Yes, but can they maintain such a monopoly? That’s a fruitful battleground. They’ve been rapidly losing the battle.
There’s a shift in power coming, the ideology of those who gain the reins is going to dictate whether the global economic life ascends through production or collapses under the ineffective solutions enacted by sterile theory.
Bloomj31,
so “human life” defined generally is sustainable. Thats my point.
its all in how you choose to look at it. (Maintaining) Homeostasis is an active process, things are always being changed into other things. No two environments are ever the same, nor is any given environment totally consistent over time, so the human body is always in a state of adaptation. I’m glad you found my post to be informative.
I dont want to harass you, but I still dont think that statement is sufficiently qualified. As far as I know, autobiographical memories are not passed genetically in humans. But I would not exclude the possibility, after all there is evidence that dna can carry some memory, and theres plenty in the human genome that we still dont understand. I think its better to be conscious of your ignorance than to import potentially false suppositions for the sake of convenience. Although those arent mutually exclusive.
when the open question of genetic memory became relevant to this thread, then animals that appear to demonstrate characteristics of genetic memory also became relevant.
No but I would rather not make this assumption. there is such a thing as genetic memory. A lot of things happen in the subconscious.
thats you. Some rational egoists prioritize the welfare of their posterity. Because thats how they find fulfillment.
Malachi, as much fun as it is to play the lawyer’s game and open up a semantics war over what exactly constitutes “memory”, “life”, “change” etc, I will simply amend my statement in the hopes that I will more effectively communicate the concepts underlying the words.
I can give you or anyone else all sorts of reasons for why worrying about the future of human life and human posterity makes no sense to me but ultimately those reasons are just attempts at explaining the feeling I have when I think of this world after I’m dead. Basically the feeling I usually have is what I would call “indifference.” I don’t care much either way. I won’t be here to enjoy it or suffer it so it matters not to me.
I don’t really know why I experience indifference I just do. I have experienced it for quite a long time. A “long time” to me is 5-10 years. It may be 15 years I don’t know. Perhaps it’s this indifference that primarily influences my political leanings, perhaps not. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m more than willing to support a system that takes from some to give to others. I do not hate it. I do not feel resentment towards it. I simply want to use it to achieve my own ends. I want to control Leviathan or if that fails, simply become a part of it. But to even be a part of Leviathan one must also be damaged by it. So I pay my taxes.
I hope I’ve avoided the drudgery of semantics this time and conveyed conceptually what I’m thinking and feeling about this subject.
Thats fine as far as it goes. The standard answer for that is usually to observe that you dont seem to be the kind of person whom I would want in the same political system as myself. But it is good to see such honesty, which is rare and probaly wont get you that well-paying bureaucratic job that you think might satisfy you.
Would like to reply to this by suggesting, and perhaps illustrating, that even given your attitude, you benefit more from a free society than from a coercive society. First I want to point something out that we all missed in your earlier example:
How does this guy have fish for us to take, if we are contemplating whether to teach him to fish or not? Either he has a supply of fish that we can appropriate, or he does not. Things have to be produced before they can be consumed.
one of the austrian insights that I personally think is most important is the specific concept of profit. Profit only comes as a result of voluntary actions, because profit represents and increase in wealth, which is the representation of the satisfaction of human wants. If the increase in goods came as a result of plunder, then some parties to the event did not have their wants satisfied, so it cannot be considered profit. I hope I explained that well enough
now I imagine yor answer to that is something akin to “I dont care about any of that, I just want to satisfy my wants.” which, in human society, involves some measure of cooperation because you dont have all the skills necessary to satisfy your wants. Unlike freedom4me, heh. So you must use a combination of techniques to elicit cooperation from other people, even if you live as a cat burglar you need to look like you are a regular dude so you dont get hooked up. You need to employ some social engineering to get the goods from other people. Well, we know the easiest way to get people to cooperate is find people who already want to cooperate, or convince them that cooperation with you is what they want to do. For the moment, lets ignore cat burglary and concentrate on a continuum of interaction. At the left-hand extreme, is murderous pillage, where the actor kills people who prevent his posession and use of goods he desires. One notch to the right is injurious pillage, and right of that is coercive pillage, where the murder or injury is threatened as an alternative to relinquishing the goods. The fourth notch is gunboat diplomacy, where coercion is used to influence the terms of an exchange, where the victim party would rather not exchange, but receives some nominal value in return. Five notches rightward is catallacty (mutual voluntary exchange) and our continuum is complete. So you can see that murderous and injurious pillage arent going to be very sustainable over a human lifespan. The damage to the means of production is too great. Coercive pillage is also bad because your continued success makes you notorious and people, when faced with losses, will attempt to limit future losses so you have to find new victims. Meanwhile people spend more money on security and less money on consumption items, therefore there is less for you to steal. Clearly the superior solution is to convince people to give up the goods with an ideology. I was gonna write more but I think I’m done. This is all covered in detail in some book written a hundred years ago by some austrian, I just know it.
