| ▲ | nopinsight 3 days ago |
| Freedom of association means that a clique does not have absolute power over you, right? Competition implies that cliques incompatible with most people’s values will wither. You can possibly live in the same house. It’s a bit like changing your insurance company or gym membership but with much larger consequences, if I understand the concept correctly (I’ve never read the novels mentioned). |
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| ▲ | glitchc 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I have no problem with cliques by way of freedom of association. But we have tried running society through cliques, and in all cases, what you end up with are variations of the mafia or worse. |
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| ▲ | nopinsight 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Modern colleges, startup incubators, professional associations are some examples of cliques that are better than mafia. I guess a key is that these cliques do not completely encompass every aspect of a member's life and do not use violence as a means to enforce their rules. |
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| ▲ | llamaimperative 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| In practice cliques have the same benefits to agglomeration that e.g. corporations and proto-governments do. So freedom of association can’t exist in practice for very long, at least not freedom to associate with multiple effectively-equal cliques. |
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| ▲ | nopinsight 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Cliques will certainly differ from one another and are likely to be unequal, much like “soft cliques” already exist today in larger cities. The question is more about how much power a clique should have and how exclusive and encompassing its membership should be, e.g., whether a person can belong to multiple cliques. | | |
| ▲ | llamaimperative 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The issue (and why states exist) is that powerful cliques end up doing bad things to other less powerful cliques, and usually the dimension of “power” that matters is not the one that you want actually making decisions broadly (e.g. who can be the most brutal and aggressive toward outsiders). |
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