David Baird
“Infinitely-more-than-minimal States”
Isdom: the domain of what is. Reality.
S-Change: Socialist meta-exchange.
Nozick
likens the condition in a non-minimal state to slavery. The minimal
state (MS) is one which is a level above the state of nature, with
people acquiring no more rights than they would have in the (imaginary)
Lockian state of nature. They would have the right not to be killed by
a goon with a club, but not the right not to be let die by a goon with
a drug factory, for lack of medication. The MS functions as a dominant
protective agency, and freedom to engage in capitalistic exchange, or
“X-change,” is highly valued. A state such as our real America is a
slave state, according to Nozick. This can be seen if we compare
ourselves to the master-slave relationship. He gives a nine-step
account (p.290, Anarchy, State, and Utopia), from one’s being a
total slave under a brutal master, to one’s being a citizen of, or
slave to, the modern state, which treats one somewhat well, though
controlling one’s life, but gives one a vote to throw in with all the
other slaves’ votes about how to let things go.
First
of all, what is slavery? A master controlling your moves? Isn’t this
similar to the boss-worker relationship in a free market, where people
are forced to work to survive, usually have no choice about who to work
for or what to do, and are treated as replaceable parts, who don’t even
need to be maintained well, because other even more desperate souls are
in line to take their jobs? In capitalism, all work is equivalent to
prostitution. Temporarily allowing yourself to be screwed, or your body
to be used in some other imaginative way conducive to the payer’s
benefit.
Nozick
thinks the aggregate, the group, is like a master. But there are
differences. First of all, in a coherently structured society, the
aggregate would be much more rational than an individual master would
likely be. Most people in a nation-large group are sane and decent, so
the aggregate is self-corrective of its more neurotic and sick
individuals, when coming to aggregate decisions about how to order
life. Given “ag-ra,” or aggregate rational, control of society, our
goal would not be to exploit ourselves, which is what a master
presumably likes to do to his slaves. Just as parents should not be out
to enslave their children, but instead to lovingly guide them in their
growth, so they turn out to be amazing, creative and curious people.
It’s the game plan that matters. The ag-ra game plan is to harmonize
human potentiality, and allow for the ultimate fulfillment of
individual desire and common good. This game plan is not quite that of
a slaveholder. Sure there would be a vast police and military
apparatus, quite capable of forcing you to pay your taxes. They would
not, as Nozick suggests, decide for you your hairstyle or recreational
drugs.
Our
society does not disallow drug use for the good of the users. This can
be seen by the fact that when they are caught, they are put in jail to
be raped and HIV’d. Our society probably disallows drug use because
drugs such as pot counteract group-think, and lead to more radicalism
and individuality. If it were about their real danger, then other more
dangerous things like alcohol wouldn’t be legal.
“So much been said, so
little been done.
They still killin’ the
people, and havin’ their fun.”
Bob
Marley, Crisis
My
argument centers around rational aggregates, “heteroactualities.” An
“actuality” is a reality, like the reality of being a philosopher
during McCarthyism, or the reality of being a student writing a paper
he knows is incoherent. Each of us is an actuality. As a society we are
thus a heteroactuality, but as of yet we are not a rational aggregate. Rich
Media, Poor Democracy, by Robert McChesney, makes this abundantly
clear. Our society’s nervous system, the media’s, are controlled by
small groups who are interested in maintaining this control, and also,
sadly, maintaining business-as-usual, and who have the means to do it,
because they prescribe the content of the information that the masses
are fed, the masses then not being able to figure out what’s going
wrong, and to make their votes count for something.
To me the choice is: I can act freely in
capitalism, and X-change things, or I can act according to law and
limitation, and base my theory on the meta-exchange. The meta-exchange
is the resultant meaning alteration of the world that takes place after
an exchange. Total meaning-in-the-world. X-change relies on tunnel
visioning into one single transfer of whatever and thinking it is the
whole story. But wide horizons are affected by changes. S-change takes
the horizon of influencibility into account. Admittedly, it is somewhat
hard to debate the merits of a free market, being that it does not
exist. The current regime is an exquisitely managed system of
domination, with the requirement to respect the stronger powers, and
the ability to exploit the weaker, and to call it “free” would be
stretching things, when the legal frameworks such as GATT are hundreds
of pages long.
