on body "rights"

I showed in the last post that your control of your stuff is the result of a negotiation between all market participants.  You control your stuff, because, on average, market participants prefer for you to control it, rather than someone else.  I want to show here that even your control of your own body is necessarily subject to the negotiation of market participants.

Current market participants would generally prefer for each other to have full control over our own bodies.  But we only allow average adults under average circumstances to have full control.  We don't allow people who are infantile or senile. We don't allow the mentally handicapped or insane. We don't allow the comatose, suicidal, sleepwalking, intoxicated, or brainwashed. In all of these cases, market participants prefer to maintain some degree of stewardship over the bodies of others.

If you are a child, we will lock you up in the house at night like a prisoner and we won't pay you back for it. We will force you to eat green leafy vegetables, to go to bed at a reasonable hour, to get vaccinated against life threatening illnesses, to memorize multiplication tables, and a host of other things that we think are in your best interest and we will NEVER pay you back for it. We will never feel obligated to pay you back for it.

If you are mentally handicapped, if you suffer from Alzheimer’s, if you are in a coma, or if you are in any other way incapable of exercising adequate stewardship of your own body according to our opinions, we won't allow you to have complete control over it. We may keep you locked in a facility, or at least under constant supervision. We won't allow you access to certain resources like vehicles or weapons. We will commit an endless stream of offenses to maintain our control over your body. And we will never pay you back for it. We will never feel obligated to pay you back for it.

Rights theories are incompatible with this reality.

At what point does it stop being OK to force a child to stay locked in the home? How old is too old? When does it transition from responsible stewardship to evil body rights violation?

At what point does it start being OK to force an adult to stay locked in a facility? How handicapped is too handicapped? How senile is too senile?  When does it transition from imprisonment to assisted living?

We generally keep kids locked up until they prove they're responsible enough. And we generally leave adults alone until they prove that they aren't, but what gives us the right to restrict their rights in the first place?

As an An-Cap, I would have said that issues like these should be settled on a case by case basis in a free market for arbitration services, but that just begs the question. What is the objective criteria by which you determine the difference between violation and non-violation in this context? “The market will decide” isn't an answer. It's a black box.

All property arrangements are negotiated, even control of your own body. If the average sentiment of the community is that you can't be a responsible steward of your own body, then we won't let you control it. That is, you don't own your body. Nobody owns anything. Ownership doesn't exist. But we all want to control resources, and we all continually renegotiate with each other for who is going to control which resources.

Final thoughts:

1. Sometimes I support rape, but "sometimes" will never happen:

If the human species ever reaches a genetic bottleneck, if it is reduced to only 300 breeding pairs or whatever the hypothetical minimum would be, each surviving member would need to breed according to a stringent central plan in order to maximize genetic diversity and population growth to save the species. If certain members of this desperate tribe refused to submit to this program, I would rape them. I would minimize the trauma associated with it as much as possible, but I wouldn't spare anyone the responsibility of participation. I love the human race more than I love any individual member of it. The human race is the most precious thing the universe has ever produced. If you wont fuck to save your species, then your control over your body is forfeit.  But this is the only scenario I can imagine, and it's vanishingly unlikely.

2.  Moral feelings have evolved to maximize the long term value of tribal assets:

We say that it's "bad" to lock up average adults, because they have a "right" to control their own bodies.  But that isn't why it's bad.  The tribe needs people who can hunt, gather, fight, nurture, heal, and everything else.  Average adults are best suited to all these tasks, and they need to control their own bodies to perform them.  The tribe that disallows average adults to control their own bodies starves to death.

We say that it's "good" to lock up children, because they have a "right" to responsible stewardship.  But that isn't why it's good.  The tribe needs children to grow up to become average adults.  The tribe that allows children full control over their own bodies, watches them die.

so I guess I'm a socialist

 Moral Journey

  Almost immediately after I published the last post, I finally followed the logic of my own argument about homesteading.  Which made me recognize that anarcho-capitalism is actually socialism.  Which means that I'm a socialist.  But let's back up.

Let's actually do an overview of my moral evolution up to now.

1. Obey Jesus. (republican)

     Q: But is it ok to burn the gays forever for the crime of accidental same sex attraction?
     A: No.  So morality is not obedience to Jesus.

2. Don't burn the gays forever. (democrat)

     Q: Can we burn anybody forever?
     A: No. Neither gays nor burning are special.  Eternal punishment is bad.

3. Don't prescribe punishments in excess of the crime. (no party, but liberal who likes the market)

     Q: What counts as a crime?
     A:  Hurting people or their stuff or taking their stuff.  Or lying to them to get their stuff.

4. Don't initiate force against people or justly acquired property. (Libertarian (big L))

     Q: How does property get justly acquired?
     A: You homestead it.  You're the first to claim it and make use of it.  Works for your body too.

5. Don't initiate force against homesteaded property. (libertarian (small l))

     Q: How do you determine what counts as legitimate homesteading and what doesn't?
     A: That should be determined in a free market for arbitration services, not a government court.

6. No seriously, don't initiate force against homesteaded property. (anarcho-capitalist)

     Q: No seriously, how do you determine what counts as homesteading?  "The market will decide"
          isn't an answer.  By what objective standard do we distinguish between legitimate and
          illegitimate homesteading claims?
     A:  ...magic man done it?

Moral Roadblock

And this is where I'm at now.  I can't find any way to objectively distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate homesteading. That means that no matter how much I want it to be, my morality really isn't any better than any body else's. It means that the foundation of my moral philosophy is nothing but another baseless preference.

Moral U-turn

And what's more interesting is that this is a SOCIALIST preference. I want homesteading disputes to be resolved by the free market. That means I want them to be resolved according to the average preferences of the community, rather than by some codified permanent standard. That means I want prevailing property arrangements to reflect the average preferences of the community. That's what socialism is.

Moral Backpedaling

But now I need to distinguish myself.  Most socialists want to use authoritarian processes to achieve this arrangement:  That's logically impossible.  Most of the rest want to use unanimous democratic processes to achieve this arrangement:  That's functionally impossible.  I want to use the free market.

Moral Recalculating

But now I have to redefine "free market".  Before, I would say that the free market is the sum of all voluntary interactions.  But the concept of "voluntary" only makes sense within the context of property rights. Voluntary wants to mean “with the consent of the owner of the object”. But owners don't exist.  All claims to “own” something are subject to the average preferences of society. The current “owner” of an object is just the person who, on average, market participants currently prefer to maintain control over the object. That means that voluntary actually means, “in accordance with the prevailing average preferences of market participants”. That means that I can take an object from somebody, an object that they made a reasonable homesteading claim to, and without his consent, but if the broader community prefers for me to have it instead of him, then the interaction was still “voluntary”.

I think that a better definition of “free market” is:

"a market in which prevailing property arrangements reflect the averaged preferences of all participants".

That means that an “un-free market” is one in which prevailing property arrangements are biased in favor of the preferences of one or more participants.  So an "un-free market" is a biased market.  Governments aren't the only biased markets.  All authority based relationships are biased, whether they are political, commercial, spiritual, romantic, or anything else.

Are we there yet?

 Here's the final interesting thing.  Let's say I live in a community in which average preferences are for things I absolutely refuse to tolerate:  things like honor killings or clitorodectomies.  In that case, a decentralized and competitive system of arbitration companies would tend to produce property arrangements that I would not accept.  I would be not only willing, but eager to violently intervene in that market or even to violently abolish that market.  I would impose a bias for my preferences on to the property arrangements in that community.  And I would feel great about it.

Market mechanisms are only acceptable when the average preferences of market participants are sufficiently close to your own.  When the preferences of a market unacceptably diverge from yours, you must desert it, distort it, or destroy it.  I support free markets only for those who are worthy of them.  I support biased markets for most, cages for some, and bullets for the rest.

Join me in my touchy-feely pinko crusade to (sort of) liberate markets!  Yay Socialism!

