cyberpunk lunch

what tahoma and i mostly talked about yesterday was related to a video on a truly free society: for the first ten minutes i thought "this guy is SO right" and then switched off as he began describing how little he understands of human psychology. you cannot remove violence from people. but even if he's totally wrong in that respect, the state and statehood is and isn't everything he says it is and isn't.

1. right now, we make laws that define a "normality" that is completely off the mark for most people. criminality and insanity are defined in opposition to normality, so debate on the topic is limited to irrationality.

2. our education is both cause and feature of the current system. its industrialized nature ensures societal norms, and it is a major factor in the primary drive of our civilization being to work ourselves to death in order to consume things we don't need. i didn't make this up.

3. we have the technology that we need to self-govern, but we're terrified of choice so we put power in the hands of people who are stupid enough to believe that they can do a good job of it. an hierarchical power structure requires bureaucracy, which forms its own unrelated power structures that piggy-back on the others...

4. pharmaceutical and insurance companies interfere with free market forces in the medical industry: medical care should not be as expensive as it is. also, in the near future machines will be able to perform most of the important tasks and that means that costs should be driven down.

5. social security? the stupidest system ever invented. taking from the present working generation to support the previous is inspired in its reinforcement of my second point

6. no risk, no reward. that's an over-simplified expression that neatly covers all that's bad about letting a bunch of arrogant, conniving monkeys decide what risks we should and should't take.

this is not the first time i've said it: i'm an free-market anarchist and i believe that as cruel as our cyberpunk future would be it would also be entirely fair and far more sustainable for the species.

the strongest point is that we, as subjects to our current systems, cannot imagine solutions to all of the problems posed by a transition (we don't solve them now anyway) to a free civilization, but that's because we would need to break out of our cage in order to develop the tools and techniques that a new paradigm would demand.

the transition itself would be traumatizing, destructive and painful. but necessary for our survival. tahoma's question to me: would i personally want people close to me (or myself) to die in order to make that transition a reality?

of course not. but this is far more important than what i want personally.