Great introduction, hadn't heard of Voluntaryism (from your anarchy link) until today. After reading Ayn Rand, I too like these concepts but wonder if they could ever be a reality.
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Great introduction, hadn't heard of Voluntaryism (from your anarchy link) until today. After reading Ayn Rand, I too like these concepts but wonder if they could ever be a reality.
Thanks @discombobulated. Yeah, you can probably guess I've read a few Ayn Rand's books (Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem). I recently enjoyed some great interviews and presentations with Yaron Brook (check YouTube), head of the Ayn Rand foundation. I was recently at the Porcupine Freedom festival where they had daily presentations on Objectivism. Really interesting stuff.
As for whether or not it could be a reality, I'd argue 90%-95% of all our daily interactions are voluntary. No coercion is involved to tell you where to live, who to marry, what to eat, what car to drive, where to shop, etc, etc. Humans high enough up on Maslow's Hierarchy of needs seek self-actualization. As automation moves forward, my optimistic hope is we'll become so prosperous as a species that more and more people will move up that hierarchy and work towards win/win interactions. Game theory in nature shows tit for tat everywhere as being the most advantageous stable strategy. Someday in the future, I think we'll laugh at how silly the time of governments were.
I'd never heard of tit for tat, and it sounds interesting. My only knowledge of game theory comes from trying to wrap my head around the attempts being made at finding optimal poker strategy. I like the concept that cooperation can be the most successful strategy when it is a shared strategy. Though one thing stuck out at me when I was reading about tit for tat just now. The word "opponent" kept cropping up. That's a very specific social relationship; one which I would not want to consider the foundation of any ideal society. But I found your use of the phrase "game theory in nature" very interesting. I think you might enjoy the book "Mutual Aid," by Kropotkin. He is my favorite anarchist writer, and his studies in biology found that cooperation had evolutionary advantages.
I haven't yet read any Kropotkin, but I plan to. Thanks for the recommendation. Game theorists use competitive language, but that doesn't mean it can't be mutually beneficial in a cooperative sense. I recently read the Selfish Gene, and it's interesting to me how much evolutionary stable strategies involve cooperation and tit for tat game theory. In many ways, tit for tat (as far as I understand it) is similar to the NAP. It's not pacifism, but it also won't initiate negatively. It rewards cooperation.
“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.” —Edward Abbey
voluntaryism will set us free! cheers @discombobulated