[extropy-chat] ENOUGH already

[Charlie Stross]

On 25 Dec 2003, at 13:32, Matus wrote:
>>
> Charlie Stross said:
>
>> I'd like to add to that: war seems to me to be about as anti-extropic
>> as you can get. The triumph of brute force over enlightenment,
>> destruction, death and despair on a massive scale. An excuse for the
>> enemies of freedom on every side to chip away at civil rights. The
>> ascendency of dehumanization is the *opposite* of transhumanism.
>
> I would like to disagree with that.  War is neither intrinsically
> extropic nor anti-extropic.  If one of the parties at war is less
> extropic, and it wins, then war is anti-extropic.

Sorry, I think you're wrong.

We're talking on two different levels. You're discussing ideology, I'm 
discussing methods.

I'll grant you that it's necessary to address the problem of 
anti-extropic ideologies, and in some cases their proponents will not 
listen to reason. But ...

>   If the other party is
> more extropic, and it wins, the result is clearly extropic.  Would you
> have been content trying to 'enlighten' Hitler or Hirohito or Stalin
> about why war was wrong?

Hitler, Stalin, et all were *symptoms* of the disease of war as much as 
they were driving forces behind it.In Hitler's case, his ascendency was 
arguably the ultimate side-effect of the botched forceps delivery of 
one of Queen Victoria's grand-children in 1859. (Specifically Kaiser 
Wilhelm II, whose physical deformity and conservative, martial 
upbringing combined to give him an inferiority complex directed towards 
his cousins, and led in no small part to his getting involved in a 
minor Balkan fracas and escallating it into a World War. Which in turn 
brought the monarchical system to an unexpected and very sudden end in 
Europe, leaving in its wake a power vacuum in which totalitarianism 
could flourish.) In Stalin's case ... well, if a certain Russian 
bomb-thrower in 1881 had missed his target, we'd probably have had no 
Russian revolution. (Vladimir Illich Ulianov's elder brother was one of 
the student radicals executed by Tsar Alexander III's police during the 
paranoid years following the assassination of Alexander II. He idolized 
his brother, and later ascribed his own radicalization to what he 
perceived as the unfair and brutal execution of the elder sibling. No 
Lenln? Then Stalin -- or rather, Joe Dzugashvilli -- stays a small-time 
bank-robber and terrorist. Or even stays in the seminary and ends up as 
a priest.)

Is this a case of ascribing too much to contingency? Sure. But I feel 
it's important to note that these monsters you point the finger at were 
in every case the outcome of a chain of violent circumstances. Violence 
begets more violence, and in each case (Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito's war 
cabinet) the monstrous fruit grows from a relatively small seed.

>  As I have pointed out many times on this list,
> there has never been a society more anti-extropic than just about every
> incarnation of communism on this planet.  More people have been killed
> by communism than all war dead combined,

Blaah blaah blaah.

I suppose "every incarnation of communism on this planet" doesn't 
include all those family groups that pool their collective assets and 
resources. Or the roughly 75% of the planetary population who live in 
dirt-poor peasant communities and are so poor that they're excluded 
from capital-mediated economic interactions, dealing instead on the 
basis of barter and favours. Right?

The truth is, communism works very well indeed -- at the smallest 
scale. And if you insist that it doesn't, I'm going to have to ask you 
how much your parents charged you for the use of your cot when you were 
a baby.

But I digress ...

> And tell me if a war to free them from that particular oppressive
> murderous regime would not have been extropic.  If any part of extropy
> requires freedoms of any kind, than turning non-free nations free by
> means of war is by definition extropic.

Tell that to the corpses.

Here's a clue: the survivors may (or may not) be better off after a war 
of liberation. But the people who die during such a war are cleary 
*not* better off; they're dead. No amount of "liberation" can help a 
corpse.

> Extropic progress requires freedom of information, ideas, thoughts,
> technology, etc.  In most oppressive states, the internet and computers
> are illegal, non-governmental publications and political disagreement,
> also are, including property and technology in others.

Like, oh, cannabis or heroin or cocaine in the USA?

Here's a thought-experiment for you. Clearly the USA is ruled by an 
oppressive regime that refuses to give its citizens the right to 
experience certain states of consciousness or to posess certain types 
of property. Political disagreement with this platform can (as in the 
recent case of Tommy Chong) make you a target for imprisonment on 
trumped-up charges.

Does this justify carpet-bombing Washington DC and launching a war of 
invasion and subsequent occupation by foreign troops, at a cost of, 
say, 150,000 lives (the equivalent per capita adjusted for the US 
population of the proportion of the Iraqi population killed during this 
years' war) to redress this oppressive situation?

I may be opposed to the war on drugs, but I suspect going to that kind 
of length to end it would be a cure worse than the disease.

War as a cure for social evils is almost invariably worse than the 
social evils it is proposed as a solution for. I find it notable that 
the only really enthusiastic proponents of such wars on the planet 
today are barking mad Islamic fundamentalists -- and Americans, who 
haven't actually experienced a war on their home territory for nearly a 
century and a half!




-- Charlie (who is *NOT* American, and who lives in a country 
             that has been bombed within living memory, and who has lived
             through a terrorist insurgency that killed five or six times
             as many people, as a proportion of total population, as 
9/11)