[From Bill Powers
(2007.09.20.0805 MDT)]
So if you can say “Well, he did it to me first,” that makes it
all right to do the same thing in return?
Doing the same thing in return is ineffective. The idea is to end
the conflict by winning it, which requires overwhelming force in
return.
[From Bill Powers (2007.09.21.1430 MDT)]
Richard Kennaway (2007.09.21.1440 BST) –
This is sort of the
reverse of the Golden Rule: you can do anything unto others that they
have done unto you. My interpretation has always been “don’t do
anything to others that you wouldn’t want done unto you”, which I
have always taken as encouraging empathy, and as a warning about the
tendency of some people with hair triggers to retaliate for any mistake
of yours. It sounds to me as if libertarians simply haven’t outgrown the
tit-for-tat principle of social interaction, which I admit to having
subscribed to myself long ago. I got over that at about the time I went
into Junior High School and stopped getting into
fights.
What do you do if you discover your home has been burgled? Tell the
police and hope the burglar is caught and convicted, and you get your
property back? That is retaliation.
No, it’s restitution. Retaliation is “returning like for like …
esp. to return evil for evil” according to my dictionary. It is
causing someone the same pain he caused you (or quite likely, lots more).
A professional law enforcement officer, ideally, uses only the amount of
force necessary to apprehend the burglar and get him into a cell pending
trial. The punishment, decided later, is supposedly adjusted to the
severity of the offense (though the implied theory of human nature is
probably completely wrong: punishment generally makes the offender more
likely to offend again, not less).
There are people to whom property is so sacred and valuable that the
simple return of stolen property or equivalent value is not enough. The
level of anger aroused by such acts is enough to call for severe, not to
say extreme, punishment, including torture or even death if the victim is
sufficiently fearful of a repetition. When people talk about having guns
at home for protection, they are saying that they are willing to use
deadly force to prevent burglary or more severe offenses. In practice,
they also knock off their own children trying to get in the door late,
and deliverymen. In England you can go to jail for doing that; in
American you’re likely to be acquitted or not even charged with any
offense for killing a burglar.
I think the picture is getting clearer: conflicts, in your view, are to
be won by applying overwhelming physical force. This implies that there
is no hope of ever removing the causes of conflicts, or of reorganizing
and changing your position to meet the other side halfway. I suppose that
would be considered a sign of weakness. Criminals are simply defective
people and must be instantly put down, with however much force is
required to make them desist permanently. I think this is basically a
pessimistic view, and factually wrong.
A little story. I worked for 13 years at the Observatory at Northwestern
University, ending up with a large electonics laboratory, photo lab, and
machine shop on the ground floor of the new Lindheimer observatory on the
lakeshore. We had a continuing vandalism problem from teenagers hanging
around the base of the 100-foot-tall structure. One day I caught a group
of three young men trampling the bushes to peer through the windows, one
might guess looking for a way to get in after dark. I went out the front
door and surprised them. I said “Would you guys like to see what’s
inside here?” When they got over denying that they were doing
anything wrong, which I had never mentioned, they said they might be
interested. So I invited them in and showed them every room on the ground
floor and all the equipment in it, and what I was working on at the time.
Then I took them up the elevator to the dome of the 16-inch telescope and
showed them how to run it, and finally across through the control room to
the big dome with the 40-inch reflector, which I moved around, also
opening the slit (it was daytime). By that time they were genuinely awed
and asking questions like what you have to learn to be able to work in a
place like this. When they departed an hour later they all said thanks
and shook my hand. I never said a thing about vandalism, but that was the
end of it. Not only by those three, but altogether. I guess the word got
around.
Force breeds force; when you push on a control system, it pushes back. If
you live by the sword you die by the sword. It’s all laughably
simple.
Tit for tat works,
as long as you can bring sufficient force to bear to end the conflict by
winning it. Providing that force is precisely what the police are
for.
