e$: You get what you pay for

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 12:50 am -0400 on 5/13/97, Blanc wrote:
> Robert Hettinga wrote:
>
> >Ah. A 90's version of Freddy Hayek's "Road to Serfdom", maybe?
> >A turn-of-the-new-century Phabian Society needs a Stalin to make it's
> >dreams reality?
> >
> >Be careful what you wish for, ladies and germs...
> .............................................................
>
>
> Well, now, what exactly do you mean?   How does this relate to bombing a
> village, with all its communists & captives, out of existence?

I was expanding on your riff, a bit, I guess.

I suppose that intellectual ruminations, including my own on occasion here
in cypherpunks, are all well and good, but when it comes time to put the
rubber to the road, or in flames around the oppressor's neck, or whatever,
people usually don't get what they think they want, um, other people to do
for them. Which is Hayek's point, as demonstrated by England's Phabian
Society, which probably did more to advance the cause of Stalin than Lenin
ever did. :-).

After such episodes of political "success", there is a *reason* most of us,
as the esteemed Mr. Townsend once said, "...get on [our] knees and pray we
don't get fooled again...".

I think that strong cryptography, especially strong financial cryptography,
is going to create a world we'll scarcely recognize in 100 years, or maybe
even 30 years. Not because of politically motivated violence, but of
economic necessity.


Yeah, I know. Economic necessity sometimes creates politically motivated
violence. And, at the heart of that is a paradox, as juicy a paradox as
well meaning victorian British socialists apologising in advance for the
behavior of a totalitarian Russian monster 50 years later.

When you think about it, the events of 1789 France, or post-Weimar Germany,
or even post-Tito (nee' Soviet) Yugoslavia, all came after the crises which
supposedly caused them were pretty much over, and people had the brainspace
to think about how pissed off they should be about it.

The Pelleponesian War was probably more about Athens slacking off her
Delian League repression (the introspective episode in intellectual
potlatch we now call the "golden age" of Athens) than her later genocidal
punishment of a vassal state for not coughing up the requisite League dues.

There was a study of  um, urban cub scouts, lately, which talked about how
it wasn't the *lack* of self-esteem which caused extremely violent gang
behavior, so much as it was, ironically, too *much* self-esteem. There's
nothing so self-confident as a 14 year old with an AK or a Mac10(?), as any
resident of Beruit, or Chicago, or Mogadishu, or Monrovia, or, now, Tirana,
will gladly tell you. Much hubris goes before the fall of domestic
tranquility. :-).


Anyway, when I'm prone to worry about such things, I think, depending on my
mood and the weather,  that either the government is getting so powerful
that we're going to have to fight back some day, or that it really isn't so
powerful anymore, and now the more cocky of us think we can stand up to it
and fight back in redress for its past sins, real and imaginary. Remember
that dear Uncle *has* demobilized considerably. Mr. McVeigh himself is
someone who would now be cheerfully blowing up things in Special Forces
practice somewhere, if he had more practice time and running room at the
selection process before he was economically demobilized after his heroic
exploits in Kuwait.


One of the fun consequences of having a large standing army, of course, is
what do you do with the, um, standees, when you can't afford to feed and
train them any more. I'd bet that a large percentage of the Russian "Mafia"
are former soldiers, and certainly spook/torturers, just doing what comes
naturally.

In this regard, I think that America lucked out after WWII because lots of
its sharply increased industrial, um, womanpower, could step aside so
Johnny could come marching home to a job in the factory down the street.
The GI bill mopped up the rest of the slack(ers) by putting the brighter
and more easily bored safely away in college for a few years :-). In a few
years, everyone had a wife, 2.2 kids and a mortgage to worry about instead
of the injustice of encroaching government power. Problem solved.

We may be reaping what we've sown after the 50-Year War with Russia,
though. This time it may not be so easy, because people like Mr. McVeigh
are not people who went off to fight a war to return immediately after the
shooting stopped, but, people who, like our politicians, are now
careerists. Lifers. Empire builders, in the truest sense of the phrase.
People who, it now appears, are as pissed off at dear Uncle as the rest of
us are, though for different reasons, all their manifestoes and
rationalizations to the contrary.

Unfortunately, we can't use the economic rent we've beaten out of the rest
of the world this time to put them to work at something else, especially
because no matter what we hire them for, it isn't the thing they were
selected and trained over a lifetime to do. More to the point, something
they expected to do for the rest of their working lives.

Oh, well. Life is hard. Sometimes you don't get what you want, to
paraphrase a fellow tradesman of Mr. Townsend. Or, as my nephews' governess
used to say, sometimes you don't have to wanna. So, though I'm not to the
"beware soft targets" stage yet, it's good advice in almost any age, and
should be paid attention to.


Finally, my own hope for stuff like financial cryptography in this regard
is that it will make so much money, wringing the required economic rent out
of progress rather than the comparative devastation of the rest of the
world, that we'll be able to "bribe" all those demobilized spooks and
soldiers to leave us alone, much the same way that Harry and Ike did with
the creation of the middle-class entitlement state. Without, of course, the
"state" part.

I think that such hopes are at least justified. History has shown us that
there is nothing like a whole bunch of technological and economic progress
to focus people on better stuff than blowing up themselves and their
enemies. Modulo the odd paradox, of course.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga


-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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