From: Olga Bourlin (fauxever@sprynet.com)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 22:21:49 MDT
From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
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. >>
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 politics 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?".
Good point. But 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.
Agree that most humans lack rationality - in fact, our most "advanced" and
civilized cultures lack rationality. But beyond the problem of finding what
is "rational," how are we going to administer that rationality? By
injecting it? Lacing it in chocolate bars? Electro-shock therapy?
> 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.
Okay, I'm out of my political box for the moment. I would love to get the
latest recipe for Rational Gingerbread Men.
Olga
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