Kayfabe

Kayfabe   (by Eric Weinstein link)

The sophisticated "scientific concept" with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling.

Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.

If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe". 

Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working". 

Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. The decades old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the "string" and "loop" camps would seem to be an even more significant example within the hard sciences of a collaborative intra-promotion rivalry given the apparent failure of both groups to produce a quantum theory of gravity. 

What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery. While most modern sports enthusiasts are aware of wrestling's status as a pseudo sport, what few alive today remember is that it evolved out of a failed real sport (known as "catch" wrestling) which held its last honest title match early in the 20th century. Typical matches could last hours with no satisfying action, or end suddenly with crippling injuries to a promising athlete in whom much had been invested. This highlighted the close relationship between two paradoxical risks which define the category of activity which wrestling shares with other human spheres:

• A) Occasional but Extreme Peril for the participants.

• B) General: Monotony for both audience and participants.

Kayfabrication (the process of transition from reality towards Kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil participants. As such Kayfabrication is a dependable feature of many of our most important systems which share the above two characteristics such as war, finance, love, politics and science.

Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling's system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real life adultery following exactly behind the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a Kayfabe back-story. Eventually, even Kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.

At the point Kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.

Kayfabe, it appears, is a dish best served client-side.

Private Belief and Public Knowledge

To believe incorrectly is never a crime, but simply to believe is never to have knowledge.

In other words, liberal science does not restrict belief, but it does restrict knowledge. It absolutely protects freedom of belief and speech, but it absolutely denies freedom of knowledge: in liberal science, there is positively no right to have one's opinions, however heartfelt, taken seriously as knowledge. Just the contrary: liberal science is nothing other than a selection process whose mission is to test beliefs and reject the ones that fail. A liberal intellectual regime says that if you want to believe the moon is made of green cheese , fine. But if you want your belief recognized as knowledge, there are things you must do. You must run your belief through the science game for checking. And if your belief is a loser, it will not be included in the science texts. It probably won't even be taken seriously by most respectable intellectuals. In a liberal society, knowledge - not belief  - is the rolling critical consensus of a decentralized community of checkers, and it is nothing else. That is so, not by the power of law, but by the deeper power of a common liberal morality.

Of course, if your belief is rejected by the critical consensus, you are free to reject the consensus and keep believing. That's freedom of belief. But you are not entitled to expect that your belief will be taught to schoolchildren or accepted by the intellectual establishment as knowledge. Any school curriculum is necessarily restrictive. It cannot not be restrictive. My point is that the right way to set a curriculum is to insist that it teach knowledge, and that this knowledge should consist only of claims which have been thoroughly checked by no person (or group) in particular. We should never teach anything as knowledge because it serves someone's political needs. We should teach only what has checked out.[...] academic freedom consists in freedom to doubt, to inquire, to check, and to believe as you like. It does not consist in the freedom of one party or another to reset the rules for inquiry or checking. Someone who wants to insist that the theory of relativity is false and that some other theory is true is, of course, entitled to do so; but passing laws or using intimidation to make teachers (or anyone else) take him seriously has nothing to do with the freedom to inquire. It has to do with the centralized regulation of knowledge. If the consensus of critical checkers holds that evolution checks out but creationism does not, and clearly it does hold this, then that is our knowledge on the subject.

And who decides what the critical consensus actually is? The critical society does, arguing about itself. That is why scholars spend so much time and energy "surveying the literature" (i.e., assessing the consensus so far). Then they argue about their assessments. The process is long and arduous, but there you are. Academic freedom would be trampled instead of advanced by, say, requiring that state financed universities put creationists on their biology faculties or give Afrocentrists rebuttal space in their journals. Wh n a state legislature or a curriculum committee or any other political body decrees that anything in particular is, or has equal claim to be, our knowledge, it wrests control over truth from the liberal community of checkers and places it in the hands of central political authorities. 

And that is illiberal. If the principle is ever established that political bodies can say what our knowledge is or is not, or which ideas are worth taking seriously, then watch out. Everyone with an opinion would be busy lobbying legislatures for equal-time laws, demanding that biology books describe prayer as an alternative treatment for cancer, picketing universities for astrology departments, suing journals for rebuttal space, demonstrating for proportionate representation in footnote citations. We would find ourselves in a world where knowledge was made by voting and agitating. Then we really would find ourselves living Bertrand Russell's nightmare, where "the lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg is to be condemned solely on the ground that he is in the minority." In that case, those of us who believe in science had better hope that we can persuade a majority and round up a quorum-and whether we can do so is not at all clear on issues like astrology.

