CHOICE, RESPONSIBILITY AND POLITICS
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
- Martin Luther King
Neo-Buddhism follows the idea of Karma. The individual is responsible in life for his own actions. This responsibility brings along with it, the right to live and act responsible. Only if you could be in the possibility to live and act responsible, then you could be held responsible for your actions. So then it would be possible to choose the right thing OR the wrong thing. Whatever you choose, you are responsible for it. And most of the time you cannot only choose between right and wrong, but you can choose from a wide variety of options. But whatever you choose, you must bare the responsibility of its consequences.
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It all implies that have a right to live and act responsible. You have the right to choose which actions you will take, or not, so it is in line with your responsibility. Responsibility also means that you could have made the wrong decision. This in short implies the right to make choices in your life.
This right of choice brings along with it the right to choose to which groups you want to belong, and to which groups you don't want to belong. Which risks you will take, and how you arrange your life. And therefor you are responsible for these choices.
Buddhism in general, and therefor also Neo-Buddhism, holds that men has the right to be happy. It is not possible to be happy if you have to follow the standards of someone else. Your happiness is a very personal thing, and if someone else would make all the decisions for you, this would not lead to your happiness. People are all different and unique. Therefor you can never be sure what would make another person happy. We can only try to determine for ourselves what would make us happy.
Suppose that the politicians would let people vote what food we like best. Then they could make a menu for all of the population with the best liked meals. Now suppose that government would decide for us, on basis of this menu, that we were all obliged to eat the national dish of the day, every day. I don't think that this would make people happy in general. Probably almost no-one would be pleased, because we would be much happier if we could decide for ourselves what to eat.
In fact happiness and responsibility go hand in hand. Your happiness depends on the choices you make, on how you arrange your life. You have to make these choices for yourself, and you also have the responsibility for your decisions.
So men should have the right to make his own choices in life. The choice which jobs you take, which relationships you get involved in, which groups you want join and which groups you don't want to join, etc.
The political consequence of this idea is an extropian society. This means that in a society, for instance a land, people can choose to which government they belong. In a standard democracy, people vote between several parties, and one party wins and has, for several years, a lot of power. Or two or more parties will win together and they will have to compromise. But the outcome is that for several years, the winning party or winning parties will decide about the policy how to run the country. So if for instance in the USA the republicans win the elections, the democrats are living under a republican government for about four years, while it was not their choice. And vise versa of course. In the extropian society there could exist a democratic administration as well as a republican administration. And people could choose of which one they would be a member. The republicans would pay for the republican administration, and the democrats for the democratic administration. And the democrats would benefit from the expenses of the democratic administration, like the social system, the healthcare etc. And the republicans would benefit from the expenses of the republican administration.
In fact it is like there would be two separate countries next to each other, with a different administration. There would also be trade and interaction. But the difference is that the people of both countries are not living next to each other, but they are mingled into one country.
What would Thomas Jefferson and Mahatma Gandhi now feel if they would see what had become of their ideals under parliamentary democracy ?
So it would be possible that my right neighbor would life under a conservative administration, pays less contribution (as an equivalent of taxes) but also would receive less benefit from his administration when he is out of a job. And my left neighbor lives under a progressive administration, pays more contribution ("taxes") but will receive more benefit when he is out of a job.
There could be administrations with very small government, and where social security is bought by insurance companies on the free market. The people living under these administrations don't have to pay very much contribution ("taxes"). There would also be people that have a need for more social security than an insurance company could offer. For instance, would an insurance company exist on the free market that would give you a benefit if you are to depressed to work? And furthermore insurance companies always offer contracts with a lot of clauses. There are undoubtedly people that would like a government that provides more social security, and are willing to pay a higher price.
In the current situation of most countries, everyone has to life under an administration that is a compromise between these two viewpoints (and more). But instead, in an extropian society people could choose for themselves, and everyone could have it his own way.
And there could be much more differences between the administrations. People could have all kind of experiments of how they would like to organize their administrations, without forcing there experiment on others. Of course the type of administration that you choose is your own responsibility. If you choose to live under an administration that doesn't give you benefit when you are out of a job, and this happens to you anyways, that you will have to face the consequences of your choice. So you then better would have saved some money.
The same goes for subsidies to universities. Suppose administration A pays subsidies to the university of Stanford. Of course they want these subsidies to benefit only there own members, and not to benefit the members of administration B that doesn't pay subsidies to the university. So administration A asks the university, in return for their subsidies, to calculate the costs for students of administration A different than for students of administration B. Thus students of administration B will have to pay a lot more, because all of the costs involved in studying is calculated in the price, where students of administration A will pay much less. So those students of administration B that don't have rich parents, should maybe make a deal with a business, to promise to go to work there in return for paying part of the study. Or they make a deal with the army, or they have a job on the side, etc. While those students of administration A that don't have rich parents, will pay less for their study which would make it easier for them to study. Of course the contributions of administration A would then be higher.
What would happen to someone who is born with a handicap, so that he can't work, while his parents where living under an administration that doesn't give benefits in these cases? And suppose that the parents of the child are not paying for the food that the child needs. Of course this will not happen to often, but still it could happen.
