sourceType:: book author:: Max Borders sourcePublication:: Book ref:: noteTitle:: The Decentralist; Max Borders. (book)
The Decentralist; Max Borders. (book)
My notes and reactions
Re: the Decentralist: so much of this transition to decentralism requires individuals to be responsible and reliable. This is in stark contrast to the rampant personal emotional and moral chaos currently on display in society. Reducing reliance on the state requires individuals to have more integrity; and presence of individuals with integrity makes it easier to reduce reliance on the state.
Highlights:
kindle highlights as of [[2023-01-17]]❌:
Motivation: An Introduction
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First, why did the mission officer need to know that you were interested in being happy? Well, for one thing, you have to be motivated by something powerful enough to undertake such a dangerous mission. It’s going to require a lot of you. A sanctimonious feeling of self-sacrifice would not last very long. For another, unhappy people can make everybody else pretty miserable. Your colleagues don’t need that.
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It’s tempting, for example, to think of happiness as a mere sensation, like a good feeling. But it’s more than that. Sure, positive emotions are part of it, but they’re not the sum of happiness. The ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle talked about eudaemonia, which includes a sense of general well-being but sprinkles in meaningful activity. Happiness can sometimes involve being in a state of engagement with something challenging, which positive psychologists call “flow.” And of course, happiness can flow from pursuing and achieving your goals.
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But after you’ve arrived on Mars and set up the colony, there must be something more. There is the day-to-day work of being a Martian colonist, solving problems, building things, and helping others. That also has to satisfy you, at least in some measure. You should also derive a sense of meaning from doing the work, which is part of happiness too—perhaps the most important part. If you only derived satisfaction from the idea of going to Mars, you would not be a good candidate. Because when you are eight months away from Earth, with space ferries running infrequently, you’d better find ways to appreciate the little things. This is one of life’s secrets.
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Mises’s theory, praxeology, rests on the idea that individual human beings act, which means they engage in conscious activities towards goals.
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Praxeologists only hold that people have goals and think they can arrive at them by taking action. Actions can be right or wrong insofar as they help one achieve contentment or happiness. Furthermore, these actions take place in some set of circumstances over time. If one’s desires could all be satisfied by snapping one’s fingers, finger-snapping might be the sum of human action. But human action is purposive and varied. Such an insight does not preclude coordination or collaboration among those who share goals. Indeed, coordination and collaboration can be essential to flourishing. Mises’s method reminds us that only individuals act, even if they decide to work in synchrony or specialization towards some end. Whenever a person acts rationally, she thinks her action will make some difference, that is, that she’ll prefer some state of affairs to whatever condition results from doing nothing at all.
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For most of human history, and certainly most of prehistory, people spent more time dealing with drives on the first three levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. It wasn’t until the Agricultural Revolution that the ancients could pursue intellectual and spiritual matters to such an unprecedented degree.
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And all were made possible thanks to the advent of settled agriculture, which made food more abundant, allowing people more time to reflect.
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Happiness without meaning is hollow. Happiness involves striving, and importantly, contact with reality.
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So, if harmony is a precondition for collaboration and exchange, it should be obvious that too much conflict increases poverty. And, of course, poverty creates headwinds to one’s pursuit of happiness. These positive and negative interdependencies can create upward or downward spirals, respectively. Thus happiness, harmony, and prosperity should always be understood as working together.
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our mission is to create a condition of radical pluralism, a garden of forking paths.
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That is, in our lives we sometimes play out seemingly incompatible storylines. These stories suggest bifurcation—splitting—whether of time, space, or association. And yet the whole human story will still be there. In our ideal future, the strutting and fretting characters come to a point where more than one outcome is possible. So it ought to be. Therefore, why shouldn’t many outcomes be possible? This way of thinking causes our stories to branch out into multiple narrative universes, setting up opportunities for new bifurcations.
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The idea, née the ideal, involves creating space for human beings to find niches that best suit their conceptions of the good life. But sometimes, one needs to create a new niche. In a world of great powers sitting on virtually all of the landmass covering the earth, new niches can be hard to come by. If our objective is to make room for the garden of forking paths, we must set about changing minds.