One cannot overemphasize: intellectual liberalism is not intellectual majoritarianism or egalitarianism. You do not have a claim to knowledge either because 51 percent of the public agrees with you or because your "group" was historically left out; you have a claim to knowledge only to the extent that your opinion still stands up after prolonged exposure to withering public testing. Now, it is true that when we talk about knowledge's being a scientific consensus we are talking about a majority of scientists. But we are not talking about a mere majority. For a theory to go into a textbook as knowledge, it does not need the unanimity of checkers' assent, but it does need far more than a bare majority's. It should be generally recognized as having stood up better than any competitor to most of the tests that various critical debunkers have tried. [...] Because space and time in textbooks and classrooms are limited, each of those groups will make demands at the expense of others. And that is how creed wars begin. 

[...] only after an idea has survived checking is it deserving of respect. Not long ago, I heard an activist say at a public meeting that her opinion deserved at least respect. The audience gave her a big round of applause. But she and they had it backwards. Respect was the most, not the least, that she could have demanded for her opinion. Except insofar as an opinion earns its stripes in the science game, it is entitled to no respect whatever. This point matters, because respectability is the coin in which liberal science rewards ideas that are duly put up for checking and pass the test. You may not get rich by being shown to be right, you may not even become famous, and you almost certainly will not be loved; but you will be paid in the species of respectability. That is why it is so important that creationists and alien-watchers and radical Afrocentrists and white supremacists be granted every entitlement to speak but no entitlement to have their opinions respected. They should expect, if they scoff at the rules by which the game of science is played, to have their beliefs scoffed at; they should expect, if for any reason (in eluding minority status) they refuse to submit their ideas for checking by public criticism, that their opinions will be ignored or ridiculed - and rightly so. Respect is no opinion's birthright. People, yes, are entitled to a certain degree of basic respect by dint of being human. But to grant any such claim to ideas is to raid the treasury of science and throw its capital to the winds.

Let us remember, then, that the proposition "We must all respect others' beliefs" is nowhere near as innocent as it sounds. If it is enshrined in policies or practices giving "rights" to minority opinions, the damage it causes is immediate and severe. Liberal science cannot exert discipline if it cannot use its tool of marginalization to drive unsupported or bogus beliefs from the agenda. When you pass laws requiring equal time for somebody's excluded belief, you effectively make marginalization illegal. You say, "In our society, a belief is respectable - and will be taught and treated respectfully - if the politically powerful say it is." Once you have said that, you face a very stark choice. You can open the textbooks only to those "oppressed" beliefs whose proponents have political pull. Or you can take the principled egalitarian position, and open the books and the schools to all sincere beliefs. If you do the former, then you have replaced science with power politics. If you do the latter, then you have no principled choice but to teach, for example, "Holocaust revisionism" (the claim that the Holocaust didn't happen) as an "alternative theory" held by an "excluded minority"-which means, in practice, not teaching twentieth-century history at all. Either way, you have taken in hand silly and even execrable opinions and ushered them from the fringes of debate to the very center. At a single stroke, you have disabled liberal society's mechanism for marginalizing foolish ideas, and you have sent those ideas straight to the top of the social agenda with a safe-conduct.

Is the liberal standard for respectability fair? That, really, is the big question today. If you believe that a society is just only when it delivers more or less equal outcomes, you will think liberalism is unfair. You will insist on admitting everyone's belief into respectability as knowledge. Or at least you will insist on admitting the beliefs of people whom you regard as oppressed-affirmative action for knowledge. Personally, I cannot think of anything good about that kind of standard for knowledge. It is bound to lead to fights over who gets what. Groups will appoint leaders, and leaders will negotiate, and when negotiations break down schism or intellectual warfare will ensue; or if negotiations are successful, then certain beliefs will be locked in place by delicate compromise, and a knowledge-making system whose greatest virtue is its adaptiveness will turn sclerotic.

Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch

Inevitabilidade

Temos um problema catastrófico nas fontes da economia global -- recursos, energia -- e nos seus escoadouros -- poluição, aquecimento global. De que forma e quão profundamente as nossas soluções para os direitos económicos e políticos -- capitalismo, democracia -- terão de se transformar para serem capazes de verdadeiramente atacar esta questão? 

Teatro

The Universe is a messy and dangerous place. Fitness is not an optional policy in the natural selection perpetual genocide. The successful life-and-death stories of our ancient primate ancestors were imprinted in our genes. They still partially define, even today in our complex social world, what 'human' means. Our brains and bodies have default mechanisms that shape and limit our cognitive abilities, our ability to learn and remember, to reason and feel, to introspect. What we recognize as 'I'.

