Matus1976 - Philosophy, Science, Politics,Art

The US is often implicated as the greatest culprit in Global Warming because it’s energy consumption is so high.  We are barraged daily with articles stating that the US is the world’s biggest CO2 producer or that if the rest of the world consumed as much energy as the US we would need 7 earths to sustain it.  The single biggest problem with these assertions is that they jugde energy consumption in a vacuum - they never consider what that energy is actually used for.  Environmentalists love to promulgate the image that the US gobbles up most of it’s energy through Jacuzzis, SUV’s and Big Screen TV’s.

The reality is far different, far more complicated, and extremely important to understand.  Consider first that China recently overtook the US as the worlds largest CO2 emitter.  See this article:

China overtakes US as world’s biggest CO2 emitter
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jun/19/china.usnews

Once this happened, the critics changed their tune, pointing out instead that the US is the largest CO2 emitter per capita.  Indeed, of course it is, the US produces 20% of the worlds GDP (yes, 20% of ALL products and services generated IN THE ENTIRE WORLD are made by the US, a mere 5% of the population)  It makes a significant portion of the worlds food supply, the worlds grain supply, the worlds textile supply, and the worlds supply of computational services and electrical and industrial supplies.   

In fact Americans produce more goods per unit of CO2 produced than any other country.  In places like sub Saharan Africa, where people burn wood and even animal waste just to cook food, they produce 10 or 100 times as much CO2 per person for the useful products they produce.  In China, people produce more than those in Africa per unit of energy used, but still much less than in the US.  In fact the US is one of the most efficient users of energy in the entire world, and if the rest of the world used energy as efficiently as the US in producing it’s goods, the total CO2 contributions to the earths atmosphere right now would be about one tenth of it’s current amount.

Consider this from wikipedia on “US Energy Consumption”
“The United States is the largest energy consumer in terms of total use, using 100 quadrillion BTU (105 exajoules, or 29000 TWh) in 2005, equivalent to an (average) consumption rate of 3.3 TW. The U.S. ranks seventh in energy consumption per-capita after Canada and a number of small countries.”

While the US is the largest energy consumer, it never the less ranks seventh in energy consumption per capita.  Concurrently, according to the World Bank, at $44,155 the United States ranks 7th in Gross Domestic Product Per Capita - The measurement of the overall goods and services produced.  (Luxembourgh ranks number 1, but does it really count?)  Comparing the Gross Domestic Product per capita with Energy use per capita we see the following (for 2005)

Country GDP / Capita (International Monetary Fund, Worldbank, CIA)
USA - $44,155
China - $2,304
European Union - $26,900

Energy Use 2005
USA - 100 quadrillion BTU’s  (Energy Information Administration and #2 is from the World Resources Institute)
China – 60.84 quadrillion BTU’s (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb1103.html  59.57 quad btu’s for 2004)
EU – 73.7 quadrillion BTU’s (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/European_Union/Energy.html for 2003)

GDP / per capita / 1 quadrillion BTU’s  (dividing the GDP / Capita by the number of quadrillion BTU’s)
USA - $441.55
China – $38.4
EU - $364

What this shows is that for every quadrillion BTU’s consumed in energy, the United States produces $441 dollars worth of usable goods and services per person.  China, by contrast, produces $38 of usable goods and services for every quadrillion BTU’s used per person, or less than 1/10 the amount.  Because of this, China has been launching major campaigns to improve energy efficiency.  The US is frequently presented as the worst offender of all the nations, and while per capita CO2 production is highest in the US, per capita energy WASTING in the US is one of the lowest in the world, and if we are to make serious headway in reducing the production of CO2, lets start by reducing the absolutely wasteful energy production systems employed in most of the world.

Cutting back on energy use in the US, or the EU, for instance, will cause increases in the cost of the worlds grain supply and much of the worlds food supply, something that will hurt the poorest people of the world the most.  How many additional people starve to death when the price of grain increases by 1%? it’s hard to say, but for the poorest of the poor in the world, small changes in prices certainly have tremendous consequences.  If we talk about energy consumption absent of energy usage and efficiency, we open ourselves up to make other problems much worse even while making little headway on the original problem.

It is extremely important to point out not only how much energy is used, but how exactly that energy is used.  For example, look at this article on “ecoworld”  http://www.ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=294

“Imagine that through conservation and increased energy efficiency, every citizen in the United States were to consume half the BTUs they currently consume. This is certainly possible, though very unlikely in the near term. In 1995 the U.S. citizenry consumed, on average, 327 million BTUs per year, which is more than twice what many developed countries use per capita, including the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and Japan.”

