Updated clarification from my previous Utilitarian video.
-
Archives
-
Meta
VideoBlog – Re Essential strategy question for anti-statists
Ancaps don’t use civil disobedience and outright rejection because of their personal lives as well as a lessened ability to spread ideas.
This is in response to Gabriel Koulikov’s video, Essential strategy question for anti-statists.
Nature and Change
There are, in most people’s minds, three ways to change the system:
-Working within it
-Education
-Revolution
The first, to me, and I think most autarchists, is illegitimate. You don’t make deals with the devil. It’s not the people, it’s the institution. It’s not the bad laws, but the bad philosophy. The anatomy of the state is such that even if you were to enact laws that did “promote freedom”, there would be others getting laws passed opposing it. It also inherently contradicts the ideas of liberty—using thestate to show people should be autonomous.
Violent overthrow is also an illegitimate means for those who believe in the non aggression principle and for those who want the state as a structuring agent of society to go away. Revolutions of this kind are oftentimes, as Rose Wilder Lane said, “revolutions only in the sense that a wheel’s turning is a revolution…only a movement around a motionless center; it never breaks out of the circle. ” Violence begets more calamity and violence; not more order and cooperation.
Education is the only viable option in working towards a more peaceful and voluntary society. I’ve been accused once of espousing something like the socialist idea of the “new man” which is a far cry from the truth. People who have already been heavily indoctrinated need to be de-schooled, not taught how to think about their nature.
People are born free. We have a property instinct (heavily referenced).; the youngest children realize ownership and the first-comer principle. They realize it is not nice to hit; you don’t need to teach them; all you need to do is not teach them that hitting is okay. If they have a few mistakes when they’re younger, they are capable of realizing they are inflicting pain. This is something healthy children do not like to do because–
We have mirror neurons. This means save the fact that the touch sensors don’t send information to the receptors that we are being touched, our brains feel that pain, and empathize. This is why you flinch when you see someone is about to get hit. We don’t like watching others in reality get hurt because it hurt us.
Children are inquisitive, creative, excited to learn about and solve new problems. They are also little philosophers. All of those “why?” questions are them trying to figure out the world. Tell a child what war is, and watch a confused reaction. Watch the determinations with which they try to accomplish goals (www.foti-peter.hu/holt/hcl.pdf)
We are biologically programmed to learn how to fit in our society; “children are like sponges”. This is why young children are excited to learn to talk, walk and do all of the grown up things. This can also have a very negative effect if they are brought up in environments where “fitting in” means being aggressive, unhappy to live and work, unwilling to cooperate.
Children have desires and do what they can to fill them. This is the crux of human actions and it starts early. As consumers, we are very selfish, in that we are concerned with our consumption. This having of desires, and using ones abilities to get what one wants, is a self-interested act, but not done at the expense of others.
All of these characteristics to me are what is beaten out of a person—physically and emotionally. Unschooling is completely in line with human nature; this isn’t pedagogy, this is precisely allowing a person to follow their nature, which makes them passionate, compassionate and successful.
For adults, what we need is deschooling, not a re-education, no more people trying to get you to accept premises you don’t get. Allow another person to bring up the subject, answer their questions, see what concerns them and see if you can connect principles of autonomy, freedom, capitalism and empathy to those. They may not become market autarchists, but they’ll have a profoundly deeper respect for themselves and for other people if they feel that they are not pressured. They can be themselves and someone else can have a different opinion and that’s awesome and can be done civilly.
There’s not doubt that “human nature” has many sides to it, but left unobstructed, I truly believe people learn to show self-interest, cooperation, and caring. It is a testament to the human mind that we have such variable possibilities; but that malleability of a child does not change what we are: social creatures.
Critique of Mutualist Labor and Organizational Theory
Mutualists have a lot of curious ideas and I have recently taken great interest in studying them because of their approach to hierarchical structures, which has great appeal to me.
After having researched if or a while, I have had to come to the unfortunate conclusion that it is not a viable system for economic and moral reasons.
Mutualist Banks
One large objection has to do with their conception of worker owned cooperatives supported financially by mutualist banks.
They are against traditional banks and capitalists because of a belief in a type of labor theory of value that supposes that even though value is determined by the subjective and free evaluation of customers, competition and market equilibrium ensure that prices will tend towards the cost of production—which is all inputs, including labor—and hence any “profits” going into capitalist pockets is still taking surplus value from workers.
Mutualist banks seem to propose that people lending from them can trade their future labor, which is measured in part by the disutility of working or else people can obtain loans by putting up collateral such as land in order to obtain loans.
This in itself confuses me as an economic theory for a few reasons: (1) although it doesn’t suffer from the fact that labor hours cannot be an accurate measurement of economic input as traditional LTV does, certificates issued for labor, because of subjective disutility, does not give us a common denominator by which prices can be established; (2) labor can be viewed as a consumer good in rare cases, but almost all of the time, labor is not a consumer good but a producer good. The price for producers goods is determined by what is ultimately valued by consumers. Because of this, market money should be dependent on consumer goods because it is something that has value even if the money system/society collapses; (3) mutualists don’t believe in absentee ownership, which makes a banks claim to such collateral that is offered to them extremely risky and generally untenable due to the possibility of extreme losses, however that is calculated. I hear there has been headway on this part of the philosophy but have not been able to locate it.
Entrepreneurs
Unlike a bank, entrepreneurs are not just passive capital providers but start businesses. They have a lot of qualities that as far as I can tell are not skills equally distributed among peoples, as most skills are not:
-Deferring Consumption: Entrepreneurs are more willing or more able to defer consumption of the product of their labor throughout the whole production process, before it can be brought to market for consumers to purchase. Shortening the production process so it is more in line with workers time preference does not bring a benefit to society.
