Kitty,
I wanted to respond more specifically to several points you made at OEN. I'll
focus primarily on one paragraph of yours first, where you talk about
libertarian concepts. I apologize in advance, if I'm not fully up to speed with
the "in-line" thing.

[You have done great. --Paul]


It may be helpful to tell you that I consider myself to be a libertarian, but I
am NOT a member of the Libertarian Party. I feel that, as a rule, party politics
creates compromises that dilute or contradict founding principles. The
Libertarian Party is no exception to this rule. I have a couple of serious
philosophical differences with their party platform.

That said, I do agree with the core libertarian principle that, "...all
individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives,
[bodies, and property] and have the right to live in whatever manner they
choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of
others..."

--- In morelife@yahoogroups.com, "Kitty Antonik Wakfer" <kitty@...> wrote:

Meta
Snip by moderator of previous introductory meta comments.
/Meta

> It's not necessary that everyone... [Title]
> ------------------------
> "be as smart as [me]", as you put it.
>
> First off, thank you, Roy, for a very substantive comment. There are
> far too few of them at those few OpEdNews.com articles, that I
> actually read. I think the practice of 1 to 3 sentence comments is
> common partly because the enormous number of articles that are
> submitted and published every day tends to encourage soundbite types
> of retorts and/or praises. It is in fact difficult, I think, for the
> newbie or only occasional reader at OEN to distinguish among writers
> and make time worthy evaluations about what to read, skim or just
> ignore. I understand why the editors themselves do not wish to make
> such essentially censorship type evaluations and publication
> decisions, but the vast numbers alone makes it very hard to find the
> gems among the chaff. But then this current overload is a major
> problem with information on the Internet in general, which will only
> be resolved when each user begins to return and gain value for all
> aspects of his/her (hir) usage.

Agreed.

> << Kitty, you present a very interesting and rational slant on the
> concepts of personal liberty and individual responsibility in a
> society. Your arguments are based on fundamentally libertarian
> concepts, <<
>
> While there are such things as "libertarian concepts", most are
> ill-defined, ambiguous and incomplete. While many libertarian notions
> are certainly in the right direction of thought and action, their
> ambiguous nature and lack of basis in human nature makes them
> inadequate for guiding social interactions.

Ill-defined, ambiguous? Seems clear to me.?
Incomplete? Only in the details of its practical application.

The core libertarian principle (see above) establishes a basis in human nature
by recognizing the sovereign nature of human individuals, and guides social
interactions by defining "forcible interference" as the boundary between
acceptable and unacceptable social behavior.

>My practical suggestions -
> the listed 6 items - did not actually come from libertarian concepts
> at all.

Your 6 items may not have come from libertarian concepts, but they sound very
libertarian to me. They are a solid set of guidelines on how a truly sovereign
(may I say libertarian) individual should avoid governmental interference and
reject governmental assistance.

>The idea of privacy adopted by most libertarians is, in fact,
> directly opposed to any practical application of social preferencing.

Social preferencing plays a very important role in libertarian thinking. It is
the essence of how individuals are able to exercise free choice without using
force against others.

> Even worse is the insistence on anonymity adopted many libertarians,
> which completely negates any possibility of social preferencing and
> consequently, of any advance to a society of self-responsible
> self-orderly individuals (which must necessarily also require the
> ability of each member to efficiently evaluate the self-responsibility
> and self-ordering actions of each other member with whom s/he
> interacts).

As a libertarian, I defend anonymity as a choice. I believe information is owned
by the individual who created it. If personal information is an individual's
property, then unauthorized use of that information must, by definition, be
considered theft.

However, no rational libertarian will recommend a lifestyle of absolute
anonymity, precisely because it will likely carry with it the cost of negative
social preferencing. i.e. - not releasing credit history information will most
likely result in distrust by lenders. But, if you want to be a social outcast or
hermit, it's your choice.

Fraud is another matter. I consider fraud to be a use of force. Misrepresenting
or withholding relevant information, so as to influence another's choice must be
considered a restitutionable offense.

Please understand that I am not defending libertarian concepts or libertarians,
as such. I am simply using what is familiar to me as a basis for exploring your
ideas. I think our difference are probably more semantic than substantive.

