From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 21 2002 - 14:19:43 MDT
Charlie Stross wrote:
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.
### Those who never thought about the real consequences of losing liberty
indeed might follow the pattern of thought you outlined. Persons like me
realize that the loss of life usually follows not long after the loss of
liberty. The reason why most people do not vote libertarian, IMO, is that
libertarianism demands intellectual and moral purity which is hard to attain
for the social conservatives (who want to use violence to enforce their
customs), and socialists (who want to use force to satisfy their feelings of
financial envy).
-----
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.)
### You might try to analyze your own motivations on a higher level - why is
staying alive so important to you (and me, too)? Do you really want to stay
alive no matter what? From your previous statements I gather you are opposed
to the regulation of drugs. Yet, from a simple analysis of survival, an
effective drug war would prolong your life, by depriving you of one the poor
choices you can make to shorten it. Why do you oppose the drug war, if it is
fought provably in your own best interest? Let me venture an answer - what
matters is your freedom to choose life, or choose death, either one in any
fashion you wish! You do want freedom as the absolute, overriding
consideration. You would vigorously protest (I think) against a state
installing suicide-prevention circuits in your prefrontal cortex. You *want*
freedom.
As it is, the current implementation of your goal system (and mine) is
geared toward survival. Both of us would (in my case, grudgingly) trade some
of the narrowly defined liberties (e.g. to own guns, or to be tax-free and
safety-net-less) for optimized outcomes to our current primary, survival
goal. But, deep down, I know it is our wish to live that matters, not life
itself.
-------
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.
### Not really. This is true only if the motivations of persons forming this
society were much different from ours. However, if you apply libertarian
principles to a society consisting of persons who mainly wish to survive, I
think the result would be a state with many features of currently existing
ones but with a rigorous elimination of the abuse of power for religious or
economic, non-survival related purposes (drug laws, entitlements for the
rich, luxuries for the poor, etc.). See the application of the "Three
functions for the state" that I suggested.
Of course, not being a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, I am hardly an
authority here.
------
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.)
### Agreed.
Rafal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:19 MST