@cicerone imposter,
cicerone imposter wrote:
As for Aristotle and governments, he examined and analyzed 158, and found only 3 to be good.
That is absolutly beside the point... No one sets out to do badly, and all forms become degraded... The only real government is self government, and it is easily perverted, and has serious weaknessess when speed is required for defense... You have to realize that failed forms did not just die, but caused the deaths of their whole societies... And still, it is in the changing of forms that humanity has always progressed, survived and thrived... If we do not understand what forms are, and that history is the changing of forms, then we are trapped like rats in our particular form and will be one more of history's victims...
All people have their forms... Their forms are how they build stability into their relationships... People can have a love relationship without the form of marriage, but if they seek stability rather than informality, they marry... But on a national level, the form of their government, or economy or riligion or education or all together can limit every person's perspective, their options, their freedom, and at the same time limit the whole societies freedom of movement and options... A whole society can get locked into an automatic mode of behavior, like we did in Afghanistan, saying we have to do this because they did that, or we will lose face... Where did that idea come from??? The East??? Some land of Ancient feudalism and tyranny??? How often does a culture as a form come to dominate their thoughts, or some form like race, as it did to the Germans??? The object is to play fast and loose with reality, and be able to adapt, and forms are how we adapt, but we must often reform the form or trash it all together... As Burman pointed out in Law and Revolution, nearly as soon as revolution was complete in a country, law as a form was quickly resurrected... By the end of the second world war, even the soviet Russians had attorneys and judges who could hold their own with the allies in the war crimes trials... And look at the code of Napoleon which transformed war torn Europe to such an extent that the royalist were never able to get it all back...
Instead of denying the role of moral forms in the creation of social forms, you should develop a consciousness of forms in our lives... Clearly and boldly, the moral forms that went into the creation of our constitution and declaration of independence are stated for all the world to see... Those moral forms suffer the weakness of all moral forms in the fact that they are infinites, and so cannot be defined... Yet we should know after 2oo plus years whether the social form is making any progress toward achieving its goals... The preamble is the least quoted section of the constitution...It is as though it does not exist, and why??? It is because the social form has failed and failed beyond any hope of reclaimation... The government does not work, and the society does not work, and the economy does not work, and it is not because the goals were unworthy of a great people, but because the form was subverted almost from conception...
