[ExI] your big chance

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 6:14 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Similarly, a duty to obey means you (or whoever has such a duty) must
> obey. Again, this isn’t about doing whatever you want — if you have no duty
> to obey a person or a group. You’d still be bound by other just claims.
>
> ### Wait, you have no duty but you are bound?

Libertarianism is not a silly word game about the meaning "duty" and "right
to rule". Libertarianism is based on acknowledging the value of individual
desires as the primary or only basis for building a society, and thus
generally refusing to recognize any societal values independent of
individual desires. Various communitarian, religious and authoritarian
philosophies claim there are values independent of individuals, that
justify suppression of individual desires to achieve diverse
self-transcendent goals - e.g. religious salvation despite lack of belief,
dominance, complete equality of outcomes despite diversity of abilities and
desires, protection of the environment despite individual wishes, etc.

We libertarians refuse such transcendent claims. We know that
self-transcendent value claims are usually power- or prestige-grabs used by
various striving sociopaths to elevate their social ranks.

We (or at least the reasonable ones among us) apply rational methodologies
to find out the specific strategies that are most likely to help us achieve
our desires, in a complex system of interactions between multiple
individuals. This is a process of discovery, not a simple derivation of
rules from axioms, and therefore the outcomes may be occasionally
surprising and are always contingent. In some places a ruthless,
overbearing state is desirable, in other places a pleasant
anarcho-capitalist governance might be possible.

Rafal
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