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From: baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Found in a strange place...
Message-ID: <131@spar.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 16-Mar-85 21:13:59 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.131
Posted: Sat Mar 16 21:13:59 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 22-Mar-85 02:15:18 EST
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Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA
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> From Baba:
> 
> 	Hmm. I predict that in the Free Market people... No, *Americans*
> 	(or Westerners, if you like) would on the whole voluntarily choose 
> 	to compete more often than to cooperate, and it is for precisely that 
> 	reason that I do not perceive anarchy as desirable in a culture like 
> 	our own.
> 
> Does this mean that you think that you should stop people from doing what
> ``on the whole they would volunatarily choose to do'' simply because you
> are resistent to changes in culture? Or do you think that there is
> something morally wrong in competing? 
> 
> Laura Creighton
>

Have you stopped beating your mother yet?  ;-)

Sorry not to be willing to offer you either idiocy, but if you want to 
talk about it, sure.

Competition is no more good or bad than, say, magnetic induction.  It's
an important phenomenon in human behavior, and it can be put to a number
of mutually beneficial uses.  But there are times when it is highly
undesirable.  To my eyes, American society has a structural component
based on balancing a generally productive, agressive competitive ethic 
against a system of legal constraints that prevent competition from 
fruiting into predation.  People internalize relatively little restraint, 
and very often take the attitude that "if it's legal, it's OK".  The
order of an anarchist society arises solely from the self-discipline
of its citizens.  Anarchy in a morally lazy society is a catastophe.

						Baba