Indeed.
Your philosophy now reminds me of Thomas Hobbes, and Han Fei of Ancient China.
Never heard of Han Fei, I’ll have to take a look into that. Can you give me the basic scoop on that?
He was born in 280 bc, he believed humans were totally selfish, and most people were ignorant and stupid.
If they weren’t told what to do at knifepoint, for their own good and the good of the state, by the dictator and his army, all hell would break loose, there could be no democracy, or liberty.
He thought the dictator should make most of the laws, but also be subject to them, his own laws, hence the philosophical school he founded was known as legalism.
Han fei believed in the supremacy of the king, and the law.
It was one of the major schools of Chinese thought, along with Confucianism, Daoism, the philosophy of Mo, and the philosophy of Yang.
At one point it was the dominant philosophy in China, but eventually Confucianism supplanted it among the elite, and Daoism and Buddhism among the people.
He sounds like my kind of philosopher king then. I will have to read up on this.
Yea you should, I think it’ll resonate with you.
At the time of Han Fei, there was no China, instead there were many independent kingdoms, each warring for supremacy, and many independent schools of thought as well, each vying for the hearts and minds of Chinese, but legalism helped one kingdom flourish, and unite all the others under its dominion by brute force, and out of that, imperial China was born, and it lasted for nearly 2000 years.
Okay, so Confucianism prevailed over Han Fei’s legalism because of Confucian individualism, every fucking time it is individualism! The more I read into extreme forms of individualism the more I come to despise it. Society is collective based not individualist!
Society is not the sum of its individual parts but rather its entire whole together!
Well yeah, say what you want about dictatorships but understand that they’re very effective concerning societal coordination. They’ve effectively created all nations that we all live in currently.
Rather than Confucianism being based on individualism, it was based on the family, and tradition. Confucians believed there should be a king, but they thought the king should have limits, he shouldn’t micromanage, or be too harsh, otherwise the people had the right to rebel.
They believed father should rule over son, son over mother, and mother over daughter.
They thought the king should rule over his subjects, but with leniency, compassion, and according to Chinese Customs, where as legalists were more radical, revolutionary, they didn’t care about religion, nor tradition, they were secular progressives.
They thought the law should be brutal, uncompromising, that the people had no right to rebel.
I guess you could say it’s sort of the same difference between constitutional monarchy and totalitarian dictatorship, Confucianism and legalism.
Confucianism also upheld traditional hierarchies, the nobility, where as legalism was radical here too, they wanted to do away with the old aristocracy, and the relationship between it and the people, and appoint new rulers at will, based more on merit than nepotism.
Legalism was a very top-down philosophy, where as Confucianism preferred a more organic hierachy, and ultimately it was Confucianism in China that won out.