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RE: An Introduction to Wage Slavery
Let's not call it "government" then, but we need to organize. And the bigger the organization, the more potential freedom we create for each other.
I think this is the exact situation we currently find ourselves in. Government is bigger than ever, which in no way is leading to more potential freedom from my perspective. LOL, we'll have to have AI run the "organization" to finally get rid of the human condition, greed, and self interested pricks sucking the life out of us like mosquitoes.
Maybe I worded it wrong, I agree with your suggestion. And I didn't mean that government needs to be big, I meant to say "the more people are represented, have a stake in the organization and contribute to it"; the "organization" itself doesn't have to have any people at all perhaps, one AI could do it, maybe ;-) We could find a way to make democracy work for the first time in history, maybe aided by AI, maybe on a public decentralized blockchain even. Who knows. We're now not really facing a situation with big government; we're facing a big board of directors ;-) Still the organization needs to be there. There is no Invisible Hand, and the human condition is not set in stone. Greed is not our defining characteristic, a measure of self interest is but one of our many qualities. I know it's quite something to go against 12,000 years of evolution, cultural evolution mainly, but what is 12,000 against the hundreds of thousands of years our species exists? I'm optimistic like that, can't help it :-)
It never hurts to dream. I try not to be overly pessimistic, but I also think it's important to honestly assess the situation for what it is and most people don't even realize we're enslaved by corporations hiding behind benevolent rulers that we allegedly choose... we're a far cry from my ideal society, but I can appreciate it for at least helping me realize what I do want to see. I think I just need to go build a seastead...
That's a wonderful attitude to have; to appreciate this world for the contrast it provides to what we'd like society to be :-) And hey, it's not all bad; life's still a miracle ;-) Still, I think we need to keep talking about the dream, and be clear about who we really talk about when we say "government," because you're exactly right when you say that most people don't have a clue... Although I'd wager that the numbers are tilted the other way here on Steemit ;-) Thanks again for a great post my friend 🙏🏼
That was a good quote to extract from @zyx066's comment, @clayboyn. Stuart Kauffman, the chaos theorist who used to work at the Santa Fe Institute, found exactly the opposite to be true in his computer models. The larger the organization, the more it tended to bureaucratically "freeze up." We know now that it was because of the centralized nature of larger organizations.
zyx066 goes on to say that there is no such thing as the "invisible hand," but of course there is. We just have a different name for it now: spontaneous order. In his experiments, Kauffman decentralized his landscapes (which is exactly how blockchains work) and this is how he described the result:
"When the system is broken into well-chosen patches, each adapts for its own selfish benefit... No central administrator coordinates behavior. Properly chosen patches, each acting selfishly, achieve the coordination... [C]ontrary to intuition, breaking an organization into 'patches' where each patch attempts to optimize for its own selfish benefit, even if that is harmful to the whole, can lead, as if by an INVISIBLE HAND, to the welfare of the whole organization."
Anyway, really good post. Wish more people would look at these issues and give up the knee-jerk cheerleading of government attempts to "help" us.
Agreed, we don't need bigger governments, if anything we just need more governments. My perfect world view involves autonomous self governance, but if we could even get down to a state/or local governance level and decentralize these massive countries into actually adapting to fit all kinds of people instead of trying to force all kinds of people to fit into few molds, I think that's where freedom can truly be found.