Can Intelligence be Represented?

Dear Believer in Global Solutions,

One of the more problematic concepts of human consciousness is the idea of ‘representation’: While the evolution of perception enables us to make distinctions of the structural changes we undergo in interacting with our environment, language allows us to categorize these distinctions as external ‘things’. We call them objects and henceforth treat them if they had an existence of their own, independent of our perception through the senses and conceptions of the mind which constructed them in the first place. In this way we often create traps for ourselves.

For example, we tend to believe that what we see or photograph is a truthful representation of an object existing as an ‘original’ in the ‘real’ world. A long line of philosophers and biologists have tried to demonstrate that what we call reality cannot be more than the sphere of constructions of our minds in language, because we have no access to the world independently of our senses and not integrated in the linguistic schemas of our mind.

The concept of representation is so deeply entrenched in Western thinking that we do not usually question it. But representation requires a direct reference to the original which is represented. The perceived ‘original’, however, is already a concept of the mind. The map is the territory. We have, however, no direct, independent or verifiable access to the territory. All we have is maps and the assuring notion that beyond this map-reality there must be something like a universe. 'Observing' cannot describe any direct access to this universe independent of the senses of the observer, but relates to the changes experienced by the observer within himself while interacting with his environment. This seemingly radical empiricist approach is dampened, however, by evolution itself which has encoded many experiences into ‘hard wired’ expectations ensuring that new experiences are interpreted according to these expectations -or otherwise ignored. The notion that what happened before will happen again, or that distinct effects have distinct causes, or that the horizon is horizontal are such hard wired 'pre-judgements'. Thus we have an evolutionary ‘rationalist basis’ encoded as a priori of our experience. Although language can free us from most if not all of these ‘presets’, we always need to seek some balance between what we rationally expect and what empirically fits. In the domain of language, logic helps us find this balance, in the domain of action, our senses reinforced by an occasional bruise are supportive. So the rational approach needs empiricism, the empiricist approach requires rationality. They are not mutually exclusive but interdependent.

Intelligence has to do with how well human beings are able to navigate their linguistic reality in such a way that it helps them to operate (survive) successfully in their environment. I prefer this definition over many others, because it brings language into play and points to the fact that every human being capable of language also has intelligence. Intelligence in this definition is completely personal and individual, although it can only evolve in interaction with others and the environment. It is what today is called an "emergent phenomenon", not a tangible object, nothing you can find by dissecting the brain, staring at brain waves or MRT images. It is like a rainbow that emerges from certain physical conditions, but only as a phenomenon to be observed.

Because we also cannot have direct access and thus reference to the ‘original’ intelligence of an individual, intelligence cannot be represented – neither by a computer nor by another human being. This simple fact has tremendous consequences: It means that a group can never claim more intelligence than each of its members. A political leader, a government or a central committee cannot represent the intelligence of the many they govern, but only their very own. Intelligence is always individual and can only be expressed by individual action.

The intelligences of the several individuals cannot be aggregated into a single operational collective intelligence which then could be exercised by a leader, a group or a government. Collective intelligence again is an emergent phenomenon that only emerges from the actions of many cooperating individuals.

Collective intelligence cannot even be articulated, just like a rainbow cannot be touched. Whatever is articulated flows from the intelligence of the one that articulates it. He might have made use of many other articulations from other intelligences to get there, but the result, as authors usually insist in their acknowledgements, is "the writer’s own responsibility". Political concepts of a 'general will' that can be represented by a government or parliament are highly dubious for the very same reason.

When many individuals each exercise their own intellectual and physical potential, chances are that there will be more collective intelligence emerging as a result than if all just follow the orders of one and thus only act in accordance to just one single intelligence. This is the secret of markets in the broadest sense: free competitive markets of ideas, of values, of individual plans, of local individual knowledges, firsthand experiences and opinions. Of course markets hardly ever are completely free. But they are the only way to bring forth a maximum of intelligence. Every attempt (and there are many) to restrict, regulate or even 'stimulate' markets will make the outcome less intelligent.

The trouble with many intellectuals and most politicians is that they see themselves as more intelligent than markets. After all, a market is not even tangible, has no college education and does not read books. It cannot even make plans. Intellectuals and politician can, and they thrive on plans. They think that if people follow just one good and big central plan the overall outcome will be more intelligent and far superior than if everyone follows his own little imperfect plan and the outcome is just an emergent phenomenon. This is the core mistake of political thought.

