Ship of Fools (was Re: Correlations and politics)

Bill Powers
(2007.09.12.0926 MDT) to Mike Acree (2007.09.11.1303 PDT) –

I don’t think

you’re being hostile, but I think you’re supporting a policy that I
consider

to be against the best interests of everyone, in fact downright
dangerous.

That’s the rub. How do you deal with awful policies like these? I

knew that Bush’s policies, which lean toward lowered government

regulation/service, would be disastrous for the poor and
"middle

class" (they work out great for the upper 1% apparently). But who
knew

those policies would kill 1,000,000 or more innocent people who had

the bad fortune to be living in a country that we decided to

“improve”.
[From Bill Powers (2007.09.14.1443 MDT)]

Rick Marken (2007.09.14.1215)]

You do the obvious: what you can. You are disturbed; you are a control
system; disturbed control systems push back; ergo, you push back as best
you can. But that doesn’t change what is wrong. The conflict is still
there and its effects will return even if you win. Also if you lose; your
fate is immaterial in the long run.

When you’re not busy pushing back more or less ineffectively, you can
devote your time and energy to finding a permanent solution that removes
the conflicts. That is what PCT is about. That is why we talk about
theory and think up experiments and try to spread the understanding of
people as control systems through writing books and articles. That is the
kind of thing that will lead to a permanent solution, so there will be
nothing to push back against. We will develop the MOL attitude further
and teach more people how to put it into practice, and we will keep
talking not about this side or that side of the conflict, but about the
system concepts that are pitted against each other, each one existing for
what seem to be good reasons, each control system being driven to extreme
actions by extreme errors.

Yes, it’s all horrible. Some day it will all be part of horrible
histories, but it won’t really matter because then we will not do things
that way any more. The horrible histories will just show how we got from
then to the future. Right now we happen to be in the messy middle of
humanity’s adolescence, so we won’t be able to enjoy the final outcome.
That being the case, we have nothing better to do than try to hasten the
day. Push back when you must, but remember that pushing back leaves us
right where we were. We have something better to do, when we
can.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Rick Marken (2007.08.20.1420)]

Bill Powers (2007.08.20.1020 MDT)

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I say that when you push
on a control system, it pushes back...

The question is, who are you saying this TO, who is not already of the same
opinion? .. . If your answers include those who have the opposite opinion, then
we have to ask if those people are control systems, and if they are, what their
reaction will be on hearing what you say. That's basically what I was asking
about when I mentioned "pushing back."

This is the same problem we have in terms of trying to "push" PCT.
People who have not already convinced themselves that people are
purposive systems are simply going to push back. But the problem is a
bit more desperate with politics and governance, so I empathize with
Bryan's desperation.

Those of us in the US are riding on a ship that we have agreed (twice,
to the chagrin of many of us) to have piloted by one George W. Bush.
This ship looks to some of us like it's running aground. So the
inclination is to "push" the commander and those who support him in a
new direction -- for the sake of self-preservation (or, in my case,
for the sake of my children, who will have to pay, with a much lower
standard of living, for Bush's transfer of the ship's wealth to his
cronies).

So what does one do? If things are not bad enough in the US for you,
think about what you would do if you were a Jew living in Germany in
1937 -- just 70 years ago. Or a Palestinian living in Palestine in
1947? How do we deal with leaders who produce bad consequences for the
whole ship -- and the often rather small set of enablers on the ship
who make it possible for such leaders to remain in control?

I don't think "pushing" against such problems is the answer (like
Hamlet, I sometimes want to rise up against a sea of troubles and, by
opposing, end them, but then I think that maybe 'tis nobler in the
mind to suffer the slings and arrows of the Bush administration) but I
can sure empathize with the inclination to do some serious pushing.

Who knows?

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
Lecturer in Psychology
UCLA
rsmarken@gmail.com

I don’t think
“pushing” against such problems is the answer (like

Hamlet, I sometimes want to rise up against a sea of troubles and,
by

opposing, end them, but then I think that maybe 'tis nobler in the

mind to suffer the slings and arrows of the Bush administration) but
I

can sure empathize with the inclination to do some serious
pushing.
[From Bill Powers (2007.08.20. 1640 MDT)]

Rick Marken (2007.08.20.1420) –

I don’t know what the answer is, either. I’m just trying to use PCT to
predict the outcome of various things that might be tried. If there’s a
conflict and the only possible solution is to win it, then I suppose one
had better concentrate on becoming as strong, physically, as possible. On
the other hand, that will result in the other side doing the same thing,
which leaves the outcome still uncertain. If the real answer is that the
most violent one wins, then it would seem that one has to be sure to be
more violent than the other side can be. But not all of us want to end up
like that.

Maybe there’s some other answer.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Fred Nickols (2007.08.21.0542 EDT)]

[From Bill Powers (2007.08.20. 1640 MDT)]

Rick Marken (2007.08.20.1420) --

> I don't think "pushing" against such problems is the answer (like
>Hamlet, I sometimes want to rise up against a sea of troubles and, by
>opposing, end them, but then I think that maybe 'tis nobler in the
>mind to suffer the slings and arrows of the Bush administration) but I
>can sure empathize with the inclination to do some serious pushing.

I don't know what the answer is, either. I'm just trying to use PCT
to predict the outcome of various things that might be tried. If
there's a conflict and the only possible solution is to win it, then
I suppose one had better concentrate on becoming as strong,
physically, as possible. On the other hand, that will result in the
other side doing the same thing, which leaves the outcome still
uncertain. If the real answer is that the most violent one wins, then
it would seem that one has to be sure to be more violent than the
other side can be. But not all of us want to end up like that.

Maybe there's some other answer.

Best,

Bill P.

There is. In a word it's "organization." Given sufficient numbers of people organized against the Bush administration (as seems likely to be the case), the Bush administration will be pushed from office (as seems likely to be the case). Organization can be loose or tight (right now, it's mostly loose). I believe the voters will overwhelmingly reject the Bush administration come election time next year. But, that's a prediction (or perhaps wishful thinking). In any event, organizing and the resultant organization is one way to muster overwhelming opposition. I guess that's a disturbance for which there is no compensatory action.

Organization(s) don't have to be big to work their wonders. Consider Saul Alinsky. All you have to do, according to Saul, is get your hands on the balls of the party you're after and you can pretty much persuade them to come around to your point of view. How to do that with George W Bush? I think it's too late for that. The two architects of the Bush administration are gone (Wolfowitz earlier and soon Rove).

My concern isn't about how to push Bush to change before he leaves; it's too late for that. I'm more concerned with the kinds of things he might do before leaving. I'm hopeful we can rely on Congress to stymie any overly outrageous moves.

···

--
Regards,

Fred Nickols
Managing Principal
Distance Consulting
nickols@att.net
www.nickols.us

"Assistance at A Distance"

Maybe there’s some other
answer.
There is. In a word it’s
“organization.” … In any event, organizing and the resultant
organization is one way to muster overwhelming opposition. I guess
that’s a disturbance for which there is no compensatory
action.
[From Bill Powers (2007.08.21.0658 MDT)]

Fred Nickols (2007.08.21.0542 EDT) –

That’s not an “other” answer, it’s just the same answer
multiplied by as many people as get organized. I believe that’s been
tried. You’re describing the basis of war, aren’t you? This is the
natural outcome of conflict: group escalation as far as it can go, until
one group is destroyed, or both.

What I’m thinking of as a substitute is reorganization (by everybody).
But to sustain reorganization, there must be something to be gained by
it, for everyone. And perhaps even more important, everyone must be
perceiving the situation from a high enough level of organization
(individual, not group, organization). Someone has to be able to look at
the escalating conflict and point out, in a convincing manner, that this
is pretty stupid, since we’ve been doing things that way long enough to
know what is going to happen and what it will cost. And others have to be
awake enough to say, “Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.” Maybe
they will put together the daily costs in Iraq and all those rotting
bridges in the US.

I think we’re seeing signs of reorganization in the Bush administration
and even in the Republican party. Perhaps it’s time to start the real
Anti-War movement. How much longer do we have to go on wasting our
energies trying to cancel out each other’s productivity, ingenuity,
organization, and labor? How long must the justice system go on being
based on conflict rather than a search for truth? How long must politics
continue to be conducted by small groups trying to defeat and thwart
other small groups? How long must we continue to teach children that they
must defeat all those who want similar things, to keep others from
enjoying life, too? How long must we teach that sharing is for sissies,
and caring is for kooks? Wow, I could get rich writing political
slogans.

Organization(s)
don’t have to be big to work their wonders. Consider Saul
Alinsky. All you have to do, according to Saul, is get your hands
on the balls of the party you’re after and you can pretty much persuade
them to come around to your point of view.

Hey, what a charming idea. Unfortunately, because there are
proportionally as many balls in one organization as in any other, it
fails as soon as everyone realizes how charming it is, because then it
comes back down to who is the strongest, not who is the smartest or the
goodest. The good guys are strongest only half of the time (results of
latest poll of everyone involved). Not very good odds, when you consider
all the people in a position to make an offer you can’t refuse.
Government by Mafia?
I don’t think Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz are being
defeated by overwhelming physical force. I think they’ve discovered that
they have to change because what they were doing was losing them what
they most wanted. That’s very hard to admit, of course, and the evidence
had to get pretty strong before the changes began. But changes did begin.
Now all we have to do is understand what happened, and remember it the
next time. Just what did these people want, and why did they want it, and
what would they have got if they had achieved it? They are now,
evidently, seeing that they were losing what they wanted, and they’ve
changed what they are doing to get whatever it is that they really
want. I think resigning counts as changing what you’re doing. So what is
it they wanted? They can’t conceal it and still try to get it. Not if
we’re smart enough to apply the Test.

