I’ve just started reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and I found a lovely example of how fuzzy language obscures what the state is and how it differs from “society.”
Quoting page 14 of my copy (hardcover, Pantheon, first edition):
“…all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of individuals and groups. There seem to be just two primary ways of answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.” [italics in original]
This kind of fuzzy language to whitewash the difference between voluntary trade and force infuriates me to no end.
Unless there is some group of people who exhibit real telepathy and hive-mind, the entity “society” has no independent existence except for individuals. This “We are the government, the government is us!” nonsense is something I ranted about earlier.
This whole absurd perspective is something Rothbard broke down brilliantly with a perspective from game theory: either the exchanges are voluntary, and the participants believe they gain from them, or there is some threat of violence, either explicit or understood, and one or more parties believe they lose from the exchanges forbidden or made mandatory by the state.
In the first case, we know that overall utility is increased. All parties leave the negotiation table as winners.
In the second, we know that the threat of aggressive force is a factor in the parties’ choices to obey. We cannot assume that the exchange(s) increase utility. In fact, we can reasonably infer that they do not for at least one party, or else the threat would not be necessary.
Haidt here hides behind fuzzy language to make it sound like the dichotomy is between society and individuals.
The dichotomy is between persuasion and coercion.
Insofar as Haidt uses this mistaken understanding of human interaction to make his “moral” judgments, he is likely to find himself in a muddled cluster of errors.