Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

Statists will argue that individuals on a free market aren't really free to choose, because they are constrained by reality and society. Then they propose Government as the solution. But Government isn't above reality, and neither is it above society. Its choices are just as constrained. All Statists actually argue is that they support the arbitrary use of force by rulers to coerce citizens into doing their bidding.

Arguing that the current average experience and proficiency of programmers is pretty low, and that programming malpractice incurs huge costs including the risk of occasional death of end-users, MIT Professor and Scheme co-inventor Gerald J. Sussman has proposed at ILC'2009 and on several other occasions [Update: as a joke] that programmers should be certified before their are allowed to practice. I heartily agree, but for the small prevention that follows.

En réponse à ceux qui me demandent comment telle ou telle autre catégorie de bénéficiaires de la charité publique (dont ils font généralement partie) feraient sans l'État, je réponds: croyez-vous vraiment que les hommes politiques se soucient le moins du monde de votre sort? Sont-ils la source d'où jaillit toute cette charité que l'État déverse sur la société? Ou au contraire, la source de cette charité se trouve-t-elle dans la générosité du peuple lui-même, les hommes de l'État n'étant que des intermédiaires? Pire, ces intermédiaires ne seraient-ils pas dispendieux, corrompus et corrupteurs, se servant allègrement au passage, et monopolisant par la force toute voie pour l'expression de cette générosité humaine? En prenant aux uns de force pour donner aux autres sous la forme de "droits" qui leurs seraient dûs, travaillent-ils à rapprocher les donateurs des bénéficiaires par la conscience et la jouissance d'un intérêt partagé, ou au contraire divisent-ils les uns et les autres en classes opposées aux intérêts contradictoires?

Vous pouvez croire effectivement que les hommes politiques sont la source de toute générosité. Mais alors, abandonnez toute illusion démocratique: ce que vous désirez, c'est la dictature, celle d'une aristocratie d'êtres autoproclamés supérieurs auxquels vous vous identifiez sans doute sur la masse du vil bas peuple, trompé et mené par le bout du nez "pour son propre bien".

Mais permettez-moi de douter de la supériorité de caractère de ces hommes politiques que vous désignez comme vos champions, et de vous trouver bien naïf de vous identifier à eux. Nous libéraux pensons que les hommes politiques se distinguent non par leur sens professé de l'intérêt public mais par la soif du pouvoir conjuguée à l'absence de tout scrupule. Et nous reconnaissons comme la source de toute générosité l'harmonie des intérêts et des sentiments parmi le peuple, quand elle n'est pas détruite par l'intervention liberticide et déresponsabilisante des hommes de l'État et autres bandits impunis.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
Le Mal ne consiste pas à comprendre le Bien et chercher son opposé (comportement psychopathique extrêmement rare voire inexistant). Le Mal ne consiste pas à avoir une notion imparfaite du Bien (de toute façon, personne n'a de notion parfaite du Bien). Le Mal consiste à user de la force pour imposer aux autres sa notion du Bien (qui est ipso facto corrompue par cette imposition). Ainsi, le Mal est l'essence même du pouvoir politique.

Nationalists, Socialists and other Statists always celebrate how military conquest, forceful union, violent revolutions, decolonization wars, and other glorious events have brought to the world the wonders of...

Lucky are the inhabitants of the Third World for having received such a blessing!

In his book Discover Your Inner Economist, Tyler Cowen notably explains why one should not give to beggars, by using an argument called rent exhaustion. I explained earlier why undiscriminating charity was indeed only fostering parasitism and vice (though I admit I've been so weak as to subsidize my local liquor store that way a few times since I wrote said article). My argument used the Law of Bitur-Camember, which indeed seems to be essentially equivalent to the argument of rent exhaustion as systematized and applied to any political rent. Unhappily, even amongst Economist (as opposed to mere econometrists), too many will not or dare not explicitly apply economic arguments to Politics itself. Tyler himself, though he doesn't seem to indulge too much in the fallacy of considering the State as above society, won't seem to openly come against it.