> << but you take them beyond principle into the realm of practical
> implementation. <<
>
> Yes, this article has taken principles into the practical, rather than
> simply repeating or lamenting as so very many articles do. However,
> any principle that cannot be made practical is not only useless but
> must, almost necessarily, be invalid. This is a point of logic and
> epistemology, too often forgotten, not understood or ignored.
>
Yes! It is extremely important to recognize the difference between what is
theoretically possible, and what is practically possible in the real world. I
believe the inability of many, if not most, to understand this difference, is
the primary source of both historical and current social tribulations. Any
social system that ignores, or seeks to somehow change, the reality of human
nature is doomed to failure.

> << However, as much as I might agree with your message, I can't
> envision it ever happening in the real world. There are simply too
> many ignorant, apathetic, and irresponsible people who WANT the
> government to make their decisions for them and to make YOUR decisions
> for you too. <<
>
> I don't envision "it" - large scale practice of the recommended list
> of items - happening in the *current* society. I and Paul are trying
> to find and encourage a cadre (nucleus or core group) of people to
> begin to use these methods and others to work outside government and
> lead the way for others to follow similarly. Some of the "ignorant,
> apathetic, and irresponsible people" will wake up and see that this
> works and follow suit, trying it out for themselves. But many will
> continue on and, like the dinosaurs, will eventually be resigned to
> oblivion. It is the young and even the children who are and will grow
> up, who are and will be open to these new ways and will become the
> greatest source of self-responsible individuals populating the newly
> evolving self-ordered society.
>
And here is where I see the practical getting in the way of the possible.

> << Who's the comedian who said, "You can't fix stupid." Well, that's
> exactly our problem. Unfortunately, to "Fix" society in the way you
> propose, you have to first fix "Stupid," at least for a majority of
> the population. I have recently started calling this the "Stupid
> People Problem." <<
>
> No, you don't fix "Stupid", and you don't even try to fix current
> society. Rather you build a new society completely intermingled with
> but largely ignoring the old one - gradually as described above - and
> you leave the "stupid" to fix themselves or get left behind and be
> eliminated by attrition. There have always been "ignorant, apathetic,
> and irresponsible people", but in the past they were few in number and
> either died off quickly or learned their lessons through reality's
> "school of hard knocks" and changed their behavior. The problem has
> only become so enormous because of the current and growing social
> practices (since at least the last 70 years) which enable
> irresponsible ("stupid") which have sought to eliminate the school of
> hard knock and to enable irresponsible thinking and behavior to arise,
> continue and even to flourish in terms of its number of
> "practitioners". The most recent and current economic mess is a direct
> result of this, though the vast majority of politicians and their
> supporters/encouragers are scrambling to place the blame for it on
> everything and anyone else than previous actions of government.
> Keeping the populace complacent and dependent is a necessity for
> governments to continue to exist; having self-responsible
> self-regulating individuals would lead to the obvious conclusion for
> vast numbers that governments are not just unnecessary but a hindrance
> to those same people.
>
I wish we lived in a world where we could simply ignore the "stupid." Maybe
someday there will be too few of them to exert control over our lives, through
their support of governments that are NOT inclined to let anyone just opt out of
their web of control without a fight.

> << I read your husband's treatise on Social Meta-Needs. It is a very
> precise and scholary (sic) work, but way over the heads of average voters.
> I will admit I had to read parts of it twice myself. I enjoyed the
> intellectual workout, but how many people would. "The Compossibility
> of Ethical Egoism" is just one example of several concepts that very
> few of the people who show up at the polls will have the ability
> and/or desire to understand. <<
>
> It has never been Paul's or my thought that the majority of current
> readers would find his essay (and thank you for recognizing it as "a
> very precise and scholarly work", something that no current
> libertarian scholar appears yet ready to do) comprehensible. It most
> definitely should have taken you 2 readings of some parts - it sure
> did me (and more in some cases) when he was first creating it and then
> during revisions. Paul has always been best as a teacher for the
> highly intelligent and already knowledgeable, dating back to when he
> taught advanced software engineers about the intricacies of the
> super-computer hardware for which they were developing software, a
> course he developed himself and taught world-wide for a number of
> years in the late 70s and early 80s.
>
> It has always been our goal to locate those initial relatively few
> individuals who would be able to recognize the essential values in our
> ideas, now crystallized by the foundational presentation of the theory
> of Social Meta-Needs, through their own reading, and then
> question/discuss with us (in public) those areas where the
> implications are quite new and even radical. Our intended plan is to
> have many more people (first a few, then dozens and finally hundreds!
> :-) first accomplish this deep understanding and full integration, and
> then present their own unique and persuasive examples and
> interpretations of these novel and profound social ideas in practical
> social actions.

