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Guest Post: The Final Form of Human Government
The next (to last) in a continuing series (most recently: The End of History).
Submitted by Free Radical
The Final Form of Human Government
Man is not only the most individual being on earth; he is also the most social being.
– Mikhail Bakunin
As Donne reminds us, No man is an island, at least if he attains to the order, the harmony – that “pleasing combination of the elements” – for which he naturally yearns. Alone against the elements, man is as nothing, scratching out an existence unfit for his kind and indeed destructive of it, selfless because, in having no others with whom to associate, no true self exists. But in that convivium – that “living together” – a self emerges, or at least the reflection of a self, into which he gazes and through which he begins not only to act but to act human, the goal of which is always the satisfaction of the acting man’s desires. And that, as we have said, is the source and sustenance of the social enterprise:
Society is concerted action, cooperation … the outcome of conscious and purposeful behavior. … Individual man is born into a socially organized environment. In this sense alone we may accept the saying that society is – logically and historically – antecedent to the individual. In every other sense this dictum is either empty or nonsensical. The individual lives and acts within society. But society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort.
In seeing that it was out of this cooperative effort that civil society’s Twin Pillars – money and law – evolved, it is clear that in order for “the final form of human government” to indeed be final (inasmuch as humanity remains subject to material scarcity and thus to the demands of homo economicus), gold and the golden rule must be put back on their foundations. They must be returned to their rightful owners, that is, leaving us with one last question so far as societal governance is concerned. For in debunking the state, including and especially the “democratic” state, it would appear that we have debunked democracy as well, and that the collapse of the democratic state therefore means the death of democracy. On the contrary, however, the collapse of the democratic state will mean the birth of genuine democracy. For as the mechanism whose modus operandi is compulsion and coercion is displaced by the organism whose modus vivendi is voluntary cooperation, democracy in the form of majority rule will give way to democracy in the form of individual rule. That is, the individual, as a sovereign unto himself, will rule over himself, the devolutionary process rendering the fraud of representative/ constitutional democracy null and void amid the flowering of a participatory, and thus truly social, democracy rooted in a negative – i.e., non-interventionist – rule of law.
It will be market democracy, in other words, and while everyone will not have the same number of “votes” – i.e., the same amount of purchasing power – the tendency will be in this direction, as the enormous, state-induced disparities between rich and poor narrow over time (even as vastly more wealth is created) and society moves toward a state of equilibrium that is steady not because it doesn’t change but because it changes steadily, spontaneously generating more and more order.
Will it be utopia? Yes, and emphatically so, for the simple reason that “Utopianism is compatible with everything but determinism,” which is to say, with everything but the state. And as the state atrophies, we can therefore expect utopia – “nowhere” – to appear first here, then there, in this form and that, at once experimental and experiential, until it is everywhere, evolving as one, under the direction of no one and everyone at the same time, and doing so, again, without limit:
Since man is always acting, he must always be engaged in trying to attain the greatest height on his value scale, whatever the type of choice under consideration. There must always be room for improvement in his value scale; otherwise all of man’s wants would be perfectly satisfied, and action would disappear. Since this cannot be the case, it means that there is always open to each actor the prospect of improving his lot, of attaining a value higher than he is giving up, i.e., of making a psychic profit.”
How much “psychic profit” is humanity capable of generating? If there “must always be room for improvement in his value scale,” how much room can man, in that convivium, make? Given that he does not live by bread alone, how far beyond bread can man live? How far beyond the margin of subsistence, in other words, can he in fact go?
We conclude this series with an answer that could well be as probable as it is seemingly impossible, the title of which we withhold with a wink, a nod, and profound thanks for the service that this extraordinary site provides to the cause of human freedom and thus to humanity itself.
You go, Tyler.
i Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, ICS Press, 1990 (Oxford University, 1953), pp. 90 and 91.
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Humans can't govern them selves (pun intended) SINGULARITY? I like my Maid with a fleshy mouth.
Take Clarky's Silver Quiz.
what the fuck does this post have to do with silver?
utopia trading silver, and equal distribution of silver to all?
same shit different day.. stop posting your shit at the top of every fucking post.
Absolutely nothing! Thanks JW n FL.
SOME "humans" can't govern themselves. Seems the darker you are...the shittier you are at it.
Why is this site and you Tyler such a socialist ?? It takes a village like hillary says ??Communes Suck !!
Why is this site and you Tyler such a socialist ?? It takes a village like hillary says ??Communes Suck !!
Social "Community" through a voluntary free market as opposed to the brute force of government. You need to think first, type later.
From the article: "And as the state atrophies, we can therefore expect utopia".
Do you read articles before you comment? If you don't like a FREE site that gives thoughtful articles on a Saturday afternoon, intermixed with some news in an interesting format that has one of the most robust commenting engines around...well, the exit is that way ===>
amen. don't let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya...
ZH has an ideology called reality maybe? Socialist: no. Have you been brainwashed into thinking anything which questions the established order is a socialist plot?
Think about who is served by MSM spin: billionaires and multi millionaires? If you are from the 'low million dollar' class on down: ZH is on your side. When the super rich attack us with Pravda style media spin, reality is our best and only weapon. Don't attack your source of real news.
