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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6789576" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm a bit surprised you think that.  We build societies, but we have to impose order by force.  And we tend toward Rule of Man and not Rule of Law, with an authority figure largely governing by whim.   Rule of Law is a concept we had to invent, and its only rarely carried out with much vigor.  For every instinct which makes us social, there is a counterbalancing instinct toward individuality and willfulness - such as the demand to hold property exclusively.I think it's instructive to look at medieval theories of property.  Under medieval law, in theory the King owned everything.  Because the King owned everything, he had a right at least in theory to take back whatever portion of it he desired.  The King lent his property to his vassals, but that doesn't mean that they then owned it.   Rather than ownership, what the King was granting was usury - the right to use the hold the property but not to have it.   The vassal then was to use the property for their own upkeep - this was considered a gracious dispensation that they should be quite grateful for - and the surplus they were to return to the lord.   The King's vassals then in turn passed this right of usury - but not ownership - down to their vassals and so forth all the way down the individual slaves who worked the fields.   So in a sense, you could say that everything was the king's private property and thus they had the idea of private property, but equally the King and his vassals are 'the public' as well and everything is theoretically owned by the state.  It's also worth noting that at the bottom level, lots of the property - grazing land, forests, etc. - would have been held and used communally in trust to the lord.   So while the concept and feeling that property ought to be 'mine' existed, what the law actually said is that this feeling was wrong and indeed criminal, and in fact property was not private.This is actually a very ancient and far from unique theory of property ownership.  The same sort of theory pervaded most of the cradle of civilization, where the majority of citizens (even powerful persons of high social standing) were slaves and in theory owned nothing, but had only use of property loaned them by their lord.  It shows up in places like the Parable of the Talents in the bible, and the vestiges of it that theory that all property is actually owned by the Lord and loaned to others is illustrated well in the movie 'Far and Away' several times, perhaps most affectingly when the Slum Lord casts out the Tom Cruise character and confiscates all his property.  In the Slum Lord's mind he isn't stealing anything, and he explains this by saying that everything the Tom Cruise character had actually belonged to the slum lord and had been loaned to him - without which he'd have nothing.  This isn't a philosophy invented for the slums, but the aristocratic/feudal idea of land lords that been imported back from how things actually legally worked in Ireland.  Actually, this theory might seem bizarre, but it's really just family or tribal property custom applied to a much larger group.  Families in general don't have a strong concept of private property, but tend to in practice and in theory hold most property communally and even to the extent that someone - like a child - thinks that something is 'mine' the family in fact believes and acts like it believes that they have only granted use of the property and not actual ownership.And this is also the central theory of for example Marxism, which borrowed much of its economic theories from the High Middle Ages that Marx was an admirer and student of.  And actually, even in highly Liberal economies like the United States, there are still vestiges of this ideology underlying the basis of taxation.  Marx is a lot more famous because his followers were violent, but are you familiar with the Georgists and their critique of property taxes?  Yes, but to me that just proves that humanity has a strong chaotic bent, and this is why theories of pure lawfulness don't actually apply well to humans.  Nonetheless, it is pretty easy to imagine alien races which didn't have theories of private property, and I think if you apply your mind to that you'll realize that they'll all stand tall on the lawful end of the spectrum.Well, first of all, Robin Hood is a idealized romantic bandit figure.  And we don't consider Robin Hood evil because he is only stealing back what has already been stolen.   Ali Baba on the other hand is the villain; I'm not sure where you get the idea that he's not evil.  He exists in the story to give the hero some treasure he can steal without being evil, since Ali Baba's treasure is itself stolen.Any legal system where we believe that grant someone the ability to take something which does not belong to them, typically speaking, systems that allow the rich to take from the poor in order to enrich themselves.   Most libertarians in fact believe that most taxation is simply legalized theft, enforced at the point of a gun.  Georgists believed any tax on the ownership of something, rather than on its employment, in fact proved that the real owner of a piece of property was the one that collected the tax on it - and that this was theft.  