Defeats in French and Dutch referenda have put the proposed EU Constitution in serious trouble. However, in the resulting political tumult, amazingly little is being said about the Constitution itself. That is unfortunate, since that is the source of the most essential problem–promising what cannot be delivered.
In some ways, the EU Constitution parallels America’s, defending rights such as freedom of religion and freedom of expression. However, it also guarantees a far broader array of rights, as well. Its Charter of Fundamental Rights includes rights to education, housing assistance, job placement services, preventative health care, social services, social security benefits, paid maternity leave, and more.
Unfortunately, that expansive combination of rights is inconsistent with a more fundamental right to be free. The Constitution says “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude” but it might have added: unless the EU itself is doing the holding.
“Positive” rights to housing, education, health care, etc., provided by or mandated by government, require that someone else must pay for them. But the corresponding obligation necessarily violates others’ “negative” right to liberty, by taking their income without their consent, despite the fact that liberty is also guaranteed as a fundamental right.
Thus do we gain a fuller understanding of the following line from the EU Constitution: “No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest…”Positive rights are really just desires that can be converted into rights only by employing government to take away others’ property, violating their rights. In contrast, negative rights are prohibitions laid out against others, especially against government’s overwhelming power. They are exemplified by the strictly limited, enumerated powers the U.S. Constitution granted our central government and what the Bill of Rights put off-limits to political trespass. But negative rights are eaten away by every expansion of what government promises.
Americans’ constitutional rights reflect the Declaration of Independence’s central assertion that all have inalienable rights, including liberty, and that government’s purpose is to defend those rights. But the only rights that can be inalienable for all must be consistent with the equal rights of others.
Every citizen can enjoy negative rights against government abuse without infringing on anyone else’s equal rights, because they impose on others only the obligation to not interfere. But when the government creates new positive rights, extracting the resources to pay for them necessarily takes away others’ inalienable rights and liberty.
Liberty means people rule themselves, and voluntary arrangements are the means of resolving conflict. But when government assigns positive rights to others, it means someone else rules over the choices and resources taken from those forced to pay. However, since no one has the right to rob others, if government is to remain within the narrow range consistent with equal rights, no one can delegate that power to government.
America was founded on the idea that we have inalienable negative rights that do not originate with the government, which the government therefore cannot take away. But as people have learned to get public support by dressing up more things they wish others to pay for in the language of rights, our government has increasingly turned to violating the rights it was instituted to defend.
Unfortunately, what in America is an abuse of citizens’ negative rights, correctable by more closely adhering to our Constitution, seems ensured by the proposed EU Constitution. Though noble sounding, it would guarantee and institutionalize a system of mutually inconsistent rights that could not, therefore, provide citizens the assurance that their right to liberty would be secure. And the more seriously its entitlements are taken, the less liberty will be left to Europeans.
Americans’ greatest legacy is liberty. We want others to share it to the greatest extent possible, as well. Unfortunately, the proposed EU Constitution would not accomplish that result. That is why the French and Dutch rejections should not signal a renewed effort to twist arms and make further deals to rescue it. Instead, it should signal a return to first principles in its construction.
{ 23 comments }
Negative rights are so 250 years ago. Most people have blinders on when it comes to government oppression – almost everyone thinks theft is wrong, but almost no one considers the forced taking of almost 50% of your labor value to be wrong. Oh they complain about it, but only in the way you complain about the dentist drill – it’s painful, but necessary.
The oppressers learned from history, and they perfected the art of giving people convienence and a sense of freedom, while ensuring armed revolution is near impossible and undesirable. The fight is over, and the US will follow the enlightened EU leaders eventually. The public school system will see to that.
We are in an age when the people don’t have the power or will to fight, and it’s too early to buy a private spaceship and live in orbit around Jupiter.
Heffalump,
Yes, logical fallacy. It is an old concept, so therefore, it must be wrong. Taking 50% of your labor value? You must mean taxes, right? Because if you’re engaging in a socialist rant against capitalist exploitation: Profits are prior to wages; companies pay employees for their labor, specifically the marginal discounted value of their product, as estimated by the company. There is a free market in this. No-one’s “forced” into anything.