I read some of your other foundational materials and reread the Meta-Needs
treatise again. I now have even more questions, concerns, and critiques than I
did before. But, I will save them for another thread.

> << (I have some issues with the idea of Rights vs. Meta-Needs, and
> with the practicality of Victim defined restitution, but that's a bit
> beyond the scope of this article.) <<
>
> Now "victim defined restitution" is one of those ideas that is not at
> all part of standard libertarian thinking (and would be soundly
> rejected by most - likely for the same reasons that you are having
> reservations about it). And it is a pleasure to see that you have you
> picked up on this major item in the SMN theory.
>
> We would have been very surprised, Roy, (and actually disappointed
> too) if you did not have some questions/issues on what you read in the
> theory of Social Meta-Needs. This idea and some others did not spring
> fully formed into Paul's head. We had many, many months of discussions
> between the 2 of us - after many years of background thinking by Paul.
> Many conclusions held by Paul to be valid (and even more for me) were
> changed by his own thinking during this process. For instance,
> although victim-specified restitution appeared to be the only
> conclusion that would be consist with our discovery and full
> understanding of the nature of human beings, we too wrestled with the
> idea for quite a while before we were could accept it as workable, and
> only were able to do so when we began to understand the full
> methodology and strength of social preferencing. But I hope that you
> will raise your issue(s) at MoreLife Yahoo so that an in-depth
> exchange can take place - OEN is just not structured for this type of
> discussion. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/morelife/
>
> << I wish that more people were as smart as you, but the reality is
> that there's more of them than there are of you. <<
>
> The "ignorant, apathetic and irresponsible" do not really matter.
> These individuals are powerless without enforcers to do their bidding
> - granted that many of these are among the first. These latter must be
> negatively socially preferenced into oblivion (ostracized, to use an
> ancient term). It is the knowledgeable, concerned and responsible
> individuals who matter in the world (this is the thesis of Ayn Rand's
> novel "Atlas Shrugged") - and this in an essential point to keep in
> mind for one's self and in associating with others. Ignore the former
> and voluntarily deal only with the latter.
>
> Another item that could be added to the list in my article is to avoid
> all "voluntary" forms of taxes - those that are not built into the
> system such as sales taxes are in the current society. Be
> self-employed (a contractor) and preferentially associate with those
> doing the same, while encouraging others in the same manner. Strongly
> consider the practice of a profession or trade without yielding to the
> current government interference between parties - have a contractual
> relationship with those who want your services, which makes clear what
> is involved, and initiate such a contractual relationship only with
> those who are agreeable to the ideas in principle as well as practice.
> (I can imagine business cards that promote this idea...) We have many
> other ideas and I'm sure others can and will produce still many more
> when they break the habit of thinking within the government-society
> "box".

All sounds good, but a whole lot easier said than done. Though, I'm not saying
that it isn't worth the effort.

> Once again, thank you, Roy. The opportunity to elaborate on the
> initial ideas in the article is greatly welcome. Hopefully some of
> those who read the article *and* the comments will be motivated to
> become more self-responsible and self-orderly, the earliest start
> towards that far better and eventually optimal society that most
> people seek.
>
> BTW I noted your comment on 4/2 to another article, the last portion
> of yours:
> "There is no solution to the problem [of distortion of words by
> politicians] as long as there are simple minded people and politicians
> who want to exploit them. I don't see the balance of rational to
> emotional thinkers changing anytime in the foreseeable future."
> [addition mine]
> Your entire reply was well worded, though cynical. Possibly now, after
> reading my article and this exchange between us, you will rethink what
> you wrote and see that there is a solution. Not one that will
> immediately bring results, but is capable of bringing about meaningful
> ones for the entire goal of the optimal society.
>
> Lastly, I will be making this entire response of mine here at OEN into
> a reply to the thread at MoreLife Yahoo that announced my article
> publication. That is where continued dialog can take place on this
> article and/or branch off onto the SMN theory and implications.
>
> **Kitty
>
> MoreLife for the rational - http://morelife.org
> Reality based tools for more life in quantity and quality
> Self-Sovereign Individual Project - http://selfsip.org
> Self-sovereignty, rational pursuit of optimal lifetime happiness,
> individual responsibility, social preferencing & social contracting

-roy