- Mission: One Revolution
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Decentralists won’t stop until we have reached our objective. We call that objective the Consensual Society.
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The Decentralist way of seeing is a general skepticism of all claims to political authority. Indeed, Decentralists in the liberal tradition are not only skeptical of authority, they think any right conception of justice ought to originate in consent. In other words, you should be able to choose your own governance association. No one else should be allowed to force any system on you. This philosophy contrasts starkly with either Lockean or Rousseavian conceptions that evoke a hypothetical social contract or general will.
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Decentralists seek consent-based governance and reject compulsion. So, despite widespread sentimental attachments to the democratic republic, Decentralists think nation-states are unjustifiable. All systems rooted in compulsion or subordination are indefensible unless their citizens give prior consent.
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those who do not accept political authority simply have to find a way to navigate life with it as a social fact. And then push back. To be a Decentralist is to be comfortable with civil disobedience—all while creating consent-based systems in parallel. Such systems will be designed to challenge, circumvent, or obsolete political authorities.
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Decentralism is then, at best, something like an asymptote, an effort that gets closer and closer to ideal but never arrives. And, indeed, its instantiations will never be perfect. Perfectionist doctrines are doomed. Instead, Decentralists embrace the mission and work relentlessly to create spaces to experiment in creating consent-based niches. We seek to lower the costs of exiting any system that does not serve its members. We seek to lower the costs of entering any system that promises better to serve its members.
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Token ecosystems are a wonderland for the Decentralist. They represent the potential for self-organization according to as many experiments in living as there are different ideas of the good. Despite hackers and scammers, the “crypto” space holds the promise and possibility of transition into more consent-based systems of governance, which we call “rules without rulers.” These technologies threaten to make powerful corporate and government hierarchies obsolete. Those who stand to be toppled are getting predictably hostile.
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Decentralists think the best check on power is more radical systems of permissionless decentralization. These forces give rise to opportunities to exit a system if it doesn’t serve one’s needs. In this way, Decentralists are pragmatic. While most see no contradiction in using both political-and non-political means to check unjustified authority, they prefer non-political means. Widespread civil disobedience is a more effective check.
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the Decentralist understands it is reasonable to accept certain constraints on her behavior, say by contract, as long as she gets something important in return—including her idea of the social good. To live under her idea of the social good, she must accept others who do not.
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and mutual aid10—
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Decentralists need not factionalize in the matrix of power, because the point of Decentralism is pluralism. Instead of the never-ending search for ‘checks and balances,’ Decentralists united under the idea of consent, which has the power to govern just about everything in a regime of governance pluralism.
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a lot of critics think that deliberation among elected officials via the legislative process creates justice (law as justice). Whatever comes out of that legitimating process is justice. But Decentralists think this gets matters precisely backward. Not only should different rulesets be tried and tested in frictions of human experience, something like law should only emerge from human interactions and agreements in which people discover justice. (Justice as law.) Consent-based law generates higher-quality law because finding justice is more of a discovery process than a deliberative one. Think: common law over statute law. In this way, the law becomes a happy byproduct of human choices, particularly as people seek to reduce friction with one another.
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the Decentralist’s starting point for justice is consent.
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Whether they have the imprimatur of political authorities, systems of consent are both justifiable and just, as long as they cause no injury to anyone, within or without.
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Decentralist systems are technological tools and institutional rules. Like more familiar tools, cryptography can be used in the service of good or evil. Hammers can be used to build a treehouse or murder one’s spouse, but that latter fact does not make the existence of hammers unjustifiable.
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There are two ways to determine whether some “good” is common to members of a group: The first way is simply to claim that something is good and then attempt to justify authoritarian means of achieving that good. The second is to offer some purported good and then determine the extent to which people adopt it. Decentralists think demonstrated preference is superior to theoretical lip service, because people’s actual choices supply proof. Solutions such as dominant assurance contracts show how consent-based provision of public goods can replace tax and transfer schemes, for example.
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governance services—including economic systems—are systems entrepreneurs will offer instead of being systems that authorities impose.
