Theme: Agency

September 7th, 2018 12:41 PM REVIEWED BY REQUEST https://medium.com/@ciaran_92884/hierarchies-of-competence-competitive-proxies-and-the-conscious-generation-of-the-collective-df68e67bad03 Good try. Good thinking and good writing. But, you should study economics, law, political history, and war rather than whatever it is you are studying at the moment (software? computer games?), so that your framing, which is ‘ideal’ can be described in existential (real, operational) terms. If you did, you would grasp that you are saying what is common knowledge. So while you correctly understand the problem in ‘private language’ and you argue by ideal analogy, you are stating the obvious to those who are informed, and who argue not by analogy but by descriptive example of demonstrated human behavior. A market allows people with dissimilar ends to cooperate on similar means. A government creates markets by the suppression of murder, harm, theft, fraud, conspiracy, immigration, conversion, economic warfare, and physical warfare, using law, and communicating that law honestly (jurists, education), or dishonestly (priests, indoctrination). These markets function as the ‘games’ you refer to. They government and it’s military and judiciary in particular are compensated indirectly via taxation for suppression of the multitude of rents extracted otherwise. A ‘good’ government is merely one that survives competition so that people can organize, plan, produce, and inter-generationally survive. A ‘better’ government is one that is suitable to the needs of the population in competition with other populations, not one that is ideal and may or may not survive in competition with other governments. A ‘better’ government is one that creates survivable markets yet does not do so by creating rents, and whose externalities are not devolutionary. A ‘best’ government is one that provides higher returns from the markets to the people, than others so that their productivity is higher (time necessary to produce competitie returns is lower). Network effects always and everywhere create a majority (practical monopoly) player, where capital as previously a competitive advantage it no longer is so. And all of that said, people seek at all times to circumvent markets because they ARE competitive. If it is possible for people to seek and obtain power by political means they will do so rather than circumvent the market by cheating somehow, or compete in the market. People don’t want fair. The want unfair in their advantage. Why? Markets (games) produce Meritocracy, and Meritocracy screws the incapable and so, the incapable organize to circumvent the market by cheating, or circumvent the market by political control. Games exist precisely because they have immaterial outcomes. Markets exist because they have material outcomes. Political markets in particular either create more market conditions or less. So how do you get from where we are to the circumstance you are describing, as a series of steps? People don’t want fair. Markets do not seek equilibrium, but disequilibrium until crash. Because people do not seek fair, they seek advantage. And the seek advantage through every unethical immoral, and illegal means available Hence why we have such enormous institutions to prosecute those who circumvent the market. More than half of the population cannot read a manual and repair a device. The world must be organized for them. Because they are the problem. Not us. And organizing it for them requires continuous diligent education, training, disciplining, monitoring, policing, prosecution and punishment.