I added the emphasis here because this article is asking us to examine how much energy the United States uses but does not ask at to look at what it is used for.  As noted, the US’s Gross Domestic Product Per Capita is almost twice that of the European Unions.  This energy is not going into Jacuzzis and McMansions, it is going to products and services the entire world uses.  Is it fair, or more importantly, reasonable, to look at energy consumption in a vacuum? That article then goes on to say -

“If, for example, everyone on earth consumed as much energy as U.S. citizens currently use, worldwide energy production would not have to go from 316 QBTUs to over 600 QBTUs, but instead to over 1,900 QBTUs!”

Something which indeed is even more disingenuous, since the United States produces 20% of the world’s products and services!  If the United States, which makes up 5% of the entire world’s population never the less produces 20% of the products and services used in the world, why would everyone else in the world, 20 times over, also need to produce the equivalent of what the US produces!?   This makes no sense; the implication in the articles is that the US merely consumes that much energy for useless things, which is completely untrue.  Look at the phrasing above “if everyone on earth CONSUMED as much energy as the U.S. citizens USES…” Uses for what?  Producing 20% of the worlds products and services!   So lets say If the other 95% of the world, divided into chunks of 5% (to equal the US’s population) that would make 20 other ‘nations’ which are ALSO producing the equivalent of today’s 20% of the worlds products and services.  This would amount to a whopping 400% increase in the gross domestic product of the world!  Of course this would require worldwide energy production to increase, but is a completely worthless comparison.    

The United States is frequently blamed, at least implicitly, as the primary contributor to global warming when people cite how much energy it uses compared to other nations.  Yet as illustrated by this bit of googling, the US utilizes it’s energy nearly 10 times more efficiently than, for example, China, and it is in fact one of the most efficient energy users on the planet.  If the rest of the world used energy as efficiently as the United States does, global CO2 contributions would be about 1/10 of what they currently are, and more importantly worl wide products and services would be less expensive.  Efforts toward increasing efficiency in the US would result in minor benefits compared to efforts at increasing efficiencies in China and India (these nations are aware of their extremely wasteful energy usage and China for instance has launched a major campaign to increase it’s energy efficiency)   When combating major problems, it is always extremely important to understand what the best thing to do to combat that problem is, not simply what is easiest or politically expedient, and certainly not by attacking the industry of the nation that has done so much to raise the standard of living for the entire world.

Astute googlers might notice that Japan exceeds our GDP / Capita and yet consumes half the energy per capita the US does suggesting we have room for improvement.  In Japan’s case though, it is important to note that the population density of Japan is much higher (127 million people living in about 1/4 the geographic area) and the climate is more moderate (a significant amount of energy is used merely to heat and cool buildings) and occupants of the US spend considerable more energy just traveling between diverse population density centers and maintaining comfortable temperatures.

While meeting Japan’s effeciency would be a two fold increase, China, India, and Africa still lag far behind with 1/10thor less the energy efficiency intensity of the US. The United States should be celebrated for it’s productiveness and effeciency, instead of attacked as an energy glutton without context.

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Here is an interesting news bit on “non intrinsic stimuli”. 

Scientific American 60 second - January 15th, 2008.

From - http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=7A81E74F-E554-39DF-62E0C6F540A3CDF8

“ You’d think we enjoy something because of it’s intrinsic qualities, food should taste good because it molecules tickles our tongue. But it’s much more complicated than that.  For example, one study shows that drinkers knowing the name brand and ingredients increase the drinkers pleasure.  Researches at the California Institute of Technology investigated our neural response to non intrinsic stimuli, 20 subjects tasted what they thought were 5 different wines and they were give the price for each of these.  In reality only 3 wines were used, and 2 were offered twice, once at a low price and once at a high price.  Subjects consistently said that the wines they thought cost more tasted better.  Functional MRI showed no difference in taste centers in brain, but revealed increased activities in brains pleasure centers.  Somehow our brains combine both actual taste and what we expect about the taste. “

One can surmise the thought process inside these researchers heads “Hmm, why in the world would our perceptions or thoughts about something alter how that something effects us?  I thought we were just robots and responded directly in pre-programmed ways to pre-programmed stimuli”  Clearly we are not merely mechanical automatons who respond in exact ways to the same thing.  Our emotions are, in fact, automatic estimations of stimuli based on our values and our understanding.  The subjects of this study attached some value to the cost of wine, which is reasonable considering cost does roughly equate to quality in most areas.   These researchers act surprised (this is news, after all) but this is in fact the only obvious way emotions would work.  Do we all respond, emotionally to the same things in the same way?  Obviously not.  What makes me sad, might be irrelevant to you.  And what makes you happy, might cause apprehension in me.  Why is that? 