The logic of political intervention is based on some tirelessly repeated myths about areas where markets and voluntary cooperation supposedly “just don’t work” and have to be helped along by coercion. Here are some of the most common ones and the arguments used to defend them:

The true values of goods

'Since market values are expressed by money, the “true value” of goods is ignored and the commons subsequently spoiled. Therefore, so the logic goes, government has to interfere and set prices representing true values.'
A value is an expression of a relation between a preference one has for a good over other goods in a certain situation. Values expressing human preferences cannot be quantified for three reasons: they are intrinsically personal, they are dynamic and they are ordinal, they can mathematically expressed only by ordinal numbers dynamically changing with circumstance: My first preference in situation A might be X, but in situation B might become Y. Complex systems with dynamic ordinals principally cannot be mathematically modelled and thus quantified. (This is why human behavior, the stock market and even the climate cannot be quantitatively modelled).

In economics, the closest we can get to expressing values are prices. Since all goods requiring human labor prior to consumption or which have another owner necessarily are scarce goods for consumers, the willingenss to pay and accept a price in a voluntary exchange contract is the only way to determine value. Again, markets allow finding emergent values (prices) of goods in letting producers and consumers freely arrive at prices where both seller and buyer see an advantage for themselves. This process is driven from the end, the 'marginal utility' of the final consumer and the result is as true to any “real value” as you can possibly get. In a free, competitive market, increased or decreased scarcity, changes in demand or preferences immediately find expressions in prices and give decisive signals to production. And because all parameters are continually changing, prices fluctuate, preferences and values change. The idea of a “true value” is self-contradictory: value is not a characteristic of a good, but a characteristic of the individual consumer desiring it. And since every individual is very different, has different plans, preferences, ideas and tastes, goods are valued differently by different people at different times. The idea of a "true value" suggests that value exists independent of the human evaluator. This is paradoxical, because even looking for a "true value" is a human evaluation process arbitrarily setting a value.

The famous ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a result of the fact that they have no producer or owner who attaches his own values to them as a basis for transactions. This is why privatization of the commons is the best way to preserve them, although this idea sounds very alien to those who believe in governments and their representation of collective intelligence. In the “public domain” nobody is or even feels responsible, everyone tries to grab a piece and nobody needs to care about what happens after…

Monopolies

'Free markets necessarily lead to monopolies because they are Darwinian institutions where the strongest dominate at the end.'
Even if we accept for argument’s sake the metaphor of biological evolution (which is problematic when taken literally, because humans are intentional ‘teleological’ actors pursuing individual plans, goals and long term ends), and even if we further accept the common misinterpretation that evolution means the survival of the strongest (Darwin was talking about the survival of the fittest – with survival itself being the ultimate proof of fitness), evolution has not lead to monopolies but rather to diversity. The `law of the jungle` - or in politically more correct terms the `law of the rain forest` is the law of diversity and interdependence, not of dominance and monopoly. In free markets, monopolies rarely form and even then they turn out mostly beneficial at the end. They form when someone has sole control or ownership of a resource, a production method, a technology, or a market. Such a unique position can, for a while, lead to higher prices and lower quality due to lack of competition or alternatives. But in a free market monopolies cannot be upheld by force and coercion. Therefore their abuse provides a growing incentive and opportunity for innovation, new technologies and alternatives. An abused monopoly is usually quickly ended by new market forces. Only government monopolies can be lasting, because they are protected and defended by physical force and coercion. Behind every monopoly today one will find a government rule, regulation, law, protection clause, custom, quota etc. Government itself is a monopoly and all its abuses can be traced directly to this very fact.