What
world do we think we want? One where the structures are robust enough
to prevent their exploitation. The governmental structures. Which will
take a total re-conceptualization of our relations to each other. The
choice about the media’s, and the “sharing choice,” about distribution
of fruits, are the most important choices a society makes. What’s wrong
with our world? The system is used/abused to transfer anti-lack from
those who have little to spend to those who think little of spending a
lot. How is the system used to do this? I can’t repeat that here. One
World, Ready or Not, by William Greider, explains it completely,
which is the useful way to have it explained. All I can say is that the
reality is a bit more complex than Nozick is willing to let on, and to
alter it in a positive way will take ultra-complex legal and perhaps
extra-legal doings, far surpassing the mere protection of our freedom
that he would offer as the only necessity. For instance it will be
necessary to tax currency speculation, which is tremendously huge
today, and not only completely unproductive of goodness except for
anti-lack, but actually does immense harm to economies as their
currencies fluctuate wildly because of the experimental free-for-all.
What
does “cash” do? It solves your lack. Anti-lack. Now they’ve developed
cryptographic cash, secret electronic net cash that is invisible to
authority. This will allow criminals to hide their money forever
easily. And when I say “criminal” think of blood, guts, torture
chambers and systematic social repression, because this is what the big
ones are up to. So I will use the term “anti-lack”,
because “cash” suggests substance, and there is no substance to
anti-lack. It is pure quantity, without extension, reducible to digital
state. Cash is digital state, like music and tv. Its flows we shall
call “rivers” and the rich’s hordes we shall call “ponds.”
The
basic conflict is about how the fruits of polynature, the
political-natural reality, the things that are, will be shared.
Because: this is a decision, and not an automatic no-brainer
inevitability. The gov decides who to give huge loans to, loans which
are then used by corporations in global enterprises which work to
enrich abstract owners totally disconnected from our home society,
whilst simultaneously working to impoverish domestic workers. An
abstract owner is a stockholder who gets the benefit from enterprise
but has no responsibility for its wrongdoing. To stop decisions like
this being made, must we (become) the gov? To save the world, we must
[blank] the gov.
To save the world and reach utopia... Nozick’s framework for utopia is an allowance
heteroutopia, where everyone’s allowed to do their thing if they set up
a community to do it in. Nozick’s utopia is a collection of different
utopia’s, because he thinks people would want different ways of life,
and that somehow the potheads wouldn’t be able to coexist with the
Christians, and they’d need different communities. With an
uber-protective agency. Maybe even only one in the world. Where they’re
not afraid to right the wrongs, as long as that doesn’t involve
impingement upon permissions to be free. (Being “free” means no one
pays for your well-being. You’re given a way to live, by lucky choice
of parents.)
My
utopia is a many-righted heterodemocracy. Like our intelligences, our
rights are not limited by a priori models. And neither is the structure
of our operations. There are local laws and state laws. People can move
into local areas that do things a bit differently. Like your house is
the ultimate local area, or your room if you’re a kid. I would diverge
from Nozick because there are many problems with the minimal state. The
state that only enforces permissions, and not entitlements. Permissions
specify “the individual’s intellectual possibilities (freedoms of
thought, expression, religion, and so on) or physical possibilities
(freedoms of work, commerce, assembly, and so on),” while entitlements
“define not the powers of acting and that are
opposable to the state, but powers of obliging the state to a number of
services.” (p.16, From the Rights of Man to the Republican
Idea, by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut). If I am disabled, I am
entitled to the help I need to function. I should not have to rely on
the random whim of volunteers. Our aggregate behavior should be
systematic. Save the irrationality for the bedroom, and let the
political philosophers explain about world domination.