Great progress will be made when people cease to implicitly accept the Statist Myth of the State as some entity above society, beyond the laws of human behavior, capable of regulating from outside and violate, counter or alter the laws of human behavior to engineer people's lives according to whichever fantasies of the rulers. Many economists have worked to dispel this myth -- Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan being some of the first to explicitly apply the economic point of view to the systematic study of government. These days, while I like the blogs of many economists at GMU, including Tyler's, Don Boudreaux's blog stands out in its relentless effort to dispel the Statist Myth. But even they seem to do it without systematically conceptualizing it.

Now even many libertarians make the mistake of discussing various policies as if there really was a State above Society capable to turn arbitrary policies into new laws of human behavior at no cost. Actually, the policies that the State enacts are arbitrary neither in their causes nor in their consequences. On the one hand, they are the result of human actions that have great cost; on the other hand, they do not alter human nature, but only modify human behavior through violence and threats thereof.

Laws are only enacted but with powerful lobbies and ideologies behind them, that either are allowed to clash in an expensive war of all against all, or are given free reign as one hegemonic party imposes its one-sided will upon all. And the same parties that clash over each of their turfs always agree in their common cause against the public.

Then again, laws only affect those who get caught. It costs in violent law enforcement, enacted by bureaucrats empowered against the designated suspects. It costs in bureaucratic hurdles that people have to comply with to receive their subsidies and privileges.

Finally, the next best alternative that people find to openly acting as is officially prohibited is seldom to embrace the desires and tastes of the oppressor. People will do in private what they can't do in public. They will rather live in the dark rather than pay the tax on windows.

No one can decree a better mankind. Political power is no magic wand that can achieve that. Prohibiting the perceived symptoms of evil only spreads more evil and dulls out perception in a typical instance of the Law of Eristic Escalation.

In a fling of procrastination, and as a reaction to an online discussion, I translated to English my 2003 essay Le problème de la dette - Une solution libérale. The result is on my web site: The Problem of National Debt - a libertarian solution.

La révolution sera gagnée non pas, comme le suggéreraient les sanguinaires socialistes, lorsque le dernier homme politique aura été étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier idéologue officiel, mais bien plutôt, comme le savent les bonhommes libéraux, quand les tentatives sans cesse répétées d'asservir le peuple par diverses idéologies collectivistes seront accueillies par le rire et noyées dans le ridicule par des hommes libres aussi bien armés intellectuellement que physiquement.

When Patri mentionned the idea of religions and cults being memetic parasites, and the following discussion bore on the difference (if any) between religions and cults, and how a same religion could sometimes have both normal and fanatical followers, my answer (in the comments) was that often the same parasite could express itself in many different ways, depending on the hygiene of the victims.

I cited the example of tape worms, that cause a rather benign intestinal infection in people having decent hygiene standards, in a way that isn't contagious to other such people, but can cause brain damage and even death amongst people with low hygiene standards, in a way that is highly contagious to other such people and contagious to to cleaner people as well. The hygiene standards discussed here consist in systematically washing your hands after any risk of contamination, segregating your food from your feces, avoiding meat of dubious quality, properly cooking meat that isn't known to meet high standards of quality, avoiding contact with people with poor hygiene and cleansing thoroughly after such contact.

And I further argued that the very same applies in the case of those memetic parasites that religions are. I said that providing our children with proper standards of hygiene, mental as well as physical, was the most important part of parental education. It is of utmost importance that children be taught such mental hygiene rules as cleansing their minds after they've been potentially subjected to propaganda, segregating what they believe about reality from what they (and other people) fantasize, rejecting beliefs of dubious origin, thoroughly criticizing all beliefs but those that were grown using the highest standards of quality, being especially wary of people around you with low standards of hygiene.

I concluded: And be sure to teach that hygiene to your kids, early on. You can't change the rest of society, but if you can change the people who count most around you. And once enough people adopt good hygiene, and the people with bad hygiene are weeded out by their behavior (rather than being protected or subsidized by the state), the community's standards of hygiene will get higher and the parasite will disappear, except for small ostracized fringe communities.

Now, I like to say that I don't count the word god as sacred, so I don't think religions that use it are worse than religions that don't. People who believe that the word god is special will be relaxing their mental hygiene against religions that respectively do or don't use that word, depending on these people themselves respectively believing in god or not -- this is the reason why all religions, whether theistic, atheistic or neutral on this topic, tend to collaborate in spreading this superstition. This meta-superstition was interestingly discussed by Mencius Moldbug (MM) on his blog devoted to debunking this memetic parasite that is the (now) atheistic religion of progressives (and their conservative hysteresical followers) who view the State as the embodiment of societal progress.