ZH might be reality for those who can't afford the services of a MSM translator...
Damn Straight, Tyler... Damn Straight...
... you go
amen
I often wonder if life was better for the Pawnee and Sioux before the pale faces came than we now have it. It was simple, you were accepted as part of a close community, there was fewer instruments with which man could impose his will upon another..
That said, I believe that any post modern society begins with a currency system built from the bottom up instead of from the top down making indentured servants of us all save the few who can master the complexities of the economic system.
http://themeanoldinvestor.blogspot.com/2011/06/us-dollar-past-and-future.html
Who cares! Ponder South Park!
they would be frontrunning smoke signals by now as well...
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. Ayn Rand
her real name was alisa rosenbaum and she clearly got off on the brute force.
http://exiledonline.com/atlas-shrieked-why-ayn-rands-right-wing-follower...
Attacking the messenger, not the message... We grow weary of your simpleton tactics. You can't own me, looter. Peddle your trash elsewhere.
"where the government is free to do anything it pleases"
yep, enter the court system and see how the gov't works for the banks.
The court "system". Hmmmm, everyone should look up BAR and then ask what swearing the oath that gets you a BAR registration. That will explan the court thing to most people.
Elaborate scams, one and all. Government, religion, politics. Three things that run/rule are all pure, multi-generational frauds.
ORI
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/pro-gress-by-de-sign/
I wonder if Tyler and Banksy are good friends.
Thank you for this post. And thank you, Tyler, for your fuerza.
Robots can't kill racoons on my Apricot trees either. My shovel and a late nite on ZH will!!! Lighten up with the junks, Girlie boys. Or should I say girls with egos and law degrees! You are toast on this site! BITCHES!
Life is a constant struggle, and must remain so to be healthy, any type of Utopia even an Anarchist/Libertarian type is doomed to failure through stagnation
Constant struggle for domination and constant struggle for survival are necessary for a healthy society, examples of the opposite are former Soviet Union, North Korea, European Union(soon to be former) etc.
Trying to take out the element of survival from society dooms it from the get go, in today's society where even people who are in a vegetative state are kept alive so that they maybe wake up in 20 years is a perversion of the Laws of Nature and Nature does not see kindly for it's laws being perverted, you have been warned
Check out the movie "Idiocracy". Funny! the premise is that intelligent people have less and less children maybe because they worry about over population, but those a bit challenged dont give a shit and keep cranking out babies. So the 'stupid genes' keep gaining til we have Idiocracy. The rule of the stupid by the stupid.. Hey wait, now that I think about it, we're pretty close to there..
makes you wonder about the movie's definition of intelligent
Brawndo! It's what plants crave!
If survival is the measure of victory, then "the stupid" stand a better chance, by sheer numbers. But what is "stupid?" Is it merely another straw-man? Is it just a tool to perpetuate the us vs. them paradigm? Shall we go steal their mascot, and deface their school statue?
Ironically, what we need is more intelligent, alturistic people. The kind of people who are likely to worry about overpopulation. If the elites were truly worried about overpopulation they would print up a few clownbux for anyone who gets fixed. I know they want to reduce our population by 80%, but they would rather do it through war and starvation so they can exploit the chaos and consolidate power. Also, the elites are trying to breed our dangerous traits out of us. Smart, honest, independent people cannot be trusted. The elites steal from such people so they can't afford kids, and some of the loot goes to indolent baby-pumpers.
You know you just might have said something very smart, so the destruction of the productive and smart people might be by design
Dear God.
I appreciate the article leading off with a quote from Mikhail Bakunin, the ideological nemesis of Karl Marx. A few years back, when I was reading as much Marx as I could lay my hands on, it struck me that Marx spent an inordinate amount of time trash-talking Bakunin.
After getting my fill of Marxist ideology, I began studying the tenets of true anarchism with such authors as Peter Kropotkin and Pierre Proudhon.
Capitalism, much like Marxist-Leninist philosophy, seems valid in theory, however when applied as a system of governance, the flaws become self-evident.
The problem is the humans always try to find a 'System' I guess it's how the brain is hardwired, however true intelligence is spontaneous, abstract and impulsive and does not need a system to function
Ah, but those with a will to power require a system that will scale up beyond their immediate reach. So long as the mass of men hold aspirations in their hearts and are unable to shed their fears, there will always be some who intentionally (and successfully) yoke others to their designs, even if such control is purely psychological in nature. The economics of scarcity and the specialized division of labor are nearly insurmountable impediments to the attainment of ones natural rights, even before the coercive designs of men come into play. Like voting booths, markets are violent places for the expression of majoritarian preference, too.
Capitalism is not a government system, seritonin, it's an economic system.
Let's try this in kindergartenese: government systems include: theocracies, autocracies, monarchies, constitutional republics, democracies, etc., etc., etc.
Read The 500 Year Leap and you will understand more clearly that the current U.S. government system doesn't even resemble its founding. That is what has failed.
Thanks for the recommendation. Maybe I'll check it out.
What precisely is the system of government in the USA? A constitutional republic? A democracy? Please enlighten me.
Read the book (and the Constitution while you're at it) and see what it was designed to be.
