Need help with a counter argument.

[Ex_Nihil0]

I was trying to extol the virtues of Libertarianism with an Rand fan, and she insists that no matter what ideology you go with, somebody will always try to work the system according to their own selfish greed, doesn't matter if it is in business or government, this is simply an inevitable and unavoidable fact.  No matter what, every system will eventually become corrupt and die be cause of this.  Every political system would work, even communism if everybody was in perfect lock step, but nobody is ever in perfect lockstep because everybody is selfish.  Libertarianism, like Communism, is just another system that requires everybody to conform to a particular idea.  For Communism, its the redistribution of wealth, and for Libertarianism, it is non-aggression.  Since non-aggression is not something we could ever get 100% of the people to get behind, its just as doomed as any other political philosophy.  Since we are stuck with the current system we have with no realistic hope for change without the system dying, their is no point to push beyond one's own selfish intentions.  Everything else is outside of the individual's control, so why waste the energy?

What do I say to a person like this?  Is this friend of mine pointing out what it was that Ayn Rand found so distasteful with the Libertarians, because they weren't selfish enough for her tastes?

[Lord T Hawkeye]

Her mistake is saying that we need everyone to get behind non-aggression.  Not so.  All you need to do is not give an elite few permission to use aggression.  The problem is that as long as some people have that permission, it's going to attract the sociapaths in society to either seek the position or seek to influence those with it.

In simpler words, to stop the abuse of power, you have to stop giving people the power to abuse.

[Travis Retriever]

I was trying to extol the virtues of Libertarianism with an Rand fan, and she insists that no matter what ideology you go with, somebody will always try to work the system according to their own selfish greed, doesn't matter if it is in business or government, this is simply an inevitable and unavoidable fact.  No matter what, every system will eventually become corrupt and die be cause of this.  Every political system would work, even communism if everybody was in perfect lock step, but nobody is ever in perfect lockstep because everybody is selfish.  Libertarianism, like Communism, is just another system that requires everybody to conform to a particular idea.  For Communism, its the redistribution of wealth, and for Libertarianism, it is non-aggression.  Since non-aggression is not something we could ever get 100% of the people to get behind, its just as doomed as any other political philosophy.  Since we are stuck with the current system we have with no realistic hope for change without the system dying, their is no point to push beyond one's own selfish intentions.  Everything else is outside of the individual's control, so why waste the energy?

What do I say to a person like this?  Is this friend of mine pointing out what it was that Ayn Rand found so distasteful with the Libertarians, because they weren't selfish enough for her tastes?

So her solution is to give those evil people an monopoly on force that is seen as legit to make it that much easier for them?
And people wonder why I don't consider myself an Objectivist...

[Ex_Nihil0]

I think her point was the same as Thomas Hobbs' point, that people, if not given power, will find a way to take power one way or another.  She presented this as an inevitable fact of life.  Either somebody will learn how to work the system to exploit as many people as possible or do something to gain power and influence over as many people as possible.  It doesn't matter if you give power or not, eventually it will be taken by somebody regardless.  The world is to chaotic to worry about who is in charge anyway, because its hopeless to affect, so you may as well act out in as much pure selfishness as possible.  Be your own master, in other words, and slit the establishment's throat if you can get away with it.

Rather then make the case that we should fight tyranny or join it, she made the case to become tyranny, to act out of pure selfishness and to not be afraid to stab somebody in the back if it meant advancing yourself.  Her life advice was to always look out for yourself, never help anybody out unless they could do you a favor, and always put family ahead of even your closest friends.

In a lot of ways, her philosophy almost sounded more like Don Corleone, then Ayn Rand.  In fact, the only sure fire way to ensure your own personal freedom is to be the man who pulls the strings, rather then be some stupid shmuck who only thinks he's independently thinking because he doesn't realize what an affect marketing and publicity has on him.

