I was a regulator and had to restrain people from coming up with a new rule every time something went wrong. I found that Montaigne was onto this in the 1500s:
"We can see how wrong that fellow was: in France we have more laws than all the rest of the world put together – more than would be required to make rules for all those worlds of Epicurus; [C] ‘ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus laboramus’ [we were once distressed by crimes: now, by laws].8 [B] And, even then, we have left so much to the discretion and opinion of our judges that never was there liberty so licentious and powerful. What have our legislators gained by isolating a hundred thousand categories and specific circumstances, and then making a hundred thousand laws apply to them? That number bears no relationship to the infinite variations in the things which humans do. The multiplicity of our human inventions will never attain to the diversity of our cases. Add a hundred times more: but never will it happen that even one of all the many thousands of cases which you have already isolated and codified will ever meet one future case to which it can be matched and compared so exactly that some detail or some other specific item does not require a specific judgement. There is hardly any relation between our actions (which are perpetually changing) and fixed unchanging laws.
The most desirable laws are those which are fewest, simplest and most general."[1]
Some rules (lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants) can cover most wrongdoing simply: do not act dishonestly; act with integrity; act in the best interests of your client/patient/student etc.
As for humans being good... history rather undermines that (as does the present). I would generally be with John Gray (political philosopher) and his view of humanity.
I find this argument very compelling but still hold faith that, as said below, what’s keeping that guys around is lack of imagination. I’m tempted to understand what causes and motivates that guys, and imagine a utopian future where they no longer crop up. But maybe another day, I got errands to do today.
I do think there are some things we can do for motivation: for example we know that harsh laws in Singapore prevent litter, improved economies prevent crimes of poverty, etc. But those are also systems that we have put in place to deal with that guy. Also: people still do chaotic things: perhaps because they just are lazy and don't want to dig their tentpole up or cleanup after themselves in the bathroom, or are mentally ill to the point of acting dangerously.
The final quoted passage was a puzzle to me, because it's so backwards from how I approach the world, but I think I've found an inroad:
Aside from the lack of imagination about how we can organize things without government (ie, we would still take the trash out and coordinate the distribution of goods and services even if we weren't compelled to by threat of prison and homelessness), the main contradiction that stood out to me was the assertion that if we lived in a world without military or police, there would be nothing to stop a person from amassing a private army or taking control of nuclear weapons.
But in fact, the absence of police or military would prevent this build up of aggressive force. It would prevent it the same way fires are prevented from spreading by removing brush and maintaining a line — basically thru starvation.
How would we achieve a world without militaries in the first place? It's absurd to simply ctrl alt delete, to pluck one element out of existing society and leave everything else the same. Of course that would never happen. Alternatively, you could assume police and militaries never developed in the first place. But then where would someone get the idea of amassing a private army? More importantly, who would go along with such an idea?
If we accept the possibility of a world without police or militaries, it seems these concerns about bad actors having an enormously outsized impact on their communities answer themselves. They just wouldn't. The real challenge is whether it's possible to achieve such a world. Concerns about recreating our current systems are valid to an extent, but more often than not seem to be the inability to really accept the idea that things could actually be any different.
Right, but this is where our paths diverge. Because even if we have a society that completely eradicated the military, that society would just be taken over by another society that didn't. Bad actors do exist. That guy does exist. That guy has taken over peaceful countries again and again. Your perspective seems to be that existence of militaries are what corrupts people to want to take over countries, even though it's just power hungry people who would figure out a way to create a military or weapons even if they didn't have them. "Taking something by force" isn't an idea founded by militaries. It's always existed.
As to your argument that "we would still take out the trash even if we weren't compelled by thread of prison and homelessness"— we don't. People don't pick up after themselves at Burning Man. In Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman talks about what happened every time trash workers went on strike: trash piled up in the streets. We didn't used to have garbage men or sanitation and poop literally ran down the middle of the street and caused the plague. That doesn't mean prison is what stops it—infrastructure does. Various organizational systems.
Great thoughts, as always! I'm wondering about the no rules libertarian inserted into the piece. I'm assuming that refers to the '25th libertarian,' who claims that having no rules is the 'libertarian ideal,' and then goes on to prove it's not practical at scale. Or, God forbid, perhaps I'm the 25th libertarian! One of the rear few who think that natural law and a principle of not aggressing against others could actually be far more practical at scale than anything we have seen to date. But, I do get your point entirely and must apologize for my snarky sensitivity.