How to do
that with George W Bush? I think it’s too late for that. The
two architects of the Bush administration are gone (Wolfowitz earlier and
soon Rove).

My concern isn’t about how to push Bush to change before he leaves; it’s
too late for that. I’m more concerned with the kinds of things he
might do before leaving. I’m hopeful we can rely on Congress to
stymie any overly outrageous moves.

I hope so, too, but that isn’t the most important consideration because
someone else will come along and try to do the same thing. We need to
reorganize the system so we don’t teach people from the cradle to slaver
for power over other people, which is what the adversarial system breeds.
We need to teach people about system concepts so they can start seeing
how their own hopes and dreams depend on having a system that encourages
everyone’s hopes and dreams – not a system where achieving one person’s
dreams requires destroying someone else’s.

We now have the knowledge and the means to provide a good life for every

person in this country. All we lack is the will to do it. The few who
would not be better off can, I hope, be convinced that what they really
want in life can’t be obtained by being better than most other people.
Contempt, derision, and pity can go a long way toward changing people’s
minds about how to get what they want. Reserving approval for those of
whom we actually approve would help, too. Do you think Bush liked seeing
himself portrayed as Alfred E. Neuman, or as a stupid monkey? Do you
think he wasn’t embarrassed by seeing his own mangled language in print,
or hearing it quoted on comedy shows? That isn’t what he was hoping to
get out of being President. If he wants love, admiration, and
understanding, he must know now that what he’s been doing isn’t going to
get that for him. I suspect he does know it. He must be bitterly,
bitterly disappointed. We should guard against driving him to suicide, if
only because of who would then be President, but also because charity is
a virtue.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Mike Acree (2007.09.04.1208 PDT)]

Bill Powers (2007.08.21.0658 MDT)–

Sorry to be interjecting a note so drastically out of sequence, but I’m
not the only one to find that interesting threads don’t always arise when
you have time to comment. There were some nice points made in this post
(and others) about seeking solutions to system conflicts by going up a
level. The very interesting situation, as it appears to me, is that
theoretically the solution is already at hand, but it’s one that almost
nobody wants, so it won’t happen. Anyone proposing a
“solution” at such a level, in any event, will need to take account
of an argument by Robert Nozick:

Wittgenstein,
Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsburg,
Harry Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey Stengel, The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses,
Einstein, Hugh Hefner, Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Baba Ram Dass,
Gandhi, Sir Edmund Hillary, Raymond Lubitz, Buddha, Frank Sinatra, Columbus,
Freud, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams, Thomas Edison,
H. L. Mencken, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Ellison, Bobby Fischer, Emma Goldman,
Peter Kropotkin, you, and your parents. Is there really one kind of life which is best for each of
these people? Imagine all of them living in any utopia you’ve ever
seen described in detail. Try to describe the society which would be best
for all of these persons to live in. Would it be agricultural or
urban? Of great material luxury or of austerity with basic needs
satisfied? What would relations between the sexes be like? Would
there be any institution similar to marriage? Would it be
monogamous? Would children be raised by their parents? Would there
be private property? Would there be a serene secure life or one with
adventures, challenges, dangers, and opportunities for heroism? Would
there be one, many, any religion? How important would it be in people’s
lives? Would people view their life as importantly centered about private
concerns or about public action and issues of public policy? Would they
be single-mindedly devoted to particular kinds of accomplishments and work or
jack-of-all-trades and pleasures or would they concentrate on full and
satisfying leisure activities? Would children be raised permissively,
strictly? Will sports be important in people’s lives (as
spectators, participants)? Will art? Will sensual pleasures or
intellectual activities predominate? Or what? Will there be
fashions in clothing? Will great pains be taken to beautify
appearance? What will the attitude toward death be? Would
technology and gadgets play an important role in the society? And so on.

The
idea that there is one best composite answer to all of these questions, one
best society for everyone to live
in, seems to me to be an incredible one. (And the idea that, if there is
one, we now know enough to describe it is even more incredible.). . . .

The
conclusion to draw is that there will not be one
kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia
will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which
people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some
kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities
will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole
lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are
at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their
own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others
(Anarchy, State, and Utopia,
1974, pp. 310-312).

Nozick’s idea of “utopia as
‘meta-utopia’” would appear to exhibit the quality of
“going up a level,” and it seems as theoretically satisfactory as
could be achieved: If allowing everybody to choose the kind of community they
wanted to live in would not work, I frankly cannot imagine what on earth
would. On the other hand, almost everyone—including many on this
list—would strenuously object to such an arrangement. It seems
clear that resolving, or avoiding, conflict between system concepts is not
something most people are controlling for with any appreciable gain. Perhaps
the problem is that the very high level of the conflict in this case means that
few people experience it as a disturbance. If Christianity or Islam is
the highest level concept in your own hierarchy, for example, then there may
appear to be no possible solution but destroying the other; it is, perhaps,
only someone whose system concepts go a level higher than that who will be
distressed by that conflict per se.

One notable group for whom system
conflicts don’t create a serious disturbance comprises all those who expect to prevail. And that’s
almost everybody. Especially when you know God is on your side, victory can
only be a matter of time. End of conflict. Americans, for their
part, are also peculiarly accustomed to getting their way in international
conflicts. There are plenty of disputes about domestic policy, to be
sure, but these are typically interpreted in partisan terms, so nobody expects
to be on the losing side beyond the range of the next election. But I
think the more important explanation for relative indifference to conflict at
this level is the one I was pointing to in my Liberty
article. Conservatives will not be satisfied merely to see the libertines
withdrawing to form their own community. If anything, they would feel
even more frustrated. Judging from history, they would feel entirely
justified in invading and destroying all the infidels. Likewise liberals
would not stand for wealthy people withdrawing to form their own
community. (Nozick: Let us call, for convenience, a territory which
does not allow rational inhabitants to emigrate an east-berlin.) Everybody wants to impose their
standards on everyone else—even if they live in a different territory
where they will never have to come in contact with them. I think the
prospects for peace are pretty well captured in that realization.

For reasons which I explained in my Liberty
article, I can see no prospects for change until religion ceases to be an
influence in people’s lives. Not that there is anything
objectionable about ascetic moral codes, or the lives to which a whole-hearted
commitment to them leads. The damage comes rather from people believing
that these are codes which they are all supposed to follow, whether they really
feel like it or not. If we were ever to reach a state where religious
codes were not a dominant influence, and where people in general were thinking
for themselves, then the political conflicts would largely take care of
themselves.

Mike

Bill Powers (2007.08.21.0658
MDT)–

Sorry to be interjecting a note so drastically out of sequence, but I’m
not the only one to find that interesting threads don’t always arise when
you have time to comment. There were some nice points made in this
post (and others) about seeking solutions to system conflicts by going up
a level. The very interesting situation, as it appears to me, is
that theoretically the solution is already at hand, but it’s one that
almost nobody wants, so it won’t happen. Anyone proposing a
“solution” at such a level, in any event, will need to take account of an
argument by Robert Nozick:

Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor,
Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsburg, Harry
Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey Stengel, The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses,
Einstein, Hugh Hefner, Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Baba Ram Dass,
Gandhi, Sir Edmund Hillary, Raymond Lubitz, Buddha, Frank Sinatra,
Columbus, Freud, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams,
Thomas Edison, H. L. Mencken, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Ellison, Bobby
Fischer, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, you, and your parents. Is
there really one kind of life which is best for each of these
people?
[From Bill Powers (2007.09.05.0844 MDT)]

Mike Acree (2007.09.04.1208
PDT) –

This is a very interesting point. The answer depends on the level at
which you’re thinking. At the level of what you like, what you do for a
living, what you believe about things you can’t know about, and so on,
it’s no, but at the level of a life that is consistent with your
properties as a hierarchy of control system, it’s definitely
yes.

The conclusion to draw is that there
will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life
led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different
and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives
under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be
more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane.
People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in
one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at
liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize
their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one
can impose his own utopian vision upon others (Anarchy, State,
and Utopia
, 1974, pp. 310-312).

Nozick’s idea of “utopia as
‘meta-utopia’” would appear to exhibit the quality of “going up a level,”
and it seems as theoretically satisfactory as could be achieved: If
allowing everybody to choose the kind of community they wanted to live in
would not work, I frankly cannot imagine what on earth would.

That’s interesting, too, because the way my eye went into that sentence I
read a fragment, at first, as “If they would not work…” And
there’s the rub. If even a sizeable minority chose the life style of not
working, and lived off others’ labor, I frankly can’t imagine that Utopia
working. My point is that to make any Utopia work, even a lassaiz-faire
one, you have to find a source of people quite different from the mix we
have right now.

For reasons which I explained in my
Liberty article, I can see no prospects for change until religion
ceases to be an influence in people’s lives. Not that there is
anything objectionable about ascetic moral codes, or the lives to which a
whole-hearted commitment to them leads. The damage comes rather
from people believing that these are codes which they are all supposed to
follow, whether they really feel like it or not. If we were ever to
reach a state where religious codes were not a dominant influence, and
where people in general were thinking for themselves, then the political
conflicts would largely take care of themselves.

