From: Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Aug 06 2002 - 23:58:03 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin@tsoft.com>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 7:03 PM
Subject: Existence and Survival of Nations (was Obedience to Law)
> Forrest writes
>
> > Nations do not do anything at all- they are fictitious entities
> > devoid of volition and action. Individual human beings cogitate,
> > win, lose, or draw irrespective of whatever collective the
> > theorist wishes to construct.
>
> Actually, human beings are fictitious entities. Cells, and
> ultimately quarks have real existence. (My turn for sarcasm :-)
There was no intention of sarcasm, it was simply pedagogic:
=======
The selection of a number of different humans to form into a collection is an arbitrary parameter imposed by the individual
theoretician. Consider a planet with a single human being, "Party A", on it- there are no groups of humans real or imagined. Add one
other person, "Party B", that is able to communicate, or engage in transactions, with the first; this forms an intermittent dyad-
the fundamental economic unit. A series of imagined contracts and exchanges of material ensues that need not be the result of
self-aware cognition. Each person evolves an internal model of reality different from the other, based on their own experiences and
physical viewpoint. A physically identifiable group consists of the two persons on a planet for a duration starting when the second
one shows up and ending when one of them leaves. The group so identified does not have a plan of its own independent of the plans of
the individual human beings. It is not able to cogitate independently of its putative members. The group does not make war, throw
parties, suffer attacks, or have any other behavior aside from the formation and dissolution process. That process itself is a
whimsical imposition of the observer's.
Add a third person, "Party C", to this system, able to engage in transactions with the first two persons. Party C may entertain
the private notion that he is entitled to take things claimed by Party A and hand some of them over to Party B. Parties A and B may
or may not hold similar views. Regardless of the unknowable individual views of any of the persons, there are no external factors at
work.
The procedure can be continued indefinitely, adding more persons to the system and restricting the groupings to arbitrary
spacetime intervals without loss of generality. A similar procedure of decomposition by arbitrary groups in arbitrary intervals
acheives the same result.
This demonstrates the non-existence of the State.
=======
> Well, I believe that nations are real, although they have at
> present nowhere near the integrity of people. They're real
> in the same way that corporations, communities, and baseball
> teams are real. Unlike you, I believe that we all understand
> the facts here, but disagree on the semantics (not, of course,
> to be confused with mere *terminology*).
> "Despotic"? Don't you find the distinction between the regimes
> in the old U.S.S.R., Castro's Cuba, Hitler's Germany, or China
> and the US, UK, today's Germany worth anything?
Comparing and contrasting is a valuable analytic tool. The contrasts are often noted, less often we see the comparisons between
current US and Nazi Germany, the USSR, 1930's US, or the Roman Empire. Each of those examples provide valuable insights.
> If the US hadn't
> believed in itself,
see above
> then it would have succumbed to the USSR.
If certain alleged Americans (Council on Foreign Relations founders, for example) had not helped fund the Bolshevik coup, and helped
prop up the Soviet Union throughout its sordid history, it would have collapsed shortly after its construction.
> Or is your reading of history completely different from mine?
Of course it is! No two internal model-building entities can have identical interpretations of events.
-- Forrest Bishop Chairman, Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering www.iase.cc
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:56 MST