I don't think no rules is the libertarian ideal, but maybe less rules?? 😆 But I'd love to know how we get everyone to be nonaggressive to one another at scale. If you write about it please send it my way!
Elle, you brought up a lot with your question. I lean towards wanting fewer rules as a libertarian, but would be happy with fair treatment under the law. I've been reading about Russia between 1914-1924, a time full of big changes and chaos. Interestingly, both under the Tsar and under Marxism, people were judged and treated based on their connections and their group identity. It lead to much abuse, much violence, and much aggression. It's a reminder that when society is okay with inequality, thinking it'll lead to a better future for everyone, it usually ends up with dictators and a lot of institutionalized violence and death. So, aiming for a society that respects everyone's rights to live and be free isn't the worst idea.
How to make everyone be nonaggressive at scale?
Heck, if I know. But maybe let them be—so they can live free and prosper, achieving something that waring would threaten. Perhaps courts that would defend the rights of people to live unmolested by others, including by the government.
Back to rules: I would hope that everyone can agree that there are good rules and bad rules. However, the issue arises when I perceive a rule as good, and my neighbor perceives it as bad. That's why I don't write non-fiction. I'll stick to thrillers, where I can weave in my thoughts on how the world turns. And since you asked 'If you write about it please send it my way! I'll send you a copy of my third novel, 'The Seventh Pawn.' (available for Kindle pre-order and will be released in three weeks.)
I'm with you in "aiming for a society that respects everyone's rights to live and be free." And if we can figure out a way to do that with less rules, I'm all for it. I'm also with you that it's probably easier to dream up such a thing in fiction! I'm not a big thriller person, but I'd be open to various chapters you think might be interesting?
I enjoyed it a lot. A very intelligent commentary that's charmingly written. You'd be interested in "The Parable of the Tribes," a book from a few decades ago that got some big prize for countering the notion that it always takes two to tango in a new agey idea of mutual responsibility: "Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one choose peace? From this basic premise, Andrew Bard Schmookler has built a towering work of intellectual and spiritual insight, a book that will shatter many preconceived notions about how civilization has developed and why human history has been so filled with torment."
When it comes to bad behavior by multinational corporations, I don't think we are talking about "edge" cases anymore. I think environmental pollution or tax fraud are easily normalized if the right incentives are in place. But sometimes it is just one guy. Thanks to Richard Reid in 2006, we all have to take off our shoes before boarding a flight.
I wonder when corporations (or states for that matter) became a living entity. An accepted shield against personal responsibility? I'm guessing a lot of very bad people would have been jailed (or worse) if not for the convenience of separation from liability.
As for corporations = people, that was late 19th-c, I believe. Not at all in the Constitution. Railroad companies wanted equal protection across state lines. But it was only recently that the Supreme Court gave them the right to political speech (1st A).
Yes, that's true. But multinational corporations are run by people who sometimes do careless and selfish and chaotic things. So it makes sense they would behave that way too!
I'd say that's why we can't have capitalism at all if we want to live peacefully. There's no way to regulate a system of infinite growth. It's true that corporations and governments act in ways individuals can't be held responsible for. That's why I think our job is to keep systems of power as miniscule as possible. The smaller the chances of accumulating power, the less opportunity for bad actors to have an outsized impact on their community.
Corporations and other collective entities like governments and unions are inherently amoral. Unlike humans they haven't been evolved to be social beings and don't care what anyone thinks. Corporations have fiscal success as their reason for being.
Governments can align themselves with social and even ethical goals, although eventually any system's drive for survival governs their behavior.
Maybe we need people who do wrong to be accountable personally. I appears that Elle's "That Guy" is getting away with it through a legal slight of hand.