OK, so the code you want everyone to follow would be
" a state where religious codes
were not a dominant influence, and where people in general were thinking
for themselves"
Since everyone thinks for themselves, I take this to mean that
nobody adopts anyone else’s ideas or follows where anyone else
leads.
Conflicts never take care of themselves. People have to change what and
how they are controlling, if conflicts are to be resolved. The idea that
you can resolve a conflict without giving up anything of importance to
you is simply a fantasy: you can’t. To resolve any important kind of
conflict, you have to change what is important to you.
I think now that the biggest problem is that of trying to resolve social
conflicts at the wrong level. You can’t do it by arguing rationally about
procedures or logic, and you can’t do it by arguing indignantly or calmly
about moral or other principles. You have to look at system
concepts.
When you look at system concepts, the core problem becomes how to
organize a system so that everyone in it suffers a practical minimum of
error. That means everyone, not just you. It means Republicans and
Democrats, Muslims and Christians and atheists, and most difficult of
all, it means con-men and thieves and rapists and murderers and child
molesters. You have to start where we are now, not in a world where
everyone has suddenly become rational, nice, pragmatically practical,
hard-working, and generous.
What this means that that everyone has to give up the idea that the way
to solve the world’s problems is for everyone else to become just like
me. It also means giving up the idea that just leaving everyone alone and
letting them do whatever they like will solve the world’s problems. It is
never going to be the case that we can get most people to be tolerant of
other people who pollute the common environment, who take what they want
without regard to the desires of others, who vandalize other people’s
possessions or relationships or peace of mind or hopes or bodies. And we
certainly can’t get the polluters etc. to desist by pointing out that
they are infringing on other people’s rights, or that they wouldn’t want
similar things done to them. That’s just logic, and logical thinking is
two levels down, by my count, from what we need to be thinking
about.
It’s all very well to speak in terms of
“many different and divergent
communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different
institutions.” That
draws attention to what is inside the boundaries of those communities,
but fails to address the interfaces between the communities. Isolationism
can’t work at the present population density: If the community of
self-reliant farmers tried to live within a separate bubble,
they would run out of gasoline in a few days, have no money, and would
have no electricity or water. They would also rapidly accumulate
huge surpluses of products. And the communities around them would have no
food, a lack which they would very quickly remedy. Any system design that
allows for individual differences must also find ways to protect
individuals from others who have antithetical interests, and that means
laws and law enforcement (how, otherwise, would nonviolent communities
survive?).In fact, you can’t separate the communities; one way or
another, they must all learn to get along with each other, or if not
that, to overpower each other (the way they do now).
What my view comes down to is anti-ism-ism. Libertarianism, fascism,
communism, capitalism, or theism are isolated views, one-track views of
society. They draw boundaries separating their adherents from each other,
so each is living under a separate system concept. But the separation is
only conceptual; physically they are all part of the same system
and can’t get out of it. The interactions happen whether anyone wants
them to or not. The Amish farmer has to put a reflector on the back of
the buggy so cars won’t hit it, and thieves from the big city will rob an
Amish bank as happily as a suburban Republican bank.
We don’t need any more isms. We need a serious plan for a system under
which people can live as near to the way they are *as possible.*This doesn’t mean that anyone can be part of such a system without
changing anything important. But it does mean finding ways for people to
change themselves in the ways required by the system concept they are
trying to develop, or invent.

Most of all, it requires a clear view of what a social system concept is,
and how it differs from, and relates to, principles and logical
reasoning.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Mike Acree (2007.09.08.1252 PDT)

Bill Powers (2007.09.05.0844 MDT)–

Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas
Merton,

Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsburg, Harry Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey
Stengel,

The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses, Einstein, Hugh Hefner,

Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Baba Ram Dass, Gandhi, Sir

Edmund Hillary, Raymond Lubitz, Buddha, Frank Sinatra,
Columbus,

Freud, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams,

Thomas Edison, H. L. Mencken, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Ellison,

Bobby Fischer, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, you, and your

parents. Is there really one kind of life which is best
for each

of these people?

This is a very interesting point. The answer depends on the level
at

which you’re thinking. At the level of what you like, what
you do for

a living, what you believe about things you can’t know about,
and so

on, it’s no, but at the level of a life that is consistent
with your

properties as a hierarchy of control system, it’s definitely
yes.

I can’t tell whether that “definitely yes” is a very
strong claim or something closer to a truism. I suppose the relevant
question is whether the level you have in mind has enough concrete content to
be relevant. If we are talking about a level where the needs of all living
control systems are the same, then one immediate consequence is that we are all
vegetarians. I don’t say that as a reductio ad absurdum, just a
test of whether I’m tracking your meaning. (If you meant implicitly
to be drawing an arbitrary line around our species, I wouldn’t quibble,
though I wouldn’t try to defend it, either.)

I liked your example of Bush being led to see that his actions were
ultimately not in his own self-interest. That solution, if I understand
it, consists essentially of removing the troublemakers, by changing them into
something else. I can imagine
that happening, but I’m very far from feeling able to count on its happening—for Bush and
all the other “mavericks” you mention. That seems to me to
commit the blunder you have accused others of, assuming the problem out of
existence. You emphasize the need to take people “as nearly as possible
the way they are” (I’m tempted to agree strongly, except that the
qualifier “as nearly as possible” could mean almost anything),
including the Bushes, rapists, murderers, etc.; on the other hand, as in the
Bush example, you are taking about some pretty drastic changes, happening
somehow or other, for an awful lot of people. I’m unclear how all
this sorts out for you; it really does sound at times as though you’re
the one for whom the good society would require changing the inhabitants.

I don’t see the problem, by the way, with your example of people
who choose not to work:

If even a sizeable minority chose the life style of not working,
and lived off others’

labor, I frankly can’t imagine that Utopia working. My
point is that to make any Utopia

work, even a laissez-faire one, you have to find a source of people
quite different from

the mix we have right now.

I gather you mean to stipulate that these people are steadfast in their
refusal to work, and that their friends and families refuse to support
them. I’ve never heard of such a case, and it’s a little hard
to imagine, except as deliberate suicide; but it seems obvious that they would
starve. If that was their choice, what’s the problem?

If you meant, on the other hand, that the people in question lived off
others by stealing from them, no society tolerates that sort of behavior unless
it is forced to. San Francisco
is a good example; it heavily subsidizes theft by making effective self-defense
illegal. But there is some migration out of the city for that reason, and
I would expect it to increase. (I came very close to moving myself after
being assaulted for the third time.)

For reasons which I explained in my Liberty article, I can see no

prospects for change until religion ceases to be an influence
in

people’s lives. Not that there is anything objectionable
about

ascetic moral codes, or the lives to which a whole-hearted

commitment to them leads. The damage comes rather from
people

believing that these are codes which they are all supposed to

follow, whether they really feel like it or not. If we
were ever to

reach a state where religious codes were not a dominant
influence,

and where people in general were thinking for themselves, then
the

political conflicts would largely take care of themselves.

OK, so the code you want everyone to follow would be " a state
where

religious codes were not a dominant influence, and where people in

general were thinking for themselves"

No, a prescriptive code calling for people to think for themselves is
virtually a contradiction in terms. My concern was merely to try to
understand why arrangements that look desirable to me don’t look that way
to everybody.

Since everyone thinks for themselves, I take this to mean that
nobody

adopts anyone else’s ideas or follows where anyone else leads.

I’d be surprised if there were any real misunderstanding
here. There’s a trivial sense in which everybody thinks for
themselves, and a serious, and familiar, sense in which they don’t.

Conflicts never take care of themselves.

Since I was seeing the political conflicts as (largely) a consequence
of the psychological-moral conflicts, solving the latter would (largely) solve
the former.

It’s all very well to speak in terms of "many different and
divergent

communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under

different institutions." That draws attention to what is
inside the

boundaries of those communities, but fails to address the
interfaces

between the communities. Isolationism can’t work at the present

population density: If the community of self-reliant farmers
tried

to live within a separate bubble, they would run out of
gasoline in

a few days, have no money, and would have no electricity or

water. They would also rapidly accumulate huge surpluses of

products. And the communities around them would have no food, a
lack

which they would very quickly remedy. Any system design that allows

for individual differences must also find ways to protect
individuals

from others who have antithetical interests, and that means laws
and

law enforcement (how, otherwise, would nonviolent communities

survive?).In fact, you can’t separate the communities; one way or

another, they must all learn to get along with each other, or if
not

that, to overpower each other (the way they do now).

I don’t think Nozick’s framework entails isolationism, and
I don’t think he thought so, either. Every community could decide
which others it wanted to trade with. The remarkable thing about trade is
its ability to transcend differences. A man I know who complains
tirelessly about the influx of Mexicans into his neighborhood boasts
simultaneously about how cheaply, and meticulously, they maintain his lawn.
We don’t have to approve of our neighbors to want to trade with them.

Mike

If we are talking about a level
where the needs of all living control systems are the same, then one
immediate consequence is that we are all vegetarians. I don’t say
that as a reductio ad absurdum, just a test of whether I’m tracking your
meaning. (If you meant implicitly to be drawing an arbitrary line
around our species, I wouldn’t quibble, though I wouldn’t try to defend
it, either.)
I liked your example of Bush
being led to see that his actions were ultimately not in his own
self-interest. That solution, if I understand it, consists
essentially of removing the troublemakers, by changing them into
something else.
[From Bill Powers (2007.09.09.0310 MDT)]

Mike Acree
(2007.09.08.1252 PDT)

No, I was talking about the level where we see that all organisms need to
make their perceptions match reference levels in order to satisfy higher
orders of control that involve the same principles.