Standards

'How can a society function without standards? We need government to set them.'
Every market sooner or later evolves standards. Language itself is such a standard (of communication). Money is a standard of exchange media. Measures, weights and even laws and rules are standards. Standards have always spontaneously evolved in free markets, long before governments tried to monopolize this process also. Modern industrial standards were originally developed by industry, just as most of them are today. In this way, they are much more stable and efficient than when governments set them. Behind the Ten Commandments is not the desire of someone to ask a higher authority for guidance and new standards of behavior, but the fact that such standards existed already but people wanted to preserve them by codifying them into written rules with some supreme authority. Moral standards, like respect for other people’s lives and property evolved as basic social standards long before anyone thought of government -and governments since have done more to destroy them than to uphold or encourage them. In fact, not only have governments made a mockery of monetary and moral standards, they also keep destroying legal standards, which in all times have set standards of justice in human relations as ‘common laws’ or ‘natural laws’. Since governments and parliaments have assumed the role of ‘law-makers’, the ‘rule of law’ standard has been replaced by arbitrary ‘laws of rule’, disconnecting legitimacy from legality and effectively destroying law. The bad reputation of lawyers today is just one result of this ongoing process of the destruction of standards…

Money

'This necessary evil should be controlled and regulated by government.'
Both the platonic intellectual and the power seeking political mind believe that any emerging result of an economy guided by the 'invisible hand' of collective intelligence processes can and should be replaced by an economy guided by central plans, designed and executed by an omnipotent government. Money, which has evolved as a medium of exchange over a long period of time, in the hands of government becomes an instrument of regulation and control that can be created immediately out of thin air by just activating the printing press. But people very early on found that tying money not only to the goods it represented as a medium, but also to a scarce good itself (kauri shells, cattle, camels and eventually rare metals) is the basis for a stable market economy. For centuries, the gold standard kept money stable and reliable by automatically restricting the money supply and making sure that investments and credit were based on prior savings. Once governments incrementally got rid of the gold standard (the final blow was dealt by Richard Nixon in 1973) and replaced it with political goals set by governments and central banks, the printing and supply of money became a political issue and a means of arbitrarily intervening in financial markets. The results are the same as in every other similar intervention in history: loss of value of the currency, loss of savings of the public followed by reduction of savings, gigantic speculation and distortion of markets, production and consumption. Instead of reducing insecurity of markets (as was promised and expected), another factor of insecurity was added. The results are all too visible today: With cheap short term credit the US Fed first flooded the credit markets, inflated real estate and encouraged a huge bubble that consequently was ended again by the Fed through raising interest rates. And while banks and speculators are rescued by the Fed through more cheap money, hundreds of thousands of house buyers will lose their properties and savings. As the US$ exchange rate documents, these policies have just in the last five years destroyed 20% of the wealth of Americans. Here we see true government standards at work…

Freedom is Utopian

'Human beings need to be stopped by coercion from killing, robbing and exploiting each other.' Proposing that individual freedom and its expression in free markets provides the most intelligent way to solve problems is not utiopian. It is in fact the very opposite, because utopias are based on positive plans of action. Utopias usually either require or propose a new, more ‘perfect’ human being. The demand for freedom and free markets, however, does not require any interference or intervention, but rather non-interference and non-intervention: it is based on ‘laissez faire’, a concept and wisdom as old as Lao Tze. He already understood that if individuals are allowed to follow their own plans, they will find better ways and means to cooperate peacefully and successfully. Free markets and laissez faire do not require a new type of human being, they do not need a grandiose central plan to save mankind, they do not encourage utopian thinking based on benevolent dictatorships. They follow the schools of thought and religious belief that consider man to be first and foremost a creative, cooperative and essentially peaceful being, not a wolf only out to kill and enslave his fellow wolf…

The doctrin of freedom and laissez faire also does not require everyone to follow it first before it can be employed. Free trade, for example, was implemented unilaterally by some nations (like Great Britain in the 19th century) even though their trading partners did not follow at first. Setting an example and demonstrating its benefits has always been the most convincing way to achieve progress. If we want peace we can start right away by being peaceful and not supporting war, coercion and forced intervention. If we want freedom, we have to practice it and respect the freedom of others. If we want changes in behavior, we have to start with ourselves. If you do not believe in beating your children, you just stop beating them. You would not wait until everybody stops childbeating. If you think smoking is unhealthy, you will stop smoking, but not continue until everyone gives up.

