Paul:
As you know, I'm preoccupied with work right now (on standby on the docket,
as it turns out -- victim of some inherent inefficiencies in the current
justice system), so my initial reply to your post will necessarily be quick,
unsystematic and poorly edited. Accordingly, I pick out only one or two
points that touched me emotionally to respond to . . .
The gist of your critique of the culture you perceive on this list seems to
be a dogmatic libertarianism that results in a cruelty to unfortunate people.
I don't like the way libertarian ideas sometimes seem to express such a
point of view and I find people who actively embrace a "screw the losers"
approach to individual liberty to actually be the worst enemies of liberty.
I agree with you that protecting the rights of minorities, the weak and the
unlucky is the greatest challenge to libertarian values. This is one reason
that -- in practice -- I tend to be a minarchist rather than a true
anarchist. It is also one reason that I spend so much of my own time
thinking about moral philosophy and the development of a practical ethical
system.
I personally think that the fact that you have found members of "the
intelligentsia" to condemn extropian thinking as "fascist" is simply the
result of a lack of understanding of the extent to which a rigorous and
honest approach to questions of human liberty results in questioning sacred
cows. Mainstream political thought assumed that a powerful state is the sole
and only safeguard of liberty for so long that any questioning of that idea
was immediately condemned as somehow "anti-liberty". There is great irony
here, one I encounter ALL THE TIME. Working every day in the real world of
practical politics, my near-universal experience has been that
"conservatives" think I'm a "liberal" and "liberals" think I'm a
"conservative". When I quote Locke and Jefferson without attribution, people
think I'm spouting some alien, incomprehensible philosophy.
Compassion is important. Anyone who says otherwise isn't really living a
full emotional life and really hasn't thought through the notion of personal
autonomy and liberty. People who relish shocking others by making harsh
statements about the effects of competition on the unlucky and the weak do
just as much damage to the cause of liberty as any statist. But condemning
extropian thought as "fascist" simply reveals the poverty of the political
vocabulary of the one doing the condemnation.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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