On Nomenclature

I call myself an anarcho-capitalist. But that term is off putting to people on both ends of the political spectrum.

People on the right hear “anarcho” and assume that I support a society that devolves into barbarism. They assume that I have no understanding of or concern for the rule of law. They assume that I have given no thought to protocol for the would be victims of violent crime. They hear “anarcho” and they immediately assert that, “Freedom isn't free”, as if I disagreed, as if I expected to immediately trust every other human being in the world so completely that I would need to invest no time or money into protecting myself, my assets or the people I love, as if I expected to wilt the vestigial remnants of criminality with a care bear stare.

People on the left hear “capitalist” and assume that I support a society that produces wealth for the few at the expense of the many. They assume that I have no understanding of or no concern for vulnerable populations. They assume that I support frivolous consumerism. They hear “capitalist” and they immediately assert that “people are more important than money”, as if I disagreed, as if I were secretly a miserly sociopath fantasizing about all the poor people I might someday enslave.

Of course, when I say “anarcho”, all I mean is the non-aggression principle. And when I say “capitalist” all I mean is homesteading. When I call myself an anarcho-capitalist, I'm only asserting two principles:

1. It's not OK to initiate force or to threaten to initiate force against persons or property, and
2. Property is legitimately owned originally through an act of homesteading.

There's nothing particularly controversial about the first principle. Almost everybody adheres to it in their private lives. Most people don't steal or vandalize, and almost nobody rapes or kills.  People already agree on the non-aggression principle even if they don't call it by it's name.  Differentiating my group from other groups by claiming that only we support the non-aggression principle isn't just inaccurate, it's insulting and alienating.  But at the same time, most people don't believe that government actions necessarily violate the non-aggression principle.  What we disagree on isn't the ban on initiating force, but on what constitutes force.

It's the second principle that's controversial.  We disagree on what constitutes force, because we disagree on the origin of property rights. People on both ends of the political spectrum want to argue that property rights are not based on homesteading but instead derive from the consent of society. They both believe that society has the authority to declare by fiat what property rights are for that time and place.

So,

Dear Anarcho-Capitalists,

By toting the non-aggression principle as our maxim, we insult the people we are trying to reach. We hear “liberal” or “conservative” and we immediately assert, “It's not OK to threaten people with murder to pay for your hobbies!”, as if they disagreed, as if they were all gleefully pondering whether continuing to watch us cringe in terror still outweighs the satisfaction of watching our brains splatter against the wall.

What really separates us from all other ethical positions is our insistence that property rights can not be declared by regulatory fiat, but are a natural extension of our biology and must be discovered through the market process. The name of our position ought to reflect our real rather than our imagined differences.  The difference between us and all other ethical positions is the same as the difference between atheism and religion.  It's the same as the difference between science and magic. Fundamentally, it's the difference between methodology and ideology.

May I suggest that we call ourselves, “market methodologists”?  I invite your suggestions.

Final thoughts:

1. I DO support the rule of law. I recognize that it is a natural byproduct of the market process. I recognize that expectations about the enforceability of property rights claims evolve with social and technological change, and that these expectations are discovered through a decentralized and competitive arbitration system. I further recognize that a state can never produce the rule of law because it must always make exceptions for itself. It must grant to itself lethally enforceable monopoly privileges that no individual citizen can claim. Therefor, states are violations of the rule of law by definition. I support the rule of law; You support the arbitrary whims of popular psychopaths.
   
   
2. I DO support vulnerable populations. I recognize that equality under the law is all any vulnerable population requires to protect itself. I recognize that affirmative action, minimum wage laws, welfare programs and all other manner of social justice tinkering brands vulnerable populations as permanently disabled and benevolently relegates them to an official second class status. I support vulnerable populations; You support the inflation of your own ego at the expense of underprivileged children.
   
   
3. Jump in the line, Bastille! Only Harry Belafonte is allowed to say “Day O”.

You don't get to call me a racist.

I'm a pancake waiter in the Midwest.

There's a certain kind of people who it's a pleasure to serve. They're pleasant to talk to. They order something off the menu without substitutions, and they decide quickly so they're ready when you are. They're satisfied with their meal. They pay for it happily, and they tip you well. They might be young or old, male or female, black or white, rich or poor, or anything in between. What they have that others don't is class. They have both the desire and the capacity to understand what your job is like and they take thoughtful steps to make sure your interaction with them doesn't add to your frustrations. And you do thoughtful things for them as well. You are constantly asking clarifying questions, reading people and anticipating preferences to ensure that your guests' experiences are as pleasant as possible.

There's another kind of people who ruin your day. They're disruptive, obnoxious and vulgar. They ignore you when you're ready to talk to them, and they yell across the restaurant at you while you're at other tables. They're not ready when they say they are and they hold you at their table while they decide. What they finally do order is so complicated with special requests and substitutions that the cook is guaranteed to make a mistake. They complain about the wait before they get their food and then they complain about their food the second it's in view. They demand that you remake something or remove something or discount something, and they never tip you. They might be young or old, male or female, black or white, rich or poor, or anything in between. What sets them apart is their complete lack of class. They treat you like a slave and they get offended if you don't act the part.

I give everybody exactly the same quality of service regardless of how well they treat me. I smile and say please whether or not you return the favor. I sprint across the restaurant for you whether or not you appreciate the effort. I dedicate exactly as much time to you as I do to all of my other tables regardless of how much I expect you to tip me. No matter how pleasant or offensive you are, the quality of service that I provide you never waivers. I pride myself on this.

So it's particularly upsetting to me when a table full of the crassest people you could ever hope to avoid, that's been rude to me since the second they walked through the door, decides to call me a racist. They will have to wait longer than they wanted for a table, and it isn't because they have a large party on a busy day, it's because I'm a racist. Their food will take longer to cook than they wanted, and it isn't because they ordered well done steaks, it's because I'm a racist. Or their food won't be prepared exactly the way they like it, and it isn't because they don't know how to order, or because they ordered something impossibly complicated, it's because I'm a racist. This used to happen at least once a week. It happens less frequently now, because I've gotten better at stroking the egos of the self righteously ignorant, but I'm over it.

You don't get to call me a racist.

You don't get to come into my restaurant flagrantly disregarding expected standards of behavior, reeking of weed, blasting club music on your phone, guffawing like a fog horn, yelling obscenities at me across the restaurant, screaming at people sitting 2 feet away from you sentences filled with more N-words than a Klan rally, sloppily and scarily hitting on every woman who strategically avoids you on her way to the bathroom, complaining about everything, demanding special treatment, intending to stiff me, and then on top if it all, accuse ME of being ignorant, and especially not on evidence as flimsy as the quality of your eggs.

You don't get to call me a racist, because while I'm not a racist, YOU ARE. Because if I were black, no matter how unjustifiably bad the service was, it would never occur to you to call me a racist. When you accuse me of being ignorant enough to hate you on sight, and petty enough to manifest my hate in the quality of service I provide you, when all you know about me is that I'm white, you are being racist. When the color of my skin is a factor in you determining the most likely explanation for why you are unsatisfied, you are being racist. When you make assumptions about my character based on the color of my skin...

YOU ARE BEING RACIST.

Final thoughts:

1. When I ask you how you want your steak prepared, don't shout at me that you want it “well done but not burnt” like it's a crime I've committed against you in the past. If my restaurant so consistently over cooks your steaks that you feel the need to specifically request that the cook please not fuck it up this time before I've even had a chance to ring it in, then just go to a different restaurant. Also, your steak isn't burnt, it's just dry. And it's dry because you ordered a lean cut well done. My cooks aren't your problem; reality is.
   
   
2. You can order your eggs “fried”, and you can order your eggs “over hard”, and depending on the restaurant you're in, those might even mean the same thing, but you can't order your eggs “fried hard”. That isn't a thing. Stop asking for it.
   