Those
without lack should positive-wise developmentally re-complicate their
enterprises so as to allow for rationality of control, responsibility,
and benefit. I would rethink the word “profits.” People
“benefit” from enterprise. It’s somewhat odd to say “I profited from my
intimate relationship with Karen.” Some people get (all) the benefit,
some are the peeps-who-are-nothing-but-parts. (The unlucky ones aren’t
even parts. We do not want them to take part in our celebration of
victory over nature.)
Why
does Nozick make us like nations in our relations with each other? A
peep (chat slang for person) is likened to a large group of peeps?
Isn’t that circular? We are peeps. We are expected to help. Buckle up,
buttercup. If you want to go for this place’s ride, better strap down
and get on this place’s side. Pay your taxes. Although a provision
could be made for people to disallow their personal taxes to be spent
on program X that they find particularly annoying. This would be a sort
of secondary voting, not for representatives, but for programs.
There
is enough food to feed the world. But to do that would be boring, I
suppose. Or it would be too much trouble. I’m kidding. There is no
lack. Lack does not exist. (The absence of value, or cash). Anti-lack
permeates reality. For now. Whilst the earth’s biosphere is still
kicking. Perhaps before we extinct the rest of the lifeforms, we will
reach the poly-omega point. The political omega point, when peeps are
in total control of peepsdom, and our interpersonal problems are
solved. The infrastructure has been built. Now we need to control it.
Direct it or executive-produce it. The executive producer should be the
idea-peep who invents radical points of view from which to look anew at
enterprises, and even enterprise itself.
Nozick
seems less interested in the hetero-ontogeny of polyslavery.
Polyslavery involves all different types of slaves. In contemporaneity,
even the rich are spiritually enslaved by injustice. Not free to feel
morally acceptable. The system calls you a number. So you have the
right to make fun of its peeps. Make fun of slaves? If they choose to
be slaves. At this point we must say the submission is pseudo-willful,
polynatural and hetero-ontogenic and hopefully clinically-critically
treatable.
We
want goodness to be a common thing. Anti-lack isn’t all there is to
goodness. Potentiality-wise heteroactuality is the good. Composite
discovery of fulfillment of heteropotentialities. “Potential” sounds
like we’re wiring a house or something. Peeps have
heteropotentialities, and these should be fully amazing. We should give
peeps fullest luck.
My
philosophy is anti-goon. Nozick’s is anti-rationality. He would let
peeps structure society according to their random flights of fancy,
while I would call upon the group to get its act together and
coordinate the intelligent engagement with the parameters of human
life. Heteroagency is the aggregate’s agency. Different from
homoagency, an individual’s. “But the state is decorticate, and
shouldn’t be allowed to do what it wants.” Wrong—it is composed of many
minds. How do minds link? What is the power of the matrix of all human
minds? We don’t know, since our matrix is disordered. It is probably
fairly powerful. Now its power is being decoherently radiantly
dissipated into the void of meaningless consumption by a few and
meaningless toil by the many.
You
should have freedom to engage in non-capitalistic acts. Metaexchanges.
Benefitistic situations. “This situation benefits me and them.” I don’t
see how we could oppose it, unless it involves restructuring the
rationality of peepsdom’s logistical structure. Mental
re-rationalization and revolution is always allowed. And encouraged.
Nozick thinks some states might be into censorship. But it’s obvious that books aren’t dangerous, unless you’re a member of a repressive regime and the population you’re repressing might figure out you maybe shouldn’t remain as such. Books are fine if we’re allowed to react to them and criticize. Not if they’re the last word. Revolutionary style/content is the highest grade of art. We do not need nonrevolution. We have had enough of that.
How
could rights be limited, when intelligence and context aren’t? How can
we say, “In all situations, you have these rights”? Situationality. In
what situations does our duty to uphold rights waver? Apocalyptic? Live
wars? Selfist gov’s tend to violate civil rights in times of war. Or,
all the time. A war on error. X’s pain is more important to solve than
Y’s pleasure is to enhance. (Unless you’re selfist.) Fixing wrong more
important than having more bliss. There is too much wrong, while there
are enough riches. Wealth acquisition should be our last
priority. Distribution of entitlements and enforcement of permissions
should be our priority. The ponds will eventually shrink to non-obscene
size. Or maybe they will linger forever.