USA has never been a democracy and was never designed to be one. It isn't a functional representative republic these days either. It is an "amorphocracy" shifting through "socialist dictatorship" to "hell-in-a-handbasketocracy"...
So we can just make up words as we see fit?
I can't tell if you're trying to be clever, or just condescending.
I am.
Therefore I exist.
Gotcha.
Non-clever, non-condescending comment:
I am most times both, but always with intent. I pick my spots where I (believe I) add value - mostly macro-economic stuff and history.
What drives me nuts is when folks converse - even quite intelligently - about stuff without having researched the original documents and/or events. As an example, one of my mantras (to tip my hand a bit farther) is that the Bible is the most criticized book by those who've never read it.
The suggestion on The 500 Year Leap is an earnest one.
I stand corrected. Capitalism is not a system of government.
I will say that the theory of capitalism is flawed, and no, I haven't read Keynes or Mises, so that is just my opinion, based upon the world as I view it. Capitalism has corrupted the US government, to the point that it resembles a socialist dictatorship.
I'll check out The 500 Year Leap.
I use to think this way. Then I started reading. It was not capitalism that corrupted the government, but the nature of people in positions of power. This was part of the reason, this nation was designed to illicit competition among the states, and the people.
What you are saying amounts to, "guns kill people." They do not. It takes an event, usually at the hands of an individual to cause the weapon to discharge. No it is not a false equivalency. You conflate mis-use of a tool, or idea, to enable coercion with flaws in the idea itself. I suspect you also expect that there is a "perfect system" which will end poverty, disease, and generally correct nature's "mistakes." There isn't. Never was, never will be. Life is terminal.
I don't claim to be knowledgable about everything in this world, which is one of the reasons that I like ZH. I'm here to learn and to be educated, and anyone who claims otherwise is most likely an arrogant asshole anyway, and not worth my time.
Your second point is a false equivalence, with me anyway. As someone who proudly owns a few dozen firearms, I am not delusional enough to buy into that false logic about "guns kill people". Bad example, and you don't know me at all.
And the YOUTH ( JUNK SQUAD on something ) Postulates. Loosers living off their Mommies. Never held a HOE! The kind that never sows a crop.
I have an appointment over seas. SUNDAY open. Jets and all!
Yen Crossover, you are 45 and live at home. You weigh over 400 pounds (on a good day) and have no life. What, you think women dont play a part in our society? Since you are so downtrodden on the women, I can say with assurance that you have never had a lady friend. Enough said...................
I'm 44 and wish I lived at home. I own a G-5 , and thats about it!
Oblahma is human?
OT: the OCC just issued a Cease and Desist Order against MERS.
http://www.benzinga.com/press-releases/11/06/p1135227/kramer-kaslow-offi...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/52972728/MERS-AND-MERSCORP-AGREE-TO-A-CEASE-AN...
My Deed of Trust states: Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems , Inc. as beneficiary. Later it also states: MERS is the mortgagee under this security instrument.
Diamond in the rough?
The final form of human government will be run by machines.
Amen
Indeed. Unless we have the Butlerian Jihad first!!!
ORi
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/in-dust-realization/
What Would Devo Do?
Some comments:
1) there are no modern democracies; the Greek model died centuries ago morphing into...
2) socialism/marxism which is currently dying out due to lack of other people's money.
3) capitalism works unless it is corrupted by fascism, cronie capitalism & bribing "citizens" with their own money thru welfare handouts, e.g., bread & circuses.
4) any form of new government will need informed responsible citizens, not the legions of ignorant couch potatoes addicted to mobile phones & the Tee Vee.
5) you will not achieve utopia with such folks. They wouldn't see utopia if it was directly in front of them. They'd just take a pic with their cell phone & Hollywood would produce a reality series.
6) most don't want to think, they want to be told what to do & how to do it. Not "Utopian material" I'm afraid. Go to Wal-Mart & report back at what you see.
Sorry chap, try to be practible with the working stock we have. TPTB have excessively dumbed them down to a pretty pathetic state. Maybe you could design a utopia for Dummies?
Well said.
Well said Lionhead. All around.
ORI
No human government will satisfy what humanity needs in a government. As long as humans are in government, government will be corrupt.
Its a lose/lose thing. Throw in an ideological component and mass slaughter is inevitable.
Nowhere, now here, no where.
For tens of thousands of years of human history there has been a few windows of stability. In the mist of destruction there is at a point, a new beginning which brings forth feelings of euphoria and a glimpse of a utopia. Every time "it" is rebuilt, renewed or replaced, it is proclaimed the best and the last, yet they all have failed at some point.
More wars bitchezzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
"How much “psychic profit” is humanity capable of generating?"
A hell of a lot less than claimed. Lying attention whoring bitches.
Please read this article from March 26, from an Oxford Expert. Telling people to "stop running away from radiation"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12860842
I found his email address through a web search, here it is. I suggest that as many people as possible email him and ask him if he still feels the same way.
wade.allison@keble.ox.ac.uk
So the final form of human government will be by Oxford academics?
Great post. The true source of power, wealth and happiness flows from the individual not govt.
Really? Are we "endowed...with certain unalienable rights" by ourselves?
Is the apostasy this far-reaching?
Individuals sovereign unto themselves is anarchy. The worlds ills stem from individuals tossing aside ordered liberty in favor of a self-sovereign state. That's the core deception and apostasy.