   
3. Dear smart friend, if class is a demonstration of empathy, which is a demonstration of self knowledge, which is a demonstration of virtue, then etiquette books are like cheat codes to help cowards pretend to be virtuous. Also, it just occurred to me that these books are used as a weapon against class itself. The crass and cowardly pretend that rules of etiquette are arbitrarily dictated by authors of books, rather than discovered through thoughtful interaction. Actually, expecting strict adherence to inherited rules to manipulate others into providing you with benefits, rather than expecting genuine and spontaneous acts of empathy to improve the lives of others around you, is just one more example of magical thinking. Next post?

outreach and the anarchist/statist divide

In the past, when I tried to communicate anarchy to people, I assumed that we agreed on basic moral principles. I assumed that they were also opposed to theft. I thought all I had to do was prove to them that taxation is theft and they'd immediately become anarchists. I was wrong. They want to be opposed to theft. At least, they want to appear to be opposed to theft, but they also want to be able to commit theft to further their own ends.

When I demonstrate that taxation is theft, they first try to argue that it isn't. They all bring up club dues. They all bring up expatriation. We go through their whole exhaustive list and I prove every argument wrong. If they make it this far, they agree that taxation is theft, but they continue to support it anyway.

They next try to argue that taxation is necessary to avoid greater injustice. They all invoke a Hobbesian nightmare. They all equate anarchy to chaos. They all ascribe god like civilizing powers to government force. So I ask them if they or any of their friends would kill and steal in the absence of government. They usually say no.  So I ask them what evidence they have to support their claim and who they think is going to be committing all these crimes. It's surprising how eager they are at this point to reveal their bigotry. Liberals will tell you that greedy capitalists and ignorant religious conservatives would be committing these crimes. Conservatives will tell you that greedy poor people and godless liberal atheists would be committing these crimes. These conversations never produced any anarchists. The only benefit that came of them was my own greater understanding of the depth of the fear of other people among statists.

So I changed the conversation recently. I've been trying to show people that theft is wrong for the same reason that rape is wrong. I figured that nobody would support universal rape, no matter how Hobbesian the world might be in it's absence. I've been using the argument that I made on this blog here. But, at least in person, nobody wanted to follow the logic of the argument. So instead, I started just asking people why they are opposed to rape. I figured that I would just keep challenging their reasons why rape is bad until they came to the non-aggression principle. This didn't work either. Here's a transcript of my most successful attempt.

Me: why is rape bad?

Her: Because it causes physical and emotional pain.

Me: What if you rape someone in a coma? It doesn't cause pain. Is it still bad?

Her: That's not the same thing.

Me: Raping someone in a coma isn't rape?

Her: I have to go.

I'm not having these conversations anymore either. They never produced any anarchists. The only benefit that came from them was my own greater understanding of how little statists care about moral principles. If I didn't have a good reason for a moral position I asserted, I wouldn't just be embarrassed; I'd be horrified. Nothing else would matter to me until I could answer that question. Statists genuinely don't care.

And this, I realize, is the real difference between statists and anarchists. Anarchists care about justice. They care about defining what justice is for themselves, about the process of self discovery that is necessary to achieve it, about the unobstructed intimacy that is the reward of it, and to building a society based on this standard above everything else. Anarchists are the kind of people who hold justice as their highest value. How many times have you heard an anarchist say that it feels like they were always an anarchist and they just didn't know it yet. Isn't that how you feel? That's certainly how I feel. Anarchy is the conclusion that we all came to, because it is the only logical conclusion you can come to, if you are passionately dedicated to defining justice.

Statists don't care about justice. They care about fear avoidance. Liberals are afraid of poverty. Conservatives are afraid of criminality. They're both so terrified of other people, that they're willing to support the universal threat of murder, even against the people they love most, to keep the monsters away. These people are cowards.

So I want to make the case for a new avenue for outreach. We've already recognized that the political process is a waste of time. I've become convinced that making both pragmatic and moral arguments is also largely a waste of time. They help the kind of people who hold justice as their highest value to come to anarchy more quickly, but they do absolutely nothing to convince statists to value justice over fear avoidance.

If we want to reach statists, we need to understand how people form their values. We need a fully integrated and fully elaborated system of logical deductions concerning the process of value formation. We need something like praxeology, if it isn't an extension of praxeology itself. To put it another way, we need an “Austrian” school of psychology. I don't know what that looks like yet, and I have no idea what it will tell us about how best to reach statists, but I've become convinced that it's the only way that we ever will. And we have to learn how to reach statists if we want to have any hope of achieving liberty in our lifetime.

The difference between principle and pretense

I once spent a year as a vegetarian for practical reasons.

Sidebar: I mean practical as in “not ethically motivated”. There was nothing practical as in “useful” about my reasons. I was a vegetarian because my Sat Sadh Guru told me that it would improve my daily karma which would help me hear the Shabd, which would lead me to the astral plane. Story for another time.

At the end of that year, I was developing conflicting values. I either wanted to dedicate my time to achieving full enlightenment, or getting sexy. I thought that I wouldn't have time to both meditate and lift weights. More importantly, I thought I was going to have to eat meat if I wanted to gain mass, which would throw a big karma coated wrench in my universal consciousness machine. Eventually, I decided that my six pack was more important to me than access to the akashic records, and I determined to start eating meat the following day.

But I couldn't sleep that night. Visions of enslaved and mutilated livestock danced in my head. The thought of killing an animal for food had become horrifying to me. After a few hours, I got up and I cried half the night over PETA propaganda films. I instantly became a vegan and I stayed that way for two more years. All the while, I preached compassion for the suffering of other sentient beings, and fire and brimstone against the non-human exploitation industry.

But questions started coming up pretty quickly:

1. What about honey? If it's immoral to benefit from the exploitation of oysters because they can experience suffering, then how could it not be immoral to benefit from the exploitation of bees?
2. What about vaccines? Don't scientists make those using chicken embryos? Is it immoral to kill baby chickens to save baby humans?
3. Why is my reaction to killing human beings infinitely more intense than my reaction to killing animals? If I were in a situation where the only options I had were to starve to death or kill and eat another human being, no matter how much of a self serving bastard the guy was, I'd probably choose to die. But if it came down to me or a cow, no matter how much of a doting, playful, docile, once-saved-a-kid-from-a-burning-building bovine hero she was, wouldn't I kill her?
4. Why should I respect the rights of species that lack the empathy or the intellectual capacity to respect the rights of others? The fact that animals have the capacity to experience suffering is insufficient. I have the capacity to experience suffering too, but the grizzly bear eating me alive doesn't really give a shit.
5. Actually, why do I have rights? Why does anybody have rights?

The answers were difficult to accept, which is why it took me two years to be able to say:

1. Fuck bees. They don't respect my rights.
2. Fuck chickens. Human life is more important than anything else ever.
3. Fuck cows. Killing a cow and killing a human aren't morally equivalent anymore than killing a cow and killing a fruit fly are morally equivalent. To say otherwise is to devalue the intellectual and emotional capacities of both species.
4. Fuck animal rights. They don't have any. If you physically lack the necessary hardware and software for universal empathy, then you don't get any rights. Sorry, animals. Rights are a two way street. Call me when the nano-swarm infects you with augmented consciousness.
5. I have rights because I have the capacity to respect the rights of others and have so far demonstrated my willingness to do so. This is why you lose your rights when and to the degree that you violate other people's rights. If you steal my car, not only do I get to use force against you to get it back, but I get to take more from you than you took from me, to compensate myself for the inconvenience. If you murder my child, you become my slave for as long as I choose to allow you to live.

This is the general pattern of principle building:

1. You have an emotional reaction to something. (like, killing an animal)
2. You assert a universal principle. (like, respect the rights of animals)
3. You follow the principle to an absurd conclusion. (like, respect the rights of fruit flies)
4. You assert a better universal principle. (like, respect the rights of those who respect yours)
5. Repeat steps 3-4 ad infinitum.

This process, I hope, stands in obvious contrast to the normal pattern of pretentious moralizing:

1. Have an emotional reaction to something.
2. Assert a universal principle.
3. Make exceptions.
4. Maintain the assertion irrespective of reason, evidence, contradiction or consequences.