If I interpret Heffalump properly, I think he’s being sarcastic, and I agree with the point he makes. The major problem is that to most people, negative rights really ARE “so 250 years ago.” Since I came to the writings of the Austrian school and libertarianism and began to actually think in a serious, logical way about rights, where they come from and what they are and aren’t, it strikes me how little they matter to most people. Talk of rights and what they can and can’t be goes right by them most of the time. For example, I have a friend, an American who lived in England for some time. He has no trouble understanding libertarian ideas about rights, but he doesn’t think we dwell in the real world, to put it mildly. What he came away with from living in the U.K. was the idea that they have successfully created a society where it’s safe (translation: no guns), no one is poor, everyone gets a free education, everyone gets free health care whenever they need it, and the government gives everybody a decent life. What more could you want? What is all this libertarian carping about rights compared to a society that great where everyone has it that good? I know you and I will look at that and consider it wrong, but he sincerely believes it, and he’s hardly the only one. That’s what I find to be one of the major problems with communicating libertarian ideas to others. Heffalump hit the nail on the head- rights don’t matter when the government can make everybody happy. Do you find this to be true often when talking to non-libertarians about these ideas?
Lisa makes a good point. I have acquaintances who are entirely unpersuaded by the concept of negative rights and its esoteric underpinnings. They are far more impressed with tangibles such as bread and circuses.
A big part of the problem is what is seen vs. what is not seen. The 50% (or more) of our labor value that is confiscated through taxation, or prevented from ever existing by regulation, is simply not seen. Reduced to such a state of serfdom and blind to any alternative, many people are all too eager for the few crumbs they receive from the state and fancy themselves better off than they would be in freedom.
As Harry Browne said, one thing government knows how to do is break your leg, hand you a crutch and say, See, if it weren’t for government, you’d never be able to walk. Americans are not the only ones to have accepted that explanation.
But for each “negative right” doesn’t there exist a positive right for the government to recognize and enforce the negative right?
I.e. if you have the right to property, and I rob you, do you steal or rob it back? If the “robbery” was actually something fraudulent, how can it be determined? How is the “current owner” determined? Can I compel witnesses to testify? Will there be courts with something designed to seek truth impartially like a judge and jury? Will there be prisons to quarantine those who violate fundamental rights of others? Can anyone be forced to pay for even these small and proper duties of government?
I think the divide is not negative v.s. positive, but fundamental-inalienable, i.e. natural rights (in the sense of rights derived from the natural law) v.s. outcomes of charitable virtue. “Nice” people would make sure people had time off for family crises. It would be evil (sinful) but not criminal to deny family leave. But the state isn’t an arbiter of sin, even in a secular context.
If my reason or will is circumscribed, or my life taken, I cease to be human in a meaningful way. Those rights are the ones to be enforced.
so a negative right is merely a moral claim, for if it were a legal one, it would require a positive right to enforce it, correct?
i may have a negative right to life, but this doesn’t work as a legal claim unless i have some right to a judicial system to enforce it.
I do not believe the concept of negative rights, which derives from each individual being the sole owner of his or her own person, is a difficult concept to understand. In fact, the Declaration of Independence refers to natural rights as “self evident”. It really does not take a rocket scientist to understand the concept. What is needed is an intellectual honesty and integrity that is, unfortunately, absent from most individuals where political theory and ethics is concerned. Most individuals believe that they are entitled to certain material things, and how these things are obtained is besides the point. However, based on this posting and the above comments it is heartening that there are still some consistently ethical and rational people in this world.
Scott,
As your right to life goes, it work if you don’t have a “right” to a judicial system to enforce it, but you have a negative right not to have the government confiscate the big stick you use to defend yourself? After all, the judicial system does not really enforce your right to life. It punishes someone who deprived you of it after you’re dead.
“Nice” people would make sure people had time off for family crises
you help someone then he becomes dependant of you or he tries to pay back so he’s free again. But thats not all, sometimes you give to someone who is too paranoyed to give it back, like if he thought death was cruel so he can’t accept any lack.