For those who recognize the one true Sovereign, nothing that is transpiring is unexpected nor a great mystery. It is the accelerating graduation of self-deification, the "power of lawlessness already at work" as Paul recorded in 2 Thessalonians.
Good folklore, but misplaced anthropology and theology.
Nice article, great comments. By the way, today on the news clip there was a brief clip of Oboma saying something like "the United States is now, and always will be..." and then the recall becomes a big foggy but it was something like ....a great and independent nation. Very scary stuff if you could have seen his face, but I have a knack for reading "subtitles" on a face. He is a bad, bad person, kid yourself not. Sometimes in your early life you become so perverted and tangled and contorted, nothing can ever straighten you out, moi believes this happened to Oboma. Again very scary, if you can watch the clip and watch his face grow very hard...
This well-intentioned article takes one-sided grains of truth and draws inferences that range from inappropriate to opposite of fact. Due to the formulation of the article, my replies will have to be more scatter-shot than integrated. Because the author quotes others, I'm not entirely clear what combination of ideas he advocates, so I address statements without always knowing where the author stands. While we come to somewhat similar conclusions, the observations and identifications that lead me to my conclusions are simpler, more direct and less abstract.
Every man is an island, and that's just as much a fact as the common saying the article quotes ("no man is an island"). Or perhaps I should say every man should be an island, since so many humans have rejected the responsibility to populate and organize their own brains, perform first-hand observation, honestly reflect on their mental content, and carefully, logically, rationally draw inferences.
At age 4 I recognized I could not trust humans to give me valid or sensible answers. Not because I was brilliant, but because even an average 4 year old can easily recognize massively contradictory answers to the same question she posed to a variety of adults. It was totally obvious to me, and every 4 year old I assume, that the only way to gain any understanding or confidence in anything was to observe reality for myself (not believe the claims of others), and over time struggle to make sense of what I observed.
It was always obvious to me that other kids did not make this decision. I did not know the reason why for decades, though in retrospect it should have been obvious. They chose to accept obvious BS because they would be treated better. Somehow I valued my mind more than acceptance and better treatment even then. I could not then, and cannot now even imagine turning over my mind to obvious liars, morons and braindead creatures... or even honest geniuses.
In other words...
... this girl is an island ...
... of the most fundamental and important type --- an intellectual island. I adopted the X-Files slogans decades before X-Files, "trust no one" and "believe no one", but also the positive flip side, to trust my own first-hand observations and honest attempts to understand and make sense of the world and universe.
It was not very long before this "personal epistemology" led me to explicitly reject ~99% of the notions commonly accepted by humans. And I mean "reject" (though always provisionally), not simply "don't believe". The more I observed and reflected, the more obvious was the almost total intellectual corruption of mankind.
So, to emphasize the obvious fact that I was born into a post-cave-man world is disingenuous. True, I did not invent cars, clothes, home-building and many other concrete activities. But you know what? I would have found some lame way to deal with these issues, assuming I survived long enough.
So yes, while we are indeed born into a universe that already has a nature (gravity, energy, inertia, solid-liquid-gas-plasma, and so forth) does not somehow make the essence of my existence a pico-pimple on the butt of the universe. To be sure, my nature is consistent with the nature of the universe, but what I do with my nature is up to me.
When I read the statement that without other humans we would be selfless --- I puke in disgust. I have spent months, completely alone in the extreme boonies. In fact, I spent 7 years like that, only traveling once every 3 months to where I would see a few humans momentarily to get supplies. I usually didn't even talk to them, or have any inclination to talk with them... I just set the products I was buying on the conveyor belt and handed them cash when the total appeared.
Now sure, everyone will rush in and say, "See, what would you have done without the stores you visited every 3 months?". Answer: I would have had to grow more of my own food, and certainly I would have had to live a vastly less scientific and modern lifestyle. But does the existence of other people also performing productive activities utterly negate mine? Does it make the fundamental and crucial nature of me become a pimple on the butt of society?
That's totally disingenuous. Hell, it is quite obvious that my existence depended vastly more on the existence of plants and animals (that is, the food I had to eat to survive). Without humans, I could have lived. Without plants and/or animals, I could not have lived.
Therefore, this whole focus on "society" is a massively, massively, massively disingenuous focus in almost every context. Sure, other humans (and plants, and animals, and rivers, and lakes, and mountains, and oceans, and continents, and planets, and stars, and galaxies) exist. But the fact is, I depend on the existence of ALL those other aspects of reality than the existence of mankind. In fact, in the world of today, mankind is the biggest problem for a creative, inventive, thoughtful, productive being like me.
The fact is, I have not always lived the life of the extreme [scientific, technological] hermit that I describe. I get along with benevolent humans easily enough, but let me be very clear - humans are anything but a central part of my life. And therefore, it is simply insane to say wacko soundbites like "I have no true self" without a huge pile of insane humans. That soundbite is opposite of fundamental. It is everything else in the universe that is important to me, since mankind has almost totally abandoned those aspects of his nature that could make him an extraordinary being (and something worthy of making somehow "central" to my being).
