Sur La Politique

Thoughts on politics. Also religion and economics.

• I had an epiphany, in the shower, the location of so many of my epiphanies. I realized that secular individualism leads, like one gear turning another, to collectivism.
  
  I shall explain. The simplest form of individualism is that of someone like Ayn Rand (or any other sociopath ignoramus, really): pure self-interest. You can find her puzzlewit personality cult saying, for instance, that an industrialist has the right to clear-cut a forest, regardless of any negative effects this will have.
  
  Of course, try this, and you'll quickly realize the flaw. Namely, if you pursue your own good completely without reference to the goods of others, as for instance gathering natural resources without reference to whether others also have need of them, nobody can buy from you. It's the same reason as why there's no predator so efficient as to wipe out all its prey populations: such a species would go extinct. After a while you replace Rand's simpleminded individualism with the intelligent kind, the "enlightened self-interest" of Adam Smith.
  
  Even that, however, isn't much of an improvement. Rational analysis of one's own self-interest, since one is a part of an intricate web of relationships, will quickly lead to selecting, as the only safe method, each individual coordinating his needs with those of his neighbors. This will allow each one to maximize his own gains while minimizing the losses to his fellows, and therefore maximizing his gains from them. It will probably be through custom rather than positive law, but it will have the effect of erecting a shame/honor society, in which all relations may be thought of as a Nash equilibrium.
  
  If you disagree, kindly offer an alternate explanation for this facet of Navajo, Hopi, Chinese, Korean, Sub-Saharan African, and Hindu life. Those first four explicitly say this is how their customs developed as they have.


• Of course, it is possible to have "enlightened self-interest" without turning into a shame/honor society. Unfortunately, you need what Rand would call a "mystical" theory to do it with. The only societies, after all, which managed to avoid basing all of law on shame and honor, and all human relations on Nash equilibria, are those which base a large portion of their customs and laws on Christianity or Buddhism.
  
  Basically, having a principle of transcendental benevolence—that one must do good for others even if it does not advance one's own interests—frees each individual to pursue his own interests. Essentially, both those systems, having the mystical doctrines of caritas or karuna, free their adherents from guarding against others' incursions on their interests—and yet allow them far more leeway to pursue their interests.
  
  Or in other words, seek ye first the kingdom and all these things shall be added unto you; neither held by anything, nor bound, all there is is the living of your own life.


• Mention of the Buddha-killing teaching of Rinzai Zen (that's what the second half of that last line is, the first half is Matthew 6:33) reminds me, did you know there's actually some Transhuman religious outreach groups? One of them involves the phrase "Cyborg Buddha".
  
  Yeah, I'm pretty sure I know Zen's take on their little movement:

  Those who have attained the HPLD are no better than hired field hands; those who have outlived the break-even point are prisoners shackled and bound; artilects and jupiter-brains are so much filth in the latrine; the Kurzweil Singularity and the Omega Point are hitching posts for donkeys.

  If there's a more quotable Zen thinker than Rinzai Gigen, I'd love to know who it is.


• I mentioned it before, but I've also always liked the Navajo take on why immortality is simply not desirable. The thin blue creature, Old Man Death, when confronted by the Hero Twins (who'd already wiped out the Hostile Gods, and were considering wiping out the other ills that plagued the people), said this:

  Kill me if you must, my grandchildren, I'm certain that you know best. But know that if you do, then people will no longer stop moving and return after four days to the previous world, and there will be no reason to birth children, and nothing but worthless old men and useless old women getting older and older forever and ever.

  Posthumanism bił doo yá'át'éeh da, I guess.
  
  For those playing along at home the others of the Four Last Ills, at least in the version I learned, were the Lice People, Old Lady Chills, and the Obsolescence People.


• I'm reminded, speaking of Native American politics, of the controversy over snowmaking on the San Francisco Peaks. The explanation offered by the Hopi (whose pantheon dwells there), for their opposition, was that the snowmaking used reclaimed water and therefore was a defilement. Unfortunately, that was not the real reason, or at least not the chief one. But the Hopi, for some reason (possibly because their religion is extremely esoteric) didn't mention their real, or at least main, objection.
  
  See, the Kachinas are primarily weather-gods; when the Snake Clan does the Rain Dances they send the rain—or not, if it's not fitting. Something people don't seem to get is that a rain-dance isn't magic, the gods don't just hop to when you do the dance right. It's a prayer, and the gods will send the rain if it's appropriate/fitting/harmonious/rightly-ordered—the literal translations of the word "Hopi"—to do so.
  
  Now, the Hopi have a strong objection to anything outside of its proper season or place; it's called "kahopi", not fitting. Artificially creating snow would be one of those kahopi contrivances. And to then heap that disharmonious, unfitting snow on the very abode of the gods, well... How do you think a Haredi rabbinical group would feel if you asked them to host a combination Mein Kampf reading/Missouri barbecue cookoff in a synagogue? Only the Peaks are more like the very Temple Mount, quite literally, not merely a synagogue.
  
  I can't help but think that if the Hopi had emphasized that—"If it's all the same to you, can we not offer a personal insult to our gods?"—the snowmaking would never have been okayed.