You should read some Bernardo Kastrup

That's libertarianism

Well, some of this was his observations during the English civil war. He sees how people behave when social order collapses. But I think in many ways he is trying to appeal to intuition.

@@armchairprofessor4249 Sounds like it. Main problem didn't want to read this.

The social contract is hypothetical. No philosopher who argues for it says we actually sign all these things. But they say if we were to reflect on the benefits, then we would see it is rational to submit to the authority of the state. Well, at least some do. There are many different kinds of contractualism. Let me ask you this. Let's say someone committed murder. How could you punish them without appeal to contractualism? A Hobbesian contractarian could say the punishment is justifiable because the person being justified could see that such a system benefited them up until they were the one being punished. Bu if this punishment did not occur for crimes that this person comitted, then they could not have enjoyed the benefits of a secure society up until that point. How else could this punishment be justified if not by social contract theory?

@@armchairprofessor4249 First, I just wanted to say thanks for the video and apologize if my comment might have seemed confrontational in any way. As a person who no longer lives in the country of their birth and suffered what I feel to be empirically immoral actions on the part of the government of my birth, I don't really agree with some of the core axioms or principles that seem implicit in many of these theories. They seem to imply some sort of benevolent government that truly acts in the best interests of the masses. However, practically speaking and from any single individual's perspective, that may be obviously not the case. For example, a paper was released a few years ago that, while not free from credible criticism, presented a strong argument stating that the US more closely resembles an oligarchy than it does what it labels itself. A relevant quote from the paper is: "Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence." I would argue that this is generally the case across the world. In practical terms, even in a democratic society, as the size of the voting population increases, the "meaningful causal power" of an individual vote trends toward zero. To be clear, "meaningful causal power" is a statement about conditional probability. Meaning that a candidate or issue, such as a new piece of legislation, has some probability of being passed, call it P(W). Then we can make conditional probability-based statements like P(W|V), which might be, "How does the probability of winning change given that I vote?" Then we can use a standard proportional change to determine the actual "meaningful causal power," e.g., (P(W|V) - P(W)) / P(W), which trends toward zero as the size of the population increases. The summary of my overall issue is that a native-born citizen, who had no choice in their place or time of birth, also has no real "meaningful causal power" regarding the leaders and the laws they enact or repeal. The points you bring up regarding benefits are valid, but I would still question who gave anyone the authority to say they have authority over me. Then, when that gets answered, I would ask who gave the person or group that granted them that authority their authority. Then I would ask to see where I ever agreed to any of it at all. In the end, authority is a symbol. One person's or group's authority over another doesn't exist in the same way a mop, bug, dog, or person does. Instead, it exists in the way a cartoon drawing of a mop does. Any power that symbol has ultimately relies on interpretation. The issue is that they often have more people who subscribe to their interpretation and use threats of violence to force a particular interpretation.

@@armchairprofessor4249 As an example, we could look at recent laws passed in Brazil. In my humble opinion, the same kind of rhetorical arguments were used to appeal to the emotions of the masses and then leveraged to pass arguably questionable legislation. A simplified example could be: Imagine some politician creates a truly horrible piece of legislation that in some small way helps orphaned babies. Then every time someone tries to speak out about it, they say, "How could anyone be against helping orphaned babies?!" In Brazil, they passed some anti-disinformation laws that, while they seem reasonable at a glance, are actually far from reasonable by most definitions. These laws would force sites like X to make fundamental overhauls, not just small backend changes, gave them little to no time to comply, and then blocked them for non-compliance. They forced all internet providers in the country to block X over it, and when Starlink didn't comply, they seized Starlink's bank accounts in the country. Furthermore, a Brazilian who simply downloads and uses a VPN outside of Brazil could be fined around $6,000, which is over 10 times the average monthly wage. This law is widely criticized in the country, meaning the actual majority do not agree with it. It is a vocal and forceful minority who have imposed it on the entire country. A similar issue recently happened in France, where they again passed arguably questionable laws that would have forced Telegram to fundamentally overhaul their system, making most of their privacy-related features impossible. This wasn't just a small request for a simple backend configuration adjustment; it was a fundamental overhaul with no funding or reasonable timeframe for implementation. They were simply expected to do it at their own cost and virtually instantly, which is absurd. The concept of the "slippery slope" is generally considered a fallacy, but it is potentially a valid concern when discussing legal matters. These laws clearly fall under "Malum prohibitum," and a good argument could be made that some of the enforcement of these laws is itself "Malum in se."

@@crypticnomad You don't need to apologize. You're free to disagree with social contract theory. I'm not a social contract theorist myself. But what I would say is that someone like Rousseau would say the US more closely resembles an oligarchy because it is not a government based on the general will. So there is a way to critique our circumstances from the perspective of social contract theory. But others like Charles Mills have made perhaps more similar criticisms to yours. So feel free to disagree. I just thought I had a responsibility to try and defend social contract theory because that's the subject of this video and this is supposed to be educational. It's the same thing I'd do in the classroom if/when teaching this.

​@@armchairprofessor4249 I guess I can see issues from both directions. While I think my previous comments highlight an example of "minority rule," there are also examples of the "tyranny of the majority." On one hand, there is the concept of the "wisdom of the masses," and things like prediction networks can show this exists in some contexts. At the same time, the opposite can also be shown to be true. A non-zero percentage of the population-estimates range between 3% and 7%, depending on the country-believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. In addition to general misconceptions, related concepts like "collective illusions" are particularly relevant. This is where large numbers of people decide to hold a particular belief because they think the majority believes it, but when questioned, the majority often don't personally believe it. The next issue is the general lack of education in debate and rhetorical strategies. I think a good summary of many political debates could be, "two people bloviated for an hour." From a practical point of view, even if I lived in some sort of direct democratic system where my vote had some measurable "meaningful causal power," I could still ask myself, "Am I qualified to make a justifiably confident judgment about X?" I'm familiar with statistics, game theory, and have always been interested in philosophy. Outside of that fairly narrow "sphere of competence," it's hard to make judgments with high levels of justified confidence. Since most democratic countries have some form of representative democracy, we could extend the question to, "Are these candidates really the most qualified the country has to offer?" I would be willing to say with fairly high confidence that the answer to that question is more likely "no" than "yes" or "less likely than not." The issues with democratic systems are not new, but the issues with alternatives are sometimes arguably worse. It’s all rather absurd from my point of view.

"Karma and the need for ethical discipline. In that sense, the ultimate understanding liberates while the cause and effect level of reality is also very relevant to our human experience." Hehe. Who is having a human experience? Find that one and come back.

I'm glad you found the video helpful. But I do want to make sure that this is just one interpretation. And what to make of Nagarjuna is heavily debated. Some, like Siderits, see him as an anti-realist. Others, like Mills, see him as a skeptic of philosophy.

@@armchairprofessor4249 The beauty of all this, IMHO, is that it is all based on the perception of the observer. I try to acknowledge the existence of the extremes of nihilism and absolutism, and recognize their power to "convince" us these perspectives can be perceieved as "legitimate," but ultimately try to align myself with the "Emptiness" of the Middle Way. The myriad of perspectives intrigue me! Thanks again for a wonderful video!

@@armchairprofessor4249 "Some, like Siderits, see him as an anti-realist. Others, like Mills, see him as a skeptic of philosophy." I do not see him at all. Who is there to see? What is there to see? Just this, but I do not know what it is. Always just this and not this.

The Hellenistic Philosophers, edited by Long and Sedley