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Comment by MispelledToyota | Hacker News Reader

I think this is magical thinking about what a government is.

The social contract theory is a just-so story. It's not real. Governments exist because they are a tool for concentrating power and out-compete other social groupings in terms of economic strength and capacity for violence. But good governments want to incentive happy, productive citizens, so they use pre-existing language, or invent new language, to discuss how to achieve that. "Rights" are an example of this.

Governments don't exist from the consent of the governed, but rather from the lack of force sufficiently strong to dissolve them. Just because I don't have this force doesn't mean I have consented to being governed.

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> Governments exist because they are a tool for concentrating power and out-compete other social groupings in terms of economic strength and capacity for violence.

Governments exist because single people aren't powerful enough to protect themselves and because people are social, so they group together.

This is more Hegel, but they totally do exist from the consent of the governed because the people do have the power to dissolve them. If the will of the people does not align with the government, over time the government will dissolve. The question is how bad it has to get before that happens.

>Governments don't exist from the consent of the governed, but rather from the lack of force sufficiently strong to dissolve them. Just because I don't have this force doesn't mean I have consented to being governed.

So essentially if a force existed that could dissolve governments, then no governments would exist? Again, I think that force does exist, embodied in the governed as a whole. By the way, you completely do consent to be governed. You can choose to drop out - the problem being that if you do that you leave yourself at the mercy of powerful actors. It's not an optimal state.

You're at the mercy of powerful actors regardless of whether you consent to it. A law will affect me the same way regardless of whether I believe in it. A rock blocking my path blocks it whether I consent to it being there. Maybe I can go around, or maybe I need to move it, but my consent isn't really important. By the way, most governments do not forbid dropping out.

Hegel is doing the continental thing of waving hands and converting a collection of individuals into a People who Consent. But if you have 80% of the people not consenting, but 80% of the power supporting the government, consent doesn't matter.

I think you're also leaving out the possibility of a Nash equilibrium, where nobody likes the government, but there is not a way to coordinate a transition to something better without a high likelihood of something worse.

But in the end I don't think we disagree too much, just some quibbling around the edges. Maybe I'm wrong though.

> The social contract theory is a just-so story.

I find this (the liberal employment of just-so stories) to be practically a defining trait of enlightenment-era political thinking. Happy coincidence that their application resulted in systems of government strong enough to survive competition, though I do worry that that had more to do with other factors than with the benefits of liberal democracy, which may be more like peacock feathers than something enduringly fit in a changing environment, and that, especially with a changing technological landscape, the March of Democracy may end up being rather less long-lived than we might have hoped. I gather some cold-war thinkers had similar concerns. That turned out to be OK, more or less, I suppose, for generous values of "OK"—Russia didn't exactly shift toward liberalism afterward the fall of the Soviet Union, for one thing.

Yes, we will have to see. I think my own attachments to liberal values don't provide much guidance for how humanity will be best served. But I hope whatever emerges or wins out does it somehow by making people live meaningful lives, and not by leading us to something like Derek Parfit's repugnant conclusion.

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