I was a regulator and had to restrain people from coming up with a new rule every time something went wrong. I found that Montaigne was onto this in the 1500s:
"We can see how wrong that fellow was: in France we have more laws than all the rest of the world put together – more than would be required to make rules for all those worlds of Epicurus; [C] ‘ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus laboramus’ [we were once distressed by crimes: now, by laws].8 [B] And, even then, we have left so much to the discretion and opinion of our judges that never was there liberty so licentious and powerful. What have our legislators gained by isolating a hundred thousand categories and specific circumstances, and then making a hundred thousand laws apply to them? That number bears no relationship to the infinite variations in the things which humans do. The multiplicity of our human inventions will never attain to the diversity of our cases. Add a hundred times more: but never will it happen that even one of all the many thousands of cases which you have already isolated and codified will ever meet one future case to which it can be matched and compared so exactly that some detail or some other specific item does not require a specific judgement. There is hardly any relation between our actions (which are perpetually changing) and fixed unchanging laws.
The most desirable laws are those which are fewest, simplest and most general."[1]
Some rules (lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants) can cover most wrongdoing simply: do not act dishonestly; act with integrity; act in the best interests of your client/patient/student etc.
As for humans being good... history rather undermines that (as does the present). I would generally be with John Gray (political philosopher) and his view of humanity.
[1] Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays (p. 1208). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
I find this argument very compelling but still hold faith that, as said below, what’s keeping that guys around is lack of imagination. I’m tempted to understand what causes and motivates that guys, and imagine a utopian future where they no longer crop up. But maybe another day, I got errands to do today.
I do think there are some things we can do for motivation: for example we know that harsh laws in Singapore prevent litter, improved economies prevent crimes of poverty, etc. But those are also systems that we have put in place to deal with that guy. Also: people still do chaotic things: perhaps because they just are lazy and don't want to dig their tentpole up or cleanup after themselves in the bathroom, or are mentally ill to the point of acting dangerously.
The final quoted passage was a puzzle to me, because it's so backwards from how I approach the world, but I think I've found an inroad:
Aside from the lack of imagination about how we can organize things without government (ie, we would still take the trash out and coordinate the distribution of goods and services even if we weren't compelled to by threat of prison and homelessness), the main contradiction that stood out to me was the assertion that if we lived in a world without military or police, there would be nothing to stop a person from amassing a private army or taking control of nuclear weapons.
But in fact, the absence of police or military would prevent this build up of aggressive force. It would prevent it the same way fires are prevented from spreading by removing brush and maintaining a line — basically thru starvation.
How would we achieve a world without militaries in the first place? It's absurd to simply ctrl alt delete, to pluck one element out of existing society and leave everything else the same. Of course that would never happen. Alternatively, you could assume police and militaries never developed in the first place. But then where would someone get the idea of amassing a private army? More importantly, who would go along with such an idea?
If we accept the possibility of a world without police or militaries, it seems these concerns about bad actors having an enormously outsized impact on their communities answer themselves. They just wouldn't. The real challenge is whether it's possible to achieve such a world. Concerns about recreating our current systems are valid to an extent, but more often than not seem to be the inability to really accept the idea that things could actually be any different.
Right, but this is where our paths diverge. Because even if we have a society that completely eradicated the military, that society would just be taken over by another society that didn't. Bad actors do exist. That guy does exist. That guy has taken over peaceful countries again and again. Your perspective seems to be that existence of militaries are what corrupts people to want to take over countries, even though it's just power hungry people who would figure out a way to create a military or weapons even if they didn't have them. "Taking something by force" isn't an idea founded by militaries. It's always existed.
As to your argument that "we would still take out the trash even if we weren't compelled by thread of prison and homelessness"— we don't. People don't pick up after themselves at Burning Man. In Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman talks about what happened every time trash workers went on strike: trash piled up in the streets. We didn't used to have garbage men or sanitation and poop literally ran down the middle of the street and caused the plague. That doesn't mean prison is what stops it—infrastructure does. Various organizational systems.
Two words: mob justice.
Great thoughts, as always! I'm wondering about the no rules libertarian inserted into the piece. I'm assuming that refers to the '25th libertarian,' who claims that having no rules is the 'libertarian ideal,' and then goes on to prove it's not practical at scale. Or, God forbid, perhaps I'm the 25th libertarian! One of the rear few who think that natural law and a principle of not aggressing against others could actually be far more practical at scale than anything we have seen to date. But, I do get your point entirely and must apologize for my snarky sensitivity.
