This is intended to correlate with Supplanting the Paradox.
I have been keeping a moleskine journal for some time now and the recent Ron Paul hoopla on the Internet has reminded me of one of my first scribbles in it:
"The Libertarian problem is that private industry would eventually replace the government, thereby making democracy a truly rich-man's luxury. Those who have chosen Huxley's [savagery] would be an ignored market. This would compound with the social Darwinism that would ensue as well."
I will both clarify and refute this statement as I have come to better understand the definitions and philosophies being discussed.
Growing up Democrat I have traditionally had the fear that, although government is inefficient and antithetical to freedom, private interests are equally as antithetical to equality. This is the summation of my understanding of the conflict between 'individual' and 'collective' in a post-capitalist society.
I recently realized, however, that if a constitution can adequately spell out even the most basic of human and civil rights, and if those rights are both respected and protected by a limited, decentralized and transparent government, both freedom and equality have an explosive opportunity to grow to a potentially absolute state.
Coming to this realization was coupled with another realization - that this has rarely ever existed or been allowed to exist anywhere in the world or in the United States. This is most likely because no paradigm so far has been governed by the reality that freedom and equality are interdependent. I believe that time has never more begged the contemplation of specific steps toward a paradigm of this sort.
To begin with, something to the effect of a Constitutional, Libertarian, Democratic Republic, as obtuse as it sounds, would effectively satisfy the philosophical requirements of both current dominant parties while disallowing them the potential to singularly impose or abuse their respective ideologies, or for parties to even be necessary at all.
All in all, what is essentially desired in these respects is the reality of individuals to be absolutely free without ever having the leverage necessary to curtail another's freedoms. This is the ongoing contradiction of the human will.
The birth and success of a system of government which desires to transcend this paradox and indeed, government itself, requires very specific and complex freedoms which are only possible with the advent of decentralized and instantaneous communication. Since this type of communication is now possible through the Internet, a few of perhaps its greatest uses can be realized provided it is homogeneously distributed. The head of ARPA's Information Processing Technology Office, J.C.R. Licklider, saw universal networking as a potential unifying human revolution well before the Internet became ubiquitous.
The unprecedented volume of transparency, autonomy and economics of scale that are drawing us exponentially closer together through this universal networking offer numerous extremely democratizing possibilities.
The premise is this - humanity will have to wind its way through the last and most telling turns of the maze of ideology before it really knows what freedom is. If our technology has surpassed our humanity, it is only reasonable to expect this sort of inertia to continue until it either kills us or saves us.
Perhaps survival means our scientific introspection and exploration unexpectedly lead us to a world that is somehow as subjectively perceived as it is free of unnecessary conflict. Indeed, what can even be unnecessary at all in the constantly evolving natural world?
Here are some of my own aspirations for history:
- Transcendental juxtaposition. Aesthetic and function combine. Technology and biology become one. Science and mythology merge. Reality's source code opens up. Earth becomes a mind.
- Every facet of society has equal incentive to be responsible with the enforcement of the constitution, which should be able to evolve along ever more objective understandings of human behavior. We will be an organic mass of checks and balances so efficient and effective that corruption's rate of return for the potential criminal will simply evaporate.
- An individual could be defined outside any particular institution and all institutions as equally representing its individual members.
- Every institution will be both public and private because every institution will have equally boundless freedom, means of communication and assessment, and an immense dependence on the capital of public consciousness offset by total independence of non-renewable resources.
- Arbitrary boundaries and values are abolished. If a substantiated correlation cannot be made by an institution, it will not be tempted to assume. Ideology has become as lame as it is blind.
- There is an inverse relation between power and autonomy as well as a parallel relation between power and transparency. Humanity's common will is revealed in the individual's will who is as free and unafraid as every other.
- Decentralization in this system is limited only by technology, accelerating in its total permeation.
- The public sector is a boundary condition and the private sector is a differential equation, complimenting one another no longer in the top tiers of institutional corruption, but in the common implementation of each individual institution who understands the synonymous nature of greed and altruism.
- Every individual is guaranteed equal opportunity to access the universal network in any way they see fit.
- Corporatism as we know it is passe, allowing every idea and the whatever capital is behind it equal opportunity.
- The economy would be human-scale where market value is human value.
- The currency is transparent, allowing any individual to track any cent within any institutional account carrying it.
- The currency would also be on an objective standard according to the highest decentralized and sustainable commodity, such as carbon-neutral energy, in order to render the banking system obsolete for the benefit of the individual over the institution and, in the case of energy, effectively bond financial efficiency with energy efficiency - allowing environmental sustainability to be seamlessly determined democratically.
"Common sense is a series of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
-Albert Einstein
"We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses."
-Carl Jung
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1 comment:
There's a lot to respond to here, and we should wade into it. For now:
One of my biggest gripes about our society is that Americans, if they think about it at all, think they are capitalists. That's the word they've heard used for the system they live under, so they think it applies to them. They don't understand ownership or investment, or they disdain it or pay other people to understand it for them, or live as numb, insensate slaves to those who embrace capitalism to the fullest. But capitalism is potentially the most egalitarian means of growing and sharing wealth that has ever been conceived, and those who are educated in it and apply its precepts cannot fail to become more secure and prosperous (not that it won't be supplanted when we outgrow currencies). These precepts have existed for a long time, but every now and again somebody publishes about them to great public fanfare, or makes much of the realization that they, too, can enter the ownership class, thinking they've discovered some secret or revolutionized finance.
Certainly, you perceive echoes of this in your observations of the steps humanity is taking in the desired directions you describe at length. We have all these bits and pieces at our disposal, we have the component pieces of the society you want to live in, but the people can't see the gigs for the kilobytes. The main current of our civilization is like the average person with a smartphone, an internet connection, a financial identity, and citizen's franchise. Any of these systems, used to their fullest potential, are powerful tools; used in conjunction, that power becomes awesome. Sadly, few ever do more than exercise the least, most obvious capacity of each system. Such are "capitalists" and "libertarians," "voters" and "consumers," "artists" and "engineers."
So, not to sound like any random Democrat during an election year, what we're really looking at is an education problem.
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