Thanks for your comment, Mike.
Each of us has a different idea of what living well means, and that's good. I'm a fan of cultivating virtue. Art and music are nice. I don't care to want people to emulate me (this is my life, yours is yours) and being pleasant is not my top priority either because it's overrated.
However, I demand to live life on my own terms. That's non-negotiable for me. Being genuine and real is very important to me.
A lot of people in this world lack for basic material and emotional needs. Virtue, art, music and pleasantries are the stuff of make-believe for them and states are a primary obstacle to resolving this problem.
If they didn't lack so much, many of them would be busy building things that would benefit me. That's the nature of a market economy. Inventor Y invents a machine to do X that costs $50 retail whereas he invested billions in creating it. I get his billions and years of work for just $50. How spectacular. And then the next guy builds on that.
The nation-state stands in the way of this kind of progress and we are all impacted negatively by it.
The only power any of us really has is decidedly local
Tell that to Elon Musk, Tony Robbins, Barack Obama, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Al Qaeda, etc etc etc.
In the future, intelligence and technology will enable savvy individuals to become hyper-empowered with influence far, far beyond any head of state of today. It's already happening with Musk, the Google founders, Zuckerberg, Satoshi Nakamoto and many others, both for good and ill.
Did any of these guys hold block parties or organize a litter pickup in the park before they started inventing? How ridiculous.
The very nature of capitalism is that it enables rapid change across an unlimited landscape, when people want it. To deny this is to deny capitalism itself. And I know you're not doing that.
This statement is indicative of a fixed-state mindset. Growth is possible, unimaginable growth - unless of course you deny it and put your head down.
To say that trying to transform the world is folly is actually self-contradictory of you. You implicitly want to change the world, you just want to do it by putting your head down and focusing on the details closest to you. If that works for you, fine. Best wishes.
I'm a big-picture thinker. I'm pretty sure you're not. That's not a slight. We just have different personalities.
I add value by focusing on the big picture. To call that folly is to denigrate my main avenue for being useful. I think you're out of place with that and not just because it's easily proven to be factually wrong.
There is a story about how when they were building the space shuttle, they had to take into consideration the road it would be transported on from the western US to Florida. At one point, the road narrows to a mountain tunnel that is an old mule trail. There's a joke about the trip to space being limited by the width of a horse's ass.
But the point I'm making is that you have to look ahead to where you want to be, to your destination, in order to plan the right strategy for getting there. Had the shuttle engineers not done that, they would have made the shuttle too wide and years of work would have been wasted.
That's what I do. I look ahead. I make plans for how to get where libertarian anarchists (voluntaryists, ancaps, agorists, market anarchists, etc) want to go.
If you want to go there, I invite you to set aside your doubts and join the conversation about how to make it happen.
I was not denigrating a big picture view in any way, shape, or form. I had thought I was agreeing with you, but possibly not. I had understood you to be saying that we--all of us--need to be better people in order for larger, systemic changes to succeed. The point about the Soviet Bloc collapsing only to be replaced by another state, and so forth. What have the accomplishments of Elon Musk, and Facebook, and Google done to make the world a freer place? Arguably no more than they have done to help the state corral, surveil, divide, and distract us. You yourself seem to implicitly recognize this in your original post when you say: "that voluntary sphere is rapidly losing ground to the aggressive sphere," and more explicitly in your article about community, where you recommend limiting yourself from exposure to social media and Internet activities that disconnect us from those around us.
Technology and the innovations of the market can be great, or they can be terrible. But they have no agency of their own. They're just tools, and so they depend on the wisdom and justice of those who wield them. It's like how the Constitution was once marginally effective in restraining people who believed in it and took it seriously, but utterly impotent against those who saw no moral or ethical obstacles to their designs. This is why I say it's folly to try to change the world -- not because it's impossible per se, but because we have not done the prerequisite groundwork that are required for it to be a positive change. We all want to avoid some upheaval that replaces one tyranny with another.
Take your example of Jesus Christ. He certainly changed the world, but the only acts on Earth He performed involved the people in his immediate proximity. It took centuries for the faith He inspired to spread throughout Europe, much less the rest of the planet. And if even the Son of God, who certainly had the power to do so, eschewed massive and relatively quick society change in favor of local action, I think there's a good lesson in it for all of us.
Hehe, it's funny, I wasn't sure what position you were taking exactly. But when you said that trying to change the world was folly, I thought you were arguing against the main premise of my argument. I think I understand you better now.
In order for us to be able to make the changes, yes, definitely.
That's an interesting question but I mentioned them only to rebut your claim that "the only power any of us really has is decidedly local." If those individuals, and others, can have a global impact, so can we.
But those acts reshaped the Roman Empire and indeed the world after his death. That's his influence, no matter when it happened.
We live in a very different world now, thanks to technology. We can change the world very quickly now and with less work than before.