From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Date: Tue Mar 25 1997 - 12:23:45 MST
> When we're discussing the nature of political possibility, I think the
> population economists would think of is not the dozens or hundreds of
> highly educated or popular people, but the millions and billions of
> people who have had their little inputs into society. When, for
> example, you advocate anarchist solutions, you are saying that all
> societies, for all of human history, have been making the same mistake
> of having government. That's a very strong claim. Can you pit your
> logic and experience against the thought and experience of billions of
> people?
Yes, I can. Reality is not a matter of consensus. It exists the way it
does regardless of what 5 billion people think. If one man has a clearer
vision of some facet of it, and he can demonstrate it, the masses have
no choice but to abandon their mistaken consensus, or it is they who are
irrational. The existence of governments is a powerful consensus, and
it is hard to fight, because it is hard to do controlled empirical
research on the hearts of the multitude. But it is not impossible to
observe and draw some reasonable conclusions, and to attack some bad
ideas and revisionist history.
> And once you have, can you convince those people that you're not nuts to
> begin with?
That's not easy sometimes, because the definition of "nuts" is usually
by consensus rather than objective criteria. But it is necessary to try.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:18 MST