Sunday, July 13, 2008

How to Handle Extremist Philosophy

There's a lot of people who say extremism is bad. Often they have good reasons.

However, there's at least one situation where it isn't bad. For instance, you want to be extremely not dead. Taking a middle ground on being dead doesn't make any sense.

So what's the difference?

When you like something, there is some property of it that you like. However, in cases that extremism is bad, this property is overtaken by a separate property in extreme cases. For instance, honest is usually good. But extreme honesty introduces a large number of new problems that don't exist for moderate honesty, and these problems overtake the positive features of moderate honesty. These features probably cannot be disentangled from each other; to get the moderate good of extreme honesty inevitably means getting the strong bad.

By contrast, being extremely happy (not excited, joyful) has no negative side effects. Greater intensity up to the usual limit is always better.

Similarly, it may be that extreme anarchism introduces new problems that minarchism or Neocameralism do not share. As an anarchist, I believe it does not, and as far as I'm concerned, the debate really is that simple. (I am also against political freedom.)

Notably, this is what science is for. We debate...or we could just experiment. Detroit is half deserted already. Sell the deserted bits to someone for their actual (minimal) price and then legally sterilize the place, and see what happens. Do we get Dubai, or do we get Somalia?

Of course, even proposing this experiment is socially risky, which is how we know we're being controlled by the state unnecessarily, and violently.

(I found this by analyzing conversation as a concept and a purpose.)

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