Thought that, instead of my normal rant on current events, I’d go and post a little bit about some first principles. This is by way of explaining why my friend Maureen calls my politics “weird.” Usually, a preface like that leads to some moral calculation of why this system is good and that system is evil, but I’m going to abstract a little further than that; I want to explain how I believe groups of human beings work. In fact, I think the central flaw in libertarianism (the philosophy I ascribe to) is its difficulty in accounting for group action. The best way I think I can describe this is in a little list of axioms:
- Axiom 1: All self-organized groups of human beings are fundamentally identical in nature. (i.e. The Post Office, The U.N., Microsoft, The Local School Board, the SEIU, the Catholic Church, all have a set of common characteristics and behaviors just by being a group of people acting collectively. The reason for the organization, and the context of the organization, make no difference.)
- Axiom 2: Morality is a characteristic of individual human beings, not groups. All self-organized groups are amoral and behave without regard to the moral context of the culture they reside in.
- Axiom 3: Any self-organized group will act to preserve its existence with any and all tools available to it.
- Axiom 4: Any self-organized group will act to increase its status, power, money and influence with any and all tools available to it. (Non-profits and NGOs are as hungry for money as your average evil multinational corporation. Governments even more so.)
- Axiom 5: No self-organized group will willingly act to cede any of its status, power, money and influence. (Note: Admitting error is ceding status and influence.)
- Axiom 6: Axioms 3, 4 & 5 all apply to sufficiently powerful members of the organization.
- Axiom 7: These axioms generally override any other laws, principles, codes of conduct, or written charters both internal and external to the organization except in those cases where failure to follow those laws, principles, codes of conduct, or written charters would inevitably lead to a loss of status, power, money and influence. (i.e. don’t get caught.)
4 Comments
Geoffrey A. Landis · October 17, 2009 at 9:00 pm
To the extent that your politics are “weird,” I find them interesting.
It’s the cookie-cutter conservative bloggers– and their identical twins, the cookie-cutter liberal bloggers– that I find most irritating. Followed by the ones that are intellectually-inconsistent (although these are usually the same people).
With that said, however, I have to say that I find your axioms a bit dubious. (Although they’re interesting in that they don’t follow the usual line of libertarian thinking.) It’s usually a mistake to try to derive vast results from first principles in human behavior, despite the fact that economists seem to succeed at it. As a counterexample, would you consider the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (aka, the “Shakers”) to be an organization? They certainly did poorly with axiom 3 (and most of the others, for that matter).
S Andrew Swann · October 18, 2009 at 3:07 pm
There’s a point there, and I think it is related to the size of a group of people, and how powerful particular individuals are within it. People do have this pesky free will thing that always tends to muck up mechanistic social models. To use a physical analog you can take my little list of rules as the general relativity equivalent that starts breaking down at the quantum level with small groups of people. the above probably doesn’t reflect the dynamics of a family, an amateur theater group, or the hamsters. There, I think the reality is more in line with the thoughts of traditional libertarians like Murry Rothbard. The problem is that Libertarian philosophy scales up horribly, and social collectivists philosophies scale down horribly. The US constitutional model of a constrained central government with descrete enumerated powers is the best compromise I’ve heard of, but even there I think the US has gotten too large for the government to be effectively constrained.
Geoffrey A. Landis · October 19, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Interestingly, the scaling argument was at the heart of Haldane’s 1928 essay, “On Being the Right Size,” still a classic. (Haldane, however, argues that collectivist philosophies do not scale well to large sizes.)
Let me rewrite your axioms to a version that I think makes more logical sense:
Organizations, like organisms, are subject to Darwinian selection. Those which are organized in such a way as to act to preserve their existence tend to survive more tenaciously than those which have other modes of action, and hence those with which use any and all tools available to ensure their survival will, over the course of time, tend to predominate.
Corollary 1: Since morality puts constraints on action, those groups which act without regard to the moral context of the culture they reside in will tend to out-compete those which act within the limits set by morality.
Correlary 2: Those groups which are organized in such a way as to act to increase their status, power, money and influence, using any and all tools available, will tend to have more status, power, money and influence. Therefore, over the course of time, the organizations wielding the most status, power, money, and influence will tend to be those which act to accumulate these without regard to morality.
Correlary 3: over time, those organizations which allow other laws, principles, codes of conduct, or written charters both internal and external to the organization to override the principles of self-perpetuation will be weeded out by organizations which find ways to circumvent these constraints. Those which allow laws etc. to override their goals of accumulation of power, money, etc., will become less powerful than organizations which do not.
Observation 2: these principles apply to individuals within organizations.
…note that in this version, the Shaker organization (which now has three surviving members) fits into the model quite well.
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