Yet we do all share the same kinds of emotions, we all feel joy, sadness, apprehension, etc.  These emotional reactions are obvious in everything from infants to tribes untouched by western conventions.  The facial expressions and body reactions to emotional responses are almost identical.  It is clear then that emotional responses are in fact automatic and nearly instinctual.  In infants, the emotional reaction exists, but the values have yet to be formed or identified, so often reactions are disjointed from what we think they should be attached to, like crying for apparently no reason. As they grow, babies learn to value certain things and soon their emotional reactions come to align with their values.  In distant tribes untouched by western conventions, the smile is still universally something of happiness and joy, the tear is still the response to sadness.  Why is this not opposite in some cultures? 

So if we have the same emotional capacities in response, why are our responses different?  Do emotional responses come from our genetic code then?  No, since identical twins can have diametrically opposed emotional reactions.  So the answer is again clear, our emotional responses come from our values. What brings joy and sadness to those distant people will depend on their needs and their values within their social and environmental context.  What brings joy or sadness to us similarly will be based on what we value.  If there is something we value and we see that value furthered, our mind and body automatically respond to recognizing our values furthered within our understanding as something good, and so invoke a feeling of happiness.  A new product at a lower cost which we find a lot of value in would invoke happiness in us, but to the workers who will be put out of business it may invoke apprehension or sadness.  An elderly person in severe pain may find happiness at the prospect of their own death, while young healthy full of life person would feel deep sadness and apprehension at the prospect of their own death.  Emotions are responses to what we value, if we value our life, then that which furthers it will bring us joy and things that harm our life will bring us sadness. If we value a quality of life for our friends and loved ones, than things which raise their quality of life will bring us joy.  If we value our own accomplishments over those of others, than success by our friends would cause jealousy and anger.  Emotions then are completely proper responses, but that does not mean they are automatically correct, because they are still based on our own values, which we choose and integrate into our lives, and also our assessment of a situation, which may very well be wrong.  This is why it is always good practice to introspect and examine our emotional reactions. 

The nature and purpose of emotions have been expanded by philosophers from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, and ought to be obvious with consideration and reflection to anyone.  Yet mainstream science is still very confused about emotions, swinging them from being absolutely pre-programmed and determined (as is demonstrated by Richard Dawkins equating immoral people with broken machines) or purely random, since the things which bring about emotional responses appear so different from person to person.  Studies like this demonstrate unquestionably that these “non intrinsic stimuli” exist, and that they in fact have a much more common name: Values. 

Richard Dawkins “Let’s all stop beating Basil’s car”
http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html
“But doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused’s physiology, heredity and environment.”

My post - The Abdication of Volition
http://matus1976.com/philosophy/abdication_volition.html
“When a person who is in love exhibits elevated levels of these opium like drugs, the scientists then interpret that to mean that they are in love because the brain has produced that drug! Which is ridiculous, of course, you do not fall in love because your brain produces a chemical, your brain produces a chemical *because* you fall in love. The difference is superficially subtle, yet vitally important to all of our conceptions of humanity and emotions. It is the difference between being a slave to your emotional whims originated in the mindless mechanistics of your biological chemistry and having your emotions be the logical consequences of the deepest values you choose. It is the difference between being a robotic slave and a thinking, feeling person.”

A friend of mine posted this. 

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ or ‘how very perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love."

~Neil Gaiman

My comments -

I think that’s a sad and very nihilistic sentiment, and not a surprising one from someone like Gaiman who makes his living focusing on angst and suffering.  Love (good love), even when unrequited, is a beautiful and amazing thing.  It is the embodiment of all the greatest essences of humanity: the recognition of values, a cherishing of ones own existence and of happiness, striving for a life of flourishing, and the use of reason in the recognition of values.  ‘True love’ or, the best kind of love, is not dependant on reciprocation but is instead based on an intrinsic recognition, appreciation, and deep admiration of a persons qualities.  Lives may lead people on different paths, but their essence, that which we love, remains the same.  If you love someone, you love ‘them’ as a person, as an identity.  Part of them may choose a different course in life, but this is no reason to not love.  Being hurt by someone choosing a different course in life is a testament that Gaiman thinks reality and everyone else’s dreams, passions, and desires ought to change entirely to satisfy each of our own whims.  To scorn love so as to never be hurt by it is nihilistic Buddhism to its core - advocating never valuing anything because it’s loss might cause you to suffer.  Why stop at love?  Why not eradicate joy and happiness as well, but the only way to do this is to never care about anything.  Is this the life Gaiman advocates?  Would this be a good life to live?  To love a person includes wanting what is best for them for their own sake, not for yours.  A flourishing fulfilling healthy relationship exists where two people who love each other and admire each other for their intrinsic qualities travel and grow together on the same course in life. 

