I’m not ready to jump on the democracy-denouncing bandwagon. In theory I’m against government, which implies being against democratic government. Off the record I’d say (to a co-religionist co-ideologist) that I’m against democracy in the sense of majority rule but for democracy in the sense of control from the bottom up. Assuming I’m against majority rule (which I’m not, publicly) I’m against it not because it’s majority (which is why the public choice theorists and other hired guns are against it) but because it’s rule.
I’m at peace with loss of privacy (confidentiality enjoyed by individuals) iff it’s accompanied by loss of secrecy (confidentiality enjoyed by business/government, between whom I refuse to pick lesser evils).
Self-employment is being both master and slave. Freedom/equality (two words for the same thing, not a “trade-off”) is being neither.
Enlightenment liberalism, under which nobody is entitled to anything, is of course a lesser evil than explicit, inherited social rank. Freedom/equality requires that either everyone is a member of the entitled class, or no one is, and we all know the former is unrealistic. I’m not above impossibilism, so I have adopted universal entitlement as a goal. By entitled class, I don’t mean Downton Abbey, or people being waited on hand and foot. I mean the part that puts the nobility in the nobility, the sheer luxury of not being in it for the money, or as RAW’s character Hassan i Sabbah X put it, being “unwillingly forced to grub and hustle in the jungle of commerce.” At the risk of being called a Maoist, I’d suggest that if we can’t achieve post-scarcity, maybe we should take turns being the non-entitled class.
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