[extropy-chat] "Hierarchical power is out"

[Damien Broderick]

At 03:00 PM 12/21/2006 -0800, Jef wrote:

>If four of the five farmers adopt
>the new technology, but the fifth resists due to, say, religious
>beliefs, then it's likely that he would lose his livelihood due to being
>unable to effectively compete.  In such a case, is he being coerced?

On the face of it, yes--by those who instilled and patrol his 
religious beliefs. But if he'd resisted on the basis of a 
sophisticated and reasoned permacultural understanding, while the 
other four rapaciously denuded their plots and as a side consequence 
disrupted his local ecology as well... who is coercing whom? As we 
agree, semiosis is contextual; the boundaries of context are decided 
by what amounts to political acts (constrained in the long run, it's 
true, by the physics of the world we share, whether or not we grasp 
its regularities, affordances and complex interactions).

Damien Broderick