Let's illustrate this process with guns.

1. Emotion: Gun violence is bad.
2. Principle: No one should be allowed to have a gun.
3. Exception: The government should use guns to take every one else's guns.
4. La la la la la I can't hear you.

Now let's do a comparison to really see how the models differ from each other. The principled process goes like this:

1. Emotion: violence is bad.
2. Principle: Don't use violence.
3. Absurdity: Don't use violence to protect someone you love from an attacker.
4. New principle: Don't initiate violence.
   3. Absurdity: Don't initiate violence to steal a car to drive a dying friend to a hospital.
   4. New principle: If you initiate violence, compensate your victim.

The pretentious process goes like this:

1. Emotion: Violence is bad.
2. Principle: Don't use violence.
3. Exception:  The government needs a monopoly on violence to protect us from violence.
4. Don't taze me, bro!

If you aren't questioning your principles, if you aren't following them to the point of absurdity, if you're making obvious exceptions, if you ignore reason and evidence, and if you get offended when I point these facts out, you're pretentious.

You can either give up asserting moral principles, or you can give up making exceptions to them. You can either begin an honest search for justice, or you can forfeit any right to appeal to morality, but you can't have both. Make a decision.

p.s.

I never did get sexy or achieve enlightenment.  But I did free myself from many of the chain rattling ghosts of childhood trauma. So that's cool.

Dear compulsory education advocates,

Whether you believe in compulsion by government or by parents, whether you believe in public or private or home schooling, I'm talking to you. If you've ever said, “I wish my parents would have forced me to learn [x]” I'm talking to you. If you think children are savages who have to be civilized, that they naturally eschew learning and socialization and must be forced to submit to formal education for their own good, that allowing a child to opt out of standardized education is an irresponsible act of neglect, I'm talking to you. 

I've got just one thing to say to you:

On behalf of every child whose initiative you have stolen, who can't set her own goals because you've always demanded she prioritize your goals first, who can't accomplish her own goals because she never had the freedom to play and develop the imagination required for entrepreneurship...

On behalf of every child whose self acceptance you have stolen, who can't measure her own success except by the letter grade approval of authority, who seeks out abusive relationships because you never respected her autonomy...

On behalf of every child whose ambition you have stolen, who prefers escapism to entrepreneurship because you made her reality a burden for your convenience, who can't remember the first subject she fell in love with because you beat it out of her with endless standardized tests...

On behalf of every child whose creativity you have stolen, who can't think critically because you expected her to obediently regurgitate, who would have invented new technologies, new theories, new art forms, new philosophies or new business models but didn't because she was shamed into mindlessly pantomiming the process of learning things she didn't care about rather than encouraged to explore her own interests...

On behalf of every child you have ever called lazy because she failed to adequately fain enthusiasm for the drudgery of your priorities...

On behalf of every child who ever jumped off a building rather than face the shame of your disappointment or the hopelessness of a lifetime without escape from enslavement to your priorities...

On behalf of all of them and more, I'd just like to say,

Fuck you.

Seriously,

Ansible

Dear Liberals,

When conservatives say things like:

“Allowing gay marriage will lead to the general moral decay of society.”

you know they have no idea what they're talking about. You know that morality has nothing to do with sexual orientation. You know conservatives are afraid to face their own unresolved personal issues related to sexuality and gender identity, and they're inventing disaster scenarios to justify it. And you know that withholding basic rights, like establishing custody and inheritance, from same sex couples is unforgivable. When conservatives say things like:

“Allowing the legalization of marijuana will lead to wide spread addiction to hard drugs.”

you know they have no idea what they're talking about. You know if you give them the statistical and biological facts about drug use, addiction and the medicinal properties of marijuana, they will reject it no matter how conclusive it is. You know that the threat of wide spread hard drug addiction is a delusional scare tactic, but the threat of unnecessary suffering from withholding medication from incurably ill people is real, immediate and dire. And you know that destroying families and communities by sentencing peaceful people to the rape rooms of government cages is unforgivable.

You know conservatives refuse to think seriously about their moral principles. You know their positions amount to frivolous bigotry. And you're right. You're 100% right.

But what you don't know is that conservatives know the same thing about you. Conservatives know that when you say things like:

“Allowing unregulated free trade will lead to the destruction of the middle class.”

you have no idea what you're talking about. They know that the middle class is a necessary byproduct of the unregulated market and that the most heavily regulated markets in history have always been the most stratified. They know that you're afraid to face your own unresolved personal issues related to poverty and efficacy, and you're inventing disaster scenarios to justify it.  They know that banishing poor and predominantly non-white children to a lifetime of poverty by removing the bottom rungs of the economic ladder is unforgivable.  When you say things like:

“Allowing unregulated private gun ownership will lead to a significant increase in violent crime.”

you have no idea what you're talking about. They know that if they give you the facts about how private gun ownership reduces crime rates, you will reject it no matter how conclusive it is.  They know that the threat of sudden increases in gang violence and school shootings is a delusional scare tactic, but that the threat of assault, home invasion, and rape in some communities is real, immediate and dire. They know that demanding that rape victims be disarmed is unforgivable.

They know that you refuse to think seriously about your moral principles. They know that your positions amount to frivolous bigotry. And they're right. They're 100% right.

Neither one of you has ever given a serious thought to moral principles. You call yourself a liberal, but what does that mean? What is the grand unifying concept from which all liberal positions logically follow? What is the guiding principle that connects being pro- universal reproductive rights with being anti- universal defensive rights? Until you can answer that question, until you can demonstrate a fully integrated system of values, you don't get to call liberalism a philosophy.

And maybe I can help both of you, because I see a pattern that fits both liberal and conservative positions. It goes like this:
                     

Allowing [natural rights] will lead to [bad stuff]. 

 

And I noticed another pattern in the way liberals and conservatives see each others positions.  It goes like this:

 [Violating natural rights] is unforgivable. 

 

Good luck,

Ansible

P.S.

Here's an example of a principle, in case you weren't sure what they look like.

ignorance, disgust, rsvp

From ignorance to anarchy

Back in September 2000, I had just turned 17. Near as I can recall, all I cared about were the second coming of Christ and the baby fat brunette in my Spanish class (stories for another time). But the Bush v Gore race was all the TV could talk about, so for the first time, I turned my attention to politics.

I remember having a sense that the free market basically worked. I was opposed to business regulations. I was opposed to welfare programs. I was even opposed to the minimum wage. I also had a vague distrust of government. I was naive enough to believe that republicans also supported the free market and distrusted government, so I became one. Had I been able to, I would have voted for Bush. But a couple of things happened over the next 2 years.

First, Jesus and I started fighting about the gays. He said that it was a choice, and a sin, and that we should burn them forever in a lake of fire. I said that it was probably a biological trait, definitely morally neutral, and that we should leave them alone. Eventually we broke up, but this was the first time I gave any consideration to body rights. Or really, any rights at all, because my support for the free market had never been about respect for property rights. I had never even had any emotional attachment to the market. I had just always thought it was more efficient than government.

Second, George and I started fighting too. He wanted to spy on me, and incarcerate me without due process, and ship me off to a secret overseas prison to be water boarded. I didn't like any of those things, so body rights suddenly became extremely important to me. I was naive enough to believe that democrats also supported body rights, so I went from republican to democrat by the time I was 19. But I realized pretty quickly that we had a couple of problems.

First, they didn't actually support body rights. They voted for the patriot act. They prosecuted the drug war. They restricted immigration. They supported restrictions on certain forms of protest. And they even waffled on marriage equality.

Second, they really hated the free market. They called successful entrepreneurs greedy and accused them of stealing and cheating their way to the top. They demonized Wal Mart for providing poor people with the lowest possible prices. They called my job “wage slavery” and would have regulated it out of existence by raising the minimum wage past my market value if they had had the chance. Listening to their hateful rhetoric, I started thinking seriously about property rights for the first time. So I found myself being a strong supporter of body rights AND property rights. I put two and two together, and by the time I was 21, I was a libertarian. I still voted for Kerry the next time around, though. I felt dirty doing it, but lesser of two evils and all that.

