Re: Ideological blinders

From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Mon Mar 31 2003 - 08:29:08 MST

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     hal@finney.org (Hal Finney) writes:
    >So this raises the question, why do people accept ideologies that impose
    >blinders? Do they have any choice? Lee's quote above suggests that

     I think they're unavoidable because the amount of available information
    exceeds that which we can absorb. A person with no blinder could waste a
    lot of time evaluating perpetual motion machines, etc.
     But we do have important choices to make about what blinders we accept,
    and how aware we are of their effects.

    >we do not, that all ideologies impose blinders, and that (presumably)
    >we all have an ideology whether we know it or not. I'm not so sure,
    >but I won't push the point right now. But to toss out a question, what
    >if you were unsure about the best economic and political system? What if
    >you were trying to decide? Is that an ideology, and if so, what blinders
    >does it impose? Or would Lee deny that anyone could be in that state?

     If you're unsure whether our current system is better than Stalinism,
    then you've done an effective job of avoiding many common blinders, at
    the cost of losing your reputation for promoting freedom.
     If you have a bias against most possible systems, but don't have an
    opinion on whether our current system or anarchocapitalism is better,
    then you've made a relatively good choice of which blinders to use.

    -- 
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Peter McCluskey          | "To announce that there must be no criticism of
    http://www.rahul.net/pcm | the President, or that we are to stand by the
                             | President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
                             | and servile, but morally treasonable to the
                             | American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
    


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