James Lovelock, a father of the modern environmentalist / green movement, is now a strong and outspoken advocate of Nuclear power.  In a recent SONE (Supporters of Nuclear Energy) podcast, Lovelock expands on the benefits of Nuclear power and chides the modern green movement for being based so strongly on scaring people about cancer even though today people live longer than ever before and cancer rates (when adjusted for age) continue to decrease.

The Earth itself, Lovelock says, is actually the left over debris of a giant nuclear explosion.  Planets form from the debris of supernovae explosions, where stars, exhausting too much of their nuclear fuel, explode in sudden bursts of energy that outshine galaxies.  The uranium and heavy elements the earth is made of was formed from these explosions.  The implication being that, to be afraid of ‘nuclear’ power in general, but for ‘the earth, is to ignore the very evolution of the Earth and its natural ties to Nuclear reactions.

Lovelock warns that as global warming gets worse, no rational person ought to oppose nuclear power in the face of these global environmental changes.  I would argue, in fact, that the modern green movement is largely responsible, to whatever degree it is actually occuring, for global warming, because they elevated a completely irrational fear of nuclear power and thus drove the United States to be almost wholly dependant on oil and coal.  It has, in fact, been *illegal* to build a nuclear reactor in this country since the Carter administration.  Thus dependance on foreign oil has also funded the murderous dictatorships of the middle east and bred the terrorist that now threaten the western world.

“I think we need nuclear power, urgently, and soon” warns Lovelock.  What of Nuclear waste?  Lovelock laughs in this interview, and says “I have offered to store nuclear waste in my backyard, because I know that in a proper storage container in a concrete pit there is no danger, and in fact I could run a pipe into the ground to pick up the exceess heat”  Lock notes that these the waste from nuclear power is one of it’s greatest benefits because there is so little of it!  Think of the invisible mountains, hundreds of cubic miles, of CO2 that is produced from the combustion of fossil fuels, compared to 10’s of cubic meters from a nuclear plant.  

Natural gas, he notes, though it produces less than half the amount of CO2 through combustion, is often in practice much work because, as a gas, it is piped through lines and industry standards are around 4% for leakage rates, but methane, a primary component of natural gas, is over 25 times worse as a green house gas than CO2 is.  The gas that leaks out is worse than burning the original fuel.

As I expand on in me Nuclear vs Coal essay, new nuclear technologies are even safer and impossible to melt down, and fast breeder reactors can create over 100 times the power existing reactors can, and can be used to consume their own waste.  A handful of these kinds of reactors could power the entire United States.

If you care about the health and well being about yourself and the people on the Earth, nuclear power is the way to go.  If you think Global Warming is a big issue than Nuclear power is also the best possible choice.  If you want cheap, safe, reliable electricity, Nuclear power is also still the way to go.
 

Nuclear Power vs Coal Power
http://matus1976.blogsome.com/2006/06/09/nuclear-power-vs-coal-power/

A little bit of etymology

The first line of Homer’s Iliad reads "Sing Muse of the Wrath of  Achilles"  The ancient Greeks had nine muses, and these muses were thought to serve as the inspiration for thought or skilled practice, and so Homer was appealing to the muses to inspire him to write of Achilles.  What is someone doing when they "muse"   Muse is a Greek word, and it means you are thinking about something.  In Greek, the prefix "a" means ‘not’ or ‘without’ as in an "a-theist", which is someone who is without theism.  Thus, "a-muse" means without thinking, an adequate description of laughing, joyful, "amusing" behavior.  Ancient Greeks used the word mouseion to refer to a place or temple dedicated to the Muses, thus today a "Museum" then is a place of the products of thought or inspiration.  "Music" holds the same origin in the word muse, but since antiquity has narrowed the idea of directed thought or inspiration to only one arena, that of sound.

Beautiful image from Argentina - 3 galaxies and a comet
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0703/3772-84mcnaught_druckmuller.jpg

French Architect proposes mechanism for construction of Egyptian pyramids.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article2405133.ece

Great comparison of the size of all objects in our solar system larger than 200 miles in diameter, gives a conceptual understanding of the size of the sun and large gas planets compared to earth and other smaller bodies.  Visually stunning.
http://kokogiak.com/solarsystembodieslargerthan200miles.html

"Liberty and Freedom, you can make a distinction between them.  Liberty perhaps being political rights, freedom; not being enslaved.  The ancient Athenian had only one word "Eleuthera"  …and to him it was the noblest and defining character of his nation.  To be free." – J. Rufus Fears – “The History of Freedom” Lecture series.

