LETTER TO MATT B (quite intelligent and literate fellow) Matt… Found you by acci

LETTER TO MATT B

(quite intelligent and literate fellow)

Matt…

Found you by accident. I was searching for comments on Veblen using google’s filter by advanced language. I suppose that is a compliment from Google on your writing.

I love your poetic language. I appreciate it. I appreciate it for its associations if not its imprecision. I have too scientific an understanding of man to agree with the actuality or possibility of what you write, but it does not mean that if it were possible I would not rather live in such a world. I would. But advocating for the impossible is not within my character or aspirations.

We have feelings for reasons. Most of them are positive toward plenty, cautious toward cooperation, negative toward scarcity, and vividly against involuntary transfers, by cheating, fraud or theft. In this sense, humans are rational creatures in so far as their abilities and cognitive biases permit them to be – and prospect theory seems to best describe our behavior.

But while nature guaranteed our progeny and perpetuation with oxytocin that provides us with good feelings from care-taking, that hormonal response is an insufficient method by which to provide people with incentives – in no small part because the distribution of sensitivity to these hormones varies considerably between individuals, groups and genders. The math is just against it.

That is the virtue of commercial consumption. In tribal society one set of stimuli evolved, and that is the one we naturally accomodate to. In early urban society, religions allows us to form uniform normative codes of action, across familial boundaries by relying on a non existent but allegorical family structure. In legal societies, these norms evolved into rules, where even some counter-intuitive rules can be enforced by threat of punishment. But neither care-taking, tribal, religious, or legal incentives provide us with sufficient incentive to act on risky ventures, and moreover, sufficient incentive to act in competition, and in the service of one another, in anticipation of long term benefit, as do credit and consumption. Further, consumption makes it possible for us to avoid the hard work of compromise that comes from the necessity of living in communal groups. This is why people choose spatial sovereignty – living independently with the ability to consume, instead of with others where compromise is necessary. In fact, we could argue that people demonstrate this preference at all times wherever it is economically possible – because they see the majority of human cooperation as rent-seeking, or free-riding not cooperation.

So I work in the world of *is* and *must* trying to solve political problems within those limitations. But that does not mean I wouldn’t rather live in your *ought* world if it were possible. I would.

Affections.

Curt