The dream of enlightenment has always been to end coercion and violence in human relations. If we want a better, more peaceful, just and caring world, we can never achieve it by coercion, violence or force. If we let our ends justify our means, we will end up with just the means, because great ends are like rainbows on the horizon: you can approach them, but you will never completely get there. Anyone promising to reach these ends by big collective plans based on coercive government laws and regulations is only taking us further away from the goal. Although this is probably one of the oldest truths of mankind, in every generation there are some who believe that their plan, their government and their coercion will be different…

The Invisible Brain: The Emergence of Collective Intelligence

Dear Believer in Global Solutions,

Human cultural evolution, and I include here economy, technology, science, social relations and arts, is based on countless and immensely complex interactions between billions of intelligent individuals, each continually making judgments based on individual goals and values, taking into consideration the specifics of time and place, of local social compatibility, weighing and balancing short term and long term preferences, needs and consequences, risks and chances, benefits and costs. Together, all these small independent decisions and voluntary consequent actions over time add up to an immensely intelligent and adaptive system of self-organization, the intelligence of which can never be represented in a single “collectivized” mind or several single minds in a group. A single mind can principally only represent a single mind, and a committee can only agree on what the single minds that form it can compromise on – which is usually not more, but rather less than each of its single minds would propose.

So what we could call “collective intelligence” is purely an emergent phenomenon, it is not the result of collective representation. It arises from spontaneous self-organization, from a process of purposeful interaction and intentional cooperation. The less restricted, controlled and disturbed by human interference or coercion this process can unfold, the more intelligence it will produce, because every participant can employ and contribute his full knowledge, experience and skills. In other words, optimal social intelligence requires a free market of ideas and actions. So when we approach problems, the best chance is indeed to rely on free markets as the best and biggest source of collective intelligence. The more complex, global and difficult the problems are, the more intelligence is required and consequently more freedom to let this intelligence emerge. Collective intelligence is the “invisible brain” that guides a society and allows it to survive, evolve and prosper.

Why is such a simple principle so hard to understand? We are all convinced that the best knowledge is always local: nobody knows more about our own affairs than we, each of us, ourselves. It should not be too difficult to see that this principle applies at any scale. There is no line where you could say: from here on knowledge must come from 'above'.

Yet politicians, scientists, journalists, preachers and artists do not seem to get tired demanding the replacement of our most efficient mechanism for finding intelligent solutions with coercive measures backed up by the threat of laws and regulations. When the diversity of individual fine tuning skills of billions of brains are required most to achieve the maximum of collective intelligence, they demand collective uniformity instead:

Bring in the tanks! Call in the Air Force! Let’s go for the big solution! We need big government now! We need Manhattan projects, global Marshal plans and any other plan as long as it is a central, global plan!

Anyone dissenting? Shut up and get in line! Enough talk, we need action! Mankind in crisis must act as one single mind! This is a war! You either follow or you are foe! Anyone having doubts? This is not the hour of doubts, this is the hour of individual obedience and collective action!

Oil too expensive and possibly running out? We have a solution:Tax the consumers! The markets cannot handle scarcities like that, a stronger force is needed! If alternative energies are too expensive we will force them on you! Biofuel laws are hiking the price of bread for the poor? Let them eat cake! The climate will change anyway because that’s what climate does? This might well be. But then at least we have taught them a lesson in government: if everyone puts aside his little private ego and individual claim to intelligence and freedom, we can do great things together! They might turn out wrong in the end, they might kill millions, they might waste the resources of several generations and even throw us back into poverty – never mind! Historians of a later age will admire the ruins of our giant solar power plants and vast windmill forests like they admired the pyramids: as grandiose monuments of human discipline and absolute political power!

Planetary Ultimatum

Dear Future,

From May 9-13th, 2007 a group of international activists convened in Hamburg, Germany to found the “World Future Council”. Initiated by Jacob von Uexküll, founder of the “Right Livelihood Award” (also labelled the “Alternative Nobel Prize”), the group declares itself a sort of “global conscience” charged with securing no less than the “future of the globe”.

One could dismiss this group as yet another self-styled “world saviour association”, if it were not for the impact it found in politics and the media right from the start. Subsidized by the City of Hamburg, their founding congress and “Hamburg Call to Action” was widely reported in the news and supported not only by the usual “we-know-what’s-best-for-you” activists, but also by prominent politicians, media luminaries, scientists and business people. What holds them together is a populist mix of central planning fantasies, naïve good will and a strong appetite for world government - well disguised under an umbrella of scientific misinformation, religious zeal and false promises.