I can assure you, I live a life of never-ending "conscious and purposeful behavior" of my own origin. I do not inherent my mental activity from "society", except in non-central ways like "which language do I understand".
Anyone who understands the nature of reality to any significant degree should understand what this article does say, that "society" is just an abstract concept that recognizes the fact that more than one human being exists. But all that exists is human beings, not "society". That "society" is nothing more than an abstract mental-unit inside the brain of the humans that do exist. There is zero existential reality to "society" except those mental units. This is exactly like any fiction, for example "Santa Claus". Humans do have a "Santa Claus" mental-unit, but that mental unit does not refer to anything that exists. Ditto for "society". To be sure, the elements of the "Santa Claus" mental-unit do refer to real existents. Fat men exist. Red suits exist. Reindeer exist. Flying exists. And so forth.
Which brings us to the other abstract (fictional) concept of "democracy". I was quite young (early elementary school) when I realized "democracy" was a form of "slavery". This has to be obvious to everyone. If the majority says (or votes) that your left arm must be cut off, your left arm is cut off. You the individual has no choice. You are a slave. Thus I became an enemy of the concept "democracy" when I was about 3 feet tall, and nothing has changed.
Obviously "the state" or "government" is yet another fiction like "society"... except much more explicitly evil. There can be no honest justification for "government", and this is trivial to prove. Every individual is born into the world. By simple symmetry and consistency, it is obvious that no individual has any authority over me or you or any other individual. Which raises the question - how can any individual [in government, say] acquire any legitimate, sensible, rational, reasonable authority over you or me? Answer: They cannot. End of issue, end of "government". The infinitude of talk about "government" is 100.000000000000000000000000000% waste. Only one observation is necessary - government does not exist, and no individual has any legitimate justification to take any action "on behalf of" government that he is not justified to take on behalf of himself or some other individual. That is ALL. That is the sum total of relevant information about so-called "government". Act on it, why don't you?
And this is a wonderful example of why the notion of "society" is horrific and deadly. This mass psychosis (the abstract fictional concept called "society") sets real individuals, real men and women to abusing and destroying each other on a scale utterly beyond possibility in the absence of such wildly insane fictional concepts in the minds of masses of individuals. This is a wonderful example of why I am so revolted with the notion that somehow my nature, my identity and laughably my well being somehow depends on this utterly revolting, destructive, fictional "society" concept. Give me a break! Nothing could be further from the truth.
As a side comment, I've taken special purpose contracts from NASA over the decades I've been a working scientist-engineer. And decades ago I first proposed that the notion of a round-trip journey to mars is utterly insane. The difficulty and cost of landing a rocket huge enough to blast off a substantial size planet like mars is massively, massively, massively greater than simply landing a spacecraft. And, of course, I volunteered to be sent to mars for the rest of my life (and explore on my own, and of course relay my findings). I had zero qualms about being that independent then, and that has not changed.
My point is, nothing is more satisfying or natural for me (and potentially for any human being) than taking 100% of the observations, actions and responsibility for myself. When I have been in remote places alone for months, after a while, I do not even think of human beings. I think about the environment I exist in, and the new technologies I am inventing and developing.
It appears very likely that earth is in the process of becoming a permanent slave planet, with predators-that-be and predator-class enslaving everyone else (most importantly productive individuals, who produce the goods the predators, parasites and producers all need to survive, prosper and enjoy life). The producers continue to happily develop and provide to the predators all the advanced technology necessary to reliably enslave everyone on earth. This is the nature of mankind in fact, which contrasts so massively with the potential of mankind that it makes any thoughtful being revolted, disgusted, sick.
The fact is, the story of mankind on the most fundamental and important level is the story of predator versus producer. Since very few individuals have made or understand this identification, predators utterly dominate producers today, as they have almost everywhere on earth for almost the entire history of mankind.
As long as the species accepts this utterly outmoded situation, the predators will remain totally dominant. The predators have almost finished establishing a world-wide monitoring grid and police-state that will virtually ensure they can dominate the species even if and when substantial masses of the population discover the scam that has worked so well precisely because they consider themselves members of society and not the independent, sovereign individuals they are.
At this point, the only hope that human beings will avoid being an absolute, complete and utter abject failure is the slim, slim, slim possibility that a few of us get off this planet and manage to live in outer space. For those not familiar with the volume of this solar system (much less the galaxy or universe), and the time and energy required to move from place to place in the solar system, let me just say that no government will have any chance to tax or control independent settlements in this solar system, much less elsewhere. This is why the space program was purposely prevented from advancing human habitation of space after the Apollo program. The predators are so intellectually craven, they cannot stand the thought that even one or a few humans might escape their domination.
Notice something about predators and producers. The predators are very effective at controlling producers. Hell, their lives inherently depend upon it (he who does not produce the goods he needs to survive, dies). Note that this does indeed make predators "social beings" - they literally perish without a herd of producers to enslave, bleed and feed off. But such is not the inherent nature of man. The producer is independent, and not dependent upon society.
Producers focus on the many aspects of reality and production, not "society" (or predators). Unfortunately, producers make the terrible mistake of allowing themselves to be intimidated and pushed around by the most vile slime in the entire universe (as far as we know so far). This is so revolting, I have no words to express. Even at this late date, the predators could easily be eliminated in 24 hours if only every producer understood the situation, and simply did what the predators do - eliminate them.