Pop culture is often a reflection of predominant philosophical themes.  By the widespread use of an idea or phrasing we can often discern some of the philosophical attitudes of people that partake in these particular cultural expressions.  They are of course never 100% accurate, and sometimes poor philosophical ideas are obfuscated and intentionally hidden to be presented to the mainstream culture.  But in this general regard, there is a popular song by 3 Doors Down which contains the line “So you call this your free country, Tell me why it costs so much to live” and it reflects, I believe, a popular cultural sentiment.  This line and sentiment infuriates me for a variety of reasons, the most important being that it wantonly confuses contradictory definitions of the word “Freedom”. 

Freedom obviously has many different uses, for the purposes of this essay I will discuss the four predominant ones in English.  To start with, one definition is being free from oppression (that is, no threat of having people force you to do something against your will) and another is Free as in ‘without cost’.  Different languages use entirely different words to say these different concepts, it is only the fact that the English language uses this same word to mean a couple different things that this line is possible, and consequently that is even has a chance of trying to make the point it tries to make (that it should cost nothing to live) and that perhaps this language quirk is a major reason why this cultural sentiment exists at all, since it is superficially ‘clever’. 

To illustrate why this is a fallacious way of thinking, let me use that exact same reversal of definitions of the word “Freedom” in a different context to illustrate how completely egregious it is to mix those two definitions conceptually.  Consider the following statement.

“Of course I think black men should be free, everyone ought to have one”

Such is the betrayal of freedom (from oppression) that is permitted by mixing those definitions. 

Being free from oppression is absolutely not the same thing as being free from cost, and ironically insisting that something be free from cost actually destroys freedom from oppression.  Life, and existing, does have a cost, and it always will.  That cost is food and water primarily, shelter secondarily, and health and medical care lastly.  When we are hungry, we can not make food fall from the sky and into our mouths just by wishing it to.  That food must be grown or killed, collected, processed, transported to us, and prepared for consumption.  Every step of this process is complex and consumes a great deal of effort and time which other people have to put in.  Whenever someone demands free (from cost) food, they are demanding that all of people, the farmers, packagers, truckers, train operators and tractor builders, fuel processors, grocery stores, etc, work for them without pay in order to provide that food free from cost. 

We can not wish a heated home with running water into existence; such a thing requires the material and intellectual effort of literally thousands of people.  Should everyone be provided with a heated home with running water for free (without cost)?  To insist such a thing means that the thousands of laborers, builders, designers, carpenters, plumbers, contractors, etc do this work without pay. 

Similarly, when we insist on free medical care, we are advocating every single medical practitioner, researcher, innovator, nurse and health aide to work for us to provide us these things for free without paying them anything. 

Now let me be clear, I think as many people as possible ought to have the best health care, education, shelter and food possible.  But under absolutely no circumstances is it right to advocate forced enslavement of people to provide these things.  Each and every one of us has a right, fundamentally, to our own life, is it ours to live freely as we choose.  No one else has any right to dictate to us or enslave us, and similarly we have no right to do that to anyone else.  No one has a right to tell a farmer forcibly what he should charge for his food when it was his own mind, effort, and labor which produced it.  No one has a right to tell a doctor what to charge for his services, his abilities are the product of his own effort and mind and they are not owned by anyone but himself.  To force him, implicitly at the end of a gun, to charge no more than a certain amount for his services, is to tell him everyone but himself is the actual owner of his abilities; and as such his life.  He is enslaved to everyone.  He is a slave who is the property of “the people”

In fact, demanding a *right* to anything that is the result of someone else’s labor or mind means that the people who make those things have no rights.  There can be NO RIGHTS in a society which demands the enslavement of all the producers and providers.  No one EVER has a right to enslave.  A right can not be just when it comes from the enslavement of everyone else, or even one single person.  If you have a right to free from cost medical care, enforced by your government, it means you have a right to enslave the providers of medical care.  If you have a right to education, it means you have a right to enslave the providers and producers of education.  If you have a right to food, it means you have a right to enslave the producers and distributors of that food.  This right to enslave is a founding element of socialism and communism, and no free from oppression society can be founded with the right to enslave embedded into its framework.

When we talk then about being free from cost, we are talking about a particular kind of freedom, which I will call material freedom. Material freedom is the acquisition of material goods with no cost to the person who has acquired them. Contrast this then to what I will call Political Freedom.  Political Freedom is freedom from being forced to do something against your will by another person.  These are the two types of freedom that are confused in the lyrics mentioned previously and in the popular cultural sentiment as well.

