From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 14:17:29 MDT
On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 08:00:37AM -0700, Olga Bourlin wrote:
>
> Realistically and IMHO I don't think we'll ever see a libertarian society.
> Don't think there has ever been a time when a libertarian society worked,
> and don't know of any successful libertarian county presently.
This will likely bring up a long thread. I have the impression that the
classical example discussed by David Friedman would be medieval Iceland.
It is also interesting to look at the current Somali rebound. Both
examples have plenty of problems as examples (population densities, clan
structures, previous systems and their remaining side-effects). Lots of
food for debate and analysis.
> One has to
> ask: why? One reason, I speculate, is that humans are imbued with the
> "selfish gene" meme - a condition that can be described as a three-pronged
> tragicomic mask: the good, the bad and the ugly. An all-libertarian
> society imagines that mask can be all good. But underneath the mask we are,
> nevertheless, only human.
And this list is about transcending a lot of human traits. I think a
more relevant question than "will there ever be a libertarian" society
(which carries a lot of standard olitics with it) is to rephrase it as
"will there ever be a society based mostly or completely on non-coercive
interactions? And how can we get (closer) to it?".
That people often are selfish is not the main problem here, since
rational selfish actors can form non-coercive societies. The problem is
the lack of rationality, which causes people to choose suboptimal
selfish solutions ("greed"), and to some extent irrational behavior
causing people to pursue inconsistent subgoals that disrupt their
supergoals. One approach would be to find ways to diminish these
factors, which is likely hard but can be quite transhumanistically
rewarding, another would be to study what institutions and rule-sets can
buffer such factors with a minimum of coercion.
Libertarians (and many others) think they have models of such
institutions, which are then usually what is being debated. But it might
be interesting to step outside the political box and see what categories
of institutions would be able to handle such issues (preferably without
assuming specific technologies or human mindsets) and then analyse how
such institutions could be fitted together into social systems, as well
as which could be started now or be created out of the material of our
current institutions.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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