There
are outlaw territories. Criminals will go there and operate. We can at
least stop our criminals (corporations) from benefiting from the
ever-actual negativity. A “negative flow” is a flow into evil hands.
You can’t stop all negative flow, especially if you don’t know who’s
criminal. You have to catch criminals. It’s not hard. Punishing
corporations once you’ve caught them is another matter. To hit them so
they feel it, you need penalties so quantitative that they seem absurd
to the ignorant onlooker. We should stop acting to please ignorant
onlookers.
Gov’s
are necessary because only they can protect us from terrorism against
the digital nervous system, and the other vital infrastructure. Only a
gov is an uber-director who can make enterprise (and other gov’s)
behave appropriately. Now we have inappropriate enterprise behavior. We
need to have a dominant protective agency. Dominant is the key word.
But for the sake of our theory, it needs to do infinitely more than an
MS. Perhaps Darwinism has tainted Nozick’s conception of how beauty and
truth develop. “Human beings have brains with one hundred trillion
neuronal interconnections, each one possibly unique and exquisitely
specific. And nature found us through randomly mutating structures and
leaving the under-achievers in the tar pits. So we should do the same
thing. Let people engage in any enterprise they want, randomly, and
maybe we’ll reach justice!” But there is strong evidence that a
directional (non-god) force is/was at work in history and evolution, as
documented in John Landon’s World History and the Eonic
Effect.
Our
end-gov will have limitless flexibility and situationality, so as to
allow for the fullest possible (moral) spectrum of enterprises. There
is nothing intrinsically wrong with enterprise or change. But it must
be change of (eventual) positive nature. Going where the aggregate
rationally wants to go. With coherent systemicity, the aggregate should
nearly always make rational choices.
The
aggregate-rationality cannot be predicted by this peep, who has only
known a randomly structured world. When the state is rational, only
then will we know what aggregate rationality means. Maybe the ag-ra
state will not want to provide welfare, but I don’t find this likely.
Groups are not selfist, and know how to sacrifice for the cause of
optimization and pain-minimization. Why rationality? It is the only
approach to the heteronature of isdom that can ultimately harmonize
desire, imagination, logistics, and ethics.
People should not be free to do wrong, and rights violations are not the only wrongs. Non-optimization is wrong. Homophilosophy is wrong, univocal thought. There is no final word on any matter. The heteronature of isdom can be rationalized by approaches from limitless points of view. The ultimate peep will never be born. There is always difference and moreness on the way.
Real freedom is freedom-to-do-right.
“I say capitalism is right.”
“Nothing
is helping your argument.”
--we’ve never had a
state of nature where pre-existing structural evil (pese) wasn’t
present; peepsdom was polynatural from the evolution-history terminator
onward.
--managed capitalism is
now producing more misery than one would expect, to say the least,
given the notions of progress and justice.
--no a priori reason
exists to value X-change over all else.
--there is a posteriori
suggestion that S-change, socialist meta-exchange, would lead to a
minimal pain.
Capitalism
has caused folk-sayings to take on telling forms:
“Don’t accept candy
from strangers.”
“Don’t smoke pot unless
you know who grew it.”
“Don’t bribe people to
decide in your favor, to do things for you.”
Should
parents be allowed to determine who their children marry? What they do?
Who they are? For 18 years we are under control. Then we are as free as
we know how to be. Or as free as our role prescribes. By role I mean
life-totality. The garbage man is expected to have a different
heteropotentiality than the exec.
The
ed-system wants to control students, understandably. It is up to the
educators to hand the students the keys to free thinking. It shouldn’t
just be up to parents to hand children the keys to freedom and
responsibility. The people should have a say. You should not let goons
train/raise peeps, because goons do damage, and foolishness is learned
and is hard to be cured of.
I
feel like since I am sick I have the right to demand medicine from the
government, or from whoever has it. Someone who owns a drug
stockpile/factory is wasting it, when people who are dying need it. The
factory shouldn’t decide who gets the drug. The people should decide,
aggregately. Why should a factory determine the life and death fate of
peeps in our society?