You have funny idea of what “works” means. You know, there’s a
very odd phenomenon along these lines. Remember the “shock and
awe” attack that opened the occupation of Baghdad? It was supposed
to demoralize the enemy and make him give up and surrender. But heark
back to the Battle of Britain. Hitler tried the same thing on London, and
we still remember how the Londoners stiffened their resolve and refused
to be either shocked or awed. Ask anyone who recommends the use of
violent force if that person would give up and surrender when the same
thing is done to him. Of course the answer would be an indignant
“NO!”. We are not weak-kneed sissies who give up at the first
shot. When you push on me, I push back, and I push back hard enough to
win. Of course if I push on you, you will wilt and show your true colors:
yellow. There’s a superman theory hiding in there somewhere. We are just
better then they are.
Of course the police can apprehend suspects (which does not mean
“perpetrators” until a judge and jury say it does), and this
has an immediate effect. But I’m not really interested in immediate
effects. I want long-term solutions that don’t require constant attention
and effort and expense to make them keep working. Winning a conflict is
not a long-term solution; it’s a reliable way to perpetuate the problem.
All you have to do is put yourself in the place of the person you want to
overwhelm. If the confrontation didn’t turn out in your favor, would you
just collapse and give up, and be good from then on? Like hell you would.
You would immediately start pumping iron and enlisting friends and
studying the winner to find his weak spots, and eventually you would have
another go, this time better equipped to win. That’s why people end up,
as usual, killing each other. It’s the only way to keep the other guy
from regrouping and trying again.
Remember Bosnia-Herzegovena? During one TV inverview one of the Serbians
was defending the Serbian violence, saying that the interviewer didn’t
understand how the Bosnians had oppressed and victimized the Serbians (or
maybe it was all the other way around, it doesn’t matter). The punch line
came when it turned out that the offenses being retaliated against had
happened mainly in the 1400s. That’s what you get by using overwhelming
physical force against people who have operating memory equipment, or at
least something to write on.
“Ethically wrong” is
not an argument unless you can describe a universal ethics to which the
other 80 to 90 percent will agree.
[referring to the
Wikipedia article:]
I can: property – the intention to keep what you have. I propose
that this is a principle that in fact – no shoulds involved – operates
in all people everywhere and always. Only in a monastery might you
find exceptions. Even thieves, who violate other people’s property,
understand that people will fight to keep what the thief would take from
them.
Well, you’re revealing a lot about your own attitudes toward property,
but I doubt that you speak for the 80-90 per cent of nonlibertarians.
Maybe a libertarian is simply someone who has an obsession with property
– is that what you’re saying? Of course some people will fight to keep
others from taking their property, but most will call the cops rather
than try to do the fighting themselves. Heck, Richard, you’re not going
to take on an armed 200-pound burglar, are you? Or even an unarmed one?
Maybe that’s why you want all that overwhelming physical force – to
avoid the humiliation.
If you’e not humiliated but simply exasperated by being robbed, it seems
to me that you would be mainly interested in two things: getting back
what was taken or being paid to cover the loss, and trying to figure out
how to keep the burglar from doing that again. We know that punishment
isn’t likely to work, and prison terms are finite for mere burglary, and
retaliating by humiliating the burglar back is just going to inflame him
(as you might have been inflamed if you had felt humiliated), so it seems
that there’s only one remedy: death. Or, if you’re a namby-pamby bleeding
heart pinko liberal do-gooder busybody like me, you begin to wonder just
how you might turn that burglar into a non-burglar.
I think that can be done, if we devote a little time and thought to it,
for long enough. PCT should be of some help. MOL too.
FWIW, it can be
observed in chimpanzees as well. They will fight to keep what they
have more strongly than they will fight to take what another
has.
Well, chimpanzees are pretty dumb, aren’t they? I think we can do better.
Perhaps what you’re saying here is that libertarianism is a mark of being
evolutionarily deprived.
But that aside, if
all talk of ethics is a show-stopper for you, then it must be difficult
for you to discuss these things with anyone. I mean, I agree with
what you’re saying there, but it’s not an argument against
libertarianism, it’s an argument against talking about
ethics.
