[ExI] your big chance

[William Flynn Wallace]

I have been in this group for quite some time, but I have not read anything
as scary as 'paid killers' and 'secret police'.  Just why do we need
those?  Rafal?  bill w

On Tue, Jan 7, 2020 at 10:27 PM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 11:35 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> I can't call myself a libertarian because I am in favor of some social
>> programs.
>>
>
> ### I think I am still a libertarian, maybe even more so than before. In
> the past few years I have become viscerally aware of tribalism, and the
> difficulty it poses to libertarian thinking, which tends to assume people
> assemble primarily to trade for mutual benefit, rather than assemble
> primarily to attack or defend. But,these difficulties notwithstanding, I am
> temperamentally inclined towards libertarianism, which I prefer to
> summarize as a combination of "live and let live" and the scientific method.
>
> So, yes, as unlibertarian as it may be, we have to come together to fight
> the "other", because in this imperfect world some of the others want our
> stuff. This implies we need to persecute traitors that weaken us and we
> need to strive for political unity. We need the secret police, we need to
> pay killers to protect us. This is only reasonable, because the alternative
> is defeat.
>
> But then the reasonable libertarian will be forever suspicious of
> political power, will use as little of it as possible, given the
> circumstances and the available technologies. We recognize that every
> society is a machine that relies on various technologies to perform its
> functions, which is why an engineer's approach of testing, measuring and
> tinkering is necessary, much more so that moralizing. Success in building a
> society is, as much as anything in the real world, an art of the possible.
>
> It's pretty easy to come up with uplifting slogans, so mass-market tribes
> generate them in abundance for striving lemmings to boldly proclaim. It's
> much more difficult to think your way through complexity, so that the
> machinery of freedom does not corrupt itself into the machinery of
> oppression.
>
> There is a dichotomy between the exigencies of mass-market politics, which
> is instinctual and thus hard to improve upon, and the reasoned, in-depth
> political philosophy that contributes to actual social progress. This is
> why mass-market political tags, such as "Democrat" or "conservative",
> convey so little information. Progress is slow, fickle and often accidental
> because political thinking rather than emoting is hard work, system 2, and
> thus is short supply.
>
> I am a systematizer and I always tried to remove internal inconsistencies
> from my beliefs, leading me to some discoveries about myself, some of which
> were mildly unflattering. So after some first-principles analysis, years of
> observation, being occasionally schooled by my betters and much
> soul-searching it looks like the middle-market "libertarian" tag is the
> closest description of my beliefs.
>
> Rafal
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