I spent the next four years reading reason magazine and trying to square the circle of libertarian government. I hated government, but it just didn't occur to me that we could get rid of the whole thing (failure of imagination on my part, I admit). I couldn't tell you how many hours I dedicated to writing constitutions, thinking that the big idea that would permanently restrain governments to their “bare essentials” was just on the tip of my brain. I majored in political science in college for just that reason. I was going to be the guy who fixed government forever. I was so radically libertarian the next election cycle that I refused to vote for Bob Barr because he wasn't libertarian enough.

I, of course, was completely head over heels banana pants bonkers for Ron Paul (Later, we broke up too. For the usual reasons.). Clicking through the Ron Paul media sphere sometime around the 2008 election, I stumbled on the Lew Rockwell Show. I fell in love with it immediately. I think I listened to every episode in one sitting. I couldn't tell you at what point in the binge I listened to this episode, but I can tell you that it was like weights falling off my shoulders. It was also the moment when I discovered that Walter Block is my soul mate (Some day I'll do my doctorate at Loyola. Wait for me, Walter!). So now I'm an anarchist. And I'm absolutely rabid. I wake up every single day full of anger for all the injustices I can't stop and the self detonating platitudes that accompany them, and enthusiasm for all the fresh ideas I have for how to effectively and efficiently communicate the moral superiority of the free society.

 

From anarchy to disgust

Being an anarchist these past several years has been liberating and joyous. It's mostly been a continuation of that same journey of self discovery I started as a teenager, slowly and painfully scraping off ever older and deeper layers of the scar tissue of childhood trauma. But it's also been increasingly lonely. The more I come to consistent principles in every facet of life, the more I peer through the fog of violent indoctrination, the less respect I have for the people who refuse to question their principles, and the less satisfied I am with my current relationships.

So I'm constantly proselytizing for anarchy at every opportunity, in hopes of making deep and lasting friendships. I quickly find a libertarian position that someone has and I try to ask them the kinds of leading questions that will get them to think about the broader principles that support the position. And I find in these conversations, almost uniformly, that people are sympathetic to the non-aggression principle, but they continue to support state violence because something else is more important to them than integrity. Some of them fear that eliminating liberal government necessarily leads to a Hobbesian nightmare or a network of tyrannical fiefdoms and they value relative peace over integrity. Some of them fear that anarchy will eliminate the middle class and they value economic stability and “dignity” over integrity. Some of them fear that anarchy will eliminate the progress we've made in elevating the status of women and minorities and they value “social justice” over integrity.

These people say they would like to see a world where government is “unnecessary”, but they can't see any way to achieve their higher social goals without supporting state violence. So what they tend to do is turn the conversation away from ethics and on to pragmatism. They want me to tell them exactly how their higher social goals would be guaranteed to be achieved without violence. In the past, I've tried to show that state violence doesn't guarantee success either, and that the comprehensively self reinforcing positive feedback loop of the free society is actually the best chance they have to achieve their goals. But it's never been successful. I don't ever go down the pragmatic rabbit hole anymore.

I don't bother with pragmatic arguments anymore for three reasons. First, the statists who ask for them don't ever intend to thoughtfully process an argument. When I've solved a problem they've posed, they've immediately moved the goal posts without conceding the point. They back themselves into increasingly absurd and implausible scenarios. I had one guy actually bring up the potential for a zombie apocalypse as a justification for the state. I think these people don't listen, because they WANT to use violence. They PREFER violence.

Second, it doesn't matter. It really really doesn't fucking matter. “Who will pick the cotton if we abolish slavery?” I don't know.  Maybe the entire economy of the south will collapse and half the people will starve.  Maybe we'll invent the cotton gin.  But it doesn't matter. “Who will defend the country if we abolish conscription?”  I don't know.  Maybe millions of men and women all over the world will volunteer to fight obvious injustice.  Or maybe we'll all be cowards and Nazis will take over the world.  But it doesn't matter. "Who will educate poor children if we abolish public schools?”  I don't know.  Maybe we'll come up with creative solutions to this problem without threatening our neighbors with murder if they don't pay for it.  Or maybe poor children will always be less educated than their more affluent counterparts.  But it doesn't matter. “Who will have sex with me if I stop raping?” Seriously, it doesn't fucking matter.  There is no social engineering hobby that is more important than personal integrity.  Everyone who supports the state has a gun to your head and a whip to your back. Giving these people the pragmatic arguments that they don't actually intend to listen to in the first place is like begging a mugger not to rob you or a slave master not to beat you. I won't beg anymore.

Finally, even if I crossed my fingers and said a prayer and waved my magic wand and the stars aligned and somebody was actually convinced by the pragmatic argument, I still wouldn't trust them. I don't want to spend my time with violence apologizing psychopathic social engineers who oppose the initiation of force only as the most convenient vehicle to their more important ends. I want people who love the non-aggression principle. More than that, I want people who ARE the non-aggression principle. I want people who would demand the destruction of the state no matter how dire the consequences would be. I want people who hold integrity as their highest value.

So,

Dear New Hampshire,

I lied. I said I wasn't coming to your party, because I got myself convinced that you weren't doing much of anything productive anyway and because I was getting the intimacy I wanted right here. It turns out that I was almost completely wrong on both counts. Sorry to keep jerking you around. Clearly I belong with you. I'll be home as soon as I finish my master's.

Save me a seat,

Ansible

preview of a possible praxeological application

I'm working on developing psychology as an axiomatic logico-deductive system based on praxeology.  Praxeologists have long argued that our science has nothing to say about what happens before values are ranked.  But I'm convinced that the logic of human action has powerful implications for the process of value formation.  I'll have a full post on that soon. In the mean time, today I was thinking specifically about the relationship between values, self efficacy and action.

The value that a man chooses to act on isn't necessarily his highest ranked value. The values that he chooses to act on are tempered by his estimation of the difficulty of the task, and his own ability to achieve his ends. His highest value may be to secure hegemonic control of the planet, but if he doesn't think that he's capable of achieving it, he won't act on it. He'll settle for acting on a lower ranked value, like getting a degree in economics or watching another episode of Breaking Bad.

Let's take a friend of mine as an example.  On any given day, his four highest ranked values are as follows:

He would prefer first to act on getting a hot girlfriend or getting a job, but he doesn't choose to act on them.  This is evidence of his conviction that he is incapable of achieving them.  This, of course, isn't some earth shattering insight.  A therapist would already ask his patient what his values are and why he isn't acting on his highest ranked values.  But the psychological literature is completely devoid of a logical system of necessary cause and effect relationships to explain this kind of phenomenon.

Consider the example of the minimum wage.  In praxeology, we would say that, ceteris paribus, if the government raises the minimum wage above the market clearing wage, it will increase unemployment.  This is a clear cause and effect relationship and a praxeological fact.

I think we can do the same thing for psychology.  We might say something like, ceteris paribus, if a patient's self efficacy falls to below his estimation of the difficulty of the current value he is acting on, he will choose to act on the next highest ranked value he believes he is capable of.  A system of deductions like this, properly elaborated, could be the beginning of a major paradigm shift in psychology and the catalyst that finally launches it into a mature science.

More on all of this soon.

negligent sexual fraud

Let's say I steal $10,000 from you.  I owe you lots of money for this.  I owe you:

1. your money back.
2. any costs you incurred trying to get that money from me.
3. compensation for any inconveniences resulting from the loss.
4. market returns on all of that money for as long as it takes me to pay you back.

Now lets say I sell you a car for $10,000.  I know that the car is a piece of junk, but I tell you the car will last you for the rest of your life.  I tell you it will never break down.  You pay me for the car.  And 3 weeks later, the car completely breaks down.  What do I owe you?  well:

1. your money back.
2. any costs you incurred trying to get that money from me.
3. compensation for any inconveniences resulting from the loss.
4. market returns on all of that money for as long as it takes me to pay you back.