I don't think no rules is the libertarian ideal, but maybe less rules?? 😆 But I'd love to know how we get everyone to be nonaggressive to one another at scale. If you write about it please send it my way!
Elle, you brought up a lot with your question. I lean towards wanting fewer rules as a libertarian, but would be happy with fair treatment under the law. I've been reading about Russia between 1914-1924, a time full of big changes and chaos. Interestingly, both under the Tsar and under Marxism, people were judged and treated based on their connections and their group identity. It lead to much abuse, much violence, and much aggression. It's a reminder that when society is okay with inequality, thinking it'll lead to a better future for everyone, it usually ends up with dictators and a lot of institutionalized violence and death. So, aiming for a society that respects everyone's rights to live and be free isn't the worst idea.
How to make everyone be nonaggressive at scale?
Heck, if I know. But maybe let them be—so they can live free and prosper, achieving something that waring would threaten. Perhaps courts that would defend the rights of people to live unmolested by others, including by the government.
Back to rules: I would hope that everyone can agree that there are good rules and bad rules. However, the issue arises when I perceive a rule as good, and my neighbor perceives it as bad. That's why I don't write non-fiction. I'll stick to thrillers, where I can weave in my thoughts on how the world turns. And since you asked 'If you write about it please send it my way! I'll send you a copy of my third novel, 'The Seventh Pawn.' (available for Kindle pre-order and will be released in three weeks.)
Be blessed and keep up the superlative work
I'm with you in "aiming for a society that respects everyone's rights to live and be free." And if we can figure out a way to do that with less rules, I'm all for it. I'm also with you that it's probably easier to dream up such a thing in fiction! I'm not a big thriller person, but I'd be open to various chapters you think might be interesting?
I enjoyed it a lot. A very intelligent commentary that's charmingly written. You'd be interested in "The Parable of the Tribes," a book from a few decades ago that got some big prize for countering the notion that it always takes two to tango in a new agey idea of mutual responsibility: "Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one choose peace? From this basic premise, Andrew Bard Schmookler has built a towering work of intellectual and spiritual insight, a book that will shatter many preconceived notions about how civilization has developed and why human history has been so filled with torment."
Thank you for the rec! And I love that quote. "But what if all but one choose peace?" is a central question in a lot of our work I think!
I understand the need for rules, but this?
"don’t hold your breath underwater"
SMH, ok, yeah, don't hold your breath SO LONG that you pass out & your body's natural instinct to breathe kicks in and you DROWN, but STILL!
It constantly amazes me how dumb some folks are that they need to be told this sort of common sense thing.
But then again, common sense is anything but common these days.
Hence why it was part of a standup comedy routine 😆
When it comes to bad behavior by multinational corporations, I don't think we are talking about "edge" cases anymore. I think environmental pollution or tax fraud are easily normalized if the right incentives are in place. But sometimes it is just one guy. Thanks to Richard Reid in 2006, we all have to take off our shoes before boarding a flight.
I wonder when corporations (or states for that matter) became a living entity. An accepted shield against personal responsibility? I'm guessing a lot of very bad people would have been jailed (or worse) if not for the convenience of separation from liability.
So true. A low-hanging fruit would be to strike down those laws establishing the "personhood" of corporations.
As for corporations = people, that was late 19th-c, I believe. Not at all in the Constitution. Railroad companies wanted equal protection across state lines. But it was only recently that the Supreme Court gave them the right to political speech (1st A).
Yes, that's true. But multinational corporations are run by people who sometimes do careless and selfish and chaotic things. So it makes sense they would behave that way too!
I'd say that's why we can't have capitalism at all if we want to live peacefully. There's no way to regulate a system of infinite growth. It's true that corporations and governments act in ways individuals can't be held responsible for. That's why I think our job is to keep systems of power as miniscule as possible. The smaller the chances of accumulating power, the less opportunity for bad actors to have an outsized impact on their community.
Corporations and other collective entities like governments and unions are inherently amoral. Unlike humans they haven't been evolved to be social beings and don't care what anyone thinks. Corporations have fiscal success as their reason for being.
Governments can align themselves with social and even ethical goals, although eventually any system's drive for survival governs their behavior.
Maybe we need people who do wrong to be accountable personally. I appears that Elle's "That Guy" is getting away with it through a legal slight of hand.