I continue to hope that a small but sufficient number of individuals wake up before it is too late, and eliminate the predators. However, my inference is, since producers allowed the state of affairs to get this far gone without taking any significant actions, they will not take actions either now (just before it is too late) or after. In fact, the entire world suffers an amazing case of Stockholm Syndrome. Only in a world suffering a near-universal case of Stockholm Syndrome can large-scale predators (and notions like "government") even exist.
Humans and their achievements could and should be wonderfully, stunningly amazing.
But the fact is, humans are an abject failure.
What a waste.
Unabomberesque
Maybe a little outRandish, but I am impressed, and certainly intimidated.
I tend to believe if there were even the remote possibility of a settlement in our galaxy, the predators would eventually surface and demand their dole. It is always sold with the best of intentions.
Without government however, we would never have made it into space, it is not economically viable.
Your wrong about the costs. It takes time, dedication but the commodities themselves are not as expensive as you are lead to believe. Basicly you need a tube and something to move it.
Its the tube and the moving it that can get tricky.
Did a Dolphin write this? That would be the only incredible part about this.
honestan - I love your rant, but I have comments, of course.
First of all, I totally agree with you about democracy - why would it be a good thing for a majority of the knuckleheads living on this planet to impose their will on the minority? It wouldn't and TPTB know this, so they have spent a lot of time trying to stop the lower classes from voting. Then they decided that it would be more effective if they just bought all the candidates off so whoever got elected, it wouldn't matter.
The thing that you don't address - and should IMO - is the possibility that there are spiritual forces that will bring to bear a better system for governance. It is my belief that the coming collapse will provide the shock to the population to alert them to the misplaced value that they place on materialism and provide an opportunity to repattern our world. This will be effectuated with an arrival of spiritual beings incarnated as material looking individuals who will provide us the leadership and structure to rethink our society. And rebuild it. The universe will not stand by and allow the predators to enslave this world, as they are attempting (relatively successfully) to do at the moment.
This is really a manifestation of the war between not only producers and predators, but also of good and evil. The ultimate battle. But I am committing myself to supporting the forces of good. Let's rumble!
Your post was excellent and shows that you are a thinking woman with a discerning eye. Thank you for taking the time to explain your perspective to ZH. Rock on!
Logic and reason are wonderful things, taken in moderation.
Thats the thing with any organization you have those who want control of it. The only solution is to undermind the foundations of that organization, limit its resorces and establish a replacement.
This seems to happen naturally anyway as internal power faults distablize the organization and growth stalls. Even governments distablize as there power grows. Creativity needs freedom and those who are creative will go to where they are most free and safe to be creative.
As far as a prision planet, the future is hard to see. As the chinese say: "the emperor is far away." Micromanaging a planet may not be the best idea. The tighter they squeeze the less they can hold on to.
Just because we have nicer toys doesn't make us any less primitive. Humans have 3 million years of creative thought maybe. Our brain developed to exploit our environments. That exploiting thiefing brain is still in our heads. Only now we are exploiting the virtual environments as well as our physical one.
It can be conforting to know that you are not the first nor the last on this road. That others have lain the cobblestone on which you now walk. All we can do is lay a few cobblestones for those who come after us and thus add to this great road and story called, "the human experience" or "mostly harmless".
What we do, we do well.
LOL fuck off to outer space then! I'm sure alien life forms would love to hear your puerile masturbation rants about your gritty mental autonomy that you developed as a 4 year old, not to mention your bad news regarding the human race. You obviously like to marvel in your lust for loneliness, social exclusion, misanthropy and paranoia so off you go then! a few billion light years away and you can put all this messy human stuff behind you…the only thing is, it will never be far enough will it?
You're not a island sweetheart, you are just an onion that’s never been peeled.
http://www.pnas.org/content/86/23/9053.full.pdf+html
Quite brilliant and true!
But that kind of truth scares the natives! They want sentimental platitudes, not truth.
My take on the world is that we live in an open-air mental asylum/ant hill that encompasses the globe. And there are clusters of inmates pushing their insane agendas with the desire to make the other inmates dance to their song. I try and do what I do without upsetting those playing games of government and law, as the inmates turn vicious if they notice you don't want to dance along with them in whatever insanity they are currently involved in.
My approach works for me, and I otherwise have a rather pleasant time in the ant hill/mad house.
in the world of nature - prey and predator has been the design for as long as we care to look back..man has found ways to upend this relationship thru technology..but we are still within this natural world and occasionally preditors get to reduce our herd.
so society just mimics nature no matter what efforts we impose to control predation.
the effort to educate a "free man" would thru his/her own acts avoid predation,but only for a time, luck and ability determine for how long.
we can only hope to support those of us who are trying to avoid predation by the human predators our society creates.
If you see free men/women..give them your support. for all of nature and man's society are marshalled against them.
Exactly. This is the best site aorund and hardly socialist. Idont always agree with eveyone here (what fun would that be) but I generally repsect almost everyone's opion and to call any source of info that maybe might be considered "left" and say it doesn't belong is retarded. ..
"Hell is other people."
So I guess hell is the perfect order.