In the current society, the outcome of democracy leads to a policy in which a lot of money is payed to foreign aid. The same goes for different administrations within one country. There will be administrations which pay for foreign aid, and other administrations will not. There will also be administrations that do give benefits to there own people with a handicap that cannot work. These administrations could, like a kind of foreign aid, decide that they would offer their membership to children born with a handicap under another administration, and thus providing them with a benefit. If in one country the outcome of a standard democracy would be that there are benefits for people with a handicap that cannot work, then if this country would be a extropian society this would also be the outcome. There would be a majority of people that want to help these people, even if their parents would belong to another administration.
You could argue that it would be a lack of solidarity of the people of the first administration, that they do not pay in these cases for their own handicapt people. But then maybe they have other ways to deal with these matters. Maybe these people collect money on a voluntary basis for cases like these. Or maybe the family would pay. I would say that forcing decisions, forcing your ideas, forcing your solidarity to other groups that think differently, is not a good idea. It is a first step into denying their own responsibility.
What would happen then, if a member of administration A has a conflict with someone of administration B? Suppose they would have different law. It would be the same as a car accident with two people involved, who are member of a different insurance company. Between all insurance companies, there are agreements how to deal with conflicts, and who pays how much. Sometimes they have already worked on compromises. There are also already contracts between them that say which arbitration commission would decide if the contracts are unclear and the conflict would not be settled without arbitration.
This would also be the case between multiple administrations within one country. If a member of administration A has a conflict with someone of B, the contracts between A and B will give answer how the conflict is settled. If not, then there is an arbitration commission. There even could be a higher appeal to the arbitration commission.
So suppose a person of administration A has a problem with a person from administration B, because the last one has caused pollution of the air, which the person of administration A has to inhale. Administration A says that in these cases, the polluter has to pay $1000,- to the victim, while administration B says it is not a crime and it goes unpunished. So administration A en B will have had to decide what will happen in these cases, and they will have to find a compromise between the different points of view. So perhaps they have made a contract that says that in these cases the polluter has to pay $500,- to the victim. If it is not in the contract, the contract maybe only says that commission C will decide in such a case. And maybe commission C says the polluter should pay $700,-. Every administration will have police and bailiffs in order to collect the agreed upon fee. They would also have their own prisons for murderers etc.
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If another administration C, would start to offer the same policy as administration A, with the only difference that there is no war initiated and thus the contribution is lower, almost all of the members would turn to administration C, and administration A would go bankrupt.
Actually, seen from an economic point of view, the very possession of an army by a government would raise the price, compared to an administration that offers the same service but without an army. And since the people of both administrations live all within the same country, an administration with its own army is not very interesting for a member. If I would switch my membership from administration A, who has an army, to administration C, who doesn't have an army, my single membership doesn't change the safety of the whole country, because administration A will still have this army, with or without my membership. But I will save a lot of contribution by changing my membership to C. But the same is true for all the clients of A. No single membership makes a difference for the existence of the army of A. But if all of the members of A will turn to C, that will have an effect. But the individual choices will not change that, so there will be no economic motivation for people to stay a member of administration A, who is simply too expensive for the same service. The members of administration C do also enjoy the service of the army of administration A, as long as it exists, because they live in the same country. They are free riders. So economically seen, and probably true, this all would lead to administrations without army's, that certainly wouldn't start a costly war.
Surely this leads to the question how this country could defend itself against a foreign attack.
The option that I'm in favor of is that next to the existence of multiple administrations within one country, there would also change a lot on the council-level as well. Instead of the councils, smaller units, like quarters, neighborhoods or streets could have self-government. They could be associations of owners of the people living there, who would as a group have ownership over there street, neighborhood or quarter. They could decide about the amount of lampposts, the speed limits, wether, where and when youngsters can hang out in the streets, etc.
In contradiction to the the multiple administrations A, B and C, these quarters, neighborhoods and streets owned by an association of owners, DO have a united territory. So for them it would make sense to align with an army, to prevent attacks from other quarters, neighborhoods or streets, (or to prevent attacks from far country's that would attack from the air or from the water). If such an alignment would be up to vote in a quarter, for instance, in a country without an army, probably the majority would vote in favor of alignment with an army and paying contribution to it. The big difference here is that in this case it really makes a difference wether the quarter would align with the army of not. This is because of the united territory for only themselves. While the multiple administrations A, B and C do not have a united territory for themselves; they have to share the territory with other administrations. And then there is no benefit for administration A to have an army, if administration C doesn't have an army and therefor would be cheeper. For the quarter it is of course also cheeper not to contribute to an army. But if the quarter would decide to align with an army and contribute to it, this would directly cause the difference between a protected quarter and an unprotected quarter. And that is the reason why quarters, neighborhoods and streets WOULD, align with an army and pay for it. Most quarters would probably align with a big army, which serves lots of neighborhoods. But of course there would also be pacifistic quarters, streets and neighborhood.
Because war is an expensive thing, the chances of quarters making war is still very low. The associated owners would have to pay a lot of contribution if there was a war. So if a quarter would be a member of army A that is aggressive and wants to start a war, while army B is only defensive and does not want to start a war, the quarter would probably vote to change its membership from army A to army B, and thus prevent themselves from being involved into a war. And this will go for al quarters, neighborhoods and streets who are a member of army A.
Although all of this will maybe sound weird for someone who is used to the dynamics of a standard democracy, the extropian society would result in a peaceful and save society, in which the abuse of power will not be possible. This is because of the freedom of choice. People could make their own choices how politics would affect them, how much they would pay for it, and what they would get in return. People would be responsible for there own choices, and could not blame society for the consequences.
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