alt Hacker NewsOne way would be to use a polycentric form of law where each individual could determine what or which form of law to live under that protects them by voluntarily entering some sort of protective group. Or choose none at all and merely protect their natural rights on their own.
A key difference here from democracy is that merely living in one place doesn't lock you into a specific legal system.
Of course these also suffer one of the same weaknesses as democracy, e.g. if certain groups disagree with you they can just kill you if they're able. We see this in US for instance where if a guy named Randy Weaver cuts a shotgun 1/4" too short than what the 'people' say your right to bear arms includes and then for contested reasons doesn't show up for court, then a man named Lon Horiuchi can snipe his wife dead while holding a child and then get promoted and go on to do similar things at Waco.
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> One way would be to use a polycentric form of law where each individual could determine what or which form of law to live under that protects them by voluntarily entering some sort of protective group. Or choose none at all and merely protect their natural rights on their own.
I don't have much in the way of critique or judgement to offer on this political philosophy, just an observation: it sounds tribal or even pre-civilization. Out of curiosity I asked an LLM what present day countries most closely implement it. It came back with Somalia and a label: anarcho-libertarianism, with the caveat that it isn't an exact match. Historical examples were also interesting. I'm curious whether you think that's a good example or not.
If the world had more unsettled land I think your ideal would be a lot easier to implement. The U.S. was borne out of people fed up with their current situation (legal or otherwise) deciding to start something new. The fact that it's made up of 50 states, each with their own set of laws and relatively high internal mobility, suggests that its already a mild compromise away from pure democracy and toward your ideal.
To me the purest form of your ideal seems unstable, especially in the face of power imbalances and conflicting choices, and I suspect it would inevitably evolve into something else. As far as I can tell history supports that view.
It’s illuminating and sad to piece together the picture of what you actually want. You mention dictatorship being better than democracy and then talk about “polycentric law” which seems to basically be sovereign citizen stuff. And then you trot out Weaver who was specifically under siege for refusing to appear on charges of dealing illegal arms to white suprematists.
You don’t have a problem with democracy. You’re just a white supremacist. You want a white dictator so you don’t have to worry about the voting rights of minorities or whites who might be sympathetic to minorities.