforce them, if the king fails to govern within them?

A majority of human beings are knuckle dragging morons, idiots, and simpletons that cannot discern anything for themselves let alone for others which is why democracy fails.

There would be an ideological tenet, decree, oath, or charter in place for every chancellor that comes into power that would effectively make it impossible for the chancellor to violate without being dethroned and exiled themselves. The chancellor would have absolute power but only within this charter which they would be unable to violate to protect against the abuses of power for the larger segment of the population.

Indeed.

Your philosophy now reminds me of Thomas Hobbes, and Han Fei of Ancient China.

Never heard of Han Fei, I’ll have to take a look into that. Can you give me the basic scoop on that?

He was born in 280 bc, he believed humans were totally selfish, and most people were ignorant and stupid.
If they weren’t told what to do at knifepoint, for their own good and the good of the state, by the dictator and his army, all hell would break loose, there could be no democracy, or liberty.
He thought the dictator should make most of the laws, but also be subject to them, his own laws, hence the philosophical school he founded was known as legalism.
Han fei believed in the supremacy of the king, and the law.
It was one of the major schools of Chinese thought, along with Confucianism, Daoism, the philosophy of Mo, and the philosophy of Yang.
At one point it was the dominant philosophy in China, but eventually Confucianism supplanted it among the elite, and Daoism and Buddhism among the people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Fei

He sounds like my kind of philosopher king then. I will have to read up on this.

Yea you should, I think it’ll resonate with you.

At the time of Han Fei, there was no China, instead there were many independent kingdoms, each warring for supremacy, and many independent schools of thought as well, each vying for the hearts and minds of Chinese, but legalism helped one kingdom flourish, and unite all the others under its dominion by brute force, and out of that, imperial China was born, and it lasted for nearly 2000 years.

Okay, so Confucianism prevailed over Han Fei’s legalism because of Confucian individualism, every fucking time it is individualism! The more I read into extreme forms of individualism the more I come to despise it. Society is collective based not individualist!

Society is not the sum of its individual parts but rather its entire whole together!

Well yeah, say what you want about dictatorships but understand that they’re very effective concerning societal coordination. They’ve effectively created all nations that we all live in currently.

Rather than Confucianism being based on individualism, it was based on the family, and tradition. Confucians believed there should be a king, but they thought the king should have limits, he shouldn’t micromanage, or be too harsh, otherwise the people had the right to rebel.
They believed father should rule over son, son over mother, and mother over daughter.
They thought the king should rule over his subjects, but with leniency, compassion, and according to Chinese Customs, where as legalists were more radical, revolutionary, they didn’t care about religion, nor tradition, they were secular progressives.
They thought the law should be brutal, uncompromising, that the people had no right to rebel.

I guess you could say it’s sort of the same difference between constitutional monarchy and totalitarian dictatorship, Confucianism and legalism.
Confucianism also upheld traditional hierarchies, the nobility, where as legalism was radical here too, they wanted to do away with the old aristocracy, and the relationship between it and the people, and appoint new rulers at will, based more on merit than nepotism.
Legalism was a very top-down philosophy, where as Confucianism preferred a more organic hierachy, and ultimately it was Confucianism in China that won out.