The “Hamburg Call to Action” is a good example how such populist “movements” are manufactured. It follows a recipe which is probably as old as power itself and can be found in just about every populist mass manipulation scheme. Let us examine how some of the rules from the book of rhetorical tricks are applied in this latest manifesto:


Rule 1: Declare this moment to be the most decisive in history, where agreement with your plan is required to save mankind!

“Today we stand at the crossroads of human history. Our actions – and our failures to act – will decide the future of life on earth for thousands of years, if not forever.”[1]

This always makes an impressive beginning. Words like “crossroads”, “human history” or “future of life on earth” are very powerful. We could call them “adult four-letter-words”, immediately evoking strong emotions and reactions. When talking about numbers of years, a thousand is the minimum. The magic millennium touch has served generations of prophets of doom…


Rule 2: Threaten them with the wrath of future generations!

“Our generation will be scrutinized with exceptional fierceness by those coming after us, for decisions taken now will have profound consequences for them in terms of lives saved or lost.”

It used to be our ancestors and history demanding from us that we should learn from them and consequently do better. At least they provided case studies and historical data. Learning from the future, as is required here, can only mean to accept as givens the utopias of modern day prophets, the predictions of political clairvoyants and the prognostic computer models of scientists. All of them are equally arbitrary and constantly proven wrong by history.


Rule 3: Proclaim that your dogma is the end of all dogmas!

“The World Future Council identifies necessary policies …freed from dogmas which sacrifice our real world…”

The human mind unfortunately has to construct its worlds and realities without direct access to “absolute truths” or the possibility to objectively prove its assumptions. Any claim to describe the world free of doctrine, dogma or ideology - “as it is”-, is impossible and a dogma itself. It serves the purpose to establish an absolute truth that cannot be challenged and an authority that must be obeyed. It is probably the oldest rhetorical trick in the book of power.


Rule 4: Promise to solve principally unsolvable problems such as inequity and injustice!

“We seek to promote systems and institutions based on equity and justice, replacing those that perpetuate inequity and injustice. “

Equity and justice are qualitative values based on individual difference, preference and judgement. They cannot be measured, quantified or objectified and thus cannot be established by rules, laws or government measures. The best we can do to achieve them is to respect and apply the fundamental “natural laws” of social relations, such as equal rights, private property, voluntary exchange and binding contracts. Any promise beyond protecting natural law can only increase inequity and injustice. Institutions based on coercion cannot provide either equity or justice.


Rule 5: Focus on one topical issue and declare it the Archimedean point to solve all other problems!

“We have decided to focus first on climate change, because this is no longer just an environmental issue. It touches every area of our lives: peace, security, human rights, poverty, hunger, health, mass migration, economics.”

Climate change currently is the favourite cause of central planners, socialists and others promoting centralism and state intervention. Although based on scientifically unsound and highly disputed theories, it nevertheless is the darling of many scientists, politicians and activists for various reasons: to scientists it provides a rich source of funding and political influence, to politicians it provides a hard to beat legitimization for government intervention, taxation and central planning, to activists it provides a seemingly common sense cause and rallying point. The solutions proposed are always the same and never successful…


Rule 6: Declare your doctrine a “natural law”!

“Natural laws supersede all others because they determine the conditions of our existence. If we do not succeed in limiting climate chaos, our earth will no longer be habitable for most of its inhabitants.”

Climate models are scenarios based on very limited data and simple arithmetic equations. They can only predict the model, not the climate. Climate is principally unpredictable because it is an emergent phenomenon depending on an infinite number of factors and interdependencies. Human influence is minor in this self-organizing system. Equating arithmetic models with “natural laws” is not only unscientific, but a travesty of science. Climate change as such is continuous and natural since climate is a dynamic system far from equilibrium. Calling it “climate chaos” and subsequently demanding to put it in “order” is ridiculous, hideous and sheer hubris.


Rule 7: Give your plan a higher religious authority!

“The protection of the earth’s vitality, diversity and beauty is not only a matter of political choice. It is a sacred trust.”

When terms like “sacred”, “holy” or “creation” are being used in connection with political actions, they usually serve the goal of legitimizing these plans by referring to a higher authority. Many of the people that use them so emphatically here generally insist that they do not believe in a god or religion and vehemently protest against theories of creationism…


Rule 8: Claim to speak in the interest of non-existing entities in order to avoid accountability!

“The World Future Council speaks up and acts to protect the interests of future generations.”