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By lowering exit costs, we will join the system we prefer—whether communist, capitalist, or something altogether different. The big tradeoff is that no one will be able to impose the One True Way on everyone else.
- Means: Two Hands
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There are only two ways to get another to do what you want him to do—compulsion and persuasion.
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By being born on a particular patch of soil, a special group of people gets to tell you what you can and cannot do. Others are paid enforcers. The rest obey, or else. If you disagree, the enforcers will come with guns and take you to prison. That means politics is more or less a complicated zero-sum game that cannot exist without the threat of violence.
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With morality, you’re trying to guide your counterpart into a sense of what is right and wrong, so he acts accordingly. In markets, you endeavor to show a customer that something is desirable so he’ll come to desire it and then act based on that desire.
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An extreme position is that compulsion is never justifiable. Yet hardly anyone would assent to such a view.
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Between the absolute and the arbitrary, we want to find a sweet spot that puts compulsion in its place. We can start by proscribing the initiation of violence (or threat of violence) against those who have injured no one. We can add that people can and should be allowed to opt into different systems of association that constrain their choices and place obligations on them. The rest is conflict resolution. While these systems might require some internal compulsion, there are reasonable limits.
- Mind: Three Governors
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there are two forms of alignment. The first is internal alignment, in which one practices tapping into the energies of the other Governors before taking action. The second is alignment among people who have different primary Governors. Both forms are critical to thriving in the Age of Complexity. Indeed, the Decentralist understands she will have to make adjustments as she adapts to waning centralization and waxing decentralization.
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Attention implies agency. In other words, as more decisions are not being made on our behalf, we must train up our sovereignty to face those decisions. That is why it bears repeating: Freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin.
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One suspects that is precisely how one ought to communicate with moral suasion, too. In fact, moral philosophers who argue that their work is just Reason are kidding themselves. One can no more assert the rightness or wrongness of some action without the heart and gut as Elliot can make a decision about what music to put on. We are creatures of embodied cognition. And we were forged in evolutionary fires over millions of years. If we are better to govern ourselves, the goal is not to deny any of the three Governors, but rather to ensure each has a seat at the table.
- Matrix: Four Forces
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Eros Masculine is the urge to control.
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Thanatos Masculine is the urge to annihilate.
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Eros Feminine is the urge to flow. If things aren’t going your way, it’s okay if they go another way, or maybe they’ll come around to your way in time.
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Call it the Law of Flow, following physicist Adrian Bejan: “For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides greater and greater access to the currents that flow through it.” 3
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Thanatos Feminine is the urge to rest. If things aren’t going your way, just go to sleep or stay in bed.
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write this volume at the cusp of the Age of Complexity. At this cusp, centralized systems must begin to give way to decentralized systems because centralized systems require controllers. In other words, the masculine must give way to the feminine. Society has become too complex for controllers to exert control, yet control is the essence of Centralism. Severe unintended consequences and information breakdown will become commonplace as authorities double down on the will to power. If they persist in clinging too tightly to the notion that control is possible, Decentralists will underthrow them. Otherwise, we will all be cast into a Dark Age. Thus, we must teach ourselves how to relate to one another peacefully without central control.
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Some imagine that disorder will follow in the absence of central control, when central control is the source of all the disorder they’re beginning to see. Thus, excess masculinity drives too many human choices, which means too many people are willing to use or to accept authoritarian measures. After all, one is more likely to seek security in control when she is afraid. There is nothing wrong with the urge to control per se. We simply have to put it in its place. And that place is almost always local.
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In developing technological means to collaborate and cooperate, we must eschew the desire to design and plan as if society were a machine run by a controller. Instead, we have to create flow systems with a high degree of flexibility and liquidity. While Eros Masculine is not good at managing a complex system, it can be suitable for protocol design. The logical bases of computer code have a certain masculine quality—a forcefulness—that allows complexity to emerge. In other words, if the foundational rules are simple, logical, and stable—if x then y—then they are more likely to give rise to systems that flow more readily. Here, the masculine enables the feminine.