The purer you get on your stand on individual liberty, the more all state actions seem like a sort of theft.  Also any legal system that makes piracy legal, for example.   Again, one way to prove that private property is chaotic and not lawful, is that the more strongly the society believes in private property, the more chaotic it self evidently is until in the extreme, when you abolish public property entirely you are left without much in the way of government or public law. Again, examine medieval law.  If someone took something from a serf - that is to say a slave - the actual crime wasn't mostly against the serf, but against the lord who actually owned the property.  The thief was guilty of stealing from the serf only the use of the property, but the thief had actually stolen from the lord.   Robin Hood's thefts aren't thefts in this sense, because the thief - Prince John - was actually the one that had misappropriated the property from the lawful lord using falsely constituted laws that where made in defiance of lawful authority.  Thus, we don't see Robin Hood's thefts as being really thefts at all, and thus not evil.   Yes.They don't.  Neither Robin Hood nor Prince John truly think of themselves as stealing, though of course, for very different reasons.No no no no no.  I'm going to great lengths to explain how a person can steal without being evil.  I'm justifying good people doing things that appear to be theft.   Lawful Evil and Lawful Neutral examples haven't even been brought up, and if you want to explain how private property is lawful concept you need to show its a distinctive and pervasive feature of LN society.  I think you'll find that difficult, except by claiming that property is private when its owned by a representative of the state or by claiming that the state and the individual are the same thing, which I think you should see is self-evidently opposed to the chaotic viewpoint.What??  No.  You have no choice about what you give or receive in a Marxist economy.  Choices are made for you collectively at the level of the State, which decides for you what your needs and abilities are.  Capitalism is such a loaded term.  But, to the extent you mean a Free Market Economy, this is strictly speaking a non-Lawful concept.  Even this ought to be obvious by definition, as the extreme end of a Free Market Economy would be laissez-faire - that is free from rules or interference by the state.Cuba, North Korea, for example.  The more lawful end of the spectrum has been banged up pretty hard by reality lately, at least as far as it comes to economics, as I think it obvious that humans don't tend toward Lawful behavior strongly or at all.  I mean it's pretty possible to find or make any law that won't be violated repeatedly simply because humans do tend to strongly consider their own wants and needs to have priority and are in fact individuals.  But by and large, I find your arguments incoherent on their own terms.  You want to argue that private property is lawful, and theft therefore chaotic.  But you are also going to argue to me that the basis of good is doing unto others what you'd have done to you, so under what theory is stealing from others not doing things to them you wouldn't have done to you?Again no.  Strictly speaking, "Valuing what is best for others, not just what is best for oneself", is a neutral concept since it implies that both the self and others have value.  Valuing others over the self is the lawful concept, and its easy to show that this is not inherently good, since the participants in a fascist culture where people fanatically serve the collective even to the point of self-sacrifice and suicide isn't Good simply because everyone is valuing what is best for others over their own interests.  Indeed, situations where individuality are repressed to that level typically strike people - particular for example modern Western Americans - as being examples of ultimate and most repulsive evil.   'The Force Awakens' uses that sort of repression of the personal identity as short hand puppy chewing to show how despicably evil The First Order is.  It's certainly Chaotic.  A Lawful Good person, hearing the Golden Rule, recognizes it as an attempt to make a statement of Good, but finds that statement problematic and prone to ills and wrongs because it is also a Chaotic statement.  A Lawful Good person, rather than preferring flexible maxim subject to questionable interpretation prefers a list of rules describing how one ought to behave which - if it is open to interpretation at all - is interpreted by experts appointed for that purpose.  It's appalling to the idea of Law that how one should behave should be left up to personal interpretation - however Good the intention of that interpretation may be.No, it doesn't.  It depends no altruism at all.  It's a pragmatic declaration of the limits of one rights, without which everyone's rights would be trampled by the strong and no one would have them.  An equivalent statement might be something like the Wiccan Rede: "Harm no one; do what you please".    These are examples of Chaotic Neutral ethos, since they only demand you refrain from actively doing harm, but make no demand on you to actively do good.  In fact, the good they define is ones own interests and violition - "what you please".</blockquote>

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