Patri Friedman

The demand is for people to feel like virtuous champions of the disadvantaged by just doing something simple, like making an emoji, instead of something hard, like improving prosthetic technology. "Effortless virtue", like "effortless weight-loss!", Is always in-demand.https://twitter.com/contrarivariant/status/984295122203328512 …

2/ "You have got your Brownie! Hope you enjoy. Have a good time thanks! How do you feel? Probably happy. Well, you earned me to help you with your hard work. I love you." I cried.

1/ My daughter recently joined Girl Scouts and read the Brownie Story (http://www.angelfire.com/mi2/pud/browniestory.html …). She wanted to copy the story, but I said not on school nights. Today I woke up and she had organized our game shelves and left a note:

If being good means hoping your enemies don't suffer & have good lives, as @jordanbpeterson says, then competitive governance is the political philosophy of good. We don't want to impose our political will on others, we want everyone to live in their ideal society.https://twitter.com/jockowillink/status/961640677246488576 …

Speaking of cults, @jacoblyles wrote an excellent "Conservative critique of Radical Gurus" based on his personal experience at Interchange Counseling. Dissolving barriers can lead to growth, but it's also dangerous and should be done very judiciously. https://jacobexmachina.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-death-of-interchange-conservative.html …

12/ A @moldbuggery Patchwork / @slatestarcodex Archipelago / Nozick Utopia of Utopias / or my thriving startup sector for governance. Watch the miniseries on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/80145240 , and read books by and about the cult: https://amzn.to/2ElTtrL .

11/ And we need a true diversity of startup societies, ranging from corporate-run states ("Appletopia") to theocracies to kibbutzim to anarcho-capitalism to things I can't even imagine, together forming ...

10/ We need ways to channel that frontier energy towards an actual, physical frontier, where labor to build a city from nothing endures for decades, rather than being wasted. We need people like Ma Anand Sheela devoting their incredible drive to building societies that last.

9/ I felt sad seeing them pour so many resources into building up land where they weren't wanted, much like I feel sad seeing people put so much effort into building Burning Man, to abandon it a week later.

8/ Given the mismatch between their views if sovereignty & reality, plus the inherent precariousness of any cult of personality, their community did not last long. Yet their journey was one with numerous lessons for those interested in creating a startup sector for governance.

7/ Easy - by seeing themselves as the government of what *felt* like a meaningfully sovereign community (which, by balance of power, it never was). From this perspective, their actions were natural acts of war against a state that refused to recognize their legitimacy.

6/ So if the cult leader's mental context was "US Citizen/Resident", then of course their actions were absurd. "How could anyone think they could get away with that?"

5/ These actions were, of course, criminal **when viewed from the context of the surrounding legal system**. Acts of war, including terrorism and guerrilla tactics, are naturally considered crimes by the warred-upon.

4/ The controversial actions taken by the society's leaders make perfect sense if viewed as a clash between a semi-sovereign entity, discontent with its level of autonomy, and the city, county, state, and country in which it was embedded.

3/ In the parlance of my dad's book "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm …), it was an "Embedded Legal System" - non-sovereign but with substantial ability to enforce its own rules through social pressure like threat of ostracism.