Interestingly, applying evolutionary thinking to the study of religion doesn't stop to talking about it in terms of memes. Religions evolve. They compete with each other. And where there isn't an official monopolistic religion or ideology protected by the State, religions have to compete in a ruthless struggle over believers. This yields religions that strip themselves from useless or obvious superstitions, and focus on the essential vectors of infection and payback. While there is room for plenty of variants to accommodate plenty of niches, these religions loosely converge on what MM calls the Synopsis, a lean and mean kernel of beliefs that will justify State plunder in favor of those people and institutions who will further spread same beliefs in the State.

In one of my comments to that article (you may search for Faré), I note that the very nature of the Synopsis is that it conflates the true and the false [and as another commenter further quoted from Rand, Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true, it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.], and tries to minimize the false needed (which both makes it more fragile and makes its slaves less productive) while maximizing the return on investment of the false.

And indeed it is in freer western societies that the worst strains of statist thinking evolve into existence, out-competing other strains in their struggle for power. From there, these strains spread to less free countries, where the most efficient memes from western ideologies have massively deadly consequences on weaker populations unable to resist. Guns, germs and steel -- and ideologies. In the third world, political devices are largely imported, just like all other technological devices. That's why MM is on the spot when he claims that communist regimes as well as third world dictatorships are emanations of western progressive ideological activity.

Happily, rational criticism, this natural defense against lies and bullshit, as promoted by infection-resistant or cured individuals is not wholly absent from the relatively free environment where these strains evolve, and this helps limit the morbidity of these pathogens, at least in western societies. But rational criticism has a cost that not everyone can afford, and the pathogens have evolved in a way that even people above average in intelligence and education can completely fail to see the edges where the web of lies falls apart. And so it's mainly the competition for more productive slaves that keeps in check the destructive effects of the Statist memes. However, this competition happens mainly between different countries rather than inside any given country, and so the political oligopoly of our world works toward increasing the level of political parasitism.

In conclusion, the biggest and most dangerous religion is Statism. It has benign and malignant modes of transmission. The best thing you can do to limit its bad effects upon you is to cultivate good mental hygiene for yourself and those you love. To avoid social disruption by epidemics of a severe form of mental infection, you may seek to spread hygiene in the society around you; failing that, your only recourse is to migrate to a society with better general standards of hygiene.

University is a plot to prevent bright people from having kids.

Welfare is a plot to encourage stupid people to breed.

We know where the State stands with respect to eugenics.

When all lawful citizens are disarmed, will we have an omnipresent police state to protect us from armed criminals?

The True Communist: scandal! In Russia, due to Capitalism, 25% of the riches in the country are now in the hands of 36 families!

Me: Despite the KGB still being in power, what a great progress since the times when a one single man (Stalin) controlled 100% of the riches in the country!

The True Communist: surely you a liberal economist should know the difference between State property and private property?

I guess, as long as it's in the name of the people, it's justified. Well then, whatever I do, be sure that I do it in the name of the people.

Toleration as a political norm is demonstrably invalid because it is obviously self-defeating: must we tolerate the intolerant who attack peaceful dissenters? if muslims threaten and kill those who dare criticize their religion, and some people say won't tolerate it, are you to tolerate the former or the latter? Effectively, you cannot tolerate the deeds of one party without approving intolerance towards the other party.

That said, there is indeed a political system that promotes toleration as a general phenomenon, and this system is Capitalism, not Socialism. And obviously so, because Capitalism is a system where everyone can create a domain where he can live according to his ideas unimpeded by others, namely his property, whereas Socialism (and after it the lesser forms of Statism) assumes communal domains where everyone is the victim of whoever manages to temporarily or permanently seize political power.

Paris devient un double musée. Celui de la splendeur passée, et celui de la déchéance présente.

1938. Un magnat de l'Opéra à privilège perd de l'argent à produire des opéras que nul ne veut regarder. Il fait faillite. L'État le rachète et éponge ses dettes à coups de millions pour qu'il puisse continuer à produire des opéras que nul ne veut regarder.

