Prelude to Politics (11) -- P(olitics) - The Ultimate Resource & Flow vs Stock Conception of P. & Civilising Power -- A First Chain of Points - An Emerging Thread of Arguments

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Continued from here.

Politics (7) - Politics (18):

(10): 

• like science, which does not happen spontaneously, improvements in social arrangements depend on human volition and design

• it is strangely inconsistent to extol Julian Simon, author of the thesis that human beings are the ultimate resource - proposing that resources do not exist independent of human design - while insisting on a minimal, by nature rather problematic role of man's discretionary activities in most other areas of life where human intervention may be applied 

• the power of trial and error applied under the guardianship of a highly intelligent and corrigible species is not broken once we enter the field of social organisation. 

• we are prone to errors, but we are not at all precluded from operating as the ultimate resource in forming the conditions of mutual coexistence among ourselves 

• the fact that we do commit fatal errors in this regard does not prove that human design sends us up an blind alley 

• to the contrary, it only goes to show that such intervention is an art, perhaps even a science in some respects, that demands of us learning and the sieving of good and bad practices

• freedom is a process rather than a fixed and finite set of states of affairs 

• freedom is a way of dealing with one another in a certain spirit and under certain rules, of which

• the most important overall outcome is that 

1. no social force attains absolute preponderance over the citizenry in its multiplicity, and that 
2. the means and possibilities of challenging the status quo (of power holders, opinions, social norms - you name it) remain in place for any free citizen to turn to 

• freedom is a way of communicating, rather than an entitlement to expect certain invariant outcomes

• freedom is brought about through the human capacity to act politically

• liberty will always be fragmentary, dispersed, discontinuous, displaced, flattened, stretched, disrupted, superimposed upon by other stuff

• we ought to develop a keen eye for liberty in its real dispersion, in its actual coexistence with phenomena and structures many of which being antithetical to freedom or ambivalent vis-à-vis liberty

• the same agents and institutions may both enforce and destroy liberty, consider for an example disparate practices of the legal system

• the possibilities of liberty are complex, for which reason we need flexible responses which are attained by political influencing

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• transacting in free markets is incapable of overcoming the antagonism between philosophical opponents opponent

• even if it were possible to offer political systems as vendible products, you cannot buy both, say, "the liberal state" and "anarchism" or any other pair of mutually exclusive political regimes or policies 

• so there are disagreements and competing ends among human beings that cannot be removed by voluntary market transactions

• this gives rise to the role of politics in civilising the inevitable structures of maximal power in human communities, which political opponents seek to occupy if the opposed system is thought disastrous

• since Genghis Khan's days, we have managed to organise power so as to dramatically improve levels of peaceableness, wealth, and welfare

• these attainments require us to act as political animals, as shapers and tamers of power and its most effective instrument: the state

• consequences of politics are prismatic and ambivalent, like those of other tools with infinite uses

• absence of a dominant power results in disoriented and vehement struggles for pre-eminence

• politics seeks a constructive alternative to anarchy  

Continued here.