Inventions
(such as the cure for AIDS) should become the property of peepsdom.
Invention is something new in the world—but something new because of
pre-existent forces and knowledges, not because of some “original”
mind. You think you should retire now that you’ve found the cure for
AIDS? Sorry, buddy. Keep at it. We need other cures as well.
Art
cannot be done by committee, but if you have artists making it, a
committee can decide what to do with it. As an artist I reserve the
right to make whatever beauty/ugliness I feel like making. Can society
demand, however, that I make some/any sort of art, and not fritter away
my hours playing video games? What if gaming is a necessity for
preparing to write book X? Tell the committee. Very, very unproductive
methods may be used by the artist on her way to art. Consuming pizza,
beer, and pot in large quantities may restructure one’s brain to let it
reach the next level.
There
are many goods. Not just enforcement of rights. Potentialities should
be enforced. This is called mandatory school. The minimal state is in
the “Low coherence” mode—there is very little method, except to counter
madness. A high coherence state would evolve its own rationality.
Rights will be violated if you let history take a “natural” course.
This has been horribly proved in the results of the absence thus far of
ag-ra states.
Sometimes
it is good to be forced to do things. To go to creatively designed
rehab for being a junkie. The MS is abusing the drug of freedom. You
can have too much freedom. People will use freedom in unpredictable and
immoral ways. Freedom-to-X means freedom-to-Y,Z,P,S. Freedom is chaos,
when robots and sociopaths are concerned. Freedom is nature. We want
culture. What is freedom? One is free, because one is not free to not
take medication for one’s mental illness. People have the right to be
helped for their own good. Observers may see more of your needs than
you can. Do you believe in science? Let the social scientists implement
their findings.
Free
markets reward evil, not good. Entering a transaction with a
slaveholder is fine? You can’t just look at capital transfer, X-change,
and use it as the basis for rationalization. The principle of
intelligence says our rights, like our creativity, are not limited. “If
I’m doing something natural, like being a wolf, I’m not violating your
rights.” We are not interested in
X-change. It is natural, unconscious, animalistic, and chaotic. We are
interested in patterned, rational re-organization of the parameters of
our existence.
What
of our behavior is natural, and what is human? During evolution, or
during history? Why begin with an impossibility? The state of nature,
where the world is held in common? This is the way things would go if
alpha, alpha being impossible. What does it matter where you arrive if
you begin with an absurdity? When did we become human? Apes have rights
against each other that are violated and upheld. Any chimp knows it
shouldn’t be assaulted by the bigger guy.
Markets
reward power, not smarts. Smarts only insofar as the powerful can buy
the best smarts. Nozick is secretly thinking some positive value such
as smarts or virtue is the basis of capitalistic success. When it is
pese. Pure power. People would not naturally take steps toward an MS
because they’d be animalistically violating each others’ rights at the
state of nature point. If they suddenly became human, they would
acquire critical consciousness, and the desire for fully elaborate
rights.
We’ll
reward your randomly gotten (inherited) power with more power? Power
tends to concentrate (in capitalism). Freedom is also ability, not just
lack of impediment. The powerful have more freedom. They are right to
do more things. They have more “rights.” The poor are dehumanized.
Their rights are minimized. Power’s are maximized.
You
are either human and artificially conceptual, or you are an animal and
are naturally free. People have rights, according to us. Who is the
most persuasive? According to us, love should be the highest good (love
of peep or love of stamp collecting or whatever). Do we also have
“wrongs”? “It would be right for you to teach me out of my wrongs.”
If
an alien species, twice as intelligent and ethical, were to civilize
us, what would we look like? We would want it to happen. If we believe
that the good is the good, and better is better. The evil person or
society is wrong, and has the super-right to be corrected. Super-rights
are not self-enforced, but enforced by others. You cannot by definition
enforce your own super-right. It is beyond you. And justice is a
world-substance that either exists or does not. It currently does not
exist. In evolution, did it exist? It is not “just” that wolves eat
sheep. It is “blank.” The ever-present lack of value.