Décidément, le Front Populaire était activement occupé à perdre la guerre en financant des entreprises inutiles pour satisfaire les goûts particuliers d'une toute petite minorité politiquement connectée au détriment de la majorité des citoyens opprimés, plongés dans une souffrance prolongée au nom du droit d'une élite autoproclamée à leur imposer ses goûts décadents.

Dans la partie musée de l'Opéra, un documentaire de propagande vichyste passe en boucle. L'idéologie nationale socialiste d'alors colle parfaitement à l'idéologie socialiste nationale d'aujourd'hui. On célèbre le collectif de 1200 personnes, qui travaillent dur tous ensembles vers un seul but sous l'autorité du chef, comme un exemple pour une nation en ruine où tous doivent se sacrifier de même.

Cruelle comparaison que celle d'avec le Metropolitan Opera de NYC, dont les comptes positifs sont financés par le public, pour le public, spectateurs et donateurs volontaires, et dont les productions classiques rayonnent sur le monde entier. Oui, il y a des subventions publiques aussi, mais elles n'égalent pas les impôts loin de là; et si les lois fiscales ont forcé l'entreprise à se faire ASBL, l'intervention politique y reste considérablement moindre qu'en France. En fin de compte, c'est bien le public qui paie à mesure de sa satisfaction -- et c'est la satisfaction du public, pas celle de maîtres politiques, que cherche activement à satisfaire l'institution privée.

— Toi, t'es contribuable ou contribué?
— Moi? Tribué: pas con!
— T'es sûr? Tu veux dire, tu as une occupation si malfaisante que dans un régime de transactions volontaires, personne ne te paierait autant voire plus pour le même boulot bien fait?
— Non, j'dis pas ça. Mais moi, tu vois, j'suis fonctionnaire: j'fonctionne pour un monopole public.
— Tu sais, si c'est toi qui fonctionne pour le monopole et pas vice-versa, alors t'es buable, tri-con de te croire bué.

* * *

— Moi j'en connais un, il est payé à rien faire, et il fomente la préservation et l'intensification des privilèges sur son temps libre.
— Tribué, clair!
— Bien sûr, il vit sur le dos des producteurs de son fief qui doivent lui payer tribut à la sueur de leur front.
— Comme quoi les rapports entre la noblesse et le tiers état n'ont jamais changé.

* * *

— J'ai un collègue, y s'casse le cul à faire appliquer des réglements malfaisants, pour un salaire de misère.
— Ah ça c'est le pire de tous: c'est le Kapo. Mi tri-buable, il aide pourtant le système à fonctionner; mi tri-bué, il est trop con pour profiter.
— Moi j'suis pas con: je touche pour fermer les yeux.
— Si t'étais sympa, tu fermerais les yeux sans faire payer.
— T'es fou? Et quand l'inspecteur verra que je ferme les yeux, comment je le paierai, moi, si j'ai pas touché?
— OK. Mais si l'inspecteur refuse de toucher, tu fais comment?
— Raison de plus pour avoir touché: faut acheter sa hiérarchie, et ça coûte carrément plus cher!

When a country goes bad, this means its statist institutions are destroying the networks that constitute civil society. If women don't want to bear children, it means they think society is not providing a good context for child rearing. Short of raping women into bearing children nonetheless, nothing can make them have children until society improves. Certainly, you can import foreign women to bear children, because they don't care about the evil of said society, because they come from worse countries where an even worse evil reigns, because they either reject the society anyway or embrace its evil as an improvement. But this will only make it worse for the people previously in that society, by disintegrating the society further and spreading more evil. The solution cannot be immigration. The solution needs be removing the oppression that makes people unhappy.

Tell about independence to the millions of vietnamese people killed in concentration camp, reduced to hunger, oppressed at home by John Kerry's best friends, sunk and raped at sea in their desperate attempts to escape slow painful death. For all their warts, the alleged puppet governments to American masters were far more agreeable to the vietnamese than the so-called independent one (that was no less dependent on support from the Russian and Chinese genocidal dictatorships than the previous government was on support from the American democracy). And let's not even start to talk about Cambodia. Were the Germans happier under the national Socialist rule than occupied by the Americans? Think again. And I don't mean just german Jews. No, the everyday life of a German under National Socialist rule was fear of being denounced by his own children. Of course, life in National Socialist Germany was admittedly not remotely as bad as life in International Socialist Russia.