I was defining a different way of interacting with Bush, should the
chance arise, different from confrontation and from fighting force with
force.

That seems to me to
commit the blunder you have accused others of, assuming the problem out
of existence. You emphasize the need to take people “as nearly as
possible the way they are” (I’m tempted to agree strongly, except that
the qualifier “as nearly as possible” could mean almost anything),
including the Bushes, rapists, murderers, etc.; on the other hand, as in
the Bush example, you are taking about some pretty drastic changes,
happening somehow or other, for an awful lot of
people.

Yes I am. I’m saying that the minimum error possible has to take into
account the people in whom error would be increased rather than decreased
(and who would, therefore, push back). I am not about to extend
principles of noninterference and lassaiz-faire to rapists. If we take
people as they are, this means we have to recognize the need for
mechanisms that will prevent and frustrate actions by people who harm
others. That is pretty much what we are trying to do now, not very
expertly or consistently, but better and more effectively than we used to
do it.

I’m unclear how all
this sorts out for you; it really does sound at times as though you’re
the one for whom the good society would require changing the
inhabitants.
I don’t see the problem, by the
way, with your example of people who choose not to
work:.

Definitely, some of them. I made a partial list of them: criminals, and
people who prey on the weak and ignorant.

Well, they expect someone to feed them, give them money, entertain them,
and so on, and if nobody gives them those things, they will take steps to
get them anyhow, which is one way a population of criminals comes into
being.

I gather you mean to stipulate
that these people are steadfast in their refusal to work, and that their
friends and families refuse to support them. I’ve never heard of
such a case, and it’s a little hard to imagine, except as deliberate
suicide; but it seems obvious that they would starve. If that was
their choice, what’s the problem?
If you meant, on the other hand,
that the people in question lived off others by stealing from them, no
society tolerates that sort of behavior unless it is forced to. San
Francisco is a good example; it heavily subsidizes theft by making
effective self-defense illegal.

Well, disposing of the bodies, for one thing. But aren’t you forgetting
that such people are control systems, too, and will find a way to satisfy
their desires? They won’t just lie down and die. If I ask you to give me
money so I don’t have to work, and you refuse, I may just brain you with
a rock and take it. If you don’t think that happens – well, of course
you know it happens. But what would you do about it? Carry a gun?
Pre-emptive strikes? Eugenics? Hire a police force? I prefer to hire a
professional police force.

Effective self-defense? I presume you mean walking around with a gun in
your belt. You’re a very nice guy, but I don’t trust even nice guys with
guns who are afraid of being assaulted. The more scared you are, the
shorter is the pause before you fire, and the less time there is to aim
and be sure of the right target. And very few people are as nice as you
are. I don’t want people with guns, especially amateurs, near me. And I
do want people with guns, well-trained, confident, and experienced, to
watch out for the kooks with guns for me. I wish more cops were like
that, but at least most of them try to be like that. Civilians with guns
tend to flash them to stake their rights to parking places and other such
trivial reasons. What’s-his-name, the actor, said it best: “Over my
dead body.” Very likely.

But there is some
migration out of the city for that reason, and I would expect it to
increase. (I came very close to moving myself after being assaulted
for the third time.)

At least you survived. If you had had a gun, the mugger would have
had one, too, and might have just used it instead of taking the risk of
assaulting you (especially if he could see you had a gun). That’s why
bushwhacking arose. You might well be dead if you’d had a gun.
Fire-fight, anyone?

religious codes were not a
dominant influence, and where people in

general were thinking for themselves"

No, a prescriptive code calling for people to think for themselves is
virtually a contradiction in terms. My concern was merely to try to
understand why arrangements that look desirable to me don’t look that way
to everybody.

Since everyone thinks for
themselves, I take this to mean that nobody

adopts anyone else’s ideas or follows where anyone else leads.

I’d be surprised if there were any real misunderstanding here.
There’s a trivial sense in which everybody thinks for themselves, and a
serious, and familiar, sense in which they
don’t.

Conflicts never take care of
themselves.

Since I was seeing the political conflicts as (largely) a consequence of
the psychological-moral conflicts, solving the latter would (largely)
solve the former.

Well, that’s a step in the right direction. Arrangements that look
desirable to you really don’t look that way to everyone. You’ve been
mugged – you should know that.

But that sense is no less trivial. You don’t accept someone else’s way of
thinking if you don’t choose to. Who is to say you don’t have the right
to follow someone else’s way of thinking? For example, wouldn’t you be
happy if everyone who doesn’t already do so accepted Libertarian
principles?

Tell that to the people who assaulted you.

I don’t think Nozick’s
framework entails isolationism, and I don’t think he thought so,
either. Every community could decide which others it wanted to
trade with.

But what about the communities that don’t trade, but lie, cheat, steal,
and kill to get what they want by force? They will interact with the
other communities whether invited to or not. That’s the whole
problem.

The remarkable thing about
trade is its ability to transcend differences. A man I know who
complains tirelessly about the influx of Mexicans into his neighborhood
boasts simultaneously about how cheaply, and meticulously, they maintain
his lawn. We don’t have to approve of our neighbors to want to
trade with them.

Yes, and at the same time there are ranchers along the southern border
who are rather strongly suspected of just shooting them and burying the
bodies.

Trade is for nice people who treat each other with respect and keep their
word. But 20 percent of the people who are not that way can screw up
everything, especially if they have disproportionate power.

I the back of my head, I’m trying to see through all these words to grasp
what is behind them. In the meantime, I’m just idling along and arguing
back at the logic level.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Mike Acree (2007.09.11.1303 PDT)]

Bill Powers (2007.09.09.0310 MDT)–

Starting at the end:

I the back of my head, I’m trying to
see through all these words to grasp what is behind them.

This seems to me the most productive level
on which to be working. If you figure out what’s behind my words, I
hope you’ll let me know.

In the meantime, I’m just idling along
and arguing back at the logic level.

I suppose I can agree that your responses
are at the logical level without
agreeing that they’re necessarily logical. The overall impression
is one of pot shots, of ready-to-wear rejoinders. That impression is
strengthened by the practice of responding line by line, when objections you
raise are sometimes addressed in the following sentence. That’s a pretty
standard practice on the list, of course. I don’t raise intrinsic
objection to sport shooting; it’s just not what I was looking for.

I was moved to respond to this thread, in
the first place, because I share your interest in trying to envision better
social arrangements (however we might each define “better”), and
because, whatever the differences in our views, there is also a very remarkable
overlap. I have been trying to understand, since I first joined the Net
almost 10 years ago, just what your vision was. Your recent posts brought
together two points I’ve had trouble reconciling. (a) On the one
hand, as I said in the previous post, you have emphasized the need to take
people as they are (including the murderers, rapists, etc.), and not to
presuppose a change in human nature. You are particularly likely to
assert this view when other people speak of their vision of a good society.
That has always been my own position, but you have apparently never believed
that it was. Perhaps the underlying problem is just that you persist in
identifying libertarianism or anarchism with pacifism or lack of organization,
or both, despite all the words we’ve exchanged on that subject. (b)
On the other hand, in speaking of your own vision in recent posts, you were
talking, as I pointed out and you acknowledged, about pretty big changes in a
lot of people. Superficially, it looks like a simple double standard—other
theorists have to take people as they are and you don’t—so it’s
clear I’m still dismayingly far from understanding your thinking.

I was talking about the level where we
see that all organisms need to make their perceptions match reference levels in
order to satisfy higher orders of >control that involve the same principles.

Ok, only that doesn’t get me very far toward seeing the concrete
implications for social organization.

Effective self-defense? I presume you
mean walking around with a gun in your belt. You’re a very nice guy, but I
don’t trust even nice guys with guns >who are afraid of being assaulted.

Two of the three times I’ve been
attacked have been by teams of three. There is no effective defense
against three people except a gun. Your wish to see me left defenseless
on the street comes across as really unfriendly. I’m guessing you’re
holding a fantasy image of an effective police force, which just happened to
slip up the three times I’ve been assaulted. The San Francisco
Police Department has a 6-year backlog of 16,000 unsolved armed robberies, 1000
unsolved rapes, and 300 unsolved murders. Incidents like mine don’t
even make it into the statistics (the police strongly resisted my making a
report the first time, and I haven’t bothered since).

I prefer to hire a professional police
force.

So would I, but, like private education,
it’s not an option except for the rich, since we all have to pay, through
taxes, for the useless government service. People or companies with a lot
to protect, like supermarkets and banks, have to hire private security.

I have asked different officers, after
each assault, how I could protect myself. One said I should vary my
route. Two of the assaults were within 6 blocks of my house, and there
aren’t that many options at that point. The others told me simply
that the police weren’t concerned with crime prevention; they were called
in only “after something happened.” But, as the crime
solution statistics show, they don’t do anything then, either.

At least you survived.

By about a quarter of an inch, apparently,
on the first assault. The second time the ER bill was $2000, but
insurance paid half.