The situation is exactly the same as when I just stole the money from you.  Whether I steal your money, or trick you into giving it to me, it's exactly the same crime.  I owe you exactly the same compensation.

Now lets go back to that car I sold you.  Let's say that when I told you that the car would last you for the rest of your life, I believed it.  I truly believed that this car would never break down, and I was so sure of it, that I convinced you that it was true.  And 3 weeks later it broke down.  What do I owe you?  Well:

1. your money back.
2. any costs you incurred trying to get that money from me.
3. compensation for any inconveniences resulting from the loss.
4. market returns on all of that money for as long as it takes me to pay you back.

This is what I would call negligent fraud.  And again, it's exactly the same crime.  It doesn't matter if I'm sinister or stupid.  It doesn't matter if I deliberately rob you of your savings or if I accidentally sell you a lemon. It's exactly the same crime.  I owe you exactly the same compensation.

The situation gets more complicated when violence is introduced.  If I threaten to shoot you if you don't give me your money, in addition to points 1 through 4, I also owe you:

5. The cost of therapy to process the trauma.

And if I actually shoot you in the process of the theft, I also owe you:

6.  the cost of hospitalization and ongoing treatment.

7. compensation for any permanent disability resulting from the attack.


This analysis applies equally to sex crimes.

Let's say that I rape you in a way that doesn't involve any physical pain or the threat of any physical pain.  Like if you were in a coma during the act.  Rape is still rape, though.  I owe you as much compensation for the rape itself as I would if I had raped you violently.  The amount I owe you for the rape itself is unclear, and should be determined in a free competitive arbitration market, but whatever amount it is, I at least owe you points 1 through 4.  And no matter how "nonviolent" the act is, it's probably still traumatic and I probably owe you for point 5 as well.

Now let's say that you would only have sex with me if I were in love with you and wanted to be with you forever.  And let's say that I'm not in love with you and don't want to be with you forever, but I lie to you in order to get you to have sex with me.  Then you do have sex with me.  Then 3 weeks later I break up with you.  What do I owe you?

This situation is exactly the same as the "nonviolent" rape.  It's sexual fraud.  I owe you exactly the same compensation.

But what if I truly believe that I'm in love with you.  What If I truly believe that I'm going to want to be with you forever.  Then you have sex with me.  Then 3 weeks later I realize that I was wrong and I break up with you.  What do I owe you?

This is what I call negligent sexual fraud.  And it's exactly the same crime.  I owe you exactly the same compensation.

And I think more importantly, I feel exactly the same guilt.  Stupid is no excuse when other people are getting hurt.

anti-rape to anti-state in 5 easy steps

Rape is bad

Rape is special to me, because there is absolutely no scenario in which it is ever ok.  It is the one universally decried, unambiguously wrong behavior.  Even the guy who shoots planned parenthood doctors thinks rape is bad.  Even the mealy mouthed college professor peddling multicultural moral relativism will in his very next breath assert the immutability of the prohibition on rape.  Everyone, liberals and conservatives, statists and anarchists, brights and supers, everyone can join hands and shout with one voice their unwavering opposition to all rape at all times and under all circumstances.  Rape is ALWAYS bad.

Theft is also ALWAYS bad, but some people don't see it that way.  Tell a staunch statist, on the left or the right, about the sacredness of private property, and you're likely to get a lecture on a lifeboat scenario.  Imagine that 10 of us are on a lifeboat in the Atlantic.  Everyone is dying of thirst, except for me.  I have a jug of fresh water, but I don't want to share.  Will you force me to share the water?  Of course you will.  I'd do the same thing if the situation were reversed.  But does that make it ok?  The statist will tell you that this situation proves that property rights are situationally relative and that they flow from the consent of society as a whole.

But that's unforgivably stupid.  If rape is ALWAYS bad, then theft is also ALWAYS bad.  I'll prove it to you.  We'll do it as a series of increasingly broad moral principles.  We already agree on the first step.
Step 1:  Don't rape.

What is rape?

A guy violently having his way with an unlucky jogger in the park is clearly rape, but rape isn't always between strangers or even violent.  If a husband forces sex on his wife, it's still rape.  If you have warm, tender, gentle, thoughtful, patient sex with somebody without their permission while they're sleeping, it's still rape.  And finally, if you tell someone that you'll kill them if they don't "volunteer" to have sex with you, it's still rape. So rape is the initiation of force or the threat of the initiation of force against another person's body for sex. so let's update our principle.

Step 2:  Don't initiate force or threaten to initiate force against another person's body for sex.

Why is rape bad?

 The person using force against your body for sex didn't get your permission first.  You have the right to grant and withhold permission.  You have the right to decide who can and can not have sex with you.  This isn't a right that is conditionally granted to you by a benevolent society.  This is an unbendable fact of moral reality.  You have the exclusive right to control your own body.  What do we call that when someone has the exclusive right to decide what happens to some physical object? 

We call that ownership.  Rape is bad because you own your body.


So if it's not ok to initiate force or to threaten to initiate force against another person's body for sex because they own their body then it's not ok to do it for any purpose.  So it's not ok to assault, kidnap, enslave, torture, or murder somebody all for the same reason that it's not ok to rape somebody.  It's all the initiation of force against someone elses body.  So let's update our principle by dropping the "for sex" bit.

Step 3:  Don't initiate force or threaten to initiate force against another person's body.

Why do you own your body?

You could say that you own your body because you need it to live.  But remember the situation in "my sister's keeper".  A couple has a child with a life threatening illness.  Then they have a specially-chosen-for-it's-magically-perfect-DNA second child in order to harvest the second child's tissues in a painful and lifelong process in order to keep the first child alive.  So now, the first child needs the second child's body in order to live, but that doesn't mean that the first child has an equal right to own the second child's body.

But the idea that you need your body to live almost has something to do with it.  You need it to live because you're inside of it.  Owning your body has something to do with you being inside of it.  But that's not quite enough.  If someone gets in your car, they don't own it just because they're inside of it.  Imagine a future scenario where we have the technology to move your mind from one body to another.  Maybe you've parked your body somewhere while your mind goes for a vacation on the internet.  But when you get back, you discover that someone else is in your body.  That person doesn't now own your body simply because they're in it.  That body is still yours.

so you own your body not just because you're in it, but because you were the first one in it.  Your mind was the very first mind to set up shop in that body.  You claimed it even before your infancy.  What do we call that when someone is the legitimate owner of something that wasn't previously owned by anybody because they were the first person to claim it and make use of it?

We call that homesteading.  You own your body because you homesteaded it.

So it's not ok to initiate force or to threaten to initiate force against a body, because that body was homesteaded.  So it's not ok to initiate force or to threaten to initiate force against anything that has been homesteaded.  So let's update our principle.

Step 4: Don't initiate force or threaten to initiate force against anything that has been homesteaded.

So now we've created this category called things that have been homesteaded.  And we know that it is absolutely forbidden to initiate force or to threaten to initiate force against it.  And we know that human bodies are one of the things in that category.  But what else is in that category?  what else can be homesteaded?

Actually, everything else.

Like land:

You go into the unowned wilderness.  You spend years chopping down trees and pulling out stumps and building a house and a silo and a fence and planting and harvesting crops and now that land is yours.  If someone comes along and says "actually, I have just as much right to this land as you do, because...", that person is wrong.  It doesn't matter how they end that sentence.   ...because I want it really bad.  ...because I need it to live.  ...because I'm a human being and the earth is the collective inheritance of our species.  It doesn't matter what he says.  You got there first.  You made it useful.  You homesteaded it.  It's yours.  Someone trying to use force against your farm is just as unambiguously wrong as someone trying to use force against your body for sex.  And for the same reason: homesteading.

