Unlike inanimate objects human beings have needs, wants and desires that vary based on gender, ethnicity, religion, culture, race, creed, and the individual. The same individual’s desires can change based on the year, month, week, and even day in question. After knowing an individual for a long period of time one may make certain general predictions based on previous behavioral patterns but even this may be risky.
Tag: collectivism
Collective Intelligence in Action: The Self-Directed Education Movement
We humans form institutions for the value they offer to society. Collectively these structures function with an intelligence based on what works. Ideally, whatever works persists and whatever doesn’t work fades away. But sometimes institutions become resistant to change or change in ways that make them more rigid and therefore less responsive. When that happens, people who work for or are served by that institution tend to suffer.
Thanksgiving Was a Triumph of Capitalism over Collectivism
This time of the year, whether in good economic times or bad, is when we gather with our family and friends and enjoy a Thanksgiving meal together. It marks a remembrance of those early Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the uncharted ocean from Europe to make a new start in Plymouth, Massachusetts. What is less appreciated is that Thanksgiving also is a celebration of the birth of free enterprise in America.
Democracy Is War by Other Means
Democracy is war by other means. Superficially, it is waged with ballots instead of bullets. At the end of the day, those ballots become bullets. Elections load real guns and aim them at real people. If you disobey the commandments handed down by elected officials, beefy men with shaved heads and Ray-Ban sunglasses will come to take you away. If you resist them, hot lead will fly. Elections are scrambles for control over the service weapons that propel those rounds. In such contests, every faction is trying to point the gun barrels at someone else.
Individualism vs. Collectivism
Division of Labor, Evolution, Tom Woods
Send him mail. “Finding the Challenges” is an original column appearing every other Wednesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Verbal Vol. Verbal is a software engineer, college professor, corporate information officer, life long student, farmer, libertarian, literarian, student of computer science and self-ordering phenomena. Archived columns can be found here. FTC-only RSS feed available here. With today’s…
Individualism, Mozart, The Excluded Other
Send him mail. “Finding the Challenges” is an original column appearing every other Wednesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Verbal Vol. Verbal is a software engineer, college professor, corporate information officer, life long student, farmer, libertarian, literarian, student of computer science and self-ordering phenomena. Archived columns can be found here. FTC-only RSS feed available here. This introduction…
On the Nauglers
Having participated in the support effort for the Joe and Nicole Naugler family, whose ten children were kidnapped by sheriffs and then passed off to child protective services, and followed online discussions of the ongoing incident, it seems to me that, like all controversial topics, this is a battle of ideologies. The ideological battles that…
Smart Phones, Spooner #17, Mental Models
Send him mail. “Finding the Challenges” is an original column appearing every other Wednesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Verbal Vol. Verbal is a software engineer, college professor, corporate information officer, life long student, farmer, libertarian, literarian, student of computer science and self-ordering phenomena. Archived columns can be found here. FTC-only RSS feed available here. Yes, I…
Government and Voluntaryism
Nobody asked but … If we decide that Government of an appropriate size and Voluntaryism are both economic goods, how shall we proceed to construct non-corrupted versions of each? With any two people government and voluntary agreement are one, because any departure would be a corruption — any instance of a disagreement converted to an…