When you need to choose between security and liberty. youre safe but then someone needs a minimum which will makes you both precarious if you share, will you be cheap? will you consider he may have time enough to wait i make more with what i got so i can give more and we have both enough, but do i trust myself enough to wait my investment to grow? am i the only one in control of this? If i share with the ones who compete with me? can we make more like this? like investing in ethical investment was not usefull before, now its more productive, but is it enough for a world so in need it can’t wait for undemocratic charity? this world is in its right to steal from the rich who are scared of giving?
death is for some a hell, some others believe its eternal peace, and others believe its nothing..so nothing you can’t try to appreciate?
Enough is diverse, but who goes first so it can help continue a growth which is improving access to everyone !?
Do we help chinese social economy so they can develop better technology that will be used by poor country who won’t have to compete with the people here in america? Or if we do will it does like american union who don’t invest in the best interest of innovation? open sourcing if it means we let property rights becomes a temporary measures (protectionism)like phrmaceuticals (generic medication) so poor and sick people can have access to a technology that will save their lives if they want it?
“But for each ‘negative right’ doesn’t there exist a positive right for the government to recognize and enforce the negative right?”
TZ, it might help you to include in your thinking the moral-legal principle of estoppel: a person cannot claim something which contractions another claim or action of that person.
How does that apply to rights? If someone tries to kill you, and doesn’t acknowledge your negative right to life, he loses the ability to claim his own right to life. Therefore, you can hurt or kill him in self-defense. There’s no particular need for an all-powerful state to protect your rights; you can do it yourself, with the help of your community, your insurance company, and any security you wish to hire. It’ll certainly be cheaper than the state robbing you to pay for overblown military and policing schemes.
It’s true that some issues will not be as clear and require arbitration, testimony, and judgement. There are still numerous ways to carry these out without forcing some state to hand down and enforce its own judgement. That was your concern, if I understood you correctly.
Democracy: The God That Failed is a must-read in this regard. It does a good job of describing how such a free society could work.
Lisa, the positive right i referred to is that of a court system, more of a right to justice than anything else. my negative right to property, life etc. requires a positive right to justice at someone else’s expense.
Scott,
You’re confusing right with power. You may have the right to your property, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right to utilize other people’s resources to catch a crook. Indeed, such is completely self-contradictory, as it means that “property rights mean the right to violate property rights”. This is clearly non-sense.
I may have the right to my property. That doesnt’ mean I have the right to steal anyone else’ property to defend my own property.
Property rights are merely a human construct of fiction. In reality, you own whatever you can enforce your will over, and you don’t own whatever someone else’s will is enforced over.
You don’t even own your own body, because other people tell you what you can ingest, carry, or use, and in what amounts.
There is no “right” to anything in this life — there are only claims against certain things, and those are only as good as your ability to enforce them.
But rights are meaningless abstractions if they cannot be enforced. Maybe the “other” loses his right to life so I could defend myself – assuming he didn’t kill me before I was able to do something about it.
A right must be both universally recognized and enforced, i.e. you will enforce rights to third parties if you see them being infringed. Otherwise it is merely a claim – but as seems to be proposed here, no venue to settle claims except might (personal or hired) makes right. If I am assaulted, maybe something akin to a posse of my neighbors might enforce things (I often point out the Opensource/GNU/Linux cooperative model as neither government nor market). But it would be because they recognized that I had rights and that they were violated.
I may be a pariah to my community, an excessive risk to any insurance company, and too impoverished or cheap to hire security. Conversely, if the community would enforce legitimate rights, they can enforce illegitimate rights such as charity taxes, insurance companies can become corrupt insuring robbers and thieves instead of their potential or actual victims, and mercenaries are merely illegitimate security forces.
If the community has few members, and many but not all obtain a “hired gun”, are those who don’t or can’t buy his services at his mercy and the mercy of those who he protects if they can’t protect themselves (and he might have far superior weapons)? All the rights you can personally afford? Is such a thing properly called a “right”?