If you had had a gun, the mugger would
have had one, too, and might have just used it instead of taking the risk of
assaulting you (especially if he could >see you had a gun). That’s why
bushwhacking arose. You might well be dead if you’d had a gun. Fire-fight,
anyone?

I’ve given some thought to that, particularly since I’ve always
detested guns, and carrying one would be a last resort. Most people carry
very little cash—enough for their Starbucks and a sandwich; they use
checks and cards even for small purchases at the supermarket. The chances
are very small that a random pedestrian is going to be carrying enough cash to
make it worth risking a bullet—or even the attention that a gunshot would
draw—especially when the take has to be divided by 3. That would be
true even if they were armed. I’m obviously counting on some degree
of rationality here on the part of my assailants, and perhaps too much.
But both statistical data and anecdotal reports suggest that merely drawing a
gun is usually sufficient to repel an attack; in the great majority of cases
like this, it doesn’t even need to be fired. If the risk from
trigger-happy amateurs acting in self-defense were as great as you think, we
should hear about it occasionally, especially given the anti-gun bias of the
major media. What I see instead is recurrent reports of trigger-happy
SWAT teams breaking in on false tips from informants with a grudge or a plea bargain.
The risk to bystanders is also pretty minimal. My assailants have at
least shown enough rationality to wait until there were no pedestrians or
traffic in sight before making their move.

We’ve been over this ground enough
that I know what I’m saying isn’t going to make any
difference. That brings me back to your point about what’s going on
behind the words. I have one clue that looks very significant: that
you have been consistently, gratifyingly complimentary of my writing, even
while disagreeing, whenever you were reading something that wasn’t
addressed to you. That makes it look as though you experience my messages
as attacks, in a way I haven’t intended—as though, when I say, “I
don’t see how these two positions fit together,” what you hear is, “You’re
contradicting yourself—you idiot!” Maybe the deliberate
delicacy of my phrasing itself arouses the fear that my intentions are all the
more hostile. I’ve commented above on how I experience your
messages as similarly attacking, in a curiously “trigger-happy”
way. Our exchanges end up feeling like the endless trench warfare of
World War I, not accomplishing anything but mutual exhaustion. (Or maybe
they’re invigorating for you, as they seem to be for others. I seem
to have the least energy for such things of any regular participant on the
Net.) It’s tricky to deal with, because, if my interpretation is
correct, just pointing to the problem will almost inevitably be construed as
yet another attack. A different solution would be to recast my messages
as impersonal essays and post them on a blog somewhere, then merely send a
link. I frankly suspect there’s something of much wider
applicability here than just the two of us. Perhaps it would help if all
of us always pretended to be addressing someone else, so that everything was “overheard.”
Philosophy as gossip; severing the message from the receiver. The effect
would be like that of that deodorant that appeared briefly in the early ’60s
called Stereo: It didn’t stop the odor, but you couldn’t tell
where it was coming from. These strategies are a little gamey for my
taste, but perhaps someone will be inspired to propose something better.

I remain interested in trying to
understand your views on social organization. It’s a serious
disturbance to me to see you making so much sense in most areas and so little
in others, but I can’t see that my contributions are helping either one
of us. That’s not a promise never to post again—I’ve
recently run across another idea I was tempted to share, in fact—but I
think I will do better in general to watch the flow from the shore.

Mike

This seems to me the most
productive level on which to be working. If you figure out what’s
behind my words, I hope you’ll let me know.
[From Bill Powers (2007.09.12.0926 MDT)]

Mike Acree
(2007.09.11.1303 PDT) –

Can’t do that. But maybe you can.

Your recent posts brought
together two points I’ve had trouble reconciling. (a) On the one
hand, as I said in the previous post, you have emphasized the need to
take people as they are (including the murderers, rapists, etc.), and not
to presuppose a change in human nature. You are particularly likely
to assert this view when other people speak of their vision of a good
society. That has always been my own position, but you have
apparently never believed that it was. Perhaps the underlying
problem is just that you persist in identifying libertarianism or
anarchism with pacifism or lack of organization, or both, despite all the
words we’ve exchanged on that subject. (b) On the other hand, in
speaking of your own vision in recent posts, you were talking, as I
pointed out and you acknowledged, about pretty big changes in a lot of
people. Superficially, it looks like a simple double standard­other
theorists have to take people as they are and you don’t­so it’s clear I’m
still dismayingly far from understanding your
thinking.

When I say we have to take people as they are, I mean we have to think of
ways to deal with them as they are, where “as they are”
includes a lot of belligerent, criminal, and violent types as well as all
the nice guys. The nice guys, of course, are reasonable and easy to deal
with. It seems to me that your vision of a good society will work only if
everyone is it is a nice guy. The changes in other people I was talking
about were changes in the behavior of the bad guys, induced by any means
that will work including imprisonment and when necessary, violence. I
just don’t want that organized violence to be mob violence: it should be
in the hands of professionals trained to use the least required force and
do it without getting angry. That means, God help us, the police, for all
their warts and failings which they share with the rest of us.

That is what I think we need as a way of holding on until a real solution
is worked out.

On the other hand, judging from your discussion of the attacks on you,
your preferred way of dealing with not-so-nice-guys seems to be to take
the law into your own hands up to and including the right to murder. From
my point of view, that puts you in the camp of the not-nice people. Of
course that is in conflict with my real impression of you, and perhaps
it’s in conflict with your own vision of yourself. You seem to be saying
so when you say you detest guns. Why should you detest them if you think
they’re a rational way to defend yourself?

Two of the three times I’ve
been attacked have been by teams of three. There is no effective
defense against three people except a gun. Your wish to see me left
defenseless on the street comes across as really unfriendly. I’m
guessing you’re holding a fantasy image of an effective police force,
which just happened to slip up the three times I’ve been assaulted.
The San Francisco Police Department has a 6-year backlog of 16,000
unsolved armed robberies, 1000 unsolved rapes, and 300 unsolved
murders. Incidents like mine don’t even make it into the statistics
(the police strongly resisted my making a report the first time, and I
haven’t bothered since).
So would I, but, like private
education, it’s not an option except for the rich, since we all have to
pay, through taxes, for the useless government service. People or
companies with a lot to protect, like supermarkets and banks, have to
hire private security.

I don’t get any pleasure out of your being assaulted. If you want
to carry a gun around for your own protection, I assume you know the
penalties for being caught and think they’re worth the risk. I assume
you’d rather fight it out than move somewhere else. But we’re talking
social principles here, not individual cases. If we abolished the police
and left justice in individual hands, the gangs of three who attacked you
would have guns, too, and they would have them drawn and aimed at you by
the time you realized you were being attacked. You wouldn’t have a chance
of surviving if you started to draw your gun. Even more likely, if those
gangs knew there were no police and that you were probably armed, they
would wait in concealment until you passed, then shoot you in the back.
That’s by far the safest way of robbing an armed man. That’s called
bushwhacking, and was popular in the old West among those who couldn’t be
sure that they were the fastest draw. Guns were invented for
cowards who want to kill at a safe distance and by surprise, whether the
target be an animal or another person.

What I’m saying is that if you were allowed to carry a gun, it would NOT
be an effective means of self-defense. I don’t want to deny you an
effective means of self-defense; in fact I wish there were one, but
allowing everyone to carry a gun will not accomplish what you want. A gun
is no defense against three people who also carry guns for
self-defense.

The only effective self-defense is to organize a group of well-trained
people who are physically and mentally strong enough, and numerous
enough, to do that job. Vigilante groups are effective, but unfortunately
they are not distanced enough from social situations to be trusted as the
only means of preserving the peace. Their agendas tend to be narrow, like
getting the guy they think stole their horse or dammed the river (or if
not that guy, anyone else who looks like they might have done it –
the approach we use in international politics). To a lot of vigilantes,
as to a lot of police, “suspect” means the same thing as
“perpetrator.”

Unfortunately, to maintain an effective, well-trained, competent police
force means paying the people what they’re worth and paying to train
them, and hiring enough of them. That costs money, and that means taxes.
I think you know where that leads.

I prefer to hire a
professional police force.

The government service is not useless. It’s just not as useful as it
should be, because people who want safety are not willing to pay for
everyone’s protection. They want to use their money to pay for their own
safety instead of diluting it by trying to keep everyone safe. The result
is that nobody, not even the rich miser with three full-time bodyguards,
is safe.

I have asked different
officers, after each assault, how I could protect myself. One said
I should vary my route. Two of the assaults were within 6 blocks of
my house, and there aren’t that many options at that point. The
others told me simply that the police weren’t concerned with crime
prevention; they were called in only “after something happened.”
But, as the crime solution statistics show, they don’t do anything then,
either.

Pretty useless. But you make it sound as if they choose to do their jobs
this way. Try questioning them about that. Saying they “don’t do
anything” is a bitter exaggeration. They do as much as they can with
the resources they are given, to the limit of their physical stamina,
under the rules they swore to obey, which include the Constitution.

The chances are very small
that a random pedestrian is going to be carrying enough cash to make it
worth risking a bullet­or even the attention that a gunshot would
draw­especially when the take has to be divided by 3. That would be
true even if they were armed.

But if they were armed and concerned about your shooting them, they would
just shoot first and claim self-defense. And you’re forgetting that one
of the rewards of robbing people is having power and causing fear. The
kids in gangs enter their fights knowing that everyone is armed and
someone is going to be killed. That’s their idea of fun and
reputation-building.