That life has a cost; the actions and efforts to sustain it, and thus could never be free (unless technology like nanotechnology literally renders food and shelter as cheap as dirt) conjures up the implicit idea from mixing these definitions of freedom; that the cost of living is similar to political oppression.  That needing to work to live to provide yourself food and shelter in order to survive is no different than being forced by a captor as a slave laborer under the threat of torture and death.  There is a tremendous distinction between these.  Needing to partake in physical labor in order to acquire the material needs for survival is a consequence of physical reality and the laws of physics.  We can not continue to exist merely by wishing to.  We must act.  All life requires a particular series of actions to be sustained, and every single person on this planet lives by only one of two means; providing that material existence for themselves, or looting or stealing the material means of survival from someone else.  Needing to get permission from a dictator to live is a far different thing than working to grow food or build housing, or working to freely trade with someone to acquire those things.  Blurring the distinction between the two in any way serves to perpetuate dictatorial rule, as it then can be hidden behind the guise of the ‘natural’ difficulties inherent in life.  If the cost of living is similar to political oppression, than the fact that life requires action and effort means that political oppression must also be a part of life and dodging a dictators noose is as natural a component of survival as toiling in a field is.  Who is it then that benefits most from convincing you that the lack of material freedom is the same as the lack of political freedom? Well those who seek to politically enslave you of course, or that seek to ally with you to enslave someone else under the banner of ‘rights’

The idea that needing to provide yourself the material necessities of life is a violation of freedom brings up a third common definition for freedom.  I call this freedom Metaphysical Freedom.  Metaphysical freedom is literal freedom of volition, it is the ability to do anything you want instantly with no effort just by wishing it, whether that is transporting yourself instantly to another continent or planet, or insisting that you do not need food to live.

Metaphysical freedom has limitations placed on it as well, and just like Material Freedom being confused with Political freedom, Metaphysical freedom is also often confused with Political Freedom.  In fact the lack of Material Freedom is a consequence of the limitations forced onto us in regards to our Metaphysical Freedoms.  Those limitations are, of course, the laws of physics.  Life requires energy to sustain it, it requires action and effort to acquire the fuel for the energy and a perpetual and directed course of action intended to further that life.  The laws of physics do not allow us to survive without eating, to work forever without rest or food, or to get a better life merely by wishing it.  No one has Metaphysical Freedom, and probably no one ever will, though advances in technology will get us closer and closer to a pure metaphysical like freedom, we will likely always still require energy and effort to survive.  Insisting though, that life should have no cost to it, that cost being food, shelter, and medicine, is an affront to the restrictions placed by the universe on our metaphysical freedoms.  It is screaming to nature in frustration that you must follow her rules.  It is screaming because your car wont start, or your investment failed, or you lover no longer loves you back.  It is throwing a childish tantrum at reality, it is unproductive, useless, and nothing less than ignorant savagery.  When you fail at a task or something happens to make your life more difficult, you have not been frustrated by a malevolent universe out to perpetuate human suffering and misery, you have instead corrected a misconception you held about the nature of the universe.  Nature and reality exist and function in particular ways, to prosper as physical beings in a material world requires us to understand and follow the rules of material existence, not whine and wail when things do not go the way of our whims and conjur up flawed philosophical notions of metaphysical freedom.   

The restrictions placed on our metaphysical freedoms by the laws of nature lead us to our final definition of freedom which I will discuss in this essay, Physical Freedom.  Physical Freedom is the literal freedom of action, to move about, to speak, to do things, to work, to act on the physical world.  Yet again this additional definition of freedom is frequently confused with the political freedom from oppression and the freedom from cost of materials.  You might hear in conversations with anarchists that Physical Freedom ought to be identical to Political Freedom.  That is, everything you are physically able to do you should be allowed to do, this includes physically brutalizing and oppressing another person.  After all, if the police prevent you from oppressing someone they are in fact restricting your freedoms, but in this case they are restricting your Physical Freedoms, they are not restricting your Political Freedoms.  Is it any wonder than whose interest is served by blurring the distinction between Political Freedom and Physical Freedom?  Again if infringing on your ‘right’ to assault someone is an assault on freedom, than it is only those who advocate dictatorial or tyrannical rule who seek to call a system where anyone can do anything to anyone else as long as he is physically able to do it, Free.  This is not Freedom in any meaningful political sense of the term.

The lack of distinction of Physical Freedom from Political Freedom often leads hardcore egalitarians and socialists to proclaim that the laws of physics themselves are a form of oppression, which of course is the only logical implication of any statement that derides the fact that it costs effort to live by providing food, and to have to deal with the physical realities of nature is a form of cruel oppression, and the people able to understand and overcome nature owe it to the people who are not able or willing, and owe it to them specifically because they are not able or willing, to shield them from the difficulties of physical existence.  To make the world soft, coddling, padded, welcoming and free from anything remotely damaging to the fragile egos of these solipsists. 

To summarize then, the four types of Freedom are:

Material Freedom – free from cost, cost as labor or effort or money
Physical Freedom – a literal freedom of action and movement, constrained only by the laws of physics
Metaphysical Freedom – literal volitional freedom unrestrained by the laws of physics, being able to do absolutely anything you wish instantly without effort.  Includes being free from being forced to do something against your will by the laws of nature.  Metaphysical freedom is a philosophical impossibility.
Political Freedom – Freedom from being forced to do something against your will by someone else. 

