From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Aug 31 2002 - 22:37:14 MDT
Charles writes
> > My attitude is that a powerful democracy like the US should
> > for it's own sake and the world's, establish a benevolent
> > hegemony when there are Hitlers, Tojos, and Stalins on
> > the loose. It's even possible that the US should establish
> > a hegemony *anyway*, like the Romans did. We want peace
> > and prosperity for everyone (historically speaking), and
> > we want huge death tolls like in Africa now to subside, and
> > we want as many people as possible involved in the Singularity.
> > Lee
>
> This is a thorny point. It's one thing to claim that we are doing it for our
> own benefit. When there are warlords stamping around, we do need to protect
> ourselves in some way, and techniques may be open to debate. What we can't
> honestly do is claim that we are doing it for the good of the others. This
> doesn't happen.
Or doesn't happen often, yes. I agree with your cautions
and the other points that you raise which complicate the
issue. Thorny indeed.
> I don't know if there *is* a moral way for large organizations of people to
> operate. Every surviving such organization that I have observed seems to be
> schizo...
"Moral"? It's not always wise to impose our personal or
community standards of morality on the big world, because
our own morality evolved specifically to deal with very
small numbers of people. To expand on this point, I admire
some American businessmen I've met who are extremely high-
minded and moral individuals regarding their honesty and
their genuine concern for their employees. Yet at the same
time, they show utterly no concern if a competitor flounders
or if someone they've been doing business for years goes
under. They hold what John Rockefeller pushed to an incredible
extreme: two sets of morality, one for home and one for
business:
Principle values of home morality:
Kindliness, cooperation, emotional attachment.
Principle values of business morality:
Honestly, reliability, competence.
(This is not to say that the latter are not on the former
list and vice-versa, but instead to prioritize what is most
important in each.)
Many of our problems in the world today arise because most
people can't handle more than one type of morality. Despite
the tremendous success, even inevitability of capitalism,
few attempt to learn about its standards and its moral
vs. immoral behavior, but instead struggle endlessly to
understand (and invariably condemn) from their personal
evolved morality. The same with nations. Since they
themselves would invariably help a starving neighbor
(and have the correct evolved instincts to do so), they
project this onto nations, and believe that exactly the
same standards must apply. They don't.
> Perhaps people can't run a sane organization the size of
> a country... or even the size of a corporation.
Again, what is "sane"? We must study history to determine
what is and isn't sane going back the last 5,000 years.
The only thing we've learned recently is that overly-centralized
control doesn't work for anything except waging war.
Lee
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