I’m obviously counting
on some degree of rationality here on the part of my assailants, and
perhaps too much. But both statistical data and anecdotal reports
suggest that merely drawing a gun is usually sufficient to repel an
attack; in the great majority of cases like this, it doesn’t even need to
be fired.

That’s fine as long as you can be the only one with a gun. Only a stupid
criminal, if everyone is armed, will give you time to draw your gun. In a
fully-armed world, the first thing you will see of your assailant, if you
see him at all, will be with his gun pointed at you and his finger on the
trigger. He is not playing by your rules. No one-two-three,
shoot.

If the risk from
trigger-happy amateurs acting in self-defense were as great as you think,
we should hear about it occasionally, especially given the anti-gun bias
of the major media.

Fortunately the law tends to deter rational trigger-happy amateurs. As it
happens, however, just yesterday the attached news item appeared in the
local paper. I hope you can read the scan. It’s about a guy who took
exception to a road closure by going home and returning to the road crew
with a gun on his hip. This guy is a Libertarian candidate around here
once in a while. I once had a phone call from a deputy sheriff after I
wrote a letter to the newspaper in Durango about how badly written the
second amendment is. He agreed with me, saying it should have been
clearer. Then he bragged to me about how useful it is to be allowed to
wear a gun. He said that when he parked too close to someone just the
other day, and the other person got out of the car to remonstrate with
him, he got out, too, and the other person, as soon as he saw the gun,
closed his mouth and backed off. This deputy had somehow thought I was on
his side, and was sharing this humorous anecdote with me.

What I see instead is
recurrent reports of trigger-happy SWAT teams breaking in on false tips
from informants with a grudge or a plea bargain.

These are a few of the people who swear to uphold the Constitution and
are trained to make sure of their targets and use only what force is
necessary. Now think how false tips from informants with grudges or a
plea bargain are treated by amateurs with private agenda (like the KKK or
the Crips) who have sworn nothing about the Constitution and have had no
professional inhibitions concerning the use of deadly force or
violence.

I have one clue that looks
very significant: that you have been consistently, gratifyingly
complimentary of my writing, even while disagreeing, whenever you were
reading something that wasn’t addressed to you.

I guess this one was addressed to me.

That makes it look as though
you experience my messages as attacks, in a way I haven’t intended­as
though, when I say, “I don’t see how these two positions fit together,”
what you hear is, “You’re contradicting yourself­you idiot!”

No, I just take it as a lack of understanding of my position. I don’t
think you’re being hostile, but I think you’re supporting a policy that I
consider to be against the best interests of everyone, in fact downright
dangerous. If it were you that I disapproved of, I probably wouldn’t
reply at all.

I remain interested in trying
to understand your views on social organization. It’s a serious
disturbance to me to see you making so much sense in most areas and so
little in others, but I can’t see that my contributions are helping
either one of us. That’s not a promise never to post again­I’ve
recently run across another idea I was tempted to share, in fact­but I
think I will do better in general to watch the flow from the
shore.

The basic problem here, and the reason I wrote last time about sort of
idling in the logic-level mode, is that I don’t think the solutions and
counter-solutions you and I have been talking about, or the solution of
any other social problem, is to be found in pushing back more effectively
against disturbances. All the ways of pushing back have been tried and
none of them works, except locally and temporarily. All that pushing back
proves is that there’s a conflict. We already know that. The solution
does not lie in winning the conflict.

What we need is to understand the social system and our part in it as
individuals, and that means we have to reorganize, not take positions and
defend them. We have to remove the causes of these conflicts, of the
violence, of the attacks, not just try to win the conflicts by being even
more violent in our own attacks. Once we have succeeded in becoming the
strongest and the most violent and least scrupulous, it will be our turn
to be removed from the scene by an uprising of those we are defending
ourselves against. Then it will be their turn, and so on to extinction.
Perhaps that’s all the human race is fit for, but I remain
optimistic.

All the followers of isms are working at the wrong level. They have a
vision of the best way for everyone to live, and are trying to persuade
or force others to agree, under the delusion that if we all agreed to the
same ism, there would be no more conflicts and violence. But as long as
we’re trying to think of logical solutions and invent universal
principles, we will end up in disagreement and conflict again. We have to
stop thinking of our own positions and look at the properties of the
system in which we live, or propose to live.

If you have a bomb and I have a bomb, the only way to prevent our blowing
each other up is to pull out the fuses.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Rick Marken (2007.09.14.1215)]

Bill Powers (2007.09.12.0926 MDT) to Mike Acree (2007.09.11.1303 PDT) --

I don't think
you're being hostile, but I think you're supporting a policy that I consider
to be against the best interests of everyone, in fact downright dangerous.

That's the rub. How do you deal with awful policies like these? I
knewthat Bush's policies, which lean toward lowered government
regulation/service, would be disastrous for the poor and "middle
class" (they work out great for the upper 1% apparently). But who knew
those policies would kill 1,000,000 or more innocent people who had
the bad fortune to be living in a country that we decided to
"improve". And now that these policies are producing what most people
seem to agree are horrible results, conservatives are saying that the
problem is that Bush's policies are not conservative enough. What do
you do when people who support dangerous policies take evidence of
their failure as proof of their success? I know that these policies
are actually working for the people implementing them -- I think Bush
is getting exactly what he and the government of Israel want,
permanent bases in Iraq -- but why are so many people still
considering voting for a Republican? Sure, the alternatives aren't
that great but, geez, even the worst Democrat is better than the best
Republican (Lieberman is, of course, no longer a Democrat but, were he
still a Dem, he would count as a Democrat who may be worse than the
best Republican; probably worse than the worst Republican, actually;-)

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

[From Rick Marken (2007.09.14.1620)]

Bill Powers (2007.09.14.1443 MDT)

> Rick Marken (2007.09.14.1215)]

That's the rub. How do you deal with awful policies like these?

You do the obvious: what you can. You are disturbed; you are a control
system; disturbed control systems push back; ergo, you push back as best you
can.

Yes.

When you're not busy pushing back more or less ineffectively, you can
devote your time and energy to finding a permanent solution that removes the
conflicts. That is what PCT is about. That is why we talk about theory and
think up experiments and try to spread the understanding of people as
control systems through writing books and articles.

That's what I always thought. And I guess I still think it. But it
would be a lot easier to believe it if so many of the people who do
get into PCT didn't do so because they think it's as a justification
for those very policies that I see as so horrible.

That is the kind of
thing that will lead to a permanent solution, so there will be nothing to
push back against.

Not in my lifetime, I'm afraid.

Yes, it's all horrible. Some day it will all be part of horrible histories,
but it won't really matter because then we will not do things that way any
more. The horrible histories will just show how we got from then to the
future. Right now we happen to be in the messy middle of humanity's
adolescence, so we won't be able to enjoy the final outcome. That being the
case, we have nothing better to do than try to hasten the day. Push back
when you must, but remember that pushing back leaves us right where we were.
We have something better to do, when we can.

I am inspired. Thanks!!

Love

Rick

···

Best,
Bill P.

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

[From Mike Acree (2007.09.16.1648 PDT)]

Bill Powers (2007.09.12.0926 MDT)–

This seems to me the most
productive level on which to be working. If you figure out what’s
behind my words, I hope you’ll let me know.

Can’t do that. But maybe you can.

Maybe I misunderstood. I thought you
had said you were trying to figure out what was behind my words.
There’s no mystery—no error—for me (though conceivably there
should be).

It seems to me that your vision of a
good society will work only if everyone is it is a nice guy.

You have maintained that position from the
beginning, and nothing I’ve said in the past 10 years has made any
difference. That tends to suggest that you really have no idea what my vision
of a good society is; but you think you do, so there’s nothing more to
understand. Your task, as you evidently see it, is just to keep pointing
out what you see as obvious flaws, over and over, until I see them that way,
too. My attempts to explain how you’ve misunderstood me never
penetrate. Not that I can blame you for the lack of communication; I have
a poor record of being understood by anybody, despite my best attempts.

(There’s a curious asymmetry in our
assumptions. I see what appear as inconsistencies in your views, and
assume for that reason that I haven’t
understood you, that a full understanding would resolve the apparent
contradictions. But perhaps, as Voltaire said, we’re both wrong.)

The situation is neither quite unprecedented
nor hopeless, in my experience. Many years ago I was involved in an
ongoing argument about epistemology with a good friend, whose position made
exactly as much sense to me as saying black is white. After 2 very
difficult years, thanks to his extraordinary patience and generosity (as well
as brilliance), I came around to his view almost entirely—an outcome
against which I would have bet everything at the outset. But in the
present case I’ve seen precious few signs of movement, either in terms of
being able to understand your position or in making my own understood.

The idea that anarchy won’t work
unless everybody is nice is not an uncommon assumption; it was Ayn Rand’s
view, and it was my own until about 15 years ago, when B:CP challenged me to pursue it
further. My unplanned talk on problems of scale at the 1994 conference
was a guarded way of exploring whether the conditions in small, homogeneous
communities, which I assumed were necessary, would scale up to make anarchy
possible more generally. At the time, as I’ve said, I assumed I was
the only nonanarchist in the room.

I just don’t want that organized
violence to be mob violence: it should be in the hands of professionals trained
to use the least required force and do it >without getting angry.

I agree.

That means, God help us, the police,
for all their warts and failings which they share with the rest of us.

