Kropotkin

About the last thing I did before entering the process of repeatedly tearing apart and putting together my office was to get into an argument with a guy over at Nolle Astro about just what exactly is the best form of government.

This guy when pressed a little, whipped out the Aristotle on me in the hope that I'd acknowledge his clear intellectual superiority and go away.

Like that might even happen.

Having read Aristotle some because I actually wanted to ..... I'm not lying here, I would not lie about Aristotle, I was in the hospital and had time on my hands ..... I began wading in looking to place a left hook when out of nowhere comes a guy who actually knows his Aristotle, as opposed to the two of us posers who mostly only know about Aristotle.

So anyway I offer the question to Ammericanu I., " What is the best form of government?" 

And he says something like "Small city-states, or that proposed by Peter Kropotkin in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

Sigh!!!

Not only does this guy know Aristotle, he knows guys I've never even heard of.

I hate when that happens!!!

So being me I order the book, only this time because I'm already on the mission and my computers are down, I actually go to reading it.

It's not for everybody, and that's for sure, but it does offer a very different and well thought out approach to having a society from a guy who is clearly beyond brilliant.

Click the quote below from the books conclusion to go to the Wikipedia site about Kropotkin and his life.

It's good stuff.

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

– Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion.

As an aside, I used to have a beard just like that ..... before the operation.