RE: Halloween Contest #3 Entry - "Near Dark" is the Perfect Vampire Movie
That's really the underlying principle of Lord Acton's famous quote. He understood human nature... People are inherently bad, self serving and self absorbed unless acted upon by some outside force- hence the need for God. Born of sin and all that. You really should read my Night Gods series... That's what it's all about- a study of evil. We don't need Satan to blame evil on... it's as much a part of us as breathing.
The fatal flaw in Marxist theory is the assumption that people are inherently good- altruistic. Marx blames capitalism for man's downfall. Like everything else, he got it backward. The thing about all of these neo-anarchists that makes me laugh is the whole Non aggression principle... what a joke. They seem to believe that if we get rid of government everybody will just get along. The first thing that would happen is that some hungry culture that doesn't believe that shit would walk in kick their asses and take all their shit!
A little different perspective;
the statists (Marxist, leftists, etc) assume that the state is good, and thus individual responsibility can be thrown aside...obey and be rewarded with utopia
It is those to the far Right (anarchists; extreme Libertarians) that put rely on the assumption that humanity is good, and if we got rid of government we'd all sit around singing th happy Utopia song in harmony.
with both extremes, individual responsibility for maintain their own liberty is thrown aside
FWIW, the more I read of NAP, the more I like it, as it does rely on personal responsibility to be good and to defend one's self
but you hear about the most about NAP from those that use it to justify their own version of Utopia, and who properly don't understand it fully, or who simply refuse to acknowledge human nature.
A similar situation; many Christians see a primary facet of morality in the Commandants in thou shalt not kill; however, the original commandment was thou shall not murder
you usually get this faulty understanding form pacifists in Christian thought (not from ALL Christians)
The NAP only works if you get everybody else to go along with it... I'm one of those "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy a gun!"