When Jesus Christ presented the gift of grace through faith and not of works he crushed your "value scale" as God is no respecter of persons. We all have and always will have exactly the same number of votes.
We can vote for ourselves because we believe in ourselves, or we can vote for salvation by faith because we believe we are separate from our Creator and want to be united as one, not merely as a compromised reflection, but as the unique one-of-a-kind creation that we are each called to be. Like God, we have the power to answer or to not answer. Yes and no belongs to us.
When we unlock the knowledge of abundance and truth, then your homo economicus is revealed to be who he really is... a liar. He wields a weapon of scarcity and fear when the truth of sufficiency and abundance surrounds us in an undeniable display each morning.
You can't suggest Isaiah Berlin's proposition of an architecture of choice such as Freedom From or Freedom To when what you are really suggesting is Freedom With. You can't suggest equilibrium while embracing Jean-Paul Sartre's Hell is other people or accept his claim of No Exit. You're proposing that entropy is a deception and that Poincare's recurrence theorem does indeed displace the second law of thermodynamics. You can't do that and not go all the way to acknowledging that it is the power of forgiveness that breaks us free from the arrow of time and that forgiveness is the one thing that changes both the past and the future.
Why wait for your evolution when you can realize true freedom now; freedom from guilt, freedom from sin, freedom from separation? The government will be on His shoulders and He will be called wonderful Counselor. If your journey is eternal, when exactly does that eternal journey begin?
Dave Harrison
www.tradewithdave.com
In regard to Democracy as a gestalt. Any form of government, even those which people have given their physical life to defend is still a form. Just like a form of architecture, a form of design, or a form of choice. The movie Zeitgeist: Moving Forward attempted to convince that there was a better way through an attempt to convince us that freedom of choice is really only freedom to choose between a pre-engineered "Pepsi challenge", so to speak, created just for you by that big computer in the sky.
Here's the commentary on that subject as it relates to forms of government: http://tradewithdave.com/?p=5282 For the most part, what is currently being offered by such movements is a new brand of libertarian paternalism which is government by those who know best because they have access to the best available objective information.
Dave Harrison
www.tradewithdave.com
The theory of the “manufacturing of consent” has less bite than one would think, it‘s much more benign and impotent than the oppressive controlling idea it intends to project. It all started off with the proliferation of manufacturing processes, advertisers trying to find the best products for people, and the attempt at directing tailored advertising at those kinds of people. Over time they (advertisers and the gamut of product developers and designers) developed all kinds of psych metrics for analysing different types of people and finding out what they wanted, through focus groups and questionnaires etc, until it became a quasi-perfect science and they had most nuances of personal desires correlated with different types of lifestyle and product…and OMG they labelled those people! The horror of it! (in the end its all been just another optimizing exercise, just another massively dynamic feedback loop, just another evolutionary process, its the same with politics) They are not “wrong“, just good at finding out what the majority want and giving to them, hand over fist.
The problem is, people think (because they have knee-jerk ideals of what freedom and “freedom of choice” is) that they should individually be able to pick from infinite choices. But the reality is, the manufacturing processes and the limitations of ideas that can be targeted at a suitable swathe of people, so as to make a business plan profitable, are far from infinite. But yet if capitalism never existed, the choices would not just be far from infinite, they would be meagre. There is no major fuck-up going on here, no one behind the curtain. Yes, you have a choice of Pepsi or Coke…but can you think of better choices we should have as a soft drink, could you market them and make money for your shareholders? (for the record I prefer Pepsi)
You might find it irritating that people want to think they are better than you because they have a better kitchen for example - but if there was no such thing as kitchens, they would just find something else to project superiority over you. The problem is not in the products or politics, its in us! There is no crisis of humanity, its just a lot of benign feedback loops generated by a bunch of grasping babies who think they should be no limits to they're "life experience". If you want to shuffle about the items we use to identify ourselves in the hope of making a better world, I assure you there would be no point.
I hear people moaning about Ipads etc, but when you consider how well this process has evolved over a small time horizon, I say its something to celebrate. The development process is a residual feedback loop of refinement, cultivated with a view to give the minimum excursion from an ideal and optimized set of consumer requirements, then manufactured excellently with those in mind to maximise profits. Apple does not tell us what we want, they use a human process to find out what we want, then tailor the product towards us(how did the ipad evolve? Its just a bigger iphone!)…its not these companies making us “lazy and vacant“, its our own feedback loops! We like being lazy and vacant, the fact is if we had a choice most of us would relax more - we are choosing the products that facilitate this. The same with politics, the majority like being filled full of shit, it gives them an illusory sense of purpose in life, patriotism, pride, belonging, social cohesion…the PR people know this and use the same feedback to run campaigns.
Even if you press the reset button on everything, this will happen again and again, if there comes a time when you are all living in abject simplicity, one day your kids will want to express themselves in different ways, externally, and other children will try to make money from what they see that others want, to get what they themselves want, who someone else will provide ad infinitum - its totally benign . Someone along the line will want to be different, others will follow, its in our nature, that has always driven consumer capitalism, politics, TV, music, art…
Its not so much “manufacturing consent”, its more like the “benign maximising of capacity to keep a bunch of yapping babies happy“.