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In the moments before letting go we can feel conflicted, which shows up as guilt, anxiety, or inner turmoil. But once we let go, relief can flow over us, signifying a healthy close. Letting go isn’t always passive. It can be a conscious process to accept changing circumstances and adapt to them. In fact, if we are to thrive in the Age of Complexity, we must train ourselves to be adaptable.
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The Tree of Liberty, said Jefferson, must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. So Thanatos Masculine speaks to us in words like “Revolution!” As a man, I certainly identify with that revolutionary fire. But we are living in different times. Thanatos Feminine says let things go. What America has become is not something Jefferson would recognize. What is needed, then, is not violent resistance or overthrow, but for a people to hold hands as we step into the black waters of the river at night. Let it envelop us, cleanse us, and shed us of all this rage for order.
- Mutuality: Five Disruptions
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Though humans can design big, amazing things, our plans and designs will eventually succumb to natural systems, which—though robust and orderly—are unplanned and undesigned. So, instead of seeing the jungle’s revenge as nature defying human progress, we can see it as the victory of evolved systems over intelligent design.
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Nature, too, is about well-designed protocols, even though those protocols are not designed by a designer. DNA is catallactic. DNA is code. And in biology, code is law. At the macro scale, we get planetary ecosystems that include such wonders as the Great Barrier Reef and the rainforests of Tikal.
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we have an evolving technological ecosystem that threatens to replace the old order, which are the various temples to power.
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The first temple to power is the Nation-State with its grand legislatures and executive palaces. Taxes supply blood for the gods in this temple. But a wave of technological solutions is allowing people new capabilities to self-govern.
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Indeed, the most promising feature of DAOs is not collective decision-making at scale. It is the built-in right of exit. The threat of defection looms over any system, which, unlike predatory states, has to provide value to keep members.
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The second temple to power is the Central Bank, with its esoteric symbols and shadowy meetings. Around them are supplicant banks, which serve as satraps in a system of private profit and socialized losses. All-seeing eyes and pyramidal structures are apt for a group that controls the sorcery of transmutation. In other words, these reverse alchemists need no longer turn gold into cheap alloys. They can magically debase the currency simply by adding zeros. Our blood sacrifice is inflation, which is nothing more than a tax on the powerless.
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As developer Justin Goro reminds us, cryptocurrency is a beast that evolves so that “the more the state clamps down, the better the evasive technology will get.”
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The powerful do not want ordinary people to escape crippling inflation or securities regulation. Financial institutions want us to operate within their matrix of go-betweens, brahmins, and fund managers, so we think their great pyramidal scheme is the only game in town. With DeFi, one can take out or pay off loans worth millions without the need for any lawyer, manager, or even personal identification. This is unprecedented in human history. The most powerful bankers in the world are understandably concerned, for their system is being threatened by underthrow.
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The third temple to power is the public corporation with its top-heavy management hierarchies and short-term incentives. Corporate gods extract blood sacrifices through the legal architecture of the corporation itself, which tends to rely on centuries-old organizational operating systems and static shareholder models.
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The fourth temple to power is the Welfare State. Though connected to the first temple, it has its own inertia. In terms of its extractive nature, it might be the most voracious of all. This temple sits on a great moral high ground after all, from which the slings and arrows of sanctimony can be launched. That makes the Welfare State among the most difficult to reform or dislodge. People simply can’t imagine that an underclass of relatively poor people can become anything more than liabilities to be managed by functionaries.
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The fifth temple to power is the Military-Industrial Complex. Though connected to the first temple, it has its own inertia. And like the Welfare State, its appetite is insatiable. Its mission, once national defense, is now to expand an empire that extends around the earth. Instead of feeding on dependency, it feeds on war. Some argue that a global hegemon is good for peace, and yet what sort of peace can last when administered by an unholy alliance between those who profit from conflict and those whose raison d’etre is war? The blood sacrifice to the temple gods is not just tax, but literal blood.
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President Eisenhower warned the world in his 1961 farewell address, In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. 4 It’s debatable whether the subsequent growth of this complex could have been avoided. But Eisenhower was right. His warning went unheeded.