And water:

You go into the unowned wilderness.  you spend years chopping down trees near a river and digging canals off of that river for irrigating distant farms and now that section of the river is yours.  And so is the land where your canals are.  If someone who owns another part of the river upstream from you starts pouring bleach into it and killing all of your customers crops, you have the right to stop him.  And he owes you compensation for the damage that he caused.  And if someone comes along and says "I want to use this part of the river to cool my nuclear reactors and i have just as much right to this part of the river as you do because...", he's wrong.  You were there first.  You made it useful.  You homesteaded it.  It's yours.  Using force against your section of the river is just as unambiguously wrong as using force against your body for sex.  And for the same reason: homesteading.


And air:

you go into the unowned wilderness and you spend years chopping down trees and building two mighty towers, but you don't homestead any of the land between the two towers.  However, you use the air space between the two towers from between 50 and 100 feet up to send messages using Morse code and occasionally to travel between them using zip lines.  If someone comes along and builds a farm between your two towers he has every right to.  But if he tries to build something that invades the air space between your two towers between 50 and 100 feet up then you have every right to stop him.  If he says, "I want to build a replica of the Eiffel tower and I have just as much right to this airspace as you do, because...", he's wrong.  You were there first.  You made it useful.  You homesteaded.  It's yours.  Using force against your airspace is just as unambiguously wrong as using force against your body for sex.  And for the same reason: homesteading.

So, literally everything can be homesteaded.

But what if you homestead some land and build a farm and grow some cotton and make a sweater and then give it to your grandmother for her birthday?  Now Grandma owns the sweater.  You have the right to transfer ownership of anything that you own.  You can do that through gifting.  Or maybe your neighbor grows corn.  You make sweaters and he makes tortillas and the two of you trade.  Now you own tortillas and he owns sweaters.  So you can transfer ownership through trade.  Or maybe you died and you wrote in your will that you want your favorite niece to have all of your sweaters.  Now she owns your sweaters.  So homesteaded property can be gifted, traded or willed and the recipient of the property is now its legitimate owner.  What do we call something that is legitimately owned by somebody through homesteading, gifting, trading or willing?

We call that private property.

And if someone comes along to your grandmother, your neighbor, or your niece and says, "I want some sweaters too and I have just as much right to them as you do, because...", he's wrong.  Those sweaters belong to your grandma, your neighbor, or your niece.  They acquired them justly.  They're theirs.  Someone using force against their sweaters is just as unambiguously wrong as someone using force against their bodies for sex.  And for the same reason: private property.  So now we can update our principle again.

Step 5:  Don't initiate force or threaten to initiate force against private property.

OK, let's do a quick recap.

Rape is bad.
   Because initiating force against your body is bad.
   Because you own your body.
   Because you homesteaded it.
   And homesteaded property can be transferred through gifting, willing and trading.
So it's not OK to initiate force against private property.  That is:  stealing is bad.

In other words:

Rape is bad BECAUSE stealing is bad.  Rape is just a special kind of stealing.

So let's go back to that lifeboat in the Atlantic:

 This time you're the water miser.  You're sitting on a life sustaining stash of aquafina.  Do I force you to share with everyone on that boat?  Of course I do! But that doesn't make it OK.  If we survive, I know that I owe you market value for that water.  I also owe you compensation for the pain and suffering associated with the force I used to get the water and with the terror of just not having the water.  I also owe you interest on all of that money for as long as it takes for me to pay you back.

Nobody has the right to use force against your body.  Your body is sacred.  And it's sacred for the same reason that all private property is sacred.  Nobody has the right to use force against your home, your business, your inheritance, the product of your labor or even your crummy bottle of aquafina.  Nobody has the right to control your body or your assets no matter how many of your neighbors vote for it and no matter how many thugs in blue costumes come to enforce their edicts.

the god hypothesis

What I love most about myself is the courage I have to constantly challenge my conclusions.  I argue against them and I seek out new evidence.  And I keep doing that until I come to conclusions that I can show are logically impossible to argue against.  Atheism is one of those conclusions.  God might exist, but belief in god is never substantiated by science or philosophy.  It's always illogical to prefer an explanation that requires the existence of god over literally ANY other explanation and for ANY phenomenon.

For example:

The oceans turn into blood and all the Christians start floating into the sky and the heavens part and a giant bearded Palestinian descends in a fiery chariot and begins to smite the unrighteous.  Or whatever.  Pick your crazy.  We could say that the existence of the universe itself is sufficiently crazy, but let's go with the revelation apocalypse scenario.

It's tempting to say that prophecy has been fulfilled and that the becharioted brute must be the son of god.  But there's a better explanation.  Maybe an alien race from another galaxy has decided to enslave us for fun and profit and they've decided that the most cost effective enslavement strategy is to convince everyone that they are one of the gods that most of the world already believes in.  They have nanobots that turn water into hemoglobin and they have tractor beams and they have a big alien in a suit who loves killing lesser beings.

And that's just one explanation.  Maybe it's mischievous  time travelers from the future.  Maybe it's an elaborate hoax orchestrated by governments or mega churches or magicians.  There are literally infinitely many explanations for this scenario.  And of all the explanations, of all the ridiculous and nearly impossibly unlikely to be correct explanations, the least likely is the hypothesis that there is an all powerful, all knowing, omnipresent, eternal being who created the universe out of nothing and has now come in human form to murder people who disagree with him.

"god" will always be the least likely explanation for any phenomenon because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  And the more extraordinary your claim is, the more evidence it requires.  Literally any and every explanation you come up with to explain any scenario will always be INFINITELY more likely than the god hypothesis because the god hypothesis requires the existence of a being who is infinite in at least 4 ways.  God has infinite power.  God has infinite knowledge.  God has infinite spacial presence.  And god has infinite temporal presence.  Can you even think of another way in which he could be infinite?  You can't make a more impossibly unlikely hypothesis than that.  It requires an infinite amount of evidence.

And that's just one way in which the god hypothesis is always the least likely explanation.  If you want to bring up the existence of the universe, then we can talk about how the god hypothesis is actually a worse explanation than no explanation at all.

So when you see a "ghost" or have an "out of body" experience or seem to to get your prayers answered or whatever the experience is, you can be convinced that god exists.  I don't fault you.  I've never had those experiences.  But don't pretend that those experiences constitute sufficient evidence for your conclusion.  I'm sympathetic to people who have had the kind of profound experiences that lead them to believe that god exists.  But I have nothing but contempt for anybody who tries to pretend that science or philosophy justifies that position.  Believe in god if you must, but have the courage to admit that you're being illogical.  It's called FAITH, right?

comedy part 1

Recently I've been obsessing over why things are funny.  I was watching Casablanca a few weeks ago, for reasons I'll explain another time (new favorite movie by the way) and for some reason, something about that movie made something about humor click for me.  For a moment I thought that I had discovered a master theory of why anything might be funny ever, but then I remembered puns and they completely violate my thesis, so I realized I'm only explaining one part of a much broader phenomenon.  But to get to the point, my theory is that sometimes...

humor is failure without frustration

 

Think about times when people laugh, but not because something is funny.  You're 100% sure that you're going to die, but you're rescued at the last second.  It isn't funny, but you can't help laughing.  You think you're going to spend the rest of your life broke and petulant, but the prize patrol shows up at your door with 11 million dollars.  Again, not funny, but you laugh.  You laugh because you feel intense relief.  And that's exactly what this kind of humor is.

Do you remember that commercial where the drunk girl tries to take a pull on her beer but she accidentally knocks her own front teeth out and then her and her friend laugh about it and then the state helpfully reminds you that driving while drunk is a dick move?  I thought it was funny too.  And while few of us can hold the honor of self dentistry, most of us can identify with how hilarious people hurting themselves is when you're drunk.  That's because being drunk removes the sense of moral responsibility.  You don't think about long term consequences.  You don't even think about the consequences for an hour from now.  And the euphoria of lacking moral responsibility drives people to purposefully make decisions they know they're going to regret, just to feel the temporary relief of failure without shame.