In this way nobody can ask whether the people you claim to speak for really want to be represented by you. We cannot know how future generations think. But we can safely assume that they will be willing and able to speak for themselves. Other virtual entities often employed for this purpose are “the people”, the “common good” or the “general will”. All of these entities exist only as “emergent wholes”, i.e. as non-tangible phenomena without consciousness, will or goal. They can be useful as metaphors, but once they serve to legitimize political actions or laws, the door to totalitarian rule is opened.


Rule 9: Power is based on obedience. Obedience is highest in times of war. Declare war!

“History reminds us that, in times of crisis, humans can take giant steps in a very short time. For example, when attacked, countries have managed to convert their entire production within months to serve the needs of the war economy. When environmental disasters struck, some peoples quickly adapted and changed their ways of life – while others failed and perished.”

We are being told here in twisted yet ultimately clear terms that climate change and other environmental issues should be approached in a war-like fashion, requiring a strong and unified leadership, an authoritative officer corps, a rigid hierarchical command structure and foot soldiers that blindly obey. Theis crusader call is being used by politicians and power-seekers in just about every aspect of life. It can be recognized easily when campaigns are titled “War on …”, or when demands for “another Manhattan Project” appear…


Rule 10: Demand sacrifices (from others) in the name of a “Common” or “Greater Good” which you alone define!

“Our political and economic goals will from now on have to aim for the maximum of present well-being compatible with our obligations to future generations. The alternative is ethically and humanly unacceptable.”

The term “maximum of present well-being” tries to cleverly hide the demand for sacrifices, from which the authors necessarily must be excluded, since fulfilling their new duties will require much more resources than before…


Once credibility, authority and legitimacy are established in this way, the plan of action can be introduced. Although plans are important for outlining the steps required for reaching a certain goal or achieving a certain task, not all planning is just planning: some plans of action are actions for planning. The latter are usually initiated by people who neither believe in the human individual’s capacity for reason, nor in the ability of voluntary cooperation between individuals to achieve their goals and adapt to changing circumstances. They instead consider human beings (except themselves) as driven primarily by negative instincts of killing, hurting and cheating each other, of plundering the planet and wasting its resources. The human individual according to this negative anthropology needs to be told what is best for him and the planet. The knowledge of what is “best” is reserved to a selected few only, and –you guessed it- our activists belong to this exclusive group.

What sets such holders of higher knowledge apart from the rest of us can only be some privileged access to information about the universe, life on earth and the human mind. To ask where they get this information from is not a legitimate question. They just know, because their special consciousness tells them. We must trust and obey them. The recipes they promote, however, are not so enlightened and invariably from the same type: It is government that must set values and goals for people, guide their actions and enforce the grand master plan. Without government we would surely be lost and society would duly disintegrate:

“Decisions by governments determine rules and influence our values. They enable the private sector and all of us to act more effectively. The World Future Council calls on the G8 and EU and other upcoming summits to face up to their unique responsibilities by responding actively and immediately to the planetary ultimatum we have all been given.”

So we have all been given “the planetary ultimatum”! Does this mean we get evicted from the planet within 30 days – unless what?

“Outdated rules and economic dogmas must not be allowed to endanger our common future. The challenge of climate change will only be overcome by global sharing of access to vital resources and technologies, ensuring clean energy, water, nutrition and education for all.”

What could be the “outdated rules and economic dogmas” that governments have to get rid of? Well, they are not mentioned explicitly, but clearly implied. The opposite of central planning and government intervention is the free market. A free market economy gives the individual consumer the last say on what is produced how, by whom, in what quantities and qualities. It is the natural enemy of coercive power. Its principles (if not distorted by governments) are voluntary cooperation and mutually beneficial exchange based on individual values, freedom of action and binding contracts, respect for elementary human rights of self-ownership and rightful property. These natural rules of human relations bring forth society independently from governments long before states even existed. They naturally strengthen social binds and with growing division of labor generate a social climate of trust and dependability.

Most human wealth has been produced under these natural laws of society, and most spectacularly so during the last 150 years. It was governments that periodically stifled, curbed and suffocated the growth of wealth or even destroyed it in wars against their own people and other governments. The only hope we can have in the future is to get rid of governments and focus on self-organizing social orders under conditions of maximal freedom and effective protection of our natural rights.

