Re: Civilization and Enemies, was Re: CONFESSIONS OF A CHEERFUL LIBERTARIAN By David Brin

From: Michael S. Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Mon Dec 04 2000 - 09:20:32 MST


"Michael M. Butler" wrote:
>
> I will not rise to any of Michael's tempting bait (yum), but there's a
> nugget of gold here:
>
> > There is a significant difference between individualism and
> > socio/psychological killers, liberty is not about nihilism.
>
> Absolutely true, and I never said it was.
>
> I will repeat what I said, broken down, with annotation:
> 1) Pure individualism <do what thou wilt, plain and simple>
> 2) in its rawest form <hmm... what the *hell* is going on? looks
> weird to me>
> 3) is hard to distinguish <not impossible, _hard_ for J. Random
> person on the street>

For J Random Ignoramus who has been fed Union, DNC, and Welfare State
media garbage, there is a significant memetic barrier to overcome, I
will grant, at least, it seems, with many city dwellers. I do not see
much difficulty for residents of rural areas to distinguish.

> 4) from psychopathology <bad craziness>
> 5) unless the observer <the person trying to gauge how to respond>
> 6) has confidence <justified or not>
> 7) in the shared values <I figure most people will eat the pie, not
> throw it in my face>
> 8) of the observed. <the person doing what he wilt>

Well, of course, but as I said above, this is typically a city dweller
response, and given rat experiments and human experiments on crowding
and sensory inundation, I would venture that a large percentage of city
dwellers are at least minimally paranoid psychotics from trying to deal
with city stresses. I have found that its far easier for rural resident
A from Montana to trust rural resident B from New Hampshire than for
city resident A from one side of Boston to trust city resident B from
the other side of Boston. Could it simply be that the shared values of
city dwellers are values of distrust of the individual in favor of
bureaucratic authority?

>
> Pick any part of this apart, Michael. Please go by the numbers, there
> are a lot of assumptions and nominalizations here; I hope you won't
> waste time quibbling over semantics.
>
> I mean, really, haven't you ever freaked a mundane? You know what I'm
> talking about, don't you?

I do freak petty socio/communo-fascists all the time.



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