Because of the nature of Material Freedom (that of being free from any cost or effort at acquiring the material necessities for life) any advancement in Material Freedom, when provided by government decree, necessarily bears a zero sum relationship with Political Freedom, You can not have a right to your own life if everyone else does.  Any material good that is provided, that the government says everyone has a *right* to must come from the material products and effort of other people, and as such those others must be forced to work, i.e. enslaved, to provide those goods and services.  If you say “I have a right to education” you are saying you have a right to force others to provide you with education, a right to enslave them.  Thus, political figures like Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Robert Mugabe, etc, operating under the guise of freedom are in fact seeking to forcibly enslave the majority of the population. 

Is it no wonder then that every single communist nation in existence has always forbidden leaving the country?  Is this not the ultimate expression of not having a right to your own life?  People are not politically free in these nations, they are merely a physical tool whose only purpose is to attempt to provide equal material freedom to everyone else.  Nations which do not allow people to freely leave them do not even deserve the respect of being called nations, and instead should be referred to as they truly are, prisons.  Dictators and rulers of these nations, the worst of which are North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam; are in fact literal hostage takers.  These nations operate under the flawed idealistic premise of material freedom as the end goal, and as a consequence have absolutely no political freedoms and are brutally oppressive, poor, and painful to live in.

Conversely, any advances in Political Freedom (including both economic and civil, which really should not be distinguished) lead directly to advances in Material Freedom, that is allowing people to rule their own lives and to discover and invent of their own accord, leads to the greatest advancements possible to man and thus the greatest reduction in the effort required to survive, implicitly speeding toward Material Freedom, though never quite completely reaching it.

I am a strong proponent of Political Freedom, that is, A life without oppression from other people.  I am a strong advocate of Physical Freedom but only when it does not lead to restrictions on Political Freedom; anyone can do anything they want as long as they do not assault person or property of others.  I am adamantly against Material freedom when it comes from the enslavement of the material production of those able to produce useful things, but completely for it when the free and voluntary exchange of these useful things results in people making the world an easier and more pleasant place for them to exist. 

Thus, a just government would defend at all costs Political freedom both civil and economic, allow Physical Freedoms where they do not conflict with Political Freedoms, and necessarily progress more toward Material Freedom than any controlled or centralized government because of the advances made from innovators and producers which reduce the material cost of everything man needs to survive.  Such a government should include a constitutional separation of church and state *as well as* a constitutional separation of business and state.  While an initial incarnation of it might require taxation to sustain itself in order to provide basic infrastructure, national self defense, protect civil liberties, enforce rule of law, and final arbitration in matters of dispute, eventually a streamlined system could work on voluntary fee based system alone.  Laws would allow individuals to do virtually anything they wanted as long as it did not infringe on someone else’s rights, or assault them physically or economically.  Prisons would contain only violent criminals.  The society would be wealthy, politically free, physically free, continually approach material freedom providing for wonderful, long, healthy lives for its inhabitants. 

But when we confuse the meanings of Freedoms we open ourselves up to promulgating dictatorial rule in the name of an abstract and harmful ideal of ‘freedom’ which is in fact a literal enslavement of the vast majority of the population.  Words are the only means by which we can convey ideas and as such are extremely powerful tools, we must always choose our words wisely and there is no more important area to be aware of the meanings of words than when it is in regards to the freedom (political and physical) of sentient beings.      

They pretend an object is not what it really is.
In the hopes it will not be that which it always is.
Imagination, it seems to them, is meant to be absurd.
They use a gun instead of reason to make their voices heard.
 
They won’t come to ever see how their morals shape reality, the only end they care to see is violent: forced equality.
 
They pretend your mind is something that belongs to them.
It’s only meant to serve all those whose needs are still not met.
Self-destruction is, to them, a means that serves an end.
Self sacrifice and immolation make the best of men.
 
They won’t come to ever see starvation comes from equity, if equal men are made by force, they turn the best into the worst.
They pretend that you’ll provide under the yoke of force.
Their need the right to claim all you have made and force out more.
They pretend that they won’t starve without a working mind.
And they wont see where they end up is where they wished to find.
 
