Five, five, of the books on your list are fiction. One of the books is Walden, and one is Ayn Rand. Two of the books are essentially prep books...just in case you are correct. What I am not saying is that any of this reading is completely unproductive. What I am saying is that if you are providing a list of material that has lead you to conclusions that are, shall we say, non-standard, perhaps the list should contain more material such as Rothbard (which I have not read, but sounds scholarly at least).
Sometimes I think there should be a logical fallacy associated with Rand as there is with Hitler. As for Walden, his solution is "run away from everything and everyone you do not like, and bingo, utopia". It certainly sounds good to me, but makes my cringe that it does. It is cowardly at best, and utterly immoral at worst.
Having said all that, you know that your ideas have shaped my own, and helped me refine them for years. This is true for theology and politics. In the end, it always feels the same though. You seem to be postulating that there is a chance that if we could snap our fingers and align the entire globe with these ideals everything would be better than it is. This not only seems ridiculously optimistic, but empirically false for a Christian that believes in total depravity.
Should we give up then? I honestly do not know. I suppose the answer is no, and we might as well work toward something similar to what you espouse as anything else. After I read these types of literature, study the world around me, history, our current affairs, the Scriptures, etc. my conclusion is we are f*%$%d, and spending as much time as you do on political/social constructs related to this world is counterproductive and possibly immoral given that this is not our home.
I reserve the right to be wrong, and assume the worst in that regard.
You mean, like if someone mentions Rand, the debate is over? May as well. You know where the discussion is going. Saves time.
His rationale wasn't as important to me. I was more interested in the ability to live simply in a simpler time. Like, how does that compare to today? If you say you want to live simply today, it just means you don't have a smart-tv or something.
Yeah, I gave up on legacy political/social constructs. But I do not think we can just snap our fingers and make it all better. I think we can start with the boring stuff. See: Disruptive Uses for Blockchain Technology
Re: Rand, yes. Re: Walden, that makes sense.
Re: Disruptive Uses for Blockchain Technology
I heard someone else say this a couple weeks ago in a different context (for the technology as such), but it makes a lot of sense here. Using roads is a great example because it is one of the first things I get thrown in my face when I start bitching about "legacy" constructs.
Of course despite watching videos for kids, reading different explanations over and over, etc. at the end of the day I still have trouble understanding blockchain completely, and even more trouble making it "concrete" in the "real" world. It is frustrating because it will be to me as the Interwebs are to my Dad...something I vaguely understand...unless it finally clicks with me at some point.
I guess just like when the internet was new, there are terms to wrap our head around. E.g.:
There's censorship resistance, which is bigger than the hippy "I can say what I want" kind of censorship resistance. It's a component of blockchain that keeps it from being suppressed by state or private attackers who want to get rid of it.
There's the immutable ledger, which is the notion that messages go onto the blockchain and cannot be removed.
There's cryptographically verifiable, which is the assurance that the person who wrote two or more messages is one in the same. It also relates to consensus data.
There's consensus, which is the idea that data is processed in a deterministic (pre-arranged) manner.
These are many of the primitives that make a blockchain useful. There are others that people think are important like scalability (performance under load) and governance (the ability to adapt).
Now see, censorship resistance just seems optimistic to me. The blockchain itself is almost a "utopia" of technology in a way, and there seems no end to the way man can "govern" itself out of utopia. As creative as any technology can be to avoid the pitfalls of depravity, it will still fail or it would be God...hmm. I think I just accidentally said something philosophically interesting, but maybe it was just dribble.
It might be a false dichotomy: either a thing fails or it's God. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's a true statement by itself. But I'm not sure it means that a thing should not be pursued just because it will ultimately fail on some near or far timeline.
In the long run, we're all dead. That doesn't mean life isn't worth living.
What if we say, any technology sufficiently perfect to be altered/used by man in such a way that it can be used for any but moral purposes is God? I do not know, I feel like there has to be a definition there, and then a corresponding proposition that proves this technology cannot exist.
Probably not critically important (although philosophically interesting...and perhaps not without application in Christian apologetics).
Either way, the key takeaway from the entire thread is certainly
We certainly should (and indeed have no choice but to) pursue imperfect solutions to our temporal problems with the direction of natural and special revelation until such time as the consummation of God's plan for redemption arrives.
That is hard for me to do. I would rather go live in the woods and wait it out :)
Or an idol.