On Wed, May 21, 1997 at 11:41:08AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
[...]
I almost never think government agents, even most rulers, are in any meaningful sense "evil."
Ah, good. Sanity has returned for a moment.
I've written in the past about "institutional" issues, and about Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil." The problems in the United States, with bloated welfare roles, a "policeman for the world" mentality, an overly litigous/litigious society, etc., come not from any personal evil on the part of the elected or appointed officials, but rather from an inexorable growth of certain institutions in predictable ways. Any enity, be it an organism or an institution, a living plant like a tree or a corporation like PGP, Inc., grows and thrives by how well it competes, how well it bends toward the sources of food and energy, and what genes or memes it received. "The purpose of any organism is to survive" is a telelogical truism, of course. But it is still true. All institutions--corporations, clubs, Cypherpunks--seek to prosper and grow, in various ways. Even if not directed by a central nervous system.
In corporations, even individual departments seek to grow. This aids in career advancement. "Empire building" happens with countries, government bureaucracies, corporations, clubs, and so on.
There are perfectlylogical game-theoretic reasons why the Washington bureaucracy has gotten so large, why every one of the 500+ Congresscritters has a staff of dozens working for him or her, why each of the dozen or so major Cabinet departments has dozens of buildings and thousands (even millions, as with DoD) of worker bees, why each entity in government seeks constantly to expand its scope and powers, and why the number of rules, regulations, laws, emergency orders, and edicts expands inexorably every day.
"Evil" is not a useful way to analyze this problem. In this sense, everyone in government is an "innocent." But the problem still needs to be fixed.
I don't think this problem can be "fixed" in any meaningful way. You just argued that the problem is a consequence of "perfectly logical game-theoretic reasons". There is nothing in the crypto-anarchy agenda or your revolutionary rhetoric that are going to make those game-theoretic reasons go away. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss". The new boss may hide behind a cryptographic curtain, but he will still scheme and plot to expand his power, and join with his allies to attack his enemies, and after he has defeated those enemies he will attempt to stab his allies before they stab him. Thus it is with you; thus it is with me; thus it is with humanity. Americans especially are spoiled: the European colonists, like Darwin's finches, were able to expand freely into a whole virgin economic ecosystem, and evolve to fit many unoccupied niches. Now the niches are full, and competition is hard. Now those free-ranging Americans have to deal with diminishing expectations. All the free stuff is gone; the pie gets cut into thinner and thinner pieces. In every field there are thousands of talented competitors. In the compressed time of high tech we now see patents on trivial and picayune ideas that not too many years ago would have been considered too obvious to bother with. Groups of 40 scientists coauthor papers concerned with esoteric minutia. Musicians scrabble to get "their" music copyrighted. Athletes talk about patenting their "moves". The frustrations of the bubba-cypherpunks with their ego-bolstering arsenals are yet another symptom, same as the bubba-militiamen. They fixate on the "gubmint" as the source of all that's wrong, hatch conspiracies, and keep muttering obscenities and veiled threats, until their imagined enemies become real.
And in fixing these institutions it is unavoidable that "non-evil" persons will be affected. How could it be otherwise? Some will lose their careers, some their current jobs, some may even lose their lives. (No, this is not a threat, just a statement of the obvious, a prediction.)
Innocents in Washington and elsewhere will, if they have any sense of their own future security, seek to avoid the institutions and power centers which will be affected by the necessary restructurings.
My friend, we are on this train together. If it wrecks we are all at risk. You can hide in your abatis on your hill, but the protection it offers is a complete and utter illusion. There isn't going to be any "restructuring" that doesn't affect us all. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html