Risk Taking – A steady, dependable income is, for many people, much more important than possible profits if they were to create their own business, because of the losses that can be endured. Profits are made by capitalists because of their successful determination and bearing of uncertainty. Entrepeneurs are willing to take risk with their capital because
Foresight – the ability to see market gaps in the amount of product being sold and/or ability to create new products that will appeal to a consumer. This takes talent, a great idea, or acuity to market conditions which takes time to develop.
These characteristics make entrepreneurs necessary for a well functioning economy. I think that a great mutualist insight is that the state has grossly perverted our time preference and innate abilities in a myriad of ways, and that many more people would be self-employed in a free economy. Their attention to detail about agency and knowledge problems in traditional capitalist firms is something that should be taken seriously. Although these insights are helpful, it still creates a problem of delegation of decision making power. This should be given more thought by capitalist autarchist, although it isn’t completely ignored. Peter Klein being the most well known of those who write on it (a short paper, a book). I plan to blog about this in the future.
Collective Ownership
Given my understanding of self-ownership and property existing as an extension of your body, workers cooperatives create a real moral problem.
In collective ownership, you have different self-interested actors all laying claim on the same good. Not as in joint ownership, where the lines of how much you own and what control you can exercise is clearly delineated; but instead that all actors own 100% of the same property. These people have different ideas about efficiency, fairness, allocation of resources, etc. In workers collectives, this problem is solved in one of two ways. One is through direct democracy, which is always and everywhere the tyranny of the majority. The other way to solve it is through electing managers to be ultimate decision makers on the allocation of resources. The problem in both of these solutions to solving the problem is that “ownership” is divided from control. For ownership of a piece of property to exist, there must be boundary, claim and control. Control consists of the right to use and dispose of a good. One of the essential feature of externally owned property is alienability of the rights of ownership—being able to transfer the good to someone else. We don’t see these essential features in collective ownership.
Things can be owned communally, but this means each part of the collective must have put labor into that good, which is rarely if ever the case in a firm.
It seems workers cooperatives demand the transgression of property and by extension the individuals. This isn’t freedom as I understand it.
If there is information out there that resolves some of these problems of mutualism, please leave a comment with the links so I can have a more informed opinion on the matter.
VideoBlog – Re: Why Aren’t Libertarians More Vegetarian?
In response to JacobSpinney’s Why Aren’t Libertarians more Vegetarians?
Communication About Freedom
For about a year and a half, I have refrained from posting on forums for a very specific reason. I found out that I am not a good conversationalist when it comes to ideas, because instead of a discussion, I have made everything into a debate. I’d always known I was a hearty debater and for a long time didn’t mind it but eventually, it came to my attention that not only was I upsetting myself, but I wasn’t actually communicating my ideas. Even if it isn’t an ad hominem or a cascade of insults, two big things have to be kept in mind when trying to present new ideas to people that are antithetical to their own:
(1) Most people are attached to their ideas more and likely have a strong interest in continuing to believe, especially people whose social groups are built up around those ideas. Our ideology isn’t something we hold onto like we do people or objects, it is actually part of the ego and the way in which we organize ideas.
(2) When coming to our current belief systems, save the rare people who were raised as anarchists, what most likely did not happen is somebody said it to us and much less pushed it upon us and we went, “oh, I get it.” It is a process that took a lot of studying, critical thinking and time. Even for those of us who read/listened to one lecture on it and decided it made sense, it still takes a lot of time to adjust and peel back all of the layers of confused thinking.
Number (1) on the list, as well as my own personal experience, leads me to correct a mistake people often make about why people get defensive about their ideas. It is not that they “aren’t confident” or “can’t explain so don’t understand”. The problem is they feel that you aren’t saying their opinion is wrong, you are saying they are wrong because of the deep way in which ideas form our conception of ourselves and the world.
When you tell a person that they are wrong, even indirectly, they will likely feel defensive and not open to new information. Robert LeFevre, who is roundabouts my favorite anarchist, (he called himself “autarchist”) has a great lecture about communicating about freedom, but it applies to all forms of communication. He differentiates between three temperature zones at which communication can occur. The torrid zone is the one I believe a lot of libertarians often put themselves in with people with using arguments like “gun against my head.” These arguments are the “heated debates” you get into where both parties become generally antagonistic and aggressive towards each other, which is likely to happen when you attack or try to just debunk someone’s ideas instead of just providing them information, a different standpoint, and logical arguments. On the chilly other end of the scale is the frigid zone in which you are giving them a lot of information and theory which they cannot connect to and do not have the time to process, in which case a listener can get very bored and come to feel so much rhetoric is being thrown at them. The zone we want to be in is the temperate zone, where everyone is collected and calm, staying honest, and being earnestly interested in listening and speaking to the other person. For speaking, this means assuming they’re capable of understanding things for themselves, that they’re sovereign individual deserving of respect with their own ideas and they have no positive obligation to accept yours. For listening, this means being open to the fact they have something to contribute to the conversation even when you disagree.
When we stop listening, dogmatism ensues. Dogmatic thinking generally seems to be something that is instilled in us not through verbal instruction but in demonstration. I consider it neither natural or right. From the standpoint of the mind, it may be more economical to adapt a belief system and hold it as long as you are unawares of it doing you any harm, but what is considered efficient by the mind depends on the way in which it was molded. Can you recall a time from early age where you saw people questioning their belief systems? I think it has become more prevalent in the Age of Information but still lacking as far as mentors in young life goes. Many adults fear that to concede a point is to appear weak and lose their control over children. This is one of the many circular systems of disrespect for the individual we should strive to get away from.
I’m probably about 30% better at not feel attacked and not attacking in conversations about ideas, but I’ll keep working on it.