From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 04:25:20 MDT
On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 11:23:55AM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 04:00:16AM -0400, Michael Wiik wrote:
> > Given that I'm informed mostly by my recent reading of the available
> > chapters of Gatto's history of education, I am at a loss to see how
> > libertarianism and utopianism can be reconciled. They seem at odds to
> > me. Is this a possible strange loop within extropianism?
Here's an interesting point: all the utopias I've come across are framed
in terms of a static (or repeating) social structure that claims to be
the One True Way for human beings to exist. Ever since Plato utopias
have been designed prescriptively, to fit the ideologues' view of human
nature. Thus, they're all based on the idea that there *is* an unchanging,
absolutist, human nature that we'll all be much happier conforming to.
As a liberal, and one who believes in the idea of transhumanism, I find
this idea -- of a static human nature -- rather bizarrely unpleasant,
not to mention small-C conservative. (It implies that we're sentenced to
live in a cage, forever or unto extinction. Bugger that!)
Curiously, although Marx sketched in the outline of a communist utopia,
the bloody-handed Leninists who tried to implement it found themselves
forced to adopt, as a keystone of their ideology, the idea that human
nature is a variable: that by trying hard they could eventually invent
the New Communist Man (and woman) who'd be happy communists by instinct
rather than coercion. If they'd opted for the traditional view of
utopia, the Leninist project would have had to encompass an internal
contradiction. Anyway, the need to believe in the plasticity of human
nature led to the popularity of Lysenko with Stalin, among other things.
> Overall, your view is quite common. People seem far more willing to
> accept the ideas of other ideological utopias than the libertarian one.
> Perhaps it is because libertarianism isn't trying to create utopia at
> all? After all, utopianism is based on the idea that there exists an
> ideal society we should strive towards, which implies that once there
> change should stop. But libertarianism is more about a *direction* to
> move, and has no end of history. Societies never become perfect, they
> will always change and the important thing is to let the inhabitants
> develop themselves freely in better ways.
I've got another idea, and it's more to do with the reason most people
*don't* vote for libertarians. It's quite simple: to most people, liberty
is seen as something important to which they'll pay lip service -- but it's
not seen as the most important value in their life, and they see little or
no value in protecting others' liberty.
I find it hard to fault this approach because it works for me. Liberty is
*not* an absolute value that overrides other things like staying alive,
having food, water, and shelter, staying out of unpleasant environments
(like prisons), and so on. If you point a gun at my head and tell me I
can be a free corpse or a live slave, I'll take slavery. (For just as
long as it takes me to escape -- but I'd rather stay alive than die to
make a point of principle.)
If you try to envisage a society in which everyone works on the maxim
that their liberty is a primary goal -- worse, one where everyone acts to
maximize *everyone's* liberty -- it looks very different from our own.
A lot of strategies for maximizing individual liberty are zero-sum or
even negative-sum: societies based on maximized individual liberty aren't
necessarily very safe places to live. Societies based on maximizing
collective liberty may be even worse -- look at the wartime exigencies
forced on the population of the UK to resist the Third Reich, for example.
Simply put, the libertarian bed is uncomfortably close to procrustean: most
people don't *want* to play for ultimate stakes all the time.
> Then again, there are many interesting looks at libertarian societies in
> sf. Ken MacLeod has played around quite a bit with them in his books
> (_The Star Fraction_ and _Stone Canal_ comes to mind), without assuming
> them to be perfect or bound to fail.
Bingo. (My take on the matter is that liberty is important -- quite
possibly *the* most important abstract priority we should follow --
but pinning such a high priority on most of the minutiae of daily life
is simply not going to make for a comfortable environment. I'm happier
contemplating societies that try to optimize liberty than those that
strive to maximize it.)
:
> My guess is that you are thinking in terms of utopias/dystopias in
> fiction. A well written scenario can help you think about how different
> societies could work, but there are also a lot of societies based on
> total handwaving or hidden assumptions. The author can "decide" the laws
> of sociology in the same way as he can decide the laws of
> faster-than-light travel within his book. The end result can be
> anything: Wil McCarthy suggests that the only true stable form is
> monarchy (in _The Collapsium_) and Larry Niven has libertarianism
> collapse immediately in _The Cloak of Anarchy_. But does it tell us
> anything?
At least Wil McCarthy has Bayes theorem on his side. (Niven hasn't
explained why the Victorian nearly-minarchist state degraded gracefully
instead of simply collapsing.) As far as democracy goes, as the Chinese
ambassador said (when asked his opinion of the French revolution),
"it's too early to tell".
My money is on there being no practical stable utopian system that can
be achieved, short of modifying the participants to the point where they
barely qualify as human any more. (And if proved wrong, I'd like to place
a side bet on the actual working utopia being based on some theory of
society that hasn't been invented yet, rather than on something already
in existence.)
> When you say "oppressive capitalism" what you are really describing is
> corporativism, and it is indeed closely linked to the original fascism.
> But such a society would hardly be stable, since corporativism is far
> less creative and efficient than free markets. This means that the
> corporativist states will over time lag behind the others, undermining
> their power. The only way of remaining stable would be to keep the rest
> of the world subjugated or corporativist - but then we are at Orwell's
> boot forever stomping the face. Somehow that doesn't seem to be a
> worthwhile goal, neither for transhumanism or humanity in general, does
> it?
Indeed not. (Nor is it a worthwhile goal for anyone with a liberal bone
in their body.) Sadly, it doesn't seem to be too hard to get there from
here. As witness the way the slowly-forming global free trade system seems
to be being hijacked by non-human entities with their own agenda that
conflicts with that of the humans who created them.
> Similarly, 'true' communism is likely not stable at all, since it relies
> on a very high level of altruism with very weak reinforcement and
> incentive mechanisms.
See "Lysenkoism", above. (Although I'd rather live in a state that ran
on high levels of altruism than one that ran on a boot stamping on an
unprotected face.)
-- Charlie
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