Originally Posted by tandempower

I just googled 'realpolitik' and it is a term that seems to describe your position fairly well. Would you agree? I dislike it because it doesn't matter to me how many people gang up to force their view of reality on a minority or individual, wrong is wrong - and I don't believe in social-cultural relativism where right and wrong are considered arbitrary cultural constructions. Making people work for you (or pay money) to use land that you have put no labor into for their benefit is wrong. It's one thing to protect yourself, your property, and the fruits of your labor against abuses. It's something else to territorialize land purely for the sake of forcing people into paying fees, taxes, tolls, etc. for your benefit. How would you like it if some clever bullies or businesspeople bought up all the land around your house and charged you a toll to leave home? They could tell tell you "this is just how it works in reality" but it would still be wrong.


It is a slave mentality. It is the mentality that we're essentially not free until we earn the right to exercise freedom. Reality is that we are inherently free and people territorialize areas to obstruct others' inherent freedom. You can normalize it all you like but it doesn't make it right, nor is it 'reality' at the most fundamental level. Maybe at the normative level but norms aren't reality, they're social-cultural constructs.


Great. My point is that it's not stealing. It is a method of simple living. And if you want to know why this topic came up in this thread, ask the people who decided to question me for explaining my view of simple living as being rooted in the ideal of freely traveling while making minimum impact and engaging in minimum economic interdependency.