Take Swiss Cheese, the variety that comes with holes (technically known as eyes). There is a clear correlation between holes and cheese: the more cheese there is, the more holes there are. If you purchase twice as much cheese, you'll get a volume of holes twice as big. Since correlations are symmetrical, this also means the more holes there are, the more cheese there is. If you purchase enough cheese to double the volume of holes, then you have purchased twice as much cheese. Thus, a static mind satisfied with correlations may conclude that a good way to increase the total quantity of cheese is to increase the total volume of holes -- which may be achieved quite simply by drilling holes in the given supply of cheese. Of course, this means fails, because it changes the proportion of holes to cheese, whereas the measured correlation upon which the reasoning stands crucially depends on this proportion being a constant. Yet that's exactly how macroeconomic regulation by government works: find some existing correlation between some kind of wasteful government spending and a measure of general welfare, and then forcefully increase the spending in the hope to increase welfare...

Il y a effectivement un équivalent du principe de moindre action en économie, ce que les économistes appellent les lois d'équilibre. Le principe général en est l'équilibre de Pareto, et mon corollaire préféré en est la loi de Bitur-Camember.

Toutefois, il y a aussi une incompréhension générale de la notion d'équilibre chez les économistes néoclassiques et keynésiens, qui voient l'équilibre comme un phénomène statique ou cinématique qui apparaît magiquement malgré l'action humaine et peut être manipulé arbitrairement par ces êtres supérieurs que sont les hommes de l'état tels que suppléés par les statisticiens officiels armés de leurs modèles économétriques magiques.

La blague connue est celle des deux économistes néoclassiques qui trouvent un billet de 500 euros par terre dans la rue, et qui devisent que ce billet est un faux ou une illusion, parce que l'économie est de façon permanente en équilibre (magik!), et qu'à l'équilibre, il n'y a pas de billet dans la rue car quelqu'un l'aurait déjà ramassé... et ils passent donc leur chemin, sans ramasser le billet et fiers de leur raisonnement.

Mon paternel réagissait il y a quelques temps à mon commentaire sur l'académie. Tonner contre - mais en faire partie si l'on peut, me rappelait-il -- définition que Flaubert donne de l'Académie Française dans son Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Si on m'offrait un poste dans cette académie, refuserais-je? Sans doute pas. Cautionné-je pour autant l'existence de cette institution? Certes pas. Et vu que je consacrerai plus d'énergie à dénigrer cette institution qu'à briguer mon accession à icelle, j'imagine assez mal qu'on m'y invite.

Laurent Lafforgue, réputé l'un des plus brillants esprits de France, avait été invité à joindre le dénommé Haut Conseil de l'Education pour donner la caution de sa médaille Fields à cette machine à parlotes comme les politiques en créent si souvent pour payer leurs copains à faire semblant de résoudre les problèmes des français avec des millions soutirés de force au contribuable. Pas de chance pour ces escrocs, Laurent est aussi quelqu'un d'une grande probité intellectuelle, et qui s'est donc atteler à étudier le sujet en question. Sa première intervention a donc déplue aux mandarins de l'Establishment, qui ont immédiatement exigé et obtenu sa démission. À lire.

Chapeau bas donc à Laurent, qui démontre contre vents et marées qu'il existe encore de grands esprits intègres en France -- même s'il ne s'agit que d'une minorité, et seulement dans ces sciences dures où il est impossible de tricher.

Arnold Kling identifies what Intelligent Design means in Political Economics (Cám ơn Palⁿ). This is quite in line with what Don Boudreaux writes about Social Creationism, Social Deism, & Social Atheism. As usual, it's all about having Faith in the Godvernment.

Am I deriding all beliefs as silly? No, just like Razib, I believe. In Science. Not in fake consensus science issued by an Establishment backed with political violence. In the science that emerges out of the rationally competing views expressed on a free market.

... would smell as bad. And here, the name for black magic is the propensity to resort to Type M arguments, as opposed to Type C arguments: Type C arguments explore consequences, Type M arguments question Motives. Another great piece by Arnold Kling. (Cám ơn Patri)