If Galt’s Gulch is going to exist in this century, might it be called Seasteading?
Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.
Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.” – Yahoo.com
A floating haven for Libertarians. It sounds like freedom. I wonder where they could find real estate expertise for such a venture?
Galt’s Gulch had one big advantage over Seasteading, it was beyond detection of government.
Lola says:
It was also beyond detection of the unenlightened folk who would try to sabotage the experiment. This is where I think this experiment falls down. With no weapons restrictions any deranged individual can go in there and bomb the place.
August 19, 2011 — 12:46 pm
Greg Swann says:
> With no weapons restrictions any deranged individual can go in there and bomb the place.
This is a distinction from where else? Can you name a place that has been bombed where weapons were not putatively proscribed? Steel can stop bullets, but words can’t even stop other words. I think seasteading is a puerile idea, but the fact that it will be subject to hostile attack distinguishes it from nothing.
August 19, 2011 — 1:30 pm
Greg Swann says:
There are so many ideas in this neighborhood that I like, Al, but I’ve seen one Libertopia after another come and go, and they all seem wide of the mark to me.
I could more easily imagine a sea-faring civilization, but even that doesn’t seem doable to me. For one thing, whether one is living on a boat or on a seastead, the fragility of the environment implies a dictatorial power. (This is why environmentalists are always shrieking that the earth is a lifeboat, FWIW.)
I’ve been thinking about sea-farming for 25 years, but that industry has moved about two inches in that time. But that kind of commerce — cultivation and husbandry in controlled environments — seems more doable to me than an artificial Hong Kong.
But everything comes back to philosophy. We are not enslaved because we live among the wrong people. We are enslaved because we are the wrong people. We live in a culture so enmired in rent-seeking that we can’t even see it any longer, especially not in our own soiled, sordid souls.
We don’t need liberty, we need egoism. Once an individual human being is an egoist as I define it — a person whose purposive actions are always worthy of his own self-adoration — he cannot be enslaved.
Political liberty is a secondary consequence — a side-effect — of choosing (teleology) to live in a manner consistent with one’s actual, undeniable, inalterable nature as a self-aware free moral agent (ontology). We don’t need to change our location, we need to change the way we think.
I know you know this, that you have felt it over and over again in your dealings with other people. If the fire in your eyes had a name, it would be Undespairing.
That’s a funny word, but the unfunny truth is that my having to make up words — and words only of negation, at that — to describe real phenomena is signal evidence that we have never yet thought about these ideas with the rigor they deserve. So much the worse for us, since these ideas, to the extent we have explored them in the past, are the sole source of all these riches we barely deign to notice.
I begrudge the seasteaders nothing, and I wish them every good fortune. But I’m with Missy Rand here: The battle is philosophical.
August 19, 2011 — 6:32 pm
Al Lorenz says:
Greg, A seastead would be a great place to try out omnipresent cameras!
August 19, 2011 — 8:42 pm
Greg Swann says:
> A seastead would be a great place to try out omnipresent cameras!
A great way to sell the idea, too: If you lived here, you could be living here and not just watching it on TV.
August 19, 2011 — 11:35 pm
Dave Phillips says:
If you have never watched the movie Waterworld,you should after reading this post.
No offense Al, but evoking Galt’s Gulch for this floating commune is a stretch and a disservice to Ayn Rand. Galt’s Gulch was a retreat for the rational and this floating city sounds more like a 70’s commune (not that there is anything wrong with that). In addition, the intent of the Gulch was to take all the really productive rational people out of society so that the corrupt system would fail. Communes do not have that higher intent.
August 24, 2011 — 8:31 am
Al Lorenz says:
@Dave, I’m a big fan of Ayn Rand, and there was no disservice intended.
If you’ve read about Seasteading, the goals are far from Waterworld. The goals include allowing competition and development in various styles of governance. Might that include a 70’s commune? Possibly. One of the folks involved seeks to create a libertarian society. In practicality what might seasteading societies look like? I have no idea.
I also can’t think of where, not just a retreat, but an actual world or society for those seeking to be free and rational might be located on earth today.
It encourages me that there are people willing to look at something as difficult to pull off as seasteading to pursue such a goal.
August 24, 2011 — 1:42 pm