For fitness sake, the evolution of our actions, our behavior, converged to pursue (desire) certain sensations -- feelings, brain states -- and avoid (fear) others. Two examples are sexual arousal and pain, respectively. We are able to learn that different contexts favor different sensations. We adapt and manage our desires and fears to serve the multilayered goal of survival (multilayered in the sense of being made of several, more specific sub-goals but also for having multiple and not necessarily compatible solutions).

One powerful factor in this emotional and sensorial ecosystem is society. Society inhibits or enhances sensations, desires and goals through social conditioning not necessarily concerned with individual survival. One example is how nationalism is able to transfer and corrupt the genetic instincts of family into social norms to better serve the preservation of a national concept. However, this reshaping is not arbitrary, since it is impossible to remove our primitive genetic behavioral heritage without losing the person within. Humans minds are elastic but they are not blank slates. The resulting individual behavior turns out to be quite subtle in complex societies, forcing part of our genetic past into sleep mode, hardly detected in normal, non stressful situations. Herein, we are not that different from most social mammals.

But we humans are not satisfied with just that. Humans are active believers, constantly inserting meaning into the world stuff and into the mind stuff. We are addicted to belief and cannot help ourselves. One important side effect is value. A value is determined by the desire/fear intensity for a certain sensation. It is natural for us to classify a goal towards a attractive (repulsive) sensation has having a good (bad) value. And then that goal's value contaminates the cognitive architecture: a good (bad) goal must come from virtuous (vicious) desires and promotes right (wrong) actions. We elaborate enormous cognitive structures around the value concept. Ethics, Politics and Religion are basically arguments -- logical, empirical, traditional, dogmatic arguments -- to shape how values, virtues and righteousness are mapped. We feel that something has value, that acting such and such is right, but these are just instances of the mind projection fallacy. They are the result of our unrestrained use of meaning inception. They are internal mind attributes not external features of those somethings. We do not avoid something because it is bad, we define as bad those things we want to avoid.

This does not imply that meaning is arbitrary or relative. We are social animals after all, and share sensations, desires, goals. Our biology and cognitive apparatus is the same. So, at least for homo sapiens, this mapping does not have that much variability. Pain, say, is intrinsically a sensation to avoid. It is no surprise that violence towards other humans is usually considered a wrong action or that, for promoting violence, political and religious leaders choose first to dehumanize the enemy.

And where is consciousness in all this? Consciousness is not necessary for this sensation/desire/goal structure nor for the resulting behavior. Many different animals seem to be equipped with them and still don't seem to possess consciousness. Also, consciousness is not necessary for choice. A simple mechanism is able to make choices when faced with multiple options (even a thermostat has capacity for binary choice). A choice is the process of selecting an action among possible actions. It can be described in algorithmic terms (one classical definition is the maximization of expected utility) and, at least in its basic form, does not need cognition. However, perhaps consciousness provides value assignment to goals. Perhaps human consciousness includes (is?) our belief generator. Perhaps consciousness is a cognitive  and social contagious infection which the symptoms are persons. Who knows how to untangle a metaphorical web using just its metaphors?

We need beliefs to fictionalize an impersonal world, filing it with meaningful narratives, appropriate reasons and reasonable causes. We also need a world with persons. Other persons and ourselves. But an indifferent Universe does not offer anything like that, only pain and pleasure, life and death. So why not, collectively, make up everything else? 

"There was kindness. I and certain others, an old man and one with a bad cough, were recognized as being least resistant to the cold, and each night we were at the center of the group, the entity of twenty-five, where it was warmest. We did not struggle for the warm place, we simply were in it each night. It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give." Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Tradições

Um ovo fertilizado não é uma pessoa. O adulto que resultou desse ovo é uma pessoa. O que aconteceu nesse intermédio? Existe um instante entre as duas anteriores afirmações em que se passou do estado de não-pessoa para pessoa? A resposta é simples: não. Procurar uma fronteira precisa neste assunto é uma missão equivocada. A noção de pessoa é gradual, não existe um conjunto suficiente e necessário de características objectivas que a determine. Resta-nos, assim, o consenso possível de uma definição. 

O consenso actual, nos países seculares, é firmado algures na segunda dezena de semanas de gravidez. Este é um período, antes da formação do sistema nervoso do feto, no qual é admissível a possibilidade de aborto. Deste modo, garante-se a prevenção da dor e a inexistência de um ser consciente (aliás, uma asserção ultra-conservadora para qualquer definição científica de consciência). Este prazo derivou do consenso possível entre especialistas de medicina, os profissionais com maior capacidade de se pronunciarem sobre o assunto.