You need an ultimate authority. I get two pounds of fruit at $2 each – then I give you $3 and start to walk off. You say “wait, that is $4″, to which I say “2+2=3″. Your hired thugs stop me, but I also point out that together the two containers only weigh 1.5 pounds. Then you claim that “pound” has no ultimate/legal/authoritative definition, so it does weigh 18oz=2pounds. Either natural rights are in the same category as 2+2=4, or they are totally arbitrary and subjective. In the case of weights and measures, they require a legal definition and standard.
I may not have a (positive) claim on other’s resources to catch a crook, but they ought not recognize the crook’s claims. But there is the snag – I say the item he is selling you is mine and was stolen. He denies it. I may be slandering, he may be selling stolen merchandise. How is it settled?
If he stole my last gold piece, he can spend part of it on security and insurance to keep the remainder, and I can only plead with them I am in the right and they ought to take a risk to get it back for me (and I would be out as much or more simply to retain my own property). I may be out more or less than if I was taxed by a state enforcement apparatus, but for some reason you seem to feel better having to pay private thugs whatever the going rate is to keep your life, liberty, and property, than paying what might be the same or less to public thugs who at least claim legitimacy partially based on impartiality. Your mercenaries simply enforce the desires of the highest bidder.
In the most chaotic regions of Afghanistan before the Taliban and other failed states, we don’t see spontaneous liberty, we see protection, robbery, theft, and thuggery. Generally the businessmen can’t outgun the warlords, but this is the outcome you would suggest would happen. Areas lacking government are not much less hells than where there is excessive government.
Let me clarify my “Nice people would insure time off” remark – I meant that if you employed people, be it to paint your house, or sell your merchandise, or do other work, you personally would allow them to have time off to take care of what ought to be more important. Not everyone is nice. If people wish to play the unreformed Scrooge, they ought to be free to do so, but people should know about the destructive avarice. If he crushes his employees, he might be clipping quality in his products. People who are uncharitable or uncaring aren’t criminal, so there is no reason for government to compel charity. But the community and individuals should shun them for their uncharity.
Clarification II:
IMHO: Natural rights are like 2+2=4. Good and reasonable people should agree and act accordingly.
The original and fundamental purpose of government is to create positive law in conformance to the natural law, including limits on government’s areas of competence (keep the peace, don’t bother with vice that doesn’t create a nuisance, leave charity to the church). This might require defining special applications, or things like weights and measures so contracts will make sense, or extending law as technology or something else changes (e.g. at some point it matters if I own the air above, or minerals below).
And for natural rights or laws to have meaning, there must be a way to enforce them, or punish those who violate them, something normally put into the positive law.
The evil of “overblown military and policing schemes” is that they are overblown and enforce nonconforming or even evil positive laws.
My point is that both rights, and the amount of force or coercion that can be used in their enforcement can be discovered in the natural law.
And because rights by nature are equal, they cannot be left to be judged or enforced only for those who can defend them theirselves, pay someone (why is that a bribe to a policeman but not to a private security employee), or has some special elite standing so others will do the enforcement. In that sense, the voters of EU countries and here are creating false rights by bidding for them.
And they are a problem whether in government or corporations, or even volunteer organizations because man is fallen and often will be selfish, take bribes, or do other evil if they can avoid being caught, or if caught, held responsible and forced to do restitution and penalty. If man were not fallen, crime would happen neither on the street nor in government (the latter is typically usurpation which they technically make a non-crime)
Clarification II:
IMHO: Natural rights are like 2+2=4. Good and reasonable people should agree and act accordingly.
The original and fundamental purpose of government is to create positive law in conformance to the natural law, including limits on government’s areas of competence (keep the peace, don’t bother with vice that doesn’t create a nuisance, leave charity to the church). This might require defining special applications, or things like weights and measures so contracts will make sense, or extending law as technology or something else changes (e.g. at some point it matters if I own the air above, or minerals below).
And for natural rights or laws to have meaning, there must be a way to enforce them, or punish those who violate them, something normally put into the positive law.
The evil of “overblown military and policing schemes” is that they are overblown and enforce nonconforming or even evil positive laws.
