From: yamauchi@ces.cwru.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy
Subject: Anarchy and Evolution (was Re: AN OPEN LETTER TO THE LIBERTARIAN LEFT)
Date: 4 Oct 92 18:34:50 GMT
	<1992Oct4.040346.21580@vela.acs.oakland.edu>
Organization: Case Western Reserve University
NNTP-Posting-Host: sartre.caisr.cwru.edu
In-reply-to: wlee@argo.acs.oakland.edu's message of Sun, 4 Oct 1992 04:03:46 GMT

In article <1992Oct4.040346.21580@vela.acs.oakland.edu> wlee@argo.acs.oakland.edu (Walter Lee) writes:
>You pose questions I've been struggling with for a long time...
>Disclaimer...the (capital L) Libertarians never claimed that utopia is an
>option....  This utopian (well, idealist) doesn't claim to have all the
>answers.

>But here's what I got so far...

	[ answers edited for brevity ]

>>1) Without property rights, what happens when two people want to use
>>the same item at the same time, and neither is willing to back down?

>Needless to say, I see the problem to be not the lack of
>established ownership, but the unwillingness of either/both parties to
>"back down".  I don't have a solution I consider adequate.

>>2) If they get into a fight, are the allowed to proceed, or will other
>>people forcibly break it up?

>If the assumption of 1), that neither is willing to back down (that both
>are "ascendant" personalities) is safe, why not just let 'em fight to the
>death?

Sounds reasonable, but it also sounds like something that's going to
escalate rather quickly.  If I'm an ascendant personality, then I'm
going to want to carry around sufficient firepower so that nobody can
take what I'm using at any time.

>>3) Can you use force to prevent others from entering your home, or can
>>anyone off the street decide they want to live with you?

>If we can't mature to the point where we can live with each other, then
>anarchy will never happen.  If anarchy does happen, "home" will simply
>be a safe place to sleep, not a territory to be defended.

But aren't there some people you wouldn't want to have to live with?
Suppose David Duke decided to use your house as a KKK meeting hall?
Suppose you're black, and they decided to follow you wherever you went
-- not using violence, but shouting insults.  Pretty soon you get
together with some well-armed friends and decide to teach them a
lesson, and this also escalates...

>>4) If nobody owns anything, is anyone allowed to destroy anything?  Is
>>nobody allowed to destroy anything?

>Destruction of life will be punishable by sentence to Hell.

Are you saying God will punish murderers, or that anarchists will
create some Hellish area on Earth and confine murderers there?

>Destruction of property will be impossible.

Impossible how?  Suppose someone picks up a rock and throws it through
a window, or spray paints the Mona Lisa, or whatever?

>>5) What happens when nobody wants to do the unpleasant or boring jobs
>>-- from working on an assembly line to shuffling papers in an office?

>Re assembly lines:
>1. Most of them produce shit nobody needs anyway like, say, electric
>   pencil sharpeners.

And automobiles and refrigerators and air conditioners and TVs and
VCRs and stereos and computers and books and magazines and CDs and
airplanes...

And food...

And clothing...

I think it would be very difficult to feed and clothe a society of 250
million people without an industrialized manufacturing and
distribution capability.

But even if you could, one thing that left-anarchists don't seem to
recognize is: people are willing to kill for luxuries.  In the inner
city, people aren't being shot over loaves of bread -- they're being
shot for their Reeboks...

So if the industrial capacity to manufacture luxuries disappears, the
luxuries that currently exist will become highly sought after -- and
fought for -- and killed for.

>2. People who aren't held to the treadmill/rat-race by the threat of poverty
>   won't offer political resistance to automating menial shitwork.

I tend to agree that this is the only solution.  I'm fully in favor of
automating both manufacturing and clerical work, but I think it will
take a capitalist economy to develop and implement the necessary
technology.

>>9) How do you handle vendettas between groups that hate each other
>>(enemies, rival families, rival gangs, ethnic groups, etc.)?

>I believe the cause of almost all of these is competition over economic
>opportunities.

While I think this is major factor, there are others.  People in
Bosnia don't seem to be primarily motivated by greed or poverty.
They're primarily motivated by a desired for "ethnic cleansing"
through exterminating their long-hated neighbors...

>>10) If a group decides to establish control over property using
>>weapons and force, do you attempt to stop them, and if so, how?

>How else could anyone establish (control over) property?
>I don't know how to stop it.  I wish I did.

>These were a lot tougher than the ones from the wobbly.
>Keep 'em coming.

Thanks for the honest answers.  I guess I'm too cynical about human
nature to believe that left-anarchy would ever be practical or stable.

I'm also not convinced that anarchocapitalism would work, though
perhaps it might.

Anarchocapitalism requires that most people act rationally, and I
think this would be difficult to achieve.  On the other hand, most
people no longer believe in evil spirits and ghosts and witches, so
at least some progress has been made.

Left anarchism requires that most people act unselfishly, and I think
that would be nearly impossible to achieve.  Most religions have been
trying to do this for millenia.  Are people today less selfish than
they were 100 or 1000 years ago?

Rationality is adaptive in the evolutionary sense.  Doing stupid
things will, on the average, get you killed sooner than doing smart
things.

Selfishness (when combined with rationality) is also adaptive.  If you
rationally pursue your own self-interest, you will tend to survive
longer than if you sacrifice your own interests.  Unlike Objectivists,
I don't consider this to be inherently good, but unlike altruists, I
don't consider this to be inherently evil.

Altruism may be adaptive at the societal level, but Richard Dawkins
makes the point that evolution selects for individual fitness -- not
societal fitness.  He mentions one theory that lemmings altruistically
sacrifice themselves when population densities get too high, and
points out the flaw in the theory by referring to a Far Side cartoon --
the lemming with the life preserver.  As soon as one individual
mutates to lose the self-sacrifice gene, he will tend to survive
longer and pass this on to more offspring and eventually, this gene
will dominate the population.  (I suppose self-sacrifice for one's
offspring might be the exception to this rule, but even this requires
self-serving behavior until the offspring are produced and the pursuit
of one's family's interests over the interests of others.)

He also raises an interesting point about the evolution of cooperative
behavior:

RD> Leigh was interested in that perennial problem, the evolution of
RD> 'altruistic' behavior in individuals.  He correctly recognized
RD> that if individual interest conflict with those of the species,
RD> the individual interests -- short-term interests -- must prevail.
RD> Nothing, it seems, can prevent the march of selfish genes.  But
RD> Leigh made the following interesting suggestion.  There must be
RD> some groups or species in which, as it happens, what is best for
RD> the individual pretty much coincides with what is best for the
RD> species.  And there must be other species in which the interests
RD> of the individual happen to depart especially strongly from the
RD> interests of the species.  Other things being equal, the second
RD> type of species could well be more likely to go extinct.  A form
RD> of species selection, then, could favor, not individual
RD> self-sacrifice, but those species in which individuals are not
RD> _asked_ to sacrifice their own welfare.

Applications are left to the reader...
--
_______________________________________________________________________________

Brian Yamauchi			Case Western Reserve University
yamauchi@alpha.ces.cwru.edu	Department of Computer Engineering and Science
_______________________________________________________________________________
Newsgroups: alt.society.revolution