[ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 9:48 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> On 5/19/2011 8:35 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
>> To respond to your point more directly, the easily-led will not be
>> quite so easily led when there is more intelligence in the world, I
>> hope. If everyone had an intelligent agent to look after their
>> political interests, that would be an interesting game changer.
>
> That would be Iain Banks's Culture, with a bit of luck. Post-scarcity
> anarcho-communism, with Minds to watch the wolves. Alternatively,
> post-Nineteen Eighty-Four hell.

### Banks is a weird screwball. He is smart enough to see the truth
but just can't lay off communism, so he came up with an utopia where
humans are more or less a pimple on the body politic, managed and
maintained by vastly superhuman creatures, and therefore able to have
their cake and eat it, too - to have peace and prosperity (i.e. "to
each according to his need") without the work ("from each according to
his ability") and without the Commissars screwing everybody over. And
he even thought about how to assure removal of old folks - somehow,
humans in the Culture become uniformly weary of life at around 400
years and choose to drop dead. Of course, this can't happen by
accident, implying that the Minds are behind it, designing humans to
remove themselves after their expiry date, for some inscrutable
Mind-derived purpose.

It's diagnostic of the imperfection of the communist vision that
thinkers smart enough to work their way through the details feel
forced on rely on divine (i.e. superhumanly smart and nearly
omnipotent Minds) force to keep their clock ticking.

Rafal