Does that mean that I now have to spend my time in the evening doing the "monolithic state apparatus'" job instead of going for a meal with my partner?
Yes. Because we are all responsible. But guess what, you'd be sharing the job with 7 billion other people, so the total workload would be like 5 minutes on a Thursday morning every other month. Could you spare that?
Please read a book called "Leviathan" [1] by Thomas Hobbes and maybe a little of Jean Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract" [2] to balance it up.
The state is not your enemy, but also it is not your nanny, there to wipe your bottom and hold your feeding bottle because you "pay taxes".
There's plenty of time for dining out and being a responsible, participating citizen.
The fact that you can bring up two books to support your opinion doesn't mean I agree with it. They are pretty much classics and anybody who was interested in philosophy would have already been familiar with it.
> Yes. Because we are all responsible. But guess what, you'd be sharing the job with 7 billion other people, so the total workload would be like 5 minutes on a Thursday morning every other month. Could you spare that?
You can't do serious politics spending 5 minutes on Thursday morning every other month. It takes me more time to plan my night commute back home on a Friday night.
Of course. Besides, they are faulted books (and thinkers). It's not really my "opinion" I'm trying to get across so much as the "Western Ideal" (the thing we're all assumed to believe in and accept as a foundation of life). A pillar of that is shared responsibility through the proxy of the State.
Namely that the "State" is there to serve us because it is us. The ideas of a General Will, Social Contract etcetera are the reason we give legitimacy to parliaments, congress, politicians, local councils and even monarchs. They are servants.
Otherwise they're just "people in power to be fought". The only alternatives, understood since Aristotle, are undesirable forms of tyranny where armed revolution is the latent objective of all free men. The deal/contract is that we are also those servants ourselves )we share power and responsibility* to a proxy or figurehead in which we invest loyally/trust and some temporary decision making powers. That's the sense in which the state takes away the burden of daily politics, freeing us for work and living.
> You can't do serious politics spending 5 minutes on Thursday morning every other month.
Not literally. I was joking a little. That's a metaphor for the small effort required by all people to maintain a democratic government of the people.
If anything, internet communication has saddled us with the worry of global affairs and economics that the social contract was supposed to unburden us of. You spend far more time concerned with the affairs of monolithic governance than enjoying nice dinners out - just by reading the "news", and a give it much more mind than a peasant from 300 years ago ever would have.
Another problem is that people are told they have ever more responsibility (through markets) and are stripped of ever more power. Our governments shrug while we are helpless to change things.
In that sense the "Social Contract" is broken. In order to fix it we ought to to know at least what it is (because we've forgotten), hence I make the effort to explain that where I can.
