X-Message-Number: 8882
Date: Tue, 02 Dec 1997 00:15:35 -0800
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Re: A kind of anarchy

Thomas Donaldson writes,

>But if we all expect to live for
>a very long time, we're going to find ourselves thinking much more about 
>others, if only (as I said) we'll know we're going to meet them again many
>times.

Quite so, but good manners don't scale well. Apart from the plentiful 
real-historical examples, looking at the steady decline of signal-to-noise 
as the net commonses have grown - usenet, irc & muds - there seem to be 
no cases where good manners have been able to keep up with social scale.

>This is not the altruism of moralists, but RECIPROCAL altruism, of which 
>human beings (and possible some higher primates) are already capable, given
>that the time spans involved are short enough and we can understand the issue
>involved. So did these people form a government? They certainly had to
>cooperate. What distinguishes a government in my mind is that it can and 
>does COMPEL cooperation with the minority who work as governors or with them.

The folk in your example governed themselves quite well. Libertarians also
base their philosophy on the premise of restricting compulsion - a libertarian
government can't compel its subjects except to prevent them from interfering
with one anothers. And yet libertarians are not anarchists - they simply 
say they prefer a minimal government.

The intention with Stones is to promote a diversity of governments - a 
network of partial governments - government by subscription, if you like.
People would associate themselves with you on the basis that you agree to
a common standard of behaviour and a common protocol for cooperation. If 
you renege on this agreement, then you're liable for restitution - and, 
possibly, expulsion from or preemptive diplomacy by their society too. 
Since this liability would only be undertaken voluntarily, can you regard 
it as a form of compulsion?

>Democracy itself, and all the trappings that go with it, are attempts to make
>that government serve some kind of common end, and we all know very well the
>many ways in which that can fail. Flat out dictatorships are governments, too,
>but they often make a pretense that they too are serving the people's will.
>(Clearly they do worse at that than a democracy would, not that democracies 
>do well). 

Ah, be careful about scale. It's not fair to lump direct democracy
in with representative democracy. The problem with both dictatorships 
and representative democracies seems simply their delegation of
authority. With delegation comes irresponsibility, then, inevitably,
inequity, inefficiency, and corruption.

Direct democracies, on the other hand, have a good chance of serving their
peoples' will. Their problem is only that, until now, they haven't scaled.

>If in the limit we expect to live for thousands of years, that reciprocal 
>altruism can take over all the tasks that governments now perform. Yes, there
>might still be events so far away that some kind of government might form to
>perform them: for instance, cosmological ones, like finding out how to 
>survive in an endlessly expanding universe (the current belief from empirical
>data is that our Universe will expand forever 

I'm afraid you're ignoring some very basic political forces. If you
don't care for the company of your fellows, and your resources become 
unbounded, fine, you need not accept their morality, take their coin or 
speak their language. But if your resources are unbounded and you do still 
care for their company - if, for example, you seek technological advantage 
by cooperation with them - then you need a protocol like the one mentioned 
in my last message. You might not think of such a protocol as a government,
perhaps more as an economics with extra provisions for pricing 
political alternatives, but I think it's needful nevertheless.

Peter Merel.

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