Volitional Science

If you either (a) want to be really happy in this life, or (b), are a student of Galambos and really insist that happiness be a part of the whole theory, or (c) both, then here's happiness defined for you. (This is my version, not Galambos', although we'll see that they're not that different.)

Happiness for a volitional being is having many opportunities to make choices.

Note carefully that you aren't required to actually make any choices. (Or we can say you like to make the NULL choice and let life take you where it will, or, perhaps, let your own inertia take you where it will, or some combination of the two).

Happiness might be a relative condition. It's certainly a subjective matter. Galambos goes into a lot of detail explaining the subjective nature of perception (and shows that therefore reality is subjective) and it's very interesting reading. You might not agree and I'm not going to spend the time to convince you. Arthur Eddington agreed with Galambos. But for the details you have to buy Sic Itur Ad Astra.

The key idea is that everyone's idea of happiness is personal and subjective. And yet ... from this personal and subjective concept it is possible to derive an absolute standard for moral conduct!

This absolute standard is made possible by the definition of property and the goal to provide each person 100% control over their own property. When all is said and done, I believe the definition of property will be the single mega-long-lasting idea that Galambos will have contributed to human kind. Some of the other ideas Galambos has introduced have been around before – but not integrated with his definition of property, which changes everything. Without the definition of property and its applications, chaos results. It’s the definition of property that creates the healthy boundary between individual volitional beings that actually increases choice rather than diminishing choice, as one might expect. (The usual objection to this kind of thing is that if everyone could do what he or she wanted, chaos would result. And that’s true – without the definition of property and its rational application, chaos does result. Even in coercive societies.)

(Galambos likes to point out that Einstein's Relativity Theory works because of the absolute standard imposed by the speed of light; no constant speed of light in a vacuum == no relativity theory.)

This last weekend I spent some time with a smart guy, Charles Vollum, who is into cryptography and the derivative arts, including authentication, digital cash, verifiable non-revocable ownership, etc. He gave me some pointers to some amazing stuff on the Web that describes how to protect ownership of intellectual and "real" property. A lot of really smart people have spent a lot of time working out the technology that will make Galambos' ideas work in the computerized digital age. I'll get into this a bit later on but if you want to do some homework ahead of time visit http://www.erights.org. For an easy preview of some key ideas coming down the road, read the first section of Earthweb by Marc Stiegler. (Thanks to Charles for giving me the pointers to this stuff.)

But back to happiness ... I maintain that a person is happiest when they think they have the most opportunity to make choices. Again, this is always a personal, subjective determination. Just so you know, I agree that many people want choices made for them. It’s just that they want to choose when that happens and also to have the option to choose when it stops. To put it in contrary fashion, people don't like to be coerced.

But still many people say to me, "No, most people like being subjugated and being told what to do." I addressed this a bit in my last column because that was my wife's objection too. Which is also why Galambos chose, I believe, the pursuit of happiness as the foundation of his theory. It’s just that as I try to simplify and explain the ideas, I keep coming back to the idea that choice is the foundation for everything. Happiness is derivative of choice, and not the other way around.

(I went back and looked up the definition of happiness in SIAA and discovered that at the root of it Galambos says "good" is a positive subjective evaluation of a preference. "Bad" is the opposite. Happiness is both added together. Having preferences implies having choices available. So we don't disagree at a fundamental level but more on an expository level. Galambos stresses the pursuit of happiness and doesn't, IMHO, spend enough time showing the basis of happiness derives from choice. In fact, just a few sentences that I could find.)

If people like having choices (notice again, I don't say "making choices" -- only 1/2 the population likes making choices [I can back that up with data and I will later]) but I maintain that all people like having choices or the option to make choices)… Right, that sentence got too long. If people like having choices, why is there so much coercion in the world?

The answer is that people choose it, of course. You know the saying, "The American people get exactly the government they deserve." -- Who said that first?

Galambos explains where our various screwed up systems of government come from - namely, from the demand for security. He describes it in terms of the pursuit of happiness, of course, but I will describe it in terms of choice.

Let’s imagine a happy tribe living peacefully by a river with their basic needs met by nature and good fortune. Everybody's happy until a threat appears and then they shout out (as a group), "Somebody do something!" (Or as Queen Amidala says in Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace, "We must do something senator." She's a true politician. Later she pickes up a gun and starts shooting.) So the strongest guy in the tribe gets nominated for the job of protector. Later on, after some technology develops for defense, and physical prowess isn't such a big requirement for the job of protector, the most manipulative guy gets nominated, because he's best at getting people to sacrifice themselves for the good of the tribe. People - even the people who march off to die in battle - make the choice to subjugate themselves to a higher authority for the good of the tribe, or, probably more directly, for the good of their families, or for glory, or for whatever reason they get conned into believing.

A big problem occurs when the guy (or gal) that the tribe has empowered to protect them wants to keep his job after the threat has been vanquished. He basically goes into the protection business, telling everyone that unless he stays in power terrible things will happen. From time-to-time, he proves it by killing or imprisoning someone in the group, whether that person is a real threat or not, just to make sure everyone knows it's a dangerous world we live in. And of course he starts taxing everyone coercively to pay for the protection of the tribe, and typically, his own vastly improved lifestyle.