Talking about whose ethics? I have my own ethical concepts, but I can see
it would be hard to make you live by them, so I won’t even try. Ethics is
just an idea of how we ought to do things; it’s of no help when trying to
decide what the best ethical system is.
Most of that
majority, I think, believe that two wrongs do not make a right, so
retaliation in kind is not a permissible response to offenses by someone
else. If you are robbed, you have the robber thrown in jail instead of
just robbing him back.
Having them thrown in jail is just as much a retaliation as taking your
goods back by force (which I think most people, and the law, would not
describe as robbery).
No, it’s not. It’s a way of using the least possible force to achieve a
temporary end: preventing the burglar from doing it again right away, and
possibly recovering the lost goodies. Taking goods back “by
force”, when done by amateurs, is likely to be a messy business with
a high probability of excessive retaliation. Six beered-up guys with
drawn guns pounding on someone’s door. Lovely.
It may feel
much more civilised to have a word with the police than to take up arms
yourself, but you’re just having someone else do it on your behalf.
Exactly, someone I can trust not to be personally involved and with
enough training and experience to do the job without giving in to a
savage desire for revenge. That is a more civilized, not to mention more
intelligent, way of dealing with crime.
Are you
seriously suggesting that if someone tries to mug me in the street, and I
think I can take him on and win, I should instead meekly hand over my
wallet?
Yes. You are probably mistaken. There is something wrong with muggers and
you would be best advised not to test how far they will go to prevail
over you.
If Sadaam Hussein’s
Iraqis tortured prisoners in Abu Graib, most people do not take that as a
justification for our torturing Hussein’s Iraqi prisoners (and anyone
else who happens to be there) in Abu Graib.
We are now in cloud-cuckoo-land.
I said most people. Some people obviously do think exactly that
way. I agree, they’re in cloud-cuckoo-land, but they’re quite
real.
Have you come
across the simulation studies of strategies for playing iterated
prisoners dilemma? In general, Tit For Tat with occasional
gratuitous acts of cooperation comes out on top. Robert Axelrod’s
book, “The Evolution of Cooperation”, discusses this, although
it’s quite old and other work has been done since. You may not like
his conclusion, but if so, think up a better strategy and simulate it
against the others.
Funny, the idea of iterating that situation has always sounded
excessively stupid to me. Who would get caught twice in that sort of
dilemma? For a smart person, the first time would be the only time, and
there is nothing to learn from one trial. You just go with your general
principles and be true to yourself.
This is also seen
in kindergartens and grade schools, where a small push turns into a
rolling-on-the-floor fight. Systems locked in conflict take themselves
and the resources they use out of the larger scene of action. Both
parties generally yell “He did it to me
first,”
At least one of them is lying or mistaken.
Not true. If I jostle you on my way out of the room, that could be
accidental or purposive. If accidental, I am telling the truth when I say
your retaliation for the jostle started the escalation. You could have
let it pass, but if you imagine I did it on purpose, your machoness says
you can’t let me get away with that, and off we go. Or I could have done
it on purpose, with the same final result. It doesn’t matter who
“started” it. It was trivial either way. People who retaliate
don’t just retaliate. They retailate with far more force than was used on
them, hoping to win in a hurry.
seeking
justification in the eyes of onlookers (adults) without realizing their
own regression into childhood. Most of the evils of human history have
come about in this way.
They continue in that way. They come about because people want to
take what other people have.
A few people do. There is something the matter with them, and the only
sane way to deal with it is to find out what is wrong and fix it. None of
the other ways works, short of killing or life imprisonment. Or maybe we
should adopt the civil law of the Muslims: cut the offending part off. A
pickpocket with no hands is out of business. A clever con man with a
lobotomy, likewise.
Some people want to
take what other people have. All people want to stop other people
taking what they have. All systems of government arise in various
ways from that conflict. All of them solve it by bringing
overwhelming force to bear against people who forcibly take from other
people, except for the government itself.
Yes. True. Stupid, isn’t it? How long have we been doing it that way, and
exactly when did it make the problem go away?
Do you have another
solution?
Yes.
Best,
Bill P.
