Social Matter

Note from the author: The following was written in a very lighthearted, fun manner. Don’t take it too seriously.

Once upon a time there was a village named Pompeii which for all intents and purposes was a libertarian structural utopia. Not a single voluntary transaction was de jure or de facto prohibited. The little village people were culturally in agreement with this legal arrangement. And since the culture was in the bag, the scenario was sustainable in the long-term. They simply had no interest in restricting voluntary exchange. Restriction of mutually beneficial, voluntary trade, after all, necessarily reduces value and makes everyone worse-off. Nobody wants that. Besides, the only reason the exchange existed in the first place is because both parties ex-ante expected it to be mutually beneficial.

Yet, the village did understand the concept of externalities. A local factory was sued to the ground for generating externalities and hence violating property rights. Causation wasn’t too difficult to establish, and the harm was very distinct and assignable and material. No escape. The sludge and pollution presented themselves for judgment. Everyone agreed that infringement occurred because rights are stuffs that individuals possess over other stuffs, whether themselves or other objects. But there exists an entire category of non-physical, ethereal, abstract, ephemeral, amorphous stuffs over which nothing is actionable or should be actionable, since something is actionable if and only if rights have been violated. No one was able to make a plausible case as to why rights should apply to stuffs like ‘good manners and decency’ or ‘pre-requisite conditions for societal trust and long-term stability,’ among other things. So, because the non-physical, non-grabbable circle stuffs couldn’t fit in the square box, they were emptied. Out of sight, out of mind.

Besides, they were probably too busy enjoying victimless crimes to notice.

On one particular happy summer’s eve, a major employer in town was caught frolicking with a lady of the night. His wife subsequently divorced him and gained title to his planes, trains, and automobiles—to his whole business. She bankrupted the company through dozens of lavish trips back and forth to India—studying yoga and meditation. Half of the quaint little town lost their jobs. A few wealthy merchants, who had a particular distaste for the local population, bought several local factories and kicked out all the employees, leaving the factories empty. But this was most obviously the highest-valued use of the resource because the transaction was voluntary. And from the perspective of the merchants, the psychic income of seeing another ethnic group suffer was preferable to pecuniary gains. They were so ludicrously wealthy from previous business endeavors that failed factories didn’t even come close to the annual interest generated by their assets.

It was difficult to find new work. Some people found themselves with lots of idle time, but that time was quickly filled up with not-writing-that-book-they-always-wanted-to. Others looked for more gainful employment, trying to make a go of it in booming segments like the murder arenas, where people would buy tickets to see fighters voluntarily duke it out to the death. The people were especially enthralled with the owner of the murder arena. His business brought in the most amount of money from ticket sales, so every year at the annual parade he received first honors from the mayor for Value Creation.

The butcher came in second place. He always came in second place. One year he managed to take first because for a while, instead of getting tattoos, people preferred to get their ears lopped off. They saw it in a tribal style catalogue. It was a fad.

No theater showed ‘good’ cinematography. That was held to be a meaningless proposition. What was good was what people deemed valuable. And what was valuable was whatever happened to convince people to transfer money from one person’s hand to another. Pornography. Prostitutes. Pimps. Drug pushers. Blackmailers. These were all held to be very popular and honorable professions—and especially recommended by parents and teachers—since they commanded high wages, and thus were indicators of how much value they were creating and how much better off society was being made as a result of their efforts.

Every manner of gambling. No limits. The townsfolk knew that if you decided to spend all day and all night at the casino, it must be what you really wanted—otherwise, you wouldn’t be there. They all knew this because psychology follows from economics, and economics says that by definition if you act, if you do somethin’, you must’ve valued that above all other alternatives.

“It’s unlikely that internal valuation systems match perfectly with external behavior, and it’s strange to automatically equate the two, as if that were the only possible model of explaining behavior,” one man once said about Dave. “Why can’t we let the two diverge? Besides, even if it were the case, it certainly couldn’t be established by semantics alone.”

The rest scratched their heads, repeated the ‘by definition’ argument a few more times, before finally shooting back a silver bullet: “But why else would they do it, except that they valued X more than the alternative?”

All of the folk living in Pompeii knew they had singular, undivided, monistic wills. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” was old, outdated, outmoded psychology.

As a result, Pompeiians held that only individuals, like Dave the bum, know what’s best for themselves, what they gain the most value from. Parents can’t know what is best for children. Governments can’t know what is best for citizens. This trend of thinking is why the citizens of Pompeii always gave cash gifts at Christmas. It is impossible to know what an individual most wants, so it’s best to let them decide. Ironically, the principle actually did bear out some of the time, as many of the children were sorely disappointed to receive cash, as they had requested fathers for Christmas, and the rent-a-father service just wasn’t the same.

Leaves swirled, snowflakes fell, years dragged on. Eventually, there were no grain stores left. Many had lost the will to live. After being seduced by a wandering cult leader who promised easy respite, they all decided to take cyanide together. They wanted to die and were willing to pay for it. So before they downed a lethal dose, they raised their champagne glasses and gave a toast to the scientist for most excellent Value Creation, since they gave what was left of their life savings in a final, last, voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange.

And then they all died. But it was okay. Because there was so much value.

Value Horrorism.

After it all ended, the last one left to survey Pompeii began to understand that Maybe Something Had Gone Wrong. He came to several important conclusions. First, societal well-being is not strictly identical with a conception of value defined and lauded by society as whatever a person perceives to be in his interest, and whatever internal or external force motivates him to transfer geld. Economic forces govern society, just as governing forces govern society. Value Horrorism is to economics as demotism is to politics.

He realized that a major stumbling block to Pompeii’s continued existence was the idea of rights as only applying to individuals and physical stuffs, making it immoral for force to be applied, in order to steward the commons. He burnt alive the idea of victimless crimes, but without jumping to a polar extreme, without jumping to Ultimate Fascism.

Full stop. I’ve decided to ruin the story. Since stories are imperfect by nature, I want to clear up possible misinterpretations. All I’m saying is that it is logically possible that an uncritical understanding of value without understanding the underlying selection environments, i.e. what it is to generally ‘be valuable’ (not that all people value degenerate bundles of goods in this scenario, but that a non-trivial number do, such that other societally productive products are crowded out), could lead one to endorse a scenario which looks like Value Horrorism.

I’m also not saying that this scenario ‘would happen’ in a libertarian society. The story illustrates a logically possible scenario which I use to better understand what could go wrong if you don’t have low time-preferenced, upstanding individuals covering for a sloppy definition of value which counts on a population that generally has a good idea of what’s best for themselves beyond hedonism. The story shows how some understandings of value break down as good models for societal well-being when stressed.

If Pompeii were filled with quality specimens, you would hardly need to dissect, poke around, and pull out value’s guts to see what’s really inside, because things will function pretty well on their own without much tinkering. But when you substitute craven savages and are still tempted to call bleeding, blisters, puss, and death ‘value’ (a concept almost always connected to well-being, either individually or societally, or both), then we have what’s called a semiotic hijack.

So, two elements are necessary to understanding Value Horrorism: (1) selection pressure is good, (2) but a selection environment which encourages the extraction of human potential directed in the right way is a pre-requisite, since otherwise what it means to be fit, or what it means to create value is just herding oneself into the oven, along with the rest. A degenerate populous, as was the case in Pompeii, actively pwns value, which results in a semiotic hijack because ‘value’ sounds like a really good thing but can in some circumstances entail the most profane and destructive offenses against God and man and society.

The real question is whether the degens were always degens, or whether they were also helped along, their vices encouraged by wily merchants trying to take advantage of personal weakness.