My blog is a roadmap to acquiring the practical skills necessary to make real connections with other people and collectively work to find ways for us to all just get along without state-sponsored initiation of aggression against the governed. My post here is aimed at showing a few causes of political conflict that we can change by changing ourselves rather than killing others.
People generally avoid an all out fight to the death if it can be avoided, but people differ on the definition of "what can be avoided." I have a preference for peace and for voluntary interactions among people, so I have developed some habits of viewing problems in a way that helps me to solve social problems peacefully. I start by searching for things that I could theoretically do on my own to create a solution that meets everybody's needs. Then I have to determine my willingness to take a route like that. With that in mind...
A great philosopher once said :^)
"If you want to make the world a better place, look in the mirror and make that change."
I will discuss two categories of problems and two categories of solutions in this post: other-focused, and self-focused. If we focus exclusively on the problems and mistakes of others (other-focused), we will tend to be hostile because we will perceive that the only way to meet our needs is to "fix" other people (i.e., get them to do things regardless of whether they volunteer to do so). I generally see that approach as intellectually clumsy at best. As a scientist, I see no objective basis to assert that the other person is always morally subordinate to me. Instead, I try to frame problems with all the actors as equals, like this: Two people have different sets of needs, how can they find a way to get their needs met by voluntary interaction and negotiation? I would typically specify the specific needs for the situation (I'll post later about what I mean by needs).
I see other-focused problems as the final hurdle on the path to a different type of government (e.g., cognitive biases, lack of self-regulation/patience, lack of perspective-taking skills, poor reasoning skills...). I see self-focused solutions as the place where most of the footwork needs to happen. What I hope to do in the coming months is describe this path to peace that I have mentioned, then present audio dialog showing how to communicate with, negotiate with, and find truth with somebody who has opposing political beliefs. Those seeking violent rebellion will then have a difficult question to answer: Am I justified in killing someone in a political dispute when I could have spent 200 hours (or whatever the number is) on building my skills so that I could connect with people and find peaceful solutions?
Since I mentioned self-focused solutions, most of us would improve our ability to share the message of voluntaryism by learning how to:
• begin and maintain a discussion without inciting negative reactions (e.g., avoid subjective judgments/evaluations, don't threaten the other person...),
• exercise enough self-control to stay calm and be patient both during the discussion and also in subsequent consideration of the discussion,
• take the perspective of the other person in the discussion (e.g., try to see things from the other person's point of view),
• treat political claims with skepticism,
• identify the most fundamental points of disagreement in terms of fundamental needs (I'll define this in a future post),
• proceed in a manner that would be deemed productive by all participants, and
• ultimately reach some type of agreement so that we can all just get along.
I omitted from that list any mention of logic or science. I suspect that if people developed the skills above, and if they communicated one-on-one with others or in small, diverse groups, they would make enormous progress in developing a culture of peace. I say this, because it is much more difficult to actively hurt somebody when you have taken the time to get to know them (or people like them) and understand their pain. Logic and science are the icing on the cake.
Rather than spend an hour rambling about military strategy, which I don't care to study, my unscientific gut feeling is that voluntaryists, anarchists, and Libertarians are a tiny minority in the United States (where I live), and I don't see any feasible chance of a military victory for any of us in the near future.
Communist revolutions around the world promised freedom from the oppression of the owners of production, but what they typically got after the violent revolution was oppression from a different master. I live in the USA. For some reason the song says that this is the land of the free, but what we have now is an abundance of people and an abundance of government regulation. My point is that so far major revolutions occurred with a centralized military force, and those leaders typically establish a government with central authority that goes wrong.
Consider the possibility that people support an illegitimate government not because they are stupid, but because WE have not made the effort to learn how to communicate with people in a manner that influences how they act.
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