A point to echo yours Malachi, is that the end result of all human production is ever cheaper servcies and products, specifically in terms of human labor in time and effort → quantity of goods.
Human labor will approach 0 and quality of goods in the attainment of ends will approach infinity.
Hmmm…
I can see practical holes but that’s how the trends work with freedom working with production to increase the velocity of those two curves.
So, I’m not saying to increase velocity, I’m asking for each of us to ask ourselves if we want to increase that velocity.
bloomj31 may respond, seriously I just don’t give a shit.
Well, whether we want to or not, any of us may end up in a place like that, and even if we don’t we will have to deal with people who do feel that way.
I honestly have no idea. I’m not really in a position to apply for those sorts of jobs anyways because at present I’m underqualified. I have no idea if my future employers will even want to know about my political philosophy before hiring me. If they do then I will have to tailor my response to be something like what I expect them to want to hear. Maybe that approach will work maybe it won’t.
A good point. I suppose in my head I just imagined a man who already knew how to fish. I don’t know why.
Once he does know and once he’s getting fish then his labors would become subject to taxation. I guess I jumped to that point in my head.
Alright.
True enough.
There are many many people who view government as cooperative. I have never been chastised by anyone I know in real life for supporting taxation and/or the state. Not a friend, family member, professor or employer. I do not stand out for advocating taxation.
The state may be losing the education battle but I’ve yet to find myself ostracized for being a statist.
Perhaps the day will come and if it comes I suppose I’ll just be executed for crimes against humanity by the new free society. Or perhaps I’ll just die during the transition. Or maybe just crossing the street tomorrow, who knows?
Well I just have to get and keep a job working for the state, someone else has to convince people to part with their stuff and I don’t intend to work for the IRS. I’m terrible at math.
I suppose so. But I don’t really see my place in all this as an ideologue. I’ll leave that sort of job to the politicians. I actually see myself working for the executive branch. I’m thinking of going back to school for a degree in criminal justice.
How long do you think it will take? Because I have things I want now as well as in the future and I, like everyone else, have a scarce amount of time in which to acquire them.
EDIT: I guess this is sort of a weird discussion because in my head I took the thread to be talking about present conditions and the idea of the gun and plowshare as metaphors for different approaches for dealing with other people at any place and/or time.
I thought the excerpt from the Tao te Ching was a sort of proverb meant to drive that metaphor home so to speak.
I didn’t think we were literally talking about teaching a man to fish. How did you intend this thread to be read David? Metaphorically or literally?
Its philosophy. We start with theory and work it into practice. If you want to make money, pick something youre good at. If you want to be happy, pick something you like. But if you want to talk about whether you benefit more from a free society or from a police state, well thats the debate I thought we were having. The problem with consuming goods that were procured through coercive means is that you dont have an accurate sense of the value of things, you lose contact with the processes that sustain civilization and your intuition suffers. It happened to me when I worked for the government, I thought I would become a more vauable employee, lo and behold I became a socially deranged monster. But give it a shot if you like, although most jobs I see (that I am interested in anyway) require a degree in something. Get a degree and go be and officer in the army or something, theres your ticket to elite society.
oops,
I said : "bloomj31 may respond, seriously I just don’t give a shit. "
I meant,
bloomj31 may respond, “Seriously. I just don’t give a shit…”
I didn’t mean that I didn’t care if he responded 
Hahaha, second reading made that jump out at me.
It’s gotten a bit contentious.
I meant it metaphorically of course. We did end up talking about fishing specifically. I don’t plan on opening a fishing school, for sure.
However, of course, the conversation I intend to have, and that one that actually happens don’t necessarily have any relationship with each other. Uncertainty Yet another given from reality that man is combatting.