My point is that both rights, and the amount of force or coercion that can be used in their enforcement can be discovered in the natural law.
And because rights by nature are equal, they cannot be left to be judged or enforced only for those who can defend them theirselves, pay someone (why is that a bribe to a policeman but not to a private security employee), or has some special elite standing so others will do the enforcement. In that sense, the voters of EU countries and here are creating false rights by bidding for them.
And they are a problem whether in government or corporations, or even volunteer organizations because man is fallen and often will be selfish, take bribes, or do other evil if they can avoid being caught, or if caught, held responsible and forced to do restitution and penalty. If man were not fallen, crime would happen neither on the street nor in government (the latter is typically usurpation which they technically make a non-crime)
David, perhaps as a moral claim you are correct, but what purpose does saying you have a right serve unless you have some guaranteed method of enforcement?
Scott,
Making an argument for natural rights will at least encourage moral people to respect them. Regarding those who are immoral, and refuse to respect property rights, the only answer to them can be force (or alternatively preventative defense, such as locks).
Even if you can’t prevent property rights violations, due to physical circumstances, or if you can’t get others to agree, so what? Proving that 2+2=4 doesn’t mean that you can convince everyone to agree, or even necessarily force everyone to agree.
Michael said: “There is no ‘right’ to anything in this life — there are only claims against certain things, and those are only as good as your ability to enforce them.”
Well, speak for yourself. Relative moral thinking – like saying on absolute rights exist – will excuse every tyranny and hurtful act man has ever conceived. Surely might=right is a tired and pointless argument by now, especially on a libertarian forum.
I certainly have the right to life and property. My rights (and yours) not just fictitious construct ssomeone has made up, and they can’t be changed or eliminated by committees or the opinions of people.
Scott said: “but what purpose does saying you have a right serve unless you have some guaranteed method of enforcement?”
What’s the point to ever standing up for the right thing? Good is its own reward, even when it’s difficult to achieve. I’d rather be good and lose than be evil and win. Anyway, nothing in life is guaranteed. Know what you are, and fight for the rights and freedoms of both yourself and your fellow beings.
Before states emerged from a fossilised feudal system in about the 13th century, the feudal system implemented a class based but non-state system. Before about the mid 11th century it wasn’t class based but embedded the facts of life of the time, so it only provided freedom to those not at the bottom of the heap (a bit like Athenian democracy). But it at least shows that there were properly functioning institutions that supported societies without using state mechanisms. It would be theoretically possible to have something like that again, only without losers if they weren’t engineered in in the first place. The very real practical difficulty is how to get there from here – but it’s simply wrong to state in general and absolute term
As the New Testament states, Jesus’s reply when asked about divorce laws was, “these things were given for your hardness of heart”. We need to remake our institutions, our culture, and we in them – but there is no essential need for statism beyond the fact that it lives within us. Need that be an eternal victory? And even if our defeat were certain, would that be any reason for surrender rather than for waiting our chance?
A state by any other name is still a state. An oath of fealty and part of my produce and conscription in defense of my feudal may not be a “state” as we think of it, but it attempts to have the features I consider good, and has some bad.
Maybe I just don’t understand the particular definition of a state you are using. Institutions either can use force or they can’t – be it a mob of ungoverned people or the police of a dictator.
I used 2+2=4 for a reason. If I disagree with it, you would think me insane. I ought not have to prove 2+2=4 no more than I should need to prove I have a right to life, liberty, and property. It is not a good idea to let insane people participate at many levels of society. So after educating children with Euclid and Pythagorus, but also Aristotle and Aquinas, we should assume they know what both circles and rights are and would act accordingly. The problem is that even where reason works, the will fails.
And let me extend two of the above comments to make the greater point. Morally good people will respect the rights of others and enforce those rights in interactions. And good is its own reward. But the key is that I will also respect and enforce the rights in interactions and transactions I am not an immediate party to for the same reason. If I see you being robbed, I should act to stop it, or to get your property back.