Or think about Ben Stiller movies.  People find them funny, because he is constantly failing socially.  They have a fear of social failure, and his movies give them the opportunity to experience social failure without experiencing any loss of value.  Some people, like myself, can't find them funny.  I've never laughed at any of them.  I used to feel bad for him.  Now he just pisses me off. (cowardice isn't funny, Ben. Grow up.)

If you fail and you lack confidence in your ability to succeed, you experience grief, anger, or even despair.  If it's your first day at work and you make a simple mistake, it's a tragedy.  But if you've been there for decades and you make that same simple mistake, you laugh at yourself.  In both cases you failed, but in the second case you didn't feel frustrated.  You know that you can do this job in principle, and you know how to fix the mistake very quickly, and you know that everyone else knows that too.

The same is true if someone else fails.  If they fail, and you aren't concerned about it, it's funny.  If it's someone you care about, and you both know that they won't suffer too much from it, it's funny.  If it's a stranger you don't care about, it's funny.  If it's someone you hate, not only does it produce an almost embarrassing satisfaction, it's also funny.  And no matter who it is, the more tragic the failure, the harder it is to find it funny, because the harder it is to suspend empathy.

So the kind of humor you prefer may say something about the kind of fears that you have. Slapstick is a fear of failing physically. Crassness is a fear of failing physiologically. Insults are a fear of failing hierarchically. Sarcasm is a fear of failing intimately. Irony is a fear of failing to recognize failure.

But that brings us back to puns.  Because puns are not failure of any kind.  Puns aren't about fears.  Puns don't produce relief.  Why should word play cleverness be funny?  I invite your suggestions.

Imagine a scenario

You've been on the other side of the planet, inventing games with children and finding the space you need to be honest with yourself. You've spent some time marveling at how comprehensively inept you've been and started coming to terms with not being nearly as much of a saint or a cunt as you often believe. Now you're grinning with contentment at a used book with a trashy title in a 3'rd class seat about a mile above certain death. You're excited to see your friends and your family but slightly less excited about reexamining the value and purpose of those relationships. You're excited about starting a new adventure, but significantly less excited about the long stretch of unemployment that will certainly preface it. For now, you're slowly sipping a cup of coffee and trying to convince yourself that this can couldn't possibly hurtle out of the sky with you on it, because you're far too important to the social advancement of the human race to die without making a splash (so to speak). About halfway through the coffee and barely past take off, the guy next to you sighs in exaggerated frustration over some exotic derivation of a sudoku puzzle and starts clicking his pen.

“frick”, you mumble inwardly. And you wonder how many clicks it'll take for his brain to remember that other people exist and up shift into empathy. Part of you knows that this guy isn't responsible for your emotions. Part of you knows he shouldn't have to read your mind and guess your emotions and put your preferences above his own and basically lay prostrate before you like some sniveling serf at the court of a tyrannical toddler. Part of you knows that it's incumbent upon you to express your own desires and negotiate for mutually satisfactory solutions. So part of you knows that the only question left is what you should do about it. But another part of you is mustering its indignation and asking, “What should I do?!.  What should he do?! What kind of a thoughtless asshole allows himself to produce a sound that's as stereotypically irritating as nails on a chalkboard in a space packed shoulder to shoulder with strangers with no escape?!”

Your brain is still addled with the lingering side effects of religiosity, so you immediately start shaming yourself. Isn't the readiness with which you become irritated over trivial things like pen clicking itself a character flaw? I mean, specks and planks and all that, right? You should have compassion for him. Aren't people's quirks the very things we come to love about them as our relationships mature? If this guy was an attractive woman, you might find the clicking charming or even sultry. If he was some precocious ten year old, puzzling over his math homework, celebrating with muffled excitement over each new problem he solved, you'd probably find the clicking adorable. You'd want to snatch him up and raise him as your own. You can just see yourself getting up before the dawn, full of joy and purpose. You're packing his lunches and preparing for the years of litigation to win custody away from his charmingly jet set but disinterested parents. You're going to soccer games and PTA meetings and pirate themed birthday parties and leaning over to whisper to your attractively plus sized wife about how much your heart is aching with the love you have for your little family and...

“Oh my God, he is still clicking that fucking pen!”

“Seriously, Guy?! Do you have absolutely no consideration for the well being of others?! Our species evolved a desire to exhibit a pattern of reciprocal altruism when we were still wandering barefoot after berries and buffaloes in extended kinship groups on the plains of the Serengeti! Is your genetic heritage that far behind the curve?! Somebody call the Discovery Institute. Apparently I've found the missing link!”

OK, so maybe that was a bit harsh. It's not like he's callously sauntering past a rape in progress. He's just fidgety. And if it weren't his pen clicking getting to you, it would probably be the next guy's humming or somebody else's slurping. What kind of a megalomaniacal moron are you that you consider it both possible and desirable to control every insignificant detail of your environment?

but before you can finish the next thought, you stop yourself, because you're still shaming yourself for your emotions, instead of deciding to have the courage to deal with the situation. And you realize that developing virtue isn't going to be as romantic as you expected.

my revolution

I live in a prison for the criminally insane

 

 Or so it so often seems at least.  Because I'll be having a reasonable conversation with a guy and then he'll tell me about his approval of compulsory education or some other threat of murder based social engineering hobby.  This is crazy enough.  Then I explain to him how what he just said is a violation of his own morality.  Usually, he refuses to follow the logic of the argument.  But occasionally, he's courageous enough to be honest with himself enough to admit he was being inconsistent.  However, invariably, he concocts a slew of ad hoc justifications for it anyway.  Either way, now he's double crazy.  Then I suggest that his illogical insistence on violating his own morality to assuage his fears of other people might be the result of his lack of success at processing the negative emotional consequences of value frustration in his own childhood.  Then he gets offended and shames me for being rude.  So now he's triple crazy.

And forever, this guy was basically everybody that I knew.  And it left me feeling insecure.  Because either every single person that I know is crazy, or I am.  And I'm honest enough with myself to prefer the simplest explanation.  So I needed new evidence.  I needed people who thought seriously about their moral principles.  I needed people who didn't make justifications for immorality.  I needed people who were dedicated enough to self discovery that they knew that when they get offended it's because they're lying to themselves about something, so they get excited and grateful for the opportunity to learn something about themselves.

So I was going to move to New Hampshire for the free state project.  Because there are so many An-Caps moving there, and while they aren't necessarily fully integrated comprehensively courageous people, they at least care about consistent morality.  I knew that most of those free staters were moving there for counter productive political action.  And I knew that most of the rest were moving there for unproductive counter economics.  But I was hoping that enough of them were moving there for the kinds of courageously intimate relationships that would finally prove to them that they're definitely not the crazy ones.  But,

A funny thing happened on the way to the revolution

First, I went away for 6 months.  I got away from all the shaming relationships with all the abusive and chronic victim of circumstances crazy people.  And I got slowly convinced of and comfortable with the ideas that they would survive without me rescuing them and that I didn't owe them anything.  I've been dropping unsatisfying relationships and enforcing boundaries with increasing ease ever since.

Second, I got a handful of people in my life who aren't crazy.  Two old friends who keep surprising me with their relentlessly successful dedication to personal growth.  And one new friend who occasionally has to remind me not to walk on her egg shells, because she's neither a coward nor an asshole.  My circle of friends is starting to resemble the cast of an ayn rand novel.  But with intimacy and irony (and subtlety, god damn it!).  And, of course, without the rapeyness.  So,

dear new hampshire,

I'm not coming to your party.  My revolution isn't violent or political or economic.  My revolution is personal.  My revolution is a dedication to being as comprehensively courageous as I can.  And to demanding the same from my closest relationships.  And then they'll demand the same from their other relationships.  And the chain will continue.  The more comprehensively courageous I become, the more courage the wider network of people around me will demand in their own relationships.  My revolution doesn't require books or guns or speaking tours or get out the vote campaigns or you tube videos or jail sentences.  My revolution is a self reflecting, consistency demanding, personal responsibility taking, boundary enforcing, intimacy building, rising tide of virtue that raises all ships.