They won’t come to ever see their morals shape reality, the only end they care to see is violent: forced equality

 – Thosquanta lyrics

 ———————

In the late 50’s as Chairman Mao Ze Dong solidified power in "Revolutionary China" he sought to increase the standing of China on the international scene.  To do this, China had to sell it’s primary domestic product; food.  Of course in China most people producing food consumed the food they were producing.  The communist party of China issued new orders and directives, every bit of food produced by the population would be ‘given’ to the government, who would then re-distribute it according to who needed it, or rather, according to what would benefit the oppressive rulers the most.  Mao’s ruling part of China began a campaign to become one of the world’s largest agricultural exporters.  Farmers were forced to hand over at gun point the food they were growing while they were starving.  Where they were producing more than enough food for themselves and others, now there was not even enough food to feed the population of China.  People were literally working themselves to death growing and collecting their own food, and being forced to give it away.  Millions and millions of people starved to death.  In all, historians estimate, about 35 million Chinese peasants starved to death during this period in the absolute worst human famine to have ever occurred, yet few today know about it.

This famine was not cause by droughts or freezes, but instead by a controlled economy in the hands of a murderous dictator, in fact all of the famines experienced in the 20th century were at the hands of controlled economies

Additionally Communist party members were fans of an "alternative" science, brought about by philosophical Dialectical materialism, which asserts all growth comes from conflict, among other bad ideas, and also abandons the mechanism of heredity, genetics, in favor of a deadly Marxist pseudoscience, Lysenkoism.  Lysenko and his poor science caused the famines in the Soviet Union which killed tens of millions of people, and many of these policies, despite these spectacular failures, were adopted in China promulgating Mao’s famine.  Later, when adopted in Cambodia, Ethiopio, and North Korea, all produced still more man-made famines.  The lysenko ideas including ‘conditioning’ seeds to grow in cold weather by dunking them in cold water, forcing peasants to bury seedlings much deeper, and forcing peasants to cover fields with 5 times as many seeds as a field could support, on the theory that similar plants do not compete with each other for resources.

You can read more on these dreadful policies here
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/health/hunger/famine/chinese_famine.html

Beyond that, Communist party members sought to make China a world player on the industrial scene in the world and desired to capitalize on their greatest resource; manpower from physical labor.  Tens of millions of farmers and peasants were ordered to leave their productive farms and build small communal "steel refractories" these refractories resembled termite mounds more than steel production furnaces and produced steel that looked more like animal droppings earning it a nickname in kind.

The single major change which ended this dreadful famine was when farmers were again allowed to produce food as they saw fit, and while they still had to provide a large quota to the government, they were allowed to keep any excess they grew and sell it.  Within 5 years agricultural output in China, from 1960 – 1965, almost tripled.  Production continued to climb until Chairman Mao regained much of the power he lost and instituted a "cultural revolution" where anyone eductated in the ways of the west was executed, again agriculture production plummeted as the people responsible for the radical increase were sent to prison camps or outright executed as "counter revolutionaries"  Millions of educated Chinese fled the country, and chances are if you are in a western country and have some Chinese friends, their parents most likely fled the cultural revolution.

Read more here is as well
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/319/7225/1619

Many people in western nations have a hard time believing such statistics, assuming by de-facto that governments tend to operate well and for the benefit of the people.  But government encroachment into markets does not bring about equality, increased standards of living, or a general betterment of society, it always plummets toward ineptitude, corruption, and inefficiencies.  .  No bureaucrat can ever respond quickly enough to rapidly changing climate and markets to get the food where it is needed, only the independent and rapid decisions of the millions of producers and distributors are capable of adjusting with lighting rapidity to great strains on products.  Any politician who controls immense swaths of the economy is immediately open to corruption, where the currency de jour is not product superiority but instead influence and bribery.  To the extent at which governments interfere in markets is the extent to which people in those nations suffer harder, shorter, more painful lives, and to the extent to which nations let free people make free decisions and produce the goods they desire of their own accord, and trade with each other of their own free will, is the extent to which a nation and it’s people prosper and live longer, healthier, happier lives as a whole.

Some quick news items Somebody beat me to it =( Still, mine will be better, but too slow on the draw again… http://i.n.com.com/i/ne/p/2007/34monotracer550x365.jpg

Check out this amazing Hubble image, 50,000 galaxies, be sure to load the zoomed version and explore the galaxies, 50,000 of them! http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/06/image/c/format/zoom/

On existential threats: NASA lacks funds to find killer asteroids http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/03/06/nasa.asteroids.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

"They are a threat even if they don’t hit Earth because if they explode while close enough — an event caused by heating in both the rock and the atmosphere — the devastation from the shockwaves is still immense. The explosion alone could have with the power of 100 million tons of dynamite, enough to devastate an entire state, such as Maryland, they said."

Check out my updated essay "Humanity Needs an Insurance Policy" on AssociatedContent.com

Humanity Needs an Insurance Policy
Is Self Destruction from the Rapid Growth of Technology the Answer to the Fermi Paradox?
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/137048/humanity_needs_an_insurance_policy.html