A opinião católica, porém, funciona através de mecanismos de tradição, processos onde a razão presente e a evidência (contrária) têm pouco a dizer. Se existe uma política defendida pela Igreja sobre o assunto, é esta política que tem de ser promovida. É uma questão de autoridade e costume. Mas que tradição é essa? A Igreja nem sempre manteve a mesma opinião. Nos séculos entre Santo Agostinho e São Tomás de Aquino era considerado que o feto só recebia uma alma no momento em que se começasse a mover na barriga materna. Isto ocorre entre a 16ª e 22ª semana de gravidez (mais tarde que o limite para o aborto legal actual). Antes desse momento, o aborto não era considerado problemático.

As posições tomadas pela Igreja não foram indiferentes às discussões sobre a procriação. Para Aristóteles, o esperma («a semente do homem») era o princípio activo da geração humana, sendo que a mulher providenciava apenas a matéria passiva para a semente crescer. Muitos pensadores que seguiam esta explicação faziam a distinção entre vida formada e não-formada, aceitando que, à posteriori, a matéria não-formada seria animada por uma alma. Uma segunda teoria defendia que o esperma e o útero continham desde logo o pneuma, um elemento espiritual, que quando misturados produzia de imediato a alma do embrião. Esta explicação era defendida pelos Estóicos e por alguns cristãos. Uma terceira explicação, adoptada por Tertuliano, retirava o papel da mulher deste processo mas mantinha a tese da alma estar presente desde a concepção. Estas explicações filosóficas sobre a biologia da procriação influenciaram fortemente as discussões cristãs sobre o estatuto moral do embrião [1].

Em 1588, o Papa Sisto V defendeu a tese da alma existir a partir da concepção. Em 1591, apenas três anos depois, o Papa Gregório XIV revogou a bula anterior voltando à tese medieval da incorporação tardia da alma que só foi, por sua vez, revogada definitivamente em 1869, por Pio IX (na bula Apostolicae Sedis). A partir de Pio IX, juntando-se outras bulas na mesma direcção durante o Século XX, chegou-se à posição oficial e actual da Igreja [2]. Uma posição que, apesar de uma história mais antiga, tem 'apenas' 150 anos.

De qualquer forma, para a Igreja uma pessoa é alguém que detenha uma alma [3]. A tese corrente que a alma entra no momento da concepção, faz com que a Igreja equacione o aborto ao assassinato de uma pessoa. Assim, assumindo este pressuposto, é lógico que se pretenda impedir o aborto até a quem não é católico. Um assassino não deixa de o ser pelas crenças que defende. Seja ateu, seja religioso, se faz um aborto é responsável por um crime gravíssimo. O problema é que os católicos não se comportam desta forma, no seu dia-a-dia. Numa sociedade com uma tão grande taxa de crentes, perante tantos milhares de assassinatos de inocentes, o seu silêncio é ensurdecedor. Se o Estado financiasse o assassinato forçado de milhares de idosos por ano, esse seria um acto que a sociedade civil não suportaria. Porque não agem, então, os católicos? A minha explicação não é que um católico é indiferente ao assassinato de inocentes (uma afirmação ridícula, como é ridícula a afirmação que um ateu não possui juízo ético). A minha explicação é que o católico típico -- incluído a maioria da hierarquia da Igreja -- sabe, mesmo que inconscientemente, que um aborto nos prazos legais, de facto, não é o mesmo que assassinar uma pessoa. Um facto que se reflecte no comportamento dos crentes, apesar de toda a regulamentação eclesiástica em sentido contrário.

Mede-se melhor alguém, não pelas crenças que afirma ter, mas pelas acções que toma ou omite.

Refs:

[1] Smith - A Christian Response to the New Genetics (pp. 112-113)
[2] The History of Abortion in the Catholic Church, http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/pubs/cfc_archive/articles/TheHistoryofAbortion.asp
[3] Catecismo da Igreja Católica, Parte III.1.1.1

Overton

A janela de Overton é um conceito da ciência política, introduzido por Joseph P. Overton, que descreve um facto social inescapável: os conceitos considerados aceitáveis para serem discutidos publicamente são muito limitados. Esta janela altera-se com o tempo, reciclando, esquecendo, introduzindo termos e ideias, soluções. Por exemplo, no século XIX era possível falar publicamente de políticas raciais ou de eugenia, mas agora seria equivalente a um suicídio político (ao ponto do corrector automático não conhecer a palavra eugenia e sugerir-me 'Eugénia'). Como exemplo inverso temos o casamento homossexual, algo aceitável para discussão hoje em dia, mas mesmo o mais racional, coerente e influente dos pensadores liberais de há 100 anos jamais ousaria discutir o tema em público. Não é certo que a janela se alargue com os anos, mesmo imaginando possível uma qualquer métrica. A única certeza empírica é a janela ser limitada. 

