From: Richard Brodie (RBrodie@brodietech.com)
Date: Tue Jan 07 1997 - 13:27:33 MST
John K. Clark wrote:
>At any rate,
>the chances that my vote will influence things is so small that it's
>not worth
>my time to study the issues very deeply, the result is that the
>politician
>with the better hairdo gets to make the decisions.
True, your own vote is worth little. But the memes you spread to
influence others' votes are potentially much more powerful.
>I am proposing Anarchy because History has shown that limited
>government does
>not stay limited for long. It seems to be in the fundamental nature of
>a state
>to increase it's power. By definition a state has power an individual
>or
>corporation does not have, it's inevitable that it will use that power,
>however small it starts out to be, to gain even more power, the process
>increases exponentially until people revolt. The lesson from history is
>clear,
>the only solution is to eliminate governments completely.
Rule #72b: Never trust any conclusion that "the lesson from history is
clear." Before H. sapiens came on the scene, the lesson from history was
clear that no such creature could exist.
You are right that cultural viruses such as governments evolve to
increase their power. I wrote about this in Chapter 9 of Virus of the
Mind. However, your conclusion that the people will then revolt at some
point is unsupported. In fact, you could argue that the main benefit of
a democracy is providing a kind of "safety valve" such that if the
people get very upset, they can vote everybody out of office and feel
like they've accomplished something without a revolution. Giving the
vote to the 18-20-year-olds may have been a recognition of that process.
Finally, any proposal to "eliminate governments completely" is silly on
the face of it. Who would enforce it? The government? Human society is a
meme pool. If you dissolve all the existing structures -- even if it
were possible -- new structures would soon arise and self-organize.
Richard
Richard Brodie RBrodie@brodietech.com +1.206.688.8600
CEO, Brodie Technology Group, Inc., Bellevue, WA, USA
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie
Do you know what a "meme" is?
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/meme.htm
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