Wealth has always attracted a small minority who wants a share without the toil and sweat that is required in its production. Some take it by force through openly criminal acts of theft, robbery, plunder, corruption or fraud; others have devised legal “political” means to achieve the same. Their arguments seem altruistic at first glance: society cannot provide for everybody’s needs unless governments forcibly interfere by seizing goods and resources (through taxation), redistributing them according to arbitrary plans (made by politicians) and coercing people into modes of behaviour considered in line with the needs of the planet (as defined again by politicians, lobbyists and clairvoyant advisors). When these schemes invariably fail, because they in fact reduce wealth and restrict its distribution, the power seekers propose even more government and ever more coercion and intervention.

The founders of the World Future Council are likewise convinced that the role of government should not only be extended, but also centralized into a single global authority, guided by enlightened Platonian intellectuals:

“From time to time our ancestors created institutions sometimes called Councils of Seers Into The Future, to guide their decisions. Today we again need such councils on all levels. With its broad membership from governments, parliaments, civil society, business, science and the arts, the World Future Council will be a global voice highlighting our responsibilities as citizens of the earth… “

Global government should be realized through “a strengthened, democratised and revitalized UN System, capable of preventing war, genocide and crimes against humanity”. The worst of these crimes, we can safely assume, will be opposition to world government…

“We are entering an era of consequences” our new custodians sternly proclaim, and the reader wonders whether the eras before were of no consequence. They end their declaration with a promise “to all children living now and in the future” that, when read in the context of their earlier declarations, sounds more like a threat:

“We promise to do everything in our power to help sustain life on earth with all its beauty and diversity for future generations, and to speak up for comprehensive peace and true justice between the world’s peoples and countries.”

To entrust governments with the task to establish and maintain “comprehensive peace” or to expect “true justice” from coercive programs of central planning, intervention and redistribution has never in history been a successful proposition. But this never stopped people from starting new organizations promoting such agendas. Since the Catholic Church once made a successful business out of selling indulgencies to its believers upon installing the appropriate guilt feelings, guilt promoters all over the globe continue to successfully apply this business model for a wide variety of causes. The political entrepreneurs behind these ventures usually seek personal prominence, power and easy incomes by preying on well-meaning but often naïve customers, by profiting from symbiotic relationships to power and by thriving on parasitic positions and privileges within political and social structures. The state and coercive state power are their breeding ground; freedom, markets and private property their eternal enemies. They should not be entrusted with our future or the future of our children…

[1] All quotes from: World Future Council, The Hamburg Call To Action http://www.worldfuturecouncil.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Dan/press_releases/english_press_releases/Hamburg_Call_to_Action-engl.pdf

Make Power Gouging a Crime

Dear Jim,

frankly speaking, I think the petition to make "gasoline price gouging a federal crime" (http://pol.moveon.org/stoppricegouging/) is stupid and dangerous. If political stupidity was a climate gas, our planet would have been incinerated quite some time ago...

Here just some arguments against:

- Price gouging happens when someone has a monopoly on a needed good or service and thus can dictate the price to consumers. The only organization having a forced monopoly on certain goods and services currently is the state (and state licensed monopolies). The government thus is the only group that can (and systematically does) engage in price gouging on a massive scale! It can do so because it has the monopoly on coercion, which it uses generously- not only abroad, but also at home. To suggest that the government as the price gouger #1 should make price gauging a crime (i.e. use its own monopoly instruments of coercion to bring it under its own price gauging monopoly) is absurd and will not only legalize and increase price gouging but als makes it enforcible by power of gun!

- the market, as long as there is no forced intervention by governments, is the most sensitive, because ultimately consumer driven, mechanism to dynamically balance demand and supply. Oil prices translate into gas prices by consumer demand and supply factors. Government interventions like a war in Iraq, increased taxation at the pump or forced biofuel additives (which in addition to market factors are seasonably highly price sensitive) are by far the biggest factors of price increases at the pump.

- Price fluctuation in a market free of forced intervention is a very useful and efficient mechanism to adapt to whatever influences the consumers and producers are experiencing. This could be scarcity, climate, new ideas and values, technical innovations, hopes and fears, political stability, natural disasters, different habits and preferences etc... The less this adaptation process is interfered with, the more intelligent and timely it can work. Attempts of price gouging by free market participants so far have all failed in the long run, because they encourage competition like nothing else does!