Galambos spends a lot of time explaining how political systems that develop from this basis are doomed to failure because they require coercion for success, and coercion is not as productive as freedom of choice.

One thing Galambos doesn't address is why communism (which is what we're talking about here) as an idea is so successful. He talks a bit about the economics of communism and how the basic horrible idea of "from everyone according to his ability and to everyone according to his need" is based on a misapprehension of what constitutes productivity (and property, obviously). I agree with his basic position but I think he missed an important point.

The reason communism (and related ideas like socialism) is so popular is that it works!

What? How can that be?

Communism works for small groups of people. Like families. (I knew I would work family systems into this somehow.) Families are little pockets of communism. Mom, Dad, or some combination of the two provides central authority over the family. When a kid gets sick (or Mom or Dad for that matter), everyone contributes according to his ability to take care of the sick person. The sick person is catered to according to his needs. Whoever is the best person to go to work each day and bring home a paycheck does so. It might be Mom or Dad or both. (It's frequently both because our standard of living has gone down the toilet so much that it requires two incomes to live a 'normal' lifestyle for most families.) We spend the first 18 or 21 years of our lives living in communism! And it works. At least, well enough.

Politicians make use of the fact that communism is familiar (or should I say "family-er") to all of us. Intuitively, it makes sense because we’ve lived in little communistic strongholds for our first 18 years.

The biggest problem with communism is that it doesn't scale up. If communism as a system scaled up, then I think we would all be very happy with it. For instance, if we could really find an uber-parent that really knew what was best for us as individuals, and we all believed it, then we would empower this person, by choice, with life-or-death power over our lives. Life would be simple because our needs would be taken care of by the uber-parent.

Sadly (or happily), there is lots of evidence that such a person doesn’t exist (at least not in the flesh – but I’m not talking about people that hand their lives over to Jesus [but I will get to it later]). There isn’t anyone around that we can hand our lives over to, who knows what’s right for each of us as individuals. It’s true that parents do in fact frequently know what’s better for their kids than their kids know for themselves, due to a lack of experience and maturity (on the kids’ part). But once we’re grown up, the evidence is pretty strong that most people can take care of themselves and make their own decisions for themselves better than some kind of uber-parent.

For one thing, the uber-parent would need to know not only what’s best for me, but for everyone else as well. I think a lot of people assume that the uber-parent could maybe do this because the uber-parent would be looking at the ‘big picture’ and could make trade-offs for the benefit of society that an individual couldn’t make for himself. Just like Mom or Dad frequently are called in to settle familial disputes.

But as it works out, there is no such uber-parent. Most people barely have the intellectual capacity to manage their own lives, let alone someone else’s. But you know what? Even if a race of intelligent aliens took over the earth, and they had the mental capacity to actually micro-manage the lives of all the people on Earth, it would still be coercive unless each individual could choose both (1) whether to let an uber-parent run his life, and (2), which uber-parent ran his life, if that’s what he wanted. If there is no choice involved, then it is forced subjugation and it’s coercive, by definition.

But I hope you’re with me on this – none of our elected leaders are super-intelligent uber-parents capable of running our lives.

So, communism doesn’t scale up. It works for families and small companies (tribes or what Richard Edlund once described to me as "hunting parties") but after about 30 people the whole communism thing gets out of hand.

(My wife also suggests another reason communism can work for small groups is that with a small enough group you actually know your fellow group members as living breathing human beings for whom you can develop empathy. But as the group gets larger you lose that personal contact that motivates you to go the extra mile for someone because of the personal satisfaction it provides to you.)

It’s for this reason that many companies are never able to get past the barrier of ten, twenty, or thirty employees (depending on the intellectual capacity of the company owner to organize ten, twenty, or thirty people). It’s only by going beyond communism that larger societal structures are created with any staying power. (There are a million books on management that describe how to structure a large organization successfully. My favorite is The Entrepreneur’s Manual, by Robert White. [Jerry Sweet first pointed out this book to me many years ago.] The approach in The Entrepreneur’s Manual is fairly consistent with Galambos’ ideas, especially the whole business of deciding who owns the company!)

It’s probably also worth pointing out that if you don’t have about thirty or more people willing to participate in a societal structure, Galambos’ ideas of property ownership and self-determination might not work. (This is my own notion based on my experience transitioning work-groups at Virgin from the tribal [or communistic] model to a better organized structure. Galambos doesn't address this point.) Since the whole foundation is based on property ownership and the ability to make choices about your own property and trades you want to make with other people, it’s possible that if there aren’t enough choices to be had the process won’t work. It might. I can easily imagine a scenario where there just isn’t the critical mass to make a system based solely on "100% control" over one’s own property work.

Just to be clear – you can start a company with one person and apply Galambos’ principles, because you’re surrounded by lots of other people and companies that provide plenty of choices.

Galambos says, and I agree, that the reason the United States has been so successful is because of the lack of oversight – of an uber-parent or, to use an old fashioned word, king -- during the first hundred years of the country, and that the market mechanisms that developed through freedom of choice created something that never existed before – namely, the energetic productive society we know today.

In my next column, I’ll talk more about freedom of choice, and how a misapprehension of the importance of this leads to all kinds of critical errors. And also … what to do when it seems like you don’t have a choice.

[All of the ideas in this column are from SIAA except the idea that communism works for small groups of people which is my own idea.]