But just as having everyone grow their own food is inefficient, having everyone act as police, judge, jailer, and jury at random intervals as things come up is just as inefficient. And you can have misunderstandings so some rules need to be written ahead of time since reasonable people may differ (weights and measures in my above example).
So we have a common group of sane people who respect each other’s rights, and an imperative for uniform enforcement since those rights don’t depend on social status or wealth. So institutions are created to protect, enforce, and punish.
What we have is a cancerous monster, but the basic idea is there. I look to what you call “statism” as the cancer and the monster. I can admit that government is basically an evil, but a necessary one. I look to the US before the Civil War without a US Bank as a model. The Constitution (with bill of rights) was close – maybe adequate except that men wanted powers beyond it and managed to get through or around the restrictions.
Michael writes: “There is no ‘right’ to anything in this life — there are only claims against certain things, and those are only as good as your ability to enforce them.”
To speak of right is to speak of ethics and morality, so allow me to begin by quoting at length from an essay by famed Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson (“The Biological Basis of Morality,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1998):
“Centuries of debate on the origin of ethics come down to this: Either ethical principles, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience, or they are human inventions. … The choice between these two understandings makes all the difference in the way we view ourselves as a species. It measures the authority of religion, and it determines the conduct of moral reasoning. … Theologians and philosophers have almost always focused on transcendentalism as the means to validate ethics. They seek the grail of natural law, which comprises freestanding principles of moral conduct immune to doubt and compromise. Christian theologians, following Saint Thomas Aquinas’s reasoning in Summa Theologiae, by and large consider natural law to be an expression of God’s will. … Secular philosophers of a transcendental bent may seem to be radically different from theologians, but they are actually quite similar at least in moral reasoning. They tend to view natural law as a set of principles so powerful, whatever their origin, as to be self-evident to any rational person. In short, transcendental views are fundamentally the same whether God exists or not.”
“In the empiricist view, ethics is conduct favored consistently enough throughout a society to be expressed as a code of principles. It reaches its precise form in each culture according to historical circumstance. The codes, whether adjudged good or evil by outsiders, play an important role in determining which cultures flourish and which decline. … The empiricist argument holds that if we explore the biological roots of moral behavior, and explain their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wise and enduring ethical consensus. The current expansion of scientific inquiry into the deeper processes of human thought makes this venture feasible.”
“[E]thical precepts…are more likely to be products of the brain and the culture. From the consilient perspective of the natural sciences, they are no more than principles of the social contract hardened into rules and dictates — behavioral codes that members of a society fervently wish others to follow and are themselves willing to accept for the common good. Precepts are the extreme on a scale of agreements that range from casual assent, to public sentiment, to law, to that part of the cannon considered sacred and unalterable. … What have been thought of as moral sentiments are now taken to mean moral instincts (as defined by the modern behavioral sciences), subject to judgment according to their consequences.”
“Now suppose that human propensities to cooperate or defect are heritable: some people are innately more cooperative, others less so. In this respect moral aptitude would simply be like almost all other mental traits studied to date. … To the heritability of moral aptitude add the abundant evidence of history that cooperative individuals generally survive longer and leave more offspring. Following that reasoning, in the course of evolutionary history genes predisposing people toward cooperative behavior would have come to predominate in the human population as a whole. Such a process repeated through thousands of generations inevitably gave rise to moral sentiments.”
“Beginning about 10,000 years ago, a tick in geological time, when the agricultural revolution started in the Middle East, in China, and in Mesoamerica, populations increased tenfold in density over those of hunter-gatherer societies. Families settled on small plots of land, villages proliferated, and labor was finely divided as a growing minority of the populace specialized as craftsmen, traders, and soldiers. The rising agricultural societies became increasingly hierarchical. As chiefdoms and then states thrived on agricultural surpluses, hereditary rulers and priestly castes took power. The old ethical codes were transformed into coercive regulations, always to the advantage of the ruling classes. About this time the idea of law-giving gods originated. Their commands lent the ethical codes overpowering authority — once again, no surprise, in the interests of the rulers.”