[The Late Andrew Ryan]

This person has no clue what they're talking about.
1. Simply because I am selfish does not mean that I cannot care about others. I consider myself selfish, but guess what? I don't go around killing babies and being a total asshol all the time. Why? Because O want to feel good about myself so instead I help others give to charity and "other" selfless acts, this person is on the opposite side of the normal, far more naive, standpoint that there is such a thing as "sefless" action. Only seflish actions exist but selfish is not the same as f*** others by a long shot
2. All people will not by their very nature become corrupt with power, communism wouldn't work even if everyone was the "ideal communist man" because of the problems of calculation and price. The current system wouldn't work even if all politicians were little angels.
3. The point is to create an environment and system where no one could use force, where it becomes unprofitable. Decentralize power so that everyone has power and that to abuse it would be suicide.
4. Not everyone would have to accept the NAP, simply fear the consequences if they did, but also the NAP is what I consider to be built into "natural law" and therefore the natural sense of justice. Almost no one considers the initiation of violence, on a personal and open basis, to be moral and most would never perform such an action.
5. The more monopolistic a system is, the more cut off from the subjective preferences of a large group of people, the more likely it is to become corrupt, and the harder it will be to cut off funding to it, that is to say to kill the corrupt institution. Therefore we must attempt to create as much competitition as we can in order to avoid as much corruption as possible.

[Ex_Nihil0]

Well, it sounds like you guys are thinking a lot like me, but I don't think she was trying to extol the virtues of any particular system, only that none of them will work because the entire world breaks down into chaos, which allows dictators and despots to take control.  In here view, everything dies, even free markets. 

I tried to explain that, although individuals die in a rain forest, systems that robust never die.  But her counter argument was that Man is destroying the rain forest and is destroying the planet.  It was at that point I realized that, although I was dealing with a very smart person, she was being rather paranoid.  To her, man's affect on rain forest habitat is proof that free markets eventually fall, because in her eyes, humans are the tyrant.  I tried to explain that given enough time rain forests are diverse enough to adapt to almost anything nature can throw at it, including us, if given enough time to evolve.  It was at this point she went on a tangent about how we are killing the planet.  As a side note, I'm starting to realize that Ayn Rand people, who seems similar to Libertarians on the surface, think completely differently then us.

I know now what my mistakes where, though, in my discussion with her.

I failed to recognize her fallacy about the second law of thermodynamics.  She insisted that the whole world leads to chaos [disorder], however, that's only true in a system with no energy input.  Since the Earth has a constant solar energy supply, it is able to increase in its complexity.  I've come to realize that chaos doesn't really exist.  Although chaos might exist in the quantum world, it does not exist for us at the macro level.  Rather, what we call chaos is actually our inability to make accurate predictions of the future due to observational uncertainties.  This gives us the illusion of a random, chaotic world.  How ironic it is that our inability to observe the true complexity of the universe that creates this illusion. 

Her counter argument to the primacy of complexity, rather then chaos, was to point out that individuals are said to be complex, but they always die.  Even if you could cure every disease in your body and prevent yourself from getting old, eventually you'd get hit by a car or get killed by some other means.  Even the Earth will eventually run out of fuel from the sun or get smashed by an asteroid or eventually suffer some ill fate in the future.  It's amusing for me to hear this argument, because I once thought this way, too.

Now here's my mistake.  I failed to point out the difference between centralized and distributed planning.  Humans die because they are centrally planned by the same exact genetic code.  Every cell is a clone of an original zygote.  Because these clones can't evolve and adapt to change (immune cells excluded), errors and corruption cannot be corrected for by natural selection.   In decentralized systems, like rain forests or free markets, natural selection corrects errors that would otherwise cause a complex system to end catastrophically.  In fact, the more diverse decentralized the ecosystem or economy, the more resilient the system is to insult. 

In every system, the weakest point is the system as a whole.  Yes, if the entire planet was ripped to shreds by a black hole, or what ever apocalyptic fate you chose, it would wipe out all life on Earth, but imagine that life on Earth migrated to other planets outside our solar system.  If humanity decentralized itself to the galactic scale, it would pretty much never die.  If you want to take it a step further towards becoming immortal, you simply apply the same decentralization strategy.  If your consciousness can exist in multiple places at once and you maintained the ability to replace any particular part of your consciousness that died, you would in fact live for ever.  Just imagine living the existence of multiple RAID 5 arrays backing each other up.

I'm now more convinced then ever that decentralized control is what sustains a system and centralized control is what dooms it.