There's a bit of irony in the current paradigm as presented by Eric Schmidt in his Google swan song in that making the final consumer's choice between Apple and Google(Android) that we get to make a choice in the machine that will be making our choices for us. Here's his Mossberg interview http://tradewithdave.com/?p=6741.
The current market is monetizing behavioral economics and its built-in ability to nudge us in the direction that the choice architects have defined as "best for you." Be that your status as an opted-in organ donor or the need to geo-locate you in the case of an emergency... or both in the instance of your organs being made available due to an unfortunate car accident. (see the book title Nudge by Sunstein/Thaler).
Regardless of the winning hand of capitalist soft drink bottlers, I would suggest that my important choice was whether to put my trust in God or in myself. The eventual failure of the state as a form is inevitable while my personal timeline (regardless of the ZeroHedge slogan) is the very basis of that choice. If our raison d'etre is a priori then it is just as likely postmortem. If that is true, then the timeline is the question and it would appear that Perelman has found the answer. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hXaNB32uASzPhXDx7DOobfGzVcTA?docId=CNG.fb6d5467c8dc5b3160c4939c2d753569.4a1
I just selected that short Perelman article above as a novelty. There are plenty more scientific papers on Poincare's conjecture and recurrence theorem. The implications to the "timeline", or the absence of the timeline altogether and the second "law" of thermodynamics (which is a probability, not a law) and the fallacy of entropy overturn the conventional wisdom. Forgiveness is the link within the consciousness that allows you to break Eddington's time arrow and forgiveness, just like Pepsi, is a choice, but possibly more impactful on your universe.
Here's some more background on the subject for those willing to willing to consider that their math and engineering degrees might not outlast their timeline assumptions.
http://tradewithdave.com/?p=6183
Dave Harrison
www.tradewithdave.com
I meant to include a list of companies that represent the monetization of behavioral economics: LinkedIn, Facebook, GroupOn, Zynga, HuffingtonPost (as a crowd-sourced feedback loop), and I am sure they are more. The value creation is huge for advertisers and policy-makers (read government). The fundamental cornerstone however is a flawed algorithm from a human perspective, but not from a machine perspective which is what we are using as our medium (i.e. the computer). It's ability to express love is missing, but otherwise it will give you most everything you need. The problem the only thing you actually needed was love. From that perspective, life within the computer is a ZERO hedge. As Niall Ferguson's latest abundant annoucement so clearly depicts, true history making events don't occur within the computer and neither does circumcision.
Dave Harrison
www.tradewithdave.com
Not too sure i'm getting you here joe, i seem to have lost the context of the discussion somewhere along the line. I will watch that "moving on" video though, it looks good.
"If that is true, then the timeline is the question and it would appear that Perelman has found the answer." I dont understand you here joe?
"Forgiveness is the link within the consciousness that allows you to break Eddington's time arrow and forgiveness, just like Pepsi, is a choice, but possibly more impactful on your universe." Nor here? Could you sum it up without me having to research all those topics? It sounds interesting.
I guess the easy answer is to rent the entire Kung Fu TV series from the 1970's. A slightly more challenging approach would be to contemplate Tolstoy's "the Kingdom is within" or Descartes "Cogito ergo sum." But if you really want to dig into the time machine, take a look in the mirror and think about how you can change the past through forgiveness and what impact that may have on the future. Once you get the hang of that, you can take a look at Everett's many worlds interpretation and consider that as far as you can see you're only riding one of those worlds and why might that be exactly. Then consider what power resides within your ability to forgive or not forgive that may move you onto a different "Everett" branch.
Then again, if you're not looking for the easy way out, you can take the path that Richard Feynman recommends and for the most part he gets it as well as anybody. At least he got it well enough to build the bomb upon which the entire current paradigm rests. Here was his recommendation; "Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible." If that's what it took to build the bomb what will it take to defuse it?
Dave Harrison
www.tradewithdave.com
Ok joe, cheers.
Manufactured consent is very real in the American political marketplace due to the underlying legal structure (ballot and media access). Some states are de facto one party states, unless one joins whichever of the two major parties is the largest in that state, they have no representation in local or state level politics. At the national level, many states restrict primary voting to party members, so the choices available at the general election have already been artificially constrained to a large degree. The last third party of any size on the national stage in a presidential race was Perot's Reform Party, which went nowhere in 1996 after being denied voice in the presidential debates by a non-profit organization run by and for the Republican and Democratic parties. Since then they've become a joke having been further psyop'd into oblivion. The two faces of Janus will abide no contenders.
You just need better quality feedback loops!...along with decent funding for the outsiders. If you ask me (off topic) i think its a good idea for the tax payer tp pay for election campaigns, only everyone gets the same amount of expenditure, same air time etc...but then again, i'm completely nuts.
the apex of the food chain is the large predator..millions of years has made this choice..this understanding of human society is a reflection of the natural world- could be why the founding fathers of the constitution made a fed gov that was filled with checks and balances and structured to be very inefficient..the Senate being a place of long debate (now they pass laws without debate or the inconvenience of reading them thank you ms pelosi/reed) and each state having it's own Senator elected not by the people but by the state reps)..seems the predators have now eliminated the very good intentions of the founders by having Senators get the public vote..bad for us great for the elites (predators)