Not necessarily. The difference
between us here is just that, for all your opposition to monopolies, you insist on monopoly provision of police and
many other services. I, on the other hand, have no objection to natural
monopolies, like Zamboni, where there is always potential competition, i.e. where it is not legally
prohibited. In cases where competition is legally prohibited, like police
protection, I see all the problems you associate with monopolies, and
more.

Now, this is your cue for the dismissive,
boilerplate remark about the Wild West. To which I respond by citing
historical scholarship contending that the popular image of the Wild West is
largely a myth, and explaining how it did work and could work. You
dismiss that as “just-so stories” and want more examples. I
supply them, but they don’t count because they
are—necessarily—from different times or places. The only
thing that will count is a demonstration that anarchy will work here and now,
but that’s a demonstration that you wouldn’t permit because it
hasn’t been done before. That’s when I withdraw; I’m
skipping a few steps this time. It not only doesn’t feel like a
good use of my time; it doesn’t look to me, I’m sorry to say, as
though conversation with me could be a very good use of your time.

The police

do as much as they can with the resources
they are given, to the limit of their physical stamina, under the rules they
swore to obey, which include the >Constitution.

That really sounds like a civics textbook
fantasy. I see the police raiding medical marijuana dispensaries,
entrapping and arresting hookers, seizing the property of drug
dealers—all in violation of the Constitution, and, in the first case, in violation
of state and local law as well. And these activities are not just a
matter of individual human warts and failings.

judging from your discussion of the
attacks on you, your preferred way of dealing with not-so-nice-guys seems to be
to take the law into your own >hands up to and including the right to
murder.

No, I already said my preference would be
to hire a professional police force, with self-defense as a last resort when
police are unavailable. But that’s not an option, and neither is
self-defense. So I’m left with no effective protection. You
say the police only need more money (every
government program is drastically underfunded, isn’t it?); but police
budgets have been growing in recent years, thanks largely to civil asset
forfeiture, and the crime statistics haven’t gone down correspondingly.
(Just as we see education budgets increasing and education declining, military
budgets increasing and security decreasing. . . .)

We have to remove the causes of these
conflicts, of the violence, of the attacks, not just try to win the conflicts
by being even more violent in our own >attacks.
Once we have succeeded in becoming the strongest and the most violent and least
scrupulous, it will be our turn to be removed from the >scene by an uprising of those we are defending ourselves
against. Then it will be their turn, and so on to extinction.

Yes.

If you have a bomb and I have a bomb, the
only way to prevent our blowing each other up is to pull out the fuses.

Yes,
again. I recently read an article by Anthony Gregory (http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory139.html),
arguing for unilateral nuclear disarmament, which, to my surprise, I found
persuasive.

Mike

[From Mike Acree (2007.09.16.1650 PDT)]

Rick Marken (2007.09.14.1215)--

···

Bill Powers (2007.09.12.0926 MDT) to Mike Acree (2007.09.11.1303 PDT)

--

I don't think
you're being hostile, but I think you're supporting a policy that I

consider

to be against the best interests of everyone, in fact downright

dangerous.

That's the rub. How do you deal with awful policies like these? I
knewthat Bush's policies, which lean toward lowered government
regulation/service, would be disastrous for the poor and "middle
class" (they work out great for the upper 1% apparently). But who knew
those policies would kill 1,000,000 or more innocent people who had
the bad fortune to be living in a country that we decided to
"improve".

I don't know whether it's through carelessness or malice that you're
trying to associate me with Bush. I don't see how there could be any
honest confusion about my view of Bush and his policies; but, if there
is, I could not oppose his foreign policy more strongly. And I can't
think of a single policy of his, domestic or foreign, that I support.

why are so many people still
considering voting for a Republican? Sure, the alternatives aren't
that great but, geez, even the worst Democrat is better than the best
Republican

On foreign policy, which I regard as the most urgent issue of the
day--and it sounds as though you do, too--the best candidate by far is
Ron Paul, who is a Republican (unless we count Dennis Kucinich, who is
the only one who comes close). Paul is the only one to have voted
against the Iraq war from the beginning, and the Patriot Act; he calls
for bringing the troops home now, and has strongly opposed attacking
Iran. I have never supported a Republican, and I disagree strongly with
Paul on some issues, but am willing to set those aside in view of the
importance I attach to peace.

Mike

[From Mike Acree (2007.09.16.1651 PDT)]

Rick Marken (2007.09.14.1620)--

When you're not busy pushing back more or less ineffectively, you

can

devote your time and energy to finding a permanent solution that

removes >the

conflicts. That is what PCT is about. That is why we talk about

theory >and

think up experiments and try to spread the understanding of people as
control systems through writing books and articles.

That's what I always thought. And I guess I still think it. But it
would be a lot easier to believe it if so many of the people who do
get into PCT didn't do so because they think it's as a justification
for those very policies that I see as so horrible.

That sounds like a reference to me, given your previous post, and some
others. For the record, once more: I was excited, and persuaded, by
the first 16 chapters of B:CP, and would have remained so had there been
no final chapter. Most of my posts have been about that chapter just
for the peculiar reason that the author turned out to disagree with it;
the earlier chapters haven't created any disturbance for me. And on the
occasional other topics where I had something to say, like statistics,
there are others on the Net who have expressed similar opinions at least
as well as I could have.

Mike

[From Rick Marken (2007.09.16.2250)]

Mike Acree (2007.09.16.1650 PDT)

Rick Marken (2007.09.14.1215)--

>That's the rub. How do you deal with awful policies like these? I
>knew that Bush's policies, which lean toward lowered government
>regulation/service, would be disastrous for the poor and "middle
>class"

I don't know whether it's through carelessness or malice that you're
trying to associate me with Bush.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I was referring only to the
overlap between Bush's and libertarians' fiscal policies, in
particular policies regarding taxation, regulation, and privatization.
Bush has cut taxes, cut regulations on business, and shifted services
to the private sector as much as possible. I think the results have
been clearly disastrous for everyone making less that $100,000 a year.
Of course, you could say that this is because he has not followed
other libertarian fiscal policies, like stopping government spending
entirely. But actually, I think government spending has increased
mainly in only one area, defense. I would say go ahead and try the
experiment; cut government spending and see what happens. But I have
now learned that, when people think something should work, they don't
give up on the idea just because it doesn't. That's the problem with
an "experimental" approach to policy. That only works when the people
doing it are of a scientific bent. And right (and left) wing
ideologues are not going to be scientific.

I could not oppose his foreign policy more strongly. And I can't
think of a single policy of his, domestic or foreign, that I support.

Don't you support the tax cuts? The hostility to unions? The removal
of environmental regulations? The business friendly policies?

On foreign policy, which I regard as the most urgent issue of the
day--and it sounds as though you do, too--the best candidate by far is
Ron Paul, who is a Republican (unless we count Dennis Kucinich, who is
the only one who comes close).

Domestic and foreign policy are linked. Paul's domestic economic
policies would be as disastrous as Bush's; probably moreso. Kucinich
is definitely my guy since he has it right on both domestic and
foreign policy. Kucinich is my kind of libertarian; a fiscal
communitarian and a social respectatarian -- a person who is against
laws preventing actions that can't hurt anyone else (like gay marriage
and marijuana consumption) and for laws that prevent actions that can
(like shooting people).

Paul is the only one to have voted
against the Iraq war from the beginning, and the Patriot Act; he calls
for bringing the troops home now, and has strongly opposed attacking
Iran. I have never supported a Republican, and I disagree strongly with
Paul on some issues, but am willing to set those aside in view of the
importance I attach to peace.

He's just too bizarre economically (and the opposition to gun control
really has to stop in this country; it's almost as insane as our lack
of a national health insurance system). But I suppose if I were
forced to vote for a Republican he'd be the guy.

But I prefer people who articulate a vision of America that is most
like mine. Kucinich and I see exactly eye to eye (if I crouch down a
bit;-). Of course, he has a snowball's chance in hell. So I'll
probably end up voting for whatever Dem comes along.

Best regards

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

Maybe I misunderstood. I
thought you had said you were trying to figure out what was behind my
words. There’s no mystery­no error­for me (though conceivably there
should be).
[From Bill Powers (2007.09.17.0300 MDT)]

Mike Acree
(2007.09.16.1648 PDT) –

I am trying to figure out what is behind your words, but I can’t do that
until you tell me. And before you can tell me, you have to figure out
what it is yourself.

It seems to me that your
vision of a good society will work only if everyone is it is a nice guy.

You have maintained that position from the beginning, and nothing I’ve
said in the past 10 years has made any
difference.

So you’re saying that the Libertarian vision will work even in a society
as selfish and crime-ridden as ours is? How will those problems be
handled in the system as you envision it? What you have implied so far
seems to involve arming the citizenry, abolishing any overall government,
and letting each group of people with different ideas settle their
differences with bullets where they can’t do it with reason – and to do
this without any base of agreed-upon laws or principles of law. That
would be a good trick but I don’t see how it can be done and still
preserve what I call civilization. Do you see how it can be
done?

I guess what I don’t understand is how you would handle all the social
problems we now try to handle by pooling resources and efforts, by
delegating responsibilities to specialists, by contributing small amounts
of money from individuals to projects that require large amounts of
money, and so on. The system we have now has evolved from previous
systems, and represents the best effort to date, which is very far from
perfect but I wouldn’t want to live in the America of 150 years ago or
the England of 300 years ago (unless I was rich). Your complaint bout the
present system seems to be that we have hired incompetent specialists,
but is the answer to do away with specialists altogether, or to find ways
to get better ones?