- Even apparently reasonable arguments for government intervention in markets based on alleged "market failures" do not increase the adaptive potential of society, but in fact decrease it, because it lowers what could be called the emerging intelligence (sometimes also called "collective intelligence", but this term obscures the fact that it is an emerging whole and not a tangible entity) of society: government intervention is not the AGGREGATION of the intelligence expressed by the emerging results of the many voluntary decisions of all market participants, but the SUBSTITUTION of this distributed intelligence for the limited intelligence of a small group of politicians (with often different agendas in mind). To demand or even assist in the substitution of distributed intelligence for the limited intelligence of a small group holding the monopoly of coercion (= power), is like proposing that the chickens be protected by the fox, because he represents their collective intelligence...

- who could be interested in such a stupid proposal? Certainly not the chickens! All such proposals originate from groups of power seeking individuals, who either want to get coercive powers in their own hands or who want to benefit from such powers. Their personal business plans are more than often sustainable jobs in NGOs that seek government subsidies or donations from companies and the public. Most of these NGOs are either modern protection rackets claiming to protect the environment or the poor, or they promise undeliverable goods like social justice and other qualitative values, which they try to quantify. Of course they cannot deliver either, because qualitative values cannot by quantified in principle, so they get into the eternal power game of raising fears and exploiting hopes. Just look at their slogans and demands and you will find this consistent pattern, both with governments and with groups striving for governmental powers...

If you want to stop price gouging, make it a crime to intervene by coercive means in the lives of people including free markets. Make power gouging a crime! You might have your jails full of politicians, but you also have ended wars and taxes!

Cheers,

AdLib

Definition of Insanity

Dear Ben and Albert,

when people define insanity (mostly in political discussions) they attribute their favorite definition to either one of you, presumably to evoke some higher authority on the subject. This definition, hardly contested by anyone, reads:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”

I personally doubt that either of you is the author of this rather dumb definition. Because it assumes several unlikely events:

1) Sameness of things. In a dynamic universe, no same things can exist. Everything is different and changing all the time. Nothing remains as it was. There just are no same things. This makes our universe principally complex and uncertain.

2) Linear causality: Doing the same thing is plainly impossible as well. Not only does the context of an action change, but so does the actor and thus the action itself. We can at most declare similarities and assume that similar things under similar conditions will produce similar results. But these are essentially speculations. We just cannot know.

To quote Heraclites: "You cannot step into the same river twice." But as Heinz von Foerster once remarked, you cannot even step into the same river once, because there is no same river. In a universe in flux, prediction is always speculation. Although we individually rely heavily (like all species) on such speculations by assuming that events of the past will happen again in the future, this is never certain. Prediction, whether by oracle or clearvoyence of computer models remains speculation.

So my definition of insanity would go like this:

"Insanity is to first believe that we can do the same things again (and again), and second to expect the same outcome."

Yours,

AdLib

Dear Reader,

Blogging is one of the new freedoms of the internet: the freedom to independently publish your own opinions. Of course you and I have countless opinions on countless subjects, so why bother? I decided to publish a blog related to the one issue that is becoming more and more important in our lives: freedom.

In order to make it more focussed I decided to write this blog in the form of letters, adressed to a particular person (which I do not personally know, in most cases). I will take up issues from the news or from my daily experience, and hope to be able to add a new and different, often critical and even contrarian angle to it. Seeing things and events from different perspectives to me is an important value in itself. When everyone thinks the same, no one thinks at all (or at best, only one does). This marks the end of freedom, because freedom is based on the recognition that we are all different and unique, and thus have each different and unique experiences, perspectives, histories and viewpoints. Even as a group, we act best when each can use his or her individual intelligence as independently as possible, because our personal experience and knowledge is unique and cannot be generalized or mapped into a computer model...

I consider freedom an endangered species, ironically because nearly everything that is done politically and individually today is done in the very name of freedom. Many of our self styled "freedom fighters" at the same time attack liberal ideas as the most dangerous modern evil. In such a time of semantic confusion, freedom is in danger of getting crushed between good intentions and the quest for political power to realize them. My blog is just one individual's resistance against this trend. It is meant to provoke and inspire. What we need is a global con-spiracy of freedom!