A Brief Note From The Doylist Perspective

General
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So, saw an addition to the verse’ trope page today:

Libertarians In Space: Examined. The central setting, the Empire of the Star, is portrayed as a libertarian Utopia, where respect for liberty and personal choice is balanced by an admirably cheerful general attitude of voluntary civic-mindedness. On the other hand, it’s mentioned that there are plenty of outliers outside Imperial space where a narrow, dog-eat-dog, almost Randian interpretation of self-interest is practiced; it’s implied that these are not nice places to live at all, especially if you can’t afford decent protection services.

Well, now. To pick a nit or two…

While this is generally accurate – in any form of governance, it turns out, people are a problem1 – and while it’s bad form, I’m told, to edit Word of God entries onto one’s own trope page, the author would beg to point out that he believes that the locals (after being provided with the appropriate literature) would probably point out that they are practicing something relatively close to a Randian interpretation of enlightened self-interest, and really, can’t these bloody Earth-monkey [pseudo|anti]-objectivists get anything right? Haven’t they even read Effective Selfishness2 [Aral Harran, pub. 7222, Clue KEW Press]? (Of course, they’d probably interpret that wrong, too.)

1. With apologies to Douglas Adams.

Also 1. If you’re an Imperial libertist, an Earth libertarian, or an anarchist anywhere, you would probably add the corollary that the problem only gets worse if you let people be in charge of things, and also people. If you’re anything else, your mileage may vary.

2. A book which points out, for those who haven’t guessed already, that similar to the alchemy which transforms effective Evil Overlords into mere Unpleasant Accountants, that it’s mathematically demonstrable that you maximize your own personal return through cooperation, niceness, active reciprocal benevolence, and only punishing defectors. That’s optimal selfishness.

Your “nasty defectors” are screwing themselves over by sticking to a particularly idiotic local maximum that’s far, far below this in terms of productivity.

(This is why the typical Imperial critique of people the rest of the galaxy sees as greedy tends to be less “you evil plundering greedheads” and more “man, you suck at greed”.

And now my head is going to be full of Gilea Cheraelar lecturing Donald Trump on how he is basically a complete and utter failure in this respect and a disgrace to the good name of plutarchy, so, um, thanks, brain!)

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2017/04/09/a-brief-note-from-the-doylist-perspective
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Comments migrated from WordPress:

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Well, that’s the difference between plutarchy and plutocracy, isn’t it? Especially since Imperials are all so rich and so avoidant of using that wealth against fellow sophs that the distinction is only meaningful outside the Empire.

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You want to be careful with that one.

The injunctions of the Plutarch’s Code, the Golden God, and the ciseflish Path of Ever-Growing Plenitude (which very heavily influenced the former, trading highly on the marketplace of ideas both figuratively and literally) are against cheating. One would never, for example, secure legal monopolies, or try to regulate one’s competition out of business, or default on contracts, or go back on one’s word, or play games with tariffs and subsidies, or engage in actual violence or sabotage or other things that are thuggish and unmerchantly and interfere with other sophs’ sacred right to seek profit wherever they may find it.

On the other hand, as cooperation is a fundamental necessity of trade, so is competition. That’s how one identifies one’s mistakes, or more accurately, everyone’s mistakes which are reducing the value added to the universe, or worst of all, subtracting value from it.

(It’s all about Entropy, after all.)

So those same plutarchs who would never, ever dream of interfering with each other’s sacred right to seek profit, on the one hand, and will cheerfully cooperate with each other in joint ventures, and offer each other warm friendship and hospitality will also cheerfully run each other out of business if they think there’s an opportunity to be had and someone’s failing in their corresponding duty to reap the market’s bounty and add value to the universe - and the person on the receiving end of this market correction will be grateful for it¹.

Because they were wrong, and now they can be right, and their ledger is going to look better in the final accounting because of it.

  1. This may not come naturally if you’re not a ciseflish, but you’re supposed to accept alathkháln with good grace, in this area as in all others.
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I do recall having heard of some OTL operation to the effect of “we’re going to try to do it at all, to show that this is actually a thing that can be happening”. And then they got outcompeted by a bigger company and were happy that this established their weird idea as part of reality, even if they were no longer in control of it.

(IOTL that kind of thing also ~frequently goes horribly wrong when the newly established Big Project starts looking for profit at the expense of public good. Which is… I was about to ask why it’s not also something that happens all the time in the Empire, before I stumbled on this version of the phrasing.)

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Alas, the annoyance of having to process one’s anticompetitive economic shenanigans through the same psychic circuitry as “I could totally win a gold medal at the Olympics - if all the other competitors were required to start half a mile back and I broke all their kneecaps first.”