If Wilson is correct (as I believe he will be proven to be), then while rights are indeed “only claims against certain things,” as ethical precepts they are claims that constitute “the extreme on a scale of agreements” such that in any given society, time and circumstance have rendered them “sacred and unalterable.” And simply put, this would be the case for the rights to life, liberty, and property, for human society as a whole (and thus the basis of true globalization), were they not constantly violated “in the interests of the rulers” — i.e., in the interests of the state, which is inherently coercive and thus inherently at odds with the cooperation that lies at the heart of the social enterprise.
Indeed, insofar as “human propensities to cooperate or defect are inheritable,” it is not too much to say that those inclined toward the latter are precisely those who are attracted to the state. For they are precisely those who believe, as Gary Galles quoted a statist at the beginning of this thread, that “No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest,” the state being the sole determinant of what the “public interest” is. Which is why, as P. M. Lawrence writes, “We need to remake our institions, our culture, and we [sic] in them,” there in fact being “no essential need for statism beyond the fact that it lives within us.”
Why? Because, the state lives within us only as a historical phenomenon and is therefore as subject to passing OUT of history as the hunter-gatherer societies that preceded it. And I for one believe that the state will not only pass out of history but that it will do so far faster than anyone imagines, given that “the twenty-first century will see about a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor” (http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=memelist.html?m=1%23610). For the more technology advances, the more it empowers the individual (notwithstanding the state’s attempt to control the process through military means; see, “Perfecting Humanity” in the May issue of Forbes Magazine). And when advanced technology has finally advanced enough to put the state on the run for good, the individual will at long last be free to cooperate with his fellows to their mutual, lasting, and ultimately transcendental benefit.
and labor was finely divided as a growing minority of the populace specialized as craftsmen, traders, and soldiers. The rising agricultural societies became increasingly hierarchical
we hear right now we need to be diversified, would this be an antidote to the elitism? to a hierarchy of coercition?
his cooperaration an intelligence pattern that lies with competition, like we can cooperate but if we can’t then we’ll compete, anyway we both need to get enough so the means does not matter unless its more productive and able of creating autonomy than with the competition.
Competition when we don’t know what to practice before death, risk unless you might be losing a part of the job, which mean unfair? or the creditor wants is money back in time, or he wont accept the depression of the debtor. faith is a gift, an advantage of knowledge, a curse for the one insufficient to bring a part of the job with him? jealous, i need to make sure death is not en echo of my own mutilation for a payback, because i did not create myself from nothing so i have to pay something that have suffered as a way to create artificial needs, peace! Infinite suffering to the thing that have made a sacrifice and who now only fantasm on violence.
I won’t choose between creditors alternative way of asking a payback, i will prevent the worst by mutilating myself,become one myself so as equal have a right to stop attaching myslf to many people which is making me an infidel, with no loyalty to anyone, an opportunist.
The solution to this bunch of violence is to believe in something else from death? not silence, because there as to be a payback, and its not by becomming what i was that will improve the world or is it? what if it was to restart my life again, the same one again and agains until i accept to become nothing,nothing to brake, nothing to be scared of, i brake to nourrish the ones who fight for a living that is made by nymphomanyak needs and the adrenaline of fighting death, which death is sufficient for me?
was a precarious world the beginning to make abundance fill my nothingness? who needed to make me alive if it was not me? what was the need for a first living creature? why there was a need? how could it be difficult to not be conscious of whats great about living? whats great is supposed to be the only solution, but how could i access that? it may be simple because i can’t face a difficult one from nothing i am. recognize others nothing, but why?
why was it precious to be curious about what was like me? to communicate what? compassion but why? why invent justice? to make fun of a contradiction? why this cynism would be sufficient to grow from nothing?narcissism, i don’t need to exist even when i do, its just to have enough attention to not be in competition with the whole lot of people who need it as an obligation to payback, sometimes its me anyway.
Why create a problem? why the solution would be interresting?to see myself being so fragile makes me affraid, may be a beginning but never enough(some exception may occur) to secure me when i am scared of death.my culpability of censoring my opinion from others, the war is not enough but the compassion seems so complicated to observe, nuance thing.
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