Sunday, February 6, 2011

Call Me a Pirate or Up the Bid...

"As a Man Thinks in His Heart, So is He..." Notates that our mental state and thus our status and being exerts that we as human beings can actually achieve our dreams due to the capacity of a positive state of mind that seeks the knowledge to become what we are striving to be. We can accomplish anything we set out to accomplish by obtaining the knowledge to do so.

This agrees with Hayek's premise in part as it states: "The mind can never foresee its own advance. Though we must always strive for achievement of our present aims, we must also leave room for new experiences and future events to decide which of these aims will be achieved". We can never know the future, unless we obtain knowledge from an entity or being that exists outside of time.

This argument of liberty and the perfect knowledge necessary to eliminate a "zero sum" game can be made all within the context of your own worldview, and whether you relate liberty and knowledge to the amount of trust in society due to regulations or the lack thereof.

Hayek's statement of the truth of our general outlook states that "...Our attitude, when we discover how little we know of what makes us co-operate, is, on the whole, one of resentment rather than wonder or curiosity. Much of our occasional impetuous desire to smash the whole entangling machinery of civilization is due to this inability of man to understand what he is doing."

Are the rules of the game fair? Every man that barters wants to know. We go to appraisers to find out whether we've gotten a good deal on an item that we've purchased from a dealer, an auction, or a pawn shop because we want to fill in the missing information that could've saved us millions. Or the information that could bring millions of dollars of value to the property we have obtained.

Making the rules of trade simple and fair encourages trade, but may or may not increase trust in them. There will always be a lack of information to fill in the details of what we've been missing in order for a "fair trade" or even an efficient trade to occur, and as a result, we resent the system.

But even if we DID have all the information necessary to understand whether the rules of trade are fair, would that make the game fair or any less "zero sum" or inefficient? Not unless individuals are completely predictable, which we know is not so.

I can't help but wonder if we need set of guiding principals that surpass our fragmented knowledge of what works and hasn't worked in the past. Shall we settle with the current system and the idea that the forces of civilization could be spun by fragments of coercion and horded knowledge? Or will we look outside ourselves to seek a different outlook?

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