From: Jeff Pritchard <jp@...>
Date: 2006-02-02T12:03:20+09:00
Subject: Re: About rant on Dave Thomas site, titled 'imitation...'

Looking at both what came before and especially what came after my 
little experiment of suggesting "open source government", I am struck by 
the lack of hubris here.  Not the usual individual hubris, but rather an 
unexpected lack of group hubris.

I rather expected the group to at least jokingly grab onto the idea of 
open source government, not because I thought then or think now that it 
is workable or "right and true", but simply because it sounds like 
something a group of software guys would find interesting and fun to 
play with.

There seems to be at least some belief here (and judging from the lack 
of posts disagreeing with it, some generalized agreement from the 
group), that intelligent people are somehow not virtuous enough to 
engage in a successful attempt at self government; a belief that such a 
government would require the participants to be better at considering 
the success of the group over and above the success of the individual. 
I used the word virtuous for that property just due to an apparent lack 
of a more suitable term.

In an effort to grok the unexpected endemic ennui that seems to engulf 
the responses to this thread, I tried to imagine a completely unbiased 
viewpoint from which to view this puzzle.  I was surprised to find 
myself toe to toe with the notion that perhaps we are expecting too much 
from this universe.  We are asking it to reward us for our genius (or 
even our incremental improvements in technology) when, as far as we can 
tell from all experimental evidence to date, the universe couldn't give 
a crap.  This universe seems more likely to reward the conniving bastard 
who thinks of a better way to sell someone else's invention to the 
masses.  This is a survival of the fittest universe, not a survival of 
the most "virtuous" (whatever we might individually choose to imagine 
that word to mean) universe.

So, perhaps the most pragmatic and practical answer to the dilemma from 
which this thread arose is that we all need to decide, individually, how 
much of our brain power we are willing to expend on survival and the 
creature comforts, and be willing to expend that effort along lines that 
are valued by the universe we live in rather than what we might consider 
to be a more "virtuous" path.

Perhaps that which we, the nerds of the world, view as slimy behavior of 
"the suits"...should instead be viewed merely as a more practical use of 
ones time, given the easily identifiable indifference with which this 
universe holds our "acts of genius".

So, let me posit that the core of this dilemma is not how to change the 
system into one that "properly worships our IQ", but rather what sneaky, 
conniving methods we can come up with to use it to get whatever it is 
that we want from this universe.  Then individually decide just how much 
of that we can stomach.

Interesting thread for me.

jp
(aka, the Mountain Man)
The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the author.  8^)

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