In B:CP I was focused on the idea of individual autonomy, and what I had
to say about that still stands for the most part. But what I did not pay
enough attention to was how autonomous individuals can manage to live
together. They have to develop social intelligence, not merely skill at
self-preservation. This means being able to see a world bigger than their
own living-rooms, and realizing that no effort at self-preservation can
wholly succeed unless the social system is set up to minimize
interpersonal conflict. And not only to minimize it, but to deal with it
effectively when there are individuals who refuse to allow others their
autonomy. It seems to me that Libertarians, like most other political
extremists, want a system in which conflicts are almost assured to
develop into life-or-death confrontations, which favor the strong over
the weak, the intelligent over the not-so-intelligent, and in general
which operates on the principle that conflicts are to be won, not
resolved. A very Darwinian approach, in which of course Libertians see
themselves as among the ultimate winners, not the losers.

Looking over what I’ve written, the main question seems to be this: How
do Libertarians plan to handle conflicts between autonomous
individuals?

Best,

Bill P.

···

That tends to suggest
that you really have no idea what my vision of a good society is; but you
think you do, so there’s nothing more to understand. Your task, as
you evidently see it, is just to keep pointing out what you see as
obvious flaws, over and over, until I see them that way, too. My
attempts to explain how you’ve misunderstood me never penetrate.
Not that I can blame you for the lack of communication; I have a poor
record of being understood by anybody, despite my best attempts.

(There’s a curious asymmetry in our assumptions. I see what appear
as inconsistencies in your views, and assume for that reason that I
haven’t understood you, that a full understanding would resolve
the apparent contradictions. But perhaps, as Voltaire said, we’re
both wrong.)

The situation is neither quite unprecedented nor hopeless, in my
experience. Many years ago I was involved in an ongoing argument
about epistemology with a good friend, whose position made exactly as
much sense to me as saying black is white. After 2 very difficult
years, thanks to his extraordinary patience and generosity (as well as
brilliance), I came around to his view almost entirely­an outcome against
which I would have bet everything at the outset. But in the present
case I’ve seen precious few signs of movement, either in terms of being
able to understand your position or in making my own understood.

The idea that anarchy won’t work unless everybody is nice is not an
uncommon assumption; it was Ayn Rand’s view, and it was my own until
about 15 years ago, when B:CP challenged me to pursue it
further. My unplanned talk on problems of scale at the 1994
conference was a guarded way of exploring whether the conditions in
small, homogeneous communities, which I assumed were necessary, would
scale up to make anarchy possible more generally. At the time, as
I’ve said, I assumed I was the only nonanarchist in the room.

I just don’t want that organized violence to be mob violence: it
should be in the hands of professionals trained to use the least required
force and do it >without getting angry.

I agree.

That means, God help us, the police, for all their warts and failings
which they share with the rest of us.

Not necessarily. The difference between us here is just that, for
all your opposition to monopolies, you insist on monopoly
provision of police and many other services. I, on the other hand,
have no objection to natural monopolies, like Zamboni, where there is
always potential competition, i.e. where it is not legally
prohibited. In cases where competition is legally prohibited, like
police protection, I see all the problems you associate with monopolies,
and more.

Now, this is your cue for the dismissive, boilerplate remark about the
Wild West. To which I respond by citing historical scholarship
contending that the popular image of the Wild West is largely a myth, and
explaining how it did work and could work. You dismiss that as
“just-so stories” and want more examples. I supply them, but they
don’t count because they are­necessarily­from different times or
places. The only thing that will count is a demonstration that
anarchy will work here and now, but that’s a demonstration that you
wouldn’t permit because it hasn’t been done before. That’s when I
withdraw; I’m skipping a few steps this time. It not only doesn’t
feel like a good use of my time; it doesn’t look to me, I’m sorry to say,
as though conversation with me could be a very good use of your
time.

The police

do as much as
they can with the resources they are given, to the limit of their
physical stamina, under the rules they swore to obey, which include the
Constitution.
That really sounds like
a civics textbook fantasy. I see the police raiding medical
marijuana dispensaries, entrapping and arresting hookers, seizing the
property of drug dealers­all in violation of the Constitution, and, in
the first case, in violation of state and local law as well. And
these activities are not just a matter of individual human warts and
failings.
judging from
your discussion of the attacks on you, your preferred way of dealing with
not-so-nice-guys seems to be to take the law into your own >hands up
to and including the right to murder.

No, I already said my
preference would be to hire a professional police force, with
self-defense as a last resort when police are unavailable. But
that’s not an option, and neither is self-defense. So I’m left with
no effective protection. You say the police only need more money
(every government program is drastically underfunded, isn’t it?);
but police budgets have been growing in recent years, thanks largely to
civil asset forfeiture, and the crime statistics haven’t gone down
correspondingly. (Just as we see education budgets increasing and
education declining, military budgets increasing and security decreasing.
. . .)

We have to remove the causes of these conflicts,
of the violence, of the attacks, not just try to win the conflicts by
being even more violent in our own
attacks. Once
we have succeeded in becoming the strongest and the most violent and
least scrupulous, it will be our turn to be removed from the
scene by an
uprising of those we are defending ourselves against. Then it will be
their turn, and so on to extinction.

Yes.

If you have a bomb and I have a bomb, the only
way to prevent our blowing each other up is to pull out the fuses.

Yes, again. I
recently read an article by Anthony Gregory
(
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory139.html
), arguing for
unilateral nuclear disarmament, which, to my surprise, I found
persuasive.

Mike

No virus found in this incoming message.

Checked by AVG Free Edition.

Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.13.19/1008 - Release Date:
9/14/2007 8:59 AM

Kucinich is my kind of
libertarian; a fiscal

communitarian and a social respectatarian – a person who is against

laws preventing actions that can’t hurt anyone else (like gay
marriage

and marijuana consumption) and for laws that prevent actions that
can

(like shooting people).
[From Bill Powers (2007.09.17.0345 MDT)]

Rick Marken (2007.09.16.2250) –

This is a narrow view. You are judging what hurts other
people by your own preferences and sensibilities. All you have to do is
switch from “gay marriage” to “white supremacy” and
from “marijuana consumption” to “bus drivers high on
marijuana”. Conflict is conflict and leads to violence; endangerment
can be created without overt violence. And when a drunk freezes to death
under a bridge, the bell tolls for thee. should we just say, “Good
riddance?” Not if the drunk is your father.

Kant tried to find a universal principle of ethics, the categorical
imperative, which states that any principle must be tested by seeing if
it can be applied to everyone. White supremacy obviously can’t. Allowing
anyone to marry anyone can, except for the restrictions that marriage
brings (legal and social). But the categorical imperative gets us back to
where we are now, arguing like lawyers looking for loopholes. Principles
can’t, by their nature, be universal; they are all dependent on the
system concept that forms their context. And logic is bound by premises.
We need to be looking at system concepts.

Under any system concept, some principles are essential, some are
optional, and some are simply errors. An individual who wants to create
and promote a system necessarily must give up some autonomy at the
principle level and the level of rules and logic, just as a driver who
wants to stay on the road has to give up some autonomy concerning the
angle he prefers for the steering wheel. No sane driver frets about not
being able to hold the steering wheel at any angle he damned well
chooses, because getting to the destination is of a higher level than
choosing an angle for the steering wheel. And nobody should fret about
not having complete freedom to chose systematic rules or principles, once
it is realized that the most important thing is to have a viable social
system to live in. We will pick principles that support the viability of
society, and rules that support the principles.

I’m beginning to feel like a preacher with one sermon.

Best,

Bill P.

I have an uncomfortable feeling that this is verging on “everything
for the state, nothing for the individual.” But that is just one of
many possible system concepts. Another is "complete individual
freedom; no state at all’. In both cases, the concept is meant to apply
to society as a whole, to everyone. These are obviously conflicting
system concepts, and both must be changed to eliminate the conflict.
Both, not just one of them, because we will never persuade everyone to
give up either concept entirely. There is something of value in both of
them – only not exactly as they stand right now. This means that
different mixes of principles must be tested to see which lead to the
least conflict; when a principle proves to be fatally
conflict-engendering, it has to be revised or abandoned. So neither
reason nor morality can be immutable.

[From Richard Kennaway (2007.09.17.1150 BST)]

[From Bill Powers (2007.09.17.0345 MDT)]
And nobody should fret about not having complete freedom to chose systematic rules or principles, once it is realized that the most important thing is to have a viable social system to live in. We will pick principles that support the viability of society, and rules that support the principles.

That begs the whole question. If "a viable social system" means peace and prosperity for all, I expect all of us on this list would like that. No conflict there. But the question is, what principles will in fact support such a society? This is a matter of fact, not of principles or system concepts.

You cannot imagine how things could possibly work without a government in charge to tell everyone what to do. At least, what you do imagine is everyone shooting each other. But other people can, and have written on the subject at length.

Go back a couple of centuries and I can imagine you arguing for absolute monarchies, and Mike Acree (and myself) putting forward the radical idea that people should be able to choose their own rulers. Well, now we do, and the new idea is that maybe we don't need to have rulers at all.

···

--
Richard Kennaway, jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk, Richard Kennaway
School of Computing Sciences,
University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.