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Overcharging is common and is a predictable consequence of the fact that the military functions in no way like a normal market actor. It is a monopsony, a single market buyer, with incentives to expand.
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Six hundred years ago, the Hanseatic League was a regional group of city-states that coordinated defense. This group held both economic and military sway in an area that went from Novgorod in northern Russia to trade zones near London. It lasted for about 500 years. The Hanseatic League established free trade among its members and created a navy and defense force to protect cargo. It succeeded in mostly eliminating pirates from the Baltic Sea.
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if the incentives align around preserving peace rather than perpetuating war, each region would have a stronger incentive to help neighboring regions defend themselves before an enemy arrived on its shores.
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Bitcoin, the first and perhaps still the most resilient cryptocurrency, shows us the way. In short, authorities can invade a country to take over territory or steal its gold, but private keys live everywhere and nowhere. More and more value will live everywhere and nowhere, which means wars of appropriation are likely to decline as more economic energy gets stored in decentralized networks.
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“When the perceived (risk/ time-discounted) benefits of switching to an alternative exceed the perceived benefits of the status quo—including the perceived switching costs—people will switch to the alternative.” This formulation can be translated into steps: Create overwhelming value in an alternative system. Expose the diminishing benefits of the status-quo offering. Change people’s perceptions of the status quo system relative to that of the alternative. Reduce switching costs. Improve customer value within the alternative system.
- Morality: Six Spheres
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Carbon can come configured as a hexagon, which gives it important properties. For example, when scientists use lasers to arrange these hexagons in certain molecular architectures, it forms a fullerene. Fullerenes, named for Buckminster Fuller, are molecules shaped like soccer balls, only there is space inside these balls. What’s striking about molecules, so configured, is that they are among the strongest materials on earth. Graphene (sheets), nanotubes (cylinders), and fullerenes (spheres) all make for durable materials due to the relationships among the hexagonal carbon atoms.
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we sit squarely in the magisterium of ought, which we call right and wrong. The Six Spheres are nonviolence, integrity, compassion, pluralism, stewardship, and rationality.
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Again, our goal is flourishing. Those who do not share the end of flourishing aren’t locked in solidarity with us. So we must move on together in our practice without them.
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Harmful words and acts begin as negative thoughts. So practice starts in rephrasing and reframing the internal chatter that keeps one company from moment to moment.
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we must also take on a mind-frame of nonviolent resistance against those who would harm or subject us. That includes agents of a state whose threat is comprehensive and systematic. Remember that when we get beyond the smiles, the elections, and the parades, politics terminate in the institutionalized threat of violence. Because Decentralism puts nonviolence at the center of all questions involving human relations, all of our ideas about politics—how it works, what it’s for, and who should run it—are open to revision.
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nonviolence must become the presumption in resolving disputes and making laws, too. Ahimsa thus calls into question the legitimacy of the whole edifice of what we currently call society under coercive governments.
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First, Do no harm. Then, Be of your word.
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Competing ephemera tempt us, so too many people think living in a world of smart devices absolves them of their responsibility to be on time, for example. But the wholesale transformation of society will only come about if more people can be trusted to keep their word. Society operates on people being able to rely on others.
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If people are going to organize themselves to achieve something, integrity is necessary for the group’s ongoing performance.
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Failure to practice integrity means that some part of the whole is not operating according to expectations.
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How do you address free riders on integrity? Probably by segmenting out those who are identified as such. If you want the rewards of networked integrity, you must earn it by being a good participant.
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So, the foundation of being a person of integrity comes in the recognition, first, that one is only as good as his word, and then that he commits to the practice.
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The practice of compassion, then, can be broken into the affective, the deliberative, and the active. That means practice starts with being attuned to the suffering of others, then one must ask oneself whether it is in his power to relieve someone else’s suffering, and then ask how best to go about providing relief. After this deliberation, one takes action. The action could be a gift of assistance, money, advice, or emotional support. The point is that there are myriad ways compassion manifests itself in action, but people tend to neglect the importance of the deliberative stage.