O transformar da opinião pública para que certas ideias passem de impensáveis para radicais, de radicais para aceitáveis, e finalmente de aceitáveis para essenciais, é um papel social da maior importância. É um caminho percorrido por inúmeras pessoas ao longo dos séculos, desde filósofos e políticos a outros agentes sociais. Os direitos humanos, a igualdade das mulheres, a abolição, a separação da Igreja e do Estado, a liberdade de expressão, o trabalho infantil, a independência da Justiça, todos elas consideradas ideias impensáveis algures no passado. Devemos muito a todos os que lutaram e sofreram as consequências para nos legar estas subtis mas críticas heranças. 

A minha opinião é que existe um problema muitíssimo grave com a actual janela de Overton. A civilização globalizada caminha para uma mudança radical, talvez inédita, mas não é possível abordar certos tipos de solução por políticos e outras figuras públicas que prezem a sua reputação. Esta mudança deriva de estarmos a atingir uma série de limites físicos do nosso planeta. Limites energéticos, sobre-população, o colapso de um sistema financeiro de natureza exponencial, uma pressão intolerável sobre o ecossistema. O tema do ecossistema é abordável mas não o é um certo tipo de raciocínio que aponta à sua resolução. Não é admissível explicitar a ligação integral entre o ecossistema planetário e a economia global. Não é possível admitir que o crescimento -- actualmente um conceito sacralizado -- possa ser negativo à economia e à sociedade, que é possível pensar políticas baseadas na estabilização da produção global (a steady-state economics) e não no crescimento infinito. Igualmente, não pertence à janela de Overton o constatar que todas estas questões estão relacionadas, e que os problemas económicos do Ocidente podem ser meros sintomas iniciais dos limites que estão a ser atingidos. 

Um exemplo particularmente difícil: será inevitável discutir a limitação do número de carros privados existentes. Estes são responsáveis pela maior parte dos cerca de 80% do consumo de petróleo mundial que é dedicado aos transportes rodoviários. A médio prazo (talvez 10, talvez 20 anos) este consumo crescente colocará em perigo o uso do petróleo (de extracção barata) para uma actividade à qual não existe alternativa: a aviação. Mas que político arriscaria informar a população que será preciso mudar a forma de nos deslocarmos para acomodar uma diminuição progressiva e a eventual proibição do uso de automóveis daqui a uma geração? A resposta é simples: ninguém. Este é um tipo de discussão que está totalmente fora da janela de Overton. O perigo é que se, e quando, este assunto entrar na discussão pública, a maior parte do combustível barato disponível estará já demasiado perto da exaustão. A partir daí o combustível da aviação ficará dependente de fontes fósseis muito mais caras, o que implicará o colapso do mercado aéreo para níveis de décadas atrás, pelo preço que os bilhetes atingirão para acomodar o preço do combustível. Poderá isto não acontecer? É possível. É possível que ocorra algum desenvolvimento tecnológico -- que os últimos 50 anos de investimento das companhias petrolíferas foram incapazes de conseguir -- e nos inundem de algum novo tipo de petróleo economicamente competitivo*. Mas não é provável. E no entanto, a probabilidade deste evento ocorrer é, literalmente, indiscutível.

* O pico de produção de petróleo convencional ocorreu por volta de 2006. [World Energy Outlook 2010, Key Graphs, p.7]

Speech and Violence

The differences between speech and violence are not the differences between words and acts, or between good and evil.

Some speech promotes violence, like teaching xenophobia or religious intolerance. Some violence protects speech, like the lawful actions of the police in a free society. The line between speech and violence is too blurry, they overlap too much on each other. Why can't someone publicly deny historical or scientific facts? Why can't religious people verbally express their emotions against heresy? This is not about spreading false personal accusations (like defamation) or taking advantage of someone's name or work (like plagiarism or fraud). The argument is symmetric: there should be nothing wrong about denying or showing disrespect about beliefs or to argue how unfounded are certain system of ideas. For example, it is wrong for a society to apply violence or censorship to the ones exposing Homeopathy for what it is (a placebo) and it is also wrong for the same society to prohibit the expression of homeopathic ideas (which is not the same as allowing people to sell homeopathic products branded as medicine, which they are not, but that is a matter of fraud, not a matter of free-speech).

One role of the state is to protect its citizens. The state will always classify and restrict variants of violence and speech. In the category of 'violent speech' it is common to find notions like libel, slander, obscenity, hate speech, blasphemy, incitement. Each society adapts the broadness of this category, but we will not find a society that dismiss the idea entirely. And this is because speech can be violent and every feasible society always restricts violence one way or the other. 

The focus should be in the discourse's subject. Is it about people, communities, specific individuals, or is it about ideas, opinions, beliefs? People have rights, ideas do not. No one owns an idea, no person 'is' one. Every criticism over an idea should never be interpreted as violence against its believers, even if they see it that way. There’s no right to not be offended. On the other hand, a verbal and personal attack can be interpreted as a violent act, just like a punch. Only the latter, not the former, should concern the judicial system. This is the difference between blasphemy and hate speech, between mocking ideas and defaming communities. Religions are systems of ideas and rituals. A religion has followers but it is not them. The same goes with Ideologies or Corporations. All systems of belief should and must be open to criticism. Every free society that gives them protective status walks a messy and dangerous path. People are, by definition, worthy of respect. Beliefs must strive to be.

"[...] in 1980, U.S. federal usury laws, which had previously limited interest to between 7 and 10 percent, were eliminated by act of Congress. Just as the United States had managed to largely get rid of the problem of political corruption by making the bribery of legislators effectively legal (it was redefned as "lobbying"), so the problem of loan-sharking was brushed aside by making real interest rates of 25 percent, so percent, or even in some cases (for instance for payday loans) 120 percent annually, once typical only of organized crime, perfectly legal-and therefore, enforce­ able no longer by just hired goons and the sort of people who place mutilated animals on their victims' doorsteps, but by judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and police." (pg.376) Debt, The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber (2011)

Eutanásia e Soylent Green

"[...] All hypocrisy aside [Soylent Green] speaks to another area of future shock that's dear to my heart: the the death with dignity right to die. GREEN has the best assisted suicide scene in all cinema! When Eddie G. can't stand it no more, he heads off to 'Home' - a giant white (air-conditioned!) edifice that draws the shambling old city dwellers in like the light at the end of a filthy smog-encrusted, rat-crowded tunnel. It's no coincidence that once one decides to shuffle off their mortal coil everything becomes suddenly magical and precious. Heston finally cries when he sees the Cinemascope vistas that only the voluntary suicides are allowed access to in the magic chamber. Beforehand, when you enter "Home"; a man and a woman in white flowing robes let you pick the color of the blazing light you want to subsume you in the chamber.

I love that retro-futuristic suicide chamber so much I want to live there! I want to encourage the building of just such a room as a place not just for dying, but tripping... instead of the usual clinical hospital setting where most legally approved medical experiment therapeutic tripping is done. In fact, if you substitute exposed brick for one of the walls and make the screen just a tiny smaller, and put the bed on the floor, it would look a lot like my old apartment!

Most of all I wish my 100 year -old granny could have access to an assisted suicide set-up like that one. They won't let her just die in her nursing home, just because she's fairly healthy for a 100 year old woman... it's just she's bored. She can barely hear or see anymore, and can't walk because of a bad hip, and can't really think straight for long periods... I know she'd at least like to have the option, as she meanders through the years; her own mom died at 107--and the last17 years (!) kind of sucked) the doctors are hovering to make sure she sticks around in this earthly, withered form as long as possible.

It's ironic that our collective denial of death has sealed the doom of this planet and made dying so unpleasant. Western medical science is convinced dying is a violation of our basic human liberties, and they're too busy curing every disease nature can come up with to consider whether they've doomed us all in the process. It's left for hundredth monkeys like me and Chuck Heston to ask the tough questions and make the grisly suggestions." Erich Kuersten

Tainter - The collapse of complex societies IV

Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity. The notion that collapse is uniformly a catastrophe is contradicted, moreover, by the present theory. To the extent that collapse is due to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity, it is a economizing process. It occurs when it becomes necessary to restore the marginal return on organizational investment to a more favorable level. [...] In a situation where the marginal utility of still greater complexity would be too low, collapse is a economical alternative.

[...]

Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum. Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration. Where such a competitor does exist there can be no collapse, for the competitor will expand territorially to administer the population left leaderless. Collapse is not the same thing as change of regime. Where peer polities interact collapse will affect all equally, and when it occurs, provided that no outside competitor is powerful enough to absorb all. [...] there are major differences between the current and the ancient worlds that have important implications for collapse. One of these is that the world today is full. That is to say, it is filled by complex societies; these occupy every sector of the globe, except the most desolate. This is a new factor in human history. Complex societies as a whole are a recent and unusual aspect of human life. The current situation, where all societies are so oddly constituted, is unique. [...] There are no power vacuums left today. Every nation is linked to, and influenced by, the major powers, and most are strongly linked with one power bloc or the other. [...] Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.

Tainter - The collapse of complex societies III

Any complex hierarchy must allocate a portion of its resource base to solving the problems of the population it administers, but must also set aside resources to solve problems created by its own existence, and created by virtue of overall societal complexity. Prior to the development of modern welfare states it is likely that these increased administrative costs did little for the population as a whole other than to maintain some semblance of basic needs. And often even that was not accomplished. To maintain growth in complexity, hierarchies levy heavier taxes on their populations. At some point even this yields declining marginal returns. This happens when rates are so high that avoidance increases, and taxation-induced infation erodes the value of the money collected.

Rulers [...] must constantly legitimize their reigns. Legitimizing activities include such things as external defense and internal order, alleviating the effects of local productivity fluctuations, undertaking local development projects, and providing food and entertainment (as in Imperial Rome) for urban masses. In many cases the productivity of these legitimizing investments will decline. Whatever activities a hierarchy undertakes initially to bond a population to itself (providing defense, agricultural development, public works, bread and circuses, and the like) often thereafter become de rigueur, so that further bonding activities are at higher cost, with little or no additional benefit to the hierarchy. [...] The alternative course is to reduce legitimizing activities and increase other means of behavioral control. Yet in such situations, as resources committed to benefits decline, resources committed to control must increase. Although quantitative cost/beneft data for such control systems are rare, it seems reasonable to infer that as the costs of coercion increase, the benefits (in the form of population compliance) probably do not grow proportionately [...] These remarks are not meant to suggest that social evolution carries no benefits, nor that the marginal product of social complexity always declines. The marginal product of any investment declines only after a certain point; prior to that point benefits increase faster than costs. Very often, though, societies do reach a level where continued investment in complexity yields a declining marginal return. At that point the society is investing heavily in an evolutionary course that is becoming less and less productive, where at increased cost it is able to do little more than maintain the status quo.

[...]

For human societies, the best key to continued socioeconomic growth, and to avoiding or circumventing (or at least financing) declines in marginal productivity, is to obtain a new energy subsidy when it becomes apparent that marginal productivity is beginning to drop. Among modern societies this has been accomplished by tapping fossil fuel reserves and the atom. Among societies without the technical springboard necessary for such development, the usual temptation is to acquire an energy subsidy through territorial expansion.

Tainter - The collapse of complex societies II

[I]ntensification in agriculture and resource production follows a pattern of declining marginal productivity [...] rationally-acting human populations will first exploit those resources that yield the best return per unit of effort, and still meet the needs of the population. If this is so, then it follows that any change in resource extraction must be in the direction of using resources that are more costly to obtain, process, distribute, and/or market, so that the marginal product of labor and other inputs declines. Thus, hunters and gatherers first exploit foods that are higher in nutritional value, and easier to obtain and process, than resources that are less favorable for these characteristics [...] In other spheres of resource extraction, minerals and energy forms can be ranked in terms of their ease of discovery, extraction, processing, and use. Resources that rank higher in these dimensions will be used before resources that don't, and when these are no longer sufficient, secondary resources will be employed. [...] Among whatever set of resources a population obtains, for whatever reasons, the law of diminishing returns is likely to apply. As demand for a commodity grows, increased production will at some point mean depletion or insuffciency of the least costly sources. At that point, more costly sources must be used, with declining marginal returns.

Tainter - The collapse of complex societies I

Despite a institutionalized authority structure, an ideological basis, and a monopoly of force, the rulers of states share at least one thing with chiefs and Big Men: the need to establish and constantly reinforce legitimacy. In complex as well as simpler societies, leadership activities and societal resources must be continuously devoted to this purpose. Hierarchy and complexity, as noted, are rare in human history, and where present require constant reinforcement. No societal leader is ever far from the need to validate position and policy, and no hierarchical society can be organized without explicit provision for this need.

Legitimacy is the belief of the populace and the elites that rule is proper and valid, that the political world is as it should be. It pertains to individual rulers, to decisions, to broad policies, to parties, and to entire forms of government. The support that members are willing to extend to a political system is essential for its survival. Decline in support will not necessarily lead to the fall of a regime, for to a certain extent coercion can replace commitment to ensure compliance. Coercion, though, is a costly, ineffective strategy which can never be completely or permanently successful. Even with coercion, decline in popular support below some critical minimum leads infallibly to political failure. Establishing moral validity is a less costly and more effective approach.

Nacionalismo

[...] There is however a less obvious, but far more important difference between nationalism and familial favoritism: Despite its mighty evolutionary basis, almost everyone recognizes moral strictures against familial favoritism. Almost everyone knows that “It would help my son” is not a good reason to commit murder, break someone’s arm, or steal. Indeed, almost everyone knows that “It would help my son” is not a good reason for even petty offenses – like judging a Tae Kwon Do tournament unfairly because your son’s a contestant.

Nationalism, in contrast, is widely seen as an acceptable excuse for horrific crimes against outgroups. Do you plan to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent foreign civilians? Just say, “It will save American [German/Japanese/Russian/whatever] lives” – and other members of your tribe will nod their heads. Do you want to deprive millions of foreigners of the basic human rights to sell their labor to willing buyers, rent apartments from willing landlords, and buy groceries from willing merchants? Just say, “It’s necessary to protect American jobs” in a self-righteous tone, then bask in the admiration of your fellow citizens - Bryan Caplan [via Café Hayek]

Distância

As palavras representam um compromisso de significados. Cada imagem do mundo, cada pessoa, encontra na linguagem uma tradução comum, uma comunicação privilegiada com os outros. Mas esta tradução tem falhas, desacordos que passam sem ser anunciados sendo, com suficiente azar, fontes de tragédia. A maioria das palavras não aparentam ter este problema, como 'formiga', 'unha', 'amarelo'. Infelizmente, porque decerto não é coincidência, palavras com impacto social, como 'política', 'igualdade' ou 'juramento', são riquíssimas em equívocos. Veja-se esta última, 'juramento'. Detenho dois significados distintos desta palavra: (i) o intuito de respeitar a promessa feita independentemente do contexto, ou (ii) o intuito de respeitar a promessa só enquanto os pressupostos iniciais continuem a ser respeitados. A distância entre estas duas interpretações é a distância que separa, por exemplo, um energúmeno com farda de um polícia.

Políticas

Como pode uma economia sustentável ser compatível com a exigência de crescimento constante? Uma economia que tem de crescer para existir não lida bem com limites ou fronteiras. Só que o mundo é este, tem um volume fixo, e há décadas que usamos mais do que a sua capacidade natural de regeneração. A tecnologia e a ciência também têm limites humanos e económicos, e é provável que tenhamos, neste domínio, já entrado em ganhos decrescentes. Se, por azar nosso, uma economia sustentável for similar a um ecossistema, como parar, dar um passo atrás, como travar este comboio desgovernado que insistimos em acelerar?

Alegoria

No corporativismo está implícito um desvalorizar sistemático da verdade dos factos e da justiça das situações. Quando polícias, professores, magistrados, sindicatos ou outras corporações protegem-se entre si e à priori numa narrativa monolítica, autista e desculpabilizante pagam o preço do Pedro e do Lobo: quando dizem a verdade, quando têm razão, poucos acreditam.

Áreas de Influência

O Estado não devia ter qualquer ligação com a noção de casamento consensual entre pessoas adultas. E nas áreas em que existe essa ligação (como a adopção, a recolha de impostos, etc.) devia focar-se na noção de agregado familiar e não preocupar-se se as pessoas em questão apenas fazem sexo catolicamente correcto.

Identidade e anonimato

"Opponents of online anonymity often repeat the platitude that “real name” identification promotes civility. While that may be true, it is often at the expense of free expression. Not only does anonymity enable dissidents in oppressive regimes, but it also helps the small-town kid experimenting with his sexuality or the abuse survivor starting a new life.

Internet intermediaries offer tools that allow users to maintain civility without sacrificing anonymity. On social networks, users can moderate offensive comments or block users who are harassing them. Newspapers can institute systems for flagging inappropriate comments.

Concerns about cyber-bullying and other online crimes shouldn’t be dismissed, but law enforcement already has tools to identify anonymous criminals. [...] We should not be willing to sacrifice free expression for the possibility of civility, especially